This week on the Guardian Teacher Network, you can find some exclusive cooking resources from Jamie Oliver
The Guardian Teacher Network has some exclusive cooking resources from Jamie Oliver, developed as part of his campaign for healthy eating. Children can learn how to whip up a salad or breakfast and there is even a recipe for home-made mince. They can discover the difference between good and bad fats and find out all about pasta and dairy. Oliver gives tips on tricky basics such as how to separate an egg or – the stickiest culinary test – to prepare a mango without turning it into a mushy mess.
You can download a set of PDFs on Guardian Teacher Network
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free.
Parliament's interns are unlikely to get paid, and a free school gets help from a millionaire plumber
MPs love unpaid interns
Last month, we brought news that eight MPs had signed up for a programme offering young people a paid apprenticeship in parliament. But with the official launch just weeks away, it seems the scheme's poster girl, Diane Abbott – the only Labour MP to show an interest – has pulled out, along with Tory MPs Matthew Offord and John Stevenson.
Stevenson and Offord's offices both said there had been a misunderstanding and the MPs hadn't committed themselves to the scheme. Abbott, it has been suggested, pulled out because she hadn't realised she would have to pay her apprentice, but a researcher in her office told us: "It's just that we have all the resources we currently need."
There is an increasing polarisation of views in parliament about whether young people should be paid for their work, especially within the Tory party. While the skills minister, John Hayes, campaigns for apprenticeships, some of his colleagues are still placing adverts for unpaid roles. For example, Daniel Kawczynski, MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, is looking for a free researcher "with strong interview, analytical and writing skills" to help with his new book.
Another Tory MP, Chris Heaton-Harris, is looking for an unpaid intern, as is the Liberal Democrat Don Foster, who is at least promising to cough up £260 a month for travel and food expenses.
It's not just backbenchers. The transport secretary, Phil Hammond, once said in an email: "I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing." The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, is advertising for a number of three-month internships. He told the careers website Graduate Fog he was "extremely proud" of his use of unpaid interns.
The school plumber
Katharine Birbalsingh was among those given the go-ahead for her proposed free school, the Michaela community school in Lambeth, but the ex-deputy headteacher still has a big hurdle to overcome. The building she had her eye on – the old Lilian Baylis school – is being sold off to developers by Lambeth council.
So who has she turned to for support? Toby Young? Her pals in the Tory party? Nope – the millionaire plumber Charlie Mullins. He says Birbalsingh dropped by recently to talk things over. Mullins, who owns Pimlico Plumbers, says: "I think she approached me because we're a local company with a couple of hundred employees … and a commonsense approach. I was really impressed by her passion and how she would like to run the school."
Mullins is now backing Birbalsingh in her campaign to stop the sale of the Lilian Baylis school. He says he'll get involved in petitions and even "speak to the government" if necessary. "There were over 400 more applications in Lambeth than there are school places this year. We need this school to succeed."
Jamie Oliver has launched his new food manifesto, calling for more money to be spent on school food, and for nutritional standards to apply to all schools – even academies
School food is sorted, right? That nice Jamie Oliver fixed it all through his telly series, didn't he? Got those horrible UKTurkey Twizzlers banned, school lunches made healthy, dinner ladies trained to cook proper grub and squeezed £280m out of Tony Blair for a much-needed canteen and kitchen revolution.
All this was widely welcomed and schools introduced the ensuing changes without too much disruption. School meals now include the right combination of energy and nutrients, while pupils who eat them are consuming much less sugar, salt and saturated fat than before, and sweet treats, chips and high-sugar drinks have been banished. And take-up is increasing. So is all that enough? Well, no, it's not – far from it.
Who says so? Oliver himself. The campaigning celebrity chef has told Education Guardian he is "very worried" at what he sees as signs the coalition government is not as committed to school food as its Labour predecessor, and that the considerable progress in this area since his Jamie's School Dinners TV series in 2005 is under threat. So worried is he that he has drawn up an action plan – unveiled exclusively to the Guardian – to try to safeguard the many achievements of the last six years and get ministers to keep the faith food-wise.
Oliver is concerned by a number of decisions made about school food policy by the Department for Education (DfE) since Michael Gove became education secretary almost 18 months ago. The School Lunch Grant, a dedicated pot of funding to enable schools to cook food more easily and tempt pupils to swap packed lunches or a visit to the local shops for a hot midday meal on the premises, has been abolished as a separate entity. It still exists, the DfE says, but is now part of the overall Dedicated School Grant, which pays for the wide range of work undertaken by England's 20,194 state schools and is no longer ringfenced.
Gove also decided that the nutritional standards for school meals in England should not apply to academies or to his new free schools. That means the dinners being offered to almost 1.2 million children could be healthy – or not – and opens up a two-tier school lunch system. And local councils no longer have to monitor the take-up of free school meals – another coalition decision.
"I'm very worried. I've had a couple of very cordial, interesting meetings with the secretary of state for education and although I would love to believe that Mr Gove has school food high on his agenda, I've not heard anything so far worth celebrating," says Oliver. "I'm sure he realises that there are clear benefits to having good food in school: it improves a child's behaviour, willingness to learn and concentration at school, and that in turn helps children to achieve more and perform better. You would have to be an idiot to ignore all of the academic research that's been published to support these things, but still … I don't see him or his ministerial colleagues in health actually doing anything to ensure that the improvements we have made over the last six years remain in place, and are built upon. The opposite seems to be happening – and instead the progress we've made seems to be at risk."
Does he believe the coalition's lack of commitment to school food is simply due to the parlous state of the public sector, or to ideology, perhaps even a belief that this sort of work is evidence of the "nanny state"? "I think it's a bit of both," he replies," but as anyone working in this area knows, we have to invest now so that we don't cripple the NHS or destroy the health of our kids later on. Obesity, and its health-related problems, already costs the NHS nearly £4bn a year and the recent Lancet report said this cost will increase by another £1.9bn a year by 2030. We simply can't afford to cut costs in prevention work now because we will have an even bigger bill in the future."
So what exactly does he want to see? In his eight-point manifesto, he wants:
• More money for school food. Oliver wants the DfE to replace the School Lunch Grant with a new School Food Premium, sums that "would be paid to reward schools and headteachers who increase school meal take-up and are committed to improving their service because they recognise its importance in improving pupil attainment and behaviour. This type of funding model fits in with the government's ideals of local responsibility and school freedom in decision-making [and] promotes good practice in other schools."
• All schools should be covered by the nutritional standards, which should be mandatory for academies and free schools. "If the government wants all schools to become academies in the long-term, the reality is we risk losing the legislation that had made a difference as well as the benefits gained from raising nutritional standards," his manifesto says.
• Teach children about food. Cooking classes should be compulsory in all schools, with pupils doing a minimum of 24 hours of practical lessons during every key stage, and ideally "hands on, get your hands dirty cooking", he adds. "Cooking also needs to be seen as part of the curriculum and not as a separate subject, but as a tool to teach other subjects such as maths, science and art in a more fun and engaging way."
• Ensure teachers are properly trained so they can teach cooking if and when it became a curriculum subject. That's a job for the DfE, says Oliver, and would help to reduce childhood obesity.
• Every school should grow some food itself. "In a country where 96% of kids currently don't eat their recommended five-a-day when it comes to fruit and veg, getting them growing their own food at school is crucial to changing their diets and long-term health."
• Improve school kitchens and canteens using capital funding. The DfE should "recommend that schools use capital funding to create on-site school kitchens, improved dining areas, multi-purpose spaces that would be suitable to teach practical cooking, and food-growing spaces".
• Ofsted inspections should "assess the nutritional content of school food", while establishments that increase take-up and lay on inspirational cooking lessons should be praised in their Ofsted report.
• Use the pupil premium to give poorer pupils access to healthy food.
Judy Hargadon, chief executive of the School Food Trust – which has seen its Whitehall grant shrink from £7m to £4.3m – praises Oliver's commitment to school food. But, while sharing his ambition to extend children's relationship with food while at school, she does not endorse his entire plan, notably the School Food Premium idea. "Incentive schemes are quite blunt instruments. It could be unfair to some schools and could demotivate those where the task of increasing take-up is harder to achieve, and it's often in precisely those areas that we need to drive take-up," she says. She would prefer motivation through recognition schemes.
Charlie Powell, campaigns director of the Children's Food Campaign – an alliance of 150 education bodies, health groups and children's charities – says: "Jamie is right that we need phase two of the school food revolution." But he believes Oliver should go further. "Government should ensure that every school does grow at least some of its own, there should be a ringfenced pot of money to replace the School Lunch Grant and every primary school pupil, irrespective of family income, should get a free school meal. Yes, that would cost an estimated £1.1bn [in England] but would be a simple way of ensuring that young children get a healthy meal every day," he says.
Like Oliver, Hargadon is worried about the future. "My concern is that the economic pressure on everyone – local councils, schools and families – will mean that people slip back into poor eating habits and that take-up might drop," she says. She also worries that schools, under pressure to generate income, might resume selling the banned unhealthy foods in their vending machines and tuckshops.
Powell adds: "We're concerned Jamie's school food revolution has the potential to slip into reverse gear if the government doesn't get behind it and show that it is committed to children's food and health at school. They don't seem to appreciate … the huge benefits healthy lunches bring for children's health and educational attainment."
The chef's latest creation helps to show what more could be done. Will Gove accept Oliver's challenge?
You can read Jamie Oliver's full manifesto here
If you want to go into prison education, says Alan Smith, you have to be prepared to lose your moral compass
I've had a couple of phone calls recently from philosophers who are thinking of going into prison education, which is, of course, wonderful. They have been asking for a bit of advice and this has sent me into some uncharacteristic musing on what I do. How do you explain a career made of hoping for the best, self-indulgence, guile and uselessness? How do you warn them against losing their ordinary compass and assuming not just the harshness of prison sensibility, but a nodding acceptance of almost anything?
When we read An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, the response was, for me at least, shocking.
