What makes the ideal school? After entries from all over the country, Dea Birkett reveals the Children's Manifesto of ideas, from comfy beanbags to soothing music and pets
In January we launched the School I'd Like, asking schoolchildren what would make their perfect school. Hundreds of young people let us know in emails, essays, poems and pictures. From these ideas, we've compiled the Children's Manifesto for the school we'd like, overseen and edited by a panel of 10 children. Some of the ideas are blue-sky thinking: horses and sheep in playgrounds may never be the norm. But many are small and easy to implement. First-aid lessons, a choice of uniform and music instead of bells at break time involve little cost or effort.
Behind these specific, modest requests lie big ideas. The most important aspect of education children want changed is the timetable. They wanted their educational experience to be tailored to them. Sausage-machine schooling, with a one-size-fits-all schedule, is their biggest complaint. They don't want to do less work (although Friday afternoons off was a popular request). They just want work that enthuses and means something to them.
About half the entries were from individual children; the rest were coordinated by teachers. Malorees infant school, London, asked their school council members, aged four to seven, to speak to their classes to find out what their perfect school would be like. The year 4 teacher at St Peter's Church of England primary in West Sussex, a small rural school, said: "Our pupils are actively involved in various aspects of school life. However, they were very excited at the prospect of having their voice heard by a wider audience." The only doubts about the project came from grown-ups. "Should we expect children to be able to think strategically about 'what is best for society' rather than 'what I quite fancy'? No, of course not," wrote one irate parent.
There's some truth in this; a few children asked for chocolate fountains and popcorn counters. But strategic thinking lies behind many of their suggestions. Imogen Jagathesan, aged nine, thought it would be a good idea to have cookery lessons, but not just to bake cakes. "It means you may be able to cook healthy food. If grown-ups keep buying junk food for their children, the government will be paying out lots of money because they will get ill when they are older," she explained. This degree of forward thinking was surprising; most entries were from primary pupils. Secondary pupils' concerns were similar, but the older they were, the more they wanted to bring an end to same-sex schools, streaming and segregation.
There was a similar strength of feeling around inclusion for all 10 years ago, when this paper ran an earlier School I'd Like. (The Observer had run a 1967 competition under the same title.) In 2001, the built environment was also paramount in pupils' concerns, with comfort at its core. Feeling comfortable is still important, with endless pleas for beanbags. But there are major differences over the last decade. In 2001, the most advanced technology requested was a laptop. Now an iPad is the most sought-after item. Behind these Christmas-list demands are sound educational aims. "With your homework on the iPad you can do it in the car, on the train, or at home," wrote Thomas Williams, 10. Thomas Yardley suggested: "Children could have MP3 players so it would be soothing when you are working. I think it is a good idea because it would stop people distracting each other."
There's a practical streak running throughout the submissions, with a keen sense of value for money and budgetary restrictions virtually absent 10 years ago. "I would like our schools to have free choice in what we buy. In assembly we could have a vote on what we would like and what we do not want, only if it is within the school budget," wrote 12-year-old Sam Gritt. Many children thought of the commercial opportunities in their classroom. The year 6 writing club at Burdett-Coutts and Townshend primary wanted a book club and gift shop, stocked with things they'd made themselves. "Every class should have a cow so they can sell the milk from the cow and improve the school," wrote Joshua Kennedy, 11.
In 2001, before the launch of Jamie Oliver's school dinners campaign, the most desired meal was chips and pizza. Now it has a far more international flavour, with Asian food particularly popular. And as canteens close, almost every entry asked for the return of hot school dinners.
Some children wrote in to say their school was near-perfect (although this was nearly always as part of a school-led project). It's clear that schoolchildren are increasingly being listened to. Many let us know about their school councils, although as many said they were tokenistic and had no real power. But there were examples of young people's real influence. "They do ask what we'd like sometimes. When we were getting a new teacher, we had a lesson from three teachers and we were asked which one we liked the best. They did choose her, so they listened to us," reported Hannah Stott, 10.
Young people now declare they have rights – an argument they didn't put in 2001. "The children of the modern day are getting more and more rights such as having the right to say their opinion, and this is mine," began Joshua Kennedy, before saying that "you should be allowed to say what you think to the teacher without being criticised or given a detention". Those who fear a breakdown of adult authority wouldn't be heartened by the children's ideas. Many said they shouldn't have to call their teachers Miss, Mrs and Mr if they get called by their first names. "Children would be equal to the teachers and opinions would be listened to by everyone," wrote Rachel Dengate, 12.
What will we do with this wealth of ideas? When The School I'd Like was launched earlier this year, we didn't only ask for ideas. We promised to listen to them. After all, this is still one of the largest informal surveys of children's attitudes towards schooling ever conducted in this country. We will now present the Children's Manifesto to opinion formers, asking for their feedback. Who knows, perhaps we will end up with horses and sheep in the playground after all.
• Find out more about The School I'd Like from www.guardian.co.uk/education/series/the-school-i-would-like
Until our political culture changes to something less adversarial, says Peter Scott, higher education funding will continue to suffer
In two days' time, we all get to vote on whether to substitute alternative voting for first-past-the-post – although many of us may not actually bother. Our choice has also been presented as a matter of great constitutional significance, even if in the last few days the choice has been trivialised as a squabble between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
But an even bigger constitutional change would be to junk our present hyper-adversarial mode of politics, which exaggerate often modest differences into massive issues of principle. The debate about the future funding of higher education is a case in point. The superficial impression is of high-stake "culture wars", with the government hell-bent on destroying public higher education in general, and the arts and humanities in particular, and its opponents conducting a Verdun-style defence of the "public good".
In fact, the differences between the government's proposals for higher fees – in practice, student vouchers repayable by graduates (which a very large minority will never actually repay in full) – and Ed Miliband's counter-proposals for a graduate tax (which, very sensibly, he has left vague) are nothing like as great – although it grieves me to admit it. No mainstream political party in England is fighting for "free" higher education funded out of general taxation.
The truth is that at the general election a year ago, no party had a credible policy for higher education. The poor LibDems had a "protest" policy, abolishing fees, which they never imagined would come even close to being implemented. The Conservatives had no discernible policy at all, none they were prepared to share with the voters, at any rate. Labour was stuck with fees, having reintroduced them in the wake of the Dearing report.
In any case, Peter Mandelson, helped by David Willetts, had conspired to keep higher education off the election agenda by setting up the Browne Committee. With hindsight, Mandelson would have done much better to establish a royal commission – or something else suitably dignified. But the one thing that rival politicians caught up in our hyper-adversarial political culture agree on is that what we need are short-sharp committees, chaired by businessmen "resting" between corporate cock-ups, rather than long-winded royal commissions chaired by the great and the good, who strive for common-sense consensus.
So the tragedy unfolded. The Browne recipe, ill-considered but not unintelligent (if you believe the market is the answer to everything), was politically unacceptable. The government's alternative, a £9,000 cap feebly policed by non-legally binding access agreements, is unworkable – as has already been demonstrated by the clustering of fee levels close to that maximum. The Treasury is insisting on tight controls on student numbers to curb public spending – which, perversely, by rationing demand will rescue low-esteem universities that charge too much.
The policy environment produced by these events can only be described as a de-stabilising mixture of a Stalinist five-year plan and the California gold rush – not a comfortable place for a higher education system that is (still) world-class in terms of scientific productivity and teaching quality, and which has also made great strides towards becoming more open and socially inclusive.
Is it too late for Willetts to pick up the phone to John Denham, his shadow and penultimate predecessor, to try to sort out some kind of sensible compromise? After all, both are perfectly reasonable people. Their policy objectives are not so very different. Both the government and the opposition agree – sadly – on the need for "cost sharing", ie higher student fees. They agree on the need for research funding to be better targeted. They agree about putting greater emphasis on teaching, and even about the means to achieve this – more robust student/customer feedback.
Neither really wants to infringe the autonomy of universities or further degrade the arm's-length principle represented by the buffer body, the Higher Education Funding Council for England. They could probably even agree on the need to get the Treasury to take its tanks off their lawn.
But, of course, this is not going to happen – not because Willetts and Denham are unreasonable men, but because both are prisoners of a hyper-adversarial political culture. And it is this that is the true obstacle to constitutional reform. Until that culture changes, the agony will continue for higher education – and the health service, local government...
• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
Universities must look at mediation to settle disputes rather than spending vast sums of money, time and energy fighting claims by staff or students
Not long ago, the University of St Andrews spent more than £200,000 on legal fees in successfully defending a claim for constructive dismissal by a lecturer. He claimed he had been forced out by bullying and intolerable working conditions. But the legal fees were 10 times the amount the university might have paid in compensation had it lost the case.
Disputes in academia tend to arouse powerful emotions, as the reputation of an institution or the intellectual credibility of an individual is often at stake. The desire to protect these is understandable, but is it excessive pride that drives people and institutions to seek vindication in the courts and tribunals? They go to extremes to achieve "justice" or "fairness", waging war on "matters of principle".
Higher education institutions are still investing vast sums of much-needed funds fighting claims by students, staff, or governing bodies, just to maintain their institutional and professional integrity. But with the recent National Audit Office report warning universities of the high risk of financial failure, continuing such expenditure in the future will be little short of scandalous.
In 2006, an eminent professor, aggrieved at his marking being subject to two reviews, brought proceedings for constructive dismissal against Bournemouth University. After the case had been through the employment tribunal and the appeal tribunal, the court of appeal finally decided in the professor's favour. It took four years of litigation and countless time, energy and costs on both sides.
In 2005, a student with a sleep disorder lodged a disability discrimination complaint against Salford University. After five years of litigation, judgment was given in the university's favour. But the judge commented: "The engagement of a suitable mediator at an early stage could result in a rapid and satisfactory resolution from the point of view of all parties before positions become entrenched."
Mediation is a way of resolving disputes quickly (in a matter of days) and effectively (approximately 85% success rate) while maintaining the reputation and credibility of higher education institutions, and keeping staff "on side".
A 1998 survey by Professor Dame Hazel Genn showed that 65% of successful litigants were dissatisfied with the outcome: either their compensation was inadequate, or it came too late, or the process had been too costly and damaging.
The mediation works like this: a trained mediator acts as a "facilitator", seeing and listening to both parties in confidential sessions. Both sides are helped to arrive at a resolution themselves. Any settlement is legally binding, with the force of a contract or court order. This system provides an opportunity for a candid exchange of views – and for venting rage if necessary – in a safe environment. A skilled mediator can cut through emotional blockages and effectively deal with those "points of principle" that can cause parties to dig in their heels.
The government is urging us all to resolve disputes without the intervention of courts or tribunals. When will universities see that this is something they too need to learn?
Paul Randolph is a barrister at the chambers of Ami Feder and teaches mediation at Regent's College, London
Finances are preoccupying our sixth-form students preparing to head into higher education
Ignoring, for a while, the burden of long-term student debt she'll take on when she goes to university, it's the expensive cost of living outside of the parental home that has just come into focus for Zowie Pearce, one of the sixth-formers Education Guardian is following through the Ucas process. "I've done quite a bit of university prep recently, looking around a couple of campuses," says Zowie, who is 18 and goes to Cornwall College. "I found the accommodation fantastic, particularly at Bath Spa, but I've discovered that it's very expensive. Due to my health conditions [Zowie has cystic fibrosis and diabetes], sharing a bathroom isn't really an option, so I'm looking at £118 a week."
Zowie has received conditional offers from Plymouth, Bath Spa, the University of the West of England and Bournemouth, and has spent the last few months pouring over funding information and sending off a loan application to Student Finance England. As a result, she believes students from middle-income households face the biggest financial challenges. "University funding is pretty weak if you don't fall in the category of 'rich' or 'poor'," Zowie says. "Some can expect quite a bit of help from parents to fund uni, but some can't."
Zowie, whose mum works as a medical secretary and dad is a building site manager, will be the first in her family of five to go to university. "Even though my household income is enough to rule me out of much of a maintenance grant, my parents are not going to be able to fund my living costs, especially with the cost of living going up so much," she says. "One of the unis I've been reading about says a single student can work on day-to-day living expenses of £200-£225 a week. "That seems like a crazy amount of money. Of course, the average student will seek employment, but with my health status that just won't be possible, so the money side is worrying."
Zowie advises younger students to start putting money aside as early as possible. "I would suggest saving lots of money before university if you're in a similar situation to me," she says. "For disabled students seeking grants or financial help with travelling costs or extra facilities, help is not that accessible or straightforward. It takes many hours and phone calls to sort out, so ask questions and really look for things you are entitled to."
