A sabbatical for teachers; an end to student visa restrictions; and more Michael Gove? Some hopes for the new year
AC Grayling, philosopher and founder of New College of the Humanities, which is due to open in October
My wish for education is the abolition of school examinations. They are not necessary; evaluating students can be done far better by reading their essays, looking at their projects, and talking to them. Although more time-consuming, this is a fairer and more accurate measure of ability and attainment, and it liberates teachers and students from the distorting tyranny of the exam hamster-wheel, which replaces education with a reductive form of training. To guard against personal bias in continuous assessment, student evaluations would need to be summed from the views of several teachers – but university interviewers would quickly see which sets of teachers were over-stating their evaluations, and which were failing to recognise talent.
John Coe, chairman of the National Association for Primary Education
In its 2010 white paper the government said teachers know best; so my wish for 2012 is that ministers would start acting as though they believed that. Specifically, I'd like them to rethink the phonics test for five- and six-year-olds being introduced this autumn. The test requires children to read 30 words, some of them just phonic sounds with no meaning; my view is that it will confuse them, and could even be damaging. Teachers know best: so leave it to them to teach young children to read.
Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director, Institute of Education
I'd like to see a change to teachers' contracts so that they had to show that they'd improved in order to keep their jobs. At their annual appraisal, each teacher would have to show evidence of one thing they had improved on over the year. At the moment, there's no requirement on teachers to get better, and teachers doing their jobs better changes society, it makes more difference to children's lives than almost anything else.
Helen Mathieson, principal, Marine academy, Plymouth (a secondary school)
I'd like to see proper resources going into child protection. There's been an explosion in child protection issues for teachers, especially in areas of high social deprivation like mine. If people realised how great the needs of some children are, the resources would be put in, and children's lives – and their futures – could be changed.
Fazia Hussain, second-year law student at Sheffield University
My wish is for more outreach schemes and work experience for students – because, it opens your eyes. That's especially true for someone like me because I'm from a poor background. No one in my family has worked in banking, law and so on, so it's only through work experience that I can find out what's out there. Also, these days, when it takes so long to get a job, life can be very disheartening if there aren't schemes to get you on to the ladder.
Tim Brighouse, visiting professor at the Institute of Education
All teachers in leadership roles should be given a month-long sabbatical every seven years. Not extra holiday, but time when that teacher could become properly refreshed, by studying teaching theory, perhaps, and observing other teachers in practice. We have to replenish intellectual curiosity; that's the essence of good teaching.
John Doyle, head of Ormskirk school
My wish would be for the government to sort out the system for vocational qualifications. At the moment, it's a complete dog's dinner. In my school about 40% of pupils have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to follow the English baccalaureate. What they need is a system that gives them something worthwhile to learn, teaches them skills that will help them to be employable, and doesn't condemn them as second-class citizens. These objectives seem to be second nature in a country like Germany – but, for some reason, it's the holy grail in Britain.
Toby Young, journalist and founder of the West London free school
My hope for 2012 is that Michael Gove remains secretary of state for education. I think there's a danger he may be promoted to the Home Office or the Foreign Office, but I hope he remains to see through the vitally important reforms he's initiated. I'm a huge admirer of Mr Gove: not only has he made it possible for groups of parents and teachers to set up taxpayer-funded schools, he has also put turbo-boosters under the academy programme, restored discipline to the classroom and reversed the process of dumbing down that saw Britain's schools plummeting down the international league tables under Labour.
Professor Les Ebdon, vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire
My wish is that the government will retain the widening participation premium, so that universities like mine can continue to encourage students from backgrounds where a degree wouldn't be an obvious choice. It costs a university far less to take young people from middle-class homes with As at A-level; students from more diverse backgrounds involve more cost because they're more likely to have disabilities, to need childcare, or to need help with their English, for example. But these are the very people whose lives stand to be transformed by university. The government has been sounding lukewarm about holding on to the premium through next year: I hope it has a rethink.
Professor Patrick McGhee, vice-chancellor of the University of East London
I'd like to see Britain declassify students as immigrants, which would give them far more freedom to come to this country and learn, and to enrich our social and cultural life – and our coffers. Overseas students generate around £6bn for our country's economy each year, but we make it as complicated and difficult for them as possible. No other country would work so hard to turn away the brightest of the world's young people – they recognise what we should recognise, that they help us remain a leading intellectual and cultural country. Australia, New Zealand and the US have already made the change I'm advocating. I'm sure it would work for us.
Camila Batmanghelidjh, psychotherapist and founder of Kids Company, a charity working with vulnerable children
I'd like 2012 to be the year the government tackles unmet social needs and what they mean for education. There's too much emphasis on numeracy and literacy – what they're not taking into account is how much effect poor social care and trauma have on children's ability to achieve. These factors are the main driver of educational failure. Of course it requires investment, but if we don't tackle it, these children cost a lot more later when they're in pupil referral centres, or youth offender units, or the mental health services; and what's more, in time, they generate more victims.
Andy Wilson, principal of Westminster Kingsway College, London
In the current economic climate, FE colleges have a role that's potentially very important – we can help to skill people up for jobs, the kind of jobs that exist. But we're hampered by a system that puts too much emphasis on qualifications, on getting bits of paper. They're important, but it's not always about that – for many students, it's about finding work. We want to tailor our courses more closely to the local jobs market, but we need the government to back us properly in doing that. That means an overhaul of regulation and funding: if that could happen in 2012, it could make a huge difference to what we do and to the wider community.
The government's higher education reforms are anything but; they are rooted in a profoundly reactionary view of university, says Peter Scott
Almost drowned out by the raging Europhobia came the news just before Christmas that the UK has slipped below Brazil in terms of total gross national product. Predictions are that the UK will also fall below India and Russia by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, student applications to English universities are plunging. In the autumn, most institutions submitted what must seem in retrospect optimistic forecasts of future student numbers to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce); a 20% decline was the worst scenario, and several were still predicting growth. As recently as a month ago, a blip was expected; now it looks more like falling off a cliff.
The two facts – Brazil overtaking the UK, and the plunge in student applications – are connected. Of course, it is not higher education's fault that successive UK governments have bet the house on the City and consumerdom (and kept out of global trouble through inflation and devaluation, both of which cost dearly).
But it is higher education's fault that it has largely accepted the high-fees logic of the Browne report and white paper, that a university education is a consumer rather than an investment good. Courses are like iPads; universities are brands, like Apple.
If this view is accepted, it does not really matter if overall demand declines – or if certain brands wilt. Consumer markets ebb and flow. The Browne and white paper proposal that stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and SIVs (strategic and vulnerable subjects) should be protected is the exception that proves the market rule.
But universities are not like John Lewis, great-and-good cooperative as it is; they are much more like railways and roads. Science and knowledge, skills and research, are the infrastructure of the knowledge society. If this counter-view is accepted, it matters a great deal if student numbers fall. The shortfall translates into a reduced output of graduates in 2015, just when they will be most needed.
Nor do many people expect student numbers to recover quickly, as they did after Charles Clarke's ill-advised increase in fees to £3,000 six years ago. Although middle-class demand will bounce back, demand from "non-standard" students, for less flattering brands and for less "saleable" products is likely to remain depressed for years. So graduate production will continue to lag.
The previous government, to its credit, realised this. Tony Blair's "education, education, education" and Labour's manifesto commitment to 50% participation were not, as they are usually represented, "bleeding heart" leftism. They were based on hard-headed assessments, validated by evidence, of the level of "production" of highly skilled graduates the UK economy would need to remain competitive.
In the Browne report, shamefully, a quite different meaning of "sustainability" emerged. It no longer referred to the sustainability of the UK's economy. Instead it was used to describe the squaring of a tawdry circle, between what citizens expect and what they are prepared to pay for as taxpayers.
In the process, a whole language has been lost – of the "race to the top" by investing in advanced skills, of "clever cities" in which social experimentation, cultural creativity and economic entrepreneurship form a potent mix. But be sure, that language has not been lost in the Far East, North America or even in the much despised Eurozone.
The government no doubt will point to various "growth" initiatives – and even one or two U-turns like the reprieve of Sheffield Forge Masters. But all the evidence is that Whitehall initiatives produce limited effects, at any rate in the long term. A free-market government surely should appreciate this most of all.
Without an enduring infrastructure, especially of highly skilled people, such initiatives flash and die. Maybe Vince Cable should pay as much attention to the skills component of his department's title as the business component, rather than leaving all the running to his Tory mate, David Willetts.
The interesting thing about policy is not the measures themselves, but the assumptions underlying them. Applying that test, the government's higher education reforms are anything but. They are rooted in a view of a university education common no doubt in prosperous London-land, but profoundly reactionary – as a bourgeois lifestyle choice rather than career-changing improvement, as validation rather than aspiration.
That view has always been there, of course, even during a half-century of progressive reform and rapid growth. Now it has re-emerged from the shadows. As Pitt said on hearing the news of Austerlitz, "roll up that map. It will not be wanted these 10 years". Let's make it five, if only to stop the UK slipping even further down the global premier league.
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
Are Oxford's students running riot? Plus the Student Loans Company gets some help with its New Year's resolutions
Known for its medieval statuary and broad avenues, Georgian terraces and riverside pubs, Oxford sounds idyllic. But all is not well in the city of dreaming spires, where some residents feel concerns about students' rowdy behaviour are not being taken seriously enough.
By day, there is litter and swearing, say locals. And when the clubs and bars close at night, there are broken windows, fights, students walking over parked cars and even assaults.
But attempts to flag up concerns to police or the local council often fall on deaf ears, says Sietske Boeles, of the Divinity Road Area Residents' Association. When residents raised objections to the building of a new block of student flats, they were accused of "anti-student vitriol" by local councillor and chair of Oxford City Council's planning review committee, Tony Brett, who wrote that their concerns sounded "horribly like the racism of the 60s, the homophobia of the 80s and the sexism of the 70s".
Boeles also says complaints are not always followed up appropriately; students are handed back to the universities for punishment, who "might take their library card away or some other very lenient sanction", she says. And she points out that around 15 of the 48 councillors – including the council leader, Bob Price, who is HR director at Oxford Brookes University – have studied, worked or volunteered at one of the two universities. Some councillors are "simply eyeing up the student vote," says Boeles.