Keith opened his hands to me across the table. "See, he just doesn't care. Like when you're in a situation and you think, I'm gonna die, and then you think, fuck it." All around the room people were nodding quietly. "That's a terrible thing," I said (or something like that). "Nah mate. It's just the way it is." And even though it's not (and I do know that it's not), the seductive power of reading the poem in this way comes as a real blow. The admiration for Macbeth ("he's a right geezer"), contempt for Antony ("pussy whipped"), the delighted laughter at The Prince ("that's exactly what happens") has an accumulating effect and it might be a good idea to steer the pristine sensibilities of academic philosophers away from all this.
The Prison Service, quite rightly, makes great efforts to protect staff from my sort of susceptibility and I still have, like a moral editor, in the back of my head the course I did early on about "prison craft".
But it is so easy to see the other point of view. There you are with not very much and you're thinking about how you might change that. There you are with all those glamorous images pouring out of the television and the steady flow of corruption and scandal from the tarts and spivs who seem to be in charge. And then someone says to you: "mind this for me", "just drive this van to Manchester", "we're going to do this, that or the other, do you fancy some of it?" and away you go. You can see, can't you, how easy that might be, especially when you're young? Then, stir in ignorance, or isolation, or drugs, or abuse and away you go.
Not that it was all like that. For Eddy it was: "I have to bring something to the table, it's how I am"; for Liam: "I just didn't want to have a boring life"; for Kenny: "I like the money, Al, I like that rich life"; for Tony: "I cannot back down, not ever".
This sort of anarchic pride was just the thing to seduce me away from myself and it was made more seductive because everyone knew that it was doomed. It was what made Paradise Lost the most popular text we ever read together. When Satan picks himself up from the burning lake and says "I reck not", there would always be a bit of applause and the laughter that recognises something you thought was a secret. Of course I would point out the dreadfulness of a 12-year sentence, the doomed nature of these sorts of lives, and of course when they said "so fucking what?" the spell was only strengthened.
So, anyway, phone back if you still fancy the job and I'll do my best. It's only philosophy and I don't see how you can possibly do any harm. Or good. Depending, of course, on what you mean by good.
New shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg has enough experience to play the long game on free schools and academies and build a fair Labour policy, says Estelle Morris
I suspect that it isn't easy to find yourself a shadow minister in a department where you once held ministerial office. There is a temptation to look backwards rather than forwards and your new policies will inevitably be judged against your own past record.
Yet I don't think we will see Stephen Twigg struggling too much. The new shadow secretary of state for education gained valuable experience as a young education minister at a key point in the last government and following the misfortune of losing his parliamentary seat, five years' recent experience of life outside politics. Both will stand him in good stead.
Perhaps it was this combination of first-hand political knowledge and real world experience that led him to frame his views of free schools in the way that he did recently.
The Conservatives would love to portray the new shadow minister as anti-free schools – it's the old "dividing lines" approach to politics. But Twigg knows from experience that some of these schools will be successful and is wise enough to say so.
Yet experience also rightly leads him to be opposed to the government's role in establishing free schools. The building costs are top sliced from the budgets of other schools and the deliberate lack of strategic planning is likely to lead to a surplus of places and the eventual closure of some neighbouring schools.
Twigg's response was just right. He criticised the questionable political decisions that underpin the initiative and drew attention to the risks they pose to existing schools, at the same time acknowledging the quality of some of the teachers who will run them.
This early fracas between Twigg and the education secretary, Michael Gove, shows the weaknesses in the government's approach to education policy.
Gove is one of the most tribal of politicians. His announcements are as much designed to position and corner the opposition as they are to advance education policy. He has staked his reputation on the success of free schools and his new brand of academies and, rather like some sort of advertising executive, tirelessly seeks to associate his preferred brand with all things good. If you don't support him on free schools, then you must be against innovation and standards. But there are dangers arising from setting out your stall so uncompromisingly – both for Gove himself and for the country. It's not a good idea to defend your position even when the evidence tells you you're wrong.
Twigg has shown he won't play that game. He knows from his time in government that the best "big ideas" evolve as they develop. I fear that this current ministerial team have set themselves against learning from experience.
So, three lessons from government policy so far. First, the vision of tens of thousands of independent state schools each relating to the government through their funding agreement, is already looking frayed at the edges.
As the government cuts out the role of the traditional middle layer in education – local authorities – new organisations are emerging to take their place. Far from the government's policies creating an army of independent schools, the burgeoning chains that have been dominant in the academy market for some time are now expanding to run free schools as well. Ark, Harris, E-act and others are showing that the middle layer matters.
Second, it's the quality of teaching that will define success, not the category of the school. The government seems to have stopped noticing successful schools unless they are academies. What a tragedy. Whatever else, one thing is certain: success and failure, innovation and creativity will be found in both academies and non-academies. There is not a school structure yet invented by a politician – and we've tried a good number over the past decades – that by itself can guarantee success.
Third, committed sponsors, or partners, who develop a good relationship with schools, are worth their weight in gold. The diversity of skills now to be found on governing bodies has been a great innovation and a huge success. Rather than abolishing the role, which the government has done for its new academy programme, it should have done its utmost to expand it.
Spotting a successful school isn't difficult; knowing exactly what it is that has led to that success needs a bit more effort. One of Stephen Twigg's challenges will be to separate his opponent's rhetoric from educational fact and build Labour's policy around what is fair and what works.
Why are students being advised to file their Ucas application months before the deadline, if there is no real advantage? Is it simply for universities' convenience?
"If a competition had a closing date of 15 January, you wouldn't expect any of the winners to be picked beforehand. But that's exactly what happens with university applications," says Stuart Lesser, 18, a first-year zoology student at Liverpool John Moores University.
According to Ucas, every student who applies by 15 January (except for medicine, dentistry and Oxbridge courses) has an equal chance of winning a place. But a row has erupted among students and teachers who fear that is not the case – and say conflicting advice is penalising students from a non-traditional background.
Universities disagree. When Education Guardian contacted them, admissions tutors up and down the country said they offer places when applications are received. As a Wolverhampton University spokesman elaborated: "We work through applications as received … we have to even out the workload, as we would not be able to deal with the volume all at once after the January deadline."
The universities claim that this process has no impact on whether early-applicant students get in. They say the reason they offer places on receipt of applications is purely practical: spreading out academics' workload and organising interviews.
As Rob Evans, head of admissions at the University of Sussex, explains: "In general, applications are considered as they arrive, and we make offers or turn applicants down as soon as we start processing applications in October ... There is certainly no added advantage to applying early, in terms of whether you receive an offer or not." He believes the option of operating a "gathered field" – considering all applications in one batch – in January is "impossible".
So why do admissions tutors advise students to apply as early as October?
The situation, says Lesser, who sent off his Ucas form in November last year, "makes no sense. Universities have to be honest about this. They may want all the applications in early to make their lives easier. If so, then why not set a deadline before January?"
Teachers agree. "Student applicants are left feeling utterly confused," says Diane Henderson, director of post-16 studies at Marine Academy, Plymouth. "Historically, the October half-term used to be the time when they researched courses, but now that whole process has been truncated due to the pressure of early applications. Those who apply earlier absolutely have a better chance of getting in. Since they accept candidates as soon as they start applying, logically, by 15 January many will have no places available. Even students applying in mid- to late December are penalising themselves, because universities may already be full."
Henderson believes universities' mixed messages about application timing hinders sixth-formers from non-traditional backgrounds. "If your parents are graduates and you've been preparing for university all your life, by year 13 you have a good idea of what you want to apply for. If you've come to the idea later on, the university application process needs more thought and guidance. The pressure for an early application is very unhelpful."
Universities claim that not providing speedy offers means they could lose out on securing the best candidates. "If we wait until January, many students may have made alternative choices," says Nicola Rees, law lecturer and admissions tutor at Kingston University. But many institutions offer conflicting advice, telling students to apply as early as possible, while claiming that doing so doesn't affect their chances. Plymouth University's spokesman, for example, said tutors "respect the 15 January deadline for equal consideration of applicants", then added: "Early application is an indicator of an individual's strength of interest, but has no bearing on a candidate's likelihood of being made an offer."
This debate is long-running. Back in May, it erupted on the Guardian's website when an article about university applications included advice from Philip Davies, head of admissions at Bournemouth & Poole College. "Don't leave your application until the new year," he said. "The best places fill up quickly – make sure you are in the first tranche." That triggered rapid outrage. "As part of a university's contract with Ucas, it has to agree to give equal consideration to all applications received by the official closing date," wrote andyjack in the comments section. "If [admissions tutors] do not know this, then they should not be working in admissions, and Ucas should be policing this with greater vigour."
RatFinkaBooBoo, who said he worked as a university admissions tutor, disputed that. "I processed over 1,000 applications for my 65 places this year. It quite simply isn't possible to process them all together… This is an unavoidable fact of life in the contemporary climate."
It is possible for some, though. At University College Falmouth, for example, spokesman Chris Harrison says although tutors begin to process applications when they come in, final decisions are not made until after interviews, weeks after the 15 January deadline. Similarly, Anglia Ruskin and the University of Exeter also fill places for competitive courses via a gathered-field strategy.
Ian Blenkharn, Exeter's head of admissions, says it only releases offers after 15 January "to ensure we can be fair and equitable to all applicants". He adds: "We take our responsibility in this area very seriously and manage our processes carefully. If a student applies later in the cycle, they can be reassured that they will be assessed in exactly the same way." At Sheffield Hallam, academics assess applications on receipt, with those who don't meet the entry criteria immediately rejected, and those who exceed them by a previously agreed margin being made an offer, and those who fall in between being stored, then ranked all together after 15 January.
For current year 13s, these divergent processes are causing concern. Some are particularly worried about missing out to Oxbridge candidates, who submit applications much earlier. "My college encourages us to submit Ucas forms by the end of November, and I've just sent mine off," says Heather Gilchrist, 17, who is studying for A-levels in politics, history and law at Cardinal Newman College in Preston and applying to read politics at university. "But since Oxford and Cambridge applicants get their Ucas forms off early [the deadline was 15 October], I know people who have already secured interviews.
"It would be fairer if universities waited until all the forms had been received, after the deadline."
Henderson agrees. "So many parts of the process are already much more difficult for first-generation applicants," she says. "The confusion and pressure over early applications is just another exacerbating factor."