As A2 exams approach, Zowie has been coping with medical flair-ups as well as juggling revision and coursework deadlines. "My health hasn't been great and I've had quite a few weeks off, but I have stayed organised, so I am hoping it hasn't caused my education too much trouble," she says. "University is a major topic at college, it's a life change and everyone is nervous and excited to branch out. It's scary to think in a matter of months the little protective barrier of Cornwall will be removed and we are going out into a bigger world."
Also preparing to face the real world is Josh Kay, 17, who is studying A-levels at Stourport school in Worcestershire. He has just heard back from his fifth and final UK university on his application to read international relations, but the rejection letter from the London School of Economics wasn't the news he was looking for. Still, having already secured offers from Birmingham, Manchester, Swansea and East Anglia, Josh isn't too downhearted. "It doesn't bother me so much because after I still hadn't heard in February, I didn't think I would get in," he explains. "Plus I think finding accommodation and the expense of living in London would have been difficult."
But the sixth former is still waiting to discover whether his option with the longest commute – the University of Maastricht in Holland – is to offer him a place. "There was a problem with the administration in part of my application, so I'm waiting for a phone call from the uni sometime today or tomorrow – I might need to send in some extra details," he says.
On the UK side, he has clicked "confirm" for the final time on his Ucas form, selecting Manchester as his firm choice and Birmingham as his insurance option. "I might still go to the Netherlands – I don't have to decide until I receive my A-level results in August – but I think I will probably opt for Manchester if I get the grades, as I like the university a lot and the city is great," Josh says. "I'm feeling quite confident about university now, I've sorted out accommodation, so it's just about getting the grades. I spent a large part of Easter on revision and essay practice as my German speaking exam is coming up tomorrow."
Now that most universities have announced their new, higher tuition fees from next year, Josh's sense of bitterness about the cost of university has deepened. "I'm not surprised a number have decided to charge £9,000," he says. "The fact the government said only a few would charge the full £9,000 shows either how naive they are or how much they love to lie. While I am not affected, I feel sorry for all of those who will have to pay."
• Lucy Tobin's book, A Guide to Uni Life (Trotman, £9.99), is available now
David Hughes does not seem the ideal candidate to lead the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, so why has he got the job?
The appointment of David Hughes to head the UK's leading campaigning body for adult education has raised many eyebrows. To the casual observer the man who has been senior executive of two national funding bodies is more readily associated with some of the harshest cuts to further and adult education in recent decades and a huge switch of funds from general learning to skills training, which cost colleges 1.4 million places.
So, what was it the board of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education saw in Hughes, the former London regional director of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and currently a national director of the successor Skills Funding Agency (SFA)? The list of candidates to replace Alan Tuckett as Niace director was said to be formidable.
Hughes says Tuckett – who, 20 years ago, on a budget of £5,000, created Adult Learners' Week, which grew from being a local award scheme to a Unesco-endorsed international celebration of learning success in 55 nations – will be a tough act to follow, and is aware of the initial reactions to his appointment – summed up by the label "poacher-turned-gamekeeper-turned-poacher". "I'm looking to the new role [of poacher] with great enthusiasm," he says.
Having started in the voluntary sector in the late 1980s, training tenants in Liverpool's housing co-operative movement to speak up for their rights, he extended such work fighting for the rights of Australian aborigines. He returned to the UK to work with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in Nottingham, joined newly created Learning and Skills Council in 2000 and rose rapidly.
The Niace board, it is understood, did not see Hughes as a hatchet man or political apparatchik, but as someone who had persuaded ministers that ex-offenders and many unemployed should be entitled to funding for "units" of study. Also, the government's decision to give the lowest achieving and least skilled adults fully-funded entitlement to progress from entry level 1 to level 2 (taking them to good GCSE-equivalent standard) was partly thanks to Hughes's efforts.
Another thing that is understood to have impressed the board was Hughes's success as a fundraiser for the voluntary sector during the repeated "efficiency" cuts under the Conservatives in the 1990s.
Much of what Hughes still wants for adults has echoes of New Labour's aspirational 1998 green paper, The Learning Age, authored by the then education secretary, David Blunkett. It includes learning entitlements at all stages of life, a robust adult qualifications system based on units accumulated over time, with short courses to help achieve certification. His aims are built on hard evidence, not whimsy, he says. "I know, for example, that by funding some units for offenders and the unemployed we enthuse them and bring them back into learning." But he also knows that times have changed. "We have three ministers who are passionate about adult learning, but we need to reposition the whole debate at a time of fiscal tightening."
So, what is his vision for Niace as he prepares to take over in August? "We need a more decisive push on higher education entitlements for low earners and part-timers," he says. "We also need to look more closely at what is happening with apprenticeships. There is a huge expansion programme (to over 400,000 places) and new standards for how they are to be designed and managed. I don't think any agency has critically appraised what this means for adult learning. Niace can fill that gap. For example, should a 16-year-old be doing the same as a 35-year-old?"
Similarly with the Wolf review of 14-19 vocational qualifications, "there is a need to consider whether the curriculum for a 16-year-old should be the same as for an adult returning to learning after five or 10 years in the workforce," he says. "We need to look much more closely at the implications for adults arising from changes in compulsory learning."
Niace has had an immense impact on areas of thinking and policy, he says. "For example, on English for speakers of other languages (Esol), Niace has made the case with government internally in a way no other agency has been able to. It must maintain its focus on disadvantage and disability and keep up the challenge to ministers, based on evidence. If there is one big challenge, it is to make Niace a lot more muscular on what it is good at."
Beyond a broad sweep of new ideas, Hughes says he want most of all to listen. "Niace is a membership organisation. That's its strength and source of persuasion. It would be very easy to come in and scare the horses with ideas of change."
Hughes was brought up on a north London council estate, but went to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, and got a 2:1 in geography, together with a postgraduate degree in housing studies.
Professionally, he soon found that "listening" was the key to influence. Particularly in his role as a national executive for the SFA: if his aspirations for adults were driven by New Labour thinking, how could he influence a coalition government FE and skills minster such as John Hayes? The answer was to go with the tide of thinking, such as Hayes's now oft-repeated personal belief in "bite-sized chunks of learning to inspire the disadvantaged to learn".
His experience at the LSC taught him to weather change and disappointment. "When I went to the LSC, in my early 30s, I saw the vision in the Blunkett letter with The Learning Age and said: 'I can buy into this'. But the LSC never quite got to grips with it." Individual learning accounts, which gave people small grants to buy education and training, were closed in 2002 amid allegations of abuse and fraud. The demand for evidence to show that colleges and other providers had hit their targets led to mounting bureaucracy and red tape. Then, in 2006, the Leitch review of UK skills shortages led to big cuts in general adult education as up to £1bn in public funds switched to work-based training.
"My last three years there were spent dealing with issues around educational maintenance allowances, crises over capital spending and the creation of the new SFA," he says. "When I saw the Niace job, I got excited at the possibilities. It was time to move on."
Malcolm Gillies has spent much of his career supporting arts and humanities, but says that London Metropolitan University must now deal with present realities.
The vice-chancellor's spacious office at London Metropolitan University, dominated by a huge boardroom table, and overlooking the take-away joints of north London's Holloway Road, is strikingly functional.
Malcolm Gillies, who has occupied LMU's top job for just over a year, is a classicist and musician who has held prominent roles representing the humanities and written widely on their importance. But if the single picture on the room's broad back wall gives any indication of this hinterland it is too small to see.
Yet Gillies says his background as a professor of music made the decision last month to axe more than two thirds of the university's degree courses, including history and performing arts, "personally very difficult". "I have spent a lot of my life arguing for the strength and diversity of the humanities," he says.
The decision follows a seven-month review of all aspects of LMU's undergraduate provision from recruitment to learning to assessment and graduation.
Careful and measured, with his executive officer, Jonathan Woodhead (a former researcher for David Willetts) at his side, Gillies says the result of this review was, first, the choice to charge lower tuition fees than most other institutions, at £6,850 on average, and to charge different prices for different courses. This is an option that most UK institutions have rejected in favour of a blanket charge, but one that has been the norm in Gillies's native Australia.
"Affordability is absolutely a key part of what we are here to do," says Gillies. "In our view, to charge a £9,000 fee for a large number of our courses would be really restricting the backgrounds of students."
Then, from September 2012, it will reduce its 577 different course arrangements to around 160, shutting history, philosophy, Caribbean studies, theatre studies, trade union studies, dance, parts of multimedia and performing arts. Closures to modern languages are under discussion. It will also move away from semester length to year-long modules of 30 teaching weeks, with more core learning in the early years of an undergraduate programme.
Gillies says the idea is to replace the "smorgasboard" approach of students picking from a huge range of courses to something more focused. Employability will be key – "our strapline does have the words 'building careers'" – and services such as learning support will be decentralised. The university will make more use of technology to communicate with students and will also become more geographically concentrated on its two main sites. A similar review of postgraduate education will take place in September.
Job losses are expected – he will not estimate numbers but says it will be in more than 10s – and some students are likely to have to transfer to different courses before the end of their degree, although this will have to be mutually agreed. Students expecting to start courses next September are now being notified of the closures and some are being offered alternative courses.
He insists that the decisions about which courses to cut and which new ones to introduce have been made on the recommendations of faculty deans – "this is not a central dictate" – and for different reasons, such as low student-staff ratios, or failure to hit the expectations of employers or student interest. He also warns that increasing competition from private providers and further education colleges has forced LMU to position itself more carefully.
But reaction from the University and College Union and students' union has been angry.
Yeashir Ahmed, president of the students' union, said: "This is a unique university because of its diversity and students from different backgrounds come because of the number of courses it offers. If you don't have those courses, those students won't come."
He said students would be lobbying a university governors' meeting in June when the proposals are to be finalised.
Cliff Snaith, UCU secretary at LMU, said the union, which is planning to ballot on strike action, believed the cuts were premature and elitist. "We think the way that they are targeted appears to be an attack on working-class students' opportunity to take non-vocational courses at university," he said. The union is holding a conference on Saturday at LMU to discuss the issue.
The news has also provoked lively debate on the blogosphere, with some suggesting that the university is doing the government's bidding both by charging its preferred level of fee and by pushing students from poorer backgrounds into vocational degrees.
There is also the suggestion that the move is just the last gasp of a doomed institution – one of the unnamed handful that Steve Smith, president of the universities representative body, Universities UK, predicted could go under as a result of the new fees regime.
Certainly, the future has sometimes looked bleak for London Met, which is still having to repay £30m to the Higher Education Funding Council two years after being found to have falsely claimed for students who never completed their courses.
"If London Met didn't go through a thorough revision of its courses, of the sort we've done, and a reassessment of the value it's giving to our students, I think it could have been at risk," says Gillies. "But we have gone through that and now I think we don't have that risk."
In fact, he suggests that its problems forced it to look in a more systematic way than other institutions at its costs – hence the decision to charge lower and differentiated fees – and at improving completion rates, which have been as low as 50-60%.
"I think we have positioned ourselves well to deal with the realities of the moment," he says. "Having said that, we don't know what will happen between now and September 2012."
The university has already had to revise its proposed fee levels upwards at the last minute after a jump in inflation and Gillies speaks of the difficulty of setting prices that will have to operate until at least 2013, without knowing what will happen to the economy, or international student numbers, or levels of future government support, or the outcome of the white paper on higher education. "This is a calculated risk we are taking," he says.
Earlier this year, Gillies wrote a well-received report for the Higher Education Policy Institute recommending that alumni should play a greater role in university governance to ensure a body that "actively and passionately represents the relative interests of the key university stakeholders" rather than its own interests. His sudden resignation as vice-chancellor of City University two years ago was also believed to be linked to his unwillingness to put the business over the academic needs of a university.
But critics of the changes at LMU now accuse him of concentrating too much on the bottom line. He says that while he does not regret that universities are becoming more businesslike, he does not want them to become more like businesses and is concerned that recent government policies push them too far in this direction.
"I want us to recognise that universities have many important roles – the most important of which is to be a neutral space in which people can test ideas and can invent in ways that don't immediately relate to government policy or to the dictates of business," he says. "That is hard to do when the government has withdrawn most of its funding."
He is keen to highlight a paper he wrote for a 2009 conference in Australia that argued strongly for the importance of the humanities, but suggested that multiple sources of public and private support would be better than becoming "a government-funded ornament".
