As New Labour's backroom boy, Michael Barber had lots of influence but very little publicity. Now he has his dream job, he tells Peter Wilby, with 'the world's leading learning company'
Sir Michael Barber was New Labour's mad professor and master of the flow chart, the man responsible for the literacy and numeracy strategies of the first term and, later, when he worked for Tony Blair as head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, for top-down targets across the public sector. He moved in 2005 to the world-renowned management consultancy McKinsey, and its unofficial motto could be his own: "Everything can be measured, and what is measured can be managed".
If teachers hated the Whitehall commands of the New Labour era, they should blame Barber as much as Blair and his education secretaries. On the domestic front, he was the nearest thing to a New Labour guiding spirit, more consistently influential than any of the intellectual gurus Blair briefly took up with. He helped to write Blair's first speech on education during the 1994 leadership contest and, in 1996, published The Learning Game, which was virtually a handbook for Labour education ministers. The phrase "standards, not structures" was his, as was the focus on failure: failing councils, failing schools, failing pupils. "Serious debate about failure," he said in 1995, "is … a precondition of success."
But Barber was the backroom boy, absorbed in graphs and charts. Newspapers hardly mentioned him, except to mock or denigrate. The columnist Simon Jenkins called him "a control freak's control freak", while the Mail's Quentin Letts compared him to the speaking clock. When he gave PowerPoint presentations on "delivery" before Blair's monthly press conferences – described by one Downing Street official as "excellent punishment for the hacks" – one journalist muttered "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" throughout.
Now Barber and his graphs have gone global. As McKinsey's hubristically titled "head of global education practice", he has set up a US Education Delivery Unit (albeit as a private sector rather than government venture), co-authored books that claim to identify what makes national education systems successful, and taken the joint chairmanship of a taskforce in Pakistan to establish "national standards" in basic subjects. Now he's becoming chief education adviser to Pearson, owner of Penguin Books and the Financial Times and also, in its own description, "the world's leading learning company", with interests in 70 countries, including English language centres in China, primary education in Kenya and higher education in South Africa. In the UK, it owns the exam board Edexcel and operates the driving theory test.
To Barber, now 55, who as a young idealist went to teach in Zimbabwe when it seemed a great hope for African development, it's a dream job. "The world is going to change dramatically in the next five to 10 years. School systems will have to innovate, and innovation will come from the private sector or public-private partnerships, rather than government." Why? "First, because sometimes you need to invest serious capital in innovation. Second, because, in the modern, transparent age, it's harder for governments to take risks. There's a long gap between deciding to do something and making it work. In that gap, it often looks as if it's failing."
More surprisingly, Barber nearly became the top civil servant in Michael Gove's education department this year. The prospect caused panic in Whitehall, where officials feared a return of his top-down regime. But the mad professor clearly regards England as too small a laboratory for his ambitious experiments. His decision to decline the job was no reflection on Gove, he assures me when we meet just before his move to Pearson is announced. "Broadly, Gove's doing the right thing," he says, "particularly the theme of devolution, encouraging schools to take control of their own destiny."
He goes on to explain how it is possible to support both the dirigiste New Labour approach and the more libertarian Tory attitude. "If you're moving from poor to fair, as we're doing with Pakistan's schools and as we did with some failing schools in England, that's one set of techniques. If you're moving from good to great, that's a different set. When you're improving a bad system or bad schools, you need to be really clear: here's what you teach, here's the lesson plans, here's the training. But when a system gets really good, you need to be significantly less prescriptive."
You may notice that Barber applies a four-point scale to education systems – poor, fair, good, great – and he probably dreams in four-point scales. But it would be unfair to pigeonhole him as a soulless automaton, lacking humanity. He is a more nuanced character than that. He was born in Liverpool to a prosperous Quaker family and went to a Quaker boarding school. His father, a pacifist, refused military service in the second world war and ferried medical supplies around China instead. A trained accountant, he later became chair of Oxfam.
Though Barber doesn't believe in God and rejects outright pacifism – a loyal Blairite, he insists that invading Iraq was "the right thing to do" – he says Quaker values still guide his life, particularly the belief that "you're on the planet to make a difference".
Despite giving off a sense of restless energy, he seems wholly comfortable, even serene, in his own skin. "What's wrong with counting beans?" is his response to those who dismiss him as a mere bean-counter. Even among critics who thought his ideas wrong, he has no real enemies. Estelle Morris, a Labour education secretary, says "he's the least machiavellian person I've ever known". In New Labour, he was one of the few who got on with both Blair and Gordon Brown, and Peter Hennessy, Queen Mary, University of London professor of contemporary history, says his achievement in negotiating the treacherous tides of Downing Street "verged on the miraculous".
After school, he studied history at Oxford, where he became president of Queen's College JCR (student union). Later, he trained as a teacher and taught in Watford, in Hertfordshire, and Zimbabwe. On his return to England, he joined the education department of the National Union of Teachers. He also enlisted in the Labour party in Hackney, east London, then ruled by a notoriously "loony left" council. He became chair of the council's education committee and fought the 1987 election for Labour in Michael Heseltine's Henley constituency. The battle was so unequal that he broadcast the latest cricket scores from his loudhailer instead of party policies. That was the end of his attempts at a political career; he was probably too diffident and professorial in manner to have much hope of success. Promoted to a senior role in the NUT, he left Hackney council in 1990.
He helped to organise the union's boycott of tests in 1993 when, he says, the issue was flawed government implementation. But he was increasingly uncomfortable with the large body of NUT opinion that opposed tests in principle. Later that year, he left for a professorship at Keele University and wrote in the Times that the union had to choose between accountability and oblivion. "Their position," he explains, "was to say to the government that, if you give us more money, we might improve the system. They should have said that we're going to improve the system and then you'll see we're worth investing in."
Such views made him a natural New Labour bedfellow, and an obvious choice as adviser to David Blunkett, then shadow education secretary. The two men talked often when Barber joined a "hit squad", set up by the Tories, to sort out the "failing" Hackney Downs comprehensive. Though the school had passionate defenders, it was recommended for closure, a decision that Barber, the squad's only local resident, publicly supported. "The stand we took on Hackney Downs," he wrote later, "became a foundation of New Labour's education policy."
Reflecting on the literacy and numeracy strategies, he says it was a mistake to underestimate their negative effect on teachers. "I thought being enabled to do their jobs better and see children in their classes doing better would have a transformative effect. I thought teachers would say: that's great." Which seems an odd misunderstanding for one who worked inside classrooms for six years and spent eight years in the largest teachers' union. But though he's a good and polite listener, he is apt, I think, to hear what he wants to hear and, like many people who derive their values from religious belief (even, in his case, an undoctrinaire religion, to which he no longer formally adheres), is a little too confident of his own rightness. "I've always enjoyed bouncing ideas around with him," says Tim Brighouse, former chief education officer of Birmingham and Barber's predecessor at Keele. "But I could never be as convinced as he is that my ideas are right."
That, perhaps, is the nature of government where, as Barber often observes, the relentless media scrutiny doesn't allow for doubt or hesitation. If, as one former colleague suggests, he designed simple solutions that provided the headlines ministers wanted, it is hard to dispute that schools were yanked in the right general direction, however clumsily. Some friends were sad to see him move to the private sector (Barber says he needed money to help his middle daughter after a serious accident), but they are reluctant to criticise explicitly.
But, Barber argues, Pearson is doing vital work in the developing world where, because government is often weak, the best hope lies with the private sector. He is still, he believes, fulfilling his mission to make a difference. Since he was always among the least cynical of New Labour acolytes, one must surely give him the benefit of any doubt.
After five years in existence, is the University and College Union proving to be a good match for further and higher?
'Tonight is the night when two become one," said the University and College Union's joint general secretary, Paul Mackney, quoting the Spice Girls, at a party held at the British Library in June 2006.
After a long and stormy engagement, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (Natfhe) had finally tied the knot.
Not everyone was convinced it was a match made in heaven. One of the biggest fears was that further education, which was in the minority in terms of membership, would be sidelined in favour of higher education.
After a year as joint general secretary with Mackney, Sally Hunt (from the AUT camp), defeated Roger Kline, the chief universities negotiator at Natfhe, by a narrow majority to become general secretary. Kline had stepped up to the plate when Mackney (of the Natfhe camp) decided not run for the top job due to ill-health.
In her election campaign, Hunt pledged not to let FE get sidelined, but five years on, has UCU delivered on that promise?
Negotiating national pay agreements has been effective in Wales, where the gap between school teachers' and FE lecturers' pay has completely disappeared. Although progress has been slower in England, the gap has narrowed from 9% in 2005 to 6% in 2010, the union claims.
The campaign has made principals wary of the union – something any union leader might take pleasure in. One college chief, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian: "Colleges can't afford to carry poor staff with poor attendance, but they don't relish taking on the UCU. Few principals who have the guts to take them on are around to tell the tale a few years later."
"I take that as a compliment," says Hunt. "Because colleges have control of their own funding, they don't feel bound to national pay agreements. Some simply ignore them. Some of them [colleges] are little chiefdoms and the principal is God. I'm not surprised that God is sometimes a bit upset if we come and knock on his door because we are not terribly impressed."
But the last five years have not always been easy. Hunt faced strong opposition in 2008 when she put forward proposals to restructure the union that involved replacing the eight departments in the union with three new ones.
Executive members complained that under the new plans, national negotiations jobs – then held by top officials – would become relatively junior roles. FE lecturers – already a minority in the union – were concerned this could weaken their position further.
"I'm not going to pretend there weren't teething problems, because there were very different cultural ways of organising things as well as political ways," says Hunt. "The joke used to be that Nafthe had all the policies and AUT had all the practice. Now you put those things together, there is always going to be some tension, but I don't think it's as bad as it could have been."
Hunt had to compromise on the restructuring, "getting 70% of what I wanted and dropping the 30% I was wrong on." But that is just how it works in unions, she says.
She insists that the voices of UCU's FE members are heard. And if it doesn't always seem that way, that's because much of what goes on does not get reported. "Schools and higher education will always get coverage, but FE, for reasons I find more and more incredible, doesn't."
While rumours abound of squabbles and infighting, those members Education Guardian spoke to were positive about the merger. "I think it has gone as well as could be expected," says Mackney. "Of course, there will always be people who say they feel marginalised, but that's normal. Most people I speak to in FE identify strongly with UCU and that doesn't always happen with mergers."
Sean Vernell, vice-chair of UCU's FE committee and lecturer at City and Islington College, says: "Sometimes people do feel as if higher education is getting more attention and members have to speak up to make sure further education isn't marginalised, but this does not detract from the considerable achievements of the merger."
But he thinks Hunt scored an own-goal with a speech at the annual conference last month in which she launched an attack on factionalism, implying that small groups of members were trying to dominate proceedings and shape the agenda, which she said had exposed the union to divide-and-rule tactics.
Rival candidate
"Many people were cross with that speech," says Vernell. "It was childish mud-slinging ... because she desperately wants to re-stand as general secretary." Elections are due to take place next spring, with campaigning starting in the autumn. The UCU Left has said it will definitely field a candidate against Hunt.
If Hunt is elected for a second term, she wants to slim down the union's national executive committee (NEC) and re-direct resources into building up local branches. With 68 members, NEC is still bloated (it has the same number as Unison, which has more than 10 times as many members) and many of these seats have been uncontested every year since the merger.
Hunt also complained at the conference that, over the last year, head office staff had produced 900 committee papers – time and money that could have been better invested on the ground working with members, she said.
One issue that has the potential for controversy is the expected growth in the number of higher education courses on offer at further education colleges.
The government is intent on opening up the market to a greater range of providers, so in addition to delivering degree courses on behalf of universities, colleges could be given their own degree-awarding powers. It's a thorny issue, because if colleges – and indeed private providers – can offer a more attractive alternative to university degrees, there is the potential for redundancies at universities.
Until now, the fight in further education has been focused on creating parity between school and college teachers' pay and conditions, but with many colleges now offering degree-level courses, college lecturers could end up taking on similar roles and responsibilities to university lecturers for less attractive salaries and employment conditions.
Hunt admits that UCU still has some way to go in supporting its members in further education. "I think we have delivered on what we promised, in terms of making our ability to represent our members better, stronger, more coherent." But as long as there are members who are struggling in disputes with their employers, she would not say she has done the job she set out to do.
"I'm not going to pretend everything's OK when it's not, but if we were two separate unions and we had FE as a minority of what was half of UCU … not a chance in hell. At least now we are in the position where we have the ability to try."