Private universities can charge about half the fees of competitors by cutting back on costs in areas that do not directly affect students, says Carl Lygo
We have a record population of students in higher education that all of the main parties tell us we can no longer fund entirely from the public purse. Yet the demand for graduates will increase as the world economy doubles in size over the next 20 years.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) recently predicted that by 2017 56% more jobs in the UK will require degree-level skills. The UK spends less as a percentage of GDP on tertiary education than the OECD average of developed countries, but produces a high number of world-class research-intensive universities. So, in constrained times, how do you get more private capital into the university sector so the UK can grow and remain competitive?
Universities minister David Willetts has said: "The idea of the public university still applies at the heart of our system, but the best features of competition should apply to the sector." He believes that introducing competition can improve quality, particularly in teaching.
At BPP University College, our aim is to challenge the status quo. Our 2012 undergraduate fees are £4,000 to £5,000 per year, less than half the average of the sector. BPP offers choice in career-focused degrees such as accountancy, business, finance, law and, soon, health. Perhaps our approach led the first "public" university, Coventry, to announce a "no frills" package last week at under £15,000 per degree, giving students more choice. Why are critics against providing choice for students?
BPP seeks to focus its costs on high-quality teaching, concentrating on business and professional careers. By doing this we are able to keep down costs for the student.
Our model uses mainly full-time faculty, most of whom have practised in the professional area they now teach about. Our learning centres are in office blocks refurbished for modern student learning, and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) described our accommodation as being at the sector's premium end. Our many student societies are supported by BPP funding.
So how can we do all this and still charge only around half the fees the other charge? The answer is by cutting back on costs in areas that do not directly affect the student experience. Having underutilised real estate (classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres, breakout space) that students do not use is just a drain on cost. Recently DTZ and UPP estimated that a prudent business approach could save a typical university as much as 20%-25%. Those savings could be passed on to students in lower fees.
There are some who warn against allowing the private sector to offer degrees, arguing that in the US there have been problems associated with unlimited recruitment. We have to remember that even after the current reforms we will continue to have one of the most regulated higher education sectors in the world. Unlike the US, the UK will be controlled in terms of price and volume. In Britain we have a rigorous code of quality assurance policed by the QAA and external examiners.
BPP gained the power to award its own degrees under the Labour government's reforms in 2007, after a rigorous scrutiny process. In fact, more than 50 public universities have academics involved in the scrutiny and governance of BPP University College, something completely unheard of in the US. So the scaremongers are wrong, but we must of course make sure that new entrants to UK higher education abide by the high standards expected.
At BPP what we do could help to drive up the quality of teaching standards, provide competition on price, and offer students a genuine alternative. What have the good public universities to fear from healthy competition?
• Carl Lygo is principal of BPP University College
Punks grow out of it and ravers stop raving. Why do goths just carry on? Sociologists can explain
What happens when a teenage goth grows up? Gets a job, takes on a mortgage, has a couple of kids…? Can you combine elaborate Frankenstein make-up and a lace-up bustier with getting a toddler ready for nursery and yourself to work on time?
Dr Paul Hodkinson, deputy head of Surrey University's sociology department and an expert in youth music subcultures, has been re-interviewing a group of goths he first studied in the late 1990s to find out. "They were teenagers and in their early 20s then, and I thought it would be interesting to go back because a number of people do stay involved in the goth scene," he explains.
Though many people who belong to youth subcultures such as punk and rave tend to drift away in their 20s, Hodkinson says it's more likely that older goths will want to remain involved in the scene, even though it may become harder to combine with the responsibilities that come with age.
To outsiders, it's the visual markers of being a goth – long, dyed-black hair, black clothes, pale faces contrasted with dark, dramatic eye make-up –that stand out. Taken on their own, these characteristics might be reasonably easy to cast off. However, Hodkinson says that although the aesthetic and clothing are important, the primary tenets of involvement in this subculture mean being "thoroughly passionate about goth music and style, and some goths would tell you they have an interest in the dark side of life, and a natural tendency towards a degree of angst".
This means a level of commitment to the goth scene, and friendship groups and identity that develop around being a goth, which result in social lives that "are so intertwined that it would feel very odd to leave it," he says.
Continuing with education and getting a decent job while staying involved isn't as hard for goths as it may be for those involved in other youth subcultures, some of which promote disengagement with school to the point that academic failure is all but inevitable.
"It's a relatively middle-class subculture, so despite … all the going out and being into the music, goths have always had a fairly positive view of people who are also achieving academically."
It means goths may have better career options than an outsider might expect. Succeeding in their chosen career had, Hodkinson observes, become increasingly important to those he interviewed as they moved into their late 20s and 30s, and he was surprised by how much participants in his study were willing to adapt their look to fit in at work. "I even gave people scenarios where they couldn't wear certain things. I expected them to say that they'd have to leave [their job], but they said they'd have to seriously consider it."
Most of his sample said they still were recognised as goths at work, but had toned down their look. "They retained a residual element of the appearance, but felt, for example, that colourful dyed hair wasn't going to work, and they'd stopped painting their nails black."
Several of Hodkinson's interviewees now had children, and he says that another sign of the importance of remaining involved despite this enormous life change is the recent appearance of websites discussing the issues facing goth families.
More parents are bringing their babies to goth festivals, too, Hodkinson says, "so organisers have started to think about policies and whether to provide facilities". For what Hodkinson calls "a fairly hedonistic youth subculture" to consider offering kids' clubs and on-site childminding means that demand from more mature goths is definitely on the increase.
Hodkinson says these individuals have found a way of "growing up together and taking on various elements of adulthood later perhaps than others might, but doing it as a cohort of people who are passionate about the same thing, and who support each other."
Clown insurance exists: researchers calculate that enough bad things happen to enough clowns to reliably yield a profit
Clown insurance is for clowns, not for persons potentially afflicted by them. Insurance companies offer it to clowns because clowns – no matter what you may thoughtlessly think of them – are people, and bad things can happen to anyone.
Clown insurance exists, as a distinct product category, thanks to the mathematical discipline called risk assessment. Industry researchers calculate that every year enough bad things happen to enough clowns to reliably yield a profit. Clowns, as a group, perform a benefit/cost calculation; that's why, year after year, they spend money to defend against life's practical jokes.
The UK boasts several suppliers of insurance for clowns. Blackfriars Insurance Brokers, for one, offers public liability clown insurance of up to £5m cover. Their website boasts, not unkindly, of "products to meet the business and personal insurance needs of clowns".
(Be aware, though, that a website temptingly called www.clownsinsurance.co.uk appears to just an example of a marketing concept.)
Foreign clowns, too, can buy clown insurance. Pretty much any clown, anywhere, can join the World Clown Association. The association, based in the US, offers its members liability insurance "with coverage of $1,000,000 per occurrence/$2,000,000 aggregate per event".
Their insurance application form specifically excludes many of the activities that, one can infer, have proved troublesome.
They will not insure a clown for clowning that involves hypnosis, bouncy castles, hot air balloons, sky diving, or competition racing. The application form does not distinguish between the numerous forms of racing – foot, horse, camel, bicycle, ski, cigarette boat, dragster, Spitfire, what-have-you.
Other things too, are verboten for the clown who wants to be protected by the association's standard clown insurance.
No throwing objects in any manner other than juggling them.
No working with animals, other than "performing dogs, doves and rabbits".
No "pyrotechnics, explosives, fireworks or similar materials". But the association is not a killjoy. It explicitly makes an exception for "concussion effects", "flashpots" and "smokepots".
No copyright infringement (that's what they call it, though they may mean trademark infringement). The association specifically mentions Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse as examples. In any event, one would do well to seek professional advice before simultaneously wearing a Mickey Mouse costume and a clown suit.
The US is blessed with a large population of clowns. American clowns, unlike their counterparts in much of the world, are blessed with a wide variety of vendors eager to sell specialised, off-the-shelf clown insurance.
American insurers, in agreement with their British brethren, view clowns as an increasingly specialised species of customer.
Not long ago, hypnotists, fire-eaters and people who do face-painting of children at public events were welcome to purchase standard clown-insurance policies. Then came legal climate change. Now everyone, no matter how clownish they believe themselves to be or not to be, should check the details before binding themselves to any policy that's designed for clowns.
Thanks to Anna Wexler, who once had clown insurance, for alerting me to its existence.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Even falling and skulking cats obey the laws of physics, research shows
Cats may skulk, and cats may fall – but no matter what they do, cats must obey the laws of physics. Scientists have tried repeatedly to figure out how they manage to do it.
At the extreme, physicists analysed what happens to a dropped cat. That's a cat in free-fall, a cat hurtling earthwards with nothing but kitty cunning to keep it from crashing.
In 1969, TR Kane and MP Scher of Stanford University, in California, published a monograph called A Dynamical Explanation of the Falling Cat Phenomenon. It remains one of the few studies about cats ever published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures. Kane and Scher explain:
"It is well known that falling cats usually land on their feet and, moreover, that they can manage to do so even if released from complete rest while upside-down … numerous attempts have been made to discover a relatively simple mechanical system whose motion, when proceeding in accordance with the laws of dynamics, possesses the salient features of the motion of the falling cat. The present paper constitutes such an attempt."
And what an attempt it is!
Kane and Scher neither lifted nor dropped a single cat. Instead, they created a mathematical abstraction of a cat: two imaginary cylinder-like chunks, joined at a single point so the parts could (as with a feline spine) bend, but not twist. When they used a computer to plot the theoretical bendings of this theoretical falling chunky-cat, the motions resembled what they saw in old photographs of an actual falling cat. They conclude that their theory "explains the phenomenon under consideration".
In 1993, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, applied some heavier-duty mathematics and physics tools to the same question. Richard Montgomery's study, called Gauge Theory of the Falling Cat, leaps and bends across 26 pages of a mathematics journal. Then it mutters that "the original solutions of Kane and Scher [are] both the optimal and the simplest solutions".
But cats rarely fall from the sky. More commonly, they skulk. And skulking cats are just as provocative, to a physics-minded scientist, as plummeting cats.