He predicts that it is only going to get harder for universities to be sustainable over the next few years. "We do need to find the very best possible ways of being realistic about what the demand is, what the costs are, how ultimately that does lead to jobs or not, and I think there are ways of doing that, but they are hard ways and they are ways that we all have to find, each institution differently," he says. "Everything does have its price."
Another pupil is needed at a primary school that will lose a teacher if the magic number slips below 20
"One more pupil please!" reads the appeal sent out by Rebecca Ridgway, desperate to find a young family prepared to move to one of the emptiest places in Europe to stop the school roll falling below 20 at her children's primary.
Ridgway – who runs the adventure holiday company founded by her father, the yachtsman John Ridgway – takes her two children, Hughie, eight, and Molly, 10, to school each morning in an open boat with an outboard motor from their home in Ardmore, in Sutherland.
"It is great on a nice day, but not so much fun when there is a howling wind." Once on dry land, the children take a school bus to Kinlochbervie primary.
Fifteen years ago, there were 57 pupils. But the fishing industry has declined and, like many rural villages, the picturesque little port has a second-home problem.
The falling rolls problem now threatens what the headteacher, Jill Bruce, describes as: "Fantastic educational facilities. We are right on the edge of the loch. Everyone who sees the place is wowed. There is just one problem – not enough pupils."
This coming year, the primary roll falls to 19, one below the magic number of 20 that guarantees two teachers. Rebecca is concerned about the impact on the children of being taught all in one room with tinies. "That will be really difficult, and the older children may not be pushed as much as they would otherwise."
The fact that no children are arriving in primary one this autumn also poses a threat to the fully staffed secondary on the site, currently employing 14 teachers for 65 children. "If the numbers continue to fall, that must affect the high school down the line." The secondary was opened 14 years ago. Prior to that, children had to board at hostels many miles from home after age 11, which parents would hate to see again.
However, Mervyn Benford of the National Association of Small Schools, criticises the Highland Council threat to cut a teacher and damage the education of the remaining 19 pupils based on an "arbitrary" number.
He says that across the UK, rural schools were getting squeezed. "The evidence is that small schools do a really good job. Councils just divide the running costs of the school by the number of pupils and say that's too expensive."
But he says they failed to take into account the real costs of big urban schools, with truancy and other social problems. "Big schools spend a lot of extra money on doing things like reaching out to parents that small schools do anyway. " He says the pupil premium in England will create an even greater disparity.
Although in 2009 the number of rural school closures in England and Wales had fallen to less than 12 a year, Benford predicts that will rise. "Many councils in England are looking at closing small schools."
In Scotland, the picture is similar, with strapped councils looking for cuts. Argyll and Bute last year threatened 26 small schools with closure.
Parents at Lochdonhead on Mull, whose campaign was featured in Education Guardian last year, are among those who have fended off closure. Among their efforts was a successful campaign for a 16-home affordable housing development they hope will make the school more sustainable.
At Ulva, a tiny community also on Mull that boasts spectacular scenery, parents have come up with an even more innovative solution.
Parents at the eight-pupil primary were "terrified" by the thought of a 20-mile round trip on icy roads in winter and the hole the school would leave if closed. They decided to found a community housing association. Caroline Charington says: "This is a great place to have a holiday home or to retire to, and that pushes the prices up. There just aren't places round here that young families can afford. We aren't looking for a short-term fix. We are working on a 20-year plan for our community."
Kinlochbervie primary's parent council has also decided on a campaign to attract new blood.
They may have their work cut out. Kinlochbervie is seven hours' drive from Glasgow and, with an average population of one person per square kilometre, Sutherland is a wild and lonely place.
It is the region where Scotland's last wolf was killed – and where the last witch was burned. It was also home to Scotland's last saint.
However, it is close to the magnificent beach of Sandwood Bay and also to the famous mountain Ben Stack.
"It is wonderful place to live," says Ridgway. "The children have freedom and an outdoor life and the community is really friendly."
Academy status, essay-writing and the justification of arts
Last week, Warwick Mansell reported that the extra money being given to schools that convert to academy status seems more often to benefit grammar schools and those in affluent areas.
My son's grammar school academy status application was openly (at parents' consultation meetings) based upon the extra cash being available. In part, the case made was based upon claims that these schools had been missing out on "extra" funding that had not been made available to the selective schools over many years, leading to a sense of unfairness (ironic?) that the schools had been "subsidising" others in the borough.
peeceedee via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• One of my local schools was quite open and honest about it. They got the unions in and said they'd write into new contracts that they'd uphold the previous national terms and conditions of employment, even for new employees. They published details of costing on things like SEN provision, showing that it would remain steady. In other words, absolutely nothing has changed but they reckon they're about £85,000 a year better off. This is an outstanding school in a leafy suburb that gets around 85% 5A*-C [five GCSEs at grades A*-C]. Meanwhile, another school three miles away (mixed urban/suburban area, less able students at entry, 50% 5A*-C but still satisfactory with good features last Ofsted) has a shortfall of £105,000 in 2011-2012 from last year. And that's with 45 more students than it had last year.
I'd love Gove to explain that one.
Talwo66 via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Secondary schools, not universities, must show more initiative and help to equip students like Daphne Elliston with the skills they need to realise their full potential (The lost art of essay writing, 26 April). The extended project, and in particular the way it has been developed at my school, has been enthusiastically welcomed because it does just that, readying pupils for undergraduate learning. By taking part in seminar discussions that address themes from science, ethics and philosophy, and then researching a question which they develop into a dissertation, those taking the course ... gain the ability to express their ideas clearly. The earlier students are encouraged to spread their academic wings, the easier their transition to higher education.
Patrick Derham
Head Master, Rugby school, Warwickshire
Jonathan Wolff wrote that it's difficult to justify the arts and humanities, but he wouldn't want to live in a world without them.
You'll find many scientists who agree with your distinction between instrumental and intrinsic worth and who are just as opposed to the philistine and flawed focus of Research Councils UK and the Higher Education Funding Council for England on "quantifiable" and predictable impact. Similarly, many scientists are aghast at the Arts and Humanities Research Council's supine inclusion of the "big society" as one of its key research priorities. (But, again, this is not so different from what's happening to science funding.)
Philip Moriarty via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Low-income families are having their first holiday in years, thanks to a charity. But should it be during term-time?
Ten-year-old Amelia Martin liked the croissants and the "crunchy" bread. But she didn't fancy the frogs' legs or the snails. "No, thanks," she shudders. "She made us try them, though," puts in her mother, Natalie. "They weren't as bad as we thought, and the frogs' legs tasted like chicken." The family lives just 40 miles from Dover, but last August's trip to a chateau in Normandy with seven other families of year 6 pupils from Delce junior school in Rochester was their first visit to France. In fact, it was their first holiday of any kind for five years.
"If I don't work, I don't get paid," says Martin, a beauty therapist. Her husband, Jason, works for a diamond drilling company. "He rarely gets home before 7.30pm," she says. "Spending a week together in France brought it home to us how little time we have together as a family. We had a wonderful time and Amelia wanted to know so much." At which point her daughter tells me about their trip to the Normandy beaches and a nearby cemetery for allied soldiers. "There were over 9,000 crosses," she says sadly.
For Amelia's headteacher, Karen White, the girl's response emphasises the importance of travel for education. "Seeing the ages of the soldiers on those tombstones adds a lot to their understanding of the second world war," she says.
White is a great supporter of the Family Holiday Association, a registered charity that helps around 2,000 low-income families a year to take a week's break. The FHA paid for the trip to France, which was unusual insofar as it was abroad (passport costs can be prohibitive for a family of four) and it was in the school holidays. Most holidays have to be taken in the UK. Never mind a French chateau; it's more likely to be a caravan near Skegness in term time, when prices are cheaper. And that means many headteachers would be concerned about attendance records. The FHA's director, John McDonald, knows this well. "We've held focus meetings with heads, and their only complaint is that so many of their pupils need holidays that Ofsted would go off the Richter scale if they allowed them all."
He believes that that there are at least two and a half million UK families who can't afford a holiday of any kind. But only those who have had no break for four years and have a total household income of below £26,000 a year qualify for help from the FHA. "Intuitively, we know that a week away makes a huge difference," McDonald says. "And schools benefit from that. Children become calmer, happier and more engaged with learning. Previously hostile parents can become allies of the school. Home support workers suddenly find themselves being welcomed. The anecdotal evidence for all this is enormous, but there's never been a robust, evidence-based survey to back that up."
Not yet, anyway. But two investigations are under way. One is a Commons select committee inquiry, due to begin taking oral evidence next month and to publish an interim report in July. It is chaired by Paul Maynard, who happens to be the MP for Blackpool North and Cleveleys. Boosting out-of-season trade is one of the bi-products of "social tourism", an area in which the French and the Spanish are said to be way ahead of us.
The other investigation is being led by Dr Scott McCabe, associate professor in tourism management and marketing at Nottingham University Business School. His two-year research project is looking at the effects of social tourism on wellbeing and the economy. "Not just the economy of the resorts where these families are sent," he stresses. "We're also trying to measure whether improved wellbeing helps to reduce the demand for prescription drugs and support services." McCabe's team are also asking whether schools should offer more flexibility to families wanting to take their children out of school for term-time holidays. And is there potential for weaving in learning opportunities?
"There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to build certain key stages into these holidays," he says. And when I suggest that a week in a cramped caravan with the rain hammering on the roof might cause more family tensions than staying at home, he already has five months of research to draw on for an answer. "I interviewed a family who had spent a week in a caravan in Yorkshire during one of those summers when there was an absolute deluge. The kids thought it was a fantastic adventure. Many of them come from the inner cities and they're not allowed to 'play out' at home."
Karen White is well aware of that. Before moving to Rochester, she was headteacher at Burbage primary in Hackney and remembers the insularity of children whose horizons were hemmed in by high-rise flats. Parents, too. "Showing them that there was a world beyond Hoxton Market was massively important to building up their confidence," she says.
In Rochester, her intake is more varied, but Delce juniors is on a former council estate with new blocks of social housing. Some 28% of pupils qualify for free school meals. "The insularity is not much different from the East End."
Last Christmas, White took around 100 children, parents and teachers on a day trip to Lapland, courtesy of the FHA and one of its commercial sponsors, Thomson Airways. "There was resentment from some of the families not chosen," she recalls. "We were accused of 'taking the naughty children'. We didn't, but perhaps it was understandable that they thought so."
A PR film made by Thomson shows a single father weeping at the end of the day. "This is the best thing that's happened to me," he sobs. "Ever, I think." Since then, his relationship with school staff has improved immensely. "He used to come in and shout at us. Now he smiles and comes to parents' evenings," says White. "And he listens."
The message would seem to be: if you want children to be more receptive and parents more amenable, give them a free holiday. But is it as simple as that? Not if you're running a large comprehensive school and some of your students are approaching GCSE year. The Westwood school, on the Canley estate in Coventry, has worked hard to boost its attendance figures from 89% four years ago to nearly 93% today. The headteacher, Roger Whittall, and assistant head, Steven Connor-Henning, are reluctant to grant holidays in term-time unless there are very good reasons. "We've had requests from parents whose children already have attendance records of below 80%," says Connor-Henning. "In those cases, we send a letter saying that we can't stop you going, but it will go down as yet more unauthorised absence."
On the other hand, both he and Whittall can see the value of expanding the horizons of students whose parents can't afford to take them anywhere. "I've given up asking what they did during the holidays," Whittall says. "Too many of them haven't been beyond Canley, let alone Coventry."
Why do people start yawning when others yawn? Let's take a look at the tortoise
Scientists know a bit more about contagious yawning – one of science's utter mysteries – than they did a year ago, thanks to a study called No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, Geochelone carbonaria. The study's authors say their experiments, conducted with seven tortoises, might help eliminate some of the many competing theories as to why humans yawn when they see other humans yawn.
Writing in the journal Current Zoology, Anna Wilkinson, Isabella Mand and Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna, Austria, and Natalie Sebanz of Radboud University in the Netherlands, explain: "This study aimed to discriminate between the possible mechanisms controlling contagious yawning by asking whether contagious yawning is present in a species that is unlikely to show empathy or nonconscious mimicry: the redfooted tortoise, G carbonaria.
The researchers say that although tortoises have not been known (by humans) to mimic each other, the animals do sometimes respond to things they see around them, making them "ideal subjects for examining this question".
The tortoises, named Alexandra, Moses, Aldous, Wilhelmina, Quinn, Esme and Molly, were not "experimentally naive, but they had never previously been involved in a contagious yawning task or any similar experiment," the study notes.