Both the city's universities were quick to dismiss the idea. A spokesperson for Oxford Brookes said: "We believe the university adds the equivalent of £1m a day to the local and national economy."
An Oxford University spokesperson said: "The university … is the largest employer in Oxford, supporting over 18,000 jobs, so it's not surprising that in any given grouping of local people you do find university employees."
The Student Loans Company should have no problem compiling a list of New Year's resolutions. Perhaps it could simply recycle last year's list.
According to its annual report, the SLC failed to meet around 62% of its targets for the year, with slow service, poor communication and late payments topping the list of student complaints.
The company started 2010 on a sour note, having failed to fully process 209,000 students' grants and loans – more than half of all applications – in time for the start of the academic year. The fiasco resulted in the departure of two senior staff.
In the report, the SLC blames its lacklustre performance last year on not having "sufficient numbers of trained staff in place" – and an increase in complaints, which it puts down to the fact that it has recently taken on responsibility for assessing students' eligibility for grants and loans.
The company remains optimistic. A spokesperson said: "We have seen a major turnaround of the performance over the last two years. These figures relate to last year's performance and our 11/12 processing figures show an even better service for our student customers."
Janet Murray and Martin Williams
A new survey of English teachers reveals intense worries about the consistency of exam marking at A-level
Exam boards in England, Wales and Northern Ireland may feel under siege. In recent weeks, the scandal of examiners allegedly giving too much help to teachers about future papers during training sessions – a subject covered by Education Guardian in 2009 – has been hitting the headlines. And a string of errors in last summer's exam papers led to an investigation by the watchdog Ofqual, which has concluded that while generally the boards met regulatory requirements, there were quality "issues" at all awarding bodies.
Now, as we await publication of the secondary league tables, a survey of English teachers carried out by the National Association for the Teaching of English (Nate) has identified the quality of marking as the largest worry among those teaching the subject at A-level.
A report in the latest edition of Nate's journal says: "The quality and consistency of examination marking … has led to a crisis in confidence about the ability of [exam boards] to employ markers and deploy procedures that can guarantee accurate results."
Ofqual surveys have found that, across all subjects, nearly three quarters of A-level teachers have confidence in the quality of marking, against 20% who do not. However, the Nate survey, completed by 144 teachers, found plenty of expressions of frustration.
One respondent wrote: "Our results were totally out of line with predictions and we were very concerned about the quality of the marking."
Another wrote of "shocking inaccuracy and inconsistency, and no apology for the distress caused".
Other comments included: "the gap between the most generous and most severe markers is a scandal" and "instances of erratic marking and moderation have increased, with some frankly bizarre results, and re-marks resulting in sometimes huge shifts [in the marks]".
Kevin Rogers, an English teacher and assistant curriculum manager at Bilborough College, Nottingham, says his c150 English language AS-level students had an "unhappy" experience last summer.
When results came back from the AQA board, teachers were surprised at the unusually small number of As and Bs. Eyebrows were further raised when staff went through students' completed scripts.
"Often we could not really see how the comments related to the script itself," says Rogers, "… so we would struggle to see how the student had ended up with the mark they had." In the end, all scripts were sent back for a re-mark, and 43 of the 150 students had their marks improved.
But it took until November. This can have big repercussions for students, some of whom will drop a subject after the AS exams if their first result suggests they are not doing as well as expected. Rogers adds that, with teachers and institutions also judged on pupils' exam grades, poor marking can provoke months of misplaced soul-searching by staff.
An experienced English A-level examiner, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the boards have impressive systems for checking that erratic marking is picked up. However, there are strains. "There is enormous pressure on the boards, seemingly from the government, for results to get out faster and faster," she says.
There are pressures on individuals, too. Typically, a marker might be allocated 200 A-level English scripts. The examiner says it would be "amazing" to get through three in an hour, suggesting a commitment in excess of 65 hours. With many examiners also teaching, this means a lot of work in evenings and weekends.
Occasionally, she says, an examiner faced with too much work might just leave scripts unmarked until the board tracked them down. Very rarely, a marker would be found to have marked too fast in a rush to earn money: pay rates for A-level English are typically around £6 per script.
The examiner added that in the scenarios described above, however, the boards would typically allocate very senior markers to these problem scripts, and the issue would be well handled.
Schools and colleges, she added, could sometimes feel aggrieved when students did not meet their predicted grades even though, on occasion, teachers had been over-generous with their predictions.
Meanwhile, an official working for the OCR exam board has made seemingly far more damning claims against procedures for investigating examiners' mistakes.
In evidence to the Commons education select committee, David Leitch, a supervisor working for OCR's parent body, Cambridge Assessment, says that senior OCR managers tried to stop further checks being carried out on the accuracy of examiners' marks after he and colleagues found 300 students' scripts containing basic mistakes in markers' adding-up. At least 80 examiners were found to be at fault.
The mistakes were first uncovered last August. Leitch says that in October, when discussing the matter, managers had not wanted to tell schools, colleges and students about them. Leitch reported the matter to Ofqual, and following this, extra checks were carried out by OCR.
An OCR spokesman says that managers had sought not to make changes to grades until after a thorough investigation. Eventually, in all instances where clerical errors were found, and where this was to the candidate's detriment, marks were changed. In only a few cases did this affect the overall grade: eight students' AS grades, two A-level grades and four GCSE grades improved as a result.
Over the years, exam boards have argued that the number of grades changed following a re-mark is very small as a percentage of papers taken.
Ofqual figures show that this year, across all subjects, 12,245 A-level papers had grades changed on re-marking, which equates to only 0.48%. However, the number of grades changed has grown by nearly 50% since 2007. It rose 16% last year alone.
Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says English is a particularly contentious subject, since subjectivity will always be greater than in maths and science. But he adds: "In general, the exams system is under strain because of the number of changes that are made to it [by ministers]."
Critics will also point to the implications of sheer scale. Some 16 million GCSE and A-level papers were sat last summer. Measures put forward by Michael Gove, the education secretary, including the ending of multiple modular papers at GCSE, may take some pressure off. But the exams regime will remain under close scrutiny, since the results are now so important to students, teachers and schools.
What can Duke Ellington and Miles Davis teach entrepreneurs? Quite a lot, say Warwick academics
Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Art Blakey are widely recognised as three of the greatest jazz band leaders of the 20th century. But did you ever consider they might be role models for entrepreneurs? In fact, each one of them has lessons to offer on how to inspire creativity and innovation within an established structure, according to Deniz Ucbasaran, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Warwick Business School.
Ucbasaran has been the lead academic on a paper, currently being peer reviewed, entitled Leading Entrepreneurial Teams: Insights from Jazz. It won an award for best paper at the Institute for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship conference in November.
Entrepreneurs are like jazz band leaders, Ucbasaran argues, insofar as they have to "build creative tension and give individuals their heads" while working within the framework of a collective. They have to harness the "disparate egos of highly talented people" and somehow keep them working towards the same goal. "To the uninitiated, jazz seems like chaos, whereas the reality is that it's very ordered," she says. "Underpinning the structure is a long tradition of education and practice."
Like any business, jazz bands have products (concerts, gigs, recordings, etc) that must be marketed and sold, and have a range of stakeholders to satisfy (customers, audiences, peers, critics, etc), says Ucbasaran. "Further, like entrepreneurial managers, the leaders of musical groups must identify and exploit commercial opportunities to survive."
When asked whether she is a jazz fan, Ucbasaran replies: "I am now." Her two collaborators on this project have been fans for some time – around 45 years in the case of Professor Mike Humphreys, 62, from Nottingham University Business School. Andy Lockett, 39, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Warwick, is keen, too. Like Ucbasaran, he recently moved across the Midlands from Nottingham, where this project had its roots.
It began when two master's students came to see Humphreys and Lockett to ask advice on subjects for dissertations. Both were interested in researching knowledge management and leadership within the creative industries. Neither knew much about jazz, but they responded positively when their tutors suggested that the organisation of bands was worth investigation. "It offered them the chance to do something a bit different," says Lockett. "And they began by doing what we would never have thought of. They posted an advert on MySpace saying: 'Jazz musicians wanted: apply within'."
There was an immediate response, and soon the students were doing interviews with some of Britain's top performers. Among them were trumpeter Guy Barker, pianist Jim Watson and band leader Wynton Marsalis who, it soon emerged, modelled his leadership style on Art Blakey. "Others would refer back to Duke Ellington or say 'this was the way that Miles Davis did it'," Lockett recalls.
He and Humphreys looked at the transcripts and became convinced that the subject was worthy of further investigation. So, in collaboration with Ucbasaran, they began looking at how three giants of jazz ran their bands and the lessons they offered for business leaders. "We used all sorts of archival data, including biographies, autobiographies, press cuttings and sleeve notes," Lockett explains, "and came up with three distinctive styles of leadership."
The paper that so impressed the conference of the Institute for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurship is the second to emerge from that research. The first, Sensemaking and Sensegiving: Stories of Jazz Leadership, has already been published in a journal called Human Relations.
A recurring theme in stories about Ellington, it seems, was his talent for motivation and inspiration. But it was coupled with what the authors call "a laissez-faire attitude towards the behaviour of his musicians". He saw their foibles as the price to be paid for having access to their talents. For Ucbasaran that raises questions for entrepreneurs. "If you have a creative process, you have to have talented employees. But talent is not always easy to manage. To what extent do you accommodate wayward behaviour? You have to give them freedom and space, but direct them in subtle ways so that the end result comes together harmoniously."
Ellington's laid-back approach meant that he kept a cadre of long-serving core musicians together over several decades. Davis, however, rarely chose musicians who knew each other. As the paper puts it, "he felt that prior relationships might lead to the development of routines which hampered innovation and improvisation". So creative tension was his over-riding priority? Lockett nods. "He was less concerned about stability than the other leaders. If it worked, it would be brilliant. If not, he'd disband the team and start again."
Blakey was much more of a father figure, he says. "His speciality was bringing on young musicians. And he was much more concerned about the decorum and behaviour of his team than the other two." Which of the three offers the best guidance to the entrepreneurs of today? "It's impossible to say. All three offer lessons that can be taken on board."
In some businesses more than others, perhaps. Ucbasaran concedes that the insights from jazz are more pertinent in the cultural industries and "hi-tech businesses with a rapid pace of change".
