This year's runner-up in the Max Perutz Science Writing Award explains how his backroom work on measurement error can make the difference between a cure and a wrong conclusion
Hi there – I'm your friendly neighbourhood statistician, and I've got a few questions if that's all right. First up, how old are you? OK, and how much do you weigh? Good, good, now how many calories do you eat on an average day?
If you're anything like me you'll have had a mixed response to that lot. It starts off OK – I'm pretty sure I'm 24 – but it goes downhill from there. I don't have a pair of scales to hand, and I can barely remember what I ate yesterday, let alone work out an average.
Welcome to the world of measurement error, a place I have lived for the last three years of my life while working towards a PhD in statistics. I'd come into it off the back of theoretical training, but then I found out about this pesky thing called the "real world" where weighing scales aren't perfectly calibrated and people don't keep a record of precisely how many cups of tea they've drunk. Unfortunately, all the statistical models I'd studied relied on being fed data that are 100% accurate. For instance, when you see a headline about how eating red meat increases your risk of cancer by some percentage, this result will be (at least partially) based on asking real people how much red meat they eat. Unless you have a lot of money to spend it's unlikely your data will be perfectly accurate. If you blindly feed inaccurate data into statistical models you can end up coming to drastically wrong conclusions: the effectiveness of a drug could seemingly disappear, or we might mistakenly find that something causes heart disease when it doesn't. It's important, then, to be aware of the problems measurement error can cause and, if necessary, take it into account.
So what can we do? As is so often the case in statistics, we collect more data. In some cases we might be able to stretch our resources to get some really precise measurements on a small group of people, or we could measure some people more than once. Both of these methods give us more information about the measurement error: if you measure someone's weight twice and get 79.5kg and 80.5kg, that suggests the amount of error is pretty small, whereas if you got 60kg and 100kg, you might think differently. The error is just another unknown in our equation, and by collecting these extra data we can learn more about it. From here, there are all sorts of algebraic tricks that help us to turn this information into something we can reliably use, and it's at this point that I come in.
Despite being a relatively new area, there's already a mind-bogglingly large range of different models and methods for dealing with measurement error. As you may imagine, this can make it quite hard to know where to start if you've got measurement error and don't know how to deal with it. My work is, at its most fundamental level, about making these methods accessible. I look at things from the perspective of the non-statistician, trying to answer the questions they would want answering, as well as making it easier to act on any recommendations I might have. Primarily this involves writing computer programs that make implementing these complex methods in a general setting more straightforward, but I also look at some specific types of scientific study to try and provide more tailored advice.
By this point you might be wondering exactly what it is I do all day, and I'm the first to admit that a statistician's life is as glamorous as, well, as glamorous as you'd expect. I spend most of my time at my computer either writing code or playing with datasets. If it's a really exciting day, I might get some paper out and do a bit of algebra. My work may not appear as dramatic as that of my more practical colleagues, but my results have the potential to be just as significant. Statistics are the bedrock of almost every scientific study: get your stats wrong and everything else is basically useless. Measurement error is an often inescapable problem, and so a study that makes use of my results is one that can (I hope) stand up to greater scientific scrutiny.
So next time you see a headline about a groundbreaking medical discovery, spare a thought for the statisticians working behind the scenes. We might not be finding a cure for cancer, but we're the ones who can tell you if someone else has.
• Michael Wallace is based at the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The winner of this year's Max Perutz Science Writing Award reveals her work to combat a deadly illness
It is the start of an invasion. There are no gunfire or explosions, just the mundane tickle of a fly landing on your skin. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this moment can be just as deadly as bombs and guns if that tickle is a blood-sucking tsetse fly. As the fly bites, the tiny protozoan parasites that cause sleeping sickness rush into your blood stream. What was a brief brush of legs and wings is suddenly a potential death sentence.
Your body is now a battlefield. The parasites begin to multiply and overwhelm your defences, causing waves of fever as you try to fight back. If you are lucky, you get an accurate early diagnosis and access to one of the two drugs available for the first stage of the disease. If you are unlucky, you are diagnosed late, when your brain is already crawling with the parasite and you begin to lose your mind.
The most commonly used drug of the three licensed for the second stage was discovered 90 years ago and is based on arsenic. There is a 10% chance the drug will kill you because it is so toxic; but what choice do you have? It's a hopeless war; sleeping sickness invariably progresses to coma and death if you do not get treatment.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the chances are you will not receive safe, effective drugs, and you will die from the disease or its treatment. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are between 50,000 and 70,000 people with sleeping sickness in Africa, and that millions more are at risk. Even if a person isn't infected with the disease it still devastates lives, because it infects and kills livestock, too. Sleeping sickness is a disease that is crying out for more research and better drugs. However, if we are to outwit the enemy, we need to understand what makes it such a lethal foe.
The sleeping sickness parasites are superbly designed for stealth; to succeed they must evade the defences of the human immune system. The shock troops of the innate immune system rapidly and indiscriminately attack foreign cells, while the adaptive immune system learns the signature of each invading pathogen, and launches powerful, surgical strikes. But the surface of the parasite bristles with an incredibly sophisticated coat of armour that is made up of millions of protein chains anchored to the cell surface. The armour repels the barrage of the innate immune system, and by the time the adaptive immune system has locked on to its target, the parasite has shed the old armour and replaced it with new, different proteins. The surgical strikes never find their target. The parasite flies under the immune system radar, allowing it to silently multiply and invade the body.
But what if we could strip the parasite of its armour? The parasites would be visible and vulnerable to the immune system. My research focuses on the anchor that holds the armour's protein bristles in place on the surface of the parasite. If the parasite cannot make the anchor, then it cannot make its coat of armour. The parasite has a production line for assembling the anchor; it is built up, piece by piece, by a series of molecular machines known as enzymes. I design and synthesize molecules that mimic the anchor at a particular stage of its production. The mimics fit into the enzyme, but instead of allowing it to add the next piece of the anchor they jam the machine and stop it working. Once the anchor production pathway is shut down, the parasite loses its armour.
Making these anchor-mimic molecules is slow and laborious because we do not know the structure of the enzyme we are trying to inhibit. It is like trying to guess the structure of a lock by making many different keys and seeing how they fit. But every molecule I make brings me closer to stripping the stealth armour from the sleeping sickness parasite, and finally letting the good guys win.
• Amy Capes is based at the division of biological chemistry and drug discovery at the University of Dundee. The runner-up was Michael Wallace, of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with his article Making statistical sense of an imperfect world.
Now in its 14th year, the Max Perutz Science Writing Award encourages Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists to communicate their research to a wider audience. The 2011 competition received over 100 entries from MRC facilities and universities across the country. Twelve essays were shortlisted and judged by the MRC chief executive, Sir John Savill; the Guardian's science and environment correspondent, Alok Jha; science writer, author and broadcaster Georgina Ferry; director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, Professor Max Parmar; and the 2010 Max Perutz competition winner, Nicola Illingworth.
Researchers assumed that men who have sex with animals are of below average intelligence, until they heard from a fellow scientist
Between the yin of devoted love and the yang of bestiality lies the curious jumble of human behaviour reported in a monograph called A Case Study of Preferential Bestiality, published two years ago in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Psychologists ML Lalumiere, of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, and CM Earls, Montreal University, take us on a journey of what they hope will be understanding. They describe a "case of zoophilia that challenges the assumptions that men who have sex with animals are generally of below average intelligence and come from rural areas".
Five years earlier, Lalumiere and Earles had published a paper about "an incarcerated inmate who presented not only a strong sexual interest in horses, but also a preference for sexual interactions with mares over humans." At the time, they argued that such cases "are rare and often involve individuals suffering from mental retardation".
Then they stumbled across the new case. It shook their naïve and, they now feel, haughty view.
After their first paper came out, Lalumiere and Earles say, they received letters "from individuals who, themselves, were currently engaging in such relations. And some of these letters appeared to come from highly educated professionals."
One letter-writer was a 47-year-old man who "has published numerous scientific papers in well-known, peer-reviewed journals ... drives a luxury sports car and owns a small farm on the outskirts of a major city."
His romances had begun at the age of 17, when he had his first sexual encounter with a horse. Subsequently, "he purchased a mare, took riding lessons, and had numerous sexual interactions with her. He described his first encounter as involving a long courtship."
He had married a human woman and had two children with her, but his heart remained elsewhere. He felt saddled to the wrong wife: "Even closing my eyes and pretending she was a horse didn't work after a while."
So the man bolted. "I moved to my own house and land, taking my two mares with me. They are my mare-wives now, each day I can get out of bed, look at them out the window, and instantly see them. They come up at night to be fed. I can go out and sit with them, or stroke them or hold them or be with them at any time I want. Life's good."
Lalumiere and Earles say that, earlier, "we, like others, had presented a stereotypic but erroneous image of zoophilia".
(Thanks to Alexandra Basford for bringing this to my attention.)
Marc Abrahams
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Autumn term is under way, and spending cuts in schools are starting to bite. Are children bearing the brunt of the coalition's austerity policies?
They are widely seen as having improved education for the children they have served. Some have been particularly praised for their support for disadvantaged young people. But, as the new term gets under way, and as government cutbacks across education and local government begin to bite, a host of projects for school-aged children are facing cuts, uncertain futures or even, in some cases, outright closure.
One highly praised project aiming to help children who are struggling with their reading is even expected to run in hundreds fewer schools this year.
Last autumn, as the chancellor prepared to deliver a speech setting out public sector spending for the next four years, England's education sector held its breath. Would school budgets be cut, as the coalition sought funding reductions from across the public sector, or would ministers decide that investment in education had to be prioritised?
In the end, George Osborne's comprehensive spending review announcement generally brought sighs of relief, as money was found to preserve school budgets, in real terms, until 2015. But beyond the headlines, many individual projects face a difficult time, particularly as schools appear to be being asked to do more with budgets that are essentially standing still.
There are at least four ways in which specific education schemes are now feeling the wind of austerity. First, ministers have removed individual "ringfenced" funding for specific education initiatives.
This money, they say, has been passed on to schools for headteachers to decide how to use it. But it is clear that individual schemes will face a fight for individual headteachers' support, given that overall budgets are not rising.
One such project is Every Child a Reader. Launched under Labour in 2008, it has offered extra catch-up teaching support for tens of thousands of infant children who are behind with their literacy. But it will be running in hundreds fewer schools this year because of the funding changes, says Julia Douetil, the scheme's national leader.
The scheme, which was praised in an independent evaluation this year for bringing demonstrable improvements to children's reading and writing, was offered for 29,020 children in 2,500 schools in 2010‑11. Douetil, an academic based at London's Institute of Education, estimates the number of schools taking it up in 2011‑12 will only be two-thirds of that figure.
Under ringfencing, money was passed from the government to individual schools identified as having children in need of extra support, who were told that they had to spend it on this particular project to support children's reading. Local authorities also received cash to employ specialist teachers to oversee the project across schools in their area. The removal of the ringfence means that money notionally allocated to the scheme nationally is now simply passed into schools' general budgets, via local authorities.
Douetil says in some areas of the country local authorities decided simply to divide all of the cash from Every Child a Reader equally among their schools. This suggests that those with large numbers of pupils needing extra support will have lost out, as funds were allocated to others whose needs were less acute.
