The UWE EdD has been running since 2000 and has recently undergone a re-validation in order to ensure it continues to provide the most up to date teaching methods and content. It is aimed at professionals from many areas of action - teachers from all sectors, educational administrators, policy officers, professionals involved in education in their specialist field such as nurses, paramedics, social workers, occupational therapists, community workers and others. Our goal is to better understand and improve programmes of training and education and, through this, to improve professional services and their role in a democracy. The teaching on the EdD programme is highly interactive. It is seminar and workshop-based, and has a supportive supervision framework. The taught element (Years 1 and 2) is driven by practical research tasks. Assessment throughout is designed to put professional learning to the forefront, and to derive from this the academic standards which will allow us, eventually, to confer the award of a Doctor of Education. What is an EdD? The Doctor of Education is equivalent in status and challenge to a PhD. It comprises four to six years part-time study and allows you to use the title 'Dr'. Like other EdD programmes, the EdD study at the University of the West of England comprises a mix of taught and research elements. Taught elements happen mainly in seminars and workshops with a number of tutors, and research elements are conducted under the supervision of one tutor. What does 'doctor level' mean? Enquiry-based work at doctor level is expected to lead to the generation of original knowledge, and this implies a greater intolerance of closure and resolution of issues and controversies and a correspondingly higher level of tolerance for complexity. We would expect, for example, compared to work at Master's level, a keener and more critical reading of research literature with the ability to differentiate between competing schools of thought. The capacity to bring to bear multiple contexts for understanding an educational issue (political, ethical, personal, historical, methodological).