The kind of businesses, indeed, that have made it more likely that the great jazz music of the 20th century is listened to in the 21st century on iPods rather than on vinyl.
Research into hair whitening suggests it was historians, not doctors, who described the overnight phenomenon – in order to dramatise events
In a study called Sudden Whitening Of The Hair: An Historical Fiction? Anne-Marie Skellett, George Millington and Nick Levell, at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, try to chop off a myth at its roots. People's hair, they believe, does not all of a sudden turn white. It just doesn't. Goodbye, ye hoary tales of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and Sir Thomas More of England each turning whitehaired the night before being beheaded.
Hair whitening – "canities" in medical lingo – takes longer than days or even weeks, they report in a 2008 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
If somebody's hair did suddenly turn white, they say, it would most likely have an unnatural cause: "the washing out, or lack of access to a temporary hair dye".
They suggest one other possible, though maybe nonexistent, mechanism. The disease alopecia totalis makes people's hair fall out. Perhaps, in someone of mixed white and dark hair, some rare form of the disease might make only the dark strands fall out.
In medical monographs over the past 100 years, doctors have almost uniformly expressed scepticism.
In 1972, Josef Jelinek of New York University medical school, debunked dozens of supposedly documented sudden-hair-whitening claims, with a monograph in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Jelinek, an MD, began by directing the blame: "It was not the physician but rather the historian who first seized on stories of sudden whitening to dramatise the tribulations of famous persons, principally in their grief or fear, in order to interest and astonish the reader. The poet, too, found poignancy in this phenomenon." He mentions as an example Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 1, where Falstaff says to Hotspur: "Worcester is stolen away tonight. Thy father's beard is turned white with the news."
Dr Alexander Navarini and Dr Ralph Trueb at University Hospital of Zürich, Switzerland have become the foremost modern scholars of sudden-whitening.
In 2009, they published a report called Marie Antoinette Syndrome, about a 54-year-old woman whose "entire scalp hair suddenly turned white within a few weeks". The next year, they published a paper called Thomas More Syndrome, about "a 56-year-old man with sudden total whitening of scalp hair and eyebrows within weeks".
They potter on about the names: "Saint Thomas More, who turned white in 1535, ought to have the right of seniority over the Queen of France who succumbed to the same fate in 1793. Since there seems to be no other particular reason for favouring Marie Antoinette over Thomas More, out of fairness, it would seem appropriate to use the term 'Marie Antoinette syndrome' for the condition afflicting women and 'Thomas More syndrome' for men".
Navarini and Trueb also disseminated some dark, happy hair news. A year ago, they published a monograph called Reversal Of Canities, wherein they explain that they can't really explain why "a 67-year-old, otherwise healthy, man presented with spontaneous repigmentation of his grey hair".
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
In the week of the winter solstice the Guardian Teacher Network's resources will enable pupils to explore the science behind this festival and understand the movements of the sun, moon and Earth
The winter solstice on Wednesday marks the shortest day and longest night of the year, but do pupils understand why it happens? The Guardian Teacher Network has lots of useful resources to help you explore the science behind one of the oldest winter festivals in the world.
Earth, moon and sun is a whiteboard resource for KS2 that illustrates why sunrise and sunset times change throughout the year. Pupils can watch an animation of the Earth as it orbits the sun. This allows them to see how the tilt of the Earth on its axis has an effect on the hours of daylight. The resource includes an animation of how night and day occur, and another explaining the phases of the moon.
This week, a new moon occurs on 24 December, and KS3 pupils can explore this further with the interactive science lesson Phases of the moon. Diagrams are used to illustrate how the moon appears to change in shape as it orbits the Earth, and a drag and drop activity allows pupils to test their understanding of terms such as "waxing gibbous" and "last crescent". By the end of the activity, students should be able to recognise the phases of the moon and explain how each phase is formed. The lesson also covers the role of the moon in religions such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
There are lots more interesting facts about the moon in the Education Guardian article Sunshine and cheese (http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/teacher-resources/3188/Moon). The piece is useful for reading comprehension tasks, and pupils can find out about superstitions surrounding the moon and the origins of the word 'lunatic'. There are also instructions for how to play the Moon Game — a test of pupils' powers of observation — and details of how to make a moon-themed greetings card.
Earth, sun and moon is a science resource for KS2 with two main activities – one exploring how our hours of daylight change as the Earth orbits the sun, and the other explaining the phases of the moon. Pupils will learn that the Earth orbits the sun once each year, and that the moon takes approximately 28 days to orbit the Earth. The resource pack includes teacher's notes and handy photographs of the Earth, sun and moon.
The phases of the moon are also covered in the KS2 resource pack All about planets . Animations and activities perfect for use on a whiteboard demonstrate how the moon orbits the Earth, how the Earth spins on its own axis, and how day and night are related to the Earth's rotation. The lesson pack includes a worksheet about the phases of the moon with illustrations that pupils have to cut out and place in the correct order.
The Guardian Teacher Network has nearly 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise for free http://schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
Schools around the country are facing enforced conversion to academy status – against the wishes of parents, staff and governors
On a sunny winter's afternoon, Downhills primary school looks like an advert for the inclusive possibilities of inner-city, multi-ethnic education.
Children of different races are running around together in the playground; inside the walls are covered with colourful artwork. The head, Leslie Church, talks about one of the school's strengths: giving each child in this deprived area of north London – just a few hundred yards from the starting point of August's riots – access to free violin, cello or guitar lessons in year 4.
The school, which has been through difficulties in the last year despite the overwhelmingly happy exterior, might in other times be cheering itself with news in September from inspectors that it is improving.
Instead, this 463-pupil institution in Tottenham is now seemingly on the front line of a struggle for the future of England's primary schools.
Downhills is facing being forced by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to become a privately sponsored academy, despite fierce opposition from parents, the governing body and staff.
Last Thursday, David Lammy, the local MP, who was a pupil here, accused Gove of an "undemocratic and aggressive" act, which threatened to erase 100 years of local democratic control at the school, founded in the late 19th century, at a stroke.
Lammy is now collecting signatures for a petition to present to the House of Commons against the plans, while the school is exploring its legal options.
Yet Downhills, which is in this position because the government says its English and maths test results are not good enough, is not alone.
Hundreds of primary schools seem to be facing the threat of mandatory conversion to academies under external sponsorship, with Downhills a high-profile test of the new and seemingly unfettered ability of the education secretary to enforce his vision of a new model of governance, even when all those closely connected to this school say they do not want it. Critics say Gove is simply forcing through an agenda of privatisation, in a trend with implications for many, if not all, of England's schools.
Although Downhills draws in some middle-class families attracted to its inclusive, creative ethos, it also has a very challenging intake. Some 46% of its children are eligible for free school meals, while for 73%, their first language is not English. Downhills is also said to have a large population of Gypsy Roma children, who nationally have the lowest results of any ethnic group.
When Ofsted visited in January, 92% of parents returning questionnaires agreed with the statement "I am happy with my child's experience at this school".
Despite this, since that inspection Downhills has been on a "notice to improve" from the inspectorate because of its test results. These had one particularly bad year in 2009, when only 40% of pupils achieved the expected level in English and maths.
In September, however, when inspectors returned, they reported that Downhills was improving. Schools are usually given 12 to 18 months to turn themselves around under this Ofsted process.
But now the school faces a different future. Downhills is particularly vulnerable because Gove has powers, under an act he hastened through parliament last year, to force into academy status any school that is said by Ofsted to need "special measures" or that has a notice to improve.
Academies are schools set up under a private contract between Gove and a sponsor: usually either another school or a privately run, though currently non-profit-making, academy chain.
Gove's officials and Haringey, the local authority, have been in discussions since July. Letters between the two show the Department for Education pushing for 10 of the borough's primaries to convert to sponsored academies.
Downhills' position became clear after a meeting two weeks ago between governors and two DfE representatives, including Jacky Griffin, a former council education director now working as a consultant. Education Guardian has heard a recording of the meeting.
Griffin told the group: "What I'd particularly like to focus on today is whether the course of action of becoming a sponsored academy is one that you would like to take with us … or whether we have to take back the message that that's not what you want to do, and see what happens as a consequence of that."
This was followed by a letter four days later from Lord Hill, schools minister, who said that Gove was "minded" to make an academy order – forcing academy status on Downhills – and to use powers granted to the government under Labour to appoint a new governing body.
He said the school had been "below the [KS2 results] floor standard" for five years, even though Downhills' latest figures, published three days after the letter was sent, see it just above floor target – with 61% of children reaching expected levels in English and maths – and faring better than the national average with disadvantaged children.
But Hill asked the governors to write back by 13 January setting out how they would pass a resolution to become an academy, "with a named sponsor agreed with the DfE". Griffin said the school was expected to become an academy in September.
The process was "brutal", says one source at the school. Church himself says he was in tears on first learning of the school's fate; governors were also said to be sobbing following Hill's letter. Gove, it is said, has never visited the school.
Other schools are in Downhills' position. In June it was revealed that 377 civil servants are working on promoting and implementing the academies policy, at a cost of £4.3m. Officials working for Gove and Liz Sidwell, the schools commissioner, have been touring England in recent weeks talking to local authorities and governing bodies about how schools with low Sats results must become academies by September.
Haringey is one of nine local authorities where these officials have been pushing hardest for more sponsored primary academies. The others are: Kent, Birmingham, Essex, Lancashire, Northamptonshire, Leeds, Bristol and Durham.
In Haringey alone, at least three other schools have been given an ultimatum: agree to sponsored academy status by mid-January, or we will force it on you.
The National Association of Head Teachers says that, nationally, at least 200 primaries with low results – lower than Downhills' – are already being moved towards sponsored academy status. But the final number is likely to be much larger; the NAHT says most authorities are coming under pressure in some way, in both primary and secondary sectors.
One head of a secondary school that is in the process of converting to a sponsored academy says: "A senior local authority official came to see me a few months ago. He said: 'Are you thinking of becoming an academy? Because you need to. The DfE are looking at your results. You will become a converter [sponsored] academy.' We were given no option."
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, says: "This is a major political attack on state education. This is not schools opting for academy status; this is the government forcing schools away from local authority influence into the arms of external sponsors. It is hugely undemocratic.
"It is the forced privatisation of our schools. People have not woken up to what is happening to our education system."