In 2008, Kristin Bishop of the University of California, Davis, together with Anita Pai and Daniel Schmitt of Duke University in North Carolina, published a report called Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats, in the journal PLoS One.
They studied six cats, three of which "were partially shaved and marked with contrasting, non-toxic paint to aid in kinematic analysis". They discovered "a previously unrecognised mechanical relationship" between "crouched postures", "changes in footfall pattern", and the amount of energy needed to produce those crouched-posture footfall patterns.
Cats that intend to skulk, in Bishop, Pai and Schmitt's view, are hemmed in by the laws of the physical universe. They must make "a tradeoff between stealthy walking", which uses a lot of energy, and plain old, energy-efficient cat-walking.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Even falling and skulking cats obey the laws of physics, research shows
Cats may skulk, and cats may fall – but no matter what they do, cats must obey the laws of physics. Scientists have tried repeatedly to figure out how they manage to do it.
At the extreme, physicists analysed what happens to a dropped cat. That's a cat in free-fall, a cat hurtling earthwards with nothing but kitty cunning to keep it from crashing.
Continue reading...Even falling and skulking cats obey the laws of physics, research shows
Cats may skulk, and cats may fall – but no matter what they do, cats must obey the laws of physics. Scientists have tried repeatedly to figure out how they manage to do it.
At the extreme, physicists analysed what happens to a dropped cat. That's a cat in free-fall, a cat hurtling earthwards with nothing but kitty cunning to keep it from crashing.
Continue reading...This week on the Guardian Teacher Network you can find a wealth of resources for teaching children about energy consumption and renewables
As the nights draw in, the heating and lights go on and it's too damp to hang clothes on the line. So what better time to focus on energy consumption?
Next week (24-28 October) is Energy Saving Week and the Energy Saving Trust has some useful resources on the Guardian Teacher Network, including top tips on how to save energy at home, a poster full of practical ideas (such as installing water-displacement devices) and up-to-date fact sheets on solar power, microgeneration and renewables.
There is also a Guardian interactive on climate change, plus lessons on renewable energy, energy use around the world, carbon footprints and recycling.
To help secondary school-aged children and sixth-formers understand the bigger picture, our Guardian interactive on everything you need to know about climate change is a must. It's an up-to-date guide to the facts of global warming, from the science and politics to economics and technology.
To get to grips with the basics of renewable energy try our interactive science lesson designed for 11- to 14-year-olds on how renewable resources are used to generate electricity and on how solar energy can be used to produce hot water. After completing the lesson, children should be able to understand the advantages of using renewable and non-renewable energy as well as make predictions and find patterns in results.
In geography lessons for ages 11-14, try this lesson, which uses Guardian articles to find out about the different types of energy and the environmental consequences of using energy in a non-sustainable way, and this on the main forms of energy used in Britain http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/ViewLesson.aspx?id=2113.
The UK Association of National Park Authorities has produced some useful activities and factsheets exploring the pros and cons of windfarms here http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/ViewLesson.aspx?id=5135.
For upper primary age-children, try this resource designed by the Saving Squad, which helps children to understand what their carbon footprint is and how to save energy.
And we have some educational materials and lesson plans for 8- to 13-year-old students from Recolight, a not-for-profit organisation that funds the recycling of energy-saving light bulbs. They've commissioned specialist teachers to create a series of practical lessons for their Big Light Project, which includes an investigation of light bulbs, an energy audit and recycling. All the PDFs can be downloaded.
Professor Danny Dorling has a knack for making statistics sexy, whether it's to show that Labour widened university intake, or that life is better in Barnsley than Chelsea. Martin Wainwright meets him
You don't need many minutes in the company of Danny Dorling to lose reservations about statistics being dry and dull; his face lights up as he transforms the world of denominators and numerators into one of surprise and delight.
Most young women in the UK (18/19-year-olds) now go to university; the biggest concentration of step-children is in the Cotswolds; the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has announced the 60 millionth UK citizen three times in the last 15 years. And that's just the human side. You should hear him describe the excellence of global data about rare toads.
Professor of human geography at Sheffield University, with a bouncy website that asks MSc applicants "Have you ever wondered where your life could have taken you if you had been born somewhere else?", Dorling is the current darling in his field. That status, earned through 30 books by the age of 43, will only increase with the publication today of his magnum opus Fair Play.
Dorling describes it as "an autopsy on New Labour", but it is a post-mortem that includes optimism rather than just confirming depressing causes of death. Especially interesting among the 400 pages, 52 chapters, multiple graphs and generous "further reading" links is proof that increased spending on schools in Labour's last five years raised standards and widened university intake.
"I've included two previously unpublished papers, the first co-written in 2005 with Mark Corver of Hefce [the Higher Education Funding Council for England], which argued that progress was not being made," he says. "We concluded that the government's aim of increasing the number of less-well-off entrants to university could not be realised.
"The second, written last year, proved that we were wrong, which is never a bad thing to have to accept. The findings came as a shock to me, and presumably as a pleasant surprise to Labour ministers."
The data show three almost identical upward curves: one for a 4% rise in university entrants from deprived areas; the second curve plots the improvement in GCSE passes by the same students three years earlier; and the third marks the increase in relevant school spending through such measures as the now largely abolished education maintenance allowance.
Bingo! And Dorling is as pleased with the results as any social reformer would be – or indeed any benevolent person, since the increase was not at the expense of the better-off, whose university entrants also rose, by 2%. But his real satisfaction is in the quality of the data: the denominator comes from stats for child benefit, which is claimed for more than 99% of UK children, and the numerator from postcodes on university applications which, as he says wryly, "applicants tend to make sure they get right".
"It's beautiful," he says, face wreathed in a blissful smile. "Beautiful. For that reason alone I had to put it in." Another example is his use of stats to show the quality of life outside London, a famous phrase which those of us who enjoy it know to be true, but only in that vague, gut way that is anathema to statisticians.
With his colleague Bethan Thomas, he searched for gold-standard data that might apply and came up with benzine air pollution, crime figures, electricity consumption and malicious calls to the fire brigade. This partly playful but exceptionally reliable quartet made the City of London and Kensington and Chelsea the least desirable places to live in the UK, and Rotherham, Redcar and Barnsley the best.
The attitude demonstrates his armour against critics who try to sideline him as partial or politically motivated, or gentler commenters such as the Guardian's own Simon Jenkins, who calls him "the Geographer Royal of the left". Ever since buying the first micro-computer to be seen at Newcastle University and loving its power to harvest facts, he has followed the figures, not started with a theory and then looked for data to support it.
Dorling is of the left, in the broadbrush terms of media discourse that are so different from the precision of academic work, especially in statistics. His parents met at Oxford and were "60s hippies" in his words – admiringly meant, and not just because they are alive and well in retirement in west Wales. His mother taught maths and his father became a GP in east Oxford and Cowley, working to improve things and, Dorling says, "driving his Mini to the car works every year to tell them that the noise levels were too high." It was a patient, Fabian approach.
"Dad carried me on his shoulders on the Aldermaston march and I did try to join the Labour party twice, once when I was too young and the second time when I walked into a branch meeting in Newcastle [his university town] and everyone went silent. I didn't actually say anything – southern accent, with Margaret Thatcher in power and half the town on benefits – but it clearly wasn't going to work. I've come to realise that I'm not a party person. We need them, don't get me wrong, but I can't toe the line."
Thus his summons to spend half an hour with Nick Clegg, conveniently a Sheffield MP, and his emails from Andy Burnham's office don't turn his head with notions of becoming a guru. Neither, refreshingly, do interruptions such as calls from BBC Radio 4's Today programme and al-Jazeera during our chat. He says: "I want to communicate and it's nice to be asked, but academic books really are very hard work, not just in the writing, but checking and checking that your figures are right. Best to stay just under the media horizon and pop up occasionally."
He means it about hard work. He could not read until he was eight or write until he was nine. He is grateful to his father for not telling him until his 20s, when he had fought his way through without special treatment, that he had dyslexia.
He has a longing for everyone to be "connected" with society for the benefit of all. Most eloquently expressed in Donne's "No man is an island", this was hard-wired into him in Oxford, through experiences such as waiting for ages while the Cowley carmakers cycled past before he could cross the road to go to school. His book So You Think You Know About Britain?, published earlier this year, attracted much attention for its dispassionate data on inequality, the geographical nature of poverty and wealth and a general upending of the Daily Mail view of the world.
Dorling is wary of the emotion surrounding private, or independent, education, on which the UK spends more per capita than any other country apart from Chile, but he does criticise it. Not from mean-mindedness – he is certain that the "tall poppy" argument, arguing that greater equality must level down, has no statistical basis. He simply says: "It makes me unhappy to watch people being unnecessarily stupid."
The "stupidity" lies in spending money on resources which the state provides equally well for families with busy, highly motivated home lives whose daily stimulation provides ample private, or independent, education. He recommends any human geographer or statistician in search of a project to study families that can afford private school but choose not to (including his own, his parents' and the present writer's). The results, he predicts, would indicate common sense, not sacrifice.
Otherwise, he would dearly like to see the ONS become fully independent, on the Canadian model, and he predicts that this will happen "following a mighty scandal over duff statistics, especially if the government does away with the census. It can be inaccurate to half or even a whole million, but it has been a wonderful statistical tool since 1801. I am hoping that Britain's army of family historians will rise up and save it."
Dorling's work is globally admired – Fair Play's US co-publishers insisted on the subtitle A Daniel Dorling Reader on Social Justice – and it draws muscle from time he spends as a professor at Canterbury University in New Zealand and in Japan. The latter fascinates him. "It is one of the most equal countries in the world, just as the UK is one of the most unequal. Status comes from age, which most of us are likely to achieve. It is in its 20th year of falling house prices. It is famously entrepreneurial and productive, but industrial relations are quite different." Anyone who has been to the corporate mini-Japan of Nissan in Sunderland, where the sense of common purpose recalls the Quaker chocolate factories of Rowntree and Cadbury, will take the point.
