On the Guardian Teacher Network this week you can find lesson plans, practical advice and more from the organisations that make up the Alliance Against Bullying
It's Anti-Bullying Week, and this year the 130-plus organisations that comprise the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA) are challenging the old "sticks and stones" adage and putting name-calling and all forms of belittling or insulting language in the spotlight. The impetus comes from the 2010 Anti Bullying Alliance youth summit, at which young people identified verbal abuse as especially damaging and which, if left unchallenged, can quickly turn schools into hostile environments.
There is a wealth of background data and research, plus practical advice, for school leaders and teachers in the ABW briefing pack.As well as containing the resources for supporting whole-school staff responses to the problem, there are four helpful teaching activities, which culminate in the development of a pupils' communications charter.
The almost casual use of terms that are at root homophobic, even if children are ignorant of their true implications, is of particular concern to the charity Stonewall, which has produced publications and reports offering advice and support for teachers. The Teachers' Report into Homophobic Bullying in Britain's Schools includes very helpful chapters of the kind of barriers that sometimes have to be overcome in order to tackle the issue in schools, and a host of examples of good practice plus "a recommendations template" upon which school policy might be built.
The School Champions Programme, meanwhile, is part of Stonewall's Education for All campaign and provides tailored support and guidance to primary and secondary schools in challenging homophobic bullying and celebrating difference.
Several Anti-Bullying Alliance organisations have created school assembly and lesson plans. For example, see the assembly and lesson plans from key stage 1 to 16-plus from the charity Beatbullying, including the secondary-aimed Words Can Hurt and associated slides.
Meanwhile, drama, with all its potential for encouraging empathy, also features strongly among the approaches encouraged by ABA members. For example, Spotlights Theatre Company, which provides anti-bullying workshops in schools, has made some strong drama workshop resources available encouraging all sorts of forum theatre approaches for exploring the issues. Think Tank is designed to encourage KS2 children to consider the effect of what they say and take responsibility for their language, and the KS2 The Good Friend Gallery was developed in line with last year's ABW theme: taking action together. Additionally, these helpful and highly interactive primary resources from Go-Givers address the harm that hurtful language can cause and the impact of online bullyingMany schools tackling bullying opt for the creation of mentoring schemes. One of the specialist organisations in this area is the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation. It administers an approved provider standard scheme. Free resources full of good practice include the report into the 2008-10 Anti-bullying National Pilot and the associated Dissemination Manual.
Bullying behaviour often results in punishment and exclusion, but there are, suggest organisations such as Transforming Conflict, more imaginative and productive restorative justice routes to bring changed behaviour. A start to such an approach is the short guide by its director, Belinda Hopkins, derived from her book The Restorative Classroom.
• This article was amended on 16 November to correct the name of the Anti-Bullying Alliance
A consultation on sex education ends this month, but the government has already ruled out the most essential change, say campaigners – and teenagers themselves
James says he has picked up most of what he knows about sex from the television; the only sex education he had at school was the biological basics at primary school and a few brief talks at the end of year 11.
He's at the Brook sexual health clinic in Brixton for a test, he explains. "I'm here because somebody I slept with had something. I'm 18 and I don't even know the symptoms of it, or what the cure is. It's that bad. All I know is the name." What is it? "Chlamydia."
At Odia's school there was a room where pupils could go and get advice and condoms, and practise putting them on a plastic penis. But there was no obligation to go, and many didn't. Boys were particularly rare attendees. The 17-year-old can't remember having any sex education lessons at secondary school. The pressure to have sex, and to do so without a condom, is intense, she says. "If you make the mistake and say 'yeah, I love you' they use that against you. They say 'if you love me we don't need to use a condom'."
Sexual cyberbullying is a very real concern. "On Facebook you see pictures of naked girls. They've sent it to their boyfriend in confidence and then it's out there," Odia says. She thinks girls need much better education and guidance if they are to avoid this kind of thing: "Remember, we're still young. If we've not got someone to explain what will happen if we do these things, we're not going to know."
Shenee, also 17, agrees. "There was a picture recently of a girl giving oral sex that went round the whole of south London. I think she was a year older than me. We don't ever learn any stuff about relationships. It's always about body parts."
The experiences recounted at the clinic one afternoon last week speak volumes about the lives of young people in a world where sex is everywhere, often in the form of pornography, and the pressures to conform are enormous. These experiences also, the sexual health charity Brook says, back up the demands of a number of leading campaigners, including the Family Planning Association (FPA), that sex and relationships education (SRE) is made a statutory part of the curriculum, ending parents' right to remove their children from lessons.
By law, pupils must learn the biology of reproduction as part of national curriculum science – the only part parents can't take them out of. But there is no statutory requirement to teach them about relationships, sexuality or choices in pregnancy.
The government is currently reviewing personal, social and health education (PSHE), which SRE falls under. Yet ministers have already ruled out making SRE statutory, or ending parents' right of withdrawal. A consultation on the review closes at the end of the month.
It's a missed opportunity, says Simon Blake, Brook's chief executive. "Not making SRE statutory is failing young people. It's failing to listen to them, and if we continue to mess around on this we're leaving them vulnerable to pregnancy, STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and sexual activity they don't want. It's irresponsible. The government has to be brave and grasp the nettle." The UK still has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in western Europe, and although the figure has now begun to fall, there are fears that cuts to services will undo that progress.
Many schools do a good job, but evidence shows delivery is patchy, Blake says. In a recent survey of more than 2,000 secondary school pupils for Brook, almost half (47%) said SRE doesn't cover what they feel they need to know about sex. A quarter get no SRE in school at all, they said, and a quarter of those who do said the teacher doesn't do a good job of it. An Ofsted report last year found that SRE teaching was no more than satisfactory in a third of schools. "Making it statutory would mean providing a core entitlement for everyone, and would also mean teachers would be trained well enough to be able to deliver it. It's as much about getting people feeling confident about that as it is getting it into the timetable."
And it's relationships that young people want to know about as much as the nitty-gritty of sex, he says: dealing with emotions and real-life dilemmas.
The Labour government had been set to make SRE compulsory, but dropped the plan in order to get its schools bill through parliament before the 2010 election, after failing to win Conservative support for proposals to end parents' right to take their 15-year-olds out of SRE.
According to Ofsted figures, though, less than 0.04% of pupils are removed from lessons. Is parents' right to do so really such an issue? Yes, says Blake, because schools may deliberately water down their SRE offer in order to avoid the administrative problems of some children being taken out of classes. "We know that some schools self-censor because they don't want people to make a fuss," he says.
His assertion is backed by women's rights campaigners, who say allowing schools to determine their own SRE content and letting parents take children out of lessons leads to girls who could be at risk of practices such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage being denied crucial information.
"If you're working at school in an area that has lots of Kurdish people, for instance, and you decide to consult parents, a lot are going to say 'we don't want you to teach about forced marriage because that's a cultural issue'," says Fionnuala Ni Mhurchu, of the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation. "In our experience, a lot of schools will just go along with that. We also hear from organisations we work with about girls being taken out of SRE lessons; they're kept completely in the dark.
"The government uses the language 'parental rights' in the consultation. But while all the human rights instruments recognise the rights of girls not to be subjected to abuse and discrimination, none of them recognise any right by parents to prevent their children from receiving potentially life-saving information."
At Crompton House school, a Church of England secondary in Oldham, the decision was made seven years ago to transform PSHE and its SRE component from an hour-a-week lesson delivered to all pupils by their form tutor on a Monday morning to a standalone subject taught by a much smaller number of staff with specialist training.
"We used to have 40 PSHE tutors all teaching an hour a week," says the school's head of PSHE, Dave Leggett. "You're never going to get 40 skilled PSHE teachers."
Three teachers are now responsible for most of PSHE, and giving the subject a higher profile – including awarding pupils an attainment level for their work – has led to them taking it much more seriously.
In year 9, pupils get a 10-week SRE course that includes three visits from Brook staff. The school has a number of "virtual babies" – dolls that need feeding, burping and changing – that students take home at weekends to learn about the pressures of parenthood.
In Leggett's eight years at the school no one has ever taken a child out of a lesson, and parents are kept fully informed of what is being taught. "We have the babies screaming the place down on open evenings," says Leggett. "Whatever the government's curriculum review says, we will carry on doing it like this, because we think it's important."
In teacher Craig Owen's class, the enthusiasm is evident. Hands shoot up as he quizzes them about a recent session on contraception. What would cause a condom to split? "Didn't put it on right," one boy suggests. "It could have gone off," says a girl in the front row.
Tom, 14, has plenty of questions. "I'm just interested in how the body works and what I could do if I had a girlfriend and she was pregnant," he explains outside the classroom. "I want to know how I could help; I'd want her to feel comfortable with being pregnant."
Nadia Sica, Brook's coordinator for a health and wellbeing programme in Lambeth, south London, funded by the local primary care trust, understands the difficulties schools face in delivering good SRE, which is not part of basic teacher training. "Schools are under a lot of pressure and SRE tends to be at the bottom of the pile because it's not statutory," Sica says. "With all the other things you have to do [as a school], why would you do something you don't have to do?"
The government insists statutory provision is not necessary, saying its policy on dealing with the challenges young people face is not limited to SRE, citing also the Bailey review into the sexualisation of childhood.
"It is not government's role to run families' lives, but it's clear that many parents need more support to bring up their children," a spokesman for the Department for Education says. "We're working closely with industry to make sure that young people are better protected in a rapidly changing technological and commercial world." Plans include putting age restrictions on sexually explicit music videos, covering up sexualised images on the front of magazines and newspapers in shops and making it easier for parents to block adult material on the internet.
"We want to simplify the guidance on sex education to focus on relationships, positive parenting and … sexual consent," the DfE says.
But failing to make those lessons statutory means there's no guarantee schools will take any notice, says Julie Bentley, the chief executive of the FPA.
"We're not pushing for teaching young people lots more about sex. But what we need is good-quality relationships education: teaching them about respect, honesty, trust and self-esteem. Otherwise they'll be entering relationships that are unhealthy, harmful, have violence in them. It's critically important."
• Some young people's names have been changed
Academies are stuffed with senior staff on large salaries. Wouldn't taxpayers' money be better spent on class teachers?
Becoming a headteacher was once regarded as the pinnacle of an education career. No longer. Now young high-fliers can set their sights on becoming a school's executive principal, its executive director or even its chief executive.
The more modestly ambitious don't have to settle for a humble classroom job. Positions to consider include, for example, assistant executive head, associate senior leader and senior assistant vice-principal.
These grandiose roles, all in academy schools, highlight a trend that is alarming some teacher unions and experts. They warn of leadership teams mushrooming when schools become academies. Staffing costs increase and the gulf between those at the top and the bottom widens.
Senior positions advertised in the past few weeks include that of executive director of the 1,300-pupil New Charter academy in Tameside. In return for a six-figure salary, the successful applicant is to inspire an executive team of four, including an academy director and a leadership team of 16.
In Kent, the 1,600-pupil Business academy, Bexley, is offering to pay an assistant head up to £61,000 to bolster its leadership team of chief executive, executive principal (both earning in excess of £120k) and two headteachers plus assorted deputy and assistant heads. In Norfolk, the 1,300-pupil Thetford academy is advertising for two vice-principals on salaries of up to £74,000 to join its leadership team of 24.
Finally, anyone looking to become a head of PE might consider applying to London's Pimlico academy, rated outstanding by Ofsted. If successful, they would find themselves at a 1,300-pupil school with a principal, a senior vice-principal, two vice-principals and eight assistant principals – not to mention a finance director.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the Nasuwt teachers' union, says: "When schools become academies, there is a massive boost to the senior leadership team, which adds layers of bureaucracy not focused on teaching and learning. Schools are being stuffed with people who are simply busy monitoring other people."