The researchers trained Alexandra to open her mouth whenever they waved a little red square near her head. "This took six months," they write, and "the resulting behaviour appeared highly similar to a naturally occurring tortoise yawn". Alexandra thus became the "demonstrator", the individual who yawned in plain view of her fellows.
In one experiment, the other tortoises watched as Alexandra yawned a single time. In a second, Alexandra yawned several times in succession. In the third and final experiment, the observer tortoises watched videos of a tortoise (a) yawning and (b) not yawning. The scientists conclude with the suggestion that "tortoises do not yawn in a contagious manner".
The monograph ends with a statement expressing gratitude to their colleagues. Perhaps lacking for warmth, it says, "Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the cold-blooded cognition group at the University of Vienna for their helpful comments."
(Thanks to Stefano Ghirlanda for bringing this study to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
British studies is a growing field in the US, bringing together many different disciplines. Should UK universities have it too?
For the last few weeks, Philippa Levine has been an academic under siege. American journalists keep ringing up wanting her to say insightful things about the royal wedding. "But what do I know about William and Kate?" she asks exasperatedly. "It is really not what most of us study."
Welcome to life as a US British studies academic. Levine, a historian of Britain who arrived in the US 20 years ago from the UK, co-directs the British studies programme at the University of Texas, at Austin.
The field brings together academics from across all disciplines who study Britain and its empire – including its history, literature and politics –and puts them into critical discussion, explains Levine, who is also the president of the North American Conference on British Studies (the field's largest subject association).
British studies is, of course, a field that doesn't exist in the UK. "It is a weird thing, but no one in Britain knows what British studies is," says James Vernon, a Briton who set up the Centre for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. "There is no organised curriculum or research agenda around British studies."
Britain is simply so ubiquitously studied in humanities and social sciences departments in UK institutions that an interdisciplinary field called British studies barely makes sense. This is in stark contrast to the US, which, while dogged by worries that it is overly nationalistic, has a large "American studies" field.
But outside the UK, British studies is flourishing, most particularly in the US. Since the early 2000s, in addition to Berkeley, research centres and programmes have been established at the University of Chicago (2003), the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (2005), Columbia University in New York (2007) and, most recently, Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey (2010). Yale, along with the University of Texas, at Austin and the University of Colorado, Boulder, have older programmes (the Texas one dates from 1975). And they are decidedly neither celebrating nor castigating Britain.
"Half a century ago, a lot of British studies in the States was motivated by a kind of Anglophilia, but this isn't the case any longer," says Steven Pincus, of the British studies faculty at Yale. Buoying the field in recent years has been a "new way" of looking at the British empire that is less sanitised and whitewashed, says Levine. British studies – which originated when the "area studies" model developed in the cold war era to study potentially threatening countries was latterly applied to America and then Britain – has gone from focusing on "little England" to being a much broader programme that studies the empire in all its facets.
Studying Britain is important for many reasons, say the academics, from the fact that Britain was the source of the industrial revolution, to the fact that English is so widely spoken, to the continued place of Britain in the world today. But, tempting as the idea is that British studies can actually "teach" contemporary America lessons as it grapples with its own position as a world superpower, most academics resist. If there is any lesson from British studies, it is that how the world works is a "peculiar condition of time and place", says Ethan Shagan, who recently took the baton from Vernon as director of Berkeley's centre.
As yet no one is offering British studies degrees (although Utah does an undergraduate minor and Colorado a certificate), but US academics teach plenty of British courses within their respective disciplines that are attracting growing numbers of students.
Certainly, a degree of Anglophilia does drive student interest, says Levine. While academics might have given up celebrating Britain to study it critically – a deference to kings and queens and tea parties pulls students in, just as many Americans are fascinated by British royalty. Likewise, a pop-culture version – where British music, film, TV and football teams peak interest – is also evident. There are also "heritage students" intrigued because their parents or grandparents have origins in Britain or its former colonies. More practically, students can study a new culture without needing a foreign language. Regardless of the lure, once in, the idea is to get students "somewhere more sophisticated", explains Alastair Bellany, who heads the British studies centre at Rutgers.
Robin Lam, who graduated in history last year from Berkeley, was drawn to study Britain because she "grew up reading about princes, castles and courts", but it was actually the "non-traditional" history courses she liked best. Last year, she travelled to Britain to research "fashion photography as a genre in postwar Britain". With an Irish family background Anne McGrath, currently studying history at Columbia, was interested in learning about the relationship between England and Ireland.
The material students study is intriguing. Nicholas Dames, who heads Columbia's programme, uses Victorian fiction to engage students in a discussion about "class", still a difficult subject to raise in America. Utah students visited London to consider the city itself as a work of theatre. Meanwhile, Vernon uses The Office as a way to understand masculine banter and the advent of 1980s management styles in Britain. Students' answers to what most encapsulates Britain range from Zadie Smith's White Teeth, to the inside cover of the Sun, to Blackadder, to the insignia of the British East India Company.
Among those funding the centres and programmes include Anglophile philanthropists, which can be tricky, says Vincent Pecora. Pecora heads the British studies programme at Utah, which was funded by an endowment started by the London-loving former president of the Mormon Church, Gordon Hinckley. Most of the academics working in the field are American, which can raise some British eyebrows. "I was not nearly as British as she would have liked," recalls Pecora of the time the British consul-general in Los Angeles paid a visit to his programme to find it led by an American. Many regularly travel to the UK for their primary research. Colorado University has just invested in a flat in Westminster so that faculty and research students at its centre for British and Irish studies have accommodation.
The academics believe, however, that their approach does bring something extra and they are freer than academics in the UK to see things in a larger framework. "It helps to study Britain from outside because you can think afresh," says Vernon. Unlike their British counterparts – whose study of their nation is simply taken for granted – US British studies academics have to answer questions about why their scholarship is important, which leads to "real differences" in the kind of work being done, says Pincus. Peter Mandler, a professor of modern cultural history at Cambridge, notes that American academics studying Britain will have their "own biases", too, but concedes that they can draw attention to things Brits themselves might neglect.
Meanwhile, Levine is adamant she would like to see the field expand its empire: "I would love to see British studies travel to Britain. I think it would be very healthy." Universities keen to attract overseas students might like to think it over.
Could it catch on here? Education.letters@guardian.co.uk
Is the Eurovision Song Contest just about music, or does it tell us all kinds of things about the new Europe?
Here's a question for you. Is the Eurovision Song Contest (a) a garish exhibition of musical naffness that nobody in their right mind would take seriously or (b) "a stage on which the realities of the new Europe are being played out"?
Dr Milija Gluhovic, assistant professor of theatre and performance at Warwick University, inclines towards b. Gluhovic is co-organiser of a group of academics from all over the world who have been gathering since 2009 to discuss aspects of the contest that may have passed many of us by as Terry Wogan drolly summed up another eye-popping performance by an Israeli cross-dresser or Finnish heavy metal monsters.
The contest, it seems, is a social barometer revealing fascinating insights into national identity. The academic project, says Gluhovic, aims to examine how the contest has forged cultural interconnections that cut across political divisions between nations and shape the contours of a cosmopolitan European identity.
Wogan has handed over the BBC baton to Graham Norton for this year's final on 14 May in Dusseldorf. But it's safe to say the BBC coverage will probably not focus too much on academic inquiry.
Gluhovic understands the majority attitude of British audiences – ironic detachment underscored by dark mutterings about conspiracies against us for reasons other than music. "Many British viewers will look on and laugh," he concedes. "But Eurovision attracts 125 million television viewers across Europe. How many events do that, apart from the World Cup?"
The project, financed by a grant of £35,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began with a workshop at Warwick two years ago bringing together sociologists, musicologists and experts on gender studies, as well as theatre studies. "Every discipline had something to bring to the table," Gluhovic says, "and we mapped out a wide field of interests, all connected to the contest. Eurovision gives an indication of what's going on in terms of aesthetics across the continent. But we're also looking at how nationhood expresses itself through the contest; how gender is represented; how historical alliances are still in place and new affiliations are being forged."
Although the contest has been around since 1956, it is the post-89 expansion to over 40 countries and the dominance of the east in recent years that particularly fascinates the researchers. Hence the project's title: Eurovision Song Contest and the New Europe. There have been two workshops since that initial gathering. One was at Royal Holloway, University of London, looking at the persistence of the notion of what Gluhovic calls "the barbarian east and civilised west" in current European public life – "the fear of widespread immigration from the east since the fall of the Berlin Wall". The other, held last month at Warwick's teaching facility in Venice, investigated the camp appeal of Eurovision under the title Queering Europe.
There has not been much clear agreement on how to interpret certain acts, Gluhovic admits. "Take Maria from Serbia, who won the 2007 contest in Helsinki with a song called Molitva, which means Prayer. Some commentators read it as a prayer for Serbia just after UN sanctions and the fall of [Slobodan] Milosevic. Others saw it as a coded lesbian performance with a butch-femme aesthetic. After all, she was in a suit, with short, cropped hair and glasses, while a chorus of very feminine women cavorted behind her."
And how did Gluhovic, who is originally from Sarajevo, see it?
"Like many academics, I was fascinated that a country like Serbia could have a representative of an ethnic minority – Maria has a mixed Roma and Serbian heritage – singing about same-sex love. Afterwards I talked to the distinguished theatre director from Serbia who had choreographed the performance and he conceded that he was playing with those aesthetics because he knew there was a strong gay following for Eurovision in the west."
That in turn is a measure of just how seriously the contest is taken by former members of the Soviet bloc, Gluhovic maintains. "From the early '90s onwards, countries from eastern Europe were very conscious of the PR value of sending good quality acts – or at least what they saw as good quality acts."
The Estonian and Ukrainian governments invested heavily in sending their acts on tours of Europe before going on to win in 2001 and 2004 respectively, he points out. "And the Russian government put on a lavish production in Moscow in 2009 to reassert its dominance and prestige. Beneath the shimmering glitz, however, academics picked out all sorts of coded and not-so-coded messages of defiance from former satellite states such as Georgia."
Gluhovic will be in Dusseldorf for this year's final, where there will be a third and final workshop under the title Feeling European. Together with Dr Karen Fricker from Royal Holloway, he will be co-editing for Palgrave-Macmillan a selection of essays inspired by the workshops.
"Eurovision is a night when Europe comes together and we start to think about how we see each other," he says. "To me that's very meaningful."
University technical colleges are being heralded as the answer to all education's problems, but we need to look carefully at what their impact will be, says Estelle Morris
Most big ideas in education can trace their roots to one or other of the political parties. For good or ill, they hook their fortunes to the coat tails of the left or right and become part of the "dividing line" in politics.
Yet an idea dreamed up by a former Conservative secretary of state and a former civil servant is managing to steal the limelight.
Lord Kenneth Baker and the late – and truly great – Ron Dearing are the unlikely parents of university technical colleges (UTC). These 14-19 vocational colleges, backed by industry, will offer vocational qualifications alongside an academic curriculum, but with the vocational qualifications clearly in the lead. The first is due to open in September and finance has been secured for 24 of these vocational colleges to be up and running by 2014.
Interestingly, it's the reasons given for supporting the idea that are more intriguing than the fact that the colleges have received general approval. I can't recall an idea being claimed as the answer to so many of our historic problems.
For some, these colleges are the answer to the nation's shortage of technical skills; for others they restore the status of craft skills. Some offer support because they promise a more "relevant" curriculum for the disengaged or the chance for a more robust vocational qualification framework.
They've also been described as unfinished business from the 1944 Education Act – the promised technical schools that didn't materialise. Then they've been claimed as an obvious development of the academy programme.
I'm a supporter because these schools could deliver a more coherent 14- 19 vocational curriculum. Students wouldn't have to navigate complicated consortia or travel from college to school to work placement. They will have the stability and continuity in their learning that their more academic classmates have always been offered.
The UTC's chameleon-like ability to be all things to all people is a strength, but it could turn into a weakness. People see what they want to see and that's a recipe for eventual disappointment. It is therefore timely to seek greater clarity on some key points.
First, who will they recruit? Baker says that there will be no selection and young people will transfer from school at 14 if they and their parents think it is appropriate. That sounds very much like the promise of parental choice the education system has found it difficult to deliver, until now. What happens when demand for places exceeds supply? Who will hold the power then?
Second, what impact will they have on other secondary schools? Will they, for example, be used to justify separate tailor-made provision for the most academically able? Could it be the tripartite system revisited, only with selection at 14 and vocational schools as well as the grammar schools being seen as having high status?
