Practice Weeks @ Bedfordshire: An innovative response to criticisms of management education

•We unveil key ME criticisms in recent business and management education literature.•HE sector responses to ME disparagements provide a practitioner perspective.•Positioning Practice Weeks @ Bedfordshire as innovative response to ME criticisms.•Our proposed intervention holds potential to deliver context-driven ME.•Bringing ‘real world’ practice to the classroom is key to shaping the future of ME.

The purpose of this paper is to position and appraise the University of Bedfordshire Business School's initiative – ‘Practice Weeks’ – as a potentially innovative response to the current criticisms facing Management Education (ME). Criticisms of ME, we argue, are founded on the ‘irrelevancy’ debate, which is conceptualised in the first half of our literature review. The second half of the literature review examines Association of Business Schools (ABS) reports and reviews how business schools are responding to these critiques, reliant primarily on the tried and tested experiential learning models to do so. Building on these, ‘Practice Weeks’ are then presented as a case example from the University of Bedfordshire Business School (UBBS) as an innovative response to surfaced criticisms. Data is drawn from interviews carried out with students and employers who have participated in UBBS Practice Weeks, supported by quantitative insights from student survey questionnaires. Findings evidence that Practice Weeks have the potential to go further than existing experiential learning models to deliver practice-based education to business school students, whilst also capturing an effective and efficient approach to supporting business and community organisations in meeting their objectives.