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, agrees: "Academies vary tremendously, but do tend to be top-heavy in leaders. The salary bill rises as more is spent on senior staff who go on 'learning walks' round the school rather than actually teaching."
Academies have 50% more senior staff on salaries in excess of £80,000 than maintained secondaries, according to a 2010 National Audit Office report. The trend continues, with a new workforce analysis from the Department for Education confirming that academies pay their senior staff more and have a higher proportion on leadership grades.
While many academies have done wonders with challenging schools, more leaders do not automatically equal more A*-C grade GCSEs. The troubled Basildon academy endured two years of poor GCSE results, high staff turnover and strikes over job cuts – despite employing an executive principal as well as two principals.
A key influence on academy staffing has been the concept of "distributed" leadership. According to Toby Greany, director of research at the National College for School Leadership, the era of the heroic superhead is over – though superhead six-figure salaries are increasingly the norm – and the era of shared leadership is upon us.
Academies have been innovative in terms of leadership, says Greany. "They've had to establish strong teams of middle leaders with responsibility, accountability and clear targets. Middle leadership is the engine room of improvement. The scale of the leadership challenge is so much greater now, you need the whole staff team pulling together."
It's called building leadership "capacity" and while Greany insists it shouldn't mean simply employing more bosses, that is exactly what some academies have done, says John Howson, a recruitment expert and emeritus professor of education at Oxford Brookes University.
"The original purpose of distributed leadership was not to create new higher-level posts. It was to ensure that the head shared power with existing staff."
Academies are free of local authority oversight and not bound by the national pay framework. They no longer have to publish their accounts through the Charity Commission, and only 38% have ever filed a detailed financial return to the DfE. Such lax accountability, says Howson, adds up to "too much room for sharp practice".
Howson wants MPs on the public accounts committee to investigate the pay of senior staff. "We now have arrived at the almost unacceptable face of education capitalism. It demonstrates why you need clarity and regulation with regard to public money."
Howson is also concerned about the role of executive principal. This relatively new position demands strategic vision and inspiration leadership in return for a large salary. The Excelsior academy, Newcastle, paid its executive principal between £140k and £150k in 2009. Her salary is in addition to that of Excelsior's five principals and five vice-principals.
Similarly, the Leigh academy, Dartford, employs an executive principal – it calls him a chief executive – as well as four principals and four vice-principals. Leigh has been praised by Ofsted for its outstanding leadership, but it hasn't come cheap. In 2010, it shelled out in excess of £170k on its top earner, up by at least £10,000 on 2009.
These people do not appear to be suffering a pay freeze, says Howson. "It's all public money. If it reduces resources for front-line teaching, is that a good use of it?"
No, says Keates. "Millions of pounds of public money are pouring into private education companies and the inflated salaries of executive principals with no evidence this is leading to rising standards."
What parents want, she says, are more teachers and support staff in classrooms. They want a traditional pyramid structure of leadership, not an inverted pyramid. "We've seen restructuring where teachers' jobs have been cut while the leadership team has increased, with half or more of them no longer having to teach."
Fred Groom, former academy head and adviser to the E-Act academies, takes a different line. E-Act, whose director general, Sir Bruce Liddington, last week defended his £280k pay packet, is advertising for an executive principal of the rapidly improving Crest academies in north London. The post, additional to two existing academy principals, comes with a six-figure salary plus performance bonus: "Good leadership is critical to success and is an investment in the future of our pupils."
Some academies, such as Leigh academy and Excelsior in Newcastle, have restructured into a collegiate system of four or five mini-schools each requiring heads and deputies.
It is a structure praised by Ofsted, but it is not the only recipe for success. Just down the road from Excelsior is the 2,100-pupil Kenton school, rated outstanding and organised on opposite lines – as a single institution. Recently, after an acrimonious dispute, Kenton's governors voted for academy status.
The headteacher, David Pearmain, says he is no apologist for academies, but he felt it was in the long-term interests of Kenton to convert. He says he has no plans to expand the leadership team. "Our thoughts have not been about leadership but about raising standards and developing the curriculum." He has already told his governors that he doesn't want a rise as "the amount of actual extra responsibility is very little". National pay scales will not be undercut – and, unlike his neighbour Excelsior, he has no intention of employing a PR agency.
Pearmain is clearly sincere, but what of those who come after him? Heads just can't give those guarantees, says Blower: "It's become a dash for cash, with no one to check up on excesses any more."
The new tuition fee regime has spawned nothing but confusion, says Mike Baker – it's no wonder students are struggling to make their choices
Complex financial strategies, shifting goalposts, last-minute changes of strategy, competitive manoeuvring – no, it's not the eurozone crisis again, just preparation for the new tuition fee regime. In view of such confusion – the latest being the request by 27 universities and colleges to reduce their average net fees – how do applicants make sensible decisions about where to study? After all, by the end of this month, when the Office for Fair Access rules on these latest bids, many applicants will already have hit the "submit" button on their Ucas forms.
It is a strange market when the price changes after customers have placed their order. But, then again, it is a very odd situation when the government says it wants a free market in tuition fees, but keeps introducing new regulations to fix that market.
When universities set their tuition fees for 2012-13, the key question for most was where to set their so-called "sticker price". Incidentally, it's revealing that a phrase borrowed from the car sales industry has been so quickly adopted for higher education. Yet such language is consistent with a fee system that, initially at least, encouraged universities to signal whether or not they were in the £9,000 class. As a matter of prestige, few could afford to say they were not.
But alarmed by the lack of differential pricing in the market, the government changed the rules. They top-sliced 20,000 places from every university's "core" student number allocations and said they would instead offer these as additional "margin" places. The catch was that only institutions charging average fees of less than £7,500 (after fee waivers) could bid to regain some of the extra places they will have lost.
Hence the late change of mind by these 27 universities and colleges. Although we don't yet know who they all are, it's likely that most will be those currently charging average fees just above £7,500. The 63 universities with average fees between £7,500 and £8,500 will be nervously checking to see what their competitors are doing.
With a little bit of manipulation of their fee waivers, or of the anticipated numbers on their lower-priced courses, they can become eligible to bid for the extra 20,000 students which, if demand falls as expected, could prove to be a financial lifeline. Despite the headlines, though, students should not expect big cuts in fees. Some of the apparent reduction will be achieved just by shifting bursaries into fee waivers. Indeed, it remains perfectly possible for universities to continue to charge £9,000 on some of their courses while managing to reduce their "average" fee below £7,500. That way they can still combine the prestige of a £9k badge with the safety net of eligibility for the cut-price market.
It's like a car salesman who, once he has failed to sell you the sleek, new model from his showroom, takes you out the back to view the "nice little runners" recently arrived on the used-car lot.
Of course, university applications really should not be like car sales. Fortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests applicants are not acting like consumers and will not be swayed by a few hundred pounds being knocked off fees. At a recent university open day, not one of the potential students and their families whom I spoke to said they would be influenced by fee-price variation. Indeed, many did not even know the range of fees available at the universities they were sampling.
They argued that the fee variations across the range of universities they were considering varied only marginally. This did not mean that money was not a big factor in their decisions. Indeed, several said cost could yet persuade them to abandon university altogether or to choose a local university to save on living costs by staying at home.
Meanwhile, leading universities that are charging £9,000 across the board remain unaffected by this last-minute jockeying over price. They won't be cutting their prices to chase the "margin". So, curiously, in higher education the government is following a policy that is the very opposite of what it is doing with the pupil premium in schools. Instead of more public money going to institutions serving the most deprived students, the effect of these changes will be to squeeze the net spending per student at those universities and FE colleges that are more likely to recruit students from poorer backgrounds.
University fees – they almost make the euro bailout look simple.
• www.mikebakereducation.co.uk
Universities are giving students networking lessons to help them succeed in the competitive jobs market
If you turn up at a networking event to find yourself surrounded by groups of people already chatting intently, how do you break into a conversation? "Avoid groups of four," says David Radcliffe, a 22-year-old graduate in criminology and sociology from Liverpool University.
"Look for people standing in a V shape," Ayesha Salahuddin, also 22, who studied law, adds. "Their body language is implying they're being welcoming."
And how do you get away when the conversation has died? You can conveniently spot someone across the room and excuse yourself saying you need to speak to them, he says. Failing that, there's always the old fallback of saying you need to nip to the gents or ladies.
Radcliffe and Salahuddin learned their new networking skills at a "graduate bootcamp" run by Liverpool University's careers service, in partnership with the city's chamber of commerce.
With the latest figures showing graduate unemployment at a 15-year high, Liverpool, along with other universities, believes these "soft skills" are more important than ever. Recent Higher Education Statistics Agency figures revealed that more than a quarter of graduates are still without full-time work more than three years after leaving university.
Once, your degree alone would get you a job, says Paul Redmond, head of the careers and employability service. Today employers can afford to demand much more of prospective staff. "The competition for jobs is so intense, and often the differentiators are those so-called soft skills ," he says. "Small talk isn't small talk in a business setting."
So far, 185 graduates have been trained on the 10-day Gradvantage programme. Of those who have been through the course, only 32 had graduated this year. "Once the credit crunch happened we thought 'we've got to start doing different things for graduates'," Redmond says.
Research by the Sutton Trust in 2009 found that while only 7% of children in the UK are privately educated, the majority of those at the top of the leading professions went to independent fee-paying schools. Among the leading judges and barristers, seven in 10 benefited from a private education, as well as 55% of partners at top law firms and 54% of leading journalists and medics.
And as unpaid internships – often obtained through family contacts – become increasingly ubiquitous, experts on social mobility believe young people from less privileged backgrounds are being put at an even greater disadvantage.
Gradvantage is not specifically aimed at graduates from less well-off families – anyone based in Merseyside, with a degree from any university, can participate (another of its aims is to encourage graduates to stay in the area).
But Redmond hopes it will help to create a more level playing field for young people who don't necessarily have the ready-built networks of their more middle-class peers.
Paul Cullinan, who works for the service liaising with employers and also teaches the networking skills section, gets the groups to map the people they know as a diagram to get them thinking where fruitful links might be.
"You get some people saying they don't know anyone," says project co-ordinator Sharon Nicholson. "It's not always someone in your network who can help, but they might be able to put you in touch with someone else who can. Some people do struggle with that to begin with."
Graduates are taught the harsh reality that while they might be looking for jobs on websites and in newspapers, many employers only advertise vacancies once they've looked internally for candidates and then asked contacts if they know anyone suitable. This means that making themselves known to those potential employers is imperative.
"We encourage them to go to the sorts of places where the people they want to speak to hang out – going to recruitment fairs and not just picking up the leaflets, but talking to people and getting business cards," says Nicholson.
The course aims to be as hands-on as possible: Cullinan demonstrates his tips on getting the most out of networking events by telling half the group to start chatting amongst themselves, while the others observe their body language.
"If people are standing face to face, they're saying they don't want anyone else to join in, but slowly but surely they'll open out," he says. "That's when to introduce yourself."
Other elements include mock interviews and putting together group presentations to test public speaking skills. Graduates may also be able to secure a 14-hour-a-week (unpaid) work experience placement through the chamber of commerce, lasting 13 or 26 weeks.
Martin Pennington, the interim chief executive of the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, says universities have been focusing increasingly on skills like networking since the recession. "It's not just about helping with their CV or job application, which careers services have always done, but help with selling yourself, getting out there and pushing yourself in front of employers.
It's possible the advice on how to work a room would sound obvious to a seasoned professional, but for recent students it has been an eye-opener.
Chris Kennedy, 22, who studied psychology at Liverpool, says he didn't realise the value of networking. "I honestly didn't even know what it really meant before the session. Now I've found out about all sorts of events and I feel a lot more confident I can get something out of them."
"While you're at university, you've been taught to do online applications, and everything is very computer-based," Salahuddin says.