And what flexibility will there be if young people later conclude they have made the wrong decision? Will their skills and knowledge be transferable to other courses or jobs?
Finally, when evidence already tells us about the problems of school transition, what will be the impact of young people transferring at 14 as well?
If these issues are papered over, they will eventually undermine the whole project. I think a vocationally led curriculum can be a basis for a broader education and the fear of early specialisation is probably unfounded, but the impact these schools could have on wider secondary provision – the age of transfer, admission and curriculum – needs a wider debate than is currently being offered.
Dwelling on the difficulties of new ideas too early can stop them ever getting off the ground, but UTCs are now secure enough to invite debate around some unanswered questions.
They really could be a power for good, but only if we are more open about the important issues they raise.
Schools that convert to academy status reap a big funding bonus, but could this be at the expense of more needy schools? Warwick Mansell reports
With many public sector organisations facing spending cuts, no one was more surprised than headteacher Chris Healy when he realised his school was actually going to be better off this year. "The increase in funding has been dramatic," he says, and it's all down to the school's conversion to academy status in February.
His reaction, which is being echoed in many other converting schools, is not surprising, when you consider the sums involved.
Balcarras school, in Cheltenham, appears to have netted a staggering £570,000 this year simply by becoming an academy – an increase of nearly 10% in its £6m annual budget.
These figures, and those of other academies that have recently converted, ought to raise eyebrows, since the government has repeatedly said that academies enjoy no funding advantages over traditional local authority schools.
Yet there is now much evidence that this is not the case. In fact, schools are claiming to have made hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit by leaving their local authorities to become academies in the last year, investigations by Education Guardian reveal.
To critics, this may equate to a hidden boost for successful schools in better-off areas, since until three weeks ago, the coalition allowed only those with the best Ofsted reports, which tend to have more middle-class intakes, to apply to become academies.
Peter Downes, a former headteacher, funding expert and Liberal Democrat councillor, who tabled a motion against academies at the party's annual conference last year, is unhappy about the situation. He says: "On the whole, this is directing resources to the most privileged. In this way, life gets harder for schools at the bottom of the heap. The dice are massively loaded in favour of academies, in terms of funding. But my thesis is that this is simply not sustainable."
Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, adds: "If schools said to be 'outstanding' by Ofsted have been given a funding boost, that's a real scandal that needs to be investigated by MPs as a matter of urgency.
"Michael Gove [education secretary] claims that his policies are designed to help close the achievement gap and this blows that completely out of the water: by giving more to those who have, he must ultimately, in a time of cutbacks, be taking money away from schools that need it most."
The explanation of the apparent windfall for converting schools lies with complicated government funding formulae for academies – specifically the funding allocated for additional services, including behaviour support, school improvement and central administrative staff – known as the local authority central spend equivalent grant (Lacseg).
Since last year, schools have been able to calculate the amount of Lacseg that would come their way as academies through an online tool provided by the Department for Education.
And for those academies that have converted under the coalition, this Lacseg figure appears, in many cases, to be much higher than the sum they need for these services.
At Balcarras, a comprehensive rated outstanding by Ofsted, Healy calculates that, of the £600,000 the school has received through its Lacseg to cover previously centrally provided services, it is only spending £30,000 to replace them.
The £570,000 benefit was the difference, says Healy, between the school using up its £125,000 reserves and going £80,000 into the red in 2011-12 (as it would have done had it remained with the local authority) or remaining in credit.
"We were initially told that our Lacseg would be about 8% of our budget, but in fact it has turned out to be about £600,000 [10%]," he says.
Documents from eight more schools seen by this newspaper, including four grammar schools, include similar calculations, with net benefits from becoming an academy ranging from £150,000 to the £570,000 figure at Balcarras.
A document published by Torquay girls' grammar school says it will receive £465,000 from the government for converting to academy status, but then includes a detailed break-down of extra costs incurred, which come to only £146,424, giving it a profit of £319,000.
A further eight schools, though not listing the likely "net benefit" to themselves of academy status, have published prospective Lacseg figures of in excess of £500,000, suggesting six-figure potential gains if the pattern reported elsewhere were followed.
Some schools openly say that cash is the overwhelming reason for converting. Marsha Elms, executive head of Kendrick school, an "outstanding" girls' grammar in Reading, which last year told parents it expected a Lacseg figure of £669,000, says that it already had "all the freedoms we want" before becoming an academy in February.
A letter to parents and students from Tiffin school, Kingston upon Thames, cites a £225,000 annual net benefit of academy status, adding that "the principal advantage to the school [of academy status] is a financial one". The school would not use the word "academy" in its name, or in its literature, and the school's ethos would stay the same, said the letter.
A survey of 1,471 secondary schools published by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) last month found 72% citing financial gain for the school as a reason for pursuing academy status.
The reasons for these apparent gains are complex.
Some believe local authorities have not been providing value-for-money services, so with the greater freedoms afforded them academies can simply spend money more efficiently.
But there is evidence of other factors at play. Two grammar schools told Education Guardian that they would benefit, under the change to academy status, from the way funding is shared out.
Under Lacseg, money for services including behaviour support and school improvement is simply allocated to schools equally on the basis of their pupil numbers. Arguably, outstanding schools converting to academy status have less use for behaviour support and school improvement services, and would have received less support through their local authority, which may explain why they are now feeling flush.
Gordon Ironside, head of Sutton grammar school for boys in south London, believes this partly explains why his school is looking at a benefit of up to £150,000 when it converts this year.
Academies also receive a proportion of funding based on what the local authority spends on administrative functions including legal services, financial services and for local authority senior officers. Some of these tasks, Downes argues, are now carried out for them by the government agency now administering academy funding and support, the Young People's Learning Agency (YPLA).
Downes says: "All these services are costly. They are included in the Lacseg costs, but academies are getting quite a lot of these services through the YPLA, so they don't need to pay for them. They are making a bonus."
Local authorities have also complained about problems with the calculations. One, Devon, wrote to Michael Gove last August to say that the Lacseg figures were "flawed", and wrongly included funding for post-16 students, which had not been provided by local authorities since 2002.
Is the government in effect offering schools a bribe to take on academy status? Some headteachers are wondering.
One, who would have faced major reductions in the funding affecting his sixth form if his school did not convert, told the Guardian: "Our local authority director says that it is quite a coincidence that the cuts that schools are facing in their mainstream budgets are sometimes almost exactly the gains they think they can make from academy status."
So what next? The number of schools becoming academies in the last 12 months has been much larger than the government predicted in its own economic impact assessment last summer. This assessment forecast that 200 would convert, at a cost to the government, not recouped from local authority budgets, of £275,000 each.
In fact, some 357 academies have converted since September 2010, with another 473 in the pipeline. This suggests a total extra bill of £228m for the policy, even if no more conversions were agreed. If every secondary school in England converted, Downes estimates the figure would rise to £1bn, giving weight to his prediction that academy funding is not sustainable.
In January, ministers reduced the general spending of local authorities by £148m in 2011-12, and by a further £265m for the following year, to pay for the academies policy. It is unclear whether this will prove sufficient in the event of more conversions.
The government has already warned academies that some may face "significant" budget reductions for 2011-12. Two weeks ago, it announced plans to introduce a new academy funding system for 2012-13, arguing that the current methodology was confusing and "unsustainable". It is as yet unclear precisely what the changes will amount to.
Malcolm Trobe, policy director at ASCL, is convinced that the funding boost enjoyed by academies converting this year will not continue. He says: "It won't last long, because it is unsus–tainable."
For schools such as Healy's, the decision was largely about trying to secure some budgetary protection, at least in the short term. So while he might be cash happy this year, he is worried about the longer-term implications.
"That's the concern: this money is coming from somewhere, and, at the moment, it's OK. I just hope that there's not a significant drop in funding as more schools become academies, as I'm sure they will over the next two years."
A DfE spokesman said: "We've always been clear that academies receive additional funding to meet the responsibilities that are no longer provided for them by the local authority – but it is the same amount as was previously held back centrally. Obviously, one of the benefits of becoming an academy is that they have greater freedom on how they use their budgets and so they are free to procure these services more efficiently.
"The current funding system is opaque, full of anomalies and unfair – that is why we are planning to reform it. We recently published a consultation on the rationale and principles for reform and will consult on further details, including changes to academy funding, later in the year. We have also published a consultation on interim proposals for academy funding in the event that wider reforms take longer than expected."
Mock ceremonies, songs for Kate, lessons on honeymoon destinations – it's a royal bonanza for schools
David Cameron's plea to ignore council "pen pushers" and "bring out the bunting" for the royal wedding has clearly captured the imagination of schools up and down the country. They are organising hearty celebrations – including mock weddings and garden parties – that could surely melt the heart of even the most diehard republican. Here, Education Guardian takes a look at what Britain's schools are doing to mark the big day.
A day before William and Kate walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey, another bride and groom will be surrounded by crowds of admirers. But, despite being the oldest in their school, Ryan "Prince William" Miller and Courtney "Kate Middleton" Pomerri are a still a lot younger than the royal duo.
The year 6 students have been picked alongside a best man, page boy and bridesmaid for Grove school's mock wedding. The local vicar will be dressing up as the archbishop of Canterbury, and there will be a buffet lunch for the whole school.
The big event follows weeks of royal wedding-related work, from geography lessons researching different honeymoon destinations, to history classes on royal weddings of the past and royal family trees. There have also been debates looking at the pros and cons of marrying into the royal family.
In literacy lessons, the children have written letters to Kate and William giving them tips for the wedding. One girl wrote telling Kate to think long and hard before going ahead, asking: "Do you really want to have to answer to someone else for the rest of your life?"
An empty classroom has been converted into a wedding planner's office and the children have made their own waistcoats, ties and accessories and designed a wedding cake, which is being made by the local bakery.
"We've been inundated with support from local businesses," says Janet Blackhurst, deputy head at the school. "A car hire company has provided a real wedding car to collect our 'Kate', and bridal companies are providing the dress and groom's outfits."
Most of the children at ACS Cobham International school are from overseas and attend for an average of three years before moving abroad, so music teacher Bill Noce wanted his pupils to create something "that would help them remember being in England when the wedding happened".
"The song follows the chord pattern of Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary, which is often played in bridal processions and we're hoping will be used for Kate's," he says. A performance of the song has been uploaded to YouTube and a copy has been sent to Clarence House as a gift.
"Several of the children are expecting to be invited to the wedding because of this," Noce laughs. Noce, himself a US expat, adds that the song-writing led to some interesting discussions about the monarchy. "The royal wedding adds another element to their English history lessons," he says. "For many, Kate's story is like a Cinderella tale for the 21st century, but one of the American boys asked why America didn't have a king, and that led to a long discussion about the idea of a head of state and a head of government, and the different ceremonial roles – it has been a brilliant project."
The Royal Wedding song
Hey Kate, we think it's great
And so on your wedding day we're gonna celebrate!
Hey Will, I mean your royal highness,
Oh heck, we're gonna call you Will!
Hey Will, it's such a thrill a modern day fairy tale, it's all so brill!
Your highness dressed up in all your finest and Kate as well will be dressed to kill.
He so handsome, she so pretty, rocking out in London city,
Giving us a grand occasion, and a day off for the nation.
Hey Will, we know until you ascend that throne you're gonna work your fill
We know your highnesses both will be pluses not minuses on that very modest civil list.
And when we think of it, our eyes all mist
So we wish you lots of wedded bliss. We wish you all the best!
Pupils will be arriving at school in their "wedding finery" on Thursday and their year 5 teacher, Nicky Newbury, is expecting to see a fair number of Cinderellas and Snow Whites dressed for a fairytale wedding. The children will be greeted with a wedding breakfast, and spend the day doing royalty-themed lessons.
There will be "wedding maths" on the curriculum – making spreadsheets for wedding costs and budgeting, and geography lessons will chart the matrimonial procession through London and the landmarks en route. In English, the pupils will be writing wedding speeches.
"We're also looking at what the royal wedding means to the UK," Newbury says. "Our class will be divided up, and each group will take roles such as the tourist industry, the media, or retailers, to look at the different points of view and the pros and cons of the wedding. We want the children to become more socially aware of the financial, moral, historical and social significance of the occasion."
Children at Oakengates nursery will be learning how weddings take place around the world. The nursery is also hosting a street party for parents and neighbours on Thursday. In preparation, the children have made wedding bunting, invitations and cakes.