In other local authorities the funds were passed on by councils to individual schools based on need, as they had been in previous years. But, with schools now free to spend this cash as they choose, and with budgets tight, some have opted not to go with Every Child a Reader. The overall result is the drop in numbers, expected to be confirmed later this month.
Headteacher Ann Politowski says she is "very, very sad" that her school is losing its Reading Recovery programme for year 1 pupils who are struggling with their literacy because of a shortfall in its budget. Reading Recovery is a part of Every Child a Reader, and offers half an hour a day of one-to-one tuition to each child on the programme, over 20 weeks. It also trains parents to support their child's reading.
Last year, the 150-pupil Riddings infant and nursery school, near Alfreton in Derbyshire, received £14,000 for Every Child a Reader, and another £14,000 for the similar maths programme, Every Child Counts. It used some of its own funds in addition. This year, with the formerly ringfenced funding now distributed across Derbyshire primary schools, this £28,000 shrank to £3,000. The school's overall budget has fallen by 1.5%, meaning continuing with the schemes was not an option.
Politowski says: "I'm very very sad that what was proving to be a very effective programme has had to disappear, because we were seeing the impact on individual children. First and foremost, Reading Recovery gave the children confidence, as they made so much progress: it helped them not just with reading but with all their schoolwork.That is something we really valued."
Douetil says, where once Labour provided earmarked funding for schemes it backed, this government wants to set up a "market" in improvement approaches, from which schools would choose.
"The government has challenged us to make Every Child a Reader a market-led programme," she says. "We know it's going to be a struggle because it is a major shift from something which in the past was simply provided to schools. But we have a solution which schools clearly need, so we are feeling positive."
Other education schemes that have had the ringfence around their funding removed over the past year include the related Numbers Count scheme, which offers support for pupils struggling in maths; one-to-one tuition in English and maths for seven- to-16-year-olds; "extended schools" schemes (health, childcare, after-school and breakfast clubs); and the ethnic minority achievement grant, which funds local authority support teams working with specific groups of pupils.
The second way in which education is feeling the pinch is due to local authority funding being reduced by 28% over four years. Youth services are a well-documented area of cuts. In June, MPs on the education select committee published a report saying that local authority "open access" youth services were being cut by between 20% and 100% across England. The report criticised ministers for placing their faith in a new National Citizen Service as the government's "flagship" new development in this field.
Local authority organised music services, supporting music teaching and offering pupils subsidised instrumental tuition and access to local authority-wide orchestras, are also vulnerable in some areas. Ringfenced national funding – at £83m a year – has been retained, at least for this academic year. National policy on the longer-term future of the services will not be known until the government publishes a national music plan later this term.
However, music services are funded by a combination of national budgets, local authority support and fees charged to parents. And, given the severe pressure on local authority budgets, some music services have faced major cuts. Last month, all 130 staff at Warwickshire music services were reportedly made redundant as the county scrapped its subsidy.
A third type of cut has been to schemes introduced under Labour. Careers services in schools and colleges seem likely to be reduced after the government replaced the Connexions service, which offered one-to-one advice focused on disaffected pupils, with telephone and web-based advice.
And the school sports partnerships scheme has been drastically reduced. Michael Gove, the education secretary, planned to scrap the £162m initiative but was forced into a partial U-turn last December. Now there will be £65m of annual funding until 2012-13, with efforts focused on a new school games competition. Some school sports co-ordinators have lost their jobs, and the amount of time devoted to the project has been reduced.
Finally, Creative Partnerships, which had been linking 2,500 schools a year with creative professionals to enliven the curriculum for pupils, was quietly wound up in July after its funding was axed. It was funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport via the Arts Council. Its funding was abruptly scrapped last October as part of severe cutbacks in the Arts Council's budget, and there was no compensatory funding from the Department for Education (DfE).
Paul Collard, chief executive of the charity Creativity, Culture and Education, which ran the scheme, says: "The Arts Council has taken the view that it does not really 'do' education, and the Department for Education has taken the view that it does not really 'do' culture, and we have fallen between two stools. We worked through a network of 24 organisations locally. Most of those are now closing down."
So the cuts affect projects that contributed to most facets of children's education. Their full impact will begin to be felt this year. But to critics, such as Collard, they are further evidence of young people bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the government's drive to cut the deficit.
He says: "There is a general theme right across government that funding for young people has been targeted for cuts. They are pulling up the drawbridge on young people."
The DfE says: "We're committed to ensuring that programmes designed to best support less able pupils are still available. But we've always been clear that it's for local authorities to manage their funding so that frontline services are protected – because we believe that heads of schools know how best to support their students – without unnecessary meddling from government.
"Every Child a Reader is still up and running and the money available for it is still going to schools. We're simply untying heads' hands so they can spend the money as they see fit. Over 29,000 pupils have been supported through the programme in 2010-11 and we want to see this success continue.
"Likewise, we've been clear that we want to see music education flourish. We've actually protected £82.5m funding for music services this year and are reforming the system so money is targeted where it is needed most in future."
Building Schools for the Future Labour's £55bn scheme was scrapped last year. In July, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced plans for a £2bn replacement.
Education maintenance allowance Labour's £560m scheme, offering means-tested grants to 16- to 18-year-olds of up to £30 a week, has been replaced with a £180m fund.
Sure Start Ministers say funding for Sure Start has been protected. But it is one of several schemes, now funded as part of an "early intervention" grant, whose overall funding was cut 11% this year.
School sixth-form funding Will be cut to bring it in line with that in colleges by 2015.
Booktrust schemes Funding through which the charity offers free books to children will be cut from £13m to £6m by next year.
Fiona Millar says her investigation, published in A New Conversation with Parents, shows what parents really want for their children and from their schools
The autumn term invariably starts with a mix of emotions, notably for parents with children starting a new school. My situation is slightly different. After almost 24 years as a parent, I am watching my youngest child start her final year.
In one sense it feels liberating, but in another sad. I know I will miss no longer having personal experience of seeing schools being transformed before my eyes, of meeting inspiring teachers, of knowing how hard today's young people work and of watching their characters being formed, in a positive way, by growing up with and learning from a wide cross-section of their local community.
In the torrent of often highly subjective, anecdotal comment and analysis on this subject, the experiences of the majority of parents seem to be rarely heard, which is why I was intrigued to be given the chance earlier this year to work with the charity Family Lives and the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning on a project delving into what parents really want for their children and from their schools.
Our report, published today, provides insights and challenges for schools and policymakers. On one level, it suggests that successive governments should be receiving a collective pat on the back. Nearly all the parents we polled and met, from a wide range of backgrounds and regions, were discerning and knowledgeable, getting their children into their first choice of school and feeling broadly satisfied with the provision once there.
They are exercising choice, but in a much more sophisticated and realistic way than was originally envisaged. Hard data about inspections, and test and exam results are being used, but as part of a complex, impressionistic mix of information in which proximity and "soft" local knowledge are just as important.
But in other ways, parents are moving swiftly ahead of government. The conversation inside the Westminster bubble appears largely irrelevant – very few parents had even heard of the English baccalaureate and only a tiny minority were keen on starting their own schools if dissatisfied with local provision. The majority preferred to try to improve the situation at their existing schools.
And a very clear, almost unanimous picture emerged of what that good local school should be like. Academic qualifications, good teaching and well managed behaviour matter hugely, and good levels of literacy and numeracy are particularly significant, but so too is the social and emotional development of pupils, their wellbeing and the opportunities to develop according to their specific personal or special needs.
There was a keen awareness that if children are not academic, they need to be offered other productive, engaging pathways, especially if these lead to fulfilling employment. Great importance was also attached to qualities like confidence, self-esteem, respect for others, manners, politeness and practical skills – such as being able to cook, manage a budget, understand nutrition, health and personal hygiene.
And there is a clear hunger for more and different information than a league table or government data set will ever be capable of providing. Parents want a more rounded, balanced picture of how their children and their schools are performing and not just academically. Bullying, exclusions, behaviour management, the personal development and happiness of pupils, the views of other parents and even the CVs and qualification of heads and teachers were mentioned. Moreover they want that information regularly, in an easy to digest format, preferably directly from the school, either by text, email or via the school website.
One mother of two primary-age boys told us she considered the business of educating her children to be a "puzzle". Ofsted reports and test and exam results were important, but just one small part of the picture. She summed up the views of many more parents when she said she wanted to be able to see "the whole picture".
In my 20-plus years as a parent, much has changed and for the better. Schools have improved and become more accountable. But if that process is to continue – and with parents in the driving seat, as we are constantly told is the priority – we need to think carefully about what that "bigger picture" will look like.
Schools will need to be more outward looking and open about their strengths and weaknesses, and everyone from headteachers to government ministers will need to listen carefully to what parents really want, rather than what they think we should have.
• A New Conversation With Parents: How Can Schools Inform and Listen in a Digital Age? by Fiona Millar and Gemma Wood, is published by Family Lives and the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning
Higher education should be publicly funded because it benefits us all, says Simon Marginson. Every other country's education system subsidises university teaching
Last December, when the coalition government decided to triple student fees in higher education, create economic markets at the upper and lower levels of the system, and abolish government funding for teaching in the arts, humanities and social sciences, it sent shock waves around the world.
Fees in England will be the highest anywhere, except for the US Ivy League. Will the product be better than before? Don't hold your breath. Market competition in university education sets institutions against one another, takes the heat off government because institutions and not the minister become responsible for better quality, and steepens the degree hierarchy. But there's no hard evidence to show quality improves.
These are not normal markets. Prestige institutions dominate by virtue of age and opacity. The consumer is poorly placed to arbitrate product quality and benefits more from better information than from competition. When education becomes a shopping mall, the noise of huckstering goes up, taking resources out of the classroom, while families with the greatest private wealth tend to win.
Higher education systems and their students everywhere are worried that something like the English market experiment will be introduced in their countries. Britain has been a thought leader in higher education policy. All Treasury departments are looking for an excuse to make savings.
What makes the new English higher education system especially unusual (apart from high tuition fees) is the government's belief that certain fields of knowledge create no public goods and therefore should not be publicly funded. Every other system provides taxpayer subsidies for teaching in all programmes. This is because all higher education programmes create public goods, known in economics as "externalities" – benefits received by persons other than the individual paying the fees.
In his book Higher Learning, Greater Good, US economist Walter McMahon finds the additional private earnings of graduates – usually cited in support of higher fees – constitute only 30% of the total benefits of higher education. On average, private non-market benefits received by graduates, such as better personal and family health, broader life choices and lower welfare dependence, outweigh the earnings benefits. On top of that, 50% of all benefits of higher education take the form of social externalities.
The list of these is long and includes more stable, cohesive and secure societies, more flexible labour markets, stronger civic institutions, greater cultural tolerance and enhanced democracy. Many of these collective benefits are generated in general education programmes – in humanities and sciences. These increase literacy and are a platform for vocational training at later stages. Without prior general education, vocational education is impoverished. Its graduates are less productive at work, and the people they work with are less productive too.
All societies need general education programmes. All other societies support them.
These programmes do not lead to lucrative private incomes. Yet by abolishing public subsidies in the humanities and social sciences, the government expects private graduates to finance the public goods themselves – goods that manifestly benefit employers and society. As the Americans say, "go figure".