"It also makes a change from the usual academic comparisons with Scandinavia," says Dorling impishly. He is well aware of how to keep ahead of the academic game, as well as needing constant fresh and interesting material for his student lectures, which are predictably popular. Up pops another of his nice statistics, which won't harm him in university circles: "The most disconnected of the UK's elites is the judiciary. The most connected are the vice-chancellors, who have had to work hard and be generally engaged to win appointment."
He has the facts from the Sutton Trust to prove this, with a lifelong belief in keeping his data to hand. A vast map of Reunion, for instance, covers the hall of his house – whose two separate front doors naturally start you wondering, statistically, how many other UK houses share this odd feature. The Indian ocean island was where he honeymooned with Ali, who works for Natural England. "Beautiful, beautiful," he murmurs again, pointing out how the permanently erupting volcano sends lava conveniently, and very connectedly, only into the sea.
• Explore the Dorling data
• This article was amended on 18 October 2011. The original described Reunion as a Caribbean Island. This has been corrected.
• Fair Play: A Daniel Dorling Reader on Social Justice (The Policy Press, RRP £24.99). To order a copy for £19.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
The government may find that it needs local education authorities after all, suggests Mike Baker
Last week's approval of another batch of free schools was a reminder that the market revolution in schools is still in full swing. It was hardly a surprise. Earlier this month, the prime minister won acclaim from his party conference by promising many more academies and free schools. Mind you, his audience was easily pleased; they lapped up his promise to restore "proper teaching, good discipline and rigorous exams" as if no one had ever suggested these were good things.
But would he have won such enthusiastic backing by promising to "nationalise" schools? I suspect not. Yet that is exactly what he is doing. Academies and free schools are wholly dependent on central government for their money; they are accountable to Whitehall, and they are controlled by seven-year rolling contracts, or funding agreements, determined by the secretary of state.
When there were only a handful of academies, mainly replacing unsuccessful local authority schools, this degree of central control was less worrying. The old system had failed these schools, and an experiment was worth a try. But now that the great majority of schools – successful, unsuccessful or "coasting" – are becoming academies, do we really trust a remote team of civil servants in Whitehall to monitor thousands of schools from widely varying localities?
Now, of course, ministers insist they are not running schools, but are creating a market in which consumer satisfaction determines which will flourish and which will have to change their ways. But markets need regulation to ensure that standards are met and to prevent a few big players creating a monopoly by forcing out smaller providers. The question the government is avoiding, at least in public, is whether Westminster can effectively provide that regulation once it is responsible for several thousand schools.
However, behind the party conference rhetoric, there is growing awareness in Downing Street that local education authorities are still needed. For example, policy advisers are worried about how to tackle coasting schools, a topic that increasingly figures in ministerial speeches. In his conference speech, the prime minister referred to schools in "affluent" Sussex, Cambridgeshire and Hampshire being outperformed by some inner-city counterparts. Cameron's advisers now recognise that some external agency may be needed to prompt coasting schools into raising their game.
Some believe the monitoring process can be achieved simply by Whitehall analysing performance data. But is that really any substitute for local experts, with an ear to the ground in the neighbourhood? Others argue it can be left to Ofsted. But the inspectorate's "wham bam thank you M'am" method means it is not around to pick up the pieces as old-style local authority school inspectors were.
The spread of academy chains brings another problem. Some have big ambitions. The charity E-ACT, for example, wants 250 academies. Others, such as ARK and Oasis, plan chains running well into double figures and the Harris Federation already has a powerful concentration of schools in south-east London.
The big question is this: what happens when one academy chain runs the majority of schools in an area? At what point does this become a monopoly undermining the intended market reforms?
So, now policy advisers are privately mulling the tricky question of whether central government should impose a limit on the percentage of schools one academy chain is allowed to run in any locality.
The rise of school brands also raises awkward questions about the much-vaunted autonomy of individual schools. I'm beginning to hear complaints from headteachers that their academy's "head office" is interfering in the day-to-day management of their school, for example telling them which curriculum consultants they must employ, or imposing senior staff appointments. This sounds like the very thing local authorities were criticised for: heavy-handed, top-down, monopolistic diktats.
In fact, despite what many believe, local authorities have not controlled schools for many years. Their main task has been the strategic functions that individual schools cannot easily or efficiently do themselves: admissions, attendance, special needs provision, and ensuring there are neither too many nor too few school places to meet fluctuating demographic demand. But how can local authorities reduce expensive surplus places if they have no control over whether academies will expand or free schools open?
If the government does not want to waste money on surplus places, and wants to raise standards at coasting schools, it will need a strong local monitoring body. It increasingly looks as if it must accept, however quietly, that it really does need those very local education authorities that it has spent so long bashing.
• www.mikebakereducation.co.uk
A new scheme offers the antidote to nasty online ratings: a chance for students to praise their lecturers
"I wouldn't say she's the worst professor I've ever had, just not terribly inspiring," writes one student on RateMyProfessors.com's UK website. Others describe various individual lecturers as: "patronising and not very bright", "nice person, but worthless teacher", "supremely egotistical", "mad as a box of badgers", and simply "awful, awful man".
Never before have students had such opportunities to let off steam when they feel their university teaching has failed to come up to scratch, and never before have lecturers been so publicly at their mercy. RateMyProfessors, used in the US for the last 12 years, started soliciting comments from UK students five years ago and covers well over 1,000 UK lecturers, rating them for easiness, helpfulness, clarity, interest, and whether or not they are "hot". Then there is the National Student Survey, which for the last seven years has asked final-year students to rate qualities such as teaching, feedback and organisation on their course. This year's annual report from the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, set up in 2004 to handle student complaints, showed that these had risen by a third in the last year, and predicted that they were likely to rise even more sharply following next year's increase in tuition fees.
The government's white paper, "Students at the Heart of the System", also seems to envisage students speaking out if they are unhappy with their learning. In a Guardian online chat last week, the universities minister, David Willetts, urged students to raise concerns about practical aspects such as getting work back and contact time. He predicted: "Our finance changes will strengthen the student voice on these issues."
But this Thursday sees the launch of a project that takes a more positive approach to student involvement.
The Student-Led Teaching Awards, organised jointly by the Higher Education Academy and National Union of Students, is an award scheme run entirely by students, based on a Scottish pilot. When the pilot began two years ago, eight institutions were involved. Last year, this had grown to 13, with students making more than 11,000 nominations.
Individual student unions decide on different criteria for assessing their lecturers – from "most organised module" to "best 21st-century teaching". They then encourage students to nominate teachers, and to explain exactly why they think the teacher they have picked is so good. A student committee assesses the nominations, noting not only the number an individual lecturer receives, but also their quality, and there is an annual "Oscars" award ceremony.
Elizabeth Bomberg, a senior lecturer in politics, who won Edinburgh University Student Association's first Overall High Performer Award in 2009, says: "Students like feedback, but so do staff. To receive that constructive feedback – there's nothing to match that in terms of encouraging good teaching. I was thrilled."
She says it has made herself and her colleagues more aware of the criteria for which her award was made – enthusiasm, feedback and the ability to prompt questions and critical thinking. "Sometimes in the rush to deliver our teaching and get work done we forget that it's really about interaction with students," she says.
The NUS and HEA are offering grants of £1,500 to help up to 20 other student unions in higher and further education colleges across the UK to set up their own schemes, and want to bring together those with existing schemes to share ideas.
They are also publishing a report on what effect the scheme has had on universities. It has made clear that students particularly appreciate good feedback, going the extra mile, and innovative use of technology in their teachers. But the report's author, Alastair Robertson, says the scheme has also had unexpected benefits, strengthening a sense of community on campus, empowering students and making them reflect on their learning.
Helen Thomas, head of teacher excellence at the HEA, says: "The demand for good teaching is on the political and student agenda. These awards help students to recognise what good teaching is so they know what to ask for and they also know that teaching is felt to be important because it is being rewarded."
Mike Williamson, vice president, academic affairs, at Edinburgh University, says the scheme at his university developed from concern that too much emphasis was being put on research over teaching. Now staff cite the fact that they have won an award when going for promotion. "You see senior members of staff, top dogs in their field, wearing the pin badge they get and being really proud," he says.
Simon Bates, professor of physics education at Edinburgh, who won an award for innovative teaching last year, says: "It's always nice to get any kind of recognition in your professional life but from students it's particularly gratifying because they're the reason why you teach in the way you do."
At Edinburgh, the awards ceremony is followed by an Inspiring Teaching conference, in which winners are invited to give workshops to share their ideas. Heriot-Watt University Student Union has found comments made in the nominations so useful that it plans to categorise them to show what students appreciate about specific aspects of teaching.
Its president, Mike Ross, says that it is a way of students being able to influence their own learning. Whereas the National Student Survey only allows students to comment once their course is over, this gives them the chance to influence teaching methods while they are still studying.
Both students and staff insist that it is not a popularity contest and often staff who most challenge their students receive most nominations. And in tough economic times it is a way of giving academics the kind of boost anyone would get from a heartfelt nomination such as this: "Through her genuine care for her students and passion for the subject, she has inspired many … In her classroom we are academics, not students. Her support in identifying the help I need has made the difference between me dropping out and staying on."
University leaders must tackle the inequality that hinders black and minority ethnic staff, says Harinder Bahra
At a time when the government is encouraging white families to adopt black babies, sadly the latest report on diversity in higher education shows that universities have not exactly been keenly adopting black and minority ethnic (BME) staff.
Despite 40 years of equality legislation, the new report by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) confirms that there are still very real barriers faced by BME staff and that they are under-represented in UK universities. Within professorial grades, only 0.4% of black academics, 1.6% of Asian academics and 1.1% of Chinese academics are professors, compared to 11% of white academics. There are 50 black professors – that's not even one per institution. We have one BME vice-chancellor, and he was not home-grown, but imported from South Africa. With a BME student population approaching 20% – albeit skewed towards new universities rather than Russell group – the staff data is pitiful and unrepresentative.
The research identifies some of the key issues: a gap between policy and practice, poor recruitment practices and few sector initiatives. It also mentions the importance of workload allocation.
The allocation of workload and its constituents, eg research time, teaching load (and type), course management and development (courses, conferences and committee work) can shape promotion outcomes. Institutions should monitor workloads to see what activities are valued as key success factors, and ensure that there is equal opportunity.