"To help the children understand different kinds of weddings, a Sikh parent and a local vicar are coming in to talk about various ceremonies," says Sam Chamberlain, business manager at the nursery. "The children are only young, but it's important to foster an awareness of big events in society. Our students come from diverse backgrounds – we're classed as in an area of deprivation, with some children having access to free childcare, and some coming from Poland, and from various religious backgrounds – so the royal wedding is something that unites all the children."
When William and Kate start the first of their two wedding receptions on Friday afternoon, staff and boarding students at the independent day and boarding school in Yorkshire will be throwing a red, white and blue-themed garden party. It won't be all fun – those taking GCSEs and A-levels face a morning of revision sessions – but then the school is hosting a hog roast, bouncy castle, wedding trivia quiz, and guessing games with photos of staff in their wedding outfits.
"We're going to show the wedding on a big screen in school, and everyone's dressing in red, white and blue – although I'm a Scot so I might wear a Scottish tie," says the headteacher, Mark Lauder. "Half of our boarders come from overseas, so they're really excited about watching British royalty."
And it isn't just about partying, he says. "Students are always bursting with questions related to the news, so I'm expecting to be asked things like: 'What's the point of the monarchy?', 'Why is the Queen head of state?' and 'Will Camilla ever become Queen?'"
We'd love to know what your school is doing, so let tell us in the comments below or email janet.murray@guardian.co.uk with links to your blogs, examples of writing, audio, even photos and video – but only if you have parental consent.
The English baccalaureate is a just ploy to keep private schools at the top of the tree, says Phil Beadle
Recently I discovered that following his entry through the doors of number 10, David Cameron was in receipt of a bottle of the finest whisky from one Francis Rossi. Whether it was accompanied with a note saying: "From one front man of the Status Quo to another" is unrecorded.
And it is with matters of establishment that this column is concerned: the real motivation behind Gove's introduction of the English baccalaureate as a measure by which schools will be judged. Gove learned his masterly skills of oratory at Robert Gordon's college in Aberdeen: a private school. The boss, as we know, attended Eton; the chancellor, St Paul's, and there are representatives from Eton, Wellington, Rugby and Charterhouse sitting round the table every time cabinet meets.
The Tories have always been deeply in hock to the alma maters that furnished them with their inviolable sense of a right to rule, and over recent years these independent schools have been becoming increasingly unhappy with improving results in the state sector. There has been, I suspect, a worry that the logical end of these improvements will be that, with time, such a number of state schools will record results rivaling those in the independent sector that their chief piece of PR, that they achieve much better results, will cease to exist. This would mean fewer punters through the door of private schools and the potential closure of many.
Over the 13 years of a Labour administration which, for all its faults, did at least attempt to use education policy as a driver of social mobility, any rise in results has always been greeted with the extended bellyache of "dumbing down" from the independents. They have consistently disavowed the GCSE as offering a qualification that is in any way meaningful, and gone off in search of qualifications bearing fancy names from abroad. These they could claim were more academically rigorous than those taken by the plebs, thereby preserving the repugnant myth of the intellectual superiority of the haute bourgeoisie and of their educational institutions.
Now, for the first time in well over a decade, the independent sector has the ear of an education secretary, and is able to ask for the implementation of reforms that will identify their schools as providing an education that's well worth the £30,000 a year it costs at some schools – an education the state provides for free.
Et voilà: the English baccalaureate, which continues the coalition's fine tradition of clever stupid oxymorons: English baccalaureate, comprehensive grammars, unions as voices of the "establishment".
One wonders what rationale could be claimed for this beyond the purely political? Gove would struggle to put forward an argument that the reform is to ensure the system churns out more employable young people, in that at least two of the subjects are nigh on useless vocationally: a history degree qualifies you to be a historian, and an English degree opens few doors.
One could argue that it is reinstating academic rigour as central to the way in which we judge the success of an educational establishment. And, aside from the marked absence from the list of the most academically challenging of all subjects, music, or the fact that students do not have to read a single full literary text to qualify to be certified as academic, who would be so foolish as to disagree with that?
In reality, the English bac is merely a bludgeoning tool that will be used to clout schools that are performing miracles in poor areas and to tell them that, yet again, they are failing, this time by a new measure, and must be handed over forthwith to be run by someone who is a personal friend of the prime minister.
Using achievements in languages as a yardstick is a particularly nasty trick. Modern foreign languages were made optional at key stage 4 by the last administration for a good reason: teaching Spanish to a bottom-set year 11 on a northern council estate on a wet Friday is the definition of pointless, as the students will tell you – at length and loudly. The English bac will cause these same students to be plunged into compulsory language lessons, in which they learn nothing and which they detest, because the headteacher thinks that if one of them accidentally jumps over a benchmark set for them by a cabal of public schoolboys, the school will go up the league tables.
The English baccalaureate exists to reinstate the birthright of private schools to be seen as superior in all areas to their state cousins, and to create another measure by which those of us working at the bottom can be judged to be useless. The status quo? It keeps rockin' on.
Britain's poorest communities have been helped by Esol classes, but many will now lose out, says Alan Tuckett
There is no other area of lifelong learning policy that has a more positive impact on the life chances of Britain's poorest settled communities than English for speakers of other languages.
Study after study shows that the lowest levels of participation in education and training after school are experienced by communities of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Somali heritage, and in particular by the women of those communities.
You need English to get a job, to support your children at school and to play an active part in the wider community – in short, to join the "big society".
The launch of the Skills for Life strategy over a decade ago increased the demand for Esol courses. Pressure on class places intensified with the arrival of large numbers of European Union workers.
By 2006, there were in excess of a quarter of a million people signed up for Esol classes. Two in three of those were women. Almost half were pursuing entry-level courses. And still there were long waiting lists in the cities, especially in London.
But since 2007 the success story has been marred by difficulties. We have seen measures to introduce fees, to change eligibility criteria, and to cap the numbers of Esol students funded by the government. There is no shortage of enthusiasm to learn the language, yet numbers have dropped year on year – from 267,000 in 2005-06 to around 187,000 this year.
The loss of government support for low-wage families and those on what the government now calls "inactive" benefits could mean an even bigger drop in participation. The Association of Colleges calculates that as many as half of all places are at risk next year. And it's not just the learners who will suffer; providers will cut classes and skilled teachers will lose jobs.
So how did we get here? Successive governments have been concerned – and understandably so - with persuading employers recruiting abroad to pay for their workers' English classes. And it didn't help to cool the debate to hear of posters in Poland saying "Come and work in Britain – the government will teach you English free", or words to that effect.
But the truth is, few employers are willing and able meet the cost of English lessons. Of course, the government will still continue to meet half the overall cost, but that leaves learners needing to find hundreds of pounds no matter how poorly paid they are. For many, that means the door to learning the language is now closed.
The government drive to focus resources on helping people actively seeking work to move quickly and successfully into sustainable employment also has its part to play. While this is also understandable, it doesn't reach out to all those in need, as those without work may well be in that situation because their language skills aren't up to scratch.
For people like this, Esol classes are a key cornerstone of industrial training. That is why so many have taken advantage of the classes on offer. At the parliamentary briefing on the Esol crisis co-ordinated by Niace and the Refugee Council last month, there was testimony after testimony from learners who, after Esol classes, moved on to become health professionals, community workers, teaching assistants, accountants and volunteers.
So, despite the sterling efforts of John Hayes, minister for lifelong learning, and Vince Cable, business and skills secretary, to protect further education and the role it can play in improving life chances, the situation facing many Esol learners is bleak. It is not too late to tweak the policy to ensure they get a fair chance.
• Alan Tuckett is chief executive of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (Niace)
It is tough to justify arts and humanities degrees to stony-faced science fans, says Jonathan Wolff, but who'd want to live in a world without them?
I used to have a badge that read "Wearing Badges is Not Enough". I don't wear badges anymore, but I do sign things, such as collective letters to newspapers. My surname, though, is so late in the alphabet that I'm normally one of the "62 others". If you don't see me there, that's why.
Signing online petitions has also become a habit, although I do worry about petition inflation, and subsequent devaluation of the currency. After all, it used to be quite impressive when a charity turned up in Downing Street pushing a wheelbarrow stuffed with sheaves of dog-eared pages that had done the rounds of doorstep, pubs and village newsagents. Now you just click three times, and then make sure you don't click again, inadvertently making a donation to the company that runs the online petition service.
This season's petitions of choice concern a worrying trend of proposals to close small philosophy departments, especially in new universities, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council's love-in with the "big society".
The AHRC is being accused of pandering to a party political agenda by including the term big society in its literature.
This has got a lot of academics hot and bothered and, dutifully, I have signed various things urging the AHRC to be less embarrassing in the future. The AHRC has replied that it added reference to the big society through its own free will, not because it was urged to by the government.
This is somehow meant to make it all better, but it seems the officials could do with a crash course in elementary sociology. The greatest power is exercised by those who can get their way without even having to ask.
This flirtation with the big society reflects a broader anxiety to show the "relevance" of arts and humanities and thereby preserve public funding for the research council. Somehow the sciences don't seem to face similar questions. Such as: why have we spent billions on the Large Hadron Collider, allowing physicists to smash small things into each other? I read somewhere that there was a hope that it would lead to a solution to climate change. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it will cure my backache, too. Perhaps we should view it just as a hugely expensive artistic installation, which actually makes me think better of it. And putting a man on the moon was a fabulous piece of performance art.
But to come back to earth; there is, at the moment, a growth industry in trying to justify the existence of the arts and humanities. This is not an easy task. Not because the arts and humanities are especially hard to legitimise, but because everything is hard to justify when your opponent is standing there with crossed arms and a stony face. How do you even get started?
Well, philosophers distinguish two types of justification: "instrumental" and "intrinsic". Intrinsic justifications appeal to the value of something in itself, while instrumental justifications appeal to the effects or consequences of something. Its contribution to the big society, for example. But instrumental justifications are, well, instrumental. Not only are they vulgar, they can be counter-productive. First, they are contingent. Suppose something else turns out to be better for the big society. Should we hand over our money? Second, they detract attention from what might really be of value in the arts and humanities.
But what is that thing? How do you capture intrinsic value? As soon as you try to justify something by appealing to something else, you seem to miss the point. Perhaps we can make some headway with the idea that the arts and humanities contribute to the enrichment and transmission of culture, but to some ears this sounds feeble when other disciplines promise clean energy, a cure for cancer or economic prosperity.
The best we can do, I think, is to adapt an argument from GE Moore. Suppose we have to choose between two worlds. In one of them, universities have flourishing departments of arts and humanities. You, your children, your grandchildren, can study literature, language, fine art or ancient history, and, talent permitting, can contribute to scholarly debates. In the other, only the rich can do this, but technical progress is a bit faster. Which world you would prefer to live in?
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly
New students often struggle with essays, but study skills departments are there to help
"When I came to write my first assignment, I cried," says Daphne Elliston. "I just didn't know what I was doing."
Elliston graduated with a degree in health and social care from the Open University. Though she's hugely proud of her achievement, she says that in the early days she worked up to three hours a night for weeks on end to construct an essay she was happy to submit.
"At the beginning, the most difficult thing was just understanding the academic words," she says.
"Then putting my own words into academic language was hard. And it was difficult to believe I was entitled to my own opinion or to disagree with all these academics who'd done years of research."
Elliston started her degree after decades out of the education system, and with just one NVQ qualification to her name.
She believes the gap in her education was to blame but, according to some academics, many of the current crop of students gearing up to A-levels will feel exactly the same when they start university this autumn.
Margi Rawlinson, academic skills co-ordinator at Edge Hill University, says it is wrong to think that only so-called non-traditional students wrestle with writing essays.
"We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic writing," she says.
"I think one of the issues at A-level is that they're not being taught to research independently, and [with essays] it's not just the writing – that's only part of it."
At Worcester University, Helena Attlee, fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and writer in residence, agrees.
"It seems to me there's a lack of interface between A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very good A-levels isn't equipping them to do what is required to get a degree."
Over the last year, part of Attlee's role has been to offer one-to-one sessions with students to help them develop the skills needed to complete a well-written assignment.
"The absolutely common thing is they have no clue that there is a recipe for an academic essay. That can make life considerably easier for you if somebody bothers to tell you," she says.
"Students can have no idea of the concept of making an argument so their essays are entirely descriptive. You know, 'and then this happens, and such-and- such an academic says this about it, and then this happens, and so-and-so says that'."
With the ability to think or write analytically "there's no end of the reading you can do," she says. "And, at that point, students start to say they feel overwhelmed."
Kate Brooks, principal lecturer and student experience co-ordinator in the faculty of creative arts at the University of the West of England (UWE), has carried out research into students' experience of the transition between school and university, and says that essay writing featured strongly in their comments.