• Simon Marginson is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne University. This article is taken from his address to the British Educational Research Association conference in London
Could Scottish students lose out as university places are offered to English school-leavers with lower A-level grades?
Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, a couple of signatories of the American Declaration of Independence and Gordon Brown all graduated from Scotland's premier university – Edinburgh. A degree from the ancient institution – recently ranked 20th in the QS world rankings, above Berkeley, California, and the London School of Economics – is the gold standard of Scottish education. But some fear that next year the creme de la creme of Scottish schools could miss out on places, turned away in favour of students prepared to pay English gold.
From next autumn, under legislation currently going through parliament, Scottish universities will be able to accept as many English, Northern Irish and Welsh students ("rest of the UK" – RUK – students) as they want – and Edinburgh recently announced it will charge them £9,000 a year in fees for up to four years.
The Scottish government will pay only £5,000 a year for Scottish students studying on many courses, and the university will have to make up the shortfall from investments and business opportunities. RUK students are seen as a way of closing the funding gap. But it may also be that the calibre of those applying to Edinburgh declines. Next year, all of England's straight-A students are to be removed from caps set by Westminster, and English universities will be "bidding" for them with scholarships and bursaries.
Currently, the prospectus minimum for entry to Edinburgh is three Bs at A-level – at the moment, this kind of offer is only made to students who are from underperforming schools or who are the first in their families to go to university. Most Edinburgh students have straight As. But, next year, offers made to RUK students may be lower than they have been in the past.
One academic, who did not want to be named, says: "One worry is that English universities are going to be offering very attractive bursaries to students who do very well in their exams, so the cream of the crop will have gone. The English students who do apply will be bringing £9,000 of funding with them and we have been told that three Bs is likely to be more of a real bar than it is at the moment."
Applying to Edinburgh would usually involve an extra year of cost plus the potentially uncomfortable situation of paying for a course that most students get for free.
Edinburgh University's vice-principal, Professor Nigel Brown, says: "Students and families will have to make their own decisions but we hope the calibre of education we offer will continue to attract the brightest students." He says the university would never deliberately set different criteria for non-Scottish students – but he admits that differences between the intakes could result as an unintended consequence of the two-tier system.
"We are in uncharted territory. We will be as careful as we can be to ensure that the quality of students we take continues to be at the highest level," says Brown. It is "highly probable", he says, that, in 2012, straight As at Scottish higher (equivalent to A-levels) will not be enough to guarantee a place at Edinburgh. "We will have to turn some very good students away."
The situation is likely be worse than usual because fewer Scots will be applying south of the border due to the fee situation. Brown is "concerned" about a proposal for some of Edinburgh's funded places to be redistributed towards lower-ranking institutions – to make up for the fact that they simply don't have the option of attracting RUK students to raise cash. Glasgow and St Andrews are likely to be in a similar situation.
The proposal to lift the cap on RUK student numbers is contained in draft legislation by the Scottish government. This should be submitted for parliamentary approval in the next few weeks.
Sir Andrew Cubie, the author of a seminal report into higher education funding in Scotland, which argued that free higher education was unsustainable, says he is concerned about the Office for Fair Access's lack of remit in Scotland. "I hope individual institutions will try to maintain the principal of equality of access for students coming from the rest of the UK as well as from Scotland," he says.
The president of Glasgow University student union, Christopher Sibbald, said: "It seems inequitable that students from Northern Ireland, Wales and England could get places here with lower marks. That will cause a lot of disquiet. At the same time, I feel sorry for them because they will be having to pay these huge tuition fees."
Edinburgh University student association's president, Matthew McPherson, said: "We call on the governments at Westminster and Holyrood to fund the education sector in a way which has fairness to access at its heart, not as an afterthought."
A St Andrews University spokesman said: "We are looking into ways in which we could increase the number of Scottish-domiciled students we accept. I can't say more than that at the present time." Glasgow University declined to comment.
A Scottish government spokeswoman said: "It is up to individual universities to manage and set their fee levels for students from the rest of the UK."
Economists warn of likely stress and absenteeism among staff when the school leaving age is raised
It's the start of the new school year. The bell's gone, 30-odd pupils have shuffled into class and you're now facing a roomful of stroppy 17-year-olds who very vocally don't want to be there.
As a teacher, this may well be your daily reality in 2015, when all young people up to the age of 18 will have to be either in full-time education or work-based training.
And based on what happened in Spain when the school-leaving age was raised from 14 to 16 in 1998, new research from economists at Lancaster University warns that schools could be hit with mass absenteeism when teachers find themselves unable to do their job because half their class isn't interested.
Colin Green, senior lecturer at Lancaster University management school, says evidence from Spain shows that raising the compulsory "participation age" is likely to result in lower job satisfaction for teachers, greater problems with stress, and and more people leaving the profession.
Employers, he points out, will have a choice as to which young people they take on. Schools, by contrast, will have a duty to accept all comers. This means there is likely to be a large cohort of teenagers who would much rather have left school, but who will be required to spend two years more with their heads in a book.
For sixth-form teachers, who have till now looked forward to lessons with keen-as-mustard – or at least moderately willing – A-level students, the dynamic of every class is likely to change dramatically, and is unlikely to be conducive to better learning outcomes for any of those involved.
Given this prospect, says Green, teachers should pay attention to how their day-to-day working lives will be affected when the school-leaving age goes up.
The study, done in collaboration with his research associate Maria Navarro, shows that as soon as Spain raised the statutory leaving age, "secondary school teacher absenteeism rose sharply – on average, by between 15% to 20%".
"And it wasn't a one-off," Green says. "Absence rates have stayed high in all the years following the reform. And the increase in teacher absenteeism has clear implications for the quality of education that students receive."
A particularly troubling finding, he notes, is that increases in teacher absence was even higher in areas where fewer children traditionally stayed on in school, reaching 40% in the worst areas."Teachers in these schools faced the largest change in the mix of students after the policy was implemented."
Of course, it's the areas with larger proportions of teenagers who would prefer to leave school that most need extra professional support. But instead, because teachers will find themselves under more pressure, classes are likely to be more disrupted, and absence rates will shoot through the roof. "There's a real danger," Green says, "that the policy will decrease the quality of education and training provision."
Green is not scaremongering. Previous research has shown that teacher absence is a cause of poor pupil achievement. Worse still, the negative effects of teachers being absent in large numbers for long periods are more severe for poorer pupils.
Given growing concern about the large numbers of young people in England who leave school with few qualifications and prospects, Green observes that the raising of the school-leaving age was virtually inevitable. "The profile of the August rioters will have added further steel to the commitment to keep under-18s inside one system or another," he says.
The problem the government faces, however, is that while many working in education might share the view that it's better for young people to remain in education or training, forcing reluctant teenagers to stay on at school may have the opposite effect to the one ministers intend. "The potential for a direct effect is clear: more students in schools and colleges will lead to more teaching hours and, in the absence of more teachers as a result of tightening budgets, either to an increase in teaching workloads or an increase in class sizes," says Green.
"All the evidence suggests that teaching and managing these students, and combining their needs with those of young people who would have chosen to stay on already, is likely to present new and difficult challenges."
Absenteeism on the scale observed by Green and Navarro in Spain is only one indicator of the impact of raising the participation age that ministers need to take note of. Green suggests that, like all employees, if teachers are not compensated in some way for a significant change in the essential nature of their work – through improvements in working conditions or increased pay – it's likely to have a negative effect on how they feel about their professional purpose.
For the policy of raising the compulsory leaving age to be successful, ministers will be heavily dependent on teachers' willingness to flex and adapt and, put bluntly, work harder in more difficult conditions.
Green suggests that the government would do well to find out what teachers feel would recompense them for the changes they'll have to make to their professional practice.
If nothing is done, he warns, "all these factors add up to the same thing – a poorer quality experience and level of opportunities for young people. There is the danger that schools will become not the hoped-for platform for development, encouragement and inspiration, but instead a 'holding' camp for a growing number of disengaged young people."
The government has done a U-turn over the funding of English classes for immigrants. But the bad news is that the timing leaves colleges in chaos
As the peak month for enrolments, September is always a busy time for colleges. But after a government U-turn on funding for English classes for immigrants (known as Esol), this year is proving chaotic.
Funding regulations announced in last November's skills strategy set out government plans to focus fully funded Esol courses on those actively seeking work, such as those claiming jobseekers allowance and employment support allowance. Learners claiming income support, working tax credits and housing benefit – who had previously been eligible for fully funded English courses – would have to pay at least half the cost of their lessons or have them funded by their employer. Many in the sector feared it could make education and training – and ultimately employment – inaccessible to those who needed it most, particularly mothers with young children, who represent a good proportion of those on inactive benefits.
But last month, just weeks away from the start of the new academic year, it emerged that the government had changed its mind. There was no big announcement; the news slipped out quietly via funding guidance documents published on the Skills Funding Agency's website.
And while the U-turn has been largely welcomed by the sector, since the news hit home at the end of August, staff in colleges up and down the country have been working flat out to manage the fallout.
Like many other institutions, London's City and Islington College had attempted to get round the proposed funding changes by devising replacement courses to attract funding from elsewhere.
The college, which generally has about 2,000 part-time Esol learners, created up to 60 new "functional skills" courses that combine vocational learning with basic literacy skills, for those who ordinarily would have done Esol courses.
Since last month's surprise announcement, the college has been trying to turn some of these new programmes back into Esol courses, but this has increased the administrative workload at an already busy time of year.
As Grant Glendinning, the college's director of lifelong learning, explains: "We've had to scrap all our original enrolment forms and invest in emergency training for our registry staff. We've also had to produce new forms for learners to declare they are actively seeking work – they need that to get the funding. It's been very time-intensive and a bit wasteful really."
But despite the hassle, he is keen to stress how pleased he is about the U-turn. What worries him most is that there may be students out there who have no idea that they are eligible for fully funded courses. "From June and July we were telling people they were not going to be eligible. How do we get the message to them that they are now eligible for Esol and get them to come back to us?" he asks.
Having found themselves in a similar predicament, staff at Bournemouth and Poole College have been pounding the streets to spread the word. Knowing that the new funding guidance would leave many students unable to pay for courses, Sue Sharkey, director of skills for life at the college, had reduced numbers for Esol classes by 75% and let go agency teaching staff (who used to make up 50% of the workforce) at the end of last term. Since the big U-turn she has been desperately trying to recruit new staff.
Over the last few weeks, teachers have been leafleting local shops, restaurants, cafes and children's centres. "At this stage in the term, we'd usually be planning lessons and drawing up class lists. Instead, we've been assessing and enrolling students from 10am to 7.30 every evening. There is a real need in the area, so we are willing to do this to expand our student numbers. But if only we'd known about it earlier ..."
Things are also chaotic at City College Brighton and Hove, which has replaced almost half of its Esol classes with newly created "functional skills". "We'd love to switch some of the new courses back to Esol, but doing that at this late stage in the day would be like turning round a juggernaut," says Simon Chandler, team leader for Esol at the college.
Chris Taylor, programme director at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, is not surprised to hear colleges are feeling the pressure. "What we have now is a fairly confused picture, with many providers at different stages in terms of understanding the latest advice and guidance," she says.