"Paul's point was 'what's wrong with face-to-face interaction?'. That's something I've lost at university, just going out there and speaking to people."
Working for yourself is ever more appealing as jobs vanish. As a result, the content of online MBAs is shifting
The MBA used to be the preserve of the senior manager – the best way to clamber up the career ladder to a lucrative boardroom position. Then came the recession, and thousands more business men and women at every stage in their careers were adding the three letters after their name in a bid to boost their employability. A few years on, MBAs are more popular than ever.
But with corporate life now involving 12-hour-plus days and stressful job insecurity, today, for many, the motivation to do an MBA has changed. The growing lure of life as an entrepreneur means MBA courses are shifting to include modules on creating a start-up. The Tomorrow's MBA study, an annual report commissioned by the Association of Business Schools, which represents the UK's business schools and management colleges, reported on the trend for the first time this summer. "For years," it said, "the focus for many MBA students has been banking, finance and consulting. This is shifting; entrepreneurship may be the trend of the future."
The research found that more than 30% named entrepreneurship as one of the most important pieces of content in an MBA programme, the first time it featured in the top five student choices.
Academics confirm the shift. With many new start-up ideas involving the internet, where entrepreneurs need to move fast to avoid having their idea copied, it's little surprise that demand for distance-learning MBAs – which are easier to juggle alongside incubating a business idea – is soaring. For example, at the University of Liverpool, the largest provider of wholly online degrees in Europe, more than a third of its 7,500 internet students are enrolled on MBA courses and entrepreneurialism has become a growing component.
"Over the past two years, we've introduced modules in social enterprise, entrepreneurial work in emerging markets, and entrepreneurship because students have become increasingly keen on them," says Alan Southern, director of e-learning and senior lecturer in management.
Durham University's business school saw enrolment in its online global MBA rise by over 200% for the 2011 intake. Warwick University, which offers modules in entrepreneurial finance and new-venture creation, innovation and creativity, also confirms a strong growth in demand. On its course, students develop their own business plans through a final project, which could be further developed into a career. "Our enterprise stream benefits from links with Warwick Science Park and Warwick Ventures, responsible for commercialising the university's research," says Jon Lees, executive director of the MBA course.
That practical element is a key attraction, adds Southern at Liverpool. Nick Jenkins, for example, the founder of online greeting card business Moonpig, dreamed up his personalised card idea while studying for an MBA at Cranfield University. Other entrepreneurial MBAs include John Scully, former chief executive of Apple, and Meg Whitman, president of eBay.
Growing trend
And the enterprise trend is spreading to traditional MBAs: the London Business School's full-time MBA programme includes six entrepreneurship electives; Cass Business School offers Entrepreneurship: From Start-up to Success, and Innovation and New Product Development, among its MBA options.
Heather Short, who is in her 40s, is studying an MBA at the University of Portsmouth. "I was sure it would lead me to something exciting," she says. "And it has." Short was working in networking marketing when she saw a product being used overseas that she thought had "huge potential" in the UK and embarked on an MBA to find out how to be more entrepreneurial. "I now have the theory to back up my business experience," says Short. "There is definitely a shift from people doing MBAs to climb the corporate ladder to those keen to learn skills for a start-up. The MBA recognises this by having an entrepreneur's masterclass, but there could even be a course in its own right."
Likewise Shaun McCormick, 38, was working in senior management for a pharmaceutical giant when he enrolled on a distance learning MBA at the University of Leicester. "The course content challenges your thought process, and the strategic and creative thinking made me look at just about everything I was doing," he says. "I kept asking myself 'why not set up a business with the ideas you are generating?'"
At the beginning of the recession, when McCormick was made redundant, he did just that. He now runs three businesses, including consultancy Tacit Pharma, which advises firms on procurement strategy, sales, regulation and new business generation. "The MBA helped my understanding of all the factors that impact on a business and how best to navigate to grow. My MBA experiences helped me launch, finance and grow the companies, find new markets and customers and create jobs."
Developing economies
Much of the current demand for online MBAs stems from students living in developing economies. At Bradford University, MBA course organisers introduced a module in entrepreneurship in April, partly to appeal to an international audience. Some 40% of the university's distance students live in developing countries. "Traditional international business strategy-type modules have been augmented by more focused ones, such as Managing International Business in Emerging Economies," explains spokesman Jonathan Muir.
That's true, too, at Liverpool. "Nine in 10 of our online student population come from overseas, where there's also a strong demand for entrepreneurial education," says Southern. "But it's a different type of need, so we've responded with modules on starting up a business in emerging economies like Brazil and China. It means our online MBA is just as valid for someone thinking about becoming an entrepreneur in Germany, the UK or Nigeria."
A team of 90 university staff and colleagues have been driving 'green' cars for 18 months to see how it feels
Swapping a normal car for what could be a virtually emissions-free electric vehicle seems like an obvious choice. But there are some real hitches to overcome, even once you've taken out a second mortgage to buy your £25,000 Nissan Leaf.
Ever driven an electric car? If so, the concept of "range anxiety", for example, will be painfully familiar. Translated, it means that you drive in a permanent state of near panic that your car is about to run out of oomph with no easy way of "filling up" again.
Finding out all the issues facing people using low-carbon cars is the aim of a study now being run by Coventry and Birmingham universities as part of a wider UK programme trialling eco-friendly transport.
To work out what people love and hate about using greener wheels, how much it costs to charge them up and what modifications users make to their driving behaviour and journey planning, researchers in summer 2009 dished out low-carbon vehicles to 90 volunteer test drivers from the universities and their associates. Now, a year and a half on, they're scrutinising the resulting data, which details every last second that their motoring guinea pigs spent behind the wheel.
Volunteer driver Neil Butcher, associate director at Arup, one of the universities' study partners, had a Mitsubishi MiEV for 12 months. "It was fantastic, a small city car, looks like a normal car, but it's [built to be] electric," he says. "It's got a curly yellow cable." He plugged it into a 13-amp socket in his garage.
Butcher grew fond of his Mitsubishi. But he also swapped it for a standard car once every six weeks or so when he needed to make a longer journey – so it only worked because he had easy access to a second vehicle.
Not all the cars in the trial were electric – Peter White, professor of thermofluid dynamics at Coventry University, was assigned one of eight Microcabs, a vehicle that works off a hydrogen fuel cell and a lithium ion battery pack, and because it only exists as an "output" of a research project, is not commercially available. The electric cars included converted Citroens, Smart cars, Range Rovers and Indian–made Tatas.
Electricity partner E.ON installed 36 charging points across Coventry and Birmingham, and the volunteer drivers were required to switch over their household supply to the utility company in order that every last electron consumed by the test vehicles could be centrally monitored.
All the information about how, where and when each car was driven has since been transmitted to researchers via a data-logger built into each car. Participants completed questionnaires over the trial period detailing their reactions to their cars and individual behaviour patterns and choices associated with using them.
For instance, it's perfectly well known, Butcher explains, that how far an electric car will go depends partly on the weather. Batteries don't like the cold. Do drivers whack up the heating in the garage before going out to increase the ambient temperature, thus reducing the overall energy efficiency of using an electric vehicle? Do they factor in the car's poorer performance by limiting themselves to doing just short hops in winter? Or do they blithely head out into the snow and ice and find themselves stranded when the battery conks out?
The answers to this and other questions are still being processed, but, according to Nigel Berkeley, director of sustainable regeneration at Coventry University and the project leader, the drivers' range anxiety did dissipate as they became familiar with their vehicles, and it turned out that the cars were more than capable of meeting most people's requirements for urban driving.
Butcher says that he now prefers driving an electric car to a standard one. "It's a far nicer experience, much more relaxing, less noisy, with just one forward and one reverse gear," he says. "You don't worry when you're in traffic jams because when you're stationary you're not using any energy."
He has noticed, too, that he's become less aggressive on the road, "maybe because you feel you're doing a good thing. Also because it's got regenerative breaking, the earlier you start slowing down, the more energy you get back into the battery".
Part-way through the trial, Butcher's Mitsubishi was swapped for a Citroen converted from petrol to electric. Rather than plugging into an energy supply, this car is simply driven over an induction pad in his garage and the battery charges over a 20cm air gap.
Apart from the obvious convenience, researchers want to find out whether his charging habits altered with the induction-pad system.
"Although it is really easy to charge with a cable, you do have to make a conscious effort," he notes. "With a pad, it gets charged every time it's parked."
If we're going to cut our carbon emissions in a meaningful way, says White, the solution goes way beyond simply switching to electric cars en masse. To prevent climate change calamity, we must fundamentally alter the manner in which we "consume" transport. "We were all green once, but it was the Middle Ages and life wasn't terribly pleasant," he observes.
But, he says, there is another way, and what is discovered about human interaction with the cleaner technologies now being tested by the researchers could help to shape how this change comes about.
Instead of owning a £25K Nissan Leaf – an impossibility for most – White suggests that people could choose transport "packages" in the same way we buy mobile phone contracts: paying for what we think we'll use.
But White warns that until governments invest "a proportion of GDP" in clean energy generation and encourage companies to create a transport infrastructure that would see fleets of low-carbon vehicles available to hire in the same way we buy minutes for our phones, the potential offered by the technologies being tested in this trial will remain unrealised.
Governments have to get tough with manufacturers, too. "The thing with the automotive industry is that unless it gives a positive sales advantage, they won't do it unless it's legislated for," he says. "So the legislators have to be absolutely brutal."
• This article was amended on 15 November 2011. The original said there is a 2cm air gap between the induction pad and the battery of the Citroen car tested when charging. This has been corrected.
Scientists discover that the left side of the brain reacts more to immoral stimuli
When a person thinks about naughty things, does one side of the brain get more exercised than the other? Eight scientists studied that question. Their report, Hemispheric Asymmetries During Processing of Immoral Stimuli, appears in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. The stated goal is to describe "the neural organisation of moral processing".
Debra Lieberman, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Miami, Florida, acts as spokesperson for the team. Other members are based at Miami, and at the University of New Mexico and at Stanford University in California. Another, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, is at Duke University in North Carolina.
They had to work with a few limitations – the same limitations that apply to anyone who tries to describe what's going on in the brain.
With the exception of a few crackpots or geniuses, scientists don't claim to understand how the 100,000,000,000 or so parts of the human brain manage to think thoughts. Many of those multitudinous parts are connected to each other in complex ways that are quirkily different in every person. Some of the connections change over the course of a life, or a day, or even a few minutes. Many tiny brain parts are clumped into big conglomerations, some quite distinct (hello, cerebellum!), but others have fuzzy locations and borders.
The study does not risk getting bogged down in those larger, complicated conundrums. It restricts itself to the simple question: how does immorality play out in the brain?
The scientists sought their answer by recruiting some test subjects. They confronted each volunteer with several levels of immorality, in the form of words and images.
The team used MRI machines to indirectly (via electromagnetic emissions) monitor where largish amounts of blood flowed in the brain as each volunteer confronted each example of immorality. In theory, anyway, blood flows most freely near whichever brain parts are actively thinking, or have just thought, or are just about to think, or are busily doing something else.
In one test, volunteers saw different kinds of printed statements. Some were about pathogens ("You eating your sister's spoiled hamburger, You sipping your sister's urine, You eating your sister's scab"); some about incest ("You giving your sister an orgasm, You watching your sister masturbate, You fondling your sister's nipples"), some about "nonsexual immoral acts" ("You burgling your sister's home, You killing your sister's child"); and others about "neutral acts" ("You reading to your sister, You holding your sister's groceries").
In other tests, volunteers saw other kinds of statements or pictures, each chosen for its evident moral content.