Back at Downhills, what most enrages parents queuing up to speak to Education Guardian is the lack of say anyone connected to the school seems to have in its future. Several say they chose the school because of that creative, happy ethos and how wrong it was that this could change, if a sponsor came in, with a different, possibly more narrowly results-focused, approach.
Elsa Dechaux, a research scientist whose son Oscar, four, is in reception at the school, says: "I visited all the schools around here, and this is the one I chose, because of the teachers' enthusiasm. I want my children to be happy to learn. I don't want them to be little robots, doing only English and maths."
Sarah Williams, a musician with children aged eight and 10 at Downhills, says: "I only moved them here in September, specifically because I love it here; they don't just teach to the test.
"I thought the Conservative party was supposed to give parents choices. I have made my democratic choice, and now it is being taken away from me."
James Redwood, whose four-year-old son, Arthur, is in reception, says: "I'm a composer, and I visit a lot of schools. This is a fantastic, happy place. It is the end of state education if they can do what they are doing to a place like this."
Schools should be rewarded for getting the best out of all their pupils, argues Mike Baker, whatever grades they make
Have you adopted the brace position for next month's secondary school league tables? After last year's introduction of the controversial Ebacc measure, more change is on the way. So, more turbulence is likely.
But how helpful will the new tables be for parents as they choose between local schools? And, equally important in the current climate of concern over exam cheating, will the changes stop the game-playing that is encouraged by the current tables?
The 2011 tables will abandon the contextual value-added measure, which attempted to take account of social factors that shaped performance. The government says this was "difficult for the public to understand". Instead, there will be new measures showing the progress pupils have made and a "narrowing the gap" measure that compares the exam performance of pupils on free school meals with others.
Yet, for all the chopping and changing, the government will continue to headline what the education secretary, Michael Gove, says is the "key performance measure", namely the number of pupils achieving five or more A*-C grades including maths and English.
Ministers appear to persist in prioritising this measure, despite recent criticism from the chairman of the education select committee, Tory MP Graham Stuart. He believes it has "contributed to gaming" as schools target pupils who are on the borderline of C/D grades, at the expense of the lowest-performing students.
Stuart has a point and, coming from that quarter, this criticism cannot be dismissed conveniently as defensiveness on the part of schools or teachers. Commenting on the recent allegations of exam board cheating, in which it was suggested teachers had been given undue guidance on future exams, Stuart said this showed how the current accountability system "will drive and distort behaviour and lead to unintended and unwished-for results".
He has urged the government to come up with "a better measure". But if contextual value added has been rejected as too complex, what might that "better measure" be? One interesting suggestion was offered by Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess in a paper published last year entitled Can School League Tables Help Parents Choose Schools?
Allen and Burgess devised a measure that gives parents the "expected GCSE performance for a child of similar ability to theirs" for all schools in the local area. Because it is reported in terms of average GCSE grades, rather than points, they argue that it is "relatively simple" for parents to interpret.
An important advantage of their proposed measure is that it militates against schools focusing their efforts on pupils at the C/D threshold. It is based on the best eight GCSE subject grades for pupils at three different points in the ability distribution: those who scored at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles in their key stage 2 tests at the end of primary school.
A further advantage is that it should be more useful in helping parents to choose schools because it works better as a predictor of their own child's likely exam grades if they attend a particular school. This would help to dispense with the misleading idea that there is somehow a "best school" when it is much more a question of which is the "right school".
No doubt some will still regard this proposed measure as more complex than the current five A*-C measure. Certainly, it does not lend itself to a simple football-style league table. But maybe it is all the better for that, since the current measure is misleading if parents believe it will tell them what their own child is likely to achieve at a particular school.
Of course, there are some who argue that all league tables, however sophisticated, will distort the behaviour of schools so long as such high stakes are attached to them. I increasingly sympathise with this view. After all, we need to worry when heads are saying, as one told the select committee recently, that "examination has overtaken teaching".
But, for now, I see little prospect of the genie of school choice (however illusory) being put back into the bottle. So rather than just creating additional, but peripheral, accountability measures, the government should take the bold step of replacing the headline five A*-C measure with something that rewards schools for getting the best out of all pupils, wherever they are on the ability spectrum.
• www.mikebakereducation.co.uk
Why are sports personalities all men? Plus, a proposed free school hops boroughs, and a season of ill will at the London College of Communications
Stopwatch at the ready
The all-male shortlist for this year's BBC Sports Personality of The Year met with outrage earlier this month. But the news came as no surprise to one academic, who after studying the awards ceremony for a decade has become something of an anorak on the subject. Dr Elizabeth Pike settles down to watch the show each year with a stopwatch, totting up how much screen time is devoted to men and women and then logging her findings on to spreadsheets.
Pike, who is head of sport development and management at the University of Chichester, says women's sports get 10% of the screen time, and when the camera pans to the audience for close-ups, more than 70% of the shots are of men. "The year Andrew Flintoff got [the award] ahead of Ellen MacArthur was particularly galling," Pike recalls. "The English cricket team had won the Ashes, but Flintoff rolled around drunk afterwards. Meanwhile, MacArthur had sailed around the world single-handed."
Pike has written to the BBC to share her evidence and awaits a reply. When this year's show airs this week, she will be glued to the screen, stopwatch in hand. "I'll be interested to see whether there's any attempt to explain the all-male line-up. I'm not getting my hopes up."
Birbalsingh spreads her wings
In October, we brought news that ex-deputy headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh was struggling to find a site for her free school, due to open next September. Having found out that the building she had her eye on - the Lilian Baylis school - was due to be sold off to developers by Lambeth council, Birbalsingh had been trying to galvanise support from locals to find a site.
But now it emerges that Birbalsingh's school could be located in Tooting, in the borough of Wandsworth. And while parents in Wandsworth may be delighted, residents of Lambeth – which had around 400 more applications for school places than were available last year – may not be quite so thrilled.
The academy is one of 63 free schools recently approved by the government. As part of the application process, proposers must demonstrate local demand from parents.
So in moving her school to another borough, can Birbalsingh still claim to be meeting demand? A Department for Education spokesperson said local demand was one of several criteria, "not the top or only one". "The Michaela school drew on demand across a fairly wide area of south London. Although the initial site was in Lambeth this wasn't essential to the proposal. They will consult local parents and others should that prove to be the final site." Birbalsingh says: "The site is close to the boundaries of both Lambeth and Merton, which widens access. We hope the school will have a multicultural intake and a multi-borough intake."
Failure to communicate
Seasonal goodwill seems thin at the London College of Communication, and, um, communications seem to have broken down. The press office has been strangely incommunicado of late, with inquiries diverted to the head of college, Sandra Kemp. Now it has emerged that the head of communications, Gillian Radcliffe, has left, escorted from the building after an apparent bust-up with her boss.
In her leaked resignation letter, Radcliffe claims she was subjected to "irrational criticism" and questions about her integrity after she raised concerns to Kemp about her management style. "It has become clear that you now view me in the same negative light as you do countless other decent and dedicated colleagues," Radcliffe wrote.
A spokeswoman for the University of the Arts London, of which LCC is part, said it was "saddened by the tone and content" of the letter. The University and College Union says Radcliffe's departure brings to 19 the number of senior managers to have left since Kemp's appointment in 2008. It says five were sacked, nine resigned under duress and five left through redundancy. The university spokeswoman said restructuring had led to redundancies. The institution had "robust" grievance procedures. "It would be inappropriate to comment on individual members of staff," she added.
David Eastwood reflects on a very political year in higher education, and suggests which direction policy might take in 2012
Bismarck once remarked that there were two processes one shouldn't observe: the making of sausages and the making of laws. He meant, of course, that close observation would lead to disaffection, so both were best left to more-or-less skilful butchery behind closed doors.
Actually, good sausages are rather a good metaphor for good laws. Use plenty of high-quality policy meat, resist the temptation to throw in off-cuts from previous initiatives, avoid bulking up with indigestible technicalities, and use ideological seasoning to draw out flavour rather than obscure bad taste.
Higher education policy used to be developed off-stage, with university leaders, mandarins and ministers locked in serious, often fierce, but apparently seemly debate – a bit like a game of croquet, really. The process might be leavened by the odd white paper, occasionally simmered in a Royal Commission, and legislation would finally pass, on the rare occasion it was necessary, without parliamentary debate boiling over.
Contrast the last 12 months: some debate contrived, some real, some ideologically synthetic, some evanescent, but all searingly public.
Higher education policy has been mired in the deep fissures within the coalition, a victim of the opposition's veering between tactical point-scoring and strategic repositioning, and beset by an unusual distance between what is said freely, but confidentially, in private and what is deemed expedient to admit in public.
There has never been a more contested environment in which to make higher education policy. From the 1960s there had been a broad consensus that higher education should expand. This was there in reports by Robbins, Baker and Dearing. There has been a similar consensus over the last two decades, sometimes sotto voce, sometimes avowed, that students should contribute more and the taxpayer less to the cost of higher education.
That consensus held through Baker, Dearing, Blunkett, Clarke, the 2003 white paper, the 2004 Act, and into the establishment of the Browne review on higher education funding. Make no mistake, both political sides committed before the election to legislating Browne. The "Days of May" changed everything. Higher education was at the heart of a fiercely contested new politics.
With this, the verities of two generations were gone; higher education politics literally and metaphorically took to the streets. The coalition agreement, which specifically sought to address the issue of party differences on higher education, creaked, groaned (very loudly) and didn't deliver what was intended.
Many made noise, some made trouble, and a few, sometimes too few, sought to make workable policy – notably, and laudably, the minister for higher education, David Willetts, and, in more circumspect ways, some of his predecessors.
In one paradoxical sense, the Browne report didn't help. Many thought they knew what Browne would say, and built their reading of Browne on scraps of misrepresentation and half-truths, and then rushed to comment. Thus the debate on Browne was overlaid by a dissonant descant of misunderstanding.
Then, belatedly, people read Browne itself and were disconcerted by what they found. They found a coherent vision of a student-centred system: an ingenious balancing of the right to set fees and the obligation to share risk, which would have constrained fee levels far more effectively than a crude cap; and a system for financial aid that would have been much simpler and better-targeted than anything else on offer.
I have now lost count of the number of people who have told me, quietly, that "Of course, Browne was right" or that their policy prescriptions were designed "To get back to Browne".
Of course there are those who repudiate Browne, some because they want a wholly publicly-funded system, some because they believe that those who don't benefit from higher education should still bear a disproportionate cost in supporting those who do, some because they believe in social mobility and genuinely hold that this can only be achieved by wholly public means, some because they want a system where the interests of institutions win out when they come into tension with those of the students, and some because they are convinced that Browne wouldn't work.
Crucially, and sadly, the debate focused toxically on fees. Fees were never the real issue: financial aid was and is. Browne's initial proposals, and the government's subsequent legislation, has ensured mass higher education, and is affordable both to the public and to the student. There are no up-front fees, and repayments are proportionate to income, which is a proxy of sorts for personal benefit. This will balance access and public and private benefit. To make access real, financial aid (and please let's start using that term, not paternalistic English circumlocutions such as bursaries), is critical.
Sadly, the concentration on the fee issue has actually reduced financial aid and thus real support to poor students. Revision of access agreements has sought to reduce headline fees by diminishing financial aid. Liam Burns, the NUS president, has rightly expressed his reservations, and like many well-informed observers, now understands that financial aid is the key issue.
The "core/margin" idea, in which universities charging less than £7,500 can bid for 20,000 students, coupled with freedom for universities to recruit as many students as they like with AAB grades in their A-levels, has introduced rebarbative new jargon into our discourse. It, too, is an example of working towards Browne, but in a way that is much more clunky. It will enhance choice for some applicants, but not all, and has brought some discipline into pricing, but not yet enough. The only way forward is for a rapid move towards substantial further deregulation of numbers control.
Browne's emphasis on student choice and proportional regulation as drivers of quality is now partially accepted. Some still exaggerate fears of market failure to propose excessive interference by regulators. Hefce's emergence as the "principal regulator" is welcome, but there remains an increasingly outdated view that one-size-fits-all regulation is appropriate for a massively diversified sector.
As we look ahead to 2012, I propose a neo-Bismarckian solution. Let's attend again to sausage-making in higher education. The high-quality meat is an emphasis on appropriate financial aid, promoting access, properly linking quality and price, and getting the regulatory framework right. The discarded off-cuts will be outdated funding streams such as Hefce's widening participation premium, which should now be superseded by all institutions' financial aid commitments in their access agreements. The fund should be repurposed to support stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects, which are teetering on a new crisis. And the seasoning should be left to those who really care about and understand higher education, rather than those who wish to use policy debates for other, generally transient, and often less noble purposes. Higher education is truly too important to be left to the ideologues.
• Professor David Eastwood is vice-chancellor of Birmingham University and former head of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Eastwood was a member of the panel that produced the Browne review on higher education funding.
• This article was amended on 20 December 2011 to clarify the explanation of the "core/margin" idea. This article was further amended on 22 December 2011 to clarify that Eastwood was a member of the panel who produced the Browne report, which was a review of higher education funding and student finance.
Demand is soaring for short courses, from drumming to shoe-making, among people seeking a portfolio career – and it's good news for colleges and universities
Sue Baughan spent a week of this summer decamped to London to learn how to shape patterns on leather. The summer before that, it was sandal-making, and the one prior to that was spent making boots. By day, the 39-year-old from Boddington in Northamptonshire works full-time as a team co-ordinator for an environmental organisation. But in her evenings, holidays and weekends, thanks to that bevy of short courses, Baughan works on shoe-making. She's part of the new breed of Britons aspiring for a portfolio career using different skills to earn money – either at the same time or across a working life – and the country's higher education institutions are reaping the benefits.
Demand for short courses in subjects ranging from African drumming to accountancy via French and family history is soaring.
"Initially, I enrolled on a short course because I wanted a pair of fitted knee-length boots and had difficulty finding any to fit, so I thought I would try making some," Baughan explains. "I enjoyed the boot-making course so much that I decided to carry on learning about shoe-making and working with leather. The more I'm learning, the more I think I would like to change my career in the long term."
Baughan believes the current economic climate means it's a "good idea to have a variety of skills in different areas – it should make you more employable". She's now making shoes for her friends and family, signing up to more London College of Fashion short courses and setting up a workshop at her home. "In the long term, I hope to have enough skills and experience to start my own bespoke shoe-making business," she says.
Baughan is not alone. The LCF reports a burst of interest in short courses from portfolio careerists: from the 400 it ran two years ago, there are now more than 450, on subjects ranging from bridalwear to PR. The number of enrolled students has grown about 6% in the same timeframe, to 5,300 students this year. "The current working environment means far more people are signing up for short courses to invest in themselves," explains Linda Roberts, senior business manager for short courses at LCF. "When the crunch hit a few years ago, students began telling tutors they wanted to take more control over their lives and didn't want to be at the mercy of their employers. They wanted extra skills and resources up their sleeve to help stay financially afloat. That sense has only grown since then."
That was the reason Natalie James, 33, spent £800 and nine weeks' worth of Wednesday evenings learning fashion and editorial makeup at LCF. She had a full-time job in advertising, but was keen to expand her career. "Thousands of people were losing their jobs every day, with many looking at ways to transfer their skills," James explains. Since completing the course she has built up a portfolio of makeup work and established contacts in the industry; she is now combining advertising with teaching her own makeup lessons, and planning to launch her own consultancy.
It's not just creative subjects that are growing in popularity: so, too, are marketing and commercial courses, as hobbyists look to commercialise their skills. "We've seen a surge in demand for business-related courses from people who are already working on crafts and who want to start selling their products online and running a business in the evenings and weekends," says Roberts. "Seminars in online retailing, e-commerce and social media marketing are really popular."
Meanwhile, tutors at Anglia Ruskin report strong interest in short courses in its publishing department, with lecturer Leah Tether explaining: "The take-up for our six-week courses on editing, marketing, magazines, publishing and design software and web design surpassed our wildest expectations. The evaluation surveys carried out at the end of each course revealed that students are increasingly aware of the need to make themselves desirable candidates for employment. These courses make it possible to show tangible experience of certain skillsets on a CV and, even better from the student's point of view, don't cost several thousand pounds."
Around the country, colleges are responding to higher demand with free taster sessions. Pitman Training in Luton is offering free accounting, secretarial, PA and IT taster courses; would-be sports reporters can sign up to news agency Sports Beat's free introduction to sports journalism workshops in London and Manchester, and Beecome is offering a free introductory course in bee-keeping over a weekend in May.
Tutors say this kind of short course is often as popular among those just looking for a hobby. That's the case for lawyer Sam Ross, 27, who has just spent £199 on a 10-week course in songwriting at the Institute of Contemporary Music in Kilburn, north London. "I have been working as a corporate lawyer for four years and wanted to find some constructive time to work on my hobby," he explains. He's not about to turn away from the law to become the next Elton John, but is enjoying involvement in both worlds. "The legal market is so competitive and the job requires a lot of time and attention," Ross adds. "But I still wanted to try and nurture a hobby that has fallen by the wayside with a course."
A special issue of the Guardian helped to win this year's Steve Sinnott award for young campaigners
How about these for a few headlines that nobody would complain about: "Malaria wiped out"; "World population levelling off"; "Last shanty towns demolished in Mumbai"; and even: "Everyone in the world now earns at least $5 a day". These were the stories in a special issue of the Guardian – dated 31 December 2025 – created by Eilidih Naismith and Billy Davidson, students at Hutchesons grammar school, Glasgow.
Their vision of how the future could look by 2025 if all children in the world were receiving a primary education by 2015 helped to win them the Steve Sinnott award for Young Global Education Campaigners of the year. They had identified universal primary education as the most important of the eight millennium development goals agreed by world leaders back in the year 2000 – and they were buzzing to spread the message.
"Education is the key to all the world's problems", said Billy, and his T-shirt backed him up. The judges were unanimously convinced by Eilidih and Billy, both 15, who showed that they had researched the issues meticulously, as well as demonstrating real passion for the cause.
The two students had also dreamed up some imaginative ways to spread the message in the UK about the importance of the millennium goals, including a schools advertising competition in which famous company slogans could be hijacked for the Send My Friend to School campaign: "Because we are worth it" and because "Every little helps".
"Eilidih and Billy were so passionate, innovative, enthusiastic and knowledgeable in making their presentation that they stood out in a very strong field," said Mary Sinnott, one of the judges. "I believe they will be tremendous ambassadors."
The award was set up in memory of Steve Sinnott, Mary's late husband, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, who died in 2008. He had been a passionate advocate of the Global Campaign for Education, which is supported by an umbrella body of charities including ActionAid, and by the NUT.
In February, the two students will travel to Malawi with ActionAid and the Global Campaign for Education to meet children who do not have a place at school, or who struggle to attend. When they arrive home, they will speak in the House of Commons and to the teaching unions, and create films and blogs, all as part of their new job as young ambassadors.
The runners-up were Tanisha Patel and Jasmin Sahota, of Soar Valley college, Leicester, Alexander Cotter and Bobo Kalungu-Banda, of Blessed George Napier school, Banbury, and Hannah Copeland and Reece Beale, from The King John school, Benfleet, Essex.
Next year, Send My Friend to School is inviting UK pupils to take part in a special Olympic-themed campaign. More information at sendmyfriend.org
Alice Woolley
• Alice Woolley, editor of Education Guardian, was on the judging panel for the Steve Sinnott award
Olympic swimmers have academics studying fluid dynamics to thank for their latest 'low-drag' gear
In 2009, an astonishing 168 swimming world records were smashed after the introduction of Speedo's full-body LZR racing suit. The sport's governing body decided to investigate, then banned the outfits, stopping manufacturers from using materials that aided "speed, buoyancy or endurance". As a result, swimming apparel-makers went under the radar for a while.
But it's all change for London 2012. In a new push for competitive swimming gear, "streamlined" has become the buzzword. And that was the message at Speedo's launch of its new FastSkin3 suit earlier this month. Michael Phelps of the US, who became the first swimmer to win eight medals, at the Athens Olympics in 2004, did so wearing FastSkin2 and has already signed up to wear the new suit at next summer's Olympics. So too has the home favourite, Rebecca Adlington.