Glendinning says the timing of the U-turn is potentially damaging to colleges' credibility. "A lot of our students hear about courses via word of mouth so it could look like we've been telling them porky pies. And our planning – which was actually very good – looks a bit undermined."
A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "The government has repeatedly taken action to lessen bureaucratic restrictions on colleges. The introduction of some additional flexibility for colleges to provide subsidised training for people on a wider range of benefits is a continuation of this process.
"English language training can be a vital step towards finding employment, and the government is committed to effective local provision."
But given the fact that an extensive campaign against the changes had been running since the start of the year, led by Esol teachers, what college staff really want to know is why it took the government so long to arrive at a decision.
On the Guardian Teacher Network you can find resources for Roald Dahl Day, which this year marks 50 swishwiffling years since James and the Giant Peach was first published
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network
13 September is Roald Dahl Day, celebrated every year on what would have been the writer's birthday. This time, it is 50 swishwiffling years since Dahl's classic tale James and the Giant Peach was first published and you can find resources to help the day go with a swing on the Guardian Teacher Network.
You can download everything needed to hold your own Peach Party. The pack includes well thought-out and imaginative activities specially created by Puffin Books.
The teachers' resource pack has ideas on how to teach the Peach, including how to use the book to explore themes of friendship, nature and travel.
Children can join the mission to roll James's Giant Peach around the world by sending their own Peach-gram, mirroring the incredible journey James and his friends made in the book. A print-out can be downloaded. More information here.
Schools and families can book visits to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden and see the Gipsy House garden where Dahl wrote many of his tales.
Quentin Blake, Dahl's principal illustrator, will talk, draw and answer questions live on 28 September from 2.15 to 3pm. The event is taking place in front of 2,000 school children in the Royal Festival Hall, and you can join them online if you register on www.quentinblakevirtuallylive.co.uk.
New for Roald Dahl Day 2011 is Dahlicious Dress-up Day, when school children are invited to dress up as their favourite Dahl characters on Friday 30 September to help raise funds for Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity. For more information see www.roalddahlcharity.org/schools.
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This is being added to every day: more than 40,000 teachers have already registered. To see (and share) for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free: schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
Does it benefit premature babies to be held close up to their mother while listening to the strains of a harp?
You might think that an Israeli Medical Association report called Combining Kangaroo Care and Live Harp Music Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Setting is the first medical study of the combined effects, on newborns, of kangaroo care and music therapy. Not so.
The invention of kangaroo care (also called kangaroo therapy) is widely attributed to a pair of doctors in Colombia in the late 1970s. Initially, both the idea and the name triggered scepticism. Thus the appearance in 1990 of a paper called Kangaroo Care: Not a Useless Therapy, in a magazine published by America's National Association of Neonatal Nurses.
The idea of kangaroo care is for premature babies to spend most of their time being held or pressed against the mother, the two maintaining direct "skin-to-skin" contact. This was meant as a substitute for incubators in places where those were unavailable. Later, some doctors and nurses began recommending that even the most modern hospitals adopt the practice.
Eventually came attempts to see whether – or not – kangaroo care produces good effects. Research journals began publishing studies, including the provocative Kangaroo Care Modifies Preterm Infant Heart Rate Variability in Response to Heel Stick Pain: Pilot Study.
Then someone got the idea of adding music. Researchers at several institutions in Taiwan combined forces to performed an experiment, documented in a 2006 paper, Randomised Controlled Trial of Music During Kangaroo Care on Maternal State Anxiety and Preterm Infants' Responses, in the International Journal of Nursing Studies.
The Taiwan experimenters had mothers and premature babies snuggle skin-to-skin while listening to recorded music emanated, for 60 minutes, from a Philips AZ-1103 ghetto-blaster. At the same time, other mothers and preemies neither snuggled skin-to-skin nor heard recorded music.
The researchers found that the kangaroo'ed babies slept a bit more than the non-kangaroo'ed babies, and cried a bit less. And, they say, the kangarooing mothers gradually felt ever-so-slightly lessened anxiety.
As for the babies' health – the main reason people recommend kangaroo care – they reported "no significant difference on infants' physiologic responses" between those who got kangarooing and music, and those who did not.
The new Israeli kangaroo-plus-harp-music study also reports that their particular "combined therapy had no apparent effect on the tested infants' physiological responses or behavioural state".
But a similar study – which the Israeli study does not mention – done in Finland and published online a year earlier by the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy reported that kangaroo therapy accompanied by live harp music "did" affect the medical state of the child. The Finns say that it "decreased the pulse, slowed down the respiration and increased the transcutaneous O2 saturation", and "affected the blood pressure significantly".
And so doctors and nurses must await further research before they know the value of prescribing kangaroo care with live harp music.
(Thanks to Andrea Halpern for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
• This article was amended on 13 September to include a credit at the end
Another kind of Olympics is being held in London next month – the biennial Worldskills competition
While many people her age are out clubbing, florist Victoria Richards spends all her spare time in a caravan in her grandmother's back garden practising different designs and techniques. Richards, 22, is one of 43 young people selected to represent the UK in the world's biggest international skills competition, which is due to be held in London next month.
Dubbed the skills "Olympics", London WorldSkills 2011 brings together young people from across the globe to compete against one another in their chosen skill, styling hair, repairing cars or building robots, against the clock, in front of a live audience.
As a finalist in the floristry category, Richards will spend two days in a packed exhibition hall, alongside 18 other young hopefuls from all over the world, completing tasks that could include anything from making a bridal bouquet to embellishing an item of clothing using petals and leaves. "To be fully prepared you need to practise with every kind of flower and every kind of material, so as soon as you get the competition brief, you can decide on a design quickly," she says.
While it may not attract the same kind of hype as the real Olympics, WorldSkills contestants train just as hard and take the competition as seriously as their sporting counterparts. But it's not all about winning medals; a good performance in WorldSkills can help competitors accelerate their careers and gain skills that will be with them for life.
Richards is so focused on winning gold, she has cut down to part-time hours at the florists in Aldridge, West Midlands where she works.
Every week brings new deliveries of flowers, wires, twigs and practice materials, provided by her sponsors, the Dutch flower importer Barendson and the Leicester-based floristry sundries company Whittingtons. Richards's grandmother offered her use of the caravan, which she has kitted out with shelving for all her tools and floristry supplies.
Richards knows that top-notch technique is not necessarily a guarantee of a medal. In the pressure-cooker environment of the competition, remaining calm and focused is also vital. Like top athletes, WorldSkills finalists are assigned a coach (or "training manager") and given a personalised training programme that can include work placements with top practitioners, giving demonstrations at schools, colleges and exhibitions, and taking part in other competitions.
Of the 200 or so who make the initial shortlist, less than a quarter survive the gruelling two-year selection and training programme (which includes psychological coaching) to represent the UK on the world stage.
For many competitors, by far the most daunting part of being a finalist is being on show to the public, some of whom can't resist trying to talk to the competitors (who are not allowed to engage in conversation) and making comments about their work. "My training manager sent me to a national skills competition in Canada so I could get a feel for the size and scale of the event," says Kerry McStea, who is representing the UK at aircraft maintenance. "There were lots of school children, some of them screaming and shouting. It gave me a real idea of what I'll be up against in the final and how much focus I'll need."
A senior aircraft technician in the RAF, the 23-year-old will be expected, among other things, to carry out an inspection on a plane's engine blades and service a helicopter at next month's final.
So what exactly makes a top tiler, premier plasterer or world-class window dresser? For Adam Bushnell, who is representing the UK at joinery, it's all about precision and attention to detail. At WorldSkills London 2011, he will be asked to complete a series of tasks that might include making a door and frame and building a spiral staircase. "Your internal joints have to be really clean and crisp, so part of the brief might be to make sure there are no gaps in the wood of more than 0.3mm. With such precise measurements it would be easy to score zero for everything."
While the UK was ranked a respectable sixth in terms of the medal score at the 2009 competition in Calgary, Canada (up from 14th in 2007), this year, with the competition being held in the UK, there are high hopes for success.
But although the UK has a strong record on vehicle body repair, beauty therapy and construction skills, there is definitely room for improvement in engineering-based categories, says Eugene Incerti, director of skills competitions at UK Skills, the not-for-profit organisation that manages the UK entry for WorldSkills.
The countries to watch are South Korea and Switzerland, which both consistently make the top five in WorldSkills competitions, he says. "South Korea's impressive performance is probably down to training young people harder and for longer. Switzerland's success may be due, at least in part, to the fact that vocational skills are more highly valued there than they are in other parts of the world, which means standards are often higher."
But the organisers are keen to point out that WorldSkills London 2011 is not just about the competition itself. It is about leaving a legacy for vocational skills that will last long after the international competitors have flown home.
It is the first time the biennial competition has been held in the UK for over 40 years. The hope is that the buzz around the event, which is expected to attract around 150,000 visitors, will encourage many more young people to consider vocational careers.
There will be opportunities to try out a range of practical skills, including bricklaying and car painting. Young people and their parents will also be able to get careers advice from experts while they are there, and talk to employers. "What we're trying to do is offer a really holistic approach," says Aiden Jones, executive director of WorldSkills London 2011. "So as well as the inspirational element of seeing highly skilled young people at work, there's also the practical side with information, advice and guidance. It's like a massive careers fair where you actually get to try out all the different jobs."
Prospective visitors to the event at ExCeL London in Docklands should feel reassured that, unlike the Olympics, which left millions disappointed and others out of pocket after being allocated more tickets than they could really afford, there is no lottery or ballot for WorldSkills London 2011. And they won't be forced to watch the plumbing competition when what they really wanted to see was leg waxing. As Jones says: "Visitors can register on our website to come to the event and there are plenty of tickets to go round."
The poet laureate believes the fun and creativity of mobile texting will turn today's children into exciting poets of tomorrow
Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there's a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing.
"The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. "It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form."
Duffy, who became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. She believes there's a myth that poetry is considered "difficult" or "complicated" by teachers – but says that's simply not borne out by what's really going on in the nation's classrooms, where poetry is enjoying a major revival. "The poem is the literary form of the 21st century," she says. "It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play." Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.
So, if texting is preparing children for a lifetime of poetry, are today's youngsters better at poetry than children in the past? "I think it's most obvious in music," says Duffy. "If you look at rapping, for example, a band like Arctic Monkeys uses lyrics in a poetic way. And using words in an inventive way is at the heart of youth culture in every way."
Duffy says she owes her career as a poet to her exposure to poetry at school in the 1960s and early 70s, when she was growing up – and that's why she's determined to do all she can to further strengthen its place in the curriculum. "I grew up in a bookless house – my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing."
When one of her English teachers died, Duffy wrote a poem containing the lines: "You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats / to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree / in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air."
Duffy says when she realised how much she loved poetry, she started to keep a notebook with her favourite poems in it. "I'd write them out by hand, and it was that very physical act that led me to become a writer. It was quite an intimate experience of poetry, and that's what I'd like us to go back to now with children."
To this end, Duffy will on Wednesday launch Anthologise, a competition for secondary school pupils, which invites them to create their own poetry anthologies. "They can do it any way they want, and they can be any sort of group they want – so it can be a class, or it can be a poetry group in a school, or it can simply be one pupil," she explains. "The anthology can be organised in any way they want – it can be themed, or it can be issue-led ... anything they choose. They'll be given a budget, and they'll also have to think about how to cost it – so, for example, they'll have to think about whether they'll have to pay fees for reproducing poems, and, if so, they'll have to think about how much these fees are."