After all the immorality was seen, and the measurements made, the researchers calculated that the left side of the brain had been more involved than the right side. Thus, concludes the study: "There is a left-hemisphere bias for the processing of immoral stimuli across multiple domains."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Click here to feed your university's statistics into our dedicated website
As we prepare the next Guardian University Guide, we invite universities and colleges to check that we are on the right track when it comes to matching subjects with cost centres and Jacs codes – the subject categories used by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa).
A dedicated website is used to simplify the process.
The Guardian University Guide uses Hesa data to calculate indicators such as spending per student and staff/student ratios, and it is vital for us to match up subjects and cost centres to reflect the performance of institutions.
Default mappings are offered as a guide that provides some consistency across the sector in representing how different subjects are provided.
We are giving all institutions the chance to make sensible adjustments to these mappings to reflect their particular course or departmental structures.
We are also requesting that institutions take the opportunity to refine the tuition fee information that we will be publishing in February's Postgraduate University Guide.
To access the system, each institution must register for a system account with mapping@intelligentmetrix.co.uk using a .ac.uk email address.
The deadline for submissions is 20 January 2012. If you have any queries about the mapping exercise, please email mapping@intelligentmetrix.co.uk.
The University Guide 2013 will be published in May on EducationGuardian.co.uk.
The mapping website is at www.intelligentmetrix.co.uk
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network, you will find resources for teaching pupils all about Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, focusing on conflict and peace
Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, both this week, provide the perfect opportunity for pupils to reflect on the events of the First World War and the continuing impact of conflict around the world.
A good starting place is the Royal British Legion's learning pack. Updated every year, it contains a wealth of lesson ideas for KS2-4 on the themes of remembrance, conflict and the importance of peace. The pack, which also contains a copy of the First World War poem In Flanders Fields, is supported by six posters that can be downloaded for free.
Remembrance is the topic of two lesson packs produced by The British Postal Museum & Archive, one for primary schools and one for secondary schools. The packs encourage pupils to link their everyday experiences with people in the past and to gain an appreciation of the impact the First World War had on British society at that time.
The developments that led to Armistice Day are covered in the Guardian Teacher Network lesson The Great War Comes to an End, suitable for use at KS3.
Never Forget is the theme of a useful assembly, with accompanying teachers' notes, produced by Christian Aid. Suitable for use at KS2, it starts by looking at Siegfried Sassoon's plea to remember the horrors of the First World War in his poem Aftermath. It then explores the need for remembrance by focusing on two communities affected by recent conflict in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, as in Sassoon's poem, it is the memory of war that encourages people to strive for peace.
Poppyscotland has a wealth of Remembrance Day-themed teaching materials linked to the Scottish curriculum. Lesson plans and worksheets are available for a range of activities that consider the importance of remembrance and the significance of the poppy. Ideas include designing a Remembrance Day card and planning a garden of remembrance.
As a primary source material to inspire creative writing, history and drama projects, these recordings by British soldiers captured during the Second World War are extremely useful. Find out how Far East Prisoner of War Fergus Anckhorn used to perform magic tricks to get food in the labour camps, or how a monkey helped Cyril Jones to survive.
The continuing impact of conflict around the world is covered in this citizenship-based lesson by the charity War Child. Pupils are encouraged to think about conflict in general, including its causes and consequences, before investigating three countries where conflict has been an issue recently – Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Bruce Liddington, boss of the academy sponsor E-Act, outlines his mission 'to improve the lot of the most-deprived children', his plans for expansion and the rationale behind his very high salary
Life has been good to Sir Bruce Liddington. He has come a long way from his roots in a working-class area of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, where his father was a stonemason and his mother worked in a shoe factory. At 62, the director-general of E-Act (formerly Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust), sitting in his London West End office, looks healthy, well-fed and pleased with himself. So he should. One of New Labour's poster boys, he is often said to be the highest-paid person in education, which is not strictly true since a few university vice-chancellors get more. But the latest published accounts of E-Act, which has charitable status, reveal a pay package of £280,017 in the year to 31 August 2010 – nearly twice what Michael Gove, the education secretary, receives – not bad for a job that involves responsibility for just 14 academies and free schools and an annual budget of less than £60m.
Empire building
It seems, however, that Liddington's job is not so much to run a handful of schools as to build an empire. E-Act will have at least 10 more schools by next September and, earlier this year, Liddington told a newspaper it planned to open a "super-chain" of 250 within five years, making it bigger than all but a handful of local education authorities. He is now oddly coy about this perhaps hubristic projection, saying he isn't sure the E-Act board ever agreed to 250 and it just wanted "responsible growth".
Last December, a new company, E-Act Enterprises, was formed. It will sell "intellectual property" and services such as school improvement, and possibly set up fee-paying schools abroad. The company can make profits, but 100% of these, Liddington says, "will be ploughed back into our English academies", providing extra funding for scholarships, prizes, staff and experiences for pupils. "This is the 21st-century form of academy sponsorship," he adds. He tells me that selling services to E-Act itself is "not on the cards". Will he, as one of two directors, receive pay from E-Act Enterprises? "Absolutely and totally no." Does he think companies running academies should themselves be allowed to make profits? "We have no public position on this but, personally, I think it's inevitable if the government continues to develop its intervention in schools. Existing chains don't have the capacity to upscale."
All this is regarded with a certain wariness by other academy providers. The education world is uncomfortable with words such as "profit" and "expansion" and academy and free school supporters sense that E-Act and its director-general are slightly off-message.
Perhaps this explains why Liddington's tone is so determinedly non-confrontational. For example, I ask for E-Act's unique selling point, the single thing that distinguishes it from other academy chains. "That's difficult without implying that other academy chains are less good," he says. After much hesitation, he continues: "We are relentless in seeking the highest levels of attainment where attainment levels have been extremely low before. Our purpose is to improve the lot of the poorest and most deprived children in this country. Most of our schools are in deprived areas and we are considerably above average in the number of our children with special educational needs."
You might expect Liddington to be an eloquent critic of local authorities' shortcomings and a proselytiser for the private sector, particularly since, when he worked at the Department for Education, he played a leading role in getting academies launched. But again he is cautious. "It's a complete myth that local authorities do nothing about failing schools. They have sought to intervene. But we still have some schools that aren't at the required level, so something else has to be tried. I don't have a council to run or potholes to worry about. So we can be very focused. We're able to function very efficiently. We top-slice 5%. That's considerably less than almost all LEAs top-sliced five years ago, and still less than most do now."
That may be so, but it doesn't mean much unless you know exactly what E-Act provides. Its schools get financial, human resources, IT and other such services, but E-Act doesn't, for example, employ special needs advisers, as local authorities usually do. As a proportion of budget, Liddington's pay must be several multiples higher than that of any local authority chief executive, and E-Act employs 10 others earning at least £100,000 a year. I ask him to justify his pay packet, the size of which he professes not to know. "This is an organisation at the cutting edge," he replies. "I know, as chief executive, that I have to be creative about getting good people here, and you have to look at the market and decide what you have to pay. It's not up to me to decide what I'm paid. It's a matter for the board who invited me to show an interest in the job."
What of the expenses (Liddington claimed £14,075 in 2009-10, according to the accounts) that attracted press comment last year, with allegations that he and other directors used "chauffeur-driven … limousines" to visit academies? "I run a four-year-old car and don't drive often," says Liddington. "Most of our academies are on the West Coast Main Line and I use that. There are no limos." He inadvertently claimed a large bill for two nights in a posh Birmingham hotel but, after the receipts were leaked, paid it back. "We have the most austere travel and hospitality that exists. We use Skype so we don't have to travel so much."
Liddington attended Wellingborough grammar school, where his ambition was to be a railway chef "because I liked cooking and I liked trains". But he "ached" to go to university and became the first in his family to do so. Between completing A-levels and starting at London University's Queen Mary College (as it then was), he taught at the local boys' secondary modern – "you didn't need a qualification; it was the gap year of my generation" – and enjoyed it so much he resolved to be a teacher.
After taking first-class honours in English, he did his PGCE at King's College, Cambridge, where one visiting speaker was the late Sir Alec Clegg, chief education officer of Yorkshire's West Riding and among the most prominent educational figures of the day. Clegg believed schools should pursue "the education of the spirit … the child's loves and hates … hopes and fears". It doesn't sound very New Labour but Liddington was inspired to teach in Conisbrough, a deprived mining community in the West Riding. "Professionally," says Liddington "I've always been attracted to kids who've had a hard time in life." Was he very leftwing as a young man? "I was quite leftwing. I wore jeans with holes and long hair. I was chairman of my Labour party ward. But that was as far as it went."
He was, he says, less inspired by Clegg's ideas at the end of three years in Conisbrough. "There were very low levels of aspiration and I found that frustrating." He did an MA at Washington State University in the US, where he met his wife, a teacher who later switched to employment law and became a judge.
He re–turned to become a head of department and then a deputy head. He didn't want a headship "because it was scary" and applied to HMI. But the inspectorate turned him down, so he became a head after all, at Northampton school for boys, a former grammar school fallen on hard times, with only 9% of pupils achieving five GCSEs at A-C. His success in turning the school round made his reputation and secured a knighthood in 2000.
"E-Act embodies what I did there. One teacher said working for me was like being on one long in-service training course. Poor performance is not acceptable to me. I don't do poor performance myself and I don't see why anyone else should." Every E-Act school principal is set a target of improving GCSE results by 10% a year. He has little patience with those who argue that, in some circumstances, failure is inevitable. "People ask if poverty has an impact on school achievement. I say of course it does, unless you do something about it."
Under him, Northampton grammar opted out of local authority control and became grant-maintained. I await an exposition of the liberationist case and examples of LEA oppression. But again he shies away. "I never fell out with the LEA. The school was heavily supported by the county council." The governors were sympathetically inclined to a Thatcher government policy, "but, for 18 months, I said I thought we were OK with the local authority". He was "eventually persuaded" that opting out "was the right thing to do".
He left Northampton to work part-time at the education department in 2000, advising on performance management. He switched to advising on academies – "I was involved in all the practical stuff about getting them off the ground" – before becoming a full-time civil servant and then, from 2006, the schools commissioner. "My job was to be the national champion for choice."
Bullied out?
He left to go to E-Act in 2009, a move that attracted criticism, though he acted within the rules. Barry Sheerman, then children's select committee chairman, suggested he was "bullied out" by the Labour secretary of state Ed Balls who wanted to row back on academies. Liddington protests, perhaps too much, that Balls was "courteous, intelligent and fascinating to work for" and argues that Sheerman and Balls, being from different generations, use the word "bully" in different senses. Did he have disagreements with Balls? "No, I was a senior civil servant. You don't disagree with ministers."
Yes, there was an ironic tone and a faint smile. Liddington says that, unlike his father, he has never done anything with his hands. But he is a practical man all the same who knows how to get things done, which is not by rocking boats or sticking your neck out too far. "On the surface, a quintessential Sir Humphrey figure," was how one prominent educational figure summed him up. "But he seems to have his own agenda, and I'm not sure what it is."
Anarchist group Etonleaks promises to make life uncomfortable for old boys, and new, plus the college that is training guards for ships
Eton mess
The annual meeting of Eton's old boys' network, due to be held in London last week, didn't quite go to plan. In the run-up, an anarchist group known as the Etonleaks Collective organised an "anti-Eton" march from St Paul's cathedral to the City law firm Withers LLP, where the AGM was due to be held, as a protest against elitism in education. One of the demo organisers, Ian Bone, claims on his website that the meeting was called off due to "fears of public disorder".
Jackie Tarrant-Barton, clerk to the Old Etonians told Education Guardian that the association did not wish to comment on the matter. A spokesperson for Withers LLP confirmed that the meeting was not held in its offices as planned, and that a "small rally" did go ahead, but would not comment on whether the meeting was held at a different venue.