Sympathy and understanding or glossy publications alone do not bring about change. What is required is the political will, a multi-partnership approach and operational objectives with clear key performance indicators. This needs the involvement and agreement of all the main players: from the funding councils to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), Universities UK and the unions.
We need to look at what has – and mostly hasn't – been achieved by the bodies concerned. It is unclear to me what impact the ECU itself, a publicly funded policy thinktank, has made for its £1.4m annual budget. It also remains unclear how we use the equality data gathered by Hesa or what good the data-gathering has done.
This is not about apportioning blame, but asking some difficult questions. The report confirms there is a problem. Many reports are gathering dust, but where many fail is in placing responsibility for implementation lower down in organisations. If we truly desire change, we need to place accountability for equality and diversity within the governance and leadership framework.
As the sector embraces marketisation, it becomes crucial to provide data to help student choice. A national league table could be developed covering the various equality strands such as race, gender, disability etc. This should include staff at various levels, promotion data, average salaries, disciplinary, grievances and legal settlements. Student attainment data could also be included. This performance data could then be used by staff and students to make informed choices.
What is clear is that progress on BME access to both Russell group student places and employment in HE falls well short of what it should be. At a time of crisis, it is even more important for leaders to challenge received wisdom, and have the courage to tackle inequalities.
• Professor Harinder Bahra is emeritus professor of management and diversity at Leeds Metropolitan University and visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire. He was deputy chair of the HE race forum from 2008-11, which contributed to the ECU project. He writes in a personal capacity
For high-flying RAF medics, an online degree course offers the chance to study anywhere in the world
For a medic on deployment overseas, on-duty shifts may be dangerously fraught, but there's not an awful lot to do on base in the long stretches of downtime between bursts of frenzied activity.
Recognising that service personnel were finding it hard to fill their off-duty periods, the RAF recently teamed up with Anglia Ruskin University to give its medics a chance to use those empty hours to stretch their brains and improve their qualifications.
As of this September, medical personnel have been able to study on three degree-level courses from wherever they are in the world. Prospective students can opt for a BSc in health and social care, a BSc in management and leadership in health and social care, or a foundation degree course – and every lecture, seminar and tutorial is delivered entirely online.
Doing a standard course on a part-time basis can be tricky for service personnel on active duty, explains flight sergeant Chris MacKay, who worked with Anglia Ruskin to get the first 21 RAF medics enrolled. Even "blended" degrees that are delivered mainly online tend to require intensive workshop sessions and tutorials at certain points in the learning process.
For an RAF medic this is not a practical way to gain a qualification. You might plan to complete a couple of modules of a course that includes contact time with your tutor or fellow students, says MacKay, but then be sent overseas at short notice: repeatedly missing out on group study sessions or face-to-face tutorials clearly doesn't help any student's morale or ability to study productively.
"The problem we have is that predicting where we'll be in 12 months' time is difficult – we could be in Scotland, the Falklands or Afghanistan," he says. None of the students who've just enrolled are currently deployed overseas, but they're only a month into their course and can be sent abroad at any time if the need arises.
Encouraging continuity of study may be a positive step, but is doing a degree over the internet really as good as having proper contact time with subject experts and fellow students who share your interests? At Anglia Ruskin University, Tony Howard, head of the employer- liaison department Higher Skills At Work, who persuaded the RAF of the merits of this approach, says that it can be.
"The virtual learning environment simulates a classroom and you can network with others doing the same course," he says. "Most of what's available on campus is available online."
A degree that has been designed for every element to be delivered via a web portal, he points out, means that students can be very well supported by specialist tutors whose time is dedicated to offering online or telephone advice and guidance. They are recruited specifically to work with students on these courses and are available virtually around the clock.
Providing staff with the chance to do an online degree isn't just about helping them to pass their off-duty time when on deployment. The services are facing swingeing redundancies, so helping staff to gain qualifications that will be recognised when they leave the RAF is becoming more of a priority. It's certainly one of the factors motivating medics to sign up.
Isabel Stone, 39, who works as deputy medical practice manager at RAF Leuchars, St Andrews, says that with the uncertainty surrounding the armed forces because of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, "it is encouraging that the RAF are actively investing in and encouraging medical service personnel with valuable learning opportunities such as this degree." Meanwhile, until redundancies start to bite, the RAF will benefit, too. Part of the idea of offering these particular courses, says MacKay, is "to develop what we're doing, to look at Civvy Street practice, and bring that into military practice".
Learning at a distance has considerable plus points, but there are downsides too, as students who have just embarked on their course explain.
Victoria Butler, 31, an instructor for the RAF's trainee medics and one of the first cohort to enrol, says the advantages for her include being able to study "at my own pace in my free time, giving flexibility and autonomy in my studies", but adds that she senses "it would be possible to feel quite alone if you have any real problems with the IT or subject matter".
Having himself just started the BSc in management and leadership in health and social care, MacKay says that being able to fit his studies around his family life is another major advantage, but observes, too, that considerable self-motivation is essential when there is absolutely no face-to-face contact time during the entire period of study.
Given that self-discipline is a quality that can hopefully be taken as read within the armed forces, it may be that interruptions to an online study session may come from less easily disciplined sources.
"I will be studying mainly at home, which at times can be distracting, especially when my three-year-old son wants my attention," says Stone.
"This said, my line management have been extremely helpful and understanding, and I have been given study time within my working day."
Even the cool boys are queueing up to take up the latest trend at school – knitting
Leaning back into the beanbag, dreadlocks swept away from his face, Remar Fulton is deep in concentration. The 11-year-old is knitting what looks like a scarf in black, green and yellow stripes. "The colours of Jamaica, my family's country," he says.
Remar is one of 20 members of the knitting club at Dog Kennel Hill primary school in Peckham, south London. As knitting fever has swept through the school, there are now almost 100 pupils on the waiting list – just under a quarter of the pupil population – and around half are boys from year 2 to year 6.
Young pupils like Remar and his classmates don't fit with the conventional image of knitters. Even in its recent renaissance among crafty twentysomethings, knitting is still considered feminine – a tradition passed down through generations of women. But boys across the country are now taking up their needles.
Boys now make up around 50% of primary pupils involved in Craft Club, the campaign run by the Craft Council and UK Handknitting Association, which supports schools to run knitting clubs led by community volunteers. Since it was set up in April last year, there are now over 350 groups around the UK, mainly in primary schools, and many more knitting groups run independently by teachers.
Stephanie Laing, trainee teacher at Dog Kennel Hill primary, can't quite believe how popular her knitting club has become among the boys. A knitting enthusiast herself, Laing set up the lunchtime club three years ago and the first four members were year 6 boys. "I was surprised by the ones who signed up – not only the boys, but it was the cool kids," she says. "I thought they weren't going to last, but it has become the cool thing to do."
Laing was a learning mentor when she started the club, working one-on-one with pupils who had emotional or behavioural problems. "I wanted them to be able to advance their skills, but it was also a way of opening up what I did for the whole school," she says. "For them, coming into a quiet room with bean bags and sometimes music playing: it's quite comforting and non-threatening."
Boys in the knitting circle agree that the club is one of the few relaxing parts of the school day. "It's peaceful, no shouting. It's different to other things in school," says 10-year-old Sam Otufale. "I usually play football – it's mad."
Another reason for the knitting club's popularity is the end-results. At today's lunchtime session, there is no sign of tea cosies or cardigans. Instead, boys proudly show off their wrist-bands, phone-holders and fingerless gloves.
The UK-wide Craft Club is keen to capitalise on this opportunity to introduce boys as well as girls to knitting, not just as a pastime, but as a technical skill that helps cognitive development.
Incorporating knitting into school life and throughout the curriculum has also been a successful way of getting boys involved. As well as teaching knitting within art, Kathryn Hitchings, classroom teacher at Bucklesham primary in Ipswich, used knitting to teach pupils about the second world war "make do and mend" campaign. This year she launched a sponsored knit, encouraging pupils to unleash their competitive streak. One boy managed to knit 75 metres in one day and pupils also took part in yarn bombing, covering a tree with their knitted garments.
The teachers involved in knitting groups have also noticed that the craft appeals to children who don't normally achieve in other areas, or who tend to misbehave. This is because there is an immediate and visible reward directly linked to the effort put in, says Katy Bevan, the Craft Council's participation and learning manager. "If you have a difficult child who's constantly misbehaving and being told off, suddenly they have knitted half a scarf and are given heaps of praise," she says.
As the boys at Dog Kennel Hill primary finish up before the bell rings, they are evidently proud of their knitting skills. They revel in advising their classmates and show off what they have made. But for one year 6 pupil, the appeal of knitting is more personal. "If you're angry, it calms you down," he says.
The new Kate Winslet film, Contagion, is a boost for academics striving to understand how diseases spread
Kate Winslet proclaims the line with a purposeful clarity. "The average person," she tells Matt Damon in the trailer for the forthcoming film Contagion, due for release this week, "touches his or her face three to five times every waking minute. In the meantime, we're touching doorknobs, water fountains, each other." Winslet plays Dr Erin Mears, one of the medics struggling to contain a pandemic that is threatening civilisation.
The film could hardly have come at a more opportune time for researchers at Warwick and Liverpool universities. "It focuses on how many contacts we make during each day and how highly infectious diseases spread through the population," says Matt Keeling, professor of maths and biology at Warwick. "That's exactly what we're looking at."
His colleague Dr Leon Danon, a research fellow in the university's Mathematics Institute, says Contagion will provide a much-needed boost to their attempts to track our interactions with other people. "Already we're getting responses from those who have seen the trailer," he goes on. "We've even discussed getting students to stand outside cinemas and hand out flyers."