The idea behind the competition, says Duffy, is to foster a stronger relationship between children and the whole poetry arena – encouraging them to think about the wider issues around poetry, but also encouraging them to read widely, and to experience – as she herself did – a more intimate relationship with poems. "I feel it will lead to new writing," she says.
The deadline for entries to the competition is 1 March 2012, and as well as Duffy the judges include Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales; Liz Lochhead, the Scottish makar (national poet); and the Cambridge professor of children's poetry Morag Styles. The winning anthology will be announced three months after the closing date, and it will be published by Picador with a foreword by Duffy, who will also visit the winning school.
"What I hope this competition will do is put some control into the hands of the students themselves," says Duffy. "They will be able to create their own anthologies, and it will help to enhance the way poetry is taught in school."
Duffy's work is studied in schools at GCSE and A-level – but, while she tirelessly tours the country visiting schools, her connection with the world of education has not been without its controversies. In 2008, her Education for Leisure, a poem about violence, was removed from the AQA examination board's GCSE poetry anthology after a complaint about its references to knife crime and a goldfish being flushed down the toilet.
Duffy has always maintained that the poem – which opens with the words "Today I am going to kill something. Anything / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God" – is anti-violence.
After Anthologise, she reveals, she has even bigger plans for poetry in schools. "What I'd like to do is create anthologies for other school subjects – for history, for geography, for maths," she says. "I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way. So you'd have a maths lesson, and the teacher would hand out a poem about mathematics. Poetry is a different way of seeing something, and seeing a subject in a different way is often a very good tool to better learning."
For more information on the competition, see www.anthologise.co.uk
School transport spending cuts mean that from this week many pupils will be walking to school along unlit 60mph roads without pavements
Late summer light glances off stubble-filled fields, a delicate breeze rustles through the trees and birds chirp contentedly. But Honeypot Lane, near Chailey school in East Sussex, is not as idyllic as all that – not if you're walking, anyway. It's bendy, has no pavements and the speed limit is 60mph. Cars, lorries, horse boxes and tractors pass with a ferocious buzz, swinging out to avoid pedestrians. In term time the road will be stuffed with coaches bringing pupils in from other areas.
But cuts to discretionary school transport implemented by the county council mean that from this week some of the students who previously caught a free bus to school now face walking the 2.5 mile route from nearby East Chiltington. It is safe to do so if they are accompanied by an adult, the local authority says.
Campaigners, who have collected 450 signatures on a petition against the changes, disagree. They say it's dangerous and argue that asking parents to either walk up to four hours a day or give their children lifts could prevent them from working.
The number of students currently affected by the change in East Sussex is actually very small, but the situation there highlights issues being played out across the country. School buses and concessionary fares are being cut nationwide, from Durham, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to Peterborough, Hampshire, and Devon.
In an open letter sent to Michael Gove this week, a coalition of groups including children's charities, teaching unions and poverty campaigners call on the education secretary to change the guidelines on what constitutes a safe route. They write: "There can surely be no point in standing by whilst savings made by local authorities increase costs to the taxpayer elsewhere due to possible hospital costs to an injured child, extra benefit payments because parents can't work, and lost tax receipts as parents can't continue in their job or have to choose not to go back to work."
The current guidelines presume children will be accompanied by a responsible adult, meaning councils can declare routes up to three miles long (or two miles for under eights) safe even if they are unlit, have 60mph speed limits, no pavements or step-offs, and are used by heavy commercial traffic. The letter's signatories, who include representatives from the NUT and ATL, the Child Poverty Action Group, Unison, Gingerbread, Children England, the Grandparents' Association and the Child Accident Prevention Trust, call for new statutory guidelines that say a route can only be deemed safe if a child of 11 is able to walk it alone.
They also complain that because children on free school meals get transport on routes that are over two miles long and will therefore still get a bus to school while their classmates walk, the kind of cuts seen in East Sussex risk stigmatising pupils from low-income families.
"The statutory regulations are just bonkers," says parent Stephen Israel.
Sarah Osborne, a Liberal Democrat councillor on Lewes district council who is leading the East Chiltington campaign, says not everyone has access to a car to drive their children to school and, in any case, the headteacher doesn't want any more vehicles at the gates in the morning. The school also discourages cycling to school, and has no bike storage because the routes in are deemed too dangerous.
Single parents will be particularly badly hit. One mother, who is on her own, won't be able to transport her son because she'll be at work, Osborne says. "Even if there is a paid alternative – which may be possible via a not-for-profit bus provider – the cost will hit her hard. She is on a very low income but now she's working she is not eligible for free school meals and transport."
Osborne fears families will be put off rural areas by such cuts, adding that she knows of one couple who pulled out of moving into East Chiltington this summer when they realised it would be impossible to get their child to school because both had to leave for work early.
"Villages will become ghettoes for the old, the wealthy and the childless," she says. "It's much healthier for us all to have a diverse community."
Norman Baker, the Lib Dem MP for Lewes and coalition transport minister, plans to bring the letter to Gove's attention personally. He hopes Gove will agree to meet him and Osborne to discuss the country-wide issue. "I'm concerned that in this case the council has reached the wrong decision," he says. "The route is clearly not safe. If this is happening across the country – councils for financial reasons concluding that routes are safe to walk when clearly they aren't – then that clearly is a matter of concern."
In 2008, a survey by ATL found that a lack of public transport and rising fuel costs significantly disadvantaged the poorest children living in the countryside, with 70% of teachers questioned saying transport problems made it difficult for children to get to school or college.
"Lack of transport is a key issue," says the union's general secretary, Mary Bousted. "This is now compounded by the slash and burn approach of the government to local authority grants, which means they can't support rural bus services. As always, the poorer you are, the harder you are hit."
And parental choice rings hollow if parents are unable to get their children to school, the NUT general secretary, Christine Blower, points out.
The Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) also fears the consequences of ending discretionary school bus provision, says its bus campaigner, Sophie Allain. "If we take out these buses then we're not going to be encouraging parents and children to use public transport," she says. "One of the solutions would be to further invest in safe walking and cycling. But in many rural areas they just don't exist. It's going to mean greater congestion, more people in cars."
CBT is investigating how many school buses have been cut across the country. Its previous research found that 70% of English local authorities have already made cuts to buses across the board (ie not just school buses).
In Nottinghamshire, £400,000 has been cut from spending on non-statutory school bus provision, while in Derbyshire funding is being axed for 73 school bus services to 47 schools. Bus companies are being consulted to see if it is commercially viable for them to replace some of the services, but if not they will stop by April next year.
In Durham, the county council is cutting services it does not legally have to provide to save more than £5.5m. From the next academic year only students living more than three miles from their nearest "suitable school" will qualify for free transport, saving £1.6m. Another £1.05m will come from ending free transport to faith schools from the same period. And eight-year-olds will only qualify for funded buses if they live more than three miles away, as opposed to the current threshold of two. Suffolk is cutting £706,000 from school transport funding, and Hampshire is cutting £600,000.
East Sussex county council insists its decision, as part of a process of finding cuts worth £20m in its children's services budget this year, was made only after a proper safety inspection concluded the route was safe. "The decision to end this support was not an easy one to make and was considered very carefully," a spokesman says. "We have had to take into account the need to make significant reductions to our budget and also be clear that if we cannot save it in discretionary areas like this, we would have to cut more vital and fundamental services to children and young people.
"This decision also makes it fairer to all parents, most of whom have not historically benefited from the county council paying to transport their children to school."
The Department for Education says the Department for Transport has protected the concessionary travel scheme in full, and has provided £10m extra funding for community transport in rural areas.
In East Chiltington, the children are weighing up what losing the bus means to them. Stephen Israel's daughter, Greta, says: "They're always telling us to get more sleep, but we're going to be more tired – and we'll have less time to do homework."
The HE proposals will limit intellectual expansion and have a chilling effect on research and scholarship, says Peter Scott
A Conservative higher education minister (of an earlier generation) once got me in a corner and insisted: '"Surely you agree that at least 25% of the research done in universities is a complete waste of time?" I replied that no, I didn't agree but that, even if I did, we would never agree about which 25%.
How little has changed. The recent white paper is not concerned with research. It does not attempt to look at higher education as a whole, concentrating instead on the new student fees market. So it is hardly surprising two fundamental principles are threatened by the white paper – the block grant to universities and the dual-support system of research funding.
In theory universities receive block grants, which they are free to spend as they decide, not as politicians or bureaucrats pre-determine. Also research funding comes in two streams (hence dual-support) – core funding, part of the block grant, and projects funded by research councils and others. So universities are free to set their own long-term priorities rather than second-guess the short-term priorities of funders.
In practice the block grant is split into a T (teaching) grant and an R (research) grant. The calculation is transparent so it is hard for universities to vary the T and R components much. Each year the components get closer to being fixed.
The dual-support system, the distinction between core and project funding, has also faded. Core funding determined by successive research assessment exercises has become more and more like a earmarked grant, devolved to the faculties or departments that have "earned" it. Meanwhile the research councils, and other funders, are encouraged to pay the "full economic costs" of the research projects they commission. So there seems to be less need for core research funding – outside the humanities.
The undermining of these two basic principles is accelerated by the white paper. First, it will no longer be possible even to pretend that universities receive block grants. For a large swath of subjects – notably the arts and social sciences – there will no longer be any T funding. Instead they will depend entirely on student fees. So they will only be eligible to receive R funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce).
Even Hefce's continuing funding for teaching in science, engineering, clinical subjects and other (yet to be defined) "strategic and vulnerable" subjects will be nothing like a block grant. The whole point is that it will now be targeted.
Second, the "dual-support" system of research funding has been further undermined. Admittedly, Hefce will acquire new powers as a regulator rather than being abolished. But its primary responsibility will be to ensure that the new student driven "market" works. This new responsibility has little in common with providing core research funding. So the case for transferring quality-related research funding to the research councils is suddenly much stronger.
However, there is a third and more fatal impact of the white paper on research. Times of hope are nearly always times of intellectual ferment, out of which academic innovation and world-class research grow. The radical thinking encouraged by the establishment of the "new" universities – Sussex, Warwick, York and the rest – was one example. A second example was the brief early hope that the polytechnics would become "people's universities".
An up-to-date example is the coincidence of the growing power of Britain's world-class universities over the past two decades with a 50% increase in students, and the final establishment of a truly mass system of higher education – which is no coincidence at all.
It is not just that more money for higher education means bigger research budgets, or that the expansion of student numbers produces more academic posts and so boosts research capacity. It is also that open systems stimulate open thinking; extending higher education's social reach expands its intellectual possibilities. Just as the white paper will not do the first, neither will it do the second.
The government's closing of higher education's open frontier will not only be a betrayal of individuals and communities given hope by the expansion of recent decades; it is also very likely to have a chilling effect on research. Those who may care little about the former, may care a great deal about the latter.