"One issue was time management – do they start writing weeks before or the night before?" she says.
In the workshop sessions she runs, she tries to explain that, in fact, writing is a small element in creating an essay.
"Students can have an idea that it's a linear thing – you do your reading, then you get a cup of tea and sit down to write. We try to get across that it's a much more cyclical process; do some research, draft a bit, read some more, think, consider what you've written, redraft... I'll explain that it's like that for academics, too – after all, I don't just sit down one day and think, 'Right, I'll write a book!'"
Some universities are now actively addressing the problem in individual faculties or by creating generic cross-subject courses delivered by their study skills departments. But some students resist the help on offer.
"The English department here put on a compulsory module called 'Writing at degree level', but dropped it because the students rebelled," says Attlee. "They felt it was remedial and offensive and they wouldn't go."
Attlee's one-to-one sessions are voluntary and very popular. Having individual attention, she says, can make all the difference to someone who is embarrassed to say that they're failing to master a basic – though far from easy – skill.
At Essex University, the head of philosophy, Professor Wayne Martin, is passionate about the voluntary module on essay writing he's created for MA and first-year undergraduate students – and he needs to be, because it sounds distinctly time-intensive and is not an official part of his job.
"Students do it because they want to. They're not assessed, but it's really hard work," he says.
"In philosophy, a particular skill that's needed, and which needs time to develop, is the representation of argument so you don't get tangled up in writing long, ugly sentences. And then, some very smart students can write, but they get to university and they overreach themselves, using phrases like 'hegemonic dialectical superstructure'!"
Sessions are run with all the students together in a room, so there's an element of having to cope with a bit of gentle public ribbing at some of the more desperate clangers. Creating an atmosphere of trust and constructive criticism is therefore essential to helping people feel safe and ensuring they want to come back.
Essays are due into Martin's inbox at midnight on Sundays. He is up the following morning at the crack of dawn reading them, so he can selects excerpts for the entire group to discuss and rewrite together.
As he points out, this form of tuition doesn't appear to make economic sense, especially with universities under tremendous pressure to teach in more efficient ways. But, he says, it is more cost-effective than it sounds. "My strategy with that is for universities to be offering a combination of very high-efficiency lectures – [he means with hundreds of students] – but then use that efficiency to offer this kind of intimate instruction."
But is it realistic to think that people's essay-writing skills can improve significantly if they've not already been developed over years in a school setting?
"Yes, incredibly. And the biggest improvement is generally in the first five weeks," he says.
Elliston is living proof . By absorbing and working through all the feedback from her OU tutors over the six years it took her to get her degree, her marks went up from 56% on her first assignment to 84% in her last essay of her final year.
"That feedback, and the nice way it was given, was so important," she says. But she wishes she had been better prepared for the shock of leaping into an academic environment.
"I think an access course might have helped me, before I started, to ge t the skills that were going to be expected of me."
On the cost of doing a degree and the qualification you get at the end of it
Last week, Josie Long spoke to Mary O'Hara about her new education charity aimed at helping young people to go to university and tackle their debt.
Admirable ideals, although perhaps Josie Long should tone down the pro-useless degree line. I hate to be all utilitarian about it, but it's not a bad idea to study something that will actually help you in life as well as being interesting to you. Not sure I'd donate to a charity that's going to use my money to pay off the loans of students with daft degrees.
TheFatCaptain via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Instead of fighting her corner and gathering support on the left to back her point up, Long seems to have done exactly what the Tories are encouraging people to do, in the hope that the perceived "luxury" elements of society, like higher education and art, will survive on the generosity of benefactors and philanthropists, instead of funding it properly themselves, which they would if they gave two shits about people and society.
markle79 via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Last week, Professor Nigel Seaton, deputy vice-chancellor of Surrey University, argued that degree classifications should be scrapped in favour of a transcript detailing the results of all degree modules.
I completely agree with Nigel Seaton's call to do away with degree classifications (Comment, 19 April). He could also have pointed out that universities and individual departments also have an incentive to inflate them. Lamenting the decline in exam standards has long been a popular sport, but the finger is rarely pointed at HE. The only obvious national decline in standards over the last 40 years is manifest in the average degree classification rising from a 2:2 to a 2:1. More did not mean worse, apparently.
Phelim Brady
Guildford
• I agree with Nigel Seaton that degree classification is unfair, but so quite possibly are all the other ways of doing it. The transcript system sounds ominously like a way of introducing continuous assessment where any student who hasn't been paying proper attention in lectures consistently for three years will be in trouble.
Further, I'm not sure that the good degree is always quite what it seems. I got a 2:1, but I've always felt that employers have paid more attention to the beard and the Marxist politics somehow.
Keith Flett
London N17
• Why should a hiring manager in, say, financial services sit there and wonder whether the marks a candidate dropped in his particle physics module are made up for by what he gained in condensed matter physics? It's an important part of the university's job to summarise this information and provide an honest indicator of how much effort each candidate put in compared to his/her peers.
roofdog via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• While we're at it, let's allow people who fail their driving exams to drive anyway. They might have just failed by the slightest error, and preventing them from driving on the motorway, when they really really really want to put their foot down and work their way through the gearbox, is unfair to them.
londonsupergirl via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Revolutions in the Arab world make it a great time for a lesson on democracy, and you'll find one this week on the Guardian Teacher Network
Democracy is big news. Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in the year saw long-serving oligarchs thrown out onto the street and sparked calls for political freedom in many more countries. Libya, where the rule of Colonel Gaddafi seemed rock solid, could well be the next to go.
It is a great opportunity to talk to children about democracy, but to the uninitiated, the complex histories of these countries can seem baffling.
On the Guardian Teacher Network, you can find now find a one-hour PowerPoint lesson, which can be used in classrooms and homes, to get children thinking about democracy.
The lesson outlines the developments of people power in the Arab world and explores definitions of democracy and different voting systems. Children are encouraged to think critically about Gaddafi's rule and to ask questions on controversial topics, such as who or what was responsible for the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, when a bomb exploded on a plane over southern Scotland, killing 270 people.
Although this is a citizenship lesson, it could be adapted for use in geography, history and RE. Children can get the inside track on different democratic processes through a role-play activity where they take the parts of victorious Libyan rebels looking at the future direction of their country. This challenges children to take bold decisions and to justify new laws and policies for a newly democratic country.
And with the AV referendum just around the corner, there is also an opportunity for children to discuss what kind of government they would like. Does the alternative vote seem like a fair way to elect a government? They might just have some bright ideas political types haven't thought of.
Find the lesson plan and other resources on democracy here.
• John Rutter is a Principal Teacher of Geography and a Chartered Geographer (Teacher). He has written and contributed to several textbooks and online teaching resources. Please add your comments to the lesson and share your own ideas and lesson outlines.
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 everyday by classroom teachers and other educationists. Thousands of teachers have already signed up. To see (and share) for yourself go to: teachers.guardian.co.uk
Legal degrees are proving popular with prisoners and ex-convicts – but can they ever become solicitors?
Like many students, Malcolm Sang, who is working towards a law degree, spends hours poring over his books. But when it comes to some aspects of his studies, the reality of what he's working on is very close to home – because he is in jail, serving a life sentence for murder.
And if his subject is unlikely, his educational past is, too: because when Sang was convicted, a decade ago, he hadn't a single GCSE to his name. "Malcolm was kicked out of school at 13," explains Jude, his mother (as he's a prisoner, Sang isn't allowed to give interviews, but he has given her permission to tell his story). "It wasn't until he found himself inside that he went back to studying. He passed GCSEs in English and maths and then got an A in A-level English."
Sang's decision to pursue a distance-learning degree in law at Nottingham Trent University was partly motivated by his disillusionment with the law. He believes he should have been convicted not of murder, but of manslaughter, as his co-defendant was.
Now 30, Sang is an inmate at Verne prison in Portland, Dorset – but when he started his degree, he was in another prison and staff there tried to dissuade him from enrolling. "They said law wasn't a suitable subject for a prisoner to study. But there's no reason why not, and he was determined to do it," says his mother.
Sang's funding came from the young people's charity The Longford Trust, named after the Labour peer and prison reformer, which since 2004 has offered scholarships to current and former convicts who want to study for a degree. But what the trust has come to realise, explains its director, Peter Stanford, is that prisoners like Sang aren't alone: law is a subject that prisoners often feel particularly drawn towards; so much so, that the Longford Trust decided to establish a new batch of awards aimed at enabling prisoners to study law. The Patrick Pakenham awards are named after Lord Longford's son, a barrister who died in 2005, and they offer practical, emotional and psychological support to students during their time at university.
"In many ways it's entirely understandable why prisoners who get involved in education should feel drawn to law as a subject," says Stanford. "They're far more likely to want to study law than they are to be drawn to, say, English or classics or history – these subjects aren't going to have the same relevance for them that they do for young people coming out of school, who have maybe had more advantages in life than many of those who end up in jail."
Another law student who has had personal experience of being on the wrong side of the law is Ana Ruiz, who was convicted of drug dealing eight years ago. "Being sent to prison is a crushing blow to anyone's self-esteem – you think you're worthless, you feel excluded," she says. "Starting to study makes all the difference, because you realise you can achieve something."
Ruiz, who is 33, is in her final year of a law degree that she started in 2007, having been released from prison the previous year. She hopes to become a solicitor, specialising in environmental law. "I feel very strongly about these cases, and I'd love to make working on them my future."
Maria Aristodemou, a senior law lecturer at Birkbeck College, where Ruiz is studying, says students who have direct experience of being caught up in the criminal justice system often have fascinating insights to share in seminars and tutorials. "At many universities, though not at Birkbeck, many students have come straight from school and have no experience like this – so someone who can talk from personal experience can be really interesting for them," she says.
"But there is a downside, too, which is that people who've been in this situation can sometimes be quite opinionated and stubborn – they're entrenched in their own experience, and they're unable to see the wider picture. You start to feel that what they're unpacking in a seminar would be better unpacked on an analyst's couch, and it can be hugely time-consuming for everyone else.
"But certainly in the long term, those who stay the course and maybe go on to work in the legal system will be able to relate to defendants in a way that many lawyers maybe can't, and that has to be valuable."
One anxiety for people like Ruiz and Sang – who would also like to work as a solicitor eventually – is that they may never be able to make the leap from one side of the courtroom to the other, despite having studied hard for their degrees. That's because they fear that the Solicitors' Regulation Authority (SRA), part of the Law Society, won't sanction their applications to work as solicitors. "I understand their worries, because certainly on past experience the Law Society has been reluctant to admit people who've been convicted of crimes to the solicitors' course," says Stanford.
According to Diane Lawson of the SRA, every application for admission to the solicitors' course is evaluated on merit – but there are concerns. "The overriding consideration is public protection," she says. "The type and number of convictions are taken into consideration, and applicants have to provide evidence of rehabilitation.
"It's quite understandable that someone who'd been exposed to the legal system may have a great interest in pursuing legal studies. However, the SRA has an obligation to build public confidence in our legal system and has to ensure that all entrants to the profession meet the requirements for competence and conduct."
But some prisoner law students have already put their learning to practical use. "Gary", who can't be named for legal reasons, served three years of a six-year sentence for rape. Like Sang, he became interested in studying law partly because he felt he'd been the victim of injustice. "When I was convicted, I was disqualified from seeing any children including my own – but when I read up on what the law actually said, I discovered it shouldn't have happened in my case.
"I lodged an appeal and represented myself – and I got the disqualification overturned. I was very nervous, but I knew I could do it. The judges took 10 minutes to reach their decision, and winning really spurred me on to study law. It made me realise how brilliant it is to be able to argue a case in a court of law – it made me determined that this was what I'd like to do."
And when he got back to prison, there was a long queue of fellow inmates all waiting to see him. "They wanted me to work on their appeals for them. My nickname became "the QC"; even some of the prison guards came to see me, to ask advice about their divorce cases.
"You need a lot of books to study law, and when I was inside, it was difficult to get them. Eventually, I decided to write to every judge, barrister and solicitor I could find, asking them to donate books they didn't need any more. Lots of them did – in the end, I had 40 or 50 books, so many that I had to be moved to a bigger cell!"
Gary is now out of prison and continuing the law degree. Like Sang and Ruiz, he hopes to practise as a solicitor. "I'd like to work in criminal and family law," he says. "I don't feel the lawyers I encountered served me as well as they should have done. I want to be a better lawyer for some other defendant in the future."