Respondents are asked to think back to the previous day and recall what they did, who they met and talked to, how they were greeted, how far they travelled and by what means. "This important research will give us a better idea of how to control infections and understand who the main at-risk groups are," says Keeling. Danon puts it rather more starkly: "This stuff will save lives and, at the very least, fewer people will catch the flu." Flu viruses are passed on in various ways. "Physical skin-to-skin contact, not just kissing, is important, says Danon. "So you can catch flu through shaking hands with someone already infected. Flu can also spread through the air with no physical contact necessary, which is why we ask respondents to tell us about those people they had conversations with. It's also possible to catch flu by touching an item that has been touched by an infected person, but only for a few hours afterwards. How well the virus survives and is still able to infect depends on the environmental conditions, including temperature and humidity."
By tracking thousands of patterns of human interaction, the researchers hope to be able to predict more accurately the spread of pandemic flu and therefore provide healthcare agencies with the information to monitor and tackle outbreaks with the most cost-effective solutions.
The project started soon after the avian flu scare of 2008 and will end in March next year, when funding of £679,294 from the Medical Research Council runs out. One of the more prestigious medical journals will be offered the chance to publish the results but, before then, the researchers are hoping to at least double the 6,000 respondents.
"We need at least 10,000," Danon says. Women and retired people are over-represented. The academics are working with a marketing company on ways of targeting men and have started taking survey forms into schools. Keeling is keen to get more schoolchildren and people under 30 to take part. "They're currently under-represented in the survey yet they're probably the most important groups in spreading the infection," he says.
Schools have rightly been pinpointed as breeding grounds of infection. Says Danon: "The swine flu outbreak of 2009 died down once the school holidays started, and one proposition for containing future epidemics and pandemics could be the closure of schools at critical moments. That way you'd buy a couple of weeks to roll out vaccines."
Preliminary results suggest that teachers are high on the list of professions in greatest need of preventative measures. "It may be intuitive that certain people and occupations have higher numbers of contacts than others," Danon accepts, "but the most important part of our work is quantifying these effects and differences. How much more are teachers at risk than cleaners? Without the numbers, we can't accurately model epidemics and predict their future characteristics. Accurate predictions are the key for this work to be useful for public health."
Outside the Mathematics Institute, a bus pulls up, packed with people under 30. Plastered the length of it is an advertisement in stark letters: CONTAGION.
• To take part, go to www.contactsurvey.org
On the Guardian Teacher Network this week you will find resources related to Amnesty International's third annual Young Human Rights Reporter of the Year competition
From bullying to the treatment of refugees to political prisoners, there are so many human rights stories to be told, and young people want the chance to tell them. This has been shown by the hundreds of entries to the Amnesty International Young Human Rights Reporter of the Year competition, now in its third year, which the Guardian Teacher Network is proud to support.
The award encourages young people to find out what's going on in their world and write about it. This year's competition asks young people from upper primary to sixth form to write a compelling human rights story. This can be from their personal experience or their interpretation of a news story.
Winners, runners-up, their teachers and guardians are invited to a special awards day in London and the winning entries will be showcased at the Amnesty International UK prestigious Media Awards ceremony.
Victoria Najifi, teacher of last year's lower secondary category winner, 14-year-old Angus Kirk from The King Edward VI school, Morpeth, says: "The … competition was literally the catalyst in the discovery of an abundance of journalistic talent and the realisation by the school, the community and beyond that actually many of our young people know more about human rights issues than the adults."
You can read more from Najifi on the experience of entering and winning the competition in the Guardian Teacher Network blog page. Find all the winning entries from last year's competition.
Amnesty International has created a set of lesson plans and resources, including a simplified version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
To enter the competition on behalf of your class or your child, go to www.amnesty.org.uk/youngreporter. Please do download the terms and conditions before entering the competition. This year, teachers are asked to choose the top three entries for their school to enter. The deadline is 31 January 2012.
The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. More than 50,000 teachers have registered. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free.
What is the justification for private schools to be given free-school status, thus saving the parents thousands a year in fees?
When it was announced last year that Batley Grammar school, a private school near Leeds, was to become a free school – meaning parents would no longer have to pay fees of up to nearly £9,000 – some were understandably delighted. One excited parent told Channel 4 news that it was "like winning the lottery".
Batley Grammar, an elegant Victorian building with many original features and a slightly shabby feel about it, is one of five independent schools out of the total of 24 that opened as free schools last month.
Others are keen to follow suit. According to the Department for Education, 40 of the 281 proposals in the second wave of applications were from private schools. Only two of these were among the schools approved for conversion by the DfE today. But a spokesman said others could follow later on.
While Christmas has come early for previously fee-paying parents, critics say that the policy is in effect using public money to fund private education. "State money is being used to better the education of a minority, a small number of children and their parents, and that is wrong," says Alasdair Smith, of the Anti-Academies Alliance. "Some of these new free schools are boasting class sizes of 15, but not everyone benefits. Essentially, this is about private education cornering a market for themselves at the expense of the taxpayer."
But Brigid Tullie, headteacher of Batley Grammar, in West Yorkshire, disagrees. She argues that her school is in an area with "one of the highest levels of deprivation in the country" and is meeting local need. Until Batley Grammar became a free school last month, there were no mixed secondary schools nearby.
Now, says Tullie, more local children have the chance to experience what Batley Grammar has to offer: "an excellent reputation for pastoral care and for discipline, behaviour, conduct, state of dress".
Batley Grammar, which had been a state school until 1978, began to struggle to attract pupils in the late 1990s when the assisted-places scheme (government-funded subsidies for children who couldn't afford to pay fees for independent schools) was abolished. "I have never seen us as a typical independent school," says Tullie. "The reason we started looking at things like academies and free schools in the first place was because we were undersubscribed … there just wasn't a fee-paying population in the local area and the demand for bursaries and financial assistance was increasing phenomenally."
Converting to a free school has enabled the school to increase its numbers from around 400 to 600, and Tullie says that the long-term aim is to bring numbers up to around 700 over three years.
Having more pupils (who are funded "per head" by the government) has helped the school to raise the cash to refurbish its food technology room and introduce new subjects, including Spanish to key stage 3 students (in addition to Latin and French).
In Tullie's office, the shelves are heaving with box files labelled "free school applications" (she received 124 applications for just two places in one year group, she says) and the only sign of the school's past is a black academic gown hanging on the back of the door.
Now Batley Grammar is a state-funded school, class sizes will increase, but Tullie says small class sizes can be overrated. "You tell parents how wonderful it is that they are getting all this attention, but in actual fact it is about the effectiveness of the teacher. Some people can be less effective in front of 10 than someone else in front of 25."
While keen to stress that free schools should not be seen as "some kind of lifeboat" for failing independent schools, Andrew Cook, headteacher of the Moorlands school in Luton, Bedfordshire – a fee-paying primary that also became a free school last month – has a similar story to tell. He describes his school – which charged fees of around £6,000 a year – as being in an "area of deprivation" and untypical of the independent sector. "We had a database of over 700 parents who wanted to send their children to the school, but couldn't afford the fees. Around a third of our students were already paying concessionary fees. There was clearly a demand."
Like Tullie, he argues that the school's conversion enables more children in an "impoverished area" to benefit from what Moorlands has to offer – namely, "a smaller scale, village-style school".
His aim is to keep class sizes at around 18. And critics who say it is unfair for some state-funded schools to be offering small class sizes when others are not are missing the point, he says. "If you look at the independent sector, you will find a great deal more is spent in pounds and pennies on individual students. If they can sustain that, why can't state-funded schools make the figures work so they can teach in classes of less than 30? I'm not saying that with a magic wand, all schools could reduce classes to 18, but there would be mass street parties from parents if they could just get that figure down to 25."
Moorlands hopes to increase its student numbers from 200 to 500 and Cook is quick to defend himself against accusations of exclusivity by pointing out that over the next three years – by his calculations – just 7% of parents will be what he calls "rollover parents", that is, parents who used to pay fees. As far as admissions go, the school prioritises children with a statement of educational need, looked-after children and siblings. It also has a priority admission area made up of six Luton wards which, Cook says, are "amongst the 10% most deprived in the east of England".
At Batley Tullie admits not all parents were happy about the conversion to free school status. Some even removed their children as a result. "You are always going to get one or two parents who have no problems paying the fees, and to them it is more important to say their child goes to an independent school. There were one or two who were like that, but it was a small minority."
Some pupils were anxious, too. "The children would make comments and they would say things like, 'Oh, you're going to let anybody in'," says Tullie.
One year 8 student tells me: "We did worry that new people coming in wouldn't be able to follow the rules or would be naughty." But a month in, she is pleased to report that the school hasn't been overtaken by riff-raff and that having more people in a class is "lots better actually".
But not all the independent schools that have converted to free school status are putting cash back in parents' pockets. Sandbach school in Cheshire was in the unusual position of being an independent, state-maintained comprehensive – a former independent school where the local authority used to "buy" a number of state-funded places each year. The practice had been phased out by the 1960s, but the school's status was never changed. This meant that although it was state-funded, Sandbach missed out on some of the perks enjoyed by other state schools; for example, it could not become a specialist school (and benefit from any extra funding) or an academy, despite being judged as outstanding by Ofsted. "Becoming a free school was the only way for us to access some of the additional freedoms," says the headteacher, Sarah Burns. "But on a day-to-day basis nothing really has changed."
The Priors school in south Warwickshire is another unusual case. The tiny village state school was threatened with closure in 1996. For the last 15 years, parents have kept it open through fundraising and volunteer work – hosting charity balls and garden parties, running a charity shop and divvying up the cleaning, gardening and administrative work between them.
Becoming a free school has allowed the school to get a cleaner, pay a music and French teacher and employ a full-time administrator. It has also been able to expand from two to three classes, which means pupils from just two rather than three year groups can be taught together.
But while parents don't miss the burden of trying to raise over £100,000 a year, the head of trustees, Tony Porter, says he doesn't want the fundraising to stop. "It really galvanised two villages with just a pub, a restaurant and no shop. The school became the focal point of the community and we wouldn't want that to change."
At a fringe event at the Conservative party conference last week, the schools secretary, Michael Gove, spoke of his ambition for a further 50 free schools in London in areas such as Kingston, Sutton and Richmond, where there is said to be a shortage of places.
A DfE spokesman said: "The government is allowing independent schools to become free schools so that high-quality education can be accessed by all – not just those who can pay or pass an entrance exam. As free schools are required to follow fair, transparent and inclusive admissions policies, independent schools entering the state sector will not be able to retain any existing academically selective admissions arrangements."