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
The world university league table could spark ideas among UK students of applying abroad to highly ranked universities that charge low – or no – fees
Students looking for any way to avoid £9,000 tuition fees and still attend a top-flight university could do worse than look at Trinity College, Dublin. The 400-year-old institution, ideally located to enjoy the "craic" of the fair city's nightlife, is ranked 65th in the world – just behind the London School of Economics – in the latest league table of the world's top universities, published yesterday. But it does not charge tuition fees to students from the UK.
QS, the international career and education network that compiled the latest world rankings, has for the first time compared tuition costs for all 600 universities. And in the top 200, many have fees below England's top whack of £9,000 a year.
So what are the realistic options for UK students willing to pack their trunk to save on the debts?
Dutch institutions are worth a look. Amsterdam university (ranked 63rd), offers numerous undergraduate degrees taught in English, and charges EU students just €1,713 (£1,516) a year in tuition fees. Also among the top 100 universities in the world are Utrecht (80th) and Leiden (88th).
According to the Student Loans Company, UK undergraduates wishing to study at EU universities would be eligible for a loan from that country to cover their tuition fees. If the countries also offered loans to cover living expenses, they would be able to apply for those. But if students are looking elsewhere in the world, they will have to apply for a scholarship or make their own financial arrangements.
For those happy to go further afield, Hong Kong has three universities in the top 50, all offering a good range of degrees taught in English. The University of Hong Kong is impressively ranked at number 22, with the Chinese University of Hong Kong at 37 and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology at number 40. Fees at the University of Hong Kong are £5,480 a year and £7,829 at the other two, and all three offer a variety of scholarships.
Outdoor types may find Nordic institutions attractive. But although the universities of Copenhagen (52nd), Helsinki (89th), Uppsala (83rd) and Lund (86th) charge no fees to EU students, they do not offer degrees taught in English. Though any would-be undergraduate who happens to be bilingual in Danish, Finnish or Swedish could be laughing in both their languages.
ETH Zurich (18th) and Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne (35th), overlooking Lake Geneva, are among the cheapest fee-charging institutions in the league table and are a good option for those interested in studying for an English degree (other subjects are taught in German and French respectively). Fees are just 580 Swiss Francs (£435) a semester for both bachelor and masters degrees – foreign students pay the same as domestic undergraduates.
In contrast, US universities, which dominate the top 20, are likely to be beyond the reach of most UK students, unless they're lucky enough to get a scholarship. Most of the US universities listed charge $38,000-$40,000 (£23,400-£24,600) a year, which does put the £9,000 fees of many UK institutions in a different light. "At undergraduate level, all of the UK institutions listed are comparatively good value," says Ben Sowter, head of research at QS.
UK universities fare well in this year's QS rankings, with 54 in the top 600. Of these, over half are ranked in the top 200 and there are nine in the top 50. The rankings are based on research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and students are.
Cambridge this year pips Harvard to the top spot for the second year in a row, while Oxford, Imperial and University College London come fifth, sixth and seventh respectively. US institutions continue to dominate, with six universities in the top 10 and 20 in the top 50.
But whereas UK institutions, including Cambridge, tend to do well in terms of how international their students and faculties are, Harvard, like most US universities, "struggles to compete" in this respect, Sowter says.
However, the tables show that if the listings were ranked according to employers' preferences, Harvard would come top, Oxford second and Cambridge third. In fourth place, according to employers, come Manchester (29th in the overall table), Warwick (50th) and the LSE (64th), in equal place with Melbourne and the American Ivy League institutions MIT, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley.
But the UK lags behind many other developed countries in terms of public investment in higher education. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), higher education spending accounts for 0.7% of GDP, below the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Slovenia.
The Guardian's HE Network has the full QS rankings.
Unlike training, real education opens the way for delight and self-esteem, says Alan Smith
We were talking about warfare, how it seems to transform individuals, how notions of morality and identity are revealed as malleable, when there was a knock on the door. One of the training staff came in and said: "OK if we clean the room?" Of course it was, and so he beckoned in the guy he was training. This guy came in and stood there, looking a bit puzzled; he had a big vacuum cleaner in his two hands. There was something about the situation that made us stop and look.
They got the thing plugged in and after a few words the guy cleaned the bit of carpet near the door. Then he stopped and looked around the room. "Put the chairs up on the desk," said the trainer. The chairs went on the desk. "Now you can clean under it, see?" the guy cleaned under the desk. Stopped. Looked round the room. "Go on, then, put the other chairs up." Two more chairs went on the next desk. He looked round the room. Smiled at us. "Go on, go on clean under there." And so on, and on, like a brick wall made of sponge, until the trainer gave up: "Yeah that'll do." You really couldn't blame him.
"You reckon he was taking the piss?" I asked Casey.
"Course he was," said Ian.
Ian and Casey are workaholics. They have jobs in the prison, they both study, both get involved in projects, both of them have plans to get into work and careers when they leave. On the other hand, I meet people in prison who are drug addicts, who have every intention of continuing as addicts; I meet people who are mentally ill, people who are consumed with resentment and anger, who have never had a job in their lives. I meet people who are criminals and have no intention of being anything other than a criminal. There are people who will remain in prison if not for ever then at least until they are past retirement age. I suspect that the number of prisoners ready for training for employment may be rather small.
Why would they want a job at all? Most of us don't want the jobs we have; we wouldn't turn up for work were we not bribed to do so. People tend to live for the weekend, for holidays; most of us skive and take sickies when we can. Anything but work. It is simply not convincing to offer work to men in prison as if it were the answer to their ills. I have found work to be the source of most of my ills and when I look at the faces travelling to work in the morning I see that most of you feel the same way. On top of that, many prisoners expect that the jobs on offer to them on release will be unpleasant and badly paid.
Not many people are tempted by work and yet education is fading away in favour of employability. Employability has a robust, commonsense vigour about it that is lacking in philosophy, art, history, literature, but it is a delusion. I don't think that it does any harm to put schemes of training in place, in fact for people like the vacuum cleaner guy they provide opportunities for harmless fun, but don't expect them to do much good. Education always does some good; it opens the way for curiosity, delight and self-esteem. Most people are in prison because of neglect, damage and abuse; they do not need to know how to do a bit of vacuuming, they need to know what it is to be human.
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network, you can find resources to cover topics relating to the riots over the summer
The civil unrest over the summer provides an opportunity to cover many powerful topics. The Guardian Teacher Network should give some inspiration.
First, a lesson for secondary school-age children designed to develop critical thinking and positive action in response to the riots. This thinking-skills lesson is based on exploring visual and verbal images of the riots and is an interesting introduction to using the 8way thinking method.
You can read more from the author of the resource in our new blog. We welcome teachers and educators who want to blog about the resources they use or create – please email us at teacher.network@guardian.co.uk with "blog" in the subject field if you are interested in contributing.
For primary school-age children, we have a powerful resource, The Broom. The PowerPoint story is designed to take even very young children on a journey through the riots, focusing on the aftermath and positive outcomes of the conflict symbolised by an ordinary object, the broom.
The Red Cross education team have also written an excellent lesson on the summer's unrest here. Children get to analyse crowd behaviour and also look in more detail at the moving words of Tariq Jahan, who lost his son Haroon aged 21 when he was hit by a car during the riots in Birmingham alongside brothers Shahzad Ali and Abdul Musavir.
The summer's riots are just the latest chapter in a long line of civil unrest in the UK. See this lesson on changes in the countryside in the 1700s and 1800s, which explains how the enclosures acts led to rioting, smashing of threshing machines, burning haystacks and attacks on landowners.
Emily Drabble
The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This is being added to every day: more than 40,000 teachers have already registered. To see (and share) for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free: schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
Researchers into the early days of TV for women want to know what you were watching in years gone by
There is a woman in Derbyshire, now in her 60s, who has fond memories of watching boxing on television. It isn't that she was particularly excited by the sight of two men trying to rearrange each other's faces. That aspect she found rather distasteful, even when screened in bloodless black and white. "What she really liked was that it was one of very few experiences that she could share with her father," says Hazel Collie, a PhD student from De Montford University in Leicester. Collie is asking women aged 40 to 95 for their personal memories of watching "the box" as part of a three-year project called A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989. The dates cover the period when TV resumed after the war to the coming of satellite broadcasting.
Some respondents have talked passionately about being riveted by early screenings of Panorama. Others recall the excitement of pop music invading screens that had hitherto hosted only big bands and crooners. "For women now in their late 60s and early 70s it was The Six-Five Special and for those now in their late 50s and early 60s it was Ready Steady Go," says Collie. "One woman remembers trying to record Top of the Pops on a reel-to-reel tape recorder by getting her brother to hold the microphone near the screen.
"As women grew older, had jobs and children, it's obvious that they didn't usually get their first choice when it came to family viewing," Collie goes on. "They could also be described as 'distracted consumers', half-watching while doing other things, such as ironing or cleaning."
Her interviewees so far have been women from all parts of the country who responded to advertisements in Saga Magazine and Woman's Weekly. Collie is also keen to hear from Education Guardian readers who are in the age bracket. A public discussion on the subject is to be staged in Leicester next month. Boxing, Panorama and Top of the Pops may well feature, but there is more likely to be a focus on programmes specifically aimed at a female audience. There are also likely to be screenings of dramas made in the early 1960s, such as Compact, which was set in a women's magazine, or The Rag Trade, a comedy focusing on bolshie working-class women in a clothing factory.
"We want to show the roots of contemporary programming," says Dr Rachel Moseley, who is leading the project at the department of film and television studies at Warwick University. "These early programmes undermine the assumption that married women were nearly all housewives back in the 1950s and 60s. The issue of trying to balance work and home life is often perceived as 'post-feminist', but these programmes suggest that it goes back a lot further."
Serious programming for women goes back further still, at least to the early 1950s. In 1951, the BBC put out Women's Viewpoint, which Moseley's colleague Dr Helen Wheatley describes as "basically a precursor for Loose Women [ITV's current chat show]". Without the emphasis on celebrity gossip and trivia? "Yes, there was less pressure to rake in audiences in those days and Women's Viewpoint fitted in with the Reithian idea of the BBC being an improving force. Space was made in the midday schedules for a group of public women to discuss the issues of the day. It's a mistake to think that daytime television was invented in the 80s."
Moseley and Wheatley are keen to undermine current assumptions. "Early television for women was much more varied, innovative and imaginative than we could have predicted and, in fact, has a lot in common with today's formats," says Moseley.
Television ownership expanded markedly with the Queen's coronation in 1953, which was also the year that Doreen Stephens arrived at Broadcasting House as editor of BBC television's women's programmes. She remained in post until 1964. "Yet she's not mentioned in any of the main histories of the BBC," Moseley says.
To set the record straight, the project's research fellow, Dr Mary Irwin, has written a paper on Stephens, describing how her zeal to inform women often brought her into conflict in a male-dominated corporation. Irwin found internal BBC memos suggesting that the controller of television programmes, Cecil McGivern, gave Stephens a particularly rough ride. He once grumbled about the unnecessary amount of gynaecological detail in a programme about childbirth.
Irwin writes: "The virtual absence of Stephens from historical records means that, until this point, any concentrated analysis of the early history of the development of television programmes for women is to all intents and purposes non-existent."
Three years ago, Moseley and Wheatley wrote an article for the television section of the Cinema Journal, asking Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? "In order to make convincing arguments about contemporary women's programming," they argued, "television scholars need to be able to see where the address, format, representations and concerns of 'the new' originate and how they have developed. We need, in other words, to pay attention to 'the old' of television as well as 'the new'."