The energy from cremation can be harnessed for use in public buildings or houses. But what are the moral questions?
Recycling the excess heat from cremation might not sound like the most obvious way to honour your loved ones, but for the environmentally aware, it could be a more efficient way to create energy.
Dr John Troyer, deputy director of Bath University's Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), is currently grappling with some of the moral issues – such as whether the process is respectful to the dead – surrounding the process, which is known as heat capture.
He has become a familiar presence at funeral services held at the city's Haycombe Crematorium. A sombre job, perhaps, yet crucial to his one-year research project, which is funded by the South West Regional Development Agency and European Regional Development Fund.
Haycombe was among the first crematoria in the country to install expensive equipment that prevents mercury emissions from the cremation process escaping into the atmosphere. Heat capture could, in time, be a possibility there, but it's sensitive territory and Troyer is at pains to tread carefully, steering clear, for instance, of canvassing the bereaved for their views. "My father was a funeral director," he says. "I'm very conscious of not being cavalier – projects can be torpedoed if you don't keep in mind exactly what you are dealing with."
Besides exploring moral questions around heat capture, he is also learning about developments in technology. As other crematoria install new equipment to comply with rules on reducing mercury emissions, some are making profitable use of excess heat that otherwise would be wasted.
But Troyer's work is concerned as much with the ethics of heat capture as with the process. "This research isn't about trying to design a system per se, but asking how you design for the future and create facilities that are used more efficiently – current crematoria designs are late 19th century," he says. "It's about the relationship between death, the body and technology."
The onus is on UK crematoria to halve mercury emissions, which come mainly from tooth fillings, by 2012 and eliminate them altogether by 2020. Many will need to install new equipment. Those that have already invested in heat-capture technology usually divert the excess heat to other crematorium buildings.
Some crematoria in Sweden and Denmark have gone further, selling surplus heat for use in houses. Many see this as entirely sensible, avoiding the need for crematoria to have expensive and energy-hungry cooling towers. But others wonder if it breaches an ethical code drawn up the International Cremation Federation, a body set up in 1937 to promote and provide information on cremation practice. This states that "the products or residue of a cremation shall not be used for any commercial purpose".
The issue is so sensitive that the Danish Council of Ethics, a group including scientists, clergy and philosophers that advises parliament, was summoned to give its opinion. After much deliberation, it found no ethical reason to oppose recycling heat despite the ICF code. Several crematoria now export energy to local companies.
The UK has a long way to go in comparison, although a new system at Redditch, Worcestershire, will pipe water to heat a swimming pool and save local council taxpayers around £14,500 a year. Councillors sought to forestall an outcry by consulting the public beforehand and 80% to 90% of responses were in favour, it says. Nevertheless, there were instances of what Troyer describes as "moral outrage". At the time, a spokesman for the public sector union Unison described the scheme as "sick and an insult to local residents".
Troyer believes such knee-jerk reactions are triggered by ignorance about what is involved. After cremation, water is used to cool gases in the crematorium chimney. Mercury is filtered out, and water heated by the cooling process then piped away. Surplus heat harnessed in this fashion is now being used in chapels and offices at Dukinfield, Cheshire, Warwickshire and Sandwell Valley, West Midlands.
"Most of it comes from the gas used to get the fire burning – a negligible amount from the bodies themselves," says Troyer. "But you are entering an area of public concern. There are questions that need to be sorted out and taken up with local and national authorities. You have to get policy-makers thinking about it. That isn't a simple thing to do."
For those UK crematoria that hold lots of daily services, the amount of excess heat generated could open up the possibility of selling energy to the National Grid.
The economic argument for heat capture would appear compelling in countries such as Japan, where over 95% of the dead are cremated (in Britain the figure is 72%). But Troyer thinks it unlikely every culture would take the same liberal view as Denmark over selling energy to a network. Here, the Federation of Cremation and Burial Authorities (FCBA) is quite relaxed about this use of technology. "There's been a fair bit of hype – talk of family members heating the swimming pool," says its secretary, Richard Powell. "But we don't see any ethical issues."
Tim Morris, chief executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, supports "any innovative approach with environmental benefits". He says plans to install heat-capture equipment at a crematorium in Cardiff provoked no hostility after staff took to the streets and explained how it works.
Troyer says he is not trying to court controversy. Rather he is using Haycombe as a base to look more broadly at possible future designs, while studying all aspects of the ethical debate. "Some grieving families like the idea of their loved ones 'giving back something'," he says. "I see that becoming predominant, and this research as an opportunity to do something innovative and respectful to the funeral mourning process."
Men's ears never stop growing ... and neither do women's
Old men have big ears, is the consensus of several medical studies. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, according with British male doctordom's smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves.
But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations have made plain a long-untold half of the story: that old women also have big ears.
The British action played out in the British Medical Journal, where body parts are always of interest. In 1993, Dr James A Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, Kent, set out to answer the question, "as you get older do your ears get bigger?" Heathcote and three colleagues examined the ears of 206 men of various ages. The biggest oddity, ears aside, comes at the end. The paper mutters: "Why ears should get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research."
In Japan, primary care physicians Yasuhiro Asai, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada measured the ears and height of 400 adult patients – of both sexes – who visited their clinics. The team's 1996 report, called Correlation Of Ear Length With Age In Japan, also appeared in the BMJ.
The doctors claim they made two discoveries: that ear length does correlate closely with age and the rather unfathomable conclusion that "ear length corrected for height shows [even] greater correlation with age".
A decade later, Carsten Niemitz, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, examined data from a thesis by a scientist named Montacer-Kuhssary, published at the university in 1959.
Montacer-Kuhssary's data was of a rare kind: photographs of 1,448 ears of newborn children, older children, and adults up to and including 92-year-olds.
For each ear, the team made 15 different measurements. This confirmed, they say, that ears never really stop growing throughout a person's lifetime. But the big surprise came from comparing women and men: "In all parameters where post-adult growth was observed, female ears showed a lesser increase than those of men." Old men have bigger ears than old women.
Montacer-Kuhssary, by the way, noted that people's noses, too, usually grow throughout their lifetimes. But, he concluded, ears usually outpace noses.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
As tuition fees continue to make the news, the comedian Josie Long has taken her comedy – and her actions – into the political arena, setting up a charity to support students
Josie Long possesses the kind of playful energy that could make even the most hardboiled curmudgeon mellow, so it takes a few moments to realise that the young comedian, known more for her whimsical musings on the minutiae of life than her political opinions, has a serious message to get across.
For someone who is worried she is "going to say things that make me sound stupid," Long displays a natural flair for articulating why, after more than a decade spent honing her comedy credentials, she is suddenly getting all political.
In 2009, Long, who has accumulated a string of awards since entering the comedy world at just 17, embarked on a typically whimsical project: "a hundred days to make me a better person" (her comedy shows have upbeat titles such as Be Honourable! and Trying is Good). She set herself small arbitrary tasks such as writing a joke every day and speaking to strangers.
One of the aims of the project was to become more politically aware because she felt a bit "woolly" on the subject. It was an experiment that sparked an unlikely journey and, later this month, she will launch an educational charity to help young people from underprivileged backgrounds get to university and tackle their debt. Underpinning the project is her desire to raise the profile of the liberal arts, which she believes have been sidelined by government ministers keen to push the idea of higher education as a route to employability rather than an end in itself.
Long, who is now 29, says she has always been annoyed that she left university in debt, when her rich friends didn't. "I've always believed that higher education shouldn't make you have a massive debt at the end. It should be state–funded."
But the thing about being more politically active is that it has been a "world of hurt" every day, she says earnestly. "I began to feel like I couldn't possibly be leading a good life unless I was doing more things. It came from feeling like I wasn't doing anything to help society be more like how I wanted it to be. I guess it was just getting a bit older and feeling a bit disillusioned with being a comedian because it felt a bit too easy and good for me."
It was the prospect of a Tory government that made her think hard about education (she is proud of having studied English at Oxford despite coming from a modest background with "no connections" or family financial assistance). "I was thinking about how much my degree enriched my life, and how much it gave me for the future, in terms of learning how to study and read and research and think critically".
Rather than stay mired in vague exasperation or using comedy to vent (although she confesses to having enjoyed doing just that as part of her political awakening), Long decided to act on her impulses.
First of all she took part in the student protests last year, ending up on the late-night political programme The Week at one point and giving Michael Portillo a run for his money debating tuition fee increases. She also became involved with UK Uncut, the disparate anti-tax avoidance network, taking part in some of the group's occupations of high-street banks.
But it still wasn't enough, according to Long, so – despite having no voluntary or education sector experience whatsoever – she decided to set up her own charity. She is starting small with the mentoring where she lives in Hackney, east London, with "perhaps only a handful of pupils", but the long-term aim is to help students all over the UK.
Her new charity, Arts Emergency Service, is a collaboration with her friend Neil Griffiths, an experienced fundraiser. As well as running a small monthly lottery for graduates where winners get some and possibly all of their debts paid off, the pair also want to raise money for a long-term mentoring scheme and to convince their friends and others that "it's not enough to have the 'correct' opinions and anxieties", but that they should play an active part in effecting change.
It's not surprising, perhaps, that for all her earnestness Long seems unable to veer too far away from her comedy roots when talking about her plans. She beams mischievously while outlining one of her more quixotic ideas for Arts Emergency Service, which involves renting a van with a few friends and "going round for 10 days doing ad hoc [comedy] shows in the middle of nowhere – like in cul-de-sacs" to promote it. Another idea scheduled for later this month will entail using Twitter [@artsemergency] and the charity's website [arts-emergency.org] to have a playful poke at Prince William. "We've got an idea to coincide with the royal wedding because prince thingy studied history of art – and he probably left debt-free." Pausing for comic effect, Long adds: "I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't have a student loan."
She says the "ultimate aim" of Arts Emergency Service is "to reinstate free education for all at a tertiary level," and, she says, giggling, trying to be as unrealistic as possible. "I'm almost perversely pro-stupid degrees now. I don't care if you are studying beer management. Good for you – you enjoy yourself. Have three years of absolute flowering."
Long recalls the one-woman standup show she did at the Edinburgh festival in 2010, Be Honourable! It was her first foray into political comedy and was written as the concept of Arts Emergency Service was gestating. The critics loved it, with some saying she was unexpectedly filling a gap where political comedy should have been.
"I'm just [trying] really hard not to be shit," Long says half-seriously. "I didn't intentionally start doing shows [that were political]. I just always believed that if I said what I really cared about I would build the right audience. That's why this last show felt totally a part of all the other ones."
Whatever Long may have felt she was doing, there is a sense of someone who has put herself in the firing line – right in the middle of one of the most contentious issues of the day. When she first began mooting her views on the cuts and on education policy on Twitter, she was slightly thrown by the "massive resentment" of many of those who responded.
"What's been really upsetting has been getting loads of people saying things like 'Why should I pay for other people to flit around?' The idea is that you would want to [pay tax to fund education] because you feel responsible for everyone else in a society. I feel old-fashioned because that's what I care about and believe in."
As she toured the country after the Edinburgh festival, Long, whose comedy is not the sort that tends to attract hecklers, found herself on the receiving end of some aggressive challenges. She recounts how one punter shouted that she shouldn't be able to rant about government policy without any balance. "I was like, 'yes I fucking can, it's my gig you prick'.
"There are people who don't like me because of a [comedy] aesthetic," Long adds, shrugging her shoulders. "But what I've encountered recently – which I've not really encountered before – is that I've made people angry and upset. That's been really hard to deal with and quite sad."
But if it has been tough, it also seems to have reinforced her view that, with a few notable exceptions such as Mark Thomas, the contemporary scene is failing to embrace political satire.
"I feel like there's been a real aggressive attempt to make comedy apolitical and to send it back to pre-alternative comedy. A lot of the mainstream shows are just men coming on and going 'Oh this is crap isn't it I hate my wife' and that's been quite tedious."
Does she worry that by venturing beyond comedy and setting up a grassroots project – and one that could ironically be heralded by the Tories as a prime example of the "big society" in operation – potentially opens her up to accusations of naivety? "I would rather do something now than look back in 10 years and [realise] that I hadn't done anything. I feel like I won't be able to sleep at night unless I'm articulating these things at every opportunity and doing everything that I can."
Then does she at least acknowledge that she's taken on a very ambitious task? Yes, she says, but that is beside the point. "We've got a lot of righteous indignation. It's fuel. And I think the government is going to keep giving us fuel for at least the next four and a half years. If in five years' time we have paid for even one person to go through university to study an arts degree, that would be wonderful."