Hunt says her election campaign will centre on the need to put members' interests at the heart of the union, to get their views on what the union's priorities should be, instead of the current "top-down" approach from the national executive. "UCU must be a union that reflects what members see as important, rather than one that assumes it knows best."
education.letters@guardian.co.uk
With the right Oxbridge connections and lots of publicity, you too could set up your own college
Last week, AC Grayling and other distinguished academics announced that they were setting up an independent university college, the New College of the Humanities. It's just possible others could be interested in doing the same. Here is a 10-point guide for those who think this is finally the answer to making the kind of money that their peers in the City have earned for decades – or a bit of extra cash for a loft conversion.
Your institution will need a strong USP. Nobody is going to pay that little bit – or preferably a lot – extra for just another college providing private tuition to pass external degrees accredited by another university. Attend lots of dinner parties with other intellectuals, people in the media and the very rich from both sides of the Atlantic. Make sure as many of your fellow guests as possible are from a golden age when you had to pass Latin O-level to get into Oxbridge, which, naturally, most of them should have attended, unless they are the ones backing your initiative. In that case, it's OK if they just wish they had gone to Oxbridge. Discuss how the priceless benefits of a UK higher education are potentially being lost for your children's/grandchildren's generation. This has the added benefit of being an excuse to boast about going to Oxbridge. Bemoan how intellectually moribund and cash-obsessed the current government is – in fact all politicians are. Swap stories about the ridiculous sums that wealthy Americans are prepared to pay for university and how the UK is heading the same way. Speculate on who in the UK is set to make a lot of money out of all this …
Your subject, of course, then anything else that regularly comes up in conversation. Young people don't seem to be able to think properly these days and their morals are all over the place, so a bit of logic and ethics wouldn't go amiss. Employers seem to think that learning time-management and teamwork are as important as an in-depth knowledge of Wittgenstein, so you'd better offer these too.
Don't bother with science. It involves lots of expensive equipment and your professors would have to spend time with students in the lab rather than just pop in for the odd lecture. It also has much less publicity power – few people in the media studied it and even fewer can envisage their dyscalculic kids in a lab coat. Also, Brian Cox is likely to be too busy. Science literacy is a good compromise and might help students understand In Our Time.
Have a think about who you bumped into at last year's Hay festival and/or flick through the Radio Times to identify the world's most distinguished academics. Promise them generous rewards in return for a few lectures. Persuade a handful of former colleagues that this is a new and exciting venture that will pay handsomely and could present opportunities for them to appear on TV.
Either Oxford or Cambridge would be good, but they might involve a long-ish taxi ride after a transatlantic flight. A London location would mean your professorati could still be easily available for book launches and Television Centre. The capital will also seem cool and edgy to students. Why not choose Bloomsbury, which carries just the right connotations of intellectuals, artists, philosophers and nicely patterned wallpaper?
Think of the sum most UK universities are about to start charging, and double it.
Emphasise employment and internship opportunities, but also hint that it is OK to just travel and hang out for a while before starting a career. Let students know that while you want them to have three As at A-level, this is a very general guide and they will be assessed as individuals. As long as they meet the minimum requirements for your linked university's external degree programme – two A-level passes – this will be fine.
Stress that most students will have to have three As at A-level. Keep mentioning Oxbridge, one-to-one tutorials, the very distinguished professors that they will have seen on the telly and your extensive contacts with lucrative employers.
Don't worry if lots of other colleges are doing the same thing. Just say the word "new" a lot. Maybe even use it in the title. You may recall the Labour party once did this very successfully. Go on about how ground-breaking your initiative is. But not too much. Remember to hark back to a time when higher education was just better, which meant that society in general was better, too.
Keep mentioning Oxbridge. Try to launch your venture on a quiet Sunday – the end of a half-term week would be perfect. Have your hair trimmed in preparation for possible TV appearances.
Make sure that at least some poor, but worthy, students can attend by charging the others so much that there will easily be some money left over for scholarships and bursaries. Comfort yourself with the fact that some students could actually be better off studying with you than elsewhere, thanks to shockingly high tuition fees caused by successive governments selling out on higher education. Ignore snide articles in newspapers like the Guardian, and start planning that loft conversion.
With student complaints at a record high, universities will have to raise their game once tuition fees rise
Two universities that have broken official rules for dealing with student complaints are named today in the independent adjudicator's annual report. The two, Southampton and Westminster, are the first to be exposed in this way – yet another sign of the new era in which universities are expected to be more accountable to students who expect to be treated as customers.
The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), which reviews complaints when students have exhausted their university's procedures, also reports a record rise in the number of cases. Last year the office received 1,341 complaints against universities in England and Wales, the highest number ever and an unprecedented rise of one-third on the year before.
As the adjudicator himself, Rob Behrens, points out, 1,341 complaints represents just 0.05% of higher education students, and 53% of those were not justified. But, he also observes, the proportion of justified and partly justified complaints has grown for the first time in several years. He predicts the increase in complaints will continue. "It's to be expected where you have rising tuition fees, where students are being invited to behave like consumers and where the labour market is difficult so students will do what they can to ensure they qualify."
He says his decision to expose the universities of Southampton and Westminster is not "naming and shaming, with all the associations of moral censure that term implies". He was, he explains, simply following OIA rules – something those two institutions failed to do.
Westminster fell short in its handling of two complaints. One was from a student who argued a disability hadn't been properly taken into account. The adjudicator agreed. The other student claimed that an exam question and its marking scheme had been unreasonable. In both cases the university broke the rules by failing to resolve the cases, as recommended, promptly and in full.
At Southampton University, four months after the OIA concluded that an undergraduate had a justified complaint about their experience on a placement, the university continued to oppose the decision and was refusing compensation.
In a second case, the university also failed to comply with the adjudicator's decision. And in a third one, although the complaint turned out to be unjustified, for 10 months the university delayed the investigation by failing to provide evidence despite the adjudicator's repeated reminders.
At both universities, it was only after the adjudicator involved the vice-chancellors that the complaints began to be resolved.
Behrens is pleased the relationships between his office and both universities are now much more positive. "As the government places more emphasis on the student experience, complaints have an important role in safeguarding that," he says. "Universities must see complaints as feedback to become more professional."
Both Southampton and Westminster universities want to charge undergraduates annual fees of £9,000. There is an expectation, not only from ministers, but importantly from students and their families, too, that all universities wishing to increase charges will move to increase student satisfaction as well.
Before making an investment of £27,000, for example, each student will ask, "Is this good value? Is the teaching good? Is this the best route to a successful career?"
Universities are being encouraged, some may say pressurised, to become more transparent and accountable in a number of ways.
The government is urging all universities to publish a student charter, a sort of statement of terms and conditions to remind students of their responsibilities and their rights. Universities are also expected to publish "key information sets" by September 2012. These will enable students to shop around by providing the same 17 pieces of information about each institution, including, for example, the proportion of "contact" time and group work, and the careers and starting salaries of previous graduates.
The OIA is already looking at creative ways to cope with both finite resources and likely further rises in student complaints. Settling more disputes by phone is one option; helping universities to install an independent ombudsman on each campus – an idea borrowed from the Netherlands and the US – is another.
The question is, are UK universities well prepared for the new consumer culture where the deal is if you pay more, you expect more, and if you feel you're not getting it, you'll complain?
The question is particularly pertinent for the universities of Southampton and Westminster on the day they are exposed for dragging their feet with a legally established adjudicator. Both vice-chancellors were unavailable for interview.
In a statement, Professor Debra Humphris, Southampton's pro-vice-chancellor, education, said the vast majority of the small number of student complaints are dealt with swiftly, described the dialogue with the OIA as "constructive and supportive" and said that an improved complaints procedure will be in place this autumn.
In a more defiant statement, Professor Geoffrey Petts, vice-chancellor at Westminster, points out that the university is working with the OIA towards compliance with its recommendations: "The University of Westminster was disappointed to have been cited in the OIA report. The university has robust procedures for handling the very small number of formal complaints which it receives from students."
Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, has welcomed the new step of naming universities that don't fully co-operate with the adjudicator. "In an environment where students are paying higher fees and will therefore raise expectations, they need to know which institutions stick to the rules."
He also makes this warning: "Faced with increasing competition to recruit students, many universities are being tempted to make grander and grander claims. They need to improve their offer, but they need to be honest in what they promise."
The advice is echoed by Steve Smith, president of Universities UK and vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter. He sees, in the adjudicator's annual report, a sector getting to grips with a new world where students are more demanding and will make sure universities correctly follow procedures. "It is vital that institutions are upfront and transparent about what students can expect from their courses. In an age of marketing, don't oversell. Any institution will have to make sure they do what they say."
Meanwhile, Behrens is monitoring reaction to the naming of Southampton and Westminster to help him decide whether his office needs more coercive powers. Before he answers that, he makes one more announcement today: from January, where it is in the public interest, he will publish summaries of a number of his formal decisions about both justified and unjustified complaints. Individual names won't be revealed, but the universities will. Watch this space.
New research taken up by the Tory right is sneakily reintroducing the idea of 'innate' intelligence
Agreement over education policy may be rare, but the need to address persistent gaps in attainment and vastly differing life chances between children from different backgrounds has attracted significant all-party attention. The remedies may be disputed, but no one would now seriously question the need to eradicate what is undeniably a scar on British society. Or would they?
One piece of academic research has been particularly emblematic of the "gap" problem. Written in 2003 by Leon Feinstein, then a researcher at the LSE, it crunched the results of the 1970 Birth Cohort Study, which tracked the development of British children at 22 months, 42 months, and five and 10 years.
Feinstein's conclusions were stark. Children's test scores at 22 months could predict, though not determine, educational qualifications at 26 and were related to family background. The offspring of educated or wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests had a tendency to catch up, whereas the low-achieving children of worse-off parents were unlikely to. Early high-achievers from disadvantaged backgrounds were gradually overtaken by early poor-achievers from advantaged families.
Over the years, Feinstein's graph, illustrating the last point, has been heavily used by the left and right. It featured in David Willetts's controversial speech repudiating the idea that selective education was socially progressive, because gaps in attainment by 10 meant that children from wealthier backgrounds would always do better in any 11-plus.
It is quoted frequently by Michael Gove; most recently, and crudely, to MPs in defence of the hasty passage of the 2010 Academies Act. Inequality, he explained, was so entrenched that "rich, thick kids" achieve more than their "poor, clever" peers even before they start school.
Then, earlier this year, the graph took pride of place in Nick Clegg's social mobility strategy and a lot of policy initiatives now appear to ride on it: investment in early years; Tory conversion to comprehensive education; proposals to rebalance access to top universities using contextualised data; and repointing internships towards the have-nots.
Maybe not surprising, then, that a recent, rival piece of research taking issue with the graph's findings has, according to reports in this paper, found a hearing among restive Tory MPs. The alternative argument, made by Anna Vignoles and John Jerrim, suggests that Feinstein's work is flawed, because over time, and with repeated testing, the children's scores would have regressed to the mean, implying that the bright, poorer children were probably misclassified initially, thus didn't lose ground as they got older.
Feinstein, on loan to the Treasury, has not yet responded publicly, but in private is sticking robustly by his original paper, insisting that the statistical basis is sound, that his fellow academics overestimate the extent to which repeated testing would level out results, and that their work makes spurious assumptions about ability, leading to a dangerous conclusion that ability gaps are "innate", which may account for its appeal to the Tory right.
While it may not be wise to categorise any child as "bright" or "thick" on the basis of a few tests, the longer-term outcomes of the children in the original study appear to back up Feinstein's deeply held view that the potential of the least privileged in society is routinely squandered. Anyone familiar with his later work will know that he, and others, have also probed why it is that some children fall back in relation to what they are capable of achieving.
Schools do have a part to play in breeding academic success, vital personal skills and attributes. But money, parenting, relationships, culture and community also matter. Bright children can easily lose competitive advantage if they are battling with poverty and chaotic home lives in poor neighbourhoods. Others can develop ability and confidence if they have aspirant, supportive parents, good schools, cultural capital and (often) private tuition.
None of this is rocket science to those working with children from a range of backgrounds. The real question is why there might now be a political class searching for evidence to undermine such a powerful and widely accepted basis for more progressive policies.
My own theory is that we are moving into an era in which what Willetts once described as the "parental arms race" will be increasingly fierce and give rise to a mean, rancorous streak. The better-off already fight like tigers to protect what they perceive to be their children's right to a place at the top. What better way to up the ante than by sneakily reintroducing the idea of "innate" intelligence, subtly linked to family background, restoring the idea of a natural order, which social policy cannot interrupt.
A new scheme from the James Dyson Foundation hopes to inject passion into design and technology teaching
It's one of the biggest "Cinderella" subjects on the curriculum – but could design and technology be about to get the makeover its advocates say it urgently deserves? Under a new initiative, to be launched in September, the country's best DT teachers are to be given passports to the frontline of British industry and then encouraged to feed back their experience to other DT teachers at regional workshops
It's all part of the billionaire inventor James Dyson's attempt to move in where others have failed and provide what he argues is a much-needed boost to a subject that's had bad PR stretching back decades.
Under the initiative – which will establish a network of "DT ambassadors" – the James Dyson Foundation will spend £100,000 on recruiting outstanding DT teachers, who will be invited to spend days away from the classroom to go into businesses to see how their subject translates into providing core skills within different industries.
Dyson says he is extremely concerned about the declining number of pupils studying DT. "China has compulsory technology lessons, and I think we could learn from that," he says. "DT inspires young people to go into industry as designers, but also, it inspires creativity and – perhaps most importantly – encourages them to work out their own answers to problems. It gives them vital life skills, whether they go on to become engineers or not – and we downgrade it at our peril. DT can come across as dry if it doesn't have enthusiastic teachers with direct experience of how it's used in the workplace. I want to stimulate, inform and inspire DT teachers, who will go on to enthuse others."
Richard Green, chief executive of the Design and Technology Association, which is working with the James Dyson Foundation on the scheme, says the big fear is that the English baccalaureate, introduced last year as a way of grading results at GCSE, will sideline DT as a subject. "Because of the way the Ebacc works, many schools are now readjusting their curriculum lower down the school to concentrate on Ebacc subjects earlier on – and since these don't include DT, it's not being prioritised.
"In one school, pupils are being withdrawn from a quarter of their DT lessons to concentrate on a modern language because the school wants to boost languages in readiness for those all-important GCSE scores.
"But it makes no sense to have the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills talking about a shortage of people with creative skills in the next decade, while the Department for Education moves towards a more academic curriculum that cuts DT out."
Dyson would like to see DT included in the Ebacc subjects. "I'm all in favour of broadening education, but it needs to be broader still, so DT is acknowledged as the vital subject it is," he says.
"It took me years to realise that DT was my subject, because at my school 'woodwork', as we called it, was for thickos, and I was a bright boy, so the assumption was that I wouldn't be interested in it. This is the perception that I'm fighting to change – because if DT had had the profile it deserves back then, I'd have cottoned on to it a lot sooner than I eventually did."
Eight teachers have so far been identified for the new initiative – among them Steven Parkinson, subject leader for design, technology and engineering at Archbishop Holgate's school in York. "This is about closing the gap between industry and school, so that schools – and that means teachers and pupils – can be inspired in terms of what it's possible to achieve," he says.
"The exciting end of DT is in real-life situations, in business and industry – but often teachers haven't any direct experience of that, because they've gone straight from school through university and training, back into school as a teacher. What they need is to see how their subject makes a difference in boardrooms and on shop floors – and this scheme is going to help do that.
"DT is a whole process – it's a living subject. In school it's too often seen as banging a few nails into pieces of wood, and we have to make people aware of the fact that it's much, much more than that."
In addition to the new funding for DT champions – which will be used largely to provide teaching cover when teachers on the scheme are out of the classroom in industry – the James Dyson Foundation recently announced £1m worth of funding for bursaries for design and engineering students. Last year, it announced a £5m donation to the Royal College of Art, Dyson's alma mater, to provide new buildings including business incubator units – another pledge to boost engineering. It also loans out engineering kits to schools, enabling pupils to try assembling a vacuum cleaner. Dave Elton, head of resistant materials technology at Malmesbury school in Wiltshire, says the kit is an effective way of helping pupils to connect the subject with a real-life industrial challenge. "We tend to use it with sixth-form students, who then work with pupils further down the school, sharing their skills and knowledge," he says.
Elton says he would welcome the chance to become a DT ambassador. "It's a really good idea, with the current shake-ups in education, to have a scheme like this that helps cement the place of DT in the classroom. DT teachers have to be passionate about their subject, and the way they become passionate about it is seeing for themselves how it works in the wider world."
• This article was amended on 14 June 2011. The original referred to Bishop Holgate school in York. This has been corrected.
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network, a lesson in design from the James Dyson Foundation
On the Guardian Teacher Network this week, you can find a special design and technology lesson, prefaced by James Dyson and created by Steven Parkinson, the James Dyson Foundation's 2011 award-winning teacher. Parkinson, from Archbishop Holgate's school in York, has created a presentation that inspires KS3 students to think critically about product design. They will then be tasked with creating their own product – anything from protective clothing for an army officer serving in Afghanistan to a power tool for a family living in the jungle. To download the lesson go to: www.teachers.guardian.co.uk/resources.aspx?q=Dyson&INTCMP=NECEDUIMG4537 or http://bit.ly/ieV6uz.
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers free access to more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This content is being added to every day by teachers and specialists. Nearly 32,000 teachers have already signed up. To see (and share) for yourself, go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also nearly 2,000 jobs on the site and schools can advertise free http://schools jobs.guardian.co.uk.
Green universities, IT in schools, tobacco money
Last week Education Guardian published the People & Planet Green League, ranking universities for their environmental performance.
Emissions will be mostly related to buildings and their energy performance. Reasons for not doing anything tend to boil down to laziness, lack of knowledge or lack of resources. With a smirk on my face I'd suggest the latter two did not apply.
Plataea via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• In my experience the universities are more concerned with new builds and expansion rather than upgrading existing buildings and consolidation. The main point is to create more space for more PhDs, more post-docs etc. This means they then score more highly for research so they can get more money for more expansion.
cougarlover via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Look at the figures behind the list. For example, Liverpool Uni is building a huge new halls. This building is energy efficient and due to its location will result in some students not having to get the bus. So while emissions will be up at the moment, this is because there needs to be a long-term plan.
Rubenremus via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• This is great work. People & Planet have been leading the way and should be recognised as the main reason most universities show any improvement at all.
alexwest via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Sue Learner reported on middle-class parents and early-years practitioners who view technology as bad for young children.
The Steiner/Waldorf system, which is viewed suspiciously by traditionalist educators, does not introduce computer learning until after 12 years old. This is not based on science, rather a feeling of what is right or beneficial.
Qube2 via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Both my children, now in their late teens, attended a Steiner school. Any engagement with technology was proscribed, at home and at school. The older child was not able to read at the age of 12, still cannot spell and has completely illegible handwriting. It was only when we took him out of the school and bought him a laptop that he was able to communicate in written form – he has had to do all his exams on a computer (at another school). The Steiner method really wasn't effective in his case.
allermuir via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Computers are almost limitlessly stimulating. A few bricks, or crayon and paper require more from a child. The possibility of boredom may be valuable.
robrose via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Lucy Tobin reported on a row at Durham University over tobacco company cash.
In the current environment of cuts, the best thing is to draw funds from as wide a spectrum as possible. Why not use tobacco money? You would use it if recycled through the Treasury in the form of a public grant.
Petunia via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• What advice were the financiers and fundraisers given about the reputation risk and did they ignore it? Surely the money disappeared in a puff of smoke when calculations are made about damage to the Durham brand, negative publicity, withdrawn funding or boycotts, lost opportunity.
CarolineMacInnis via EducationGuardian.co.uk
It's hard to find somewhere that offers courses like furniture making, jewellery and upholstery. Don't kill this off with cuts
The bombshell course cuts at London Metropolitan University where I am doing a part-time furniture-making degree are having unexpected repercussions. None of the cuts have been implemented yet, but potential students are being turned off the idea of a university that hit the headlines at Easter with the news that it is culling 70% of its courses.
London Met is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's financially strapped and desperate to save money; there was no good time to announce any cuts, which of course have been greeted with widespread anger and threats; tutors say that the news has seen interviewees for the new academic year in the autumn – in which courses are still guaranteed – cancelling. Last week, Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the Commons public accounts committee, called for students to be made aware of the financial health of the institution they are seeking to attend. Not unreasonable, but such a reality could be catastrophic here.
And all this gloom just added to the pressure-cooker atmosphere around end of term last week. The whole place was frantic, with students working to hand in projects on time. People struggled to find a bench or machine on which to complete their masterpiece. Where once there was time to stop and chat, now we rush past asking "How's it going?", and "Are you winning?" You get a nod, a sigh or a look of anguish.
I made a rather stylish, 50s-look kitchen table in oak, with a groovy pale blue, geometric-pattern Formica top. But it was a desperate race to finish in time and produce something half decent for the summer show. I had a massive swearing fit after two days of fruitless attempts to cut a sliding dovetail joint in the central divider of the table. The divider is vital, joining the back and front rails of the table and providing the tramlines on which the two drawers will glide like Torvill and Dean. But could I cut the joint using the router – a fiendish electric device that is meant to make these things easy? Could I heck as like. In the end I gave up and used a delicate little saw and a chisel – easy! It took 20 minutes. Cue more effing and blinding. Apologies to offended students and technicians for breaking the router.
I sometimes grab a workbench in the guitar-making class, where intense young maestros build stupendous instruments that look and sound like works of art. When the woodwind class test out their latest creations, the ethereal sound of flutes softens the clamour of saws and mallets.
Last week, I found space in a class filled with antique furniture; by my elbow, a French sedan chair with red-plush velvet interior that is being restored after life as a novelty phone box in a French bar; nearby, an 18th-century escritoire and a gothic-looking ebonised grandfather clock. And where else but here among the shavings, glue, paintbrushes and odd-smelling bottles of varnish would you spy a copy of Debrett's – the authoritative tome on how to say howdy-do to aristos (presumably useful when trying to blag a Hepplewhite).
The whole point of this place, a former polytechnic, is that it offers esoteric stuff that other academic institutions don't: jewellery, musical instruments, fine furniture, upholstery, conservation and restoration. Long may this beautiful eccentricity reign. For the sake of creativity in all its diverse forms, please don't desert London Met.
Americans like to celebrate their Irish and Scottish roots, but not their English ones. Why is that?
"My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I've come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way," joked the US president when he visited Ireland en route to the UK last month. Like John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan before him, Obama was just another US president embracing his Celtic heritage. And the practice isn't just for those looking for a vote-winner: Yankees have always loved to talk up their Irish blood – and Scottish, too. But Americans celebrating their Englishness? That's not quite so common.
Now a group of academics want to find out why. Donald MacRaild, professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, and his colleagues Tanja Bueltmann and David Gleeson, reckon English cultural communities did exist in North America, but have been ignored by traditional historians.
The academics believe the commonly accepted truth – that the English assimilated into Anglo-American culture without any need to shout about their separate ethnicity – just isn't true. And they're now embarking on a three-year project to prove their case. The study – called Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective – focuses on the years between 1760 and 1950 to find out where history lost sight of Englishness in America.
"The English," says MacRaild, "have had very little exposure to the historian's gaze, and we want to rectify that. Back in the 1730s, the English in North America formed an array of ethnic clubs and societies, like the St George's Society, in the same way that their Irish and Scottish peers had St Patrick's societies, Caledonian societies and St Andrew's societies. They provided charity – from meal tickets to Christmas gifts – to poorer English immigrants, and celebrated English events. But since then, no one has shown much interest in the English cultural legacy. Whilst the Irish, Scots, Germans, and many other European ethnic groups have been subjected to dozens, if not hundreds, of studies, it hasn't been so for the English."
The Arts and Humanities Research Council clearly agreed with MacRaild's point. The distributor of state cash for academic research has gifted the Northumbria trio £286,000 to re-examine English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts, photos, newspaper articles and books. The trio will also look at contemporary traces of Englishness in the US. "A huge number of American traditions come from England," says MacRaild. "We took tiddlywinks to America as well as cricket, association football and the annual Easter egg-rolling tradition at the White House."
Other evidence of Englishness have been spotted in reports of immigrants to the US celebrating St George's Day, toasting Queen Victoria, marking Shakespeare's birthday and Morris dancing. "So much that is English is liked in America, from the way universities work, to a love of English culture and history and a belief in the fundamentals of individualism and democracy," MacRaild adds. "What Americans don't do today is to simply see themselves as an extension of England. That began to die quite quickly after the American Revolution of the 1770s and 1780s."
As the founding colonists, the English were the benchmark against which other ethnic groups measured themselves, the academics have found thus far. "Whilst the Irish saw themselves as a victim diaspora, they saw the English as central to their victimisation. We also have lots of evidence of conflict between the English and Americans over dual allegiances to Uncle Sam and Queen Victoria. In many towns, there was significant conflict between the Irish and the English as they extended their homeland disagreements into the new world."
Previously under-examined manuscripts are throwing new light on centuries of US politics and nationalism, MacRaild reports. He is currently analysing an article in The Republic: A Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Politics & Art from June 1852, which expressed anger that the English in New York were swearing allegiance to the monarch of England. "The magazine's editor accepted that the British consul had every right to 'reiterate their loyalty and subjection to her most excellent Majesty, even to the kissing of her most excellent Majesty's little toe-nail'," says MacRaild. "But that wasn't acceptable for immigrants who, becoming American citizens, had 'solemnly abjured and renounced' Victoria. There were clearly divisions. Nowadays the English are dubbed 'invisible immigrants'. That plainly isn't true."
The Northumbria academics believe that a central reason for the lack of interest in English nationalism abroad was confusion about its status at home. "The apparent absence of a sense of an English diaspora derives partly from the weak and bitty nature of Englishness at home," says MacRaild. "Contemporary English identity, under pressure in a dissolving United Kingdom, drifts between tub-thumping populism and teary-eyed public spectacle. English people experience cultural cringe against anything which separates Englishness from Britishness." The professor points out that the 2001 UK census added the ethnic category Irish, but not English, while in Scotland, Scottish and Irish were identified as ethnic categories alongside British, but English was absent.
The next stage of the Englishness project is to connect the findings to the present day. The researchers are working on books, an exhibition and a series of public lectures to expatriate community groups throughout North America. They also intend to work with local folk groups in the UK to spread the news about the English in America, and hope that English-Americans will make a "homecoming event" like that set up by the Scottish government in 2009 to lure ex-pats back to the land of their ancestors. "Englishness in England is bedevilled with fears about rightwing, nationalist politicians and football hooligans," says MacRaild. "We hope that demonstrating the vibrancy of Englishness beyond England's shores will contribute to debates about how Englishness fits into today's multi-ethnic and increasingly federal political culture."
Internet trolls are maddening, but a lecturer has set up a guide to interacting with them
A new study tries to sharpen our understanding of the highly verbal parasites known as trolls. Trolls – call them internet trolls, if you like – are in some ways quite similar to Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan parasite that causes malaria in large numbers of human beings. Both kinds of parasite are maddeningly difficult to suppress. They manage, again and again, to return after we thought we'd seen the last of them. Each can, if left untreated, cause agony or worse.
These trolls infect any place where people gather electronically to converse by writing comments to each other. Trolls creep into and crop up anywhere they can, wheedling for attention in chat rooms, Twitter streams, blogs, and, as you may have noticed, in the comments section of online news articles.
One of the many annoying things about internet trolls is that it's difficult to define, with academic rigour, what they do. Claire Hardaker, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and a PhD student at Lancaster University, took up the challenge. Her study, Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication, is published somewhat counter-intuitively in the Journal of Politeness Research.
Hardaker presented an early form of the paper to a mostly troll-free audience at the Linguistic Impoliteness and Rudeness conference held at her university in 2009.
After much research and hard work, Hardaker came up with a working definition. A troll is someone "who constructs the identity of sincerely wishing to be part of the group in question, including professing or conveying pseudo-sincere intentions, but whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement".
She arrived at this after much trawling through data. Lots of data. A "172-million-word corpus of unmoderated, asynchronous computer-mediated communication", a nine-year collection of commentary in an online discussion group about horse riding. She focused in on the huge number of passages where people mentioned trolls, trolling, trolled, trollish, trolldom, and other variations on the key word "troll".
Distilling the wisdom, Hardaker set up this handy guide to interacting with trolls:
"Trolling can (1) be frustrated if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but are not provoked into responding, (2) be thwarted if users correctly interpret an intent to troll, but counter in such a way as to curtail or neutralise the success of the troller, (3) fail if users do not correctly interpret an intent to troll and are not provoked by the troller, or, (4) succeed if users are deceived into believing the troller's pseudo-intention(s), and are provoked into responding sincerely. Finally, users can mock troll. That is, they may undertake what appears to be trolling with the aim of enhancing or increasing effect, or group cohesion.
Any comments?
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
• This article was amended on 14 June to correct the name of the researcher's institutions.
Study says nursery staff and 'affluent' parents are spurning new technologies in early years
While most pre-school children are playing with cars or drawing with crayons, a group of three-year-olds at a nursery in Bath are colouring in on iPads and navigating their way through an interactive storybook.
Snapdragons is one of the first nurseries in Britain to use iPads to teach children. It is buying touchscreen tablets for all of its six nurseries. "Digital technology is part of children's everyday lives," says manager iPads. "I think it would be negligent for us not to focus on it."
The iPads are used for learning the basics about letters, numbers, shapes and colours, as well as drawing and even composing music. "Staff are also using it for interactive storytelling. The children can press the characters and see them move. I am not saying it should replace books, and we would never use the iPads to replace valuable outdoor time," he says.
But a new study suggests many nursery staff – and parents too – see time spent using screens as a bad thing, liable to make children unsociable or, even, obese.
Dr Rosie Flewitt from the Open University says nurseries and pre-schools that engage with new technologies in constructive and exciting ways are "the exception rather than the norm". Flewitt and her research associate, Dr Sylvia Wolfe from Cambridge University, found many early years practitioners lacked confidence in how to use technology, were uncertain about its value, "or feared the potential harm to 'childhood'".
Their study, Multimodal Literacies in the Early Years, found some parents and practitioners are afraid "new technologies might damage children's wellbeing, social interaction and learning".
Concerns have been raised in the past about how many children from poor families miss the opportunity to use computers and iPods, but this time it is educated, middle-class families who are in the spotlight, as well as nurseries.
"Some children from highly educated, affluent families had very little exposure to new technologies," says Flewitt, "whereas some children from less affluent families were given excellent support at home to develop their literacy skills through diverse uses of new technologies."
The study found the children who were the most computer savvy "were also the ones who took part in the greatest range of indoor and outdoor activities, and led extremely diverse lives".
Flewitt says some parents have been influenced by books and the media that have explored how the modern world damages children. "Parents are very vulnerable to scaremongering about the dangers often associated with new technologies," she says. And, according to Lydia Plowman, professor of education at Stirling University, for some parents and practitioners "technology is seen as responsible for children's lack of social skills and emotional development, the loss of pleasure in books and reading, and attacks on their physical and mental wellbeing."
Plowman, author of a study called Rethinking Young Children and Technology, says parents pick up concerns from media stories about couch potato kids who prefer computer games to sport and become antisocial and obese. And parents often draw on their own experiences of being a child to guide them: digital technology is not part of their childhood memories. "For parents who like to feel that they have a reasonable level of control over their young children's activities, keeping up with all these changes can seem daunting."
Flewitt's study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, concludes that parental beliefs had a huge impact on how children used digital media, with some children developing sophisticated skills, while others lacked both skills and confidence. Practitioners in nurseries and pre-schools are in an ideal position to bridge the growing gap, she says. But they are not given the support they need.
"There is a lack of guidance on how to support literacy with digital technologies," says Flewitt. The exception was with children with learning difficulties or physical difficulties, as practitioners had realised new technology could really help.
"If early years education continues to focus exclusively on traditional forms of literacy, then it will be failing to provide all children with the skills they will need at school and in their future lives," she says.
Dr Richard House, senior lecturer in psychology at Roehampton University and founder of Open Eye, which campaigns against the Early Years Foundation Stage, often called the "nappy curriculum", is one of those who believes younger children should not be using digital technologies.
He points to "an increasing body of research which shows that early exposure to these technologies actually compromises healthy child development in all kinds of negative ways".
He believes the tendency to not engage with new technologies is a conscious decision "made by highly experienced practitioners with an intuitive feel for what is developmentally appropriate, rather than being the fear-driven, reactionary viewpoint that the researchers seem to be assuming".
Literacy expert Sue Palmer, author of the bestseller Toxic Childhood, says Flewitt is "completely misguided". "Too much engagement with this quick-fix technology is making it more difficult for some children to learn to read and write," she says. "Learning to read and write is not easy. It is a long, slow process. We already have problems with children not being able to hold a pen or pencil. But we are giving our kids instant gratification all the time with ICT and it makes it harder for them to persevere with something that takes a while to learn." And in any case, "Any digital skills that pre-school children learn will be out of date by the time they are teenagers," she says.
Dr John Siraj-Blatchford, honorary professor at the University of Swansea centre for child research, believes the iPad and other new mobile touchscreen technologies have enormous potential in supporting children's literacy. "Generally speaking, if technologies are suitable for three- to five-year-olds, adults don't find them too challenging." He agrees that "there is an articulate but relatively small minority of parents who are very concerned about children's screen time", but believes the new technologies will change attitudes. "The new mobile technologies often encourage interaction rather than the solitary and sedentary activity encouraged by arcade games," says Siraj-Blatchford.
Megan Pacey, chief executive of Early Education, a national organisation for early years practitioners, says: "Technology in the early years is a very emotive area. There does seem to be a middle-class attitude that technology is not always good. But it is all about moderation and context."
Durham University's decision to accept award funding from tobacco firm causes a storm of protest
When Durham University launched an appeal to fund postgraduate scholarships for female students from Afghanistan, the last thing it must have expected was criticism. But despite the successful chancellor's appeal raising more than £600,000, and rapidly being put to use, with two women from Kabul University already enrolled in postgraduate studies at the northern university, the initiative has put Durham at the centre of controversy.
The reason? £125,000 of the money used to bring the Afghans to the UK was a donation from British American Tobacco (BAT), the cigarette giant that last year made a £2.5bn profit selling brands including Lambert & Butler cigarettes and Rizla papers to smokers around the world. That, say students, academics, charities and alumni, is putting the university's reputation at risk. They are uniting to condemn the funding of Durham's Afghan Women Appeal, and to ask the university to send the cash back.
"Although it may seem admirable to take funds for a worthy cause, BAT's efforts to look respectable come at a very cheap price," says Jean King, director of tobacco control at Cancer Research UK. "The death and disease caused by BAT's products dwarf this small award." The cancer charity – which itself will not financially support institutions working with the tobacco industry – believes Durham may have contravened the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That legislation, ratified by the UK government, says government-funded bodies should not engage in "socially responsible" activities that are funded by cigarette makers. "Durham University should be ashamed to have taken these funds," King adds. "We hope that other less lethal sources of funding can be found to support the education of Afghan women."
Those views are echoed by many groups within the university. While Durham's student newspaper, Palatinate, reports that some on campus believe the Afghan education ends justify the means, its editorial reads: "However laudable the end, the university would do well to accept that the association with such a tobacco company is in itself damaging to Durham's reputation as a first-class British university." Meanwhile, a group of leading Durham academics have written to their vice-chancellor saying the acceptance of BAT's gift "does not sit well with our commitment as a university to being 'a socially responsible institution'". They also point out to colleagues across British academia that the Universities Superannuation Scheme – the pension fund of choice for most UK academics – invested £214m in BAT last year. The group urges academics to "take a stand about their retirement income being dependent on the prosperity of a company which actively markets its deadly products worldwide."
Durham University's leadership, unsurprisingly, takes a different stance. "The chancellor's appeal to fund a programme of postgraduate scholarships for Afghan women has been widely recognised as a pioneering fundraising drive," its spokesman says. "The university can confirm that in June 2010 it accepted a financial donation from BAT to support this appeal. Alongside donations from more than 2,000 others, this contributed towards the appeal's target to fund a Durham University education for five female graduates from Kabul University each year for the next five years … The BAT donation was accepted following careful consideration by the university executive committee in line with its gift-acceptance policy, which is approved by university council. Maximising the resources available to support studentships is an important way in which the university supports its educational purpose."
But its mollification doesn't seem to be working. On and off campus, outrage is growing. "Academic institutions should not take funding from any tobacco company," says Martin Dockrell, for the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash). "The industry has a long record of systematically undermining academic health research – notably on the role of smoking in causing cancer, the addictiveness of nicotine and the effect of second-hand smoke."
Dockrell adds that BAT could use Durham's acceptance of cash to boost its own credentials. "Internal tobacco industry documents show how the industry uses corporate social responsibility to preserve its 'licence to operate'," he says. "By appearing to be good corporate citizens who advance the education of Afghan women, they will be tolerated despite the harm they cause to health." A BAT spokeswoman disputed that claim, however. "We approach corporate social investment as an end in itself, rather than as a way to promote ourselves," she says. "We have long supported tertiary education, including management and business education, and will continue to do so."
Yet Durham's wider community is also noticing the furore. Keith Burnett, who studied for a master's in social science at Durham in the 1990s, has complained to its chancellor, the writer Bill Bryson. "The University of Durham should have known better," Burnett says. "It's meant to have an active ethical scrutiny process, which has evidently failed in this case. The only sure way for the university to restore its reputation now will be to return the money."
Burnett – who has worked for the NHS on anti-smoking initiatives – is also worried about the impact of the BAT funding on individual researchers, and whether that was considered by the ethics committee who rubberstamped the donation.
This is a growing problem for academics, particularly as universities' squeezed budgets put them under more pressure to accept money from large corporations, or even individuals, according to Prem Sikka, professor of accountancy and lecturer on business ethics at the University of Essex.
"Even if tobacco companies like BAT don't pressurise university staff directly, academics will feel forced to censor themselves – they will fear that upsetting a financial benefactor might cause the university to lose its funding, or hit their promotion prospects," Sikka says. "This kind of donation always creates a dilemma. But sadly it's part of the increasing corporatisation of universities. There's this idea that money from any source will do – the focus is increasingly on money and decreasingly on values."
The Durham tobacco funding controversy isn't the first. Back in 2000, Nottingham University's acceptance of £4m in sponsorship from BAT caused a stream of academic resignations as campaign groups said it had sold out by accepting "tainted" money. More recently, contentious donations have included the £1.5m given to the London School of Economics from the family of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which led to the resignation of its director Howard Davies.
The latest controversy proves just how seriously universities need to think about their "mission statement" before accepting cash, says Jonathan Wolff, professor of philosophy at University College London.
"It's a great idea to provide scholarships for Afghan women at Durham," he says. "And because it is such a great idea I would have thought that it should be possible to fundraise in a less controversial manner. In taking money, universities should have regard to their mission statement, or general statement of aims, and consider whether accepting money from a particular source is consistent with their announced aims."
Universities have always had roles that transcend national boundaries, says Peter Scott, but there is an ugly side to internationalisation
Like widening participation, internationalisation is a "good thing". But while widening participation is more observed in the breach than in the observance, bar the efforts of a dozen big urban "post-1992" universities, internationalisation is for everyone. In a word search of university strategic plans, "internationalisation" would probably top the poll. Examples abound. For instance, University College London proudly proclaims it is "London's Global University".
But what does internationalisation mean? The experts, of course, define it as the highest stage of international relations among universities. It is not just a fancy word to justify packing in more (high-fee) international students, or even a label to describe exotic partnerships (which inevitably demand much travelling by senior managers). The whole institution – its courses and curriculum, all its students, its research reach – has become infused with an international spirit.
I prefer a simpler distinction – the good, the bad and the ugly. Internationalisation is a clumsy word used to describe a wide range of activities, some of which we should be very proud of, and others best left in the shadows. But first, we need to dispose of the rhetoric. The overwhelming majority of universities were established as national institutions – for example, the big civic universities here in Britain and the land-grant universities in the US. They were not spontaneously created somewhere in the international ether.
Of course, universities have always had roles that transcend their national boundaries. Students and scholars have always been "mobile". International research collaboration has always flourished. Scientific communities have always been global. But all of this happened without any need for managerial-bureaucratic initiatives to "internationalise" the university. Internationalisation is a neologism, dating back to the 1980s at the earliest – and, disconcertingly, aligned with neo-liberalism.
So back to the good, the bad and the ugly. The good aspects of internationalisation are things such as its potential to transform the lives of international students; its role in sustaining, and growing, science and scholarship through vigorous academic exchanges; and its potential to build social and economic capacity (especially, but not exclusively, in developing countries). The first of these will always endure. But the second nowadays often seems a contingent effect of other, less wholesome, objectives; while the third, I fear, is dwindling into insignificance.
The bad aspects, sadly, are the mainstream drivers of internationalisation. First is the pressure to recruit international students, almost entirely because they can be charged higher fees. Maybe the post-Browne ability to charge English students much higher fees will curb that appetite.
Second is the drive for geopolitical and commercial advantage. In the eyes of government, this is what it is all about. For institutions it has the advantage of gold-plating, and future-proofing, international student recruitment. Either way, ethical considerations count for little. The recent London School of Economics imbroglio with Gaddafi was a modestly venial example. Of greater concern is the way British universities have piled into China, human rights record be damned.
Third is global positioning. UCL's "global" claim in its strapline is an assertion of status. The same applies to membership of global alliances of research-intensive universities or just of "top" universities. Maybe as national hierarchies have become more open, as they have in Britain with the abandonment of the binary distinction between universities and polytechnics and the unpredictable effect of league tables, newly constructed global hierarchies offer a comforting refuge.
Finally, the ugly: "international flight". Universities that struggle to recruit students at home have targeted less discerning international students to fill their places. Others have attempted to overcome chronic threats to their sustainability, perhaps because they are too small or too specialised, by engaging in what can only be described as foreign adventures, fraught with financial and reputational risks. Both strategies subvert their core responsibilities as UK institutions founded and funded with national purposes in mind.
There is an urgent need to reset the compass of internationalisation, to steer towards the good and away from the ugly. Not only is this morally right, it is also probably in the best long-term interests of the sector. At the very least, it provides firm ground on which to stand against the rising wind of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-"other" populism.
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
There's a sharp increase in people signing up to learn a trade, and a lot of the new recruits are women
Remember the joke, "how many women does it take to change a lightbulb?" Well, forget the old punchline. The new answer appears to be "just one, and she'll charge you a £40 callout fee".
Colleges are reporting a sudden upsurge in students signing up to learn how to be an electrician, decorator, mechanic or builder, and much of the increase seems to be down to female students. Far more women are now choosing to train in these trades, rejecting the more traditionally "female" roles of hairdresser, childminder, care worker or beautician.
"Welding and fabrication is absolutely booming," says Andy Dawson, assistant director of manufacturing and technology at Preston College. All his welding courses are full and he's recently had to put on two more - also running at capacity.
Overall applications for Preston College's mechanical engineering and electrical engineering courses are up 50% on 2010. Bournemouth and Poole college has 17% more enrolled on painting and decorating courses this year compared with last, and Harlow College is this year processing more than double the number of applications for painting and decorating it received for entry in September 2010.
Ask students why they're choosing to train for these jobs and the answer, Harlow principal Colin Hindmarsh, says, is that "these students are thinking about their future and doing something about it".
"The labour market for the under-24s looks grim. We're finding that our students are becoming more entrepreneurial, they want to be in charge of their own destiny and these sorts of vocational courses allow them to set up their own businesses. They can be self-employed and self-reliant.
"In the current climate, without getting a high-level qualification in a trade like welding, they don't think they will get a job," says Dawson.
The rapid rise in the cost of a degree may well be playing a part, says Michael Grange at Derby College. "With universities charging higher fees, we seem to be attracting the better students; certainly the ones who apply have better qualifications and are more focused."
"We've had a significant increase in the number of women on this kind of course," says Hindmarsh, "most noticeably in painting and decorating. At level 2, two thirds of our students are female."
At Bournemouth and Poole College, head of construction Mark Loose says the number of women doing painting and decorating is up by 30%. At Preston college, Dawson says that whereas a few years ago six or seven girls might have done welding and fabrication and motor vehicle courses, this year it's 40 to 50. Newcastle college has taken on its first female scaffolding apprentice, and hopes more will apply.
For Kerry Isom, 22, just finishing her second year as a painting and decorating apprentice at Bournemouth and Poole College, the motivation comes from the creativity she can bring to her work, and job satisfaction. Currently employed by her local council and doing one day at week at college, Isom's work is, says her tutor, "exceptional", and won her the Johnstone's Young Painter of the Year award last October.
"I wasn't sure about the job prospects at first," she says. "But I like the fact you're not behind a desk, and you can see what you've done. Painting's quite relaxing!"
Isom wants to travel and knows she's got a skill that will make her good money around the world.
Ruth Brough, 49, is currently studying to be a plumber and renewables installer with New Career Skills. Changing careers and looking to "make the most of the rest of my working life" she hopes she has discovered a market niche where she can work in the practical way she enjoys, and help people to live the greener lifestyle she believes in.
Plumbers and electricians are now having to get to grips with green technologies and more stringent health and safety regulations, says the chief executive of New Career Skills, Steven Wines — an evolution that may be attracting more women as the perception of traditional trades changes from blue collar to "green collar".
Wines also notes that female plumbers or electricians have an interesting market advantage: hiring a woman for work in the home can be reassuring for older people, or women living alone, which, he says, "creates a niche for a female tradesperson".
But are there jobs to be had in sectors that have always employed men and may be reluctant to take on a woman, no matter how well qualified? According to Tony Joyce, head of construction at Tresham College, "the opportunities need more advertising from the construction industry."
The informal way in which recruitment often happens in vocational trades still prevents women getting jobs in significant numbers, says Linda Clarke, professor of European industrial relations at Westminster University. "If you go into colleges, there's a far higher proportion of women training than you'll find actually working in the labour market," she says. "And I don't see that's changing very much."
However at Newcastle College, Colin Stott, director of the National Construction Academy, says that in his experience, companies are more interested in the someone's competencies than their gender. "Many [women] have had success as finalists in national competitions and the majority have found employment following completion of their course," he says.
Dawson confirms this: "Particularly in motor vehicle, females are as good if not better. And their work ethic is often very good. They seem to be more rational about doing the tasks and, particularly in the 16-18 age range, a bit more mature. They're more methodical and are very keen."
Says Loose: "They have proved to be more competent decorators than the boys — often their drawing skills are better, their attention to detail, and they're much calmer. Girls tend to get to a higher level. They who have done particularly well in the last three years."
The pay for some trades is far cry from the relatively low earnings of childminders, care workers and beauty therapists. Welders involved in the construction of the BBC's new Manchester home would, says Dawson, be "earning between £30,000 and £50,000". And plasterers, says Grange, can pull in £650 a week.
Stott points out that these days he's also able to recruit female tutors, which, in turn, transforms the career expectations of all students, male and female.
The latest government report on prison education recognises that employability is the key to rehabilitation, but there remain difficulties that may let offenders down
In many ways, the latest government report on prison education has great potential. Based on the compelling correlation between employment and reduced reoffending, Making Prisons Work recognises prison education as the key to enhancing offenders' employability, and the cornerstone behind the much-heralded "rehabilitation revolution".
Many offenders enter prison with an entirely negative experience of education and work; almost half were unemployed in the year before arriving in custody, and 80% have the literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old. Prison can provide a stable environment in which prisoners develop the skills that will enable them to follow a life in employment and out of crime.
Yet, while efforts to place offender learning at the heart of the prison regime are laudable, three main difficulties permeate the vision – each potentially undermining the government's entire rehabilitative mission.
First, numerous promises in the report have been made and broken many times before. Since 2004, prison education has purportedly been a key government priority, and funding for offender learning almost trebled between 2001 and 2005 to £151m. Nevertheless, much has been wasted, absorbed by a catalogue of institutional obstacles and misguided targets. In a number of core areas, Making Prisons Work tackles the symptoms rather than the causes of these barriers that have long suffocated reformative efforts.
For instance, the perpetual movement of offenders between different prisons causes tremendous disruption to work and education. Yet the report makes no attempt to reduce this "churn" directly. Dismissing such movement as "unavoidable", it seeks only to mitigate its effects by coordinating learning across prison "clusters".
Additionally, while the report identifies the need to involve a wider range of providers, there is no guarantee that sufficient work will be sourced. Prison industries currently offer approximately 9,000 places a day for prisoners – a far cry from the number needed for the 80,000-strong prison population.
Even if enough employers can be tempted into prison work, the prisons may be unable to accommodate them. Furthermore, creating a prison regime that imposes real-world expectations on learners will place demands on prison staff that, without substantial additional funding, they will simply be unable to meet. The current average working week in prison – some 22 hours – is self-evidently insufficient.
In the absence of enough work places and staff support, some offenders will continue to slip through the net. Worse still, those at highest risk of reoffending are liable to be most neglected. Vulnerabilities within payment-by-result schemes risk creating perverse incentives to skew provision towards those least likely to reoffend. More prolific offenders could be left by the wayside, deemed not worth the investment gamble, given the diminished chance of a successful outcome. This situation can only be exacerbated by the nonsensical reluctance to bring prisoners serving fewer than 12 months under post-release supervision.
A further risk is that interventions will be chosen for financial reasons. While the paper recognises the invaluable role of the Virtual Campus, the secure intranet service that has been successfully piloted in two regions, this will be implemented only "as resources permit", it says. Given the immense difficulties engendered by limited ICT access, both in custody and after release, the roll-out of the Virtual Campus should be made a funding priority.
Prison education can have substantial financial benefits for the public purse; the Ministry of Justice has calculated that vocational interventions can result in savings of up to £97,000 per offender. But money spent must be understood as an investment; it is imperative that the government does not follow the false economy of choosing provision based on cost, rather than on learners' needs.
In placing employability as the goal of punitive incarceration, Making Prison Work undoubtedly sets the right agenda. What is less certain, however, is whether these plans will translate into reality.
Without rehabilitation, prison offers no long-term social remedy for the reoffending epidemic. Having identified the crux of how to reduce recidivism, the coalition's vision must now take the next steps where previous government initiatives have stumbled, and end the long-standing paralysis in reform of prison education.
• Carolina Bracken is criminal justice research fellow at Civitas thinktank
These are university rankings with a difference. They order institutions according to what they are doing to reduce their impact on the environment
There's something a bit unnerving about the lifts at Nottingham Trent University, once you're inside at least. Your fingers reach towards where the buttons for the 10 floors should be, only to discover there aren't any. Panic. Then you remember that you already picked the floor you wanted when you called the lift. "It is a bit disconcerting, at first," the environmental officer, Grant Anderson, concedes.
But it's all in a good cause: the "intelligent lift" system minimises the distance the lifts travel by sending one that is close to the floor you're on and is already carrying others to the same destination, cutting down on wasted journeys, and, in turn, wasted energy and the university's carbon dioxide emissions.
A tour of Nottingham Trent reveals countless other thoughtful innovations and moderations: Victorian buildings once modernised into mazes of small windowless rooms have been opened up to make best use of natural light; ranks of white and green-liveried bicycles that can be hired full-time for just £35 a year; windows that open and close automatically depending on the temperature inside.
And the crowning glory, the "green" sedum roof – actually more of a russet colour – on the Newton building, which acts as a natural insulator, helps prevents flash flooding and provides a haven for birds, bees and butterflies. High above it at the top of the listed 1950s Portland stone tower incorporated into the newly constructed modern part of the building, four peregrine falcon chicks await the return of their parents to the nest that has been kept secret for 10 years to protect them from thieves.
It seems no stone has been left unturned in the university's bid to green its operations, so it's no surprise that NTU has just topped the People & Planet Green League of UK higher education institutions for the second time in three years.
Its vice-chancellor, Professor Neil Gorman, puts it down to staff – including, crucially, the senior management team – ensuring environmental issues are on a par with other key tasks, such as deciding which courses to offer and working with business.
"It's not a 'nice to do'," he says, sitting in his office equipped with state-of-the- art video-conferencing equipment (he refuses "to go to Australia for 45 minutes" to deliver a speech). "It's an equal partner."
Yet for all the successes, one critical area remains a major stumbling block for the university, and it is not alone. Despite setting an ambitious target to reduce its carbon emissions by 48% between 2005 and 2020, and 10% by 2012-13, they have actually gone up by 24% so far.
The story is the same across large swaths of the sector, this year's Green League reveals. A sector-wide target calls for a 43% decrease in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, but at 63% of universities in the tables they've actually gone up. The average increase per university is 7.4%, and total emissions from the institutions giving figures have risen by 3.9%. All this is despite the fact that their capital funding, in England at least, is now linked to the reductions they can achieve against sector targets.
"It's incredibly worrying," says People & Planet's climate campaigns and communications manager, Louise Hazan. "The planning is there, the policy is there, to a certain extent the resourcing is there, but the performance is just lagging behind.
"Over the next couple of years I would expect to see that change quite rapidly. But it's not looking terribly encouraging at the moment – on current trends the sector is nowhere near reaching the emissions cuts required of all public sectors by the Climate Change Act."
Andrew Smith is the Higher Education Funding Council for England's (Hefce) head of estates and sustainable development. "This is a really pressing issue," he says. "We've got a load of plans and strategies, but what we really need now is delivery."
In some areas even the planning was not up to scratch. More than a fifth (22%) of universities who took part did not have a publicly available carbon management plan setting out targets for reducing emissions at the time the research was conducted.
Given that universities can save cash through greater energy efficiency and risk losing funding by not getting their act together, as well as alienating increasingly climate-conscious students (a 2009 study found that more than a third consider the environment to be important in their choice of university), Hazan says it's time for them to get smarter about how they spend their money. "Quite simply, it just makes financial sense for institutions to start investing as soon as possible. There are universities saving massive amounts of money on energy bills from really relatively small investments upfront."
Nottingham Trent's experience reinforces this: Anderson describes its chief financial and operations manager, Stephen Jackson, as "like a pitbull" in finding funding for projects that save energy – and money.
The Green League looks a bit different from your average university ratings table. Newer, teaching-focused institutions tend to be at the top, while research-intensive Russell Group members are hardly to be seen in the higher echelons. None makes it into the top 20, with the London School of Economics the highest Russell Group institution placed at number 22. That earns it a "first", in the table's degree classification style. Only five Russell Group members get 2:1s, 10 receive 2:2s and three – Oxford, Sheffield and Liverpool – only manage thirds. Cardiff, coming in at number 130, is deemed to have failed.
Carbon emissions have increased since 2005 at three quarters of Russell Group universities, and by as much as 51% at UCL. There are four Russell Group members among the 31 institutions lacking a publicly available carbon management plan.
Why aren't these universities measuring up? "For non-Russell Group universities, being green is definitely a selling point and a way to attract students," Hazan says. "That's not so much the case for Russell Group institutions."
Being research intensive, she points out, means they are bound to be using lots of water and energy compared with teaching universities. But she adds: "In terms of policy, I think it could be said, for some institutions, to come down to a certain arrogance that this is not a priority for them."
Wendy Piatt, the Russell Group's director general, disputes that. "Environmental concerns are taken very seriously," she says. "All of our universities treat their environmental obligations, policies and goals as high priorities."
Research in science and engineering, particularly, involves a relatively high level of energy consumption, she says, and important work in the environmental field is being carried out at Russell Group institutions.
"Researchers are working on new low, carbon energy technologies at Imperial College London, for example, the development of greener aircraft at Bristol, and catalysing cleaner fuels at Oxford," she says. "Such initiatives are crucial if the UK is to remain a world-leader in global efforts to deal with climate change."
So where are those institutions that are doing badly, going wrong – and why?
Queen Mary, University of London, previously ranked in 87th place, this year slips to 135th in the league.
Its newly appointed head of energy and environment, Rebecca Maiden, says it struggles with its buildings, but knows it needs to raise its game, especially in regard to turning policy into action. Part of that has been the creation of her post – she's been there for just four months – and another position the university is currently recruiting for.
"In the past 12 months there has been a real acknowldgement that the environment is an area we need to improve on," Maiden says. "It's been about setting up for the next 12 months, which will hopefully see a major improvement."
Cardiff's spokesman says the university takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously, with senior staff committed to "continually driving forward" existing and new policies to improve performance. "The league table does not reflect the tremendous practical efforts made by staff and students to reduce carbon emissions, promote sustainable development, and embed sustainable development in our operations," the spokesman says.
"We acknowledge that we have a significant challenge with regard to carbon management as a consequence of our substantial research agenda. People & Planet continually fail to credit Cardiff University for the number of core staff we have with designated environmental responsibilities, seemingly because they are not purely dedicated to environmental issues."
There are plenty of success stories in this year's results too. Given that almost a third of the UK's greenhouse emissions come from food production, People & Planet is encouraged that 49 universities - 34% of the sector - now have a publicly available sustainable food policy, an increase of 10 percentage points on 2010.
One in 10 institutions is now purchasing significant amounts of renewable energy (compared with 8% last year), and the sector is recycling 45% of its waste on average - including construction waste. That's a significant increase on last year's figure of 37%, says Hazan.
This year, two new areas are also being considered: ethical procurement and curriculum content. Universities have massive purchasing power – more than £8bn is spent each year on goods and services, through lots of different supply chains, and they've got a responsibility to ensure they're not causing human rights abuses through those chains," Hazan says. Although 68% of the sector is now accredited with Fairtrade status, no universities gain full points in the ethical procurement section.
Only 16 institutions scored full points for integrating sustainability into their teaching and research activities, a move necessary not just to promote behaviour change, but also to give graduates an understanding of environmental and social issues that will be crucial in the future, according to People & Planet.
"Students who are now being asked to pay on average £9,000 a year are demanding that their universities prepare them for entry into the fast-expanding low-carbon workforce and marketplace," Hazan says.
A commitment to including sustainability in the teaching on every course has been NTU's big triumph this year. University is about building the individual, Gorman believes. Putting the underlying environmental challenge at the heart of all the institution's projects has been the key to getting buy-in from students and employees, he says. "That's how we have embedded it across the culture. I don't think you can achieve this just by saying 'thou shalt'."
And while he still gets the odd email complaining about having to queue at shared printers, the kudos the university gained from its previous Green League win, in 2009, seems to have inspired a cross-campus sense of pride and eagerness to do more, right down to reception officer Michael Wells's obsession with checking the webcam trained on the peregrine falcons.
Coming top was a watershed moment, Anderson says. "Since then it's always been an open door with new ideas."
He and Gordon accept that institutions with historic buildings that are all but impossible to make more carbon efficient face tougher challenges. But with so many other critieria to gain points in, they say that shouldn't be a barrier to achievement.
Hazan agrees. "There are lots of things you can't get around, but there's an awful lot that universities could be doing that they're not yet doing."
The chief executive of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge, says the targets set by the sector are meant to be challenging. "We recognise that there is more work we need to do," she says. "But it's important to focus also on universities' wider and invaluable contribution to the green agenda in terms of their environment-related research and teaching."
People & Planet says action is going to be required from the government. "There's been no high-level acknowledgement of the importance of this at all. We want to see this is an issue that's being looked at and that they're taking note of quite serious shortcomings," says Hazan.
"For the universities minister, David Willetts, in particular, the recommendation is clear: show more leadership and vision for a sector-wide low-carbon transition plan within the next 10 years and prioritise the resources to help universities achieve it.
"This should be a wake-up call to government and the sector to act faster and deeper in the face of a looming climate crisis and funding cuts."
1 Lack of a transition vision
By 2011, every institution should have a publicly available carbon management plan that sets out how it will reduce its emissions. Without clear targets, universities struggle to devote the necessary priority and resources to tackling the challenges of climate change and sustainability. A fifth of all universities have yet to publish their strategies.
2 Failure to engage students
Universities are missing a trick if they're not doing everything possible to engage their students and to influence student behaviour. Given the rise in tuition fees, it's also inexcusable for students not to be involved in shaping universities' future and priorities.
3 Not employing sustainability staff
Without professional staff dedicated to environmental management, it has been consistently demonstrated that green initiatives are unlikely to be systematic, well-co-ordinated or sustainable.
4 Lack of action on carbon reduction
It's unacceptable for institutions to lead the way on climate change research globally while continuing to increase their own emissions. Serious investment in energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy generation is needed now to have any hope of meeting government targets.
5 Not telling the whole story
Universities spend around £8bn a year on procuring goods and services but the majority do not monitor the emissions arising from this. As this can account for more than 50% of an institution's carbon footprint it's essential that they be monitored … and reduced.
Louise Hazan, Climate campaigns manager, People & Planet
• People & Planet is a student campaigning network originally set up in 1969 to raise money for overseas aid. Recently it has campaigned for Fairtrade school uniforms and against sweatshops, and for ethical investment by pension funds. People & Planet is also behind the Transition University initiative, which enables institutions to improve their environmental performance. There are People & Planet groups at 71 universities and colleges.
This is the fifth successive year of the People & Planet Green League and the first time the organisation has teamed up with the Guardian. This year more universities than ever have participated: 142 institutions provided enough information to be entered into the league table.
Universities have been ranked according to 13 criteria, which are explained here
The table above shows the overall ranking of universities and what "grade" they have been awarded. The People & Planet Green League 2011 ranks institutions according to 13 criteria designed to assess their policy and senior-level commitment to environmental management (40 points), as well as indicators of performance against policy commitments (30 points).
The criteria
1. Environmental policy (5 points)
Full points are awarded for a publicly available environmental policy that sets clear targets for reducing key impacts. Must be reported on annually at senior level.
2. Management staff (8 points)
Points for having between at least 0.5 and two full-time equivalent staff members devoted to environmental management. Calculated based on number full-time equivalent staff per 5,000 students.
3. Environmental auditing and management systems (8 points)
Includes 4 points for auditing procedures to establish impacts in key areas such as waste, water, procurement and biodiversity.
4. Ethical investment (3 points)
Full points for taking into account the environmental and social impact of investments. Must include clear evidence that ethical investment action has been taken as a result of the policy.
5. Carbon management (7 points)
How strong and ambitious are universities' carbon management plans and carbon reduction targets? Bonus points for targets that include the full scope of climate emissions.
6. Ethical procurement (2 points)
One point for achieving Fairtrade University status, one point for considering human rights impacts in other supply chains such as garments and IT.
7. Sustainable food (2 points)
Points awarded for having a publicly available sustainable food policy, as well as key actions such as using 100% free-range eggs and seasonal ingredients.
8. Staff and student engagement (3 points)
Rewards those doing the most to encourage behaviour change in diverse and creative ways, from Go Green Week to formal student and staff union representation.
9. Curriculum (2 points)
Full points for taking steps to integrate sustainability into all teaching and research.
10. Energy sources (6 points)
Compares the amount of renewable energy institutions purchase and generate on-site against each other.
11. Waste and recycling (8 points)
Compares the amount of waste mass per head each institution generates and the percentage recycled.
12. Carbon reduction (10 points)
Compares the total carbon emissions per head and ranks institutions according to the actual level of reductions achieved since 2005 compared to sector-wide targets.
13. Water reduction (6 points)
Compares institutions' water use per head and percentage of grey or rainwater used.
• See a more detailed table at
• To see all the data go to
• Find the full methodology on the People & Planet Green League website: http://peopleandplanet.org/greenleague/methodology-2011
Academies, young offenders, the French in waiting
Much as the title suggested (Do-it-yourself conversion, 31 May) your article presented some tips to schools thinking of going for academy status. But an opportunity to explain the problems with academies was lost.
A visit to some of the failing or under-performing schools in Devon might have shed some light on the situation. Outstanding schools often complain about the service they get from local authorities, and your piece strengthened the impression of local authorities as inflexible and inefficient bureaucracies. What these heads fail to say is that the 13% of budget held back was never intended to be used on their schools only. Education authorities spend money on schools (and therefore children) in greatest need and they use pooled funds to meet those needs. Schools that have benefited from such funding and who may need it in the future are opting out of what is in effect an insurance scheme.
The obscenity of the new academy programme is that it drains funding from under-performing schools. The programme requires new academies to support other schools, but it is currently up to the school which institution it supports. In the case of my own local school they have chosen a feeder primary with few serious difficulties and not one of the county's more difficult secondary schools.
It is hard not to conclude that long standing opposition to local education authorities is driving this policy. As the new academies cherry pick the easy schools to support, problems will be left flapping in the wind. This massive hole in education policy needs to be exposed.
John Eglin
Primary headteacher and parent Maesbrook, Oswestry, Shropshire
As the union representing most teaching and training staff employed by the Manchester College in its offender learning programme, the University and College Union supports the call for an inquiry into operations at Wetherby Young Offender Institution Prison (Prison education provider faces further questions, 31 May). But we would point out an underlying problem in the current funding system, which is based on crude targets and payment by results.
The truth is that many offenders are prevented from finishing courses by the nature of the prison regime, including the high levels of transfers between institutions. We hope the further education minister will confront the inherent problems with the funding approach.
Sally Hunt
General secretary, UCU London
Last week Jonathan Wolff wrote that current government policies threaten UK universities' standing in the world.
I've recently returned from a conference in France (not paid for by the taxpayer), and they're expecting UK universities to implode, that the job market will be awash with good previously UK based academics. They are anticipating the rise of French academe.
DrzBa via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Our BTec student can relax for a bit longer, but for others, it's time to get nervous about the exams
Buried in revision notes and stressed by exams, the five students Education Guardian is following through A-levels and university applications were hard to get hold of. But despite being surrounded by frazzled friends, 17-year-old Danielle Fox, who is midway through a two-year BTec diploma in art and design and a photography A-level course, is feeling relaxed about her own final few weeks at school before summer.
"Exams are already over for me as I had only one eight-hour photography exam for my A-level, because my BTec in art and design doesn't require an exam," explains Danielle, who is a pupil at Plymouth Marine academy. "I'm glad now that I opted to do a BTec, because coursework is easier to handle and not as much stress. I have a few friends with lots of exams and not much space in between each of them. They're finding it quite tough, but my one exam didn't require much revision. I managed to complete it in time, and it went better than I'd expected. It helped that I'd made a plan on how to spend my time. Now I just have to wait for results, which I'm really nervous about."
It's a different story for Christopher Howarth, a student at the private Haberdashers' Aske's boys' school in Hertfordshire, who hasn't yet begun his A2 exams in English literature, Latin and chemistry. With his place to study classics at Cambridge University on the line – he needs to match its offer of an A* and two As – 17-year-old Christopher is feeling nervous about his first exam in Latin verse literature next Monday.
"The fact that A2 exams are later than ASs has allowed for a little more time to prepare, but I wish I could have a couple of weeks more – and that I'd started the 30 pages of Latin vocab on my desk a little earlier," he says. "That's especially true as my Cambridge offer requires an A* grade, which is based solely on A2 performance, and means getting 90% or more, which is a high target. But I haven't had any nightmares, I'm trying to keep it all in perspective – though it's important to squeeze in every ounce of work."
Revision apart, Christopher has started to get excited about university. "I've applied for funding from the student loans website, and last week I got a letter from my prospective Cambridge college – Trinity – giving information about accommodation. Some of my friends are starting on their course reading lists already. One with an offer to study English has received a reading list from his Oxford college that simply listed authors: the entire [Charles] Dickens, the entire [James] Joyce ... but I haven't been set anything so far."
With another year to go at school, university decisions are still on the back-burner for Danielle, who remains torn between her favoured courses of Japanese studies at Leeds University and illustration at Falmouth University. "I haven't made any further inquiries about uni, I think I'll do so only when my big BTec project – designing a sculpture for the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth – is over," she explains. "But teachers at school have been talking to us about Ucas quite often – we've had hour-long sessions once a week to show us how to write a personal statement and what good ones look like, plus how to search for subjects at different unis, and what kind of Ucas points and grades we need."
At home, Danielle has also been talking through undergraduate options with her parents. Her mum, who is unemployed, and dad, who works for contractors installing power cables, didn't go to university, but are keen for their daughter to do so.
"They think my current workload is appropriate and say they're happy with whatever decisions I make," the sixth-former adds. "But the biggest issue is still tuition fees. Starting uni next autumn, I'll be part of the first group to pay the new high fees. I just think they are too much, especially since the government is taking away EMA [the education maintenance allowance, scrapped last year, which paid low-income students up to £30 a week to help them to stay on at sixth forms and colleges]. Right now I get £30 a week, and put £20 aside to help towards uni. But future students won't get that. I've also had to shell out for materials for my exam. I'm thinking that if I continued art at uni then I'd need even more materials and it would cost more than other subjects."
Danielle still wants to go to university, as she believes it's the best route to employment. "I think with a degree I'll be able to start a really good job in a few years' time. But I do feel it's unfair that students a few months older than me don't face the same level of worries about tuition fees. I wish I was born earlier so that I wouldn't have to face this. I didn't vote for the government, but nothing they've done has helped anyone for the better and their tuition fee rules aren't fair to anyone."
Christopher, meanwhile, comes from a background with a tradition of going to university: both his parents – his dad is a civil servant and his mum works in a school's admissions office – are graduates. And starting university this September, he won't have to pay the higher course charges. But he still agrees with Danielle's views on tuition fees. "Education is not a commercial product, and to my mind that means it should be free," he says.
Ahead of his own A2 papers, Christopher is also worried about news reports of under-qualified exam markers as well as A-level grade inflation. "It is a bit galling to find that your paper won't necessarily be marked by people qualified in the subject," he says. "Go into too much depth in your chemistry answers and you're liable to lose marks, not gain them. I think the main problem with A-levels isn't with the qualification itself, but with an education system that requires so much to be taught 'for the exam' rather than for love of the subject."
A scary inflatable doll was invented to protect fearful hikers against aggressive animals such as a bear or moose, but sadly the patent never saw the light of day
When a big bear approaches, some people choose to quietly stroll away. To give them an extra measure of safety, Anthony Victor Saunders and Adam Warwick Bell invented what they call a "pop-up device for deterring an attacking animal".
Saunders, a London-based mountain climber, and Bell, a California patent attorney, applied for a patent in 2002, but later abandoned it. They would equip hikers with, essentially, an inflatable doll "meant to scare away an attacking or aggressive animal such as a bear". The frightful balloon could also be used against "elk, moose, mountain lions, buffalo, hippopotamus, rhino, elephant, boar". They explain that it "works on the principle of maximising the apparent size and ferocity of the human, intimidating the bear".
In the patent application, Saunders and Bell refined their thoughts. Here's how they decided the device must deploy quickly: "The figure should be fully inflated within less than one minute, or within less than 30 seconds, or preferably within less than 10 seconds, or most preferably five seconds."
The device can be "incorporated into clothing or luggage [or] into the hilt of a walking-stick" and activated "by pulling a cord. The figure would inflate and pop up out of the back-pack, presenting the attacking bear with a huge and frightening opponent".
The bear then gets an escalating series of surprises, beginning with "one or more explosive 'bangs', a fog-horn, or a loud roaring or screaming sound".
The noise is augmented with smells. "The musky odour of a bear helps convince the attacking bear that he is being faced with a powerful, aggressive and musky opponent."
Then would come "an odorous or noxious gas or liquid".
There's also smoke: "from a typical 'smoke-bomb' type of device".
Some bears are not easily deterred. So "the deployment of the device may be accompanied by the launching of projectiles. [This] would further confuse, scare and disorientate the bear. Such projectiles could be launched from a mortar or mortar-type device".
The whole thing, they say, is "detachable and may be left between human and bear as the human retreats".
(For a different way to greet bears, consult Troy Hurtubise, whose book about building grizzly-bear-proof suits of armour I discussed here recently.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Exasperated academic completes study on the faults in home entertainment technology
It's one of the 21st century's biggest frustrations. You excitedly unwrap your latest technology purchase, plug in the flashy TV, charge up the pristine smartphone or unbox the new laptop. The screen remains pitch black, so you wait. And wait some more. And then furrow your brow as you try to work out exactly how to turn the thing on, what the thicker-than-the-Bible book of instructions means, and why the hell you bought the thing in the first place.
Next time, know this: you're not alone. In fact, the paradox that technology which is supposed to make life easier can in fact be fraught with frustration is so common that one academic is devoting his PhD to investigating it. Philip Ely, head of the business and community school at the University for the Creative Arts, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Surrey's Digital World Research Centre, has even come up with a name for the hours sapped from our daily routines by technology: digital DIY.
Ely's interest goes back to his time working for the broadcaster Granada, where he designed new sites for the likes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale. "I was struck by how engineers, designers and marketers privilege their own views on technology development at the expense of the people who use them," he explains. "The obsession in government policy and the City with technological infrastructure and the digital economy has neglected the real challenges people face when living with these technologies."
So he decided to investigate Britons' problems with installing and working with the latest technology, and consider how much of the difficulty could be blamed on manufacturers. Ely began tracking families from different backgrounds over 18 months, interviewing, recording and photographing their digital DIY experiences. "The study focused on three areas – how people actually use, maintain and repair home entertainment, information and communication technology, the home ecology – all the devices and services in the context of the domestic setting, with its walls, tables, chairs, sofas and other people –and individual values and self-identity," Ely explains. "To that end, I visited the families during the course of a year, just after they had moved home or had new arrivals into their homes."
As well as interviewing households and photographing their homes, the academic asked participants to draw a plan indicating where all their technology was located. They were also asked to create a "social network map" to identify the main friends, family or professional IT workers who had helped them to buy, install and use technology. Later in the year, participants were asked to redraw the maps to reveal how computers and other hardware had moved around, and who had helped to maintain and install it.
One of Ely's key observations was that it was often the less obviously important computing gizmos that families found most frustrating. "I found that mundane artefacts such as USB cables, internet infrastructure, and even doors, walls and sofas often prevented households from sharing music or pictures for months on end," he says. "Individual devices became redundant for even the most trivial of reasons, like losing a cable. I realised that manufacturers tend to forget just what a 'messy' and contingent place the home can be."
Ely also found that although home technology has the potential to be more and more interdependent, the reverse is actually happening. "Brands such as Apple, Sony, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard sit alongside service providers such as Sky, Tesco, BT, Orange, Amazon, John Lewis, Google and the BBC, and software, component and peripheral manufacturers such as Adobe, 3M, Epson or Belkin," he says. "But many pieces of home technology don't work together. Competing companies use technical protocols to inhibit the compatibility of their product or services. They have their own agendas. Making things easier or enjoyable is only important if it 'locks' users into that particular brand or company. But in this political tussle between competing interests lies the end user, who is not working with simply one computer, as they may have done only 20 years ago, but many computing devices."
As a result of his research, top of Ely's hall of blame is Apple's iTunes music software. "It is not people-centred, but revenue-centred," he explains. "I'd like it to connect to all devices, managing all of your music, videos and picture libraries without the constant updates, authentications and processor-hungry demands." Even this IT specialist has suffered iTunes exasperation: "If there was a micro-payment system for every time I shout at iTunes, when it doesn't work properly or is too slow, someone would be a millionaire," he says.
Interestingly, Ely's findings contradicted the common view that technology is isolating. He found most households contacting others on online forums for IT help. "Users are now relying on each other to provide valuable technical support," he says. "People support each other through technology problems both online and via face-to-face communication. None of the households I visited could have relied purely on a digital-only interaction – homes have become a lot more open not because of the intrusions into private life by online media, but because people are having to work with wider social networks to help support the everyday problems they face with technology.
"Just as in traditional DIY, people share hints, tips, shortcuts and even 'gift' each other technologies; people enjoy helping each other, and helping with home technology is a rewarding and socialising force."
Ely says his research also proves that the young generations of digital natives – those know-all kids who grew up with the internet and other new technology – can still find things to learn about from their parents. "In households with children there was an exchange of knowledge between generations," the academic reports. "Parents teach children how to download images from cameras, children teach parents how to purchase and download apps and music."
Ely now hopes to use his findings to set up consumer advocacy groups, both to influence government policy and to inform technology firms' innovation processes.
In the meantime, his research has had an expected consequence. "When I tell people about it, they often start telling me how so-and-so spent ages setting up the new digital TV, or recount a lengthy conversation with a helpline in India," he says. "It seems to be cathartic for them and I think they expect me to know the answers to their problems. But really that just reveals exactly how widespread the issues of working with home technology are."
Young children in inner-city areas often have to face knife crime in their neighbourhood. Does it help them to tackle the issue head-on at school?
In a classroom at St Ignatius Roman Catholic primary school in Tottenham, London, Alvin Carpio sits amid a circle of children, 24 pairs of eyes intently focused on him as he talks about his own childhood, a few miles away in east London.
"Whoever stole the most, or had the biggest knife, was the biggest man there. And you wanted to be that guy," he says. "We thought it was cool to steal – we really weren't making the right choices."
Choices are the theme of the day for this class of nine- and 10-year-olds. Carpio, social outreach co-ordinator of the church next to the school, has been invited in to lead a drama workshop about good and bad decisions. The class have been acting out little scenarios: pick up that purse and take the money, or take it to the police? Bully the new kid at school, or make him a friend? But they know there's a darker theme underpinning the exercise. Carpio's visit is part of a class project on knife crime, and the aim is to make them think about decisions they may one day have to make about whether to carry a weapon.
St Ignatius is among a growing number of primary schools that have decided to tackle the issue head-on – often prompted by their pupils. According to the Citizenship Foundation, under whose auspices this class are running their project, knife crime is one of the top three issues named by this age group as their most pressing concerns, along with the environment and health. And although the charity hasn't yet assessed what proportion of schools taking up its "Make a Difference Challenge" – under which children choose a topic to tackle in their local communities – are looking at knives or other violent crime, it says a very significant proportion have done so.
It is certainly a topic in which this class is interested, not to say fascinated. They start off shy – "Why am I looking at three hands when I have 24 children in front of me?" exclaims the class teacher, Justa Fernandez. But within minutes there's a sea of waving hands and voices crying: "Miss! Miss!" Everyone has an opinion. Some have suggestions about how to avoid getting involved: "Sometimes you just have to say 'no' to people," Naysha, 10, suggests. Some want to share their experiences: Evita, 10, tells a story about how her brother was mugged three times for his mobile phone. "It was because he lived in N16," she says. And some, particularly a few of the boys, just really want to share their knowledge on the subject. "People just want you in their gangs, so they don't get in trouble – they stab people and run away," says Jezreel, nine.
And that's hardly surprising: these children could hardly be unaware of the effect of knife crime in their local community. On the front of the church next door to the school hangs a huge banner, which reads: "Isaiah 2:4: They will hammer their swords into ploughshares". Underneath it is a knife amnesty bin into which people can place their weapons, dedicated to the memory of two young local men stabbed to death recently in separate incidents. One of them, a talented 17-year-old footballer named Godwin Lawson, who was killed last year, was a former pupil at St Ignatius, and some of Fernandez's class knew his siblings.
Nationally, knife crime is on the wane – there were 210 murders involving knives or other sharp instruments in 2009-10, compared with 270 two years earlier. Yet there's no denying it's a real issue for the children at St Ignatius. The children chose the project themselves after drawing up a list of things they'd like to change about their area. The final choice came down to a vote between knife crime and pollution – and crime won hands down.
Over the last three months, they've been building the subject into their normal lessons. Work on persuasive writing produced a list of slogans, now pasted boldly on to the white board: "If you use a knife, you could delete a life", "Drop that knife – don't waste my time". A surgeon has been in to talk about her experiences of treating knife-crime victims, and the local police have also been invited.
The subject has clearly caught the children's imagination. Yet there's no suggestion any of these pupils have been tempted to get involved in gangs or knife crime themselves. So why are they so seized by the issue?
Fernandez says it's often on their minds: "It's all around them; it's on the news. They'll often come in on a morning and say, 'Did you see the news last night?'" she says. "Godwin Lawson went to school with one of our girls' older brothers. She said in class that it made her sad when she heard his name mentioned."
But while St Ignatius is in a high-crime, inner-city area, pupils from other districts are concerned, too. Marguerite Heath, director of Go Givers, the Citizenship Foundation's main programme for primary schools, says it's important to address their fears head-on.
"I think a lot of children do get quite concerned about this type of thing, particularly when they start to move on to secondary school," she says. "When they start to travel around on their own, rather than going by car. And I think on the whole we try to protect them too much, actually. A lot of this is to do with peer pressure – children get pressured into belonging to gangs, and this kind of programme gives them opportunities to rehearse the skills and practice the values they need to overcome that."
Leading campaigners on knife crime have argued that all children should learn how to make themselves safe – and should do so as early as possible. Earlier this year, Brooke Kinsella, the former EastEnders actress whose brother, Ben, was stabbed to death during a night out in north London in 2008, produced a report on the subject commissioned by the Home Office. It argued that all pupils should learn about knife crime during the last years of primary school, as the St Ignatius pupils have done this year.
But some sceptics say these efforts could prove counterproductive. Dennis Hayes, head of the Research Centre for Education and Career Development at the University of Derby, argues that there is a lack of solid evidence showing the effectiveness of such programmes.
"I think that unless they are thought through, initiatives with the best intentions can do a lot of damage," he says. "For most kids, knife crime isn't really an issue. Making them think about it is a bit like making people think about suicide. The message they get is that knife crime is a real problem, so perhaps they should carry a knife."
Heath does not agree: "I think if you don't address these issues that the children are thinking about, then misunderstanding grows and they can't get on top of it," she says. "The idea of the 'Make a Difference Challenge' is that they are finding a way they can actually do something about it, so they feel empowered, and once you feel on top of something, it's no longer frightening."
Some of the class have brought their own personal experiences in to share during the last two months. During our discussion, Olivia, 10, has been sitting with her hand up, but perhaps too shy to push herself forward. Eventually, Fernandez invites her to speak. "Not long ago," she says, "someone stabbed someone near my house. And that made me think about knife crime. I felt that person's family must be really sad about what happened."
The bilingual support assistant, Maria Miele, prompts her: "Tell me what you told me when you came in that morning."
"I thought maybe I would see them," she says. "And maybe they could do something to someone I knew."
The headteacher, Con Bonner, says it's hardly surprising the children are frightened by such incidents when they happen so close to home: "It's the environment where they're living," he says. "It's a topic that's discussed among young people generally. Literally in the streets they walk up and down, these events take place."
Government policies are threatening the dominance in Europe of British universities
In the days not so long ago when British universities were full of optimism and self-confidence, and the smell of fresh paint was everywhere, I received a visit from an academic working in France. He was on a mission to find out why the UK higher education sector was doing so well compared to our European counterparts. He showed me a world ranking table, which listed 29 UK universities in the top 200, compared to Germany, with 14, and France, with three, just above Spain's two and Italy's zero. His beloved Sorbonne, perhaps the one university in continental Europe that the man on the Clapham omnibus can name, was nowhere to be seen. What could they do to catch up?
Before answering that question, a bit of wallowing and boasting seems in order. At the end of the second world war the UK, with the US and USSR, was one of the three world super-powers. World influence, empire and economic strength all faded, but academia, alongside snooker and darts, is one of the few areas where we retain world-class status.
Speaking English, the international language of scholarship, must be a huge advantage. I was once told that America once debated whether to adopt English or German. This is a load of nonsense, apparently, but it raises a fascinating question. How would things have turned out if America had adopted German? One thing's for sure: our university world rankings would suffer, though I doubt that this would be the biggest story.
But speaking English is not all there is to it. Like it or not, the research assessment exercise changed attitudes to publication. League tables and research assessment, both crude and potentially distorting of academic values, are made for each other.
In addition, the government understood that if you wanted a flourishing university system it would cost money. True, we were "comfortable" rather than wealthy. Money always was tight, but if something was important, funding would be found. New buildings, equipment, conferences, academic travel, and a couple of bottles of wine for the postgraduate seminar all appeared when needed.
Finally, we benefit enormously from the incredible openness of the UK academic job market. Although we can't quite match football's Premier League, even small departments will typically have several overseas players in their squad. Compare this to almost all other European countries, where the tradition is to appoint locals, often groomed for the job. An international recruitment strategy widens the talent pool, and allows a department to develop in new and unexpected ways. But it also creates opportunities for international connections, which in turn generate energy, intellectual stimulation and a sense of going places.
So that was my story. I've just received a follow-up email, asking me if the UK will be able to sustain its European pre-eminence given recent government policy. Well, I didn't take this question seriously, until I started to think about it.
Luckily we still speak English. But then so do European academics, and they are increasingly choosing to publish, and even teach, in English, too. We still assess research, but other countries have copied us here as well.
And, what's more worrying, money and international recruitment are under pressure. In anticipation of big financial cuts to come, "adjustments" are being made here and there. That little bit of cash lubricating the system, making small but highly valuable things possible, has disappeared. Like sensitive children, we no longer ask, for fear of disappointment and mutual embarrassment. And the government's promise to "get tough" on immigration has repercussions for international staff recruitment. The number of work permits is being limited, and what was already a drawn-out and nerve-racking process may well just become more trouble than it is worth.
Could it be that our super-power status is under threat? As continental Europe tries to bring about economic growth by investing heavily in higher education, we are dimming the lights and shutting the doors. We just have to hope that our effortless superiority carries us through.
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His new book, Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry, will be published by Routledge at the end of this month
Faith schools will continue to foster ethnic segregation, argues Peter Wilby, no matter how much religious leaders promote understanding
Nothing has changed in Oldham. After the three days of Bank Holiday riots that shocked the country exactly 10 years ago, inquiries concluded that it was one of the most segregated towns in England, where whites and Asians led "parallel lives". The schools, according to research by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University, were "the most ethnically polarised in England". Now a new study from the centre, reported in the Guardian last week, finds "little evidence of change". Segregation has declined, but only very slightly. It doesn't help, the centre suggests, that Church of England and Roman Catholic faith schools account for more than a third of the primaries and 40% of the secondaries.
I last visited Oldham in autumn 2007, when the council was planning three secondary academies, physically located to bring the communities together. They opened in September, but nobody can yet judge whether they will achieve greater ethnic mixing, not least because they have still to move on to permanent sites. My discussions four years ago with teachers, council officials and particularly faith leaders did not, I regret to say, fill me with optimism.
One idea floated then – more by outsiders than by Oldhamites – was that the new academies should be multifaith schools, in which Muslims, Catholics and Anglicans would all have a stake. Leaders of the three faith communities, it was suggested, should help to determine the schools' curriculum and ethos. Moreover, the schools could expand into community services, offering sports facilities, adult evening courses, opportunities to learn English, and so on. Muslim children could learn the Qur'an inside school after normal hours instead of going daily to the mosque, it was proposed.
That hasn't happened: the academies (though one is sponsored by Oasis, a Christian group) are non-faith, rather than multifaith. I am not surprised. It was evident to me that most faith leaders were at best suspicious of, and at worst downright hostile to, mixing across religious boundaries. This is not peculiar to Oldham, and certainly not to the imams.
Faith leaders wish to protect and expand their markets. I do not blame them. They have premises to maintain and employees to pay. Education is one of their best promotional vehicles. The Christian churches sponsor schools because they help to fill the pews: parents get their children baptised, attend on Sundays and, if they can afford it, donate to the church roof in order to maximise their chances of a school place. Nearly all costs are met from public funds. It is a win-win for the churches. Why should they jeopardise it? Equally, why should the imams jeopardise the survival of their after-school classes or private Muslim schools? Many of the latter hope eventually to join the state sector and receive taxpayer support as CofE, Catholic and Jewish schools do.
Last month, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, chair of the CofE Board of Education and Bishop of Oxford, proposed that CofE schools should reserve as few as 10% of their places for churchgoing families. The CofE's function, he said, was not about "collecting nice Christians into safe places", by which he meant (I think) that church schools should cease to provide white middle-class parents with havens in which to shield their children from rougher and duskier-skinned peers. It is all very well for him. The CofE has been the established church since the 16th century. It has a lucrative sideline in marrying, baptising and burying the secular masses. If there are redundancies, bishops, like any boss class, will be last to go. As for Catholic, Muslim and other minority faith leaders, fear of losing their customers and of ultimate extinction is in their DNA. One Catholic priest in Oldham summed it up. He would not, he said, support anything that "takes people away from their own worshipping communities".
I wish Oldham luck in reaching across the religious divisions. But faith leaders will not do much to help. They will strive to increase understanding across the boundaries, but they will not work to demolish them. It is not in their interests to do so. That is why it seems so extraordinary that the government not only supports faith schools, but encourages more.