The article may have helped to secure them a grant of £397,880 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And it's definitely part of their remit to write a document for the industry on the need to be aware of the history of women's television, and to preserve what has survived.
• Memories of the early days of women's television can be sent to hazel_collie@hotmail.com
FBI forensic guidance combs through the incriminating nature of follicular evidence
Despite its reputation for sporting nearly-identical conservative haircuts, the FBI – the Federal Bureau of Investigation, America's government gumshoes – assembled and published an all-inclusive guide to hair. And despite its reputation for tight-lippedness, it made its guide available to anyone who might have a use or desire for it.
Hair Bibliography for the Forensic Scientist might make a fine gift for anyone who cares about the sometimes-tangled relationship between hair and crime. You might regard this as completely legal intellectual pornography for those who watch CSI [Crime Scene Investigation].
The author, Max Houck of the FBI's Trace Evidence Unit in Washington DC, at least pretended that his 17-page report, published in 2002 in the journal Forensic Science Communications, would appeal strictly to professionals. "It is hoped that this listing will provide some assistance to forensic hair examiners who are seeking information and support for courtroom forensic challenges," he wrote.
Some light, even playful, touches suggest that Houck knew his paper would also find its way to amateurs, and even to casual fans of the hair-and-crime game.
The list begins coyly with Don't Miss a Hair, a seven-pager published in 1976 in the FBI law enforcement bulletin.
Next comes more cutesiness: From Bad to Worse: Hair Today, Scorned Tomorrow, which you can find in a 1997 issue of the journal Science Sleuthing.
Then comes a more specific, and mildly grizzly, title that's worded with strange ambiguity: Laboratory Solves Variety of Crimes with Animal Hairs (FBI law enforcement bulletin, 1960).
Then a return to the strictly human, and a higher degree of specificity: Pigmentation in a Central American Tribe with Special Reference to Fair-headedness (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1953).
One report's title almost begs you to go and find out how, exactly, its authors, DL Exline, FP Smith and SO Drexler, gathered their knowledge: Frequency of Pubic Hair Transfer During Sexual Intercourse, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1998.
The list is dominated by 10 items written or co-written by BD Gaudette. That's Barry D Gaudette, chief scientist for hair and fibre, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Gaudette's An Attempt at Determining Probabilities in Human Scalp Hair Comparison, co-written with ES Keeping in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 1974, specifies a rule of thumb that you can use in writing either a crime novel or a maths textbook: "It is estimated that if one human scalp hair found at the scene of a crime is indistinguishable from at least one of a group of about nine dissimilar hairs from a given source, the probability that it could have originated from another source is very small, about 1 in 4,500. If, instead of one hair, n mutually dissimilar human scalp hairs are found to be indistinguishable from those of a given source, this probability is then estimated to be (1/4,500) to the nth power, which is negligible when n is greater than or equal to three."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Melissa Benn still believes the public can see the benefits of the classic comprehensive school system
Britain doesn't have many American-style political dynasties, but the Benns are an exception. Three generations have produced a cabinet minister apiece: Tony Benn, once the stuff of bourgeois nightmares but now an octogenarian "national treasure", is the best-known and his son Hilary, a New Labour minister from 2001, is the most recent. And from the next generation, Emily Benn, Tony's granddaughter, stood unsuccessfully, aged 20, as a Labour candidate in last year's general election.
But there are other Benns keenly doing their bit for what are loosely called "progressive" causes. Among them is Melissa, Tony's only daughter, one of our "leading feminist writers" (the Guardian's description), a one-time assistant to Labour's future deputy leader Harriet Harman at the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), a former Open University researcher on deaths in custody, and a founder of the Local Schools Network, which "celebrates and supports local schools". Now 54, her latest contribution to the common welfare is School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education, published next week. (In the interests of full disclosure: she interviewed me for the book, and quotes me in it.)
No prizes for guessing which side she's on in those wars. The book is a passionate defence of comprehensive schools and she doesn't mean the allegedly non-selective academies, free schools, faith schools, trust schools and other varieties invented by successive governments. She's a true believer in what New Labour airily dismissed as the "bog-standard" comprehensive. Benn prefers neighbourhood schools run by elected public authorities. She also favours mixed-ability teaching, though as a "compromise", she'd reconcile herself to setting by subject after 14. She talks, as the pioneers of comprehensives did, about creating a "common culture" through education and asks, "how do we learn about others if we never come in contact with them?"
Is there any chance that this classic model of the comprehensive can come back? She replies that what "they" have set up will fail (she doesn't say so, but I'd guess "they" means New Labour as well as the coalition government) and what she's arguing for will, 20 or 30 years hence, emerge as the only alternative. "This whole shimmer of choice," she continues, "it just confirms class hierarchies. In the early 21st century, we have something that increasingly looks like the set-up in the 19th century. The three biggest blocks to a fairer school system don't involve genuine choice. Private schools obviously, because you can't go if you can't pay. Grammar schools are positively Orwellian: the state sorts children out and says where they should go. Faith schools: well, if you're not a churchgoer, the only option is for deception."
So she would deny choice to parents? "I don't think we can any more just tell parents where to send their children. But we have to find a way to ensure that no school is stuck with the most disadvantaged. School admissions may be politically unsexy but they're absolutely crucial." All this is said with the expansive hand gestures characteristic of the family, and eyes trained slightly upwards into the middle distance, as though scanning anxiously for a vision of happy comprehensives where rich and poor learn to love and cherish each other.
But as Benn happily explains, her ideal school is on her doorstep, in the socially and ethnically mixed area of north London where she lives with her husband, a psychotherapist, and daughters, aged 14 and 17. "We didn't decide to live according to the availability of local schools. But we went to see the local primary and we thought it was great. Secondary school was more of a decision. Our nearest school, Queens Park, 20 minutes walk away, was not, to put it crudely, the one the middle-classes were sending their children to. But a group of parents, whose children were about two years ahead of ours, got together and said, if we all support this school, we can be part of changing it. We were lucky. It is a really good example of a hard-working, creative local school. Results have gone up and up. It so annoys me that schools like that are routinely denigrated."
Ofsted reports confirm that Queens Park has been improving since the early 2000s. It has almost equal numbers of white, black and Asian children (white British account for under 20% of pupils), an above-average proportion on free school meals, and lower than average attainment levels on entry. Has Benn used private tutors? "Ah, I woke up this morning and thought: he'll ask me about private tutoring. Well, a bit of help a couple of times when exams were coming up, but we're not running a complete parallel system. There's no denying that parents like ourselves can help our children, but I also bring that helpful practice to the school, running workshops and so on."
Her own education was a different matter. Strange as it may now seem, Labour frontbenchers, if they could afford it, once sent their children to private schools without significant comment from either press or party. The Benns, with money on both sides of the family, enrolled Melissa at Norland Place, an expensive London preparatory school later attended by George Osborne. But when she was seven, she and her two elder brothers were switched to the state sector. Oddly, her name was still put down for the posh, fee-charging St Paul's girls' school because, she says, "there was a tremendous nervousness, not from my parents but from the world they lived in, grandparents and so on, about what they'd done and so they wanted reassurance that I was keeping up academically". A place was offered but rejected. Melissa, like her three brothers, went instead to Holland Park comprehensive, close to the family home in west London.
It became known as "the socialist Eton" because so many prominent leftwing figures, including Tony Benn's cabinet colleague Roy Jenkins, sent their children there. After starting with the trappings of a grammar school, including teachers in gowns, it threw out uniform and other traditions and embraced mixed-ability teaching, then very rare. "It was a very creative and exciting time," says Benn. "I really, really enjoyed school." But she adds: "There were elements that, as a parent, I wouldn't have been happy with. I didn't feel unsafe exactly but I knew there were certain toilets I shouldn't go into, and there were pockets of disorder, things that frightened me, skinheads, gangs and so on. As a parent, you have to be in favour of order. On discipline, I think the right is on to something."
As Benn's father became more prominent, emerging as a leader of the Labour left, media interest and hostility grew. She recalls a forest of photographers as she stepped out of the house and being followed as she walked to school. "The children's lives were scarred," her father once said. Her late mother, Caroline, took it particularly badly and, though a knowledgeable and articulate pro-comprehensive campaigner – she co-wrote two exhaustively researched studies of the schools – could scarcely bear to speak even to sympathetic broadsheet journalists.
The family wariness of the media remains. Benn says she always wanted to be a writer, composing her first story at six, a novel shortly afterwards and a play about resistance fighters "when I was nine or 10". She eventually worked at the radical magazine City Limits and contributed freelance features and reviews to the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent. But, she says, "I have never felt fully comfortable in the media world, it has taken time for me to learn to inhabit it in my own way." She has written two novels that explore the uneasy relationship between the public and private lives of politicians and the media's role in it.
Benn believes the British public can still be persuaded to view a truly comprehensive state education service with the affection it has for the health service. "Education's problems go back to 1944. The NHS became a symbol of common citizenship but education couldn't because it divided 20% of the population from the other 80%. Ed Miliband recently talked of the things that bind us together, but he didn't mention schools. People are always talking about the importance of churches, post offices and pubs to communities, but not about schools. If we make the political weather, we can change that."
Melissa Benn's book School Wars is published on 5 September by Verso Books
The UK's first university technical college provides hands on training for the young engineers needed by the industries of tomorrow
The 18th-century mill in the village of Rocester, near Uttoxeter is a stunning blend of ancient and modern. Rooms are spacious and light, with views of the Staffordshire moorlands. This was a cotton mill for two centuries, until its closure by Courtaulds in the 1980s. It has now been adapted for academic use – to educate the engineers who will be required by the industries of tomorrow. This is the site of the JCB academy, Britain's first university technical college (UTC), which opened for its second academic year on 22 August.
UTCs are the brainchild of Lord Baker. The former education secretary is back with a rekindled vision for reform. He chairs the Baker-Dearing Trust, which developed the idea of technical colleges. JCB may be the first UTC, but it won't be the last. Next month, the Black Country academy will open, also in Staffordshire, and the current education secretary, and the chancellor, George Osborne, has already announced funding for another 24 by 2014. Baker envisages between 200 and 300 in 10 years' time.
Although they sound like higher education institutions, in fact UTCs are non-selective colleges for pupils aged from 14 to 19, sponsored by universities. They teach practical subjects such as engineering, product design and health sciences, which require specialised equipment, as well as English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages and IT. Pupils also do 40-80 days' work experience a year. "This is going to be the answer to all the mistakes we've made in British education," Baker told the Guardian this year.
"No pressure then?" I ask Jim Wade, principal of JCB, which is supported by five universities, including Cambridge.
"All I can do is try to deliver a first-class education for the students who come here," he says. "And it's my belief that there are a group of youngsters out there for whom this is a preferred way of learning. If you can provide them with that, you can enthuse them."
They need to be enthusiastic because they're here from 8.30am until 5pm three days a week. Students come from an 18-mile radius, so buses pick them up in Derby, Stafford or Stoke-on-Trent at 7.20am every weekday. "They get used to it," Wade says. The attendance record is 95.6%, which is above the national average. "And they do work experience during their holidays. They like meeting real engineers."