What the athletes might not know, however, is that their swimwear was created with the help of a cohort of British academics. Speedo's bid to create a suit with the lowest possible level of fabric drag – the measure of how easily a material enables water to move over it – saw it sign up academics at the Sorby environmental fluid dynamics laboratory at Leeds University. The university's project leader, Jeff Peakall, a reader in process sedimentology, spends most of his time working on fluid dynamics in the deep-sea, in applications such as oil drilling, and on nuclear waste management. So working on an Olympic swimming outfit was a glamorous change. "Who wouldn't want to be involved in making the fastest racing system yet," he says. "Ultimately, of course, it's exceptional swimmers who break records, but the suits can help swimmers in finding those fine margins."
Measuring water flow
The work by the Leeds team – lab academics Dan Parsons, Gareth Keevil and Russ Dixon were also involved – centred on measuring the interaction of water with materials. Peakall explains: "Ideally you want water to move over a material smoothly, rather than in a chaotic manner where the water is mixing and generating swirls in the flow. We focused on developing a new technique for measuring this process accurately in conditions very close to those achieved by internationally competitive swimmers." The academics measured a range of very low-fabric-drag materials, before working out which of them had the lowest fabric drag and would allow the fastest movement under water.
The Leeds team used a flume machine with a powerful recirculating torrent that can move a large body of water at very high speeds and lasers that measured the flow around the pieces of fabric under test in great detail. "The equipment was all contained in a large black box because the laser beams are so dangerously powerful that a stray reflection from the surface could easily blind a person," says Peakall.
While there was no swimming involved for the academics – "I certainly didn't get in the flume at those speeds," he says – Speedo later put their kit under drag tests in the pool, measuring swimmers being dragged along underneath the water in a swimming position while wearing the FastSkin3's hat, goggles and swimsuit outfit.
Speedo claims its newest swimsuit's design reduces passive drag – the resistance produced by a swimmer's body while it is held in a streamlined position — by 16.6% compared with its earlier models. "It marks a very considerable technological advance in swimsuit fabrics," says Peakall. "And we now have a proven methodology to support the development of the next generation of fabrics – the 2016 development programme [for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics] will start very soon!"
Before then, Peakall will be tuning into the summer's Olympics to see how the swimmers he helped to dress perform. "It will be fascinating to see the kinds of performances and times they put in while competing in these suits," he says. He won't, however, be pool-side for the Games, despite his best efforts. "The swimming is just amazingly popular," he says. "I applied for lots of tickets, but have had to settle for water polo instead."
Still, there's a chance swimmers in FastSkin3s could be spotted in Britain's local pools: the new suits have to be made available to all teams, and are also on sale to the general public. Priced between £85 and £330, however, they're unlikely to be very common. Peakall himself reckons he'll stick to his swimming trunks. "I'd love to sport a FastSkin3 suit," the academic says, "but I fear I'd need to spend a lot less time in the lab and a lot more in the pool."
Researchers take a comprehensive look at the incidence of dandruff among Pakistani soldiers
Public knowledge about dandruff in Pakistan's army comes mainly from a study called Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Regarding Dandruff Among Soldiers, written by Naeem Raza, Amer Ejaz and Muhammad Khurram Ahmed, published in 2007 in the Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Pakistan.
Raza, Ejaz and Ahmed surveyed 800 male soldiers of all ranks, ascertaining each soldier's knowledge about, and personal experience with, dandruff. The survey was "designed keeping in mind the general taboos of our region about dandruff, which included visits to doctors, homeopathic physicians or 'hakims', use of oils, any home-made remedies or commercial products".
If this sampling of soldiers was truly representative, we now know that approximately 65% of Pakistani soldiers have, or have had, dandruff "either permanently or periodically".
"Almost two thirds of the respondents stated to remain tense and embarrassed because of their dandruff." Noting that the "media has played an important role in making people think like that", the study concludes with a recommendation. Healthcare professionals should make a greater effort to educate the populace.
Both the numbers and the reactions are typical of the region and the world, according to a study published three years later in the Indian Journal of Dermatology, called Dandruff: The Most Commercially Exploited Skin Disease.
The Indian report sketches the underlying situation: "Dandruff is a common scalp disorder affecting almost half of the population at the pre-pubertal age and of any gender and ethnicity. No population in any geographical region would have passed through freely without being affected by dandruff at some stage in their life." It helpfully fills in the etymology. "The word dandruff (dandruff, dandriffe) is of Anglo-Saxon origin, a combination of 'tan' meaning 'tetter' and 'drof' meaning 'dirty'."
The Pakistan military report cites a 1990 monograph called The History of Dandruff and Dandruff in History. A Homage to Raymond Sabouraud. That homage was written by Didier Saint-Leger of l'Oréal in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France, and published in the journal Annales de Dermatologie et de Vénéréologie.
Saint Leger explains that Raymond Jacques Adrien Sabouraud, 1864-1938, a French dermatologist, painter and sculptor, is the dominant figure in humanity's effort to understand dandruff.
Saint Leger explains how dandruff figured in Sabouraud's greatness: "In one of his books, written at the beginning of this century, Raymond Sabouraud devotes some 280 pages to the history of dandruff. Their reading illustrates how, from the Greeks to Sabouraud's era, this desquamative disease has been subjected to endless doctrinal and scientific conflicts."
A medical book written during Raymond Sabouraud's lifetime speaks admiringly of the man: "It is said that Sabouraud can tell your moral character, the amount of your yearly income and what you have eaten for breakfast by looking at the root of one of your hairs."
Thanks to Ernst Niebur for bringing this to my attention.
Schoolchildren reveal what gifts they have in store for their teachers, from a turkey to a (very cheap) computer
Mary Buscombe, 15, is in year 11 at St Michael's small school in Truro
I live on a farm outside Newquay, and for the last few years I've always given the teachers a turkey at Christmas. We've got about 50 turkeys on the farm; most of them are killed in the runup to Christmas, although we always keep one alive for Easter.
People think you get attached to the turkeys, or that it's difficult to see them die, but it's not like that – when you live on a farm, you understand that's the point of it. Usually, I help kill the teachers' turkey the day before they're going to eat it – I might hold it while someone wrings its neck. They die quickly and easily, and then we'll hang it up and pluck its feathers.
My mum will cook the turkey here on the farm because they haven't got an oven big enough at school, and then we'll take it in one day next week. My school is tiny – there are only 31 pupils, and 10 teachers – so although the turkey is my present to the teachers, we'll all get some of it for our lunch that day because it's the sort of school where we're like one big family.
Everyone always says how delicious the turkey is – there's no comparison between a home-reared turkey and the sort you buy in the shops. It's a really nice treat before we break up for the Christmas holidays.
India Diment, nine, is in year 5 at Holy Ghost primary school in Balham, London
I'm giving my teacher, Miss Wood, some bath stuff. Last year I gave Miss Ruff, my year 4 teacher, the most brilliant present ever – a chocolate pizza! She really loves chocolate, so I thought it would be perfect for her. She opened all her presents in front of the class and when she saw the pizza box I think she thought it was a prank – and then when she saw the pizza she couldn't believe what a huge slab of chocolate it was! She took it off to try some in the staff room at break and said it was delicious.
Beth Frost, nine, is a year 4 pupil at Bamford primary in Brough, Derbyshire
I've done crochet club every Monday this term, and I've really enjoyed it. My grandma encouraged me to do it – she's brilliant at knitting, and she lives in the village and helps run the crochet club at my school. So when I thought about a present for my teacher, Mr Friend, I thought: why not crochet one? So I'm crocheting him a decoration for his Christmas tree. It's going to be a cute little animal with baubles attached. It's nearly finished.
Mr Friend is a brilliant teacher. He's really kind and helpful, and he loves computers – and computing is my favourite subject. I don't think he knows how good I am at crocheting, so I think he'll be surprised when he sees this. I hope he'll put it on his tree and have a wonderful Christmas holiday.
Matthew Pickering, Jamie Thrippleton and Tom Davies, all 17, year 13 pupils at Queen Elizabeth school, Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria
Matthew: Mr Davies, our computing teacher, has been going on and on about the Raspberry Pi. It's a new computer coming on the market very soon, and he says it's going to revolutionise the teaching of computing in schools. It's tiny and it will cost £15.
Jamie: We know he can't wait to get one, so we're clubbing together and trying to get him one for Christmas. It hasn't been released yet, but we've signed up on the supplier's website in the hope of getting one of the first batch.
Tom: We're all planning to do computing at university, and it's down to Mr Davies – his enthusiasm is infectious. Fingers crossed we'll be lucky and manage to get one before Christmas.
Molly Farrow, five, is in year 1 at Busbridge infant school in Godalming, Surrey
I'm making a big star for my teacher, Miss Browning, to hang from her window at home – it's a sun-catcher. She gives me lots of sticker stars for getting things right at school, so I thought I'd give her a big star for being such a good teacher all year round. My mum is very good at making things, and she's helped me. We made the frame out of willow and then decorated it with lots of coloured sequins. I found some little sequin robins in the box, and robins are Miss Browning's favourite bird, so I got lots of them out to stick on the star. I really hope she likes it.
The Guardian Teacher Network this week is full of festive resources to keep pupils engaged
Your lesson plans are likely to go out of the window this week as pre-Christmas excitement takes hold of your pupils.
But do not fear – the Guardian Teacher Network has lots of festive resources that will engage your class in the run-up to the holidays.
Younger pupils will love Kessie's Gift for Santa, a story about a little girl who suddenly feels that Santa should get a present. Suitable for KS1 and KS2, the story explores the themes of giving and receiving and provides a handy stimulus for Christmas-themed drama activities.
For KS2 and KS3, 'Twas the Fright Before Christmas is a humorous play that re-works Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Featuring three ungrateful children and a reformed Scrooge, the play has plenty of parts to get your whole class involved. A scene from the film A Muppet Christmas Carol is used in this English lesson to get pupils talking about Dickens's classic Christmas tale. The KS2-KS4 resource includes links to an edited and abridged version of the novel, particularly useful for Esol students and reluctant readers. Suggested activities include writing a diary entry for Christmas Eve. Scrooge writes his first Christmas card is a KS3 lesson in which students read an article and answer questions about the beginnings of the Christmas card in Britain. During the activity, pupils will discover what the first Christmas card looked like and why people complained about it.
Victorian attitudes to Christmas are explored in this KS3 lesson. Using extracts from A Christmas Carol, pupils examine how different characters felt about Christmas and why. The lesson links to a Guardian article about the effect that writing the novel had on Dickens, who completed the work in just two months and saw the first edition sell out in five days. An extract from an Observer review of the book is included in the KS3 lesson A Christmas Carol .
For a quick craft activity, the conservation organisation ARKive has produced a set of origami templates with a Christmassy theme. Pupils can use their paper-folding skills to create either a Christmas tree, turtle dove or arctic fox.
Each template includes an interesting fact – did you know an arctic fox has furry feet that help prevent it from freezing in the snow – and is accompanied by teacher's notes. The organisation has also produced a set of Christmas masks for pupils to cut out and wear. Choose from a penguin, polar bear or reindeer.
There are more craft ideas in this interactive advent calendar produced by the charity Cafod, including how to make stained-glass shortbread stars and how to use handprints to make a Christmas tree picture. The Guardian Teacher Network has nearly 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise for free http://schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
No new community schools can be created under coalition policy … or can they? Dorothy Lepkowska meets a group of parents who have found a way, and wonders whether others could follow suit
Sixteen little heads sit bowed over their desks, hard at work, the children's purple and silver uniforms almost a perfect match with the classroom furniture. The colours were chosen, parents say, so they didn't clash with those of any other school in the city.
All Saints junior school in Reading opened as a free school in September. Over the next five years, its roll will rise annually until it reaches a capacity of 120 pupils. It currently comprises a single class of year 3s, learning in a room in a church hall that has been converted into a classroom through a transitional grant of £40,000. With its interactive whiteboard and bright wall displays, it could be a typical class in any school in the country.
Which is exactly what the parents want it to be. "We are completely apolitical," says Katherine Knight, whose daughter Isabel, seven, is a pupil. "We aren't interested in ideology, or creating some sort of exclusive school, or enticing pupils away from others. We just wanted a junior school that teaches the national curriculum, and that our kids could move to straight from the infants'."
The 25-strong group of parents, community members and teachers who spearheaded All Saints have created a community school out of a piece of legislation that many believed would cause divisions and disrupt local education provision. In this area of central Reading, it seems, it is doing the complete opposite.
While some free schools face claims of elitism – such as Toby Young's West London Free school, where Latin is compulsory to the age of 14 – there is nothing quirky about All Saints. This is a community school for local children.
"It had become harder and harder to find places for children from the infant school," Knight says. "Pupils were dispersed all over the city to schools that had places, but it led to friends and even siblings being split up, creating a huge amount of angst and distress. Last year, five children didn't get a junior place at all."
Hopes were raised three years ago when a local authority-owned building became vacant opposite the infant school. "We asked the council to convert the premises, but they said they didn't have the money and neither did the diocese," says Dorothy Yuille, a mother of four, whose daughter Eva, seven, attends All Saints. "But they said we could have it if we raised £500,000.
"We knew we could never afford it, but we set about fundraising anyway. We even managed to secure a mortgage but, realistically, unless something drastic happened we would never have been able to meet the repayments."
As the election approached, and with little more than £2,000 in the fund, parents realised that the only way they were going to get a school was through the Tories' free schools policy. "We were running out of options," Knight recalls. "Reading council said they were going to put the property on the market within a few weeks if we couldn't find the money."
At around that time, the local vicar, who was a member of the campaigning group, met with representatives from the CfBT Education Trust, a charity that also provides school services and runs independent schools. The meeting had been set up by the warden at the local church, who worked for the chief executive of the charity. It could not have been more timely. "That meeting and the outcome of the election changed everything," Knight recalls. "The CfBT became interested in coming on board to help us run the school and, because of their input, the council gave us until November to come up with a free school proposal.
"The charity had given us credibility and our vision and philosophy coincided, so there was no conflict. We wanted a school that would be strong on discipline and teaching literacy and numeracy, and they shared that ethos."
CfBT, which has published a guide for those seeking to set up a free school, helped the Reading group with their application. The proposal was sent to the Department for Education in September 2010, but official approval was not confirmed until April this year. During that time, parents with children at All Saints infant school were faced with the dilemma of whether to seek places for their children at other junior schools around Reading, or to risk applying to a school that did not yet exist.
In the event, 16 families took that leap of faith, and two days after the notification of places was sent to parents, All Saints juniors was given the go-ahead. The school currently employs a headteacher, one full-time qualified class teacher and a teaching assistant. More staff will be appointed as pupil numbers grow, and it will move into the former council building down the road in September, refurbished at a cost of about £1m.
Coalition policy dictates that all new schools must be either academies or free schools; no new community schools can be created. But could other parents and community groups use the free schools model to create a community school by the back door? All new schools will be able to choose how closely to collaborate with town halls and maintained schools.
Critics of the free schools policy, such as Melissa Benn, have doubts over whether free schools can really promote community cohesion. "You can't blame parents for wanting the best and for reacting to a government that says 'this is the best way to get what you want'," she says.
"We are being told that free schools are being created through community organisation, but what is really happening is that semi-private organisations are coming in and who knows where that will lead. What happens when parents decide they no longer like the way their school is being run?
"Free schools also utilise a model which gives them certain dubious advantages over other schools, for example in terms of admissions and exclusions, or the power to hire non-qualified teachers. But where the freedoms genuinely promote innovation, then surely they should be given to every school?"
Parents at All Saints are aware of the negativity and the fact that it may take a while for attitudes to change. "There remains a general belief that we are taking money and resources from other schools," says Yuille. "But we aren't. We are fulfilling a need in the area and doing the best for our children. We are also helping to solve a serious problem over junior school places that all schools should benefit from."
CfBT is providing services to the school as it evolves, but Knight says the school will be under no obligation to continue with this arrangement in the future and it plans to use services provided by the local authority wherever possible, particularly where these are linked to those already being provided to the infant school, to encourage continuity, stability and value for money.
The junior school has already negotiated to rent some under-used playing fields from the council for PE and games lessons, and it is represented on Reading's schools' governing body association. All Saints will be also included in Reading's schools admissions process like every maintained school in the city.
Even with their school up and running, parents believe it is too soon for celebration – though a 100% satisfaction rate in a recent survey was encouraging. "The children are flying and love it here," Yuille says. "But it's too soon to rest on our laurels as our work isn't done yet. It is safe to say that the school has rejuvenated the whole area."
They also acknowledge the scale of the responsibility they have taken on. "We have to make sure it works because we have taken public money and we have to be accountable for it," says Knight. "It all has to be done properly – even if we don't always know what 'properly' means."
The new admissions code contains a loophole that could see a return to the unfair practices of the past
Some months ago, the government began a consultation on the new school admissions code. It came after months of nods and winks about the need to streamline the overly bureaucratic regulatory framework of the Labour years.
Since its introduction in the late 1990s, the admissions code has undergone several incarnations. All have tended to strengthen its stated aim of ensuring that admissions practices are fair, clear and objective, and enable parents to understand easily how school places are allocated. And that is vitally important. On paper, school admissions may look dry and technical, but in the real world they are a highly political issue and go to the heart of parent choice, social justice and community cohesion.
Sadly, there are still too many discrepancies between the code's intentions and what happens in practice. Schools can find convoluted ways to baffle parents and weed out the least desirable children, often the poorest, using an array of criteria that are discriminatory, opaque and unfair, such as complicated catchment areas, own-school "banding" systems or devious faith-based points systems that rank parents and pupils according to their willingness to ring bells, arrange flowers, count the collection money or clean the church.
They are usually practised by schools that are successful (partly because of their intakes) and therefore formidable lobbyists. Moreover, they tend to remain in place for years unless there is a successful objection to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. So it was a pleasant surprise to note that the consultation document appeared to increase the opportunity for complaints.
However, something very sneaky happened between the end of the consultation period and the publication of the new code, which was laid before parliament earlier this month.
A new clause has been inserted, which bans objections in two key areas: where governing bodies have decided to increase their planned admissions number (PAN) and where independent state schools have been allowed an "agreed variation" to the requirement that they follow the admissions code in their funding agreements.
The freedom to opt out of the admissions code has been theoretically possible from the moment the first "independent" state school was established, and is one reason I have always opposed them. The whole point of independence is to escape the legislative ties that bind maintained schools and to benefit from an altogether looser contractual agreement, which can be easily changed, between the founder or sponsor and the government.
Free schools, most of which like to publicly proclaim their adherence to the admissions code, actually have their own special "model" funding agreement with an annex that allows them to opt out of it. Several of the first 24 have already taken advantage of this, but their dogged refusal to publish these documents means that we (the people who pay for them) can't see how.
It is pretty obvious why this is the thin end of a very long wedge. There are already thousands of independent state schools and technically there is nothing to stop any of them reinstating an array of dodgy admissions practices that years of campaigning managed to outlaw, if the secretary of state will permit it.
How long before interviews, lengthy supplementary forms, primary school records, priority places for certain groups (like the children of founders and governors) and even feeder schools in the private sector start to resurface in some schools' entry criteria?
Even more worrying is the potential for the gradual expansion of academic selection. Grammar schools can now expand at will, and it is not inconceivable that a future Conservative secretary of state could give non-selective schools the permission to introduce partial or even total academic selection, which always favours the better-off, via the funding agreement route.
By the same token, a future Labour government could cease funding selective schools that have converted to academy status unless they phase out existing selection, but I won't be holding my breath on that one.
One of the first articles I wrote for this paper, in 2003, was about school admissions. The words of the then schools adjudicator, Philip Hunter, have rung in my ears ever since. "Left to their own devices," he said, "schools invariably drift to the posh." The government claims to be skewing policy to favour the poor. Not for the first time, what they do is very different from what they say.
• The Local Schools Network is interested in examples of schools in your area that might be breaching the spirit and the letter of the school admissions code.
If the same fees apply for all subjects, humanities departments may benefit, says Jonathan Wolff – but creative arts and some social sciences may suffer
In one of the first columns I wrote for this newspaper, back in 2006, I recounted the curious story of the unintended expansion of university philosophy departments throughout the 1990s. In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's government introduced a form of internal cost-accounting in the universities, and everyone expected the arts and humanities to grind to a halt when our baleful effect on university coffers was revealed. But to the perverse delight of those of us in the humanities, the sums showed that you could turn a nice profit by teaching classroom-based subjects such as English, history and philosophy. This fuelled a little boom in which some departments even doubled in size.
It took the Labour government to return things to their natural order. A decade of fiddling with fee banding and rejigging of research funding returned most arts and humanities departments to deficit. We walked through the cloisters with our heads hung low. We got tummy aches before meetings of finance committees, where we mumbled our gratitude to our science and medical colleagues for dropping pennies in our begging bowls. Vice-chancellors claimed that it was worth subsidising us in order to preserve the ancient idea of the university, whatever those philistines in government wanted.
In truth, though, arts and humanities departments have always attracted the most students. We still produce internationally admired research, and some of it is even read by that semi-mythical beast, the educated general reader. But what's going to befall us when the next round of cuts bite? Can we still be bailed out? If the humanities go, we'll take the sector down with us. Or at least we'll try.
But blow me down, I've visited a few universities lately, and despite what we read in the papers, including, sometimes, this one, the whispers are not exactly what one might expect. Financial officers are finding some simple arithmetic rather exciting.
What the sums show is that although we will no longer get any money from the government for teaching arts and humanities students, in charging the same fee for everyone, whatever subject they do, there's gold in them there humanities. And with universities able to admit an increasing number of highly qualified applicants, there is reason to expand once again. The creative arts, and some social sciences, tragically, won't fare so well, as they can be as expensive as science to teach, but will get no extra funding. There is a potential crisis brewing here.
So what do the next few years have in store? Oxford and Cambridge will have great difficulty taking more students, unless they stop promising rooms to undergraduates and start building new halls of residence. The rest of the Russell group can be expected to try to expand in the humanities. But the inevitable effect is that humanities departments further down the pecking order are going to struggle to attract students with decent qualifications, and below that there could be serious problems of recruitment, as the supply of places at the top increases.
And there is another factor to give us the shivers. Ordinary market economics tell us that where there are above-average profits to be made, greedy new providers will rush in. In the 1980s, this would have been unthinkable, but now the private sector is at the door.
Whether the prestigious branding of the major universities will ward off competition remains to be seen. Maybe things won't be very different. Or perhaps we really are about to enter a period of unprecedented change. Either way, we are at the beginnings of a case study for future business studies undergraduates. If there are any, that is.
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London
Rising student fees and increasing competition are putting universities under pressure to market themselves more aggressively
Until recently, the University of Kent prided itself on its friendly image. Not any more. Over the past few months it has been working hard, with the help of media consultants, to downplay its cosy reputation in favour of something more academic and serious.
Kent is not alone in considering an image revamp. Changes to next year's funding regime are both forcing universities to justify charging students up to £9,000 in fees, and increasing competition for students with AAB or above at A-level, which is putting institutions under pressure to argue they offer something better than the rest.
Paul Starkey, research director of Heist, a higher education marketing consultancy, which for the first time this year will include an award for a corporate campaign in its annual awards, says: "We are starting to see universities putting much more of a focus on their brands and what their value propositions are, and there has been a move in the last six months or so at looking at refining those brands, particularly for the undergraduate market."
He says that while in the past universities have often focused on student social life and attractions of the university town in recruitment campaigns, they are now concentrating on more tangible attractions, such as employment prospects, engagement with industry, and lecturer contact hours, making clear exactly what students are going to get for their money.
The problem for universities is that if those benefits fail to materialise, students notice. That worries Rob Behrens, chief executive of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), which deals with student complaints. "Universities need to be extremely careful that … they describe the reality of what's going to happen to students," he says. "Because competition is going to get greater for attracting students, there is a danger that universities will go the extra mile."
One university told prospective engineering students they would be able to design a car and race it at Brands Hatch, which never happened, he says. Others have promised use of sophisticated equipment that turned out to be broken or unavailable. He has also received complaints in which over-enthusiastic marketing or descriptions of courses by overseas agents have given students false expectations.
"If universities spent as much money on handling complaints and appeals appropriately as they spend on marketing, they would do better at keeping students, and in the National Student Survey returns," he says.
Starkey says ongoing research by Heist tracking prospective 2012 students suggests that they are not only becoming more sophisticated in thinking about what they want from a university, but are also spending more time researching evidence to back up institutional claims.
Hence the growing importance of the student survey and league tables. From next September, all institutions will also be expected to publish on their websites key information sets, allowing easier comparison between institutions – and between promises and reality – of student satisfaction levels, course information, and the types of jobs and salaries graduates go on to.
And then there are unofficial online sources of information, such as Facebook and The Student Room website, as well as more random searches.
Last year Ian Benson, a business broker specialising in media, who runs a website making freedom of information requests on academic issues, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the University of Plymouth using the strapline "the enterprise university". He had obtained FOI data showing that of the 10,000 students who graduated from Plymouth in 2008, only two went on to start a business with the university's support.
The ASA rejected his complaint, agreeing with the university that it was a "visionary and inspirational phrase" rather than one of objective substantiation, and that readers were likely to interpret the claim "merely as a statement of the university's ethos and ambition".
Donald McLeod, chair of the Higher Education External Relations Association, says much more information is now available to students that has not been mediated by marketing departments, which means institutions are having to be especially careful about what they claim.
At the same time, according to Starkey, marketing departments are expanding, and becoming increasingly involved in corporate decision-making, influencing the kinds of courses and student experience offered.
Richard Taylor, director of corporate affairs at the University of Leicester, says it is hardly surprising that universities are beginning to change the way they market themselves since the pricing structure has changed so radically. "Some universities assume that a market where everyone charges £9,000 will behave in the same way as one where everyone charges £3,000," he says. "I fundamentally disagree."
He believes that while the best form of marketing for institutions is to be good at what they do, they also need to be clear about how they are different from others.
But Chris Chapleo, senior lecturer in marketing at Bournemouth University, who has researched marketing and branding in higher education, says differentiation for differentiation's sake is difficult, especially when most universities essentially offer similar things. As publicly funded organisations, he argues, universities also have to be particularly careful of narrow or frivolous branding.
Taylor admits there are dangers. He says that once an institution claims to be particularly good at something, it must live up to it. "The moment you position yourself, you become exposed because you have played your joker, and if you fail in that you are in trouble," he says.
And increasingly, students will not put up with this kind of failure. The OIA's annual returns increased by 30% last year. "They will be at a record level again for 2011," says Behrens. "I'm clear that student complaints are on the rise."
Charity singles tell us about changing concerns and how society responds to need, says historian
Dr Lucy Robinson describes herself as a contemporary historian. But rather than poring over parchment dredged from dusty archives, she's more likely to be found in her office at Sussex University listening to pop music. She is currently researching the history of the charity single as part of a wider study of the politics and cultural heritage of the 1980s.
Robinson has tracked the chart history of 65 singles released in the UK between December 1984 and 1995, as well as a number of protest and benefit singles, charity albums and some local releases that either failed to chart or were sold only on an independent basis. "I've analysed their lyrics, videos and marketing as well as the ways in which they solicited donations to charities."
Why would anyone put themselves through such a test of aural endurance? "Some of it has been absolute agony," she concedes with a grin. "But I've enjoyed most of it more than I thought I would. I'm now a big defender of the charity single as a musical genre. Not necessarily, though, as a way of solving social inequality or responding to humanitarian needs."
The reason that charity singles are worthy of academic study, she explains, is that they can tell us much about attitudes to society and to need. "I'm interested in the relationship between popular culture and politics. Charity singles are part of this story. At certain points in the last few decades, they've dominated the charts, often vying with each other for top positions. The singles serve as a way of gauging changing concerns more widely."
As an example, she cites Margaret Thatcher's support of "traditional family values" and the insertion of Clause 28 into the Local Government Act, 1988, banning local authorities from "promoting homosexuality". "It meant that British artists and organisers found it difficult to launch campaigns around Aids research and education." This changed with the death of Freddie Mercury in November 1991, she says. "After that point you can see a run of releases raising money for Aids charities, including George Michael and Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me, suggesting a shift in the level of public discussion about HIV and Aids."
Robinson was 19 in 1988 and remembers feeling that Clause 28 was "trampling on the liberal gains of the 1960s". Now she looks back at those days more analytically. "I'm sure I'm not the only one viewing the '80s as a way of to trying to make sense of what's going on now," she says. But she is almost certainly the only one doing it through the prism of the charity single. Her research will provide a chapter in her forthcoming book on the '80s, alongside such definitive events as the Falklands war and the miners' strike.
The charity single had a particular resonance with the Victorian values of Thatcher's Britain, Robinson argues. "Victorian philanthropy was not just a way of raising funds for a cause. It viewed charitable donations as a means of raising awareness – identifying the deserving and the undeserving and building a sense of identity, importance or community in the donor."
She even goes so far as to compare those '80s icons Sting, Bono and Bob Geldof with "the great men of Manchester" – the benevolent 19th-century industrialists, in other words, such as Richard Cobden. "Their causes were moral rather than political," she points out, before going on to list some of the beneficiaries of charity singles. "They supported sick children and humanitarian crises as well as relatives of the victims of sporting disasters, such as Hillsborough and Heysel, the Hungerford shootings and the sinking of the Zeebrugge ferry."
Nothing there that anyone could argue with, she suggests, before drawing parallels with the current Conservative-led government, rolling back the frontiers of the state while encouraging individual donations to deserving causes. "There is a counter side to all this," she warns. "The underlying implication is that if you behave, you may be in line to benefit from a charitably funded community project; if not, we'll take away your mother's council house. The human drive for compassion is central to our humanity and that has been a driving force of this phenomenon from Band Aid to the X-Factor charity single. But you have to be aware of the political context."
She hastens to add: "That's not a criticism of Band Aid. Do They Know It's Christmas was the fastest-selling UK single of all time when it was released in 1984." As well as raising awareness and a lot of money for starving people. "Quite. But I'm interested in how that became a model for, among other things, making up for a lack of funding for children's medical care."
And what about the X-Factor Christmas single?
"This could be seen as the more cynical end of the market," she says. "The songs are always cover versions that fulfil the sentimental and inspirational end of the charity brief and are designed to showcase the individual voices within the X-Factor collective. So the awareness raised is ultimately for the X-Factor brand as much as for the recipients of the donation."
Whatever else he is, Simon Cowell seems unlikely to be compared to "the great men of Manchester" just yet.