The protest appears to be part of a wider campaign from the group against the top public school. A recent post on Bone's website invites "whistleblowers" to send "documents from Eton" via a dedicated email address, and claims to have received papers uncovering all sorts of dodgy – and, my goodness, surely inconceivable – practices at the school, including tax avoidance and "hush, hush foreign investments". But with an "Occupy Eton" event scheduled for later in the month, when protesters plan to march on the school grounds against "future privileged social parasites" there may be be further discomfort ahead for the top public school. Eton College did not respond to requests to comment from Education Guardian.
Gun-ho
The seaside town of Blackpool might not be the first place you'd rush to to learn how to use lethal weapons on the high seas, but a new course from Blackpool and the Fylde College is teaching just that. Thought to be the first of its kind, the 10-day vessel protection officer course teaches students everything they need to know to guard against piracy at sea, including putting out fires and "managing" dangerous weapons.
The majority of students – mostly ex-military personnel – are already trained to use guns. Some have worked as security officers on ships, but it's to Blackpool they are heading for to find out how to use their weapons in the event of a pirate attack. At the college's Fleetwood nautical campus they can find out how to set off flares or use lines of live ammunition around the ship to prevent pirates approaching. They also learn when and how it is "appropriate" to return fire.
The course was launched two months ago in anticipation of last week's government announcement that British vessels are to be allowed to carry armed guards to protect them from pirates. Tony Dumbell, head of maritime operations at the college thinks the course has never been more necessary. "These guys [the pirates] can be really dangerous. We need to make sure ships have people with the skills to cope in an emergency."
The government says it is working on school improvement but, argues Fiona Millar, academies and free schools seem to be the only strategy – and they are not necessarily working
Last month I wrote an article here responding to Michael Gove's speech to the Tory Party conference. On the day it appeared, I was contacted via Twitter by one of the Secretary of State's senior policy advisers, Sam Freedman.
For those who don't know of Mr Freedman, let me explain. He is a former Tory policy adviser turned government official at the Department for Education (DfE) who, in spite of his civil servant status, is an active user of social media to promote Conservative party education policy.
His complaint was that if only I could look beyond free schools and academies, I would see other important common ground between this government and the last when it came to school improvement. He singled out the work of Labour's London Challenge, which he claimed was being continued in the new generation of teaching schools.
It is, in fact, quite hard to look beyond academies and free schools, since they dominate so much of what his department says and does. The coalition's recognition of Labour achievements in office has also passed me by in the torrent of speeches designed to trash the previous government's record.
Nevertheless, the London Challenge point is an interesting one. A dominant strand in Labour's school improvement strategy for the last decade (and latterly extended to two other regions), it must have some important lessons.
The reasons why London Challenge was so effective are set out in the final Ofsted report before the programme was wound down in 2011. The opening summary is succinct. "Programmes of support for schools are planned, with experienced and credible London Challenge advisers using a shared and accurate audit of need. Excellent system leadership and pan-London networks of schools allow effective partnerships to be established between schools, enabling needs to be tackled quickly and progress to be accelerated."
Ofsted highlighted other striking features: the clear sense of moral purpose among teachers and school leaders; their commitment to all London children; their sense of pride in being part of a city-wide education service, irrespective of whether they were receiving or providing support; their appreciation of effective professional development opportunities, use of data and well supported interventions for individual children.
By the time the programme ended, less than 1% of London secondary schools were below government floor targets and 30% were judged "outstanding". Moreover, statistics released by the DfE last month show that London is now the most highly performing region in the country on the GCSE measure of five A* to Cs including English and maths. Some of the capital's most deprived boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets (incidentally without any academies or free schools), chalked up results this year that are comparable with Mr Gove's leafy Surrey and knock spots off the performance of the prime minister's affluent Oxfordshire.
So back to Mr Freedman. How much of this work is being carried on and scaled up? Judging by the DfE website, very little. True, 100 teaching schools have been approved (out of 23,000 schools), but this was only one element in the London Challenge's highly tuned, multi-faceted approach.
Other crucial elements – centrally resourced strategic partnerships, advisers, focus on teaching and learning, have gone. Moreover, budget cuts mean local authorities are increasingly under-resourced and relatively powerless.
It is worth asking if there is in fact any coherent school improvement strategy being proposed by Mr Freedman's department. The only evidence on the DfE website is a letter from Mr Gove to local authorities, asking them to set out their plans for schools below government floor targets, and a press release explaining that another civil service tweeter, schools commissioner Dr Elizabeth Sidwell, will then step in and broker sponsorship with an academy chain.
Yet even Dr Sidwell recently admitted to having concerns about a significant number of sponsored academies that appear to be stuck, unwittingly reinforcing the point that structural solutions do not necessarily equal school improvement. The fate of those schools is presumably to be passed from one edu-chain to another until they start to progress.
In fact, the government's education policy increasingly resembles its questionable plans for the economy and the health service. All have the same basic features: set out a clear ideologically driven path that runs counter to most evidence, then hold on for dear life and hope it works. Unless I am missing something blindingly obvious, there is no plan B for schools, in spite of what Sam Freedman says.
Many lecturers who are 'working to contract' over a pensions dispute are finding that they suddenly have time for their families
The differences to Fiona Patrick's working practices in recent weeks are subtle, but they have been, she says, an "absolute revelation". The lecturer at Glasgow University's school of education has been reading a book or newspaper on the hour-long train journey to and from work, rather than desperately catching up on admin tasks or poring over research articles. During the day, she's been taking the odd half-hour break for a cup of coffee and even, occasionally, to chat to a colleague. And she has had the physical and mental energy to play with her seven-year-old daughter when she gets home without feeling as if all she's capable of is collapsing into bed.
Patrick, along with 40,000 other members of the University and College Union (UCU) in 67 pre-1992 universities, has been "working to contract" since 10 October in a dispute over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions. She is also one of around 250 academics – three-quarters of them female – the union says have been in touch detailing how they have now realised just how much the extra hours they put in have affected their lives.
"I've just been inundated," says Sally Hunt, UCU's general secretary. "People are saying that for the first time in years they've been able to have some kind of normal life. It's clear it has become very normalised for people to work 50-plus hours in a week, doing evening and weekend work. We've got very committed staff who are struggling to fulfil their research commitments alongside admin and teaching, and that will only get worse with the pressures they're having to deal with."
She has been particularly struck by the impact on younger women and those with childcare responsibilities: "It's been absolutely stark. They're saying the action has enabled them to get some work-life balance back. It's shocking that it's taken this to do that."
Patrick realised she had regularly been working 45 or 50 hours a week. "When you're working flat out you don't have the time to really know how stressed you are," she says, adding that she is not criticising her university.
"Sticking to my contracted 35 hours has shown me that work was almost taking over my whole life. If you're conscientious, what inevitably happens when you've too much work to fit in is that you take it home. I haven't taken lunch breaks since I can't remember when.
"It's a bit of a cliche, but working to contract has been like having a weight lifted off my shoulders. I've still got the same amount of work to do, but it's just getting that breathing space that makes the difference: you begin to look at what you have to do and prioritise it, instead of feeling that everything has to be done as quickly as possible and feeling guilty when it isn't.
"At the moment I'm prioritising everything to do with the needs of my students. I will make time for the things I usually worry about, for example research, when students are out on placement and teaching contact drops."
Key duties are still being carried out, but extras such as sitting on external committees, outreach work with the public and requests for extra seminars may get turned down.
For Martine Turgeon, who works in Lancaster University's psychology department, sticking to her 40 hours a week, instead of between 45 and 60, has given her the chance to spend more time with her seven-year-old son. But it raises problems, too. "I'm very behind and I feel I'm letting down my students. There are simply too many urgent things to do in a normal full-time week for a lecturer to cope. Forty hours is not enough to do the teaching and research required of me."
Kathy Romer, a senior lecturer in astrophysics at the University of Sussex, hadn't even realised she was working more than her contracted hours until she totted up the previous week's work and discovered it came to 55 hours. Because she needs to leave work before 4.30pm to collect her children from after-school club, she has to put in two hours in the evening even when working to rule – or get up and start work at 5am. But since starting the union action, she has been freer to enjoy weekends with them.
"I still work three or more hours at the weekend, but that's less than before and, most importantly, I'm not feeling guilty when I'm doing something else," says Romer, who teaches 100 undergraduates on two courses and five research students, as well as running careers training for undergraduates and doing research work. "I was able to take my kids out on Saturday without having to worry about work.
"I don't feel like I am drowning, and feel in control of my life, for the first time in a while."
Imposing limits has stopped her feeling "panicked" by the volume of work to be done, and she believes that the consequent feeling of greater control may even be improving the quality of her work.
"I don't think my students or the university are suffering – perhaps even the reverse. I feel more able to do my job. The last thing any academic wants to do is something that disadvantages their students. We just can't stand doing it.
"I didn't want to … take any action. But I thought I could support this because it's nothing anyone could say is against the students." All the women we spoke to stressed that they were talking personally and not on behalf of their university.
So what happens when the action ends? Patrick says she will make sure she talks to her line manager about how to control her workload, and aim not to just keep taking on extra work.
And Hunt says universities can expect to hear more from the union on the subject. "I've argued for a long time that we should look at workloads, and for a long time we've had nice words back from the employers," she says.
"It's no longer something where nice words tell me they're taking it seriously. This is clear evidence that the sector has been relying on the goodwill of our members, and getting away with doing so for too long."
Computers have saved us all time, but what have we done with it? asks Jonathan Wolff
There was great excitement the year I started lecturing in the philosophy department. Not, sadly, about me, but because we had obtained, for the first time, a usable computer in the department. It was placed in an attic room, and I would get to work at eight in the morning to use it for two – well, OK, three – hours, before anyone else rolled in.
It was several years before we each had our own computer. And a few weeks later, all were gone. Security, covering their backs, insinuated that one of the faculty must have turned up over the weekend in a hired Ford Transit. But now that the department actually possessed things worth stealing, the university installed some industrial-strength locks. We bought some more computers and tried again, thereby learning other new ways in which modern technology can routinely ruin your mood.
It is hard to think back to academic life before computers. I was there only as a witness. My teachers used to write out the drafts of their books and papers by hand, with expensive, though smudgy, fountain pens, and the departmental secretaries would type them up over the summer break. The secretaries also had to type all student references and important correspondence. No more, of course.
Every few years, another computing triumph was achieved. Email saved the time and trouble of printing letters, folding them up and putting them in envelopes. The internet, eventually, put the resources of a reference library on your desk. And, in the last couple of years, the widespread electronic availability of journal articles has cut out the need to root through dusty shelves and stand in line at the photocopier.
Just as the end of the Cold War was meant to produce a "peace dividend", we should now be experiencing a "technology dividend", luxuriating in the spare time we have created for ourselves. But what has happened to all that time saved?
I vaguely recall a story in which the central character did everything he could to save time, counting out the seconds banked. But at the end of each day he realised, to his despair, that just as much time had gone as usual, whatever he did. Beckett makes the point the other way round: Vladimir: "Well, that passed the time." Estragon: "It would have passed anyway."
Innovations are introduced with the promise that they will save time, or money, or make us safer or more comfortable. But, as my UCL colleague John Adams observed, innovations can have a perverse effect. Notoriously, he claimed that when seat belts were introduced, people simply took more risks when they drove. If we really want road safety, he suggests, we should put a sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel. Then you'd watch your braking distance.
Karl Marx noticed something similar. In early industrial Britain, he reports, a factory boy modified his machine in order to complete his day's work in a couple of hours, and laze around the rest of the time. So impressed was the factory owner that he modified all the machines and multiplied the production targets.
I'm hardly the first to point out that instead of consuming the time-saving benefits of information technology by making the work day less pressured, we have found other ways of filling up the time. Now that we have such whizzy computers, university administrators can do valuable things that we had no time for before, such as making sure every member of the department has signed a piece of paper swearing that they know where the fire exits are.