Wade came here after eight years running a comprehensive in Devon, which specialised in technology. "This was an opportunity to set up something special," he says, fiddling with his laptop. Up pops a glossy film of the academy's opening day, with comments from luminaries from industry and academia. Among them is Sir Anthony Bamford, chairman of JC Bamford (Excavators) Ltd, better known as JCB, who has put his money where his mouth is. JCB's headquarters are just across the road and the donation of the mill made up a substantial wedge of the £2m that the company has put into the venture. The government provided £20m.
So far there are few pupils here. The first year's intake was 120 year 10 students and 50 year 12. "But 148 applied for year 10 and 63 for year 12," says Wade. They were selected through "the digital equivalent of drawing names out of a hat". By 2013, there will be a full complement of 600, aged 14-19. "When we're doing engineering, which is 40% of the curriculum time, there will be one member of staff for every 12.5 students," the principal says. "For other subjects, it'll be one to 24." Not all engineering staff are teachers. Some are "learning mentors", who have worked in industry or the armed forces.
"We have to do in-house training because they have to be taught how to teach," says the vice-principal, Mark Henshaw. "But the sad truth is that there are a lot of trained teachers without hands-on experience. At my last school, it took months to raise the money to buy two lathes. Here we have 30, and it's the kind of equipment that students will find when they go into industry."
Harriet Chiles from Ashbourne is part of a small minority at JCB. Girls account for just 10% of the school population. Attempts to remedy that disparity are going on upstairs, where female sixth-formers are entertaining around 80 girls from local primary schools over two days. "Too many of them have a lack of understanding of engineering," says Meg Aucott, 18. "They think it's oily, greasy work."
The curriculum covers maths, English, German, at least two sciences, IT and business enterprise, as well as engineering. "We break the school year into eight-week blocks, each one based around solving an engineering problem in teams," Wade explains. "Each problem has a business element to it. And we try to build the rest of the curriculum through engineering. So, if we're designing a pump for a Rolls-Royce jet engine, we might be writing about it in English."
So is this school more about training than education? "They do a programme of studies here," he says, "that would equip them to train as a doctor or a journalist if they decide at 16 that they no longer want to go into engineering." What about history, art and literature? "We run clubs offering art, music, drama, dance or journalism. They have to do one [of those] and they can't do the same thing for three nights running."
There's no doubt the school has the sort of equipment, staffing levels and work ethos others would envy. And it's easy to be persuaded that we need more like it to meet the demands of a second industrial revolution so very different from the first.
Politicians who blame the riots on a lack of school discipline have got it all wrong, says Phil Beadle
So, the citizenship classes were a smashing success then! And, next week, countless lessons on the subject of being a good citizen will start with the teacher asking, "So, what did we learn from the riots?"
"Well, sir, man, I learned that you need to try stuff on before you loot it, or you get something that don't suit you; it don't go with your bandana."
The reaction of commentators and politicians to the riots has been predictable: voices from the right pontificating views unlevened by any experience whatsoever of the people whom they rightly denigrate; and voices from the left seeking to justify an outbreak of wanton criminality as an almost reasoned response to the current administration's "scorched earth for the poor" policies.
It is the right's response, however, that shows the most perverse perspective on the relationship between cause and effect.
Witness the prime minister, with his crassly simplistic, "broken society" slogan, identifying that: "The next part of our fightback is what happens in our schools." The heir to the throne weighs in: "Schools don't have enough extra-curricular activities. There are not enough organised games or other activities." John Howell, Tory MP for Henley, calls for "more discipline in our schools", and a clueless cleric takes the riots as proof that we need to "rebuild education" and starts jibbering about "ethos".
Teachers around the country will have let out a rueful sigh – "I thought it would be our fault. Schools aren't doing their job properly. It's clearly time for me to be sacked" – before realising that they were actually on a wet beach in northern France. "Hold on. I'm pretty sure I'm on holiday. It can't really be my fault, can it?"
Indeed, the riots did happen when schools were on holiday. This reveals those blaming educational institutions for the trouble to be guilty of reverse logic. The riots are actually evidence of the exact opposite: that once the expert guidance and care, the moral framework, the daily routine, the discipline and – yes, Charles – the extra-curricular activities provided by schools are absent from these children's lives, it all rapidly goes to hell in a handcart.
Why has no one asked: would the riots have happened in term time? Even if they had, I strongly suspect the numbers of rioters aged under 18 would have vastly diminished. First, rioting on a school night is probably beyond the pale even in the inner-city home. Second, there were rumours throughout the day of the worst outbreaks that it was all about to kick off. Had this been the case in term time, each maligned educational institution would have mobilised with military precision, keeping kids in school, texting parents to pick them up, arranging transport, and calling assemblies in which no one would have been left in any doubt about the potential consequences of dangerously irresponsible behaviour.
The most measured and reasoned responses to the troubles have been from the teaching profession, its representatives and associated organisations.
John Murphy, director of education at Oasis Community Learning, who has been the principal of two schools for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, hits the nail on the head: "In the recent riots, politicians espouse single reasons to complex problems. The reality is those involved were not from one group with one reason. There were opportunists, gang members and there were people who are totally disenfranchised from any involvement with civil society."
The second of these categories plays a huge part: immediately outside the gates of most inner-city schools there exists a thriving gang culture, eager to gobble up those who need a sense of belonging. This gang culture, both formal and informal, plays a huge part in the identity-making of an increasing number of young people in the inner cities.
The gang culture is critical to what happened this month. And it is time that denial of its existence in the upper circles of government stopped. As Murphy says, "There are many young people who are in gangs and who were part of the troubles - they are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. The question is how to bridge the gap between them and the institutions of state."
Schools in inner cities have been dealing with this matter for years, but we cannot solve it. We merely provide a safe place in which gang rule does not apply. It is a societal problem: the only safe place for some of these young people is within the civilised, nurturing bosom of the school. As Old Andrew, the consistently readable blogger behind Scenes From the Battleground, writes: "Even though so many of the rioters are young, the education system could not have prevented this. Better discipline in schools cannot ensure better discipline in the streets."
Research shows that a coyote with a damaged foot can run almost as fast on three legs as its uninjured pals
Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes introduced itself in 1976, in a journal called Northwest Science. You'll find few scientific studies that tell their story so clearly and efficiently. Bruce C Thompson, of the department of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, wrote everything he had to say in a plain two pages.
It contains little jargon or lingo, and no clever metaphors. When the study speaks of crippled coyotes, it means exactly that: coyotes that are crippled.
Thompson begins with some history, just enough so you learn that other people, in earlier days, spent time thinking about how fast coyotes run. He alludes to decades-old studies, by scientists named Cottam, Sooter, and Zimmerman, that "reported running speeds of presumably uninjured coyotes being chased by cars".
Thompson brought something new to the table (so to speak): "On 21, 22, and 23 October 1974, I recorded running speeds of three wild-trapped coyotes that had lost the use of one foot due to damage from a steel trap".
How exactly did Thompson accomplish this? He tells you in just a few sentences: "During the tests, the coyotes were released from their cages singly and allowed to run along the perimeter fence of the enclosure. Each day the coyotes were timed with a stop-watch as they ran three measured courses along the perimeter fence. As a coyote approached the starting point of each course, I chased the animal on foot at a distance of 45 meters to 70 meters."
Thompson also measured the running speed of a coyote that had all its original equipment. On its best run, that animal had a speed of just under 32 miles per hour. One of the crippled animals matched that almost exactly, despite lacking a right foot. The other three-footed coyotes attained best speeds of 22.5mph and 25.4mph, respectively. (The full-bodied coyotes chased by four-wheeled cars decades earlier, by the way, ran much faster than the one chased in the 1970s by the two-legged Bruce Thompson.)
Thompson also paid attention to style. "Although the crippled coyotes occasionally contacted the ground with their damaged appendage", he wrote, "they typically adjusted their stride to prevent contact with the ground. The adjusted stride resulted in a noticeable bouncing movement when the crippled coyotes ran."
Bruce Thompson's monograph refers, glancingly, to a 1939 study called "Food habits of peg-leg coyotes," by Charles C. Sperry of the U.S. Biological Survey's Food Habits Laboratory in Colorado. Sperry, too, knew how to tell a tale. Who could resist this beginning: "During the past two years, 164 peg-leg coyote stomachs that contained food remains were obtained and their contents examined in the Denver laboratory."
I will skip over Sperry's other good parts, and get right to his thrilling conclusion: "It will be noted that two peg-leg coyotes eat as much livestock as three normal coyotes.
(Thanks to Sally Shelton for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
There are endless theories about why Mozart died at the age of 35, but the reality could be quite simple
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has died a hundred deaths, more or less. Here's a new one: darkness.
Doctors over the years have resurrected the story of Mozart's death again and again, each time proposing some alternative horrifying medical reason why the 18th century's most celebrated and prolific composer keeled over at age 35. A new monograph suggests that Mozart died from too little sunlight.
The researchers give us a simple theory. When exposed to sunlight, people's skin naturally produces vitamin D. Mozart, toward the end of his life, was nearly as nocturnal as a vampire, so his skin probably produced very little vitamin D. (The man failed to take any vitamin D supplements to counteract that deficiency. But that wasn't Mozart's fault. Only much later, in the 1920s, did scientists identify a clear link between vitamin D, sunlight, and good health. Vitamin D supplements did not go on sale in Salzburg and Vienna, Mozart's home towns, until many years after that.)
Stefan Pilz (who, if he plays his cards right, will hereafter be known as "Vitamin" Pilz) and William B Grant published their report, called Vitamin D Deficiency Contributed to Mozart's Death, in a journal called Medical Problems of Performing Artists. Pilz is a physician/researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. Grant is a California physicist whose background is in optical and laser remote sensing of the atmosphere, and atmospheric sciences.
Pilz and Grant explain: "Mozart did much of his composing at night, so would have slept during much of the day. At the latitude of Vienna, 48º N, it is impossible to make vitamin D from solar ultraviolet-B irradiance for about six months of the year. Mozart died on 5 December, 1791, two to three months into the vitamin D winter."
But they acknowledge the existence of competing medical theories. They do not bother mentioning the possibility, depicted in Peter Shaffer's 1969 play Amadeus, that a rival composer did him in. Other academic studies do examine the evidence for poisoning; most conclude that that evidence is lame.
Rival doctors and historians have presented arguments, in medical and other academic journals, that Mozart perished from acute rheumatic fever, bacterial endocarditis, streptococcal septicemia, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease, brain hemorrhage, hypertensive encephalopathy, congestive heart failure, uremia secondary to chronic kidney disease, pyelonephritis, congenital urinary tract anomaly with obstructive uropathy, bronchopneumonia, hemorrhagic shock, post-streptococcal Henoch-Schönlein purpura, polyarthritis, trichinellosis, amyloidosis, and quite a few other unpleasantnesses.
Other studies have tried to tease out biomedical causes for some of Mozart's eccentric behaviour. Two of the more abstruse are by Benjamin Simkin. In 1999 he wrote about a concept called "pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcal infection" (Pandas). The study is called Was Pandas Associated with Mozart's Personality Idiosyncrasies? It expanded on Simkin's curse-filled 1992 monograph, in the British Medical Journal, called Mozart's Scatological Disorder.
(Thanks to Jim Cowdery for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize