Academic departments that have shot up the university rankings attribute this to listening to and communicating with students
The departments that have leapt fastest up the Guardian university league tables this year have all realised one thing: doing your best for students is not enough ... you have to be seen to be doing it.
With the national student survey gaining in importance, institutions have to make it clearer than ever to students what they should expect from their university experience, and how far these expectations are being met.
James Kennell, programme leader of BA honours in tourism management at the University of Greenwich, which has gone from 28th, close to the bottom of the Guardian's tourism, transport and travel table, to 14th, says that when he became programme leader two years ago, many university departments were still under the impression that research was enough to boost them up the league tables. "At that time, people didn't realise how significant the NSS was," he says.
In direct response to the annual survey, his department has made an effort to develop its relationship with students, concentrating particularly on feedback.
"Student feedback is what all academic departments get slated for by students," he says. "That's partly because there is real inconsistency about how students receive feedback, and because students often don't know what it is."
At Greenwich, staff spend time explaining to students that one-to-one discussions, written and verbal comments in seminars and tutorials are all different kinds of feedback. "Once we did that, attendance went up," he says. "The students knew they wanted feedback, but they weren't used to getting it in the way a university gives it. We asked them to look behind the marks they get on the paper and think more holistically about what they learn."
At the beginning of every course is a session explaining how feedback will work, and every student is given the opportunity to discuss their feedback during their course. Another feedback discussion session takes place at the end.
The department has also concentrated on employability, linking up with the university's new guidance and employability team to help students understand better how their academic learning ties in with developing professional skills, and helping them to spot and make the most of job opportunities.
Colin Bamford, associate dean of the school of applied sciences and head of the department of logistics and hospitality management at Huddersfield University, which rose from 20th to third in the same table, agrees that graduate employment is key.
"We have put a lot of energy, resources and effort into placements," he says. While he attributes the department's rise up the table this year partly to a problem with the way it was classified in previous years, he says it scores well on student satisfaction because of its young, dynamic staff, many of whom have worked in industry, and because the university as a whole is "a friendly university". And, again, he mentions feedback. "We have certain criteria that cover the way we feed back to students," he says. "We have a time within which we have to hand back work and we also have to have group or individual sessions to provide feedback."
For Anne McKee, head of Anglia Ruskin University's department of educational studies, which leapt from 66th last year to 34th in the tables this year, it's also about students feeding back to staff. "We ask our students for feedback while they are studying with us," she says. "We act on it and tell them how we have responded to it." The department website has a "you said … we did …" section to help show students that their concerns are being listened to, and staff make sure that they are approachable and available.
The department has recently introduced personal tutors so that students feel they have an "anchor person" in the faculty as well as their academic tutor, and has invested in a senior academic to work with schools so that students have someone monitoring and supporting them when they go on teaching placements.
There has also been a drive to introduce more interactive approaches to teaching, including a successful experiment to give feedback through podcasts.
Then, there is "coffee and cake" – a number of informal meetings during the year when students can swap recipes and speak to staff and other students about any academic or personal difficulties they may have. "We had 100% satisfaction on some of our courses, and we reckon it's down to cake and coffee," says McKee.
Despite dropping slightly in the overall rankings, Anglia Ruskin has also seen a significant climb in sociology because of a much improved student-staff ratio.
Liz Bradbury, programme leader for social sciences and lecturer in sociology at the university, which was 81st last year and has now risen to 16th, says: "We weren't doing anything particularly different, but we were aware that we needed to focus on students understanding what it was we were trying to do. We tried to be more explicit about it."
She says staff concentrated on developing students' confidence and ambition, and on conveying their own enthusiasm for the subject. "The NSS gave us 100% for enthusiasm," she says. "That gives a course legs and a sense of momentum."
While lecturers emphasise that they are available to be contacted, they also tell students how to find their own solutions to problems, academic or otherwise, and make clear that they are "educating for autonomy". "We wanted them to see that was what we were all up to," she says. "Whether encouraging them to speak in seminars, develop their writing, and think about how these kinds of things could relate to what their futures might be, we tried to give them a sense of discipline, of their own potential and how they could be successful."
One of the biggest climbers this year was modern languages at the University of Northumbria, which jumped from 48th to third spot, behind Oxford and Cambridge and above University College London, thanks to significant improvements in every performance measure, and particularly its value-added score, which means far more students are exceeding expectations and overcoming lower than average entry standards to progress to a first or 2:1.
Jon Robinson, director of the Northumbria Language Centre, attributes the meteoric rise simply to "having dedicated teaching staff and very hard-working and committed students" who, because they speak many languages, are "excellently placed to fill graduate positions within the global workforce".
What is clear is that universities are beginning to recognise not only their responsibility for boosting students' future prospects in a competitive market, but the power of students, and student opinion, to boost theirs.
Our tables are designed to help students deciding on a university course for 2012
Next year is a big one for students who want to start a degree course. Although no one will have to pay the new higher fees upfront, students will want to feel confident of choosing a university where they feel the experience is worth the money.
Our University Guide measures how well institutions perform at the things that really matter to new students. Let's face it, most new undergraduates care more about the teaching and resources than the research performance of their university, so that is what we focus on, unlike other league tables.
We know our tables attract enormous interest around the world as well as in the UK. We hope they will prove useful as a first step to comparing courses and prompt students to investigate further on their own before making the all-important decisions on where to apply and what course to follow.
You will also find online a comprehensive A-Z guide to what campuses have to offer. If you'd prefer a small (or huge) institution, or one near the beach, or a place with tip-top sporting facilities, our guide can help.
We have provided 46 interactive subject tables online for nearly 150 universities and colleges in the UK. Readers can create their own tables by ranking the institutions according to, say, career prospects, or staffing ratios.
The tables cannot capture every single one of the thousands of courses available. Courses with small numbers of students are listed at the end of each table, but are not given a ranking. That should not be taken as any comment on their quality.
In compiling our tables, we have been advised by a review group of experts from UK universities who have made critical comments and suggestions for improving our methods.
We have rated departments against the following criteria:
• Teaching quality, as rated by final-year students in the national student survey (NSS): percentage of students satisfied.
• Feedback and assessment, as rated by final-year students in the NSS: percentage of students satisfied.
• NSS results when final-year students were asked about the overall quality of their course.
• Spending per student – given as a banded score out of 10.
• Staff-student ratio: number of students per member of teaching staff.
• Career prospects: proportion of graduates who find graduate-level employment, or study full-time, within six months of graduation.
• Value added: comparing students' individual degree results with their entry qualifications – given as a banded score out of 10. This helps to show the effectiveness of teaching at an institution – the extent to which a department helps students to exceed expectation.
• Entry qualifications (Ucas tariff score).
The data used in the guide applies to full-time undergraduates, which means that institutions such as the Open University and Birkbeck College do not appear.
The tables have been compiled for Education Guardian by Intelligent Metrix, an independent consultancy specialising in measures of higher education performance and activity. The rankings are based on official data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) and on the national student survey, published by Hefce.
Details of how value-added and expenditure data was converted into points out of 10 are available on the website as a spreadsheet to download.
Three universities – Liverpool Hope, Swansea Metropolitan and Wolverhampton – declined to allow their data to be used. We are grateful for the cooperation of those that did.
• • For more detail about the methodology and banding go to:
guardian.co.uk/education/universityguide
• For queries about the tables email:
university.tables@guardian.co.uk
Source: Hesa Student Record 2009/10 Hesa Staff Record 2009/10; Hesa Destination of Leavers survey 2008/09; Hesa Finance Record 2009/10. Copyright Higher Education Statistics Agency Limited 2011. For technical reasons data from 2008/09 has been used to compile the value added score for London South Bank University. Hesa cannot accept responsibility for any inferences or conclusions derived from the data by third parties
More and more students are taking their degrees at further education colleges. What do they have that universities don't?
Siobhan Alvey had high hopes for university, but just six weeks into a degree in health, nutrition and fitness at Liverpool Hope University, she was feeling disillusioned.
"I had three two-hour lectures a week, which were packed out with up to 60 students, and a one-hour tutorial," she recalls. "And if I didn't understand something, there was no one to ask."
On top of that, the university experience wasn't what she had imagined. "I was based on the outskirts of the city, so the nightlife was an expensive bus ride or taxi away. It was quite quiet really – not at all what I had expected."
Two years on, she is just coming to the end of a foundation degree in sport and science at West Nottinghamshire College and planning to top up her qualification to a full degree in a two-year course at Chesterfield College.
With average marks of around 70%, she is well on target to achieve a 2:1 or first-class degree and puts this down to quality teaching and, in particular, workshops on academic referencing, essay writing and critical analysis. She has also had more than double the contact time with tutors that she had at university, but at £1,500 a year, pays less than half in tuition fees than she would have been paying at a university (the maximum is currently £3,290 a year).
But, back at the college where she did her sixth-form studies – which also happens to be just across the road from where she lives with her parents – does she feel she is missing out on the social side of things? Or even just being a university student? Definitely not, says the 20-year-old. "Nottingham is a vibrant student city, so there is always stuff going on and the college puts on student nights in a nightclub in town. Living at home, I've actually been able to knuckle down with my work without having to bother too much about cooking and cleaning. I'm not sure I'd have done so well if I was living independently."
Kyle Williamson, meanwhile, thinks he has the best of both worlds. The 26-year-old is in the second year of a degree in computing and internet technology at Bournemouth and Poole College. His campus is next door to Bournemouth University (which validates the degree course), and he has full access to its library and student union facilities. And while he pays the same fees as students at the university, with smaller classes and more contact time with tutors, he feels he is getting better value for money.
"I definitely feel like I'm a university student," he says. "The higher education students from the college and university just seem to mix in. We go along to events at the student union and the university nightclub. And Bournemouth is just a really studenty city anyway."
More than 260 colleges currently teach 160,000 students on higher education courses. Of course, not every one of those is in the heart of a thriving city with a vibrant nightlife. But not everyone is looking for that kind of student experience.
As Shane Chowen, vice-president of the National Union of Students (FE), puts it: "A lot of people are a bit warm and fuzzy about the idea of university as a rite of passage: leaving home, discovering yourself and all that. But ... it doesn't mean every student wants that. What we need to be offering students is a range of choice about how they study, and colleges go some way to doing that."
Twenty-year-old Sam Sorce was offered a place on a fashion degree at the University of East London, but decided to stay local and do a foundation degree in fashion and textiles at North Hertfordshire College, simply because "I'm a home bird and like to stick with what I know". And he also liked the idea of keeping down his student debt by living at home.
The majority of people on college-based higher education courses are mature students, with 70% studying part-time, combining work and study. And with rising tuition fees and the government intent on opening up the HE market to a wider range of providers, many in the sector predicted, until recently, growing diversity in the college higher education market.
But this has made universities nervous. Colleges do not currently have degree-awarding powers, so many deliver higher education through franchise agreements with partner universities that validate their courses.
Some colleges have said they have been under pressure from their partner university to charge the full £9,000 in tuition fees – the implication being that if they didn't play ball, the university would pull out of the partnership. Critics argue that this is about eliminating the competition; if colleges charge lower tuition fees, universities could end up losing students.
The government has recently commissioned the first independent research of higher education provision in FE colleges.
The study will look at 2,500 students in 25 colleges and up to 150 employers in an attempt to better understand how higher education delivered in FE colleges is seen by students, employers, college principals and partner HE institutions.
Early indicators suggest that even when fees rise in 2012, colleges will continue to offer value for money. Just 17 out of 124 directly funded colleges have said they want to charge more than £6,000.
But Lynne Sedgmore of the 157 Group of colleges says the future is far from certain. "The market is up in the air at the moment. It has opened up the whole debate about fees again, and who knows where it will lead."
What should you look out for at an university open day? Emma Woolley went to six and gives some advice on what to take note of and what to disregard
Having to decide which university you want to go to is something that jumps at you out of the blue. I'd only just finished my GCSEs and suddenly people were asking me where I wanted to go to university, and what I wanted to do a degree in. I really didn't have a clue. After lots of nagging from my mum, I started looking into the whole idea; I found a few I liked the sound of - well, six universities dotted around the country, to be exact - and booked in for their open days.
Buy the time I started my visits I hadn't decided what course I wanted to do, so I sat through a through a good number of Introduction to law at Nottingham and Welcome to mathematics at Bristol style talks. These aren't often the most exciting of speeches, but if you're stuck in a subject dilemma, attending talks for both options helps to give you a better idea. Something in the approach or course structure of one might just swing the balance to settle your decision.
The thing to remember at these talks is that their subjects are the lecturers' passions. My chosen subject was maths and to budding mathematicians, I would say: do not be alarmed when you find yourself on the receiving end of a detailed description of Markov chains, which you simply cannot follow. Given the opportunity to excite new students, I think lecturers can get a bit … well, geeky and carried away. I can honestly say I didn't understand a word of most of these "sample lectures", but to my pleasant surprise I am actually doing well at uni, so there was no need to be panicked. They did, however, lead me to wonder about the support I might want at uni and if, like me, you would be reassured by this, don't be embarrassed to ask. I got the impression from my guide at Bristol that the university puts a lot of emphasis on research, but at Exeter people talked a lot about open office hours to question lecturers and showed me the "learning resources room" where maths students work on their coursework together.
I didn't pay much attention to halls on open days as I wasn't thinking that far ahead, but I did find myself wanting to know more later on. If you get the chance to do an accommodation tour, or even just a moment to chat to a student guide about this, do it. I'm not sure whether it is true of all universities, but certainly at Exeter and a few of my friends' universities, the halls are known to attract different types of people and, as a result, each has a slightly different feel. Whether it's the shared dinners, "more rah" or "cheap cheerful party" halls you're looking for, this is something a student would be able to tell you that's not in the guide book.
The most important thing, I would say, is to explore the area. Tours are great for seeing the obvious student haunts, the library, sports facilities, computer labs etc but, if you can, explore the campus and city on your own.
I visited Durham, Warwick, and Bath too, but Nottingham and Exeter were my final choices, and Exeter was my favourite: partly for its academic "respectability" but in the end it was also because the campus was attractively green, the city was nice, I'd heard the nightlife was good and perhaps because on the day of my visit the sun was shining and there was an ice cream van on campus. How could I resist?
• Emma Woolley is currently taking her finals in maths at Exeter University
Seasoned students reveal the things they wish they had known right at the start
Ravi Amruth, 18, studying psychology at Teesside University
"I wish I'd known that lecturers can't help but be boring. Lectures are just lullabies that cost £100 a pop. But luckily the presentations are always on the internet. Also, the first year can seem more pointless than a broken pencil. I'm studying a BSc in psychology, but I'm learning about alien abduction, hypnotists, and sociology. You're probably asking 'what's that got to do with psychology?' Also, you really learn what university is like when the weather turns crap. In the prospectus, it looks brilliant. Even when you visit, the uni is somehow bathed in sunshine, and the people smiling. As soon as you live in the place, it becomes grey and miserable – as do the people. Don't forget, when looking at a university, that that will be your life. The university and town may be showing their airs and graces for an open day – could you live there when they're not?"
Megan Harrison, 22, studying marketing and advertising management at Leeds Metropolitan University
"Things I wish I'd known from the start? That Wikipedia will become your best friend. That it's acceptable to nap in the library. It's OK to 'borrow' toilet roll and ketchup from the pub. Christmas lights are an acceptable form of decoration all year round. You'll probably speak to the takeaway guy more than your mother. Forget textbooks, it's all about Facebook. The library is empty all year round except for the two-week run-up to deadlines. Do a paid placement year if you can, it will change your outlook on the world and mature you beyond words."
Jodie Ford, 21, studying advertising with design at the University of Northampton
"I didn't realise how much the "vital" core text books would tot up to. Buy all your text books second hand. If you're not going to buy them, make sure the uni has enough copies as you'll find all copies are on loan close to that deadline and panic will set in. And make the most of your first year. I wish I'd joined course-relevant society groups and gained more work experience in my first year. During my third year (the hardest and most stressful), I'm having to contact agencies for work experience to beef up my CV, which has eaten up crucial study time. Don't leave gaining work experience until the last minute."
Jeremy Power, 42, studying IT at the University of Gloucestershire
"My one regret is not looking at the timetable more closely – I didn't notice that the 'summer' holiday starts around Easter and ends in September. Mature students want to get the degree over and move on. So, not wishing to sit idly around I have started my own video production business which operates outside term times. I was previously a post-production editor with BBC TV and entered university after taking voluntary redundancy – and I'm more within the age bracket of the lecturers than most of the students."
Jayne Larsen-Edgar, 22, drama and English at University of the West of England
"Don't worry if you don't take to university like a duck to water. I certainly didn't. After a gap year, I found adjusting difficult as I was used to earning a living. In the first year, I was having second thoughts. But throw yourself into university, and join societies to meet friends."
Charlotte Lytton, 19, studying English literature and philosophy at the University of Birmingham
"When I started I had no idea how many fire drills you'd have to go through at 5am, in the rain, wearing your slippers. I am so regretful that I didn't get more involved in societies in my first year – being in various productions and becoming a section editor of our student paper has absolutely made my second year."
Victoria Shires, 21, studying English and drama at the University of Birmingham
"I wish I'd known what a class shock university would be, so I could have prepared more. Living in the most expensive halls merely for an en-suite bathroom meant I had to lose my south London(ish) accent very quickly. And as the only one in my flat of eight without a 'gap yah' behind me or a private school on my personal statement, perhaps I would have fitted in better in the cheaper halls – the boys were better looking there anyway...
"Also, freshers' fairs are there to steal your student loan. The sweets, pens and stickers are just a ploy to get you to pay annual membership fees."
Ffion Spooner, 20, studying French and Spanish at the University of Southampton
"I'd advise new students to pick housemates wisely. They become your surrogate family. Also I wish I'd known that so much of my time and budget would go on making fancy dress costumes. In the last year I've been a sheep, a farmer, a daffodil, a schoolgirl and a Disney princess.
Ben Miller, 22, studying British politics and legislative studies at the University of Hull
"Here are some things I wish I'd known before going to university. No matter how much you enjoy cooking, you definitely won't need a mortar or a pestle. If you hand in your essays at midday and you have a tutorial or seminar at three, it's not a great idea to start celebrating early. Five hours in the library twice a week is not a lot, even if it sounds like it."
Carli Ann Smith, 20, studying marketing and public relations at the University of Lincoln
"I wish I'd known how the time flies. I'm weeks away from finishing and it feels like I started two seconds ago. Make the most of every opportunity that is available to you – I do not want to leave."
Amelia Dale, 23, studying English at Queen Mary, University of London
"I regret not taking more time to think about my future career in relation to my course. I originally began studying pharmacy at King's College London, but it wasn't what I'd expected. My fear of unemployment after university had driven me to take a vocational course that I did not actually enjoy. If you're on a course that you know you aren't enjoying, don't continue – there are ways to modify or even change course completely. Your university will have someone who can help you. Don't be afraid to ask – you are paying for your degree, and need to get the most out of it."
Creative writing, private tutors, listed buildings and charitable status
Last week David Baddiel, Fay Weldon, Will Self, Andrew Motion and others told us whether they think creative writing is well taught at UK universities. Our readers had plenty to say about this
Sadly, it's mainly a way universities and other institutions have of making money. It's cheap – employ hard-up poets or novelists looking for a sinecure for a nominal sum, hoover up fees from aspirational students, and the institution is quids in. Whether it makes writers any better is moot.
apatheticzealot via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Teaching creativity is an oxymoron; something taught must exist, something creative must be new.
acommenter via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Interesting to see the refrain about only published novelists being capable of working with students. My experience as a student is that having a tutor with a published book is no guarantee of their being pedagogically sound, but is much more likely to predispose the writer/teacher to liking the sound of their own voice. One tutor on my MA used to race through the discussion of students' work in order to do such things as show us the covers of his novels and, in a low point, distribute reviews of his own work. Surely there should be more interest in the teaching ability and methods of writers, rather than just the size of their backlist.
wittgensteinsmonkey via EducationGuardian.co.uk
What an indictment of his establishment that the principal of Cleethorpes academy distributes information on private educational support outside school instead of telling parents not to waste their money (A message on headed notepaper, 10 May). Shouldn't he be providing support during the school day, unless of course he lacks confidence in his own staff to deliver it? My children were fortunate enough to attend a comprehensive school that meant what it said on the label and their needs were addressed in house. There was no need to fill the coffers of private tuition businesses; all that was needed were politicians and local communities supportive of their comprehensive schools.
Mike Willson
Southwick, West Sussex
• I get enough spam already. I don't expect to find it in my child's school bag. What a sad, cynical world where our children are used in this fashion.
emale9 via EducationGuardian.co.uk
"At the end of the day, it's what goes on in the building that matters," said the Surrey head whose school is in an historic building (£1,000 for one flagstone, 10 May).
One of the many sicknesses in our society is that so many citizens rarely get to experience aesthetically positive surroundings. The wealthiest in society constantly enjoy the uplifting benefits of historic and beautiful surroundings, at home, at school and at our ancient universities. Schooling in an historic building also gives pupils a physical resource in which to bring the teaching of history (amongst other subjects) truly alive.
Sam Gibson
Ravensthorpe, Northamptonshire
How did public schools acquire charitable status (Opinion, 10 May)? Some were established in the Middle Ages by generous benefactors, their aim not to educate the poor, but the "sons of dec'yed gentlemen". In Victorian times, case law established a highly questionable interpretation of "public benefit".
Through claiming "charitable" status public schools are able to garner millions in tax exemptions. If this tax could be reclaimed by the state it could be spent on the 93% of pupils in the state sector.
Richard Knights, Liverpool
We need a university admissions system based on school students' actual exam results not unreliable predictions, says Mike Baker
How much longer must we wait for a fairer university admissions system? Specifically, when will we get a sensible system based on real exam results not unreliable predictions?
The need for reform has been highlighted again by research from Warwick University that suggests reliance on predicted rather than actual exam results reduces the chances of entry for pupils from poorer households, ethnic minorities and state schools.
The research also shows that students are penalised the later in the cycle they apply. Although the formal applications deadline is mid-January, students can apply from October and independent schools, in particular, encourage students to apply very early.
Although all applications are supposed to receive equal treatment, the Warwick research suggests that later applications are generally less successful and that the "lateness penalty" is particularly harmful to under-represented groups. One reason for this is that as the number of available places diminishes, the hurdle is raised.
A recent briefing paper for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills argued that moving to post-qualification admission (PQA) "would assist students from disadvantaged backgrounds who may suffer disproportionately from the use of predicted grades for offers of university places".
That paper cited research from the university admissions service, Ucas, which concluded that predicted grades were only accurate in 45% of cases. It was even worse for students from the lowest socio-economic groups, with only 39% receiving accurately predicted grades.
The current system means admissions tutors rely on GCSE and AS results as a predictor of full A-level success. But pupils who are bright, but late developers, can be disadvantaged, particularly if they have been badly advised about which subjects to study at GCSE or if they had not realised the longer-term importance of getting good grades.
The Villiers Park Educational Trust, which helps very able pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to get into leading universities, finds such students are often entered for GCSEs early because they are capable of passing. The result is they may achieve Bs or Cs when they should be getting A*s. They have boosted the school's league table position, but they may have wrecked their chances of getting into a top university.
A system based on actual results would do away with the guessing game of relying on predictions and on GCSE and AS results. The delayed higher education white paper is now due in June. Will it tackle the issue?
I understand PQA will feature in the white paper, but as an expression of ministerial interest rather than a definite proposal. We have been here before. The last Labour government was keen on PQA, following a clear recommendation from the Schwartz report in 2004, but it retreated in the face of university opposition. Reform was limited to the minor change of an "adjustment period", when students have very limited options to trade up if their exam results prove better than anticipated.
However, as the Warwick research has reminded us, the case for change remains, particularly for a government that repeatedly states its commitment to improving social mobility. This is one of the few education policies the two coalition partners still agree on and I understand ministers remain interested in PQA, although it's not top of their agenda.
The problems are not insurmountable. There is currently about a six-week gap between A-level results day and the start of university terms. The objection has always been that either A-levels would have to be brought forward or the start of the university term delayed, and either would be disruptive.
But only a small extra shift is needed, since the whole process of exam marking is now being speeded up by the use of technology. For example, simply reversing the exam timetables for AS- and A-levels would probably buy enough extra time.
The Warwick research suggests the current system particularly penalises later applicants for the most heavily over-subscribed courses. According to Sir Martin Harris, head of the Office for Fair Access, while there has been good progress in getting a wider range of people into university overall, there has been little advance in terms of better access to leading universities.
PQA would help to overcome this barrier to social mobility and is a reform whose time is overdue.
Technology that records babies' eye movements could pinpoint problems early and help children in deprived areas to get targeted educational help
Anyone who's ever spent hours trying to work out whether a screaming baby is hungry, tired, soiled or just whingeing for the TV to be switched on to an episode of In The Night Garden will agree that little 'uns aren't the easiest people to communicate with. For parents, that's often frustrating. But for doctors, it can seriously impede the ability to make diagnoses, particularly in areas related to attention, communication and language development.
Now, however, researchers from the University of East London are working on a cutting-edge way to tackle the issue. Taking the latest eye-tracking technology directly into local children's centres, the academics are investigating whether it's possible to identify attention deficiency and communication development problems in babies as young as six months.
With studies suggesting that as many as 10% of British children are suffering from language difficulties by the time they start school, Professor Derek Moore, the lead researcher at UEL's institute for research in child development, says his findings could have a significant impact on children, schools and local communities. The academic uses technology that records babies' eye movements using an apparently normal computer monitor, which has infrared eye-trackers built in. They pick up on reflections from the eye, and provide precise measurements of where the babies are looking on the screen as they watch video clips of speaking faces and moving objects.
The technology is already used in a range of scientific fields, as well as in commerce. Market researchers use eye-trackers to work out what parts of websites, adverts and newspaper best draw readers' attention, for example. But it's only recent updates to the eye-tracking devices that have made it possible to use them with young children to investigate how much of their surroundings they take in.
"Newer equipment is less sensitive to head movements, so ideal for use with babies," says Moore. "It's very powerful – you can immediately play back a video showing a trace of where the baby looked from moment to moment, plus contour maps showing where they looked most overall."
The UEL study, which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, will run for three years in order to keep monitoring the children and to check whether the data collected accurately reflects any emerging difficulties when they begin to talk. So far, Moore says the first parents to enrol their children in the trials have been surprised by how much their babies notice on the computer screens. "Quite a few parents are amazed to see how good their babies were at controlling where they were looking," he says. "Many have little idea about how able their baby is, but this technology engages them and this study begins to harness this enthusiasm."
The early parts of the research – which also involves academics from the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London – have shown that babies are not always most interested in the things that best engage adult attention spans. In one of the eye-tracking tasks, Moore presented groups of six pictures including many common objects to the babies. Before the experiment took place, several of the parents told him they expected their child to focus on the picture of a mobile phone, believing it was this that would most hold their interest. That wasn't the case. In fact, Moore says, most of the babies far prefer looking at pictures of faces, while clocks come a close second .
The academic hopes his findings will enable speech and development experts to work on early screening and help that will enable babies born in some of the UK's most deprived areas to enter school with an equal chance of success.
"The eye-tracking technology means that we can now do work on early responses to social and speech stimuli, and it's portable enough to take this technology into the heart of communities," Moore says. "A diverse range of families are involved in the study, from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds speaking a wide variety of languages at children's centres in Tower Hamlets and Newham, east London. If we can identify weakness or difficulties and set up programmes of intervention earlier here, this will allow GPs to refer infants to specialists earlier, and mean that children entering school will already have had the opportunity to receive targeted educational help. That will improve the quality of life for children, their families and communities."
If his research pays off, Moore hopes eye-tracking technology could eventually be a part of the usual screening techniques used by paediatric doctors and developmental psychology specialists with young children. "In this way, we could have a significant positive impact by reducing the proportion of children presenting with problems at entry to school," he says. For the cash-strapped NHS, Moore hopes eye-tracking tests could also result in serious savings, despite the necessary early investment in technology. He points out that research in both the US and UK suggests spending money on early intervention in children's health can trigger ten-fold returns in cost savings.
"Ultimately eye-tracking measures could be used as part of a toolkit for identifying potential language and social perception problems even before children start speaking," Moore says. "If this technology can be rapidly and effectively integrated into children's centres, then this could have significant long-term health and educational implications."
If the world ends this year as predicted – by some – will psychologists and novelists benefit?
When the world ends this year, psychologists and novelists can take advantage, much as they did when the world ended in the 1950s. Advance notice of the timing comes from a corporate source: Harold Egbert Camping, president of a chain of radio stations based in California, called Family Network, Inc, which says it "regards the Lord Jesus Christ as its chief executive officer".
This will be another test of American psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, which Festinger presented in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World.
Festinger had read about a tiny group of people in a Midwestern city who believed that flying saucers were coming on a particular date to whisk them away. That inspired Festinger to go and insinuate himself, under the pretence of being a fellow believer, into the group to see what they would say after the flying saucers failed to appear. Festinger soon realised that almost no one in the group really cared whether flying saucers would come. Festinger cajoled the group members to have faith that the saucers would show up. He persuaded a very few of them to stick around through the date the space aliens were supposed to arrive, long enough for Festinger to secretly gather enough notes to write his book.
Festinger's book inspired the novelist Alison Lurie to take the story of the professor and the sad sack saucer semi-enthusiasts, change a few details, add a little sex, and tell the tale in more beguiling prose. Lurie's 1967 novel, Imaginary Friends, became the basis for a 1987 Thames TV mini-series, also called Imaginary Friends, which transformed the American Midwestern oddballs into British seaside oddballs.
Festinger wholehearteadly believed in his theory of cognitive dissonance, and was loath to let the saucer-seekers' weak beliefs prevent him, Festinger, from observing how that theory would play out in what we nowadays call "real life". In his book's preface, Festinger wrote: "Man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before."
The new test will happen soon, according to Camping's book We Are Almost There, in which Camping explains: "We indeed can be certain that the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011, and the final day of the history of the world is October 21, 2011."
Afterwards, the rest of us will learn whether some latter-day Festinger is studying the situation, and if so, whether Alison Lurie will write a novel about him and his observations of Leon Camping.
• Marc Abrahams is founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Parents say tactics used by schools are pressurising them into signing up to home tuition schemes
Parents across the country are protesting about letters from their children's schools that help to market a DVD home tuition scheme. In return for sending out the letters on school headed notepaper, signed by the headteacher, the schools receive a payment for "administration costs".
The critics complain that some parents are signing up to the Student Support Centre's literacy and numeracy programme, which can cost thousands of pounds, because their school is advising them it "may be of benefit" to their children.
The headteacher's letter states: "I have been asked to distribute information on behalf of the Student Support Centre and, having reviewed the service they provide, feel it may be of interest to you and of benefit to your children." It adds: "Neither I nor the school actively endorse the service."
Bob Jefferson, whose daughter attends Towerbank primary in Edinburgh, calls it "an abuse of trust". "I don't feel that it is appropriate for the school to be promoting a private company. Quite a few parents at our school were upset about it. I know schools are strapped for cash, but it seems they are getting paltry sums of money, so why are they selling their souls to the devil?" he says.
Towerbank's headteacher was contacted by Education Guardian but did not wish to comment. A spokesman for Edinburgh city council said: "We recently developed our policy on this and we advise schools not to use headed paper."
Contact details
More than 25,000 primary and secondary schools have sent out the SSC material, says the company, one of the largest UK providers of home tuition materials. Parents are urged by schools to return the form whether they are interested or not. They are asked for their contact details, which are passed on to the company.
The programme of DVD lessons for key stage 1-4 is backed by a tutor helpline, and children are given regular tests.
Zoe Hall signed up when her daughter was in year 8 at what was then Lindsey school and community arts college in Lincolnshire (now Cleethorpes academy). "She brought home a letter and, because it came from the school, I trusted it. I thought she could do with some extra maths tuition. So I returned the slip. A sales lady came to the house. She said: 'You can't put a price on your daughter's education', which made me feel very guilty."
Hall signed up at £65.60 a month and quickly regretted it, but was unable to cancel the contract because she missed the five-day cooling-off period (since changed to 14 days). "It makes me feel so angry," she says. "It has been a waste of money and has caused arguments in our family." SSC says it considers cancellation of contracts on a case-by-case basis.
Hall says her daughter tried to follow the DVDs for six months in year 8. "She found it too hard. I don't think she even needed it in the first place. The sales woman assessed her as needing to do the programme, but she sat her mock GCSE in maths at Christmas [in year 11] and got a B [without using the programme]." At the end of the four years of her agreement, Hall will have paid out £3,148.80.
Martin Brown, principal of Cleethorpes academy, says: "We agreed to distribute the leaflets because we are often asked by parents where they can access good educational support outside of school. Having looked at the material provided by the Student Support Centre, we were confident that it could be of help to students as a home-based complement to their schoolwork. We do not endorse this company and we make this quite clear in the letter we send out. Our role is simply to distribute the leaflets, collect the return slips and pass them on to the company." The school has decided not to distribute the leaflets any more, he adds.
Not all parents disagree with SSC's marketing methods. Caroline Stevens (not her real name) from Yorkshire has a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. Her children have been doing the programme for over a year, after she found her son was performing below the average level for his age. She has found the programme "really good". "My son has progressed from level 3, which was below the level for his age, to level 4. I am thrilled."
SSC says that other tutoring organisations, such as Kumon and Explore Learning, also promote their programmes through schools.
Guy Flower, communications manager of Kumon Educational UK, says: "Schools are a key audience for Kumon and we encourage our instructors to build good relationships with schools. There are cases of Kumon instructors sponsoring school football teams by offering branded football kits, for example, but we do not give schools any kind of payment."
Tutors at Explore Learning build up relationships with schools by offering free maths and literacy workshops, and putting on assemblies. Heather Garrick, its marketing director, says: "We do not have any financial arrangement with them. We sometimes send out leaflets through the schools, but these are clearly from Explore Learning and are not signed by the headteacher."
Anthony Lee, founder and chairman of SSC, says the programme has been of huge benefit to the children who have been on it. "Parents get in touch with us because they are concerned about their child's maths and English," he says. And he believes schools are not giving out the information about SSC because of the money they receive. "We make a small token payment of up to £160, which barely covers the administration costs of the distribution of the letter. We have been operating this system for 15 years and schools are quite happy with it ... The schools clearly say in the letter that they are not endorsing the programme."
However, school newsletters indicate that the schools themselves sometimes see this as a source of easy fundraising.
Fundraising
A newsletter from one school said: "An envelope from the Student Support Centre will be sent home with your child. Please read and return the reply slip to school whether Yes or No. The school will receive an increased donation on the number of replies received. Last year the school increased their donation by 100% purely on the number of replies received. Please help us to achieve this once again. It is an easy source of fundraising for school funds."
A spokesman for SSC explains: "We pay a lower fee if the school does a small amount of admin work. We pay a higher fee if the school does a larger amount of admin work. Schools also now have the option to donate the token payment to World Vision – a worldwide charity. A number of schools do take this option."
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, is concerned that with more schools becoming responsible for their own budgets, an increasing number could turn to these kinds of schemes to make money. He is warning schools to "think very carefully about what they put out on letterheaded paper".
"Parents trust their schools and schools need to be very careful how they use that trust," Hobby says. "What seems to be a fairly sensible way of generating funds can turn out to be something very different. Schools should make sure they do a lot of research before becoming involved with these kinds of companies."
A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: "Heads should use their common sense and professional judgment when dealing with approaches from outside organisations. Schools are in a position of authority, and so helping to publicise specific suppliers or products could put a parent under unintended pressure to pay for it."
Private schools are not open to all and, therefore, should not have charitable status, says Fiona Millar
Recent rows about social mobility, interns and Nick Clegg's work experience have been heated and have flushed out some important, if intractable, issues. Odd, therefore, that an imminent court case about the meaning of charitable status for private schools, an equally significant issue for future social mobility, has attracted so little attention.
The dispute about charitable status has been simmering for several years. The 2006 Charities Act removed the presumption that all charities providing education also automatically provide public benefit. The then government swiftly offloaded the task of explaining what that meant in practice to the Charity Commission, which was required to issue statutory guidance.
The commission's new public benefit test ruled that people in poverty should not be excluded from the services of these "charities"; that their benefits should be made available to a "sufficient" section of the population, be quantifiable and reported on annually. The days of sharing the swimming pool and requiring pupils to undertake the odd charitable run appeared to be over.
Since then a slow war of attrition has been grinding on between the private charity school sector and the commission. Many schools assumed that increasing the number of bursaries would tick this box, others barely changed, and, in 2009, the Charity Commission put a sample five schools to the test. Two failed because they provided too few bursaries, and the Independent Schools Council, which oversees about 1,000 private charity schools, has been given leave to judicially review the commission's guidance.
The case starts next week, and the ISC's core argument, set out in papers now before the court, makes depressing reading. It suggests we should simply return to the pre-2006 status quo because charitable private schools already educate a "sufficiently wide" section of the public to a very high standard while not explicitly barring entry to anyone else. Apparently their doors are technically open to all, in the same way that anyone is theoretically free to have dinner at the Ritz, buy a Bentley or take their holidays in Mustique.
This is nonsense, of course. Schools that charge fees approaching the average net earnings of some families are plainly not open to a broad cross-section of the public. Look at their websites and it is clear to see why they cost so much. Beagling, polo, golf courses, rowing lakes and recording studios jostle for attention with classes half the size of those in the state sector, access to the top universities, high-level networks and strings to pull in a gold-plated service that the rest of us subsidise and which simultaneously divides young people by race, class and family income, acting as a break on social cohesion as well as social mobility.
The idea that a handful of subsidies, – many of which do not fully cover the fees and are often offered to siblings, families of alumni and staff – should magically turn these institutions into charities is absurd. Most bursaries are linked to academically selective tests more likely to favour the impoverished middle classes than the socially excluded poor, and also deprive many state schools of the academic mix they need to do well.
There are people who would like to see these public disbenefits eradicated by the simple blanket removal of charitable status from all independent schools, but this is a more complicated legal process than many assume.
One campaigning organisation, which I support, the Education Review Group, has been given permission to intervene in the case. Its submission suggests that, rather than turfing out the Charity Commission's guidance, we should go much further and require more exacting eligibility criteria for bursaries (I favour focusing them on those pupils most at risk of exclusion); partnerships that make a quantifiable impact on the performance of local state schools and their most needy, rather than most able, pupils; and more rigorous methods of measuring that impact.
The private charity schools will say this is a costly distraction from their core job of educating an elite very well. Some of their parents, many of whom are powerful voices in society, will object to their fees being diverted into "legs up" to schools they have rejected for their own children. But charitable status is a right to be earned, not a privilege. Until the private sector can make a better case for the public benefit it provides, it should do more than simply exist.
Researchers find that smiling works wonders in social transactions – but don't try it if you're a banker
You can't put a price on a smile, so goes the popular saying. But a team of British academics claim to have done just that. After developing computer software to test people's responses when someone's face cracks into a smile, researchers at Bangor University have calculated the economic value of a grin. Sadly, their findings suggest that flashing gleaming gnashers isn't going to make you a millionaire: each smile is, they report, worth precisely one third of a penny.
With three smiles earning just a penny, not even the Cheshire cat would be able to give up his day job, but, according to the academics, working out the value of a grin could have a significant impact on our human interactions. Danielle Shore, who led the research with her colleague at Bangor's school of psychology, Erin Heerey, says smiles act as a form of "social currency – a valuable reward that people will pay to receive". She says her research suggests they have the power to do anything from luring shoppers to spending more than they intended to creating lucrative working relationships.
But just before you start flashing fake smiles at everyone in a get-rich-quick kind of way, take pause. Shore found that positive responses to smiles only worked when they were genuine. Her research involved recruiting students to play a game against computerised opponents. The computer avatars either smiled genuinely – defined as having the presence of "laugh lines", tiny wrinkles in the corners of the eyes – or politely. Through playing the game, participants learned to associate a probability of winning money with each of the computer figures, with some programmed to have a better chance of winning than others. The avatars indicated participants' wins by displaying either genuine or polite smiles. Later in the game, participants were asked to choose which opponents they wanted to play on each round.
"We were able to determine the value of a smile based on their choices," Shore explains. "The really surprising finding was that participants preferred genuinely smiling opponents to politely smiling ones, even when the politely smiling ones offered them a greater chance of winning. We expected our participants – all university students, whom you might expect to be highly motivated to earn money – to prefer genuinely smiling opponents only when the odds of winning were equal. The fact that they chose opponents who were less likely to pay out was a big surprise."
It was after totting up all the results from those experiments and working out how much extra candidates would pay for a smile that the academics found the value of a genuine smile.
"It's a bit funny to think about smiles in monetary terms – and the actual economic value of a smile does depend on the person with whom you are interacting and the context of the interaction," says Shore. "But in our study, students gave up the equivalent of just over a third of a penny to see a smile. A genuine smile seems to add value to a person or conversation, and therefore has the power to influence how we view people and the decisions we make during conversations.
"Smiles might be helpful in closing deals on the high street, while if a waiter seems genuinely happy to serve, you might tip more for your meal and recommend the restaurant to your friends. This sort of thing could help boost the economy." Would-be Lord Sugars and Richard Bransons should, Shore suggests, consider throwing more smiles around.
"When meeting people for the first time, your impression of them may depend on how they smile," says Shore. "Our lab has found that when people don't return smiles, this can lead to breakdowns in the conversation. Smiles encourage collaboration and productivity in work – if more genuine smiles are seen in a meeting, that meeting is likely to achieve its aims more quickly and with fewer difficulties."
But as for whether more smiling bankers and politicians would put Britain back into the top flight of economic recovery, Shore isn't so confident. "There are limitations to these findings, and one of them relates to the social context within which smiles occur," she admits.
"We are currently working on examining how the context of the smile shapes behaviour." The Bangor academics' latest software has computerised faces smiling genuinely when candidates win and lose games. So far, the data suggests participants "really dislike the faces that appear to take pleasure at their losses". Adds Shore: "We all know that the current financial crisis was precipitated, at least in part, by banks. For people who have seen tax rises, taken pay cuts or lost their jobs because of the crisis, I can well imagine that seeing genuinely smiling bankers with multimillion-pound bonuses or happy politicians who have just passed tax increases would not make people inclined to feel positively."
The academics are also investigating how humans' brains work while conversing with others. "People are social experts. No two social interactions are the same and when you start a conversation with someone, it is difficult to tell where it is going to lead," says Shore. "Yet, we still manage to produce interactions that show a high degree of co-ordination and that almost seem as if they were rehearsed.
I am interested in how people are able to adjust their behaviour to adapt to changing social situations and how the brain manages the neural computations involved." Shore – who says she is a "smiley person" – has bold hopes about the potential impact of her research, suggesting its findings could be used to boost everyone's quality of life.
"If people perceive that others are friendly, they will enjoy their interactions more and build stronger relationships," she says. "We know that people's social networks are an important determinant of longevity and health. If you smile more, it may help you to build stronger social networks that can provide support throughout life." And that's one kind of social networking that isn't possible to carry out on Facebook or Twitter.
As 10 of the new free schools prepare to set up in listed buildings, state headteachers reveal what life is like working in one. Could it be a big mistake?
The Kings House, St Luke's, Broadfield House, the Wormholt ... it reads like a roll-call of minor public schools. In fact, all are listed buildings bought by the taxpayer to house free schools, the experimental institutions championed by the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Ten of the first 17 free schools to be given the go-ahead have been bought listed homes, according to English Heritage. The Department for Education refuses to say how much it spent, but if the experience of heads who run state schools in historic buildings is anything to go by, the purchases could be criticised on both economic and educational grounds – particularly when budgets are under such strain.
Listed buildings are not cheap to remodel, repair or maintain – as Julia Deery, head of the grade II* Royal Liberty school, knows only too well. The poets Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas trained as soldiers in her magnificent 18th-century hall with its colonnades and rustication. Now the east London building houses a comprehensive school for 600 boys – as well as a resident historian.
"It's a beautiful, distinctive building and the students are very proud of its history," says Deery. "But we get no extra money for its upkeep and we have to deal with English Heritage if we want to repair or change anything. This can be problematic. It took us more than two years to get approval for a back-up boiler and replacing just one flagstone in the entrance hall recently cost £1,000."
"There are significant disadvantages to being listed," she says, adding that Royal Liberty costs much more than other schools of similar size to heat and light. "We struggle to do anything to save energy beyond just turning the thermostat down. It's not fair. We are having to pay to preserve what is everybody's heritage."
Royal Liberty was one of many listed schools poised to get cash for a major refurbishment through the Building Schools for the Future programme. But, while the refurbishment of the new free schools gets under way in time for their September openings, Deery's repairs were cancelled when Gove scrapped BSF.
Woodlands in Coventry, a listed 1950s school, also saw its promised BSF money whisked away. The head, Neil Charlton, said at the time: "It's not our children's fault they're educated in a listed and decaying site, and it's simply unfair to them to allow this to continue. Despite our appalling fabric, we have driven results forward in recent years, but further progress will be limited by our facilities."
Deery and Charlton are far from alone in their struggles with historic buildings. Matt Pendleton left his Derbyshire primary last July vowing that he would never again work in a listed school. Unlike Royal Liberty, Milford primary in the Derwent Valley is a modest structure. It owes its grade II status to its significance in the history of the industrial revolution – built as part of a model town by a mill owner who believed in educating his workers' children.
Like Deery, Pendleton feels being listed is a punishment. "A lot of the finances are tied up in the building and you haven't got the same control you would have in a normal school. When you are looking for work to be done, you have to forget best value – only more expensive options are viable."
The bane of Pendleton's existence until he left Milford was a leaning playground wall. Its repair became mired in talks between the council, the school and English Heritage. In 2007, a huge array of scaffolding weighed down by sandbags and covered with hoardings was erected to support the wall. More than three years later, it was still there. The children were irritated by the way it encroached on their play space, says Pendleton. Local people were irritated by the hoardings. He was irritated by the talk of spending "an extortionate" half a million pounds on it.
Pendleton had many other bugbears, including Milford's windows. "They were a real mish-mash of styles and not very secure, but we would have had to replace them with replicas of the 18th-century originals – at a cost of about £50,000."
Complying with health and safety rules can also be a headache. Milford's fire escape was wooden with an asbestos roof. While Pendleton could ditch the asbestos, he had to retain the wooden steps. Then there are planning constraints. Even erecting a noticeboard for parents required jumping through planning hoops. "It all just drains you of time," he says.
Ann Utting, headteacher of a listed Suffolk primary, knows what he means. Her school, Somerleyton, is charming, tiny and thatched. At its heart is an octagonal house that would once have accommodated her predecessors. The children love its quaintness, she says, but it is expensive to heat, difficult to find furniture to fit and the pillars get in the way of the overhead projector. More important, Somerleyton needs to expand and the discussions take "an extraordinary amount of my time" – time better spent on education.
Both she and Pendleton say compromises have to be made. "Listed buildings can be lovely places for schools, but they have to be fit for purpose and there has to be compromise when it comes to maintenance," says Pendleton.
Tim Brennan, senior regeneration adviser at English Heritage, insists that listing does not automatically add to the refurbishment bill, though if particular materials are needed, or if the architecture is particularly sensitive, costs can escalate. "You have to take a rounded view," he says. "You have the satisfaction of reusing a beautiful building and one that with a little imagination and investment can be made to suit what a school wants."
Positive
One Surrey head is adept at adapting his grade I school to suit – and he is on Christmas-card terms with English Heritage. Noel Lellman, the head of Reigate Priory junior school, is overwhelmingly positive about his building – a glorious mix of former Augustinian priory, Tudor great hall and Victorian country house. "It's a treasure chest – an amazing resource," he says.
"The key is to work with the building and not see it as a problem. I'm here in my Georgian study with its immaculate ceiling, its chandelier and its marble fireplace … which is Blu-Tacked all over with pieces of kids' work."
Lellman's year 5 pupils are based in three interconnecting wood-panelled Stuart bedrooms, one of which was used by Edward VII on weekend visits. Last year, when the over-subscribed school became six-form entry, he turned the old nursery into a new classroom. "Where two little girls played with wooden toys 110 years ago, we now educate 30 children with laptops connected to the internet. I see a link there. This is a living building and we are just carrying on after the Tudors, the Georgians and the Victorians."
Lellman says he is lucky in that Surrey county council has been generous in allocating money for restoration. But he concedes he can get jealous: "If the guttering goes on a colleague's school, they just go to Homebase. If I knew what our last piece of bespoke cast-iron guttering cost, I'd probably be demanding two new teachers for the price."
And if he were setting up a free school, Lellman admits he would probably choose something more practical, low maintenance and modern. "I suppose I'd be looking at out-of-town commercial units … at the end of the day, it's what goes on in the building that matters."
There has been a huge expansion in creative writing courses in the last decade, but is it something you can teach? Well-known writers give their verdicts
It has featured on US higher education programmes for more than a century, but British universities took longer to be convinced by creative writing. The notion that decent writing can't actually be taught was something Malcolm Bradbury found himself up against 40 years ago, when he was setting up an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), the first of its kind. The course is now considered by many to lead the field, and has an impressive alumni list including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Anne Enright.
A new book from UEA by Andrew Cowan, novelist and director of the university's MA course, is intended to offer an insight into the UEA method. It covers how to structure short stories and novels, creating convincing characters, writing believable dialogue and even how to overcome writer's block. Giles Foden, author and professor of creative writing at the university, says the book "answers many of the criticisms levelled at the subject and, to some degree, opens up the fabled 'black box' of our teaching."
The last decade has seen a huge expansion in creative writing courses. More than 90 British universities now offer a range of postgraduate degrees, and around 10,000 short creative writing courses or classes are on offer in the UK each year.
But, 40 years on and amid all this clamour to master the art, how well do universities teach creative writing? Can anyone actually teach it at all?
Andrew Motion, author, poet and professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London
There was a time when creative writing courses were seen on a par with athletes taking steroids, as if it somehow gave them an unfair advantage. There was this idea that creative writing was something that had to take place in a garret. But aspiring dancers go to the Royal Ballet School, and actors to Rada – why should writing be any different?
Now there are many MA programmes and degree courses with a creative writing element. There is also a move to introduce creative writing into GCSE and A-level courses. But teaching is still of variable quality. It's not about teaching students to avoid making mistakes or 'bad' writing; finding out what a blind alley looks like is an important part of the process.
David Baddiel, author, comedian and broadcaster
There seems to be a real hunger to know about the writing process. The thing is, all writers approach the process differently. I know that I work very differently to someone like Roddy Doyle, for example. He plans out the plot from start to finish before he starts a novel, whereas I tend to improvise until I feel a structure emerging. So I'm not sure writing can be taught as such. Certainly, I think you can pass on your experience as a writer and this can be used to develop latent talent. I haven't done any kind of creative writing courses myself, but I have got an English degree from Cambridge University, which was a fairly classical grounding. Ultimately, I think the only way to learn is by reading other writers.
Will Self, author, columnist and broadcaster
I'm still not convinced creative writing can be taught. Perhaps you can take a mediocre novelist and make them into a slightly better one, but a course can't make someone into a good writer. Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguru both did the UEA MA, but they were both innately good anyway. Some people swear by creative writing courses. I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one instead. Otherwise what are you going to write about? Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can't work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.
Fay Weldon, author and professor of creative writing at Brunel University
Four years ago, when I started teaching at Brunel, I was of the opinion that creative writing couldn't be taught. I wasn't taught how to write novels – I just wrote them. But I completely overlooked the years I spent writing copy in an advertising agency and what I learned about the nuances of language – for example, how switching the order of two words can completely change their meaning – or even just the impact of how words look on a page.
Now I believe creative writing can be taught, but only by published writers. A student with some aptitude and interest can benefit an awful lot from coaching and mentoring and sharing their work with other students.
But there are no rules; you can't say "this is how you write a short story" or "this is how you structure a novel" because something good that doesn't follow that pattern will always come along to challenge that. That said, it's difficult to turn a boring writer into an interesting one. And people who don't read a lot rarely write well.
Judy Astley, author
An MA is neat way of putting off actually writing the damn book. By time you've finished, you will be so intimidated by submersion in great and good, you may not actually want to write at all. Courses are also very concentrated on literary work – as if commercial is cheap and dirty – and sometimes taught by failed or unpublished novelists. But you go to art school to refine art techniques, so the MA could be useful for some.
MR Hall, author
I came to novel writing via 12 years of writing for the screen. While I was learning to write screenplays, I did a course with the American screenwriter and creative teacher Robert McKee. His "story" course was enormously helpful in providing basic scaffolding for my ideas. It's fashionable to dismiss this approach as formulaic, but it's like learning to compose music. You learn the principles of harmony and counterpoint before you start to write the melodies. And once the basics become instinctual, you're freed up to break the rules.
While you can learn technique, no one can create a voice for you. You either have something to say or you don't. All the decent writers I know are troubled souls: that's why they write – as lifelong therapy. But they are far from self-indulgent: a professional writer is a person with the discipline to sit at a desk for hours each day to turn the pain into well-structured words and stories designed to hold attention.
Maureen Freely, author and creative writing lecturer, Warwick University
There is a huge and growing demand for creative writing courses, but there are universities out there that simply see it as a money-making enterprise.
Good courses are taught by published writers who see it as a space to nurture and edit new writers. When I was first starting out, I had an editor who would ask me very tough questions about my work. You need that.
There are no hard and fast rules, but writing exercises can help students become more sensitive to the impact of different techniques.
Anna Davis, author and director of Curtis Brown Creative, the first literary agency to run its own creative writing courses
Publishers and agents spend a lot of time reading and assessing work, and would probably tell you that material produced on reputable creative writing courses is likely to jump to the top, or near the top, of the pile because it has already been vetted and assessed by writing tutors and refined under their guidance, but taking a creative writing course is no guarantee of publication. It is absolutely possible to be successful without this.
Curtis Brown Creative's three-month course started last week and is taught by myself and the novelist Jake Arnott. The aim is to help writers develop exciting new debuts at a time when it's not easy for first-time authors to break through.
We selected our first 15 students from a mountain of applications. In our view, you need all your students to be talented in order to really be able to achieve. We are also bringing our experience of the publishing scene and what is working in today's marketplace. I think a lot of students want this kind of practical approach, but a lot of courses focus on pretty prose and lose the bigger picture.
Andrew Cowan, author and director of the MA in creative writing (prose fiction) at the University of East Anglia
While a creative writing course can't turn someone into a writer, if you have ability and are willing to work hard, a course can help you to improve more quickly.
There has been a viral spread of creative writing courses in recent years, but teaching is not always good. You can get someone with a BA, MA and PhD in creative writing teaching on a university course with very limited experience of being published.
One criticism that is often levelled at creative writing courses is that they produce "cookie cutter" fiction. But if you look at the list of published graduates from the MA at UEA, you couldn't get a more diverse range of writers.
• The Art of Writing Fiction by Andrew Cowan is published by Longman, an imprint of Pearson. • The Death of Eli Gold by David Baddiel is published by Fourth Estate
It's all very well announcing an all-age careers service, but where's the funding to go with it, ask Tony Watts
The coalition government's early policy statements on career guidance were widely welcomed. It declared its commitment to establish an all-age careers service, and to revitalise the professional status of career guidance practitioners. For young people, it indicated that it would safeguard the partnership model between schools and external career guidance providers.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has retained its commitment. Its contribution to the new all-age national careers service is to be £84.4m. But an all-age service requires two departments to tango, and it is clear that the Department for Education is refusing to dance. Not only that, but it appears to be removing, by stealth, almost all funding from existing career guidance services for young people.
The assumption had been that BIS's contribution would be complemented by the existing funding for the career guidance component of Connexions services, estimated at £203m. But a parallel funding announcement from DfE has been conspicuous by its absence. Fears are growing that its contribution will be confined largely or wholly to the £7m currently given to the telephone/web-based services of Connexions Direct.
A convenient smokescreen for this has been provided by school autonomy. For the crucial face-to-face services, the DfE has indicated that in future it expects schools to purchase such services. Yet there has been no discernible transfer of funding for such services to schools. And the overall budgets of many schools are being cut. Meanwhile, without a clear policy steer from the DfE, many local authorities have announced big reductions and even closures of their Connexions services, including massive staff redundancies.
The preoccupation with school autonomy is also weakening careers provision in other respects. The essence of the partnership model is that schools provide careers education, while external providers offer impartial guidance. But in the new education bill, the statutory duty for schools to provide careers education is being withdrawn.
It is being replaced by a new statutory duty for schools to "secure" independent career guidance for their pupils, either from the all-age service or from other providers. This converts the partnership model into a contractor-supplier relationship. The model is undermined further by a recent announcement that schools can appoint their own careers adviser if they wish, and that access to external guidance can be confined, at a minimum, to access to web-based or telephone services.
Whatever the evidence may be for school autonomy in terms of pupil attainment, there is no indication that it applies to effective career guidance.
Indeed, the evidence is to the contrary. International studies demonstrate that school-based guidance systems tend to have weak links with the labour market, to view educational choices as ends in themselves rather than as career choices (which they are), to lack impartiality, and to be patchy in extent and quality. In two countries that abandoned the partnership model in favour of school commissioning (the Netherlands and New Zealand), the outcome was significant reductions in career guidance provision.
This now seems highly likely in England, too. Unless an overt and credible announcement on initial DfE funding for the all-age service is made soon, with stronger policy levers on schools than those indicated to date, DfE will be open to charges of collective deceit and hypocrisy.
• Professor Tony Watts is an international policy consultant on career guidance and career development
Next week our University Guide will appear online and in the Education supplement
Are you thinking of applying to university? You need the Guardian's University Guide 2012, next Tuesday
In the Education supplement
We will have hot insider tips on how to make your application stand out; how to choose your university and the best course for your interests and needs; plus the vital low-down on the new fees and finances involved in going to university in 2012.
Online
• Interactive subject tables showing which universities are best at teaching the courses of interest to you - partly judged by students themselves
• An overall ranking showing which universities perform well in teaching across all subjects
• An A-Z of campuses and what they have to offer, from clubbing to kayaking
guardian.co.uk/education
The charity Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities, praised by users, FE organisations and government as a vital information and support service, announces its closure
Toby Morrison says his dreams of academic success and a career as a welfare worker were thwarted at school by teachers who saw only his disabilities. They were misguided, says the 19-year-old, now an occupational therapy undergraduate at Coventry University. "Their comments made me all the more determined to succeed – but didn't make it any easier."
The odds were certainly stacked against Morrison. Born with bleeding on the brain and hydrocephalus, he suffers lifelong problems including cerebral palsy, weakness on his right side, tunnel vision and partial epilepsy. His family gave all the support they could. But pursuing his ambitions in the wider world, he says, "was like doing the 100 metres with your shoelaces undone".
Then everything changed. As a BTec national diploma student, he was on work experience at the charity Action for Kids when he was introduced to staff from Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities. "They told me: 'forget you have a disability, don't let it get in the way of what you want, do the best you can'."
The personal attention and appreciation of his aspirations this charity gave him were just what he needed. "It has given me the biggest boost of confidence," says the young man, who soon became a youth ambassador for the Skill Volunteer Voices programme, visiting schools and colleges to encourage other disabled students.
So he was appalled to learn that Skill had run out of cash and was closing. In the fragmented world of charitable support for the disabled, Morrison is pessimistic that the well-focused campaigning and policy work of Skill will be taken up by others. It is a concern shared by many leading organisations in FE, some of which have had to take tough cost-cutting action for survival and have little flexibility left.
Relatively generous funding and support from business, colleges and other agencies, plus contracts for research and development, helped to sustain Skill for 40 years, and to fund a helpline for the disabled and a strong policy team with influence on government decision-making. But, says Peter Little, chair of the board and a trustee for 20 years, given the economic crisis, "the general fundraising climate grew difficult. We took a hit last year and were not able to replace those funding streams no longer available".
On 7 June, the trustees and 500 active members of Skill will gather for the formal closure meeting. "We are in discussion with BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] to see where they can support others taking on the services," says Little.
The skills minister, John Hayes, has expressed dismay at the closure and says: "The government remains committed to ensuring the needs of disabled students are met and we are in discussions with other organisations in the sector about taking this work forward."
Skill is no ordinary charity, says Yola Jacobsen, programme manager for the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, which itself recently had to make huge reductions. "It is a vital information and support service that has campaigned successfully for disabled people on so many fronts – promoting equality in education, training and employment. It has given people the power of self-management and the ability to participate."
Its demise could not come at a worse time, she says, given the need for close scrutiny of new public duty regulations arising from the Equality Act and the special education and disability green paper, now before parliament.
But there are even deeper concerns for the future rights of disabled people, says Jacobsen. Skill tackles a big long-term problem facing disabled people – the disproportionately high numbers kept out of work and in poverty by the high costs of skills training. "It is not about intelligence and ability, but access and financial support."
A powerful example of Skill's effectiveness is its helpline. Over 50% of inquiries are about finance for learning, and it acts as an early warning alarm when systems fail. For example, when the Student Loans Company failed to make payments on time last year, Skill could identify 12,500 disabled students in England waiting for grants to pay for specialist equipment.
The small intelligence team sustained by Skill has been an essential service for FE organisations, working through the mire of legislation and regulations. "It was the only organisation in that niche and served a key role," says Jacobsen. "I get many inquiries on technical issues and would confidently refer people to their free helpline. Who now will offer support for disabled students?"
Her biggest fear is the impact on student access of the 25% cut in college budgets – the sort of issue on which Skill was sharp-eyed, she says. "Colleges have to run as businesses and make the sums work. People who need extra support will lose out big time."
College leaders agree there is a need for vigilance to alert ministers and funding agencies to any difficulties. Debbie Ribchester, a senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, says: "We have concerns about the complexity of the system for people with disabilities and the SEN and disability green paper is seeking to address many of these issues."
With Skill's closure, other agencies such as the Institute for Learning and the Disability Alliance are looking to take on some of the work. But Toby Morrison fears it will "completely vanish. Maybe there will be pockets of support, but I don't think any organisation could match the amazing level of work Skill did. It's hard to comprehend how much they have done – for millions of people across the country".
Lord Baker gives some reassurance on university technical colleges, plus the school I'd like, and British studies
I am glad Estelle Morris supports the University Technical Colleges (Opinion, 26 April). She raises some questions about their impact.
Who will UTCs recruit? Students at 14 will themselves decide whether they want to go to a UTC. When speaking to students at the JCB academy, the first UTC, I found most seem to have learned about it through local radio. JCB was seeking to recruit 120 students and was oversubscribed in the end. In the second year, there was no need to advertise: it was overwhelmed with applications.
The general academic education at a UTC is as important as its specialism. GCSEs in English, maths, and science are central, together with bridging studies in business, finance and entrepreneurial skills alongside a language such as German – for engineering, not Goethe, and the history and geography of engineering and science to cover humanities.
I can assure Morris that a student's choice at 14 is not irrevocable. Any youngster who has started at a UTC but feels it is not for them will be able to transfer to another school at 14 or 15, or take a different course when they are 16.
As regards the impact upon other schools, we are learning as we go along. Three or four years ago, many schools were suspicious of UTCs since they would attract some of their students, but a UTC requires a wide catchment area and this means no individual secondary school is affected too greatly. Recently, we have had schools approaching the Baker Dearing Trust to say they are willing to have a UTC in their area because there are youngsters who would like and benefit from a highly skilled technical education.
These are early days but there are encouraging signs. At the JCB academy, by the end of the second term there was a distinct improvement among students in English and maths. And truancy has disappeared.
The attractions have caught on and I believe we will see a growing number of applications in the years ahead.
Lord Baker of Dorking
Baker Dearing Trust,
London SW1
Last week we published the Children's Manifesto – a list of things to make a dream school drawn up by a panel of children. It is part of The School I'd Like project, which has been running for 10 years.
Well done, everyone. I really enjoyed your article. I'm glad you expect us teachers to be experts – it's what most of us have spent our lives trying to achieve. I'm also glad you like a quiet voice and no shouting – though sometimes we do get provoked...
Quaestor via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Great to see such support for hot school meals, international food and cooking lessons!
SchoolFoodTrust via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Fascinating article. The uncanny thing is that much of what the children are asking for are things that home educating families are providing.
RossMountney via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Zoe Corbyn asked whether UK universities should think about introducing British studies courses.
British studies would be pointless. If you're looking at any period of history from 55BC onwards, British history, politics, culture etc is intertwined with the rest of Europe. A lot of America's foreign policy blunders have stemmed from the fact they don't appreciate the context that their empire sits in. Studying Britain out of context won't help that. European studies would make sense though.
Polhotpot via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Mobiles are commonplace in secondary schools, but can they be used for teaching? Find out on the Guardian Teacher Network this week
If there's one thing you'll find in the pocket or bag of every young person in secondary school, it's some kind of mobile device.
From the smartphone to the iPad to the Nintendo 3Ds, the range of mobile devices is growing. The education secretary, Michael Gove, wants to ban mobiles from school. But while some see them just as entertainment, many teachers and educators know that they can be used in exciting ways in class.
On the Guardian Teacher Network, Doug Belshaw, a researcher at Northumbria University, a former history teacher and one of the driving forces behind the viral backlash to the education secretary's comments, "govephonehome", has prepared a guide to how mobile devices can be used for learning. What about asking students to record their ideas to play back later? Or the application that features all the works of Shakespeare and other classics that students can use for reading along in class?
To see the full guide go to the Guardian Teacher Network.
• The Guardian's new education resources network offers access to 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials all absolutely free. This content is being added to every day by classroom teachers and educationalists. Nearly 30,000 people have already signed up. To see (and share) for yourself, go to teachers.guardian.co.uk
From free school meals to leader of a university: Carl Lygo the head of BPP is setting an example. By Janet Murray
Carl Lygo is used to being misunderstood, he says. As the CEO of BPP University College, one of just two private universities in the UK, he knows that handling suspicion and criticism comes with the territory. It's mostly ideological, he says, the idea that a profit-making company could provide higher education – and do a good job – just doesn't sit well with some people. "We get rapped, but people don't want to look at the whole story and at the fact that we have done it all properly."
He says the University and College Union, for one, "continues a campaign of misinformation". On the UCU website, mentioning BPP, it says: "Private companies have no tradition of academic freedom, are exempt from Freedom of Information legislation, and are not subjected to the same academic rigour or public scrutiny as UK universities."
This angers Lygo, especially the bit about academic freedom. "Have you ever tried to tell a barrister or a solicitor that they can't do something? If you tell them they cannot research what they are particularly interested in, then they will go and work somewhere else."
Lygo is an amiable man, who jovially says he "enjoys a fight" and what keeps him going under fire is his stubborn streak. "I get a thrill out of leading a university that is different. If people think I can't do something, I try to find a way around it."
Existing universities now feel they must justify their increased tuition fees and a promised higher education white paper is expected to relax the rules on university titles and encourage for-profit organisations to enter the market. BPP — along with the other the only other private provider, the University of Buckingham – could find it is not the "bad guy" any more. In fact, it may find existing and new providers looking to emulate its business models. When Lygo stood up to speak at the Guardian's Higher Education summit recently, his opening words to university chiefs were: "Welcome to the real world!"
In this new era of higher education, some universities will try to improve their kerb appeal, says Lygo. But students don't want swimming pools or swanky coffee bars, he says. "They want more contact time, more feedback, smaller groups, a tutor who knows their name and the chance of a job at the end."
Inevitably, the fee rise will lead to a dip in the number of young people going to university and a big shift in how higher education is delivered, he says. "I suspect the Open University, FE colleges and the private sector will all have a role to play in moving towards more career-focused degrees."
Last month, the government announced plans to extend tuition fee loans available to students at private universities, in a bid to encourage more companies to enter the education market. Ministers hope this could put pressure on publicly funded universities not to pitch their fees too high.
But Lygo doesn't believe students will shun the universities charging the highest fees. "The typical student is not necessarily a rational buyer. It may be, for example, that some Russell Group universities haven't got great teachers, but students will choose to go there because it looks good on their CV."
BPP is yet to announce its fees for the coming academic year, but Lygo hints there could be some surprises. "We haven't decided yet, but it may be that it is radically different from the rest of the sector," he says with a twinkle in his eye.
Lygo, born in Doncaster, was raised by his mother, a sewing machinist in a local factory. He learned to read alongside her at the local FE college when she took basic literacy classes. It was his parents' divorce that sparked his interest in studying law. "I had an exposure to authority figures who were looked up to in society, and I thought it would lead to a job."
While his mother was supportive, a school careers adviser told him to go into the building trade.
He did well in his exams, getting A grades in both O- and A-level law (he won't be drawn on his results in other subjects), but it is clear that he feels he could have done better. "I had not appreciated when I rocked up for my exams that you were actually supposed to revise for them. Nowadays there is a whole industry in preparing kids for exams at all levels."
Asked where he went to university, he replies: "You are the first person in 15 years who has asked me that. It becomes irrelevant after a while, where you studied."
For a man of 43, Lygo has packed plenty into his life and career so far. After a first-class law degree from the University of Central Lancashire (Lancashire Polytechnic) he did a master's at UEA while teaching trainee solicitors part-time. He then moved to London to train as a barrister specialising in personal injury and clinical negligence law. An MBA followed, including a spell at Michigan State University, before he moved into full-time teaching at London Guildhall University (then City Polytechnic).
What drove him into the private sector, he says, was the fact that in a publicly funded institution, teaching wasn't valued as much as research. During his 15 years at BPP, he has held a number of posts, including chairman of the BPP Law School.
He travels daily from his home in Canterbury, but is often at his desk by 7.30am and rarely home before 9pm. With five children aged seven and under, there is little time for leisure, he says, although he admits to a heavy metal habit that helps him let off steam and it's not unheard of to hear Motorhead or AC/DC blasting out of his office.
With his softly-spoken, unassuming manner it is much easier to imagine Lygo in the classroom than in court and he is keen to stress that he is a teacher first and foremost. Being the boy-done-good from Doncaster, who is "best mates with a white van driver" meant he found life in chambers wasn't always easy. "The Oxbridge-style dining environment was extraordinarily alien to me. I remember lacking confidence and wondering if it was or me, but I had good mentoring from someone from a similar background who gave me the confidence to get involved."
For that reason, he says, he has always felt the need "to shine a path, and offer a helping hand for others like me".
He admits his background is "very different from what you might expect of someone leading a private sector organisation." So as someone who, in his own words, had all the "grants and passes" he needed to complete higher education, how does he reconcile the idea of students paying up to £9,000 a year? He points out that students are not required to pay up front. But the sector does need to do more about scholarships, he says. BPP spends "upwards of half a million a year" helping students from disadvantaged families with bursaries, and as fees go up universities will need to think harder about how they support this group.
Lygo refuses to be drawn on his politics, but describes the balance of "left and right" in his life. His grandfather was a trade union official, while his grandmother drove a bus through a picket line during the general strike. And BPP is staffed by people of all political persuasions, he says.
He is not willing (or able, he says) to comment on claims that the Apollo Group, the American owner of the university, is under investigation by the US government over its "recruiting, admissions and financial aid practices".
His belief is that "there are lots of opportunities and it is just a case of the individual taking them". "The American dream does live in the UK. It is possible to achieve what you want through hard work and perseverance – and perseverance is the key for getting on in life."
The ham sandwich theorem has intrigued mathematicians for more than half a century, but research now has tied up some loose ends
The Ham Sandwich Theorem has been a treat and a spur to mathematicians for more than half a century. There was a bit of a kerfuffle about who invented it, but that question did get settled.
The Ham Sandwich Theorem cropped up in a branch of mathematics called algebraic topology.
The theorem describes a particular truth about certain shapes. Most published papers on the topic make a hash of explaining it to anyone who is not an algebraic topologist. But the authors of a 2001 paper called Leftovers from the Ham Sandwich Theorem wrapped up an important little leftover – they put the idea into clear language.
The Ham Sandwich Theorem, they wrote, "rescues the careless sandwich maker by guaranteeing that it is always possible to slice the sandwich with one cut so that the ham and both slices of bread are each divided into equal halves, no matter how haphazardly the ingredients are arranged".
For a while, most ham sandwich theorising dealt with simple cases. A paper called Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions, published in 1986 in the Journal of Symbolic Computation, is typical. It considered only ham sandwiches that had been flattened flatter than even the chintziest cook would dare to devise. Mathematicians often do things this way, first considering the extreme cases, digesting those thoroughly, and only then moving on to more substantial versions. Indeed, the Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions paper itself contains a section called Getting Rid of Degenerate Cases.
People did solve the mystery of slicing a thick ham sandwich. And, inevitably, they developed a hunger for more substantial problems.
In 1990, Yugoslavian theorists were writing in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society about An Extension of the Ham Sandwich Theorem.
Two years later a theorist at Yaroslav State University in Russia published a paper called A Generalization of the Ham Sandwich Theorem.
That same year, a team of hungry American, Czech, and German mathematicians assembled a master collection of recipes for slicing ham sandwiches. Mathematicians almost never use the word "recipe", so they called their paper Algorithms for Ham-Sandwich Cuts. You'll find it in the December 1994 issue of the journal, Discrete and Computational Geometry.
Research then moved on to exotic, distantly related questions, exemplified by a 1998 monograph called Green Eggs and Ham.
And who started this? A 2004 paper called The Early History of the Ham Sandwich Theorem took care of a lingering leftover: it identified the inventor. Mathematico-historians WA Beyer and Andrew Zardecki of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico say that it was a Jewish theorist who introduced the ham sandwich into mathematical theory. Beyer and Zardecki trace the theorem back to a 1945 paper by the Polish mathematician Hugo Steinhaus that "represents work Steinhaus did in Poland on the ham sandwich problem in World War II while hiding out with a Polish farm family".
(Thanks to Stanley Eigen for bringing the ham sandwich research to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Twitter is playing host to a group of teachers who meet weekly to swap top tips and advice
It's Thursday evening and hundreds of teachers are engrossed in a training session. The topic is pupils using mobiles in class; more than 1,000 questions and answers are pinging back and forth. "If students text in your lesson and aren't engaged, leave the profession – you're not cutting it," says one. "The kit in their pockets is often better than school equipment," says another. "Give a pupil an encyclopaedia and they get so much knowledge.
"Give them tech and wow – exponential learning," enthuses a third.
The teachers – who work in schools dotted around the country, from urban academies to tiny primaries – enter and exit the training at various points.
They do so without disturbing anyone. Not because they're expert tiptoers, but because they're not in the same room.
This is UKEdChat, a weekly congregation of teachers on Twitter. It began when Colin Hill, a year 2 teacher at Birkdale primary school in Southport, saw US teachers tweeting about their work at a particular time every week.
"The time difference made it tough to actively participate," Hill explains.
"But I was keen to attract UK educators to a similar chat session, discussing subjects and policies more related to our side of the Atlantic."
Hill approached teachers on Twitter, plus colleagues he knew from outside the micro-blogging community, about a UK version. He posted an online poll asking teachers for their ideal time, and settled on Thursdays between 8pm and 9pm. Each week, a volunteer moderator would pick five questions for a poll on the UKEdChat website. Then, at 8pm, teachers nationwide would log into Twitter on laptops, iPhones and BlackBerrys to debate the poll-topping issue. Sessions so far have included "homework: waste of time or limitless opportunity?", pupil feedback to enhance learning, and encouraging reading.
"The impact has been amazing," says Hill. "It's surprising how colleagues from primary, secondary and beyond share similar issues or problems." Some weeks, UKEdChat invites experts to host sessions, including Michelle Treagust, who works for The Reading Agency (@readingagency) and responded to questions about adult literacy. Each tweet contains the hashtag #ukedchat, so participants search that to see all comments all the time. After each pacey session, the moderator uploads all the tweets to the UKEdChat website.
"Twitter is a brilliant way of bringing innovative and inventive teachers together," says Jackie Schneider, a primary teacher in Merton, south London.
"Most schools have a really dull, top-down culture in which the senior management try to 'manage' learning. But on Twitter there's a huge generosity of spirit where teachers help out complete strangers with lesson resources purely for the love of learning.
Fresh air
"It's invigorating for old lags like me. I discovered that innovative cookery teachers in secondary schools are making their own YouTube videos to inspire kids, and did the same, and was directed towards a range of free online music resources perfect for my year 4 students. I really value the community – it's a breath of fresh air compared to traditional forms of teacher improvement."
Across the UK, Glen Gilchrist, head of science at Newport high school, says he "instantly fell in love" with UKEdChat because "schools hold their cards close to their chest and LEAs [local education authorities] are inefficient at spreading good practice".
He explains: "I have Twitter running on my laptop all the time. When faced with a question about pedagogy during an 'out of specialism lesson', like maths, I tweet the question and within minutes have the answer. Whether you need inspirational classroom management techniques or want to discuss Bloom's Taxonomy, there's always an audience at UKEdChat."
Hill is working on plans for a live conference for tweeting teachers later this year. In the meantime, UKEdChat is becoming more established online. As Gilchrist puts it: "The more teachers start using the #ukedchat tag, the more useful it becomes."
• Find out more at www.ukedchat.wikispaces.com. Non-tweeters can read past sessions at www.ukedchat.wordpress.com . Follow Lucy Tobin on Twitter: @lucytobin
If your school rates highly, we want to know about it
How does your school match up to the Children's Manifesto?
If you think your school scores highly, let us know why. We'll profile some of the highest-scoring schools, so we can all learn from those that listen to children.
Just email school.i'd.like@guardian.co.uk. Please include a contact phone number.
Who drew up the Children's Manifesto? Meet our panel of 10 children who oversaw and edited all the submissions
Markus Heinonen, 6, Cambridge
Children should be listened to because they sometimes have better ideas than adults. That is because the children's brains are new and not old.
Oliver Stewart, 12, Cornwall
I think having nice teachers is the most important because lots of children don't like certain subjects because of the teacher, and then that influences them on jobs in later life.
Zarah Yesufu, 8, London
It's important to listen to children because you have to treat them with respect if you want them to have respect for you.
Linda Epstein, 15, London
I think the most important point is having expert teachers, because if you have people who are passionate and well known in their subject they are more likely to engage and motivate the students into excelling in the same way as them.
Alice Nutting, 16, Lincoln
Why should schools listen to children? Well, why shouldn't they? Government ministers and teachers don't always know best: pupils will be happier with something they've contributed to.
Sofia Lockwood, 7, Guernsey
Being comfy is important, because if you weren't comfy you wouldn't really like it and if you didn't like it you wouldn't want to go to school.
Jake Swinburne, 8, Hartlepool
It's really the children's school, and the children would be able to do things better if it was the way they liked it.
Vishane Mendis, 9, Essex
I think it's important to listen to children since we have a really big imagination and we could have ideas on how to make lessons fun. And the teachers may be able to learn something from us since they don't know everything.
Michael Anning, 11, Norfolk
Children would be more confident if the school encouraged them to express their views and showed them they had listened. It would feel as if everyone was part of a team.
Jessica Stewart, 18, Berwick-upon-Tweed
An ideal school is inclusive of everyone. I think that's important in the modern world we live in.
From milk cows to after-school clubs, ideas flooded in from children all over the country about the kind of school they would like. Here is their manifesto
★ Active – with lots of different sports, including judo, dance, karate, football and abseiling, and a swimming pool with slides. Playgrounds with climbing frames and treehouses where you could learn about nature.
"Rock climbing could help your education because you have to think where to put your hands and feet."
★ Calm – with a chill-out room; music instead of bells, and a quiet place inside at playtime for drawing, reading and board games.
★ Comfortable – with beanbags, big enough chairs, small enough chairs, slippers, and somewhere personal to store things. There should be cold drinks in the summer and hot drinks to warm you up in winter.
"Pink fluffy carpet so we can walk around in our socks."
★ Creative and colourful – with lots of room to make and display art, bright painted walls in corridors and dining rooms, and flowers in the classroom.
"I would like to ban the colours black, brown and grey from our school."
★ Expert - with teachers who don't just read up about their subjects, but live them, and visiting celebrities to talk about what they do.
"In the classroom we should have Stephen Hawking to teach us science. I would like Gordon Ramsay to cook our lunch, but he would have to promise to zip his mouth. I would like Besse Cooper to teach us history, according to the internet she is the oldest person alive today so she could tell us about her life."
★ Flexible – with more time for favourite subjects, no compulsory subjects apart from maths and English, and more time for art and sport.
"If we're doing something that needs a lot of thinking, there should be enough time to finish."
★ Friendly – with kind teachers who speak softly and don't shout, and special members of staff that you can go and talk to. You should be allowed to sit with your friends in class and assembly.
"The cool thing is the friendship bench. If anyone sits on there sad, someone comes up to them and always says what's wrong and they will sort it out with a big cuddle and go off and start playing together."
★ Listening – with forums for classes to express their views and also chances for pupils to have quiet chats with teachers. Don't just listen, but take children's comments seriously and make changes as a result.
"I like the idea of having a suggestion box because we can share each other's ideas with the school council."
★ Inclusive –with pupils of all achievement, ability and background learning together. Everybody should learn in one room, with opportunities for small group or private work.
"I think it's unfair that only the people who are good at writing stories have their stories displayed in the school hall. I think everyone should have their work displayed. That way no one feels left out."
★ International – with food from all over the world on the dinner menu and pupils from all over the world in the classroom; with opportunities to go abroad to learn languages and about other cultures.
"At lunchtime a buffet with Namibian, Chinese, Indian and French food would be served on flower-shaped plates and we would listen to music from that country as we ate."
★ Outside – fortnightly school trips (without worksheets), animals to look after like chickens, sheep and horses, and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables to eat at school and sell to raise funds.
★ Technological – with iPads to read and work on, MP3 players for relaxing during breaks or to help concentrate while working alone, and usb sticks to take work home (and save paper).
"There should be digital recorders available for lessons, so if you go to the toilet, when you come back you can catch up on what you have missed."
What the perfect school would have
★ No homework (all the work would be finished at school)
★ A flexible timetable
★ An hour-long lunchbreak
★ Pets
★ First-aid lessons
★ A choice of uniform to express your personality
★ After-school clubs in all sorts of subjects
★ Hot dinners
★ An iPad for each pupil
★ A football field
★ Fewer tests (but not no tests at all)