And what, as an academic, do I do with the hours and minutes I save by not having to traipse off to the library each time I need to check a reference? I would like to tell you that I have finally taken up the tuba, or, at the least, am using the time for ever deeper reflection. But the truth is I still begin every email with the line "Sorry to be slow replying, it has been exceptionally busy over the last few days".
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly
Queen's We Are the Champions is officially the number 1 catchiest song, say academics
Do you belt out your favourite song in the bath when it comes on the radio? Sing along as you're driving, at a gig, cleaning the loo or just walking to work plugged into your Shuffle? And what is it about a song that catches our attention and makes us want sing our hearts out?
It's a question that led to a lot of hanging out in nightclubs for musicologist Dr Alisun Pawley, as she tried to find the answer. Clearly, some research projects are more fun than others.
"I got the idea when I was living in Newcastle and on a night out," she explains. "I was watching people singing along to "Hey baby," by DJ Otzi – big huddles of men really going for it. The physicality of it, the vigour ... it was really tribal."
Pawley, an academic working at Kendal College, who performs and teaches as well as analysing music, wondered exactly what elements in music make a song particularly sing-alongable.
To find out the answer, it was time to go clubbing. "I did 30 nights' research – six nights at five venues – to get a good range of demographic," she explains. "We chose a small pub in York, a student nightclub, a trendy gay bar in Leeds, an indie rock bar in Manchester and a big nightclub in Kendal."
With a research assistant to help her do the count, Pawley hit the dancefloor "undercover", with a dictaphone that passed for a mobile, and started monitoring who was singing along to what.
She also noted factors such as time of night, whether it was a weekday or a weekend, how well a song was doing in the charts and when it was released – all elements that might influence how willing people were to fling off their inhibitions and give their lungs a workout.
"I had an internal rule that if about 80% of the people were singing, I was allowed to sing myself, so I wasn't putting anyone off," she laughs.
Given that each track was only a few minutes long, assessing how many people had got sucked into a catchy number was tricky in a dark nightclub environment – if it was small numbers, she counted during the chorus when most people were singing, but with larger groups, it had to be an estimate.
Another problem arose when Pawley didn't know the name of the track straight away, though a phone app solved that one; recording the music then playing it into her phone allowed the app to identify most songs.
Thousands of people were monitored for their responses to over 1,000 songs and, perhaps predictably, the student night had the highest percentage of people singing along. The lowest proportion of warblers were found in the cool indie bar in Manchester. But it was the factors that incentivised people to sing that really took Pawley by surprise.
"I thought the musical structures of the song would be more influential, but it turns out the most important thing is the vocal aspect – how the singer sings," she says.
The subject of a song and the sentiment described by the lyrics don't really matter, either. Whether you're singing miserably or happily about love, banging out a political war cry or rapping about how society has treated you wrong, what makes a tune really catchy, Pawley found, is if it's sung in a high voice, with lots of energy, by a male singer, using clear consonants so you can make out the words, and without much elaborate dancing around the melody.
"One of my hypotheses was that the catchy songs would fall in a smaller range of notes, so it would be comfortable for both males and females to sing along to – but that wasn't significant," says Pawley. "Bon Jovi in Livin' On A Prayer goes up really high at the end, but it doesn't put people off."
The more words a singer can manage in one breath, the more likely ordinary punters are to succumb to a sing-song, and the more sounds there are in a chorus, the more infectious it gets.
Once she had worked out which songs got most people going – Queen's We Are The Champions came in at number one – Pawley gave her results to Goldsmiths music psychologist Dr Daniel Müllensiefen, who extracted the data that explains the blueprint behind a catchy song.
A few songs in the top 10 came as a surprise. "The Sum 41 and Wheatus songs are the most surprising in terms of not being 'classic' anthems," says Pawley. "They were very popular in the student nights I observed at the time the research was carried out, which demonstrates that more 'niche' songs can be popular sing-along songs within certain subcultures at a certain moment in time."
While nobody joining in their favourite chorus in a nightclub will realise it, Müllensiefen says that every musical hit is reliant on maths, science, engineering and technology for its effects.
"We've discovered that there's a science behind the sing-along and a special combination of neuroscience, maths and cognitive psychology can produce the elusive elixir of the perfect sing-along song," he explains. "We hope our study will inspire musicians of the future to crack the equation of the textbook tune."
Research suggests that the shape of a chief executive's head can show whether he will be successful
A new line of American-British research suggests that the shape of a chief executive officer's head can indicate how well his firm will prosper. The shape also predicts whether the chief executive will act immorally.
The research offers a mathematical tool that financial analysts can add to their professional kit bag: the chief executive officer's facial width-to-height ratio. The "chief executive facial WHR", for short.
The research and its financial implications are outlined in a study called A Face Only an Investor Could Love: Chief Executive Facial Structure Predicts Firm Financial Performance, to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
The authors, Elaine Wong and Michael Haselhuhn at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Margaret Ormiston at London Business School, explain the significance of their work. Prior researchers, they say, failed "to empirically identify physical traits that predict leadership success" or predict "the ability of leaders to achieve organisational goals".
Their discovery, in their view, constitutes a breakthrough: "We identify a specific physical trait, facial structure, of leaders that correlates with organisational performance. Specifically, chief executive officers with wider faces (relative to facial height) achieve superior firm financial performance."
The story is not always that simple, the researchers caution, nor is it guaranteed: "The relationship between chief executive facial structure and financial performance is moderated by the decision-making dynamics of the leadership team."
Wong, Haselhuhn and Ormiston painstakingly examined the financial performance and chief executive facial measurements of General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Nike and 52 other publicly traded Fortune 500 organisations for the period 1996-2002. The companies are big, averaging $38bn in annual sales and about 120,000 employees.
Wong, Haselhuhn and Ormiston obtained chief executive facial photos from the internet, using them as raw data from which to calculate each chief executive facial WHR. They looked up each firm's return on assets (in financial industry shorthand, the "ROA"), using that as the measure of the company's financial performance.
Wong and Haselhuhn spell out their logic in a study called Bad to the Bone: Facial Structure Predicts Unethical Behavior, published a few months ago in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
They tell of experiments conducted on students, which showed "that men with wider faces (relative to facial height) are more likely to explicitly deceive their counterparts in a negotiation, and are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gain".
They explain the mechanism that might make this happen. Prior research indicated that wide-faced men are "associated with more aggressive behavior". If "observers respond to facial cues by deferring to men whom they perceive to be aggressive based on their facial WHR, these men may find it easier to take advantage of others. Similarly, if men with greater facial WHRs are treated in ways that make them feel more powerful, this may foster a psychological sense of power, which then affects ethical judgement and behavior".
The facial indicators, say the researchers, are more reliable in men than in women.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
As bonfire night approaches, you can find resources on the Guardian Teacher Network for teaching pupils about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot – and their impact on democracy and parliament
"Remember, remember the fifth of November – gunpowder, treason and plot."
The rhyme may be quite familiar to many children – but do they know the significance of the story behind it and the impact it had on democracy and parliament in the UK?
With the UK's first ever Parliament Week launched yesterday (and with bonfire night fast approaching), now is the perfect time to bring parliament and democracy to life.
A great place to start is the Introduction to Parliament. This interactive guide, ideal for use on whiteboards, allows students to zoom into the House of Commons and House of Lords, take a quiz on the role of the monarchy, and explore how the UK is governed.
Alternatively, pupils can try their hand at being an MP for a week. This multi-level, online game aims to help 11- to 14-year-olds develop their political awareness, with the opportunity to plan speeches, vote on laws and watch videos of MPs in action.
Younger pupils can explore how laws are made with the illustrated booklet Parliament, Laws and You. Following the imaginary story of Froggypop, students investigate what happens when the government tries to ban a popular fizzy drink, examining the role of MPs, Lords and the Queen along the way.
A useful resource aimed at 14- to 18-year-olds is Politics for Beginners . This document introduces the ideas of capitalism and socialism, and highlights some hot political issues including immigration, tax and public spending.
For a more historical look at the changing role of the UK parliament, you can explore the Execution of King Charles I. This KS3 resource encourages pupils to analyse and evaluate a variety of sources, including an engraving and an eyewitness account of the death of Charles I in 1649. It also examines the rise to power of Oliver Cromwell.
As Parliament Week includes 5 November, you might want to draw pupils' attention to the Gunpowder Plot. This lesson plan for KS2 contains useful links to worksheets and games about the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. There's also an assembly about Guy Fawkes and an article that is perfect for KS3.For a comprehensive look at the birth and development of the Westminster Parliament over the last 1,000 years, check out the Houses of History resource. This interactive timeline allows students to track the shift in power from the monarchy to the people through a range of animations, articles, images and quotations. There is also a KS3 parliamentary scrapbook for students to use plus a look at the "Tower of Power" in this magazine-style resource for KS4 pupils.
The Guardian Teacher Network also contains further details about UK Parliament Week, which is focusing on "Stories of Democracy". You can also access a selection of activities about campaigns and debates for use at KS3.
With tuition fees set to rise, more and more students are attending university open days to see what they will be getting for their money
Choosing a university has taken the Gordon family on a nationwide tour of campuses. Today, they are at Worcester, they've already visited Derby and still plan to see Cumbria. In the course of a week they will have visited five in all, totting up 1,000 miles and staying overnight with friends, family and in youth hostels.
"We're going to all the universities I'm interested in applying to," says 17-year-old Anna, from Ipswich in Suffolk, who plans to do a degree in outdoor adventure leadership and management.
"I'm keeping an open mind until I've seen them all."
Ben, her father, jokes that their week away has been a nice family break. But there is a more serious side to it. "We want to make the decision process easier for Anna, as university will be a different prospect for her than for her older sisters because of the rise in tuition fees next year," he says.
"We're interested in seeing the range of subjects she'll be studying, how much work will be involved – as formal tuition time seems to vary by university – and what the employability rates are. There are value-for-money issues to consider."
The Gordons are typical of the new trend to emerge in this year's application process, fuelled by next year's rise in tuition fees to up to £9,000. Universities across the UK are reporting a huge increase in the number of prospective students attending open days – up by more than 75% in some places – and, in particular, in parents accompanying their children.
Applicants are no longer just interested in choosing the most suitable course, but in meeting staff, looking at accommodation, discovering more about the location and the nature of university life.
Their parents have questions about funding – the availability of bursaries and scholarships for those on lower incomes, what "extras" the fees will include and the university's record on graduate employment. In other words, they want to know, as never before, what they will be getting for their money.
For Oli Dowling, 17, from Cambridge, visiting his five choices with his parents has already paid off.
Having met the history lecturers at one institution, he has decided to strike it from his list. "They just weren't inspiring at all and that put me off," he says. "If I'm going to devote three years to study and have to pay the fees, then I want to enjoy the course and get the best out of it."
Increases in attendance for open days at Worcester have ranged from 12% on some days to 76% on others, and the university has added extra events to meet demand. It is a pattern that is being repeated around the country. If the early indications are that applications to universities are significantly down for 2012 entry, then this is not being reflected in open day visitors.
Newcastle University, for example, has recorded one of the biggest rises, up by 24% on last year and reaching a record 18,000 visitors. At Bristol, the rise was 18%, up from 11,000 in 2010 to more than 13,000.
David Alder, the university's director of communications and marketing, says: "The visits allow prospective students to put into context all the information they have already researched about a university. They want to know that the whole experience will be right for them, from the course itself to the town or city they will be based in. Parents are increasingly a part of the process because they want to be sure their children are making the right decision."
Some of the biggest rises have been at open days held in the summer, suggesting that students are starting the selection process earlier. Leicester University saw a 13% rise in numbers from the previous year, with more than 4,500 visitors during one weekend in June.
Jonathan Tinnacher, its head of student recruitment, says: "Students are becoming much savvier about what they want and expect for their money, and are far more robust than ever before in their decision-making.