Most children are still educated in maintained schools, but they have become invisible compared to the government's new free schools and academies, argues Fiona Millar
I started to watch Michael Gove's Conservative party conference speech online and on a train. After the first sentence, in which he announced that he was going to tell his audience "what is changing", I was treated to 30 minutes of the secretary of state "buffering" as the internet connection faltered, so I amused myself by writing my own speech about "what is not changing". It goes something like this...
We still have the same old hierarchical and stratified school system. Even the vice-chair of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (who should know a bit about social segregation) last week raged about schools being "racial silos" – even if he did neatly sidestep the role that his own sector plays in sorting children by ethnicity, class and family income.
Government policy persistently endorses this sort of behaviour. As the founder of the new Bristol free school, situated in a disadvantaged community, but giving priority access to children from a more affluent postcode, explained in a recent interview: "Being a free school gives us the right to choose our catchment area".
Meanwhile, the mass centralisation of education continues apace. For an elegant and incisive account of this, I recommend a recent lecture by Sir Tim Brighouse to the Oxford Education Society. It includes several killer facts, but my favourite is the following.
Before 1988, the Secretary of State for Education enjoyed three powers of direction. As a result of the 1988 Act, he gained over 250. He now has 2,000 powers and is gathering more by the day via the funding agreements he signs with the growing number of independent state schools. Forget about autonomy and localism. Control and influence increasingly reside in Whitehall, where decisions are made, strings are pulled and budgets manipulated, secretly and often in cahoots with the predatory edu-chains.
In the summer, I spent some time investigating the structures and finances of these chains using information freely available on the Charity Commission website. Yet in the last few months, most of these chains have become "exempt charities" and are no longer required to submit their annual reports and financial statements to the Charity Commission for publication, nor do their budgets appear on the government's new Go Compare! website. The more schools they acquire, the more public money they rake in, and the more profit-making arms they set up, the less accountable they become.
Then there is the rapid and continuing marginalisation of maintained schools. A million pupils may now be educated in academies, but that leaves 7 million who aren't, yet their schools have become invisible. Ministers don't visit them or talk about them and a visitor from Mars could be forgiven for thinking that only a handful of academies educate black children, or send any disadvantaged sixth-formers to university. The Department for Education's own website lists "types of schools", but makes no mention of community, foundation or voluntary aided schools, which still educate the majority, but have ceased to exist officially.
So contested, confused and opaque has the organisation and governance of schools become that London barrister and education law specialist David Wolfe has set up his own website appropriately named "A can of worms" to advise and help parents, teachers and governors who are concerned about the legal ramifications of changes taking place in their schools and communities.
Finally, there is little chance of this approach changing, at least in the short term. The Tories have only got one script and Labour daren't attack it because, even though they introduced many welcome reforms, they also set in train changes that the coalition is now ruthlessly exploiting and they failed to tackle deep-seated issues such as selection, charitable status for private schools and the balance between vocational and academic education.
Standards will continue to rise, incrementally, as they have done for the last 20 years, because pupils, teachers, heads and governors in all those schools that are never mentioned will continue to work hard at improvement. But new perverse incentives in the accountability system (like phonics tests and the EBacc) will eat away at the idea of a rounded, creative and enjoyable education.
And, as with all highly diverse school systems, there will be winners and losers. In the year since we started the Local Schools Network website, it has been clear that for every parent group that is benefiting from reforms, there is another that is bitter about the failure to support, celebrate or invest in their local schools.
The OECD data, both treasured and misused by Gove, continues to prove that the best-performing countries are the most inclusive, separating children neither academically nor geographically. The London Challenge, pioneered by Brighouse, showed what collaboration and partnerships, rather than competition and fragmentation, can achieve. There are real changes that could be made. It is just that no one has the courage to articulate them yet.
If the prospect of debt forces students out of the education 'supermarket', society as a whole will suffer, says Michael Mansfield
In the wake of the US civil war, President James A Garfield, a radical Republican, observed: "Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be maintained." He had been a tireless anti-slavery campaigner advocating civil rights for African-Americans and most of all the need for an educated electorate.
These sentiments have been poignantly echoed as the rationale for various instruments of international human rights law relating to education. The UN committee that oversees the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) has stated in unequivocal terms: "Education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realising other human rights." The committee emphasises the vital role education plays in empowering those groups and individuals who are vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation. In other words, we are dealing with the quality and dignity of life, not products on a commodity market.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the normative terms of the covenant itself are in explicit and mandatory language: "Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education".
These provisions have to be read in conjunction with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, to which the UK was a party, and ratified by the UK government in 1976.
There appears to be collective amnesia, or wanton disregard, over these obligations. We have regressed from free education, to modest interest-free loans, to huge loans attracting interest. We are not dealing with rocket science here.
If a younger generation cannot, or is afraid to, incur a massive millstone of debt, their right of access to education is being severely curtailed, if not extinguished. This is a generation whose economic future is bleak in any event. Universities have had their teaching grants cut by 80% and in July the axe fell upon the research students awards scheme.
No wonder Oxford's vice-chancellor made clear that the university's reputation as a world leader in higher education is being threatened by cuts. The funding gap, especially for international students, is the "single biggest reason why those to whom we make offers turn us down", he said.
On the domestic front the draconian cuts have unsurprisingly forced a large number of universities to charge the maximum fee of £9,000 a year, saying that £7,000 barely allows them to break even. A mild arithmetic calculation in relation to average UK household earnings of £22,000-£23,000 shows how impossible the prospects are for vast swaths of the population.
Last month the Office for Fair Access (Offa) reported that a quarter of universities had failed to meet their targets to admit substantially more disadvantaged students. Sir Martin Harris, its director, illustrated the shortfall by highlighting the position at Cambridge, where in 2009-10 12.6% of students came from homes with an annual income of less than £25,000.
It is worth a moment's reflection upon the grandiose statements of intent put out by the coalition soon after the general election in 2010. In section 31 it was proposed that "public funding should be fair and follow the choices of students" and should be judged against the need to increase social mobility, the impact on student debt, a properly funded university sector, improvements in the quality of teaching, advancement in scholarship, and attracting "a higher proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds".
But then along came the market entrepreneur the following October in the form of the Browne report, which suggested universities should charge what they like. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are wishing none of this had happened and the Labour party is wishing it had not voted against a rise in fees from £3,000 – which it now does support up to a level of £6,000.
This is not the place to develop alternative economic strategies, but the debt crisis is not the fault of the public sector, let alone higher education. The shadow economy, derived from highly speculative and unregulated transactions, is yet to bear its lion's share of financial responsibility.
No politician dare face down the vested interests of big business with initiatives such as the financial transactions tax (Robin Hood tax), the abolition of the bonus culture, and a crackdown on tax evasion together with corporation and individual tax avoidance.
Besides the ICESCR, there are other instruments enshrining rights to education. Section 3 of the UK Human Rights Act 1998 gives effect to European Convention rights. One of those provides that "No person shall be denied the right to education." European case law suggests that states are under an obligation to afford an effective right of access to institutions of higher education that exist.
Interestingly, these issues are to be canvassed in a judicial review by two students challenging the increase in tuition fees with the assistance of Phil Shiner and the Public Interest Lawyers Group. Once again it is left to the efforts of ordinary people to raise fundamental challenges based on basic values.
Education is not a commodity and students are not consumers in a supermarket choosing which can of knowledge will attract the most wealth.
• Michael Mansfield QC is a candidate for the chancellorship of the University of Cambridge. Tonight he will be speaking at the Cambridge Union Society
A school by any other name, university for baristas and a new kind of apprentice
Now, what would you call a brand new school, an academy, that is opening up on the site of the Olympic village in east London? The Olympic Academy has a ring to it. Or, how about the Olympic Village Academy?
But the builders of the new school for Chobham Academy had a better idea. The school, latest member of the chain run by Lord Harris of Peckham, the Tory peer and founder of Carpetright, is going to be called the Lend Lease Harris Academy Chobham, according to the building website, bdonline. Lend Lease is the Australian company that is constructing the school. "We wanted to call it the Olympic Village Academy, but weren't allowed to," Harris told the TES.
The academy will cater for 2,200 pupils and will specialise in performing arts and English, not sport. Oh, and by the way, it is nowhere near Chobham.
Readers, please tell us any dafter school names than this. Education.letters@guardian.co.uk
As a crossbencher in the House of Lords and chair of numerous businesses and advisory boards, ex-CBI chief Lord Digby Jones is a busy man. So what price does he put on his time? A whopping £2,000 an hour, it seems. When asked for an interview with the trade title FE Week recently, his business manager, Lorraine Ellison, said an interview was not an option, but half an hour on the phone might be – in exchange for a donation of £1,000 to Ladies Fighting Breast Cancer. Lord Digby Jones did not respond to requests to discuss the matter.
If you thought working in a coffee shop was a doddle, think again. Starbucks is recruiting 1,000 student baristas, and while they are learning how to make the perfect latte, they will work towards a level 3 qualification (equivalent to A-levels). The company hopes the project – which it is calling "Starbucks University" – could be developed into an apprenticeship in partnership with City & Guilds. Jan Smallhouse, head of talent at Starbucks, believes it could give other educational establishments a run for their money. "We equip our baristas to deliver world-class customer service. With university fees increasing, this is an opportunity for young people who are serious about a career in retail."
In August, I wrote about my decision to hire an apprentice and my ambition for more routes into journalism, which is largely a graduate-entry profession.
After a two-day assessment, which included tests in writing, spelling and current affairs, as well as a formal interview, the job has gone to 22-year-old Rhian Jones, who has given up a degree in English and media to train on-the-job.
Jones will spend four days a week working for me (on a training wage of £6.08 an hour, paid by me) and one day at Harlow College working towards an apprenticeship in business administration (sadly it is not yet possible to do an apprenticeship in journalism). I'm also hoping she will be able to do a qualification from the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). What impressed me about Jones was her drive, determination and interpersonal skills – none of which can be learned in a lecture theatre.