"They are asking increasingly about finance and this is a complex picture because every university will have its own criteria for administering scholarships and bursaries."
Sheffield University has seen visitor numbers up by almost 30%, while Nottingham plans to review the number of events it holds next year in the light of an overall 17% rise in attendance this year. Stewart Aitken, the director of marketing, says: "Students are looking more rigorously at the institutions and it is important the universities support them in that by making all the information available.
"They are looking not just at value for money, but also at the currency their degree will have on graduation. They want to know that they will be taught by lecturers with a solid background in research. The increased focus on employability is a growing trend, and not a surprising one in the current economic climate."
At Winchester University, one of the smallest in the country with about 6,500 students, Professor Elizabeth Stuart, the senior pro-vice chancellor, prepared answers to anticipated questions about tuition fees that were never asked by sixth-formers attending open days.
"Students seem to be resigned to the tuition fees rise – it is the parents who are worried. We were ready with responses to those who might be considering not applying, but we didn't encounter the question," she says. Just how much of an impact fees are having will be apparent after the deadline for university applications in mid-January. "Debating this now is meaningless when people are leaving it later and later to apply this year," she says.
At Worcester, surprisingly few of the students were concerned about the rise in tuition fees.
Matthew Ketch, 17, from Polesworth in Warwickshire, says: "It's going to happen so why worry about it? I want to get a degree and I won't let that stand in the way." Meanwhile, Bethan Watson, also 17, who travelled with her mother from Kington in Powys, adds: "I'll only have to pay them off when I get a good enough job, so I'm not going to worry about it. It's going to be the same for everyone starting next year."
It remains a big concern for the thousands of parents following their teenagers around campuses, however. Today, for the first time in his eight years as Worcester's vice-chancellor, Professor David Green was asked in an open session by the mother of a prospective English student whether her daughter's core texts would be included in the fees.
"To be asked such a specific question just shows the extent to which funding is a concern and the extent to which there is an expectation of value for money," he says. "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the rising numbers of teenagers and parents attending open days is due to tuition fees.
"We haven't just seen parents, but whole families, including aunties, cousins and toddlers in push-chairs, accompanying sixth-formers. Going to university is becoming a decision that the whole family makes and everyone is rallying around emotionally, intellectually and financially."
Green believes that what he calls the "waverers" – the students who are undecided about whether to go to university at all – can't be persuaded, as they are simply not turning up to open days.
"They seem to have made that decision privately already, and sadly we are not meeting them to be able to have that conversation."
• A change has been made to the first paragraph of this story to make clear that Derby's open day had already taken place. The university has another open day later this month.
We must defend the principle of widening participation, says Peter Scott, against those who favour elitism
Half a century ago Kingsley Amis, aided and abetted by the Times, moaned that "more means worse". A decade later, the notorious Black Papers were published, peddling the same reactionary views. But then the right abandoned its campaign against the expansion of higher education.
Now the beast is back. The tripling of tuition fees has reduced demand for undergraduate degrees. While liberals hope this is a temporary blip, conservative opponents anticipate a permanent shrinking of a bloated mass system. Then there is the Treasury. With deficit reduction a non-negotiable priority, any decline in the number of students means a welcome similar decline in the up-front state loans they are entitled to.
Already, the prospects look bleak. Last week, Ucas reported an 8% decline in applications for undergraduate courses next year and, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, public expenditure on education, including universities, is being cut back at a rate not seen since the 1950s.
But there is more – a steady trickle of articles trashing the value of higher education (not, of course, for "top people", but for the people at large) and talking up alternatives to university (whether apprenticeships or cheap substitutes provided by private colleges). The aim is obvious – to soften up and, if possible, to reverse support for an open and public system of higher education.
Fees were introduced by the previous government to enable higher education to access more public funding by the back-door. Existing public investment was, broadly speaking, maintained – until the banking crisis hit.
Now, the combination of much higher fees and steep cuts in government funding has produced a counter-revolutionary moment, as elitist ideologies have re-emerged from the undergrowth.
But let's be fair. This is not a case of (progressive) Labour versus (reactionary) Tories. There are powerful voices in the Labour party who argue for a re-division of higher education into "real" universities and new-style "technical colleges".
As with the enthusiasm for apprenticeships, usually unspecified, the common ground is the old idea that we need more plumbers and fewer sociologists. Maybe. However, advocates of recreating a clean distinction between academic higher education and advanced vocational training are behind the times. Pharmacy courses are stuffed full of academic study of chemistry, and humanities degrees obsess about employability, to give just two examples.
The universities minister, David Willetts, and the business secretary, Vince Cable, deny that a reduction in student numbers is their aim. They argue that provided students have access to the right "key information sets" (the information that universities will be obliged to make easily accessible to the public) and that barriers to new providers of higher education are lowered, the system will find its own level. Students will be able to make informed choices about whether or not to go into higher education in the first place – and, if so, choose the type of higher education that suits them best.
The catch, of course, is that more students are expected (and may be required?) to opt for higher education-lite (steered away from "proper" HE into studying at FE colleges, private colleges etc) – which takes us right back into the Black Papers territory of 40 years ago. The political naivety, and brutal insensitivity, of the Black Papers has gone. But the message is essentially the same. The expansion of higher education has been a mistake. It has diluted "proper" university education while doing nothing for the life chances of students from less-well-off backgrounds.
Widening participation in higher eduction is off the agenda. It has been replaced by "fair access", a much narrower ambition. The responsibility for addressing deeply entrenched social inequities has been passed from the government, which can do a lot, to institutions, which can do much less.
But this counter-revolutionary moment will pass. First, it is too late to turn the clock back. Higher education for the masses has proved itself, even if some people still dislike it. Excellence and access are recognised as mutually dependent.
Next, even the offspring of the Black Paper pamphleteers concede that there is no alternative to maintaining higher levels of participation in higher education. All competitor nations are investing hard in tertiary education. The only argument that still has some traction is over the nature of the higher education to which the masses have access.
Britain has become a graduate society. Long-term, there are fewer and fewer jobs for non-graduates, whatever may happen to graduate job prospects in the short term. But it is about more than jobs. It is becoming increasingly difficult for non-graduates, especially among the younger generation, to access the full range of social and cultural opportunities available in modern Britain. They risk being, in some intangible but powerful way, disenfranchised.
We must defend higher education in its current form. A lot is at stake – not just our future wealth, in the shape of a successful economy, but our common wealth, in the form of our democracy.
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
Councils are warning that the government's academy programme is draining resources away from maintained schools – and vulnerable children may be the ones who lose the most
It is the government's flagship education policy. But councils in England are warning that the academies scheme will drain resources from support services used by thousands of conventional state schools that have not left their local authorities.
Education Guardian has calculated that the huge expansion in the government's academies programme could cost councils up to £820m over two years.
Councils claim that money to meet these costs will inevitably have to come from other services provided by local authorities, including support for the most vulnerable pupils, at a time when education is facing its sharpest spending cuts for 50 years, according to analysis last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Analysis of submissions to the government's consultation on academy funding by the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents all English and Welsh local authorities, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) and the umbrella body London Councils, supplemented by information from six individual councils, shows that councils believe too much money has been given to individual academies by the government, and that ministers are now trying to take cash from local authorities to meet these costs. The claims come after this newspaper revealed in April how some schools appear to have received six-figure windfalls after becoming academies.
Peter Downes, a Liberal Democrat councillor in Cambridgeshire who opposes academies, says: "The whole academies policy has been carried out without any serious assessment of the financial implications. It risks creating extra costs for the education system, at a time when we can ill afford it."
Academies are funded directly from central government and operate largely without receiving local authority support services, including school improvement and behaviour support. The government says they receive the same amount of money for support services as they would have received had they been a conventional local authority "maintained" school. Academies can then buy in any support they need.
Since summer 2010, 1,525 schools have taken on academy status, or applied to do so. Ministers said last year that they expected only 400 new academies in 2010-12.
The government is therefore seeking to slash the funding for local authorities to provide support services since, ministers say, the growth in academies means there is now less demand for these services.
In January, the government proposed to cut local authority budgets by £148m in 2011-12 and by £265m in 2012-13. But following a legal challenge in May by 23 authorities, which argued that the reductions were calculated unfairly and flouted government guidelines on passing extra costs on to local councils, the government launched a new consultation on academy funding over the summer.
But the consultation proposed to cut local authority budgets even further to take account of the faster-than-anticipated growth in academy numbers. This would see councils lose between £940m and £1.06bn by 2012-13.
Although councils accept that there should be some reduction in funding for their services, they say the proposed cuts go far beyond any likely savings. Other budgets will therefore have to be raided to make up the shortfall.
The LGA surveyed 32 authorities and found them reporting average savings of £15 per pupil because of a falling demand for services as more schools in their areas became academies.
The LGA therefore says council budgets should be cut by a figure of £15-£70 for every academy pupil. But the government says this sum should be more than £200.
Calculations by this newspaper, based on the LGA's estimated per-pupil savings, suggest that council budgets should therefore be reduced by a maximum of £233m over two years to pay for the academies policy. As ministers are seeking to make cuts of £940m-£1.06bn, councils believe they face an unjustified bill for academies of £707m-£822m.
David Simmons, chairman of the LGA's children and young people board, says: "We are supportive of the academies policy, but we are concerned that at present the Department for Education [DfE] does not have sufficient funding in its budget to support the number of schools looking to convert, and therefore is looking for money from councils that are already hard-pressed. We need to find a new way to provide funding for schools when they convert."
The councils argue that individual academies have been overfunded because:
• The government's formula wrongly gives academies a share of some council budgets for functions which local authorities, rather than academies, have to perform, such as strategic planning and, in some authorities, children's social care;
• Academies are wrongly given an equal share of funding for school improvement support. Councils argue that, with most schools that have become academies now either rated good or outstanding this is unfair, since councils in the past have rightly focused such resources on weaker schools. The LGA says the government has breached equal opportunities law by not considering the effect of this on disadvantaged pupils in non-academy schools;
• Academies receive a share of what the local authority was spending on its school support services the previous year. With council budgets falling year-on-year, this also represents over-funding.
In their consultation responses, the LGA, London Councils and local authorities including Kent, Somerset and Cambridgeshire have castigated the proposals as unworkable. They describe the government's methodology variously as "irrational", "completely unreasonable" and "fundamentally flawed".
England's largest local authority, Conservative-controlled Kent, says that, while academies are receiving £230 per pupil in support service payments, the true figure, reflecting the cost of extra services academies must provide once they leave the local authority, should be £40 per pupil. This means a secondary school with 1,000 pupils would gain £190,000 simply by becoming an academy.
Kent also calculates that the overfunding of academies is so acute that, if 30% of its schools were to convert to academy status, payments to them would leave it with no budget at all for services to support the remaining 70%.
Somerset council, another Tory authority, says in its consultation response: "The current proposals would place an unacceptable burden on local authorities and the remaining maintained schools." John Osman, Somerset county council's cabinet member for children and young people, says: "We support the statement in the consultation document that academies and maintained schools should be funded fairly and equitably and strongly believe that the current proposals would not deliver this equity."
Cipfa believes the proposed cuts could be challenged in court. "The [government proposal] … would overstate the amount that should logically be transferred to academies. In that event, local authorities' remaining maintained schools – and therefore their pupils – would be financially disadvantaged," its consultation response said. "We believe that, if the methodology is not amended, it is possible that the size of this problem might be so significant as to trigger some further legal challenge."
Local authority sources say that, in the longer term, academy funding must be cut to come into line with that of maintained schools, in order for the policy to be financially sustainable.
Simon Pickard, a member of Cipfa's children's services panel, says: "If more and more schools convert to academy status, sooner or later the policy is going to become unaffordable, so academies will find their budgets will reduce over time."
A DfE spokesman says per-pupil funding is the same in academies as in maintained schools. He adds: "In the light of the greater numbers of academies converting nationally than initially anticipated, we need to ensure that they and local authorities are funded fairly.
"In July we published a consultation on the appropriate methodology for calculating the amount of funding relating to … relevant services that should transfer from local government to academies in 2011-12 and 2012-13. We are currently considering the responses in detail and will be making an announcement in due course."
Councils do not know when they are going to get an answer. With budgets so tight, ministers seem unlikely to want to respond positively to the authorities' claims. The reaction from local authorities, if their arguments are rejected, will be interesting to watch.
The winner of this year's headteacher of the year Teaching Award reveals how she has turned her school around
Listen to headteacher Pat Davies talking about what her school was like when she arrived, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was in a remote corner of a developing country. "It was filthy," she says, "and there was rubbish piled up all over the place. The whole school was infested with mice and cockroaches – it was a real mess. There were hardly any pens or books to be seen, either."
And it wasn't just the buildings and the classrooms that left a lot to be desired. "Morale was at rock bottom, too," she remembers. "There was nothing here, no ethos. When you go into a school, you should be able to feel a vibe – and there simply wasn't one."
The school she's describing is Chingford Hall primary in east London; and, she goes on, its results weren't much to crow about, either. In 2007, the year she arrived, only 38% of year 6 pupils achieved level 4 in literacy, while just 54% hit the target in maths.
But what a difference four years and Pat Davies have made. Today, Chingford Hall is thriving. It buzzes with energy, and it's festooned with imaginative artwork. For the last three years it has ranked in the top 1% of the most-improved schools nationally – and in its most recent Sats results, not only did 100% of year 6 pupils achieve level 4 in literacy and maths, 81% of them also hit grade 5 in maths, and 75% of them reached it in literacy.
This week, Davies was named headteacher of the year in the 2011 Pearson Teaching Awards – and it's an accolade that will come as no surprise to anyone at the school she has transformed. "She brought our school out of failing, to be the best," pupil Ellie Stevens told the judges, while a member of the senior leadership team told them that the changes at Chingford Hall should serve as a benchmark for schools in difficulty throughout the UK.
So what's the secret of Davies's success? In her early 50s, and the mother of four daughters aged between 14 and 30, her maxim, she says, has always been to create a school where she'd be happy to have her own children as pupils. "If I wouldn't want my own children in my school, I shouldn't expect others to want to have theirs in it," she says.
"Chingford is one of the poorest areas of London and there are a lot of problems here. But my feeling is, why should the children here have fewer advantages than those in, say Hampstead or Chelsea?" Setting high values, and striving to attain them, has always been at the root of what she does. "It's the most important thing you do as a head. And your values have to come through everything you do – you need everyone to role-model the values you are championing, so you have to make sure that you surround yourself with staff who give off the messages you want the children to get."
A "can-do" attitude shines out of Davies: she is one of those people who knows she can make things happen, but who also knows that her effectiveness is because of her willingness to work hard. Some days, she says, she arrives at work before the cleaner, and there have been times when she's still been in school at midnight. The first year she was appointed, she came in every day of the summer holidays.
"I knew I had to get things right, and I had to get them right fast." Her first priority was to order a skip; the second was to tackle the teaching shortcomings. "Some of the teachers here couldn't teach," she says. "I had to show them, and everyone, a new style of leadership. I had to show them how to plan lessons, how to mark books. And those who could step up to the mark did; and those who couldn't, left. I used to say: if you're not here for the children, just get on the bus and go somewhere else."
Getting things right for the pupils meant being firm with the parents, too. When she realised that many parents were themselves lacking in literacy, numeracy and IT skills, and that some of them didn't speak English, her solution was simple: she started classes for them.
Another innovation was the establishment of a children's centre. Earlier this year, both the centre and the school were judged by Ofsted to be "outstanding".
The next change on the horizon for Chingford Hall is that it's about to become an academy. Davies says she can see lots of positives in the academy model, but she worries about the wisdom of free schools. "Anyone can go and get a building and set up a school, and that sounds questionable to me. You need qualified people."
What's next for Davies? She admits she's never been one for an easy life: Chingford Hall, she says proudly, is the sixth "challenged" school she has worked in. So, now that she has turned it around, is she on the lookout for another school to help? "I love this school," she says. "So no, I'm not looking to move on. Since June I've been executive head of another school in the area – Whittingham primary in Waltham Forest – and that's another job I relish. I've also been put forward to be a national leader of education, and that means I'll be able to share my ideas and vision more widely. That matters to me, because this isn't about being some kind of "hero head". What it's about is looking at what works, and sharing ideas. We want other schools to turn around, too."
This is the full list of winners of the Pearson Teaching Awards for 2011
• Outstanding New Teacher of the Year:
Rachael Keeble, Severn Banks primary school, Lydney, Gloucestershire
• Headteacher of the Year:
Patricia Davies, Chingford Hall primary school, Waltham Forest. She is also consultant head at Whittingham primary in Walthamstow
• Teacher of the Year:
Christine Emmett, St Elizabeth's primary school, Eddlewood, Hamilton, South Lanarkshire
• Special Needs Teacher of the Year:
Simon Roberts, Selworthy school, Selworthy Road, Taunton, Somerset
• History Teacher of the Year:
Richard Rodd, Tendring Technology College, Frinton on Sea, Essex
• Teaching Assistant of the Year:
Mandy Theobald, Spring Meadow primary school, Dovercourt, Harwich, Essex
• Science Teacher of the Year:
Nicki Bovey, Saltash.net community school, Saltash, Cornwall
• Ted Wragg Award for Lifetime Achievement:
Jeff Stratton, Lipson Community College, Plymouth, Devon
• Outstanding Team of the Year:
The PE department at Dyffren Taf secondary school, Whitland, Dyfed, Carmarthenshire
• The Henry Winkler Teaching Award for Special Needs:
Wren Spinney community special school, Kettering, Northamptonshire
• Pearson Teaching Awards Film My School award:
The Lewis school Pengam, Gilfach, Bargoed, Caerphilly
Could religion be playing a part in the relative success of Europe's economies? One academic thinks so
If maps were shaded like balance sheets, the bottom part of mainland Europe would be deepest red. Italy, Spain and Portugal are heavily in debt. They are also Catholic countries. Their predominantly Protestant neighbours to the north, including Germany and Scandinavia, are in comparatively good shape financially. Is that simply a coincidence, or is Max Weber's theory about the Protestant ethic being intertwined with the spirit of capitalism still valid, over 100 years on?
Dr Sascha Becker moved to Warwick University from Munich, where Weber finished his career as a sociologist. And his recent research leads him to suggest that religion is a factor in the budgetary discrepancies between the north and south of Europe. "There are plenty of other factors, too, and they're not easy to disentangle," concedes the deputy director of Warwick's Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy [Cage]. "But even data compiled as recently as 2000 suggests that Protestants generally are educated to a higher level than Catholics. They have a higher probability of going to university and finishing their course."
Cage is one of several centres at British universities supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and setting out to put economic performance in some kind of perspective. Becker believes that historical context can help to explain the difference between comparative success and failure.
Together with Ludger Woessmann, professor of economics at Munich, he started by looking at data from 19th-century Prussia, the society that Weber was born into. The region was split into 450 counties, around two thirds of them predominantly Protestant and the other third Catholic. "Religiosity was more pervasive at that time than it is today," he says, "and it seems that religion was the main driver behind education differences. Protestants were more likely to be encouraged to go to school. And this higher level of education translated into jobs in manufacturing and services rather than agriculture. Accordingly, they earned higher incomes than their Catholic neighbours."
In a paper written in 2009 for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, entitled Was Weber Wrong?, Becker and Woessmann argue that Protestants were more successful because they had the advantage of a better and longer education. Further research has led them to conclude that the educational advantage began soon after Martin Luther broke away from the established Church in the 16th century and has continued to play its part in creating economic success throughout Europe.
Luther wanted women as well as men to be able to read the Bible, he points out. Not only did his followers set out to establish church schools in every parish, but girls went there as well as boys, he says. "We looked into the records of school building in the German federal state of Brandenburg in the 16th century, and discovered that there were disproportionately more girls in school than boys. Protestantism, it seems, was an early driver of emancipation. At that time, remember, Catholic areas didn't even have any boys' schools.
"Those trends continued into the 20th century, when women were allowed to go to university. Comparatively few Catholic women went."
What about the 21st century?
"Well, we looked at the German equivalent of the British Household Panel Survey for the year 2000. It measures economic and social change and covers such areas as income, education …" And religion? "Obviously religion doesn't play as much of a role now as it did over 100 years ago, but it's still the case that Catholics tend to marry Catholics and Protestants tend to marry Protestants – or at least those from a Protestant background. Also, attitudes towards education tend to linger from one generation to another. So if your parents and grandparents went to university, then you are likely to go yourself. That's how these differences survive to this day." He goes on to caution that he is talking about general trends. "We all know Catholic professors and Protestants who are uneducated," he says.
I can't help wondering where France fits into this analysis. Considered an economic power in mainland Europe, it is predominantly Catholic and its southern regions are on the same latitude as northern Italy. "France is a good example of how political secularism affects performance," Becker ventures. "It came in much earlier there than in Italy, which still carries statements by the Pope on the front pages of its newspapers."
And what about Greece, whose economy is in danger of collapse? Becker prefers not to venture into Greek Orthodoxy. "I prefer to make statements when there are statistics to back them up," he says, before stressing once again that religion is only one factor in the balance-sheet shades on the map of mainland Europe.
Researchers have put breakfast cereals and milk through their paces
After generations of humans had been pouring cows' milk onto breakfast cereal flakes and then pouring that milk/flake mixture into themselves, a researcher named Luigi Degano fed breakfast cereal to 21 cows in Italy. Degano wanted to see how this might affect the milk that later issued from the cows.
Degano, based at the Istituto Sperimentale Lattiero Caseario in Milan, published the results of this feed-flakes-to-cows experiment in 1993, in the journal Tecnica Molitoria.
Degano called the study Cereal Flakes in Milk Cows Diet. Effects on Yield and Milk Quality. He reported that yes, mixing plenty of maize-and-barley flakes into the cows' usual, unflaked maize-and-barley fodder did result in different milk. Slightly different. Those cows gave about 2% more milk (by volume), with about 2% richer protein content and about 2% greater creaminess. All this as compared with the milk-making of 21 cows that munched only the usual mealy mush.
Degano's monograph seems to have attracted little attention, at least in print, from other dairy scientists. And it garnered just about no acclaim from the general public in Italy or abroad.
Scientists have, as a group, shown more interest in cereal's crispness, especially as it interacts with liquid, than in how the flakes interact with cows or with human innards.
The most famous report, A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes, was published in 1994, in the journal Powder Technology. Three scientists at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich wrote it.
In 2001, a student named Kunchalee Luechapattanapom, at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, submitted a master's thesis called Acoustic Testing for Evaluating the Crispness of Breakfast Cereals.
Others, too, tried their hand at the flake analysis game, generally using either the Norwich or the Bangkok approach.
But Lawrence Edward Bodkin, Sr, an inventor in Jacksonville, Florida, may have circumvented the traditional worries about milk and breakfast cereal flakes, by combining the two elements into one.
In 1998, Bodkin patented a foodstuff he calls Breakfast Cereal with Milk Pieces. Bodkin's odd patent describes a "commingling and packaging of milk nuggets with cereal pieces ... The milk pieces may be compact, or flattened and flake shaped and may generally be as variable as the shapes of the cereal". Any strangeness in the milk's flavour, he writes, "is unlikely to be noticed due to the typically more dominant flavors of the cereal".
(Thanks to Greg Kohs for indirectly bringing some of this research to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize