The outdated laws on royal marriages need changing, says a researcher – and William and Kate's wedding is the perfect time
Prince William's forthcoming marriage to Kate Middleton is unlikely to be beset by any legal confusion. But future Windsor weddings could easily be mired in controversy unless there are changes to the law, according to Professor Rebecca Probert from Warwick University, an expert on marriage law.
Probert argues that laws need to be unravelled which, for example, give the royals exemptions that don't apply to the rest of us, while others saddle the royal family with archaic restrictions that contravene their human rights.
The forthcoming royal wedding seemed a good impetus to convert 10 years of research into a book, The Rights and Wrongs of Royal Marriage: How the Law Has Led to Heartbreak, Farce and Confusion, and Why It Must Be Changed.
Probert points out that, as the law stands, any future heir could succeed to the throne if he or she married a Muslim or a Hindu, but not a Catholic. And in fact, marrying a scientologist or a Satanist would still put him or her in the clear. "There's nothing stopping them under current legislation," she says. "The Act of Settlement says only that you drop out of the succession if you marry a Catholic. Any other religion, it's fine. Of course, it's absurd by 21st century standards. But it's a consequence of 18th century law designed to secure a Protestant succession. It's ridiculous that it has never been repealed. "
It's even more ridiculous, perhaps, when heirs are allowed to cohabit with Catholics or enter into same-sex relationships with them without forfeiting their place in the succession. Also there is nothing to stop the wife or husband of a royal from converting to Catholicism after the wedding.
The issue of royal consent is just as baffling. Anyone who can trace his or her ancestry back to George II may require the Queen's consent before marrying. Otherwise the marriage could be declared technically void under UK law.
Extensive research in the National Archives has led Probert to conclude that while successive governments have been aware of the "absurdities" of royal marriage law, they have done nothing about it. "They don't want to be seen to be legislating during a crisis, such as Princess Margaret's plan to marry [the divorcee] Group Captain Peter Townsend in 1955. And when there isn't a crisis, there are always more pressing problems."
The issue came to a head, she feels, 50 years on from Princess Margaret being pressed into breaking off her engagement. The build-up to Prince Charles's marriage to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005 brought about judicial contortions from the Lord Chancellor of the day. Lord Falconer struggled to balance laws that were forged in the 18th century to bolster the hereditary monarchy with a Human Rights Act passed in 1998 making equality before the law a fundamental principle.
Result: farce. "The initial announcement that the civil marriage was to take place at Windsor Castle had to be hastily revised," Probert recalls. "It was shifted to Windsor Guildhall, which was registered for civil marriages." And why did it have to be a civil ceremony for the man who was first in line to the throne and head of the Church or England? Because he was a divorcee, and so was his bride. Attitudes had changed in 50 years, and the Queen felt able to give the consent to her son's marriage that she had been advised not to give to her sister's.
Crucial to the Queen's decision was Lord Falconer's judgment that the Human Rights Act meant that nobody, including the Prince of Wales, could be discriminated against on grounds of birth. "All we had was a statement in parliament and a decision by the registrar general to grant a certificate of marriage," says Probert. "The Lord Chancellor never went into detail about how the Act might apply to other members of the royal family. Can any of them now get married in a civil ceremony? And, if they choose to marry in church, do they have to go through the same formalities as everyone else?"
Royal privilege, it seems, has hitherto exempted them from certain requirements enshrined in the Marriage Act of 1753, including the need to get a licence and sign the appropriate parish or civil register. If Probert has her way, even the Archbishop of Canterbury could face a fine of £1,000 if he failed to ensure that this was done. Why? Because claiming rights on the basis of non-discrimination must inevitably mean forfeiting privileges enjoyed since the 18th century, she argues. "The time to legislate is now while there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for the forthcoming wedding." But surely the government has more pressing problems to deal with?
"Successive governments have been saying that since the 1950s and ducking the issue."
But why does it matter? "For the general population, it doesn't matter too much these days whether or not their parents are married. But unmarried royals can't pass on titles to their heirs. So as long as we have a royal family, we need to have clear laws that ensure that their marriages are free from challenge as to whether or not they're valid."
The Rights and Wrongs of Royal Marriage is published by Takeaway Press at £9.99
James Dyson fears for the future of design and technology as the national curriculum consultation draws to a close
The billionaire businessman and inventor Sir James Dyson is the first to admit that, as a subject, design and technology still has a bit of an image problem: "That's probably because it has its origins in the school wood workshop in the days when everyone had to make wooden matchbox holders", he muses, conjuring up images from the '50s of Bryl-creemed boys in baggy brown coats fashioning these curiously pointless items on old-fashioned woodwork benches.
But Dyson, one of the most high-profile entrepreneurs representing Britain's creative and manufacturing industries, warns that the future will be very bleak for the sector if the subject – with its now more up-to-date focus on high technology – is downgraded as a result of the review of the national curriculum recently launched by the coalition government.
The deadline for submissions to the review – launched in January by the education secretary, Michael Gove, is next Thursday (14 April) and the Department for Education is bracing itself for a flood of criticism that the government wants to concentrate on too narrow a range of core subjects such as English, maths and science. There are fears that design and technology may be one of the more marginal subjects removed from the list of those that, as part of the national curriculum, have to be studied by secondary school pupils.
Explaining the reasons for the launch of the review, Gove said: "We have sunk in international league tables and the national curriculum is substandard. Meanwhile, the pace of economic and technological change is accelerating and our children are being left behind."
But design and technology has many supporters – not least Ofsted, which hailed high standards of teaching and learning in a recent report. And while some teenagers currently learning design and technology may groan at the less exciting areas of study, such as "resistant materials", the subject has more take-up than many people realise. A breakdown of last summer's results for the GCSEs taken in 2010 revealed that, after maths, English and science, design and technology was the most popular subject.
Dyson, who was knighted in December 2006, revolutionised the domestic appliances market with the bagless Dyson Dual Cyclone, which became the best-selling vacuum cleaner in the UK within 18 months of its launch.
He has always shown a keen interest in design education and, after his ambitious plans to open a government-backed £25m design school in Bath foundered, his company pledged £5m to the Royal College of Art, where he himself studied, to support aspiring designers.
Dyson was asked by David Cameron to make recommendations on how Britain can become the leading high-tech exporter in Europe, and the new government has clearly listened to his recommendations. Two weeks ago, he was personally named in the budget by the Chancellor, George Osborne, as he announced plans to increase tax benefits for small companies for their research and design activities.
But after this boost for Britain's manufacturing industry in what Osborne dubbed a budget "for making things", Dyson fears that removing design and technology from the national curriculum would be a retrograde step. "It is a stem subject that uses maths, physics and chemistry and it absolutely deserves to remain as a compulsory subject on the secondary school curriculum," he says. "Without it, it will be even harder to inspire young people to go into the engineering professions and develop new technology. Modern design and technology should sit alongside science and maths. And it should have the academic rigour of engineering, attracting the brightest minds, and it should be logical, creative, and practical – inspiring young problem-solvers. If you drop DT as a core subject, it will no longer be seen as important."
He also believes it teaches important life skills to youngsters who may not pursue a career in design or technology. "We don't want to have a whole generation of techno-phobes."
Underlining these points, today he will launch the 2011 international James Dyson award, which aims to challenge young engineers and designers at the university stage of their education to develop problem-solving inventions. Previous winners have tackled problems from different angles: from a buoyancy aid inspired by a grenade launcher to a kitchen tap that can tackle a blaze in your home. The prize-winner receives £10,000 to develop an invention and £10,000 towards their university education.
Dyson says the awards recognise the talents of young people who "take frustrations and solve the problems that cause them. We're looking for the people who, rather than accept a problem and make do, design a simple and effective solution."
Banging the drum for design and technology in schools is last year's UK finalist David Graham, who admits he "caught the bug" for the subject at the Suffolk comprehensive school he attended – Sudbury Upper school.
Here, he benefited from the school's "well-equipped design and technology department", he says, with enthusiastic and enlightened staff. "I was not academically gifted. I made a nuisance of myself and got to learn how to use all the equipment. By the age of 15, I was competent to use all the machinery in the various workshops and that gave me more confidence, too."
After leaving school at 16, Graham had a chequered education and career – sadly punctuated by illness – before landing on his feet taking a double master's in industrial design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College. He was shortlisted for the Dyson award for his (now patented) design for ingenious sets of recyclable cardboard wheels and handles to help people move heavy objects around. "I watched all these people struggling around London with bags and boxes and, basically, carrying too much stuff. I thought, we can't change their habits, but we can help them." He is already taking orders for the ground-breaking product, which will be officially launched in September this year.
"The help and the PR exposure I have received through the Dyson award have helped me to get my product on the map," says Graham. "But I also owe Mr Fazackerly – the design and technology technician at my school –a huge debt of gratitude. Without his help and enthusiasm, I would never have got started."
Minister called in to negotiate peace between angry college staff and their professional body
There was hectic activity last week as the further education minister John Hayes tried to negotiate peace in a bitter row between lecturers and their professional body, the Institute for Learning (IfL).
The IfL, to which all further education teachers must belong, had triggered fury by ordering them to pay their own membership fees after the government announced it would no longer cover these. Rarely can the demand for an extra pound a week have touched so raw a nerve. To make matters worse, the fees suddenly went up from £30 to £68 annually.
The hike has exposed other festering sores. Lecturers on message boards write of IfL's "intrusive demands"; of members "gaining nothing for enforced membership". In a letter to IfL, lecturer Martin Ellison from Stamford, Lincs, says: "If members are forced to pay their fees, the organisation becomes an expensive, self-serving irrelevance. Straw polls from around the country suggest that 70-90% of members are not going to pay. It is time for everyone in governance within IfL to face up to the fact that it has failed."
One major bugbear is IfL's insistence on members having to prove that they've completed 30 hours of continuous professional development (CPD) each yearr.
Doncaster College lecturer and UCU activist Rod Challis says this "added insult to injury" for staff receiving a negligible pay increase. "We have the qualifications to do our job and we always used to log CPD in our record of achievement," he said. "But when some of us tried using IfL software to record and upload it, there was no sign of it online. There's a strong suspicion that nothing has happened to this information. Someone here even told IfL they'd done 1,500 hours of CPD and there was no challenge to that claim."
Meanwhile, the IfL admits that 18% of members had failed to complete their CPD in 2009-2010, yet it remains unclear what fate awaits them.
As Hayes sought to broker a peace deal, he held three separate meetings with unions representing lecturers and support staff, the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the IfL. This resulted in all parties agreeing to sit down and try to find a solution acceptable to everyone by early May.
"We're pleased and satisfied there's a commitment … a recognition that something's going to have to change," says Barry Lovejoy, UCU head of further education. "It's a big step forward."
But while UCU has withdrawn its payment boycott, big questions remain. The union has been adamant its members won't pay. Moreover, it wants IfL membership to be voluntary rather than compulsory. Yet for the IfL that would present a potential funding black hole as it relies on subscriptions from its 195,000 members.
The IfL was formed in 2002 to protect and enhance the status of FE lecturers, but things have gone badly wrong. UCU's anger is shared by the public sector union Unison, many of whose members, such as assessors, are classified as "associate teachers" and so are required to belong. Some earn just £13,000-£14,000 a year. "Many have told us it's not just about the money but what they get in return," a spokesman says.
There's further confusion about who actually has to join the IfL. In some colleges, assessors count as associate teachers; in others, they don't, depending on what is in their individual job description.
Clearly the IfL's relationship with members needs straightening out. Recently, the UCU's head of legal services and employment law, Michael Scott, wrote to the chief executive, Toni Fazaeli, telling her he could find no copy of the institute's conditions of membership on its website.
Scott also pointed out that anyone failing to adhere to the IfL code of conduct – such as by withholding subs – has the right to "a fair and public hearing in keeping with the rights conferred on individuals by the Human Rights Act … reflecting …that no person may have their livelihood taken away from them without observing due process". This conjured the chaotic prospect of hundreds of personal hearings for payment refuseniks.
Yet the IfL says its own survey shows that most members are satisfied with how it operates. With its financial future uncertain, IfL has recently cut staff from 52 to 38 "to make sure there is a sustainable long-term future for the professional body," says Fazaeli.
She casts doubt on 16,000 UCU signatories to the petition calling for a boycott. "We had member records for only one third of those," she says. "Quite a lot of signatures were duplicates. Some were working in universities; some just signed themselves with a first name."
As the alternative to a payments boycott, UCU had lobbied for employers to find the money. It's unclear how many takers there have been so far. Fazaeli says she knows of about 60 prepared to pay employees' subs direct to the IfL. "I expect only a tiny minority are colleges," she says.
She welcomes Hayes's intervention. "We're satisfied all parties are looking for a resolution and will not take action to escalate matters."
Martin Doel, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, says he has no mandate to steer colleges one way or another on paying IfL subs. "There are differences of opinion among our members. We're sympathetic to those who have made strong representations about the fee and the nature of membership," he says.
"But this is a complex sector; some lecturers only teach 14- to 16-year-olds, some teach all ages, some are industry professionals teaching vocational courses and others only teach on higher education courses within a college setting. There will be anomalies."
Of his meeting with Hayes, Doel says: "It was clear that the minister was trying to act as mediator and to reconcile the parties. If he can, that's a good thing."
Some numbers are essential to running a university, but others should be treated with caution, argues Peter Scott
Everyone remembers "lies, damned lies and statistics" attributed, perhaps wrongly, to Disraeli. Now perhaps we should expand it – "lies, damned lies, statistics and metrics". Modern higher education systems are increasingly driven by numbers – management information, liquidity ratios, key performance indicators, workload models, student (and staff) satisfaction scores, research assessment grades, citation indices, media league tables … Everything, it seems, can be reduced to a number.
But can it – or should it? First, these numbers are a mixture of the good, the bad and the mad. Second, there may be something deeply incongruous about universities that are designed to ask questions, to engage in critical inquiry and (however clichéd) push back the frontiers of knowledge reducing everything to uncomplicated digits.
Of course, some numbers are good – and essential. Universities need the best possible information on staff costs, income projections and cash positions. They need to know whether their students are progressing, completing their courses and finding jobs. They need to make sure their research is sustainable. Good management information is essential to ensure universities operate effectively – as business organisations.
But there is, or should be, always room for questions even in these operational matters. For example, squeezing down "completion" rates may be in the best interests of the institution, because it maximises its income and improves its league table position. But it may not be in the best interests of individual students weighed down by caring responsibilities or going through "bad patches" in their lives.
Or, to take another example, research offices and finance departments may insist that all research (or as much as possible) is fully funded – in other words, it covers its full economic costs. But to turn down projects of significant academic potential just because they are not fully funded is plain daft. Another saying comes to mind – "the operation was a complete success, but sadly the patient died". The point of research is not to cover its costs or make a profit; it is to improve our understanding of the world.
Some metrics have become a sad necessity. Student satisfaction must be tested – regardless of whether they pay high fees. The National Student Survey, a bit like democracy, is a bad way of doing it, but probably the best we've got. But its limitations need to be understood. For example, by far the major determinant of institutions' relative "performance" is their subject mix. The other big one, of course, is student mix – in terms of class, gender and ethnicity.
Research scores need to be treated with similar caution. The steep cliff-like "grades" of earlier research assessment exercises (RAE) were indefensibly crude. Last time, the substitution of "profiles", covering the very best to the very worst research, was a step in the right direction. The new research excellence framework (Ref) brings "impact" into the picture, which is right, although measuring "impact" through case studies will be a fraught (and inaccurate?) business. At least the Ref has resisted the lure of "metrics" – for the moment.
There are two problems with the proliferation of metrics. First, they inevitably get translated into "winners" and "losers". So they can be the enemies of diversity because they translate legitimate differences – in student mix, research priorities and the rest – into illegitimate hierarchies. My guess is that rankings – and the measurements that have fed them – have done far more to destroy diversity than, for example, the decision two decades ago to make polytechnics universities.
Second, they can encourage corruption. Institutions have to become adept at game-playing, often in the worst interests of their students – or of junior researchers. But a more serious form is the betrayal of what higher education is for. Higher education is not a competitive sport, like football. What I learned at university is not diminished because others have learned things, too (though my degree may have become a less valuable positional good in the labour market). My research is not diminished, nor improved, because others have carried out "better" or "worse" research.
We can all be winners, if we stick to "the good, the true and the beautiful" (as opposed to "lies, damned lies, statistics, metrics..."). But we will all be losers if we end up, according to another cliché, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the Institute of Education
Toby Young did not follow in his father's socialist footsteps, becoming instead a celebrity failure. Can his free school succeed where other ventures have not, asks Peter Wilby
Anybody who has seen the film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, based on Toby Young's autobiographical book of the same title, will know that Young is an imbecile, a prat and a pain in the hindquarters. On his own admission, he is a professional failure who has been sacked from every job he's had. He once wrote a regular Guardian column called "Toby Young on failure". "The moment I'm perceived to be even a tiny bit successful," he said in 2006, "my career will go down the pan."
He has been called Britain's "most socially inept man", and that's by his wife. Asked to avoid German jokes when he was giving the best man's speech at a wedding – because the bride's mother was German – he told German jokes from beginning to end. He has been intimately acquainted with several mind-altering substances and, for a period, was for all practical purposes an alcoholic. And not only was he a pornography user, he was interviewed on TV about it.
That doesn't sound like the right kind of person to run a school and, if this were the Daily Mail (where Young often writes), you'd probably have headlines of the "Would You Entrust Your Child to This Man?" variety. But Young's West London Free School was the first to sign a funding agreement with the education department at the beginning of March, and one of only two secondaries likely to be up and running by September.
It's also the only free school most people have heard of. There are 14 other members of the steering committee, including Young's wife, Caroline Bondy (whom he described in his book as having "Baywatch tits"), and John McIntosh, former head of the London Oratory (attended by two of Tony Blair's children), with which the school will have a formal partnership. But thanks to his addiction to self-publicity, you could be forgiven for thinking West London is all about Young, who promises an "Eton of the state sector".
Is this personality cult helpful, I ask Young over lunch. "From the start," he says, "I decided the benefits outweighed the costs. It helps in attracting teachers and applicants. And as the most visible free school group, it's harder for the government to ignore us. But from now on, the costs will outweigh the benefits. If anything bad happens, the media will leap on it. We're under a huge obligation to be successful." But he's a professional failure, isn't he? "I have retired that persona."
Young, now 47, does indeed seem to be a changed man, as perhaps you have to be when you have four children under eight, with a non-working wife (though she's a qualified solicitor) and an income from jobbing journalism.
He still gets up people's noses. He denigrates his local community school without ever visiting it; argues that local authorities have an inbuilt incentive "to preserve mediocrity"; describes the website of the London University Institute of Education as a satirical hoax; and generally carries a deal of rightwing baggage while accusing his opponents of working to a political agenda.
But, far from being the bumptious, wisecracking character you might expect, he talks seriously, even earnestly, weighing his words carefully as if he's a politician giving a tricky press conference, which, in a way, I suppose he is.
It's a mistake to assume that because Young has made a career out of sending himself up he's an idiot. A recent lecture at Middlesex University shows a sophisticated grasp of the relationship between social class and education. He has clearly read all the literature on the subject and he says he visits at least one school a week. Even his books aren't just collections of comic anecdotes. How to Lose Friends is a quite subtle exposé of New York society and how American claims to classlessness don't remotely accord with reality.
So when Young says the West London Free School will be "a comprehensive grammar", we should take him seriously, even if it does sound like an oxymoron. "There's no reason," he says, "why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake." That, he argues, was Harold Wilson's original vision when, under his leadership, Labour embraced comprehensives in the 1960s. Young is adamant the school won't be exclusively middle-class – "if we have an anomalous cohort in any way, our critics will say our success proves nothing" – and says the first two children given places come from council estates. It is hard to fault the admissions policy, which gives priority to local children, but uses a lottery to determine successful applicants from a wider area.
Anybody who attended grammar schools in their heyday will recognise both the curriculum and the organisation of pupils into competitive houses, with names such as Athenians and Spartans. All children will have to study at least six academic subjects – English language, English literature, maths, history, science and a foreign language – until exams at 16. Latin will be compulsory in years 7 to 9. Music will be a specialism, alongside lots of drama. There will also be interdisciplinary topics such as Ancient Greece and the Renaissance and lectures on politics and philosophy.
There's absolutely nothing technical – no computing, no design and technology, no domestic science – largely because, Young says, it will be a small school of just four-form entry. If any pupils "passionately want to do a subject like DT", they can go for "a period or two" at the Oratory. He accepts that the narrow focus "will be a shortcoming from some parents' point of view", but doesn't explain how this can avoid skewing the intake, in terms of ability and aptitude if not social class. He says, though, that if an academic curriculum is to be delivered, "we shall have to be flexible on pedagogy", and the prospectus has a section on "habits of mind", which will be "built into the curriculum". They include "Persisting. Managing impulsiveness... Striving for accuracy ... Finding humour."
What drove Young to start the school? "Both my wife and I went to comprehensives [he doesn't mention that Bondy did most of her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College] and we wanted our children to do so, too. But we didn't want them to be force-fed New Lab mumbo-jumbo." We briefly argue about whether this is an accurate description of what comprehensives do and, after agreeing that the state sector is infested with jargon and "pupils" shouldn't be called "students" ("I replaced every instance of it in our literature," he says proudly), I embarrass Young by pointing out that the prospectus uses "holistic" at least twice.
Then we get to the nub of the matter: his father. It is impossible to understand Toby Young without discussing the late Lord Young of Dartington (originally Michael Young), for years a pillar of the Labour party who, as his son recalls, sang "Balls to the Bourgeoisie" with Tony Crosland, Wilson's education secretary, on Christmas Eve. Young Sr wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto, virtually invented what is now called social entrepreneurship, set up the Consumers' Association, Which? magazine, the University of the Third Age and the National Extension College (prototype for the Open University), and wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, a dystopian satire about the consequences of continuing with the 11-plus. He and his wife, as a family friend recalls, ran "a household of moral passion and seriousness" that was regularly seized by great causes and such compassion for the unfortunate that several homeless people usually came to Christmas lunch.
Young Jr adored his father and is touchingly proud of him. But, the family friend says, he was overshadowed in cleverness by his sister, and "he looked like somebody who couldn't cope in Michael's world". So he became something different: shallow, amoral, obsessed with glamour and celebrity, and aggressively rightwing. (Strangely, he announced in a Spectator column last year that he had become a Tory, though nobody ever thought him anything else.) At what he calls a "bog-standard" comprehensive in Devon, where "pretty much the only thing I learned was how to roll a joint", he got a C in O-level English lit, a grade one CSE in drama, and nothing else.
His mother agreed he wasn't academic and, as a lifelong socialist who respected all workers, she assented enthusiastically to a work experience programme. "I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering," recalls Young, "but I realised I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work." After a spell on an Israeli kibbutz, he got three more Cs at O-level, thanks largely to his father's tuition, and then took A-levels at William Ellis in London in its last years as a grammar school.
He applied to Brasenose College, Oxford, which was then trying to recruit more state-school pupils. Young was told he needn't sit the entrance exam and could read philosophy, politics and economics if he got three Bs at A-level and acquired an O-level in a foreign language. He got two Bs and a C and didn't even attempt the O-level. He still got in, thanks to a curious episode in which, though he got a personal rejection letter, he first received a circular telling him when to arrive and where to collect his keys. His father rang the college, which agreed the circular created a moral obligation that should be honoured. From this unpromising beginning, Young got a first and, later, a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard and a place at Cambridge to do a PhD, which he never completed.
By then, he'd also done journalism, getting commended in the British Press Awards for a piece on youth culture in the Observer and winning a Times traineeship. Though he was sacked from the Times for hacking the computer system and circulating senior executives' salaries round the office, he decided that was the career for him. The journalist Julie Burchill, detecting a fellow contrarian ("he always carried a rolled-up copy of the Sun in his pocket," she has recalled), took him under her wing. With her, he started the Modern Review in 1990. Its slogan was "low culture for highbrows", so it got intellectual types to write about Madonna and the Simpsons. Though it was more talked about than read, Andrew Neil, Sunday Times editor in the 1990s, acknowledged it as the inspiration for his paper's Culture section. Eventually, after a row involving Young, Burchill and her protégé Charlotte Raven, the magazine was shut down.
That was followed by an attempt to become a celebrity journalist at Vanity Fair in New York, and then by an equally unsuccessful bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, each of them chronicled in books. These made him far more famous than his father, a shy man who abhorred celebrity culture. But Young Jr seemed destined to become little more than a media tart, who wrote comic plays for metropolitan audiences (there was one on sex scandals at the Spectator), and appeared on TV shows such as Come Dine with Me.
Then came the free school, and at last he feels he's doing something Young Sr would approve of. "Because my father was able to set up all those institutions, I'm confident it's possible to take on a project of this size and succeed. Without such a role model in their lives, most people would think it's complete pie-in-the-sky."
He says he's still having arguments with his father in his head. "He may have wobbled a bit between Labour and the SDP, but he was a committed egalitarian and his belief in socialism never wavered. From quite an early age, I rejected his belief in hard equality – equality of outcome. With free schools, I know he would have worried about the impact on neighbouring schools. But he would definitely be in favour of groups of parents hiring their own staff and deciding their own curriculum. He was no believer in the big state and I think he would have had some sympathy with the 'big society'. It's not a million miles from the socialist Utopia he wanted. I got a nice letter from Crosland's former private secretary, supporting what I'm doing and saying if Tony were still alive, he would, too."
He continues: "I imagined the people who disapproved of me when I was a celebrity journalist would change their minds and think he's his father's son after all. But now they disapprove of me even more." He sounds surprised and exasperated, but it's difficult to believe he doesn't understand why.
If the free school concept has any intellectual coherence –as opposed to being just another government gimmick – it is largely thanks to him. Yet you're bound to wonder if it's just another ego trip that allows new subject-matter and a new persona for his journalism, the laddish type being so 1990s and, in any case, not quite right for a man nearing his sixth decade. Nor can you quite escape the suspicion that this will end in another spectacular failure and perhaps another book, called something like How to Alienate Teachers and Muck Up Your Children's Education.
"I don't think I've ever wanted anything in my life to succeed more than the West London Free School," Young says. But – and I know it's unkind – I'd lay odds that, once it's up and running, Young will be smartly pushed aside by his fellow founders and his own children will end up somewhere else. It's the least you would expect from a professional failure.
One of our five students has started visiting institutions, while another has a full house of offers
Year 12 student Sam Jacobs, one of five students Education Guardian is following on the path to university, is anticipating a busy summer full of university research and work experience as he dreams of studying medicine to qualify as a doctor. "This summer, I'm planning on attending one of the Sutton Trust summer schools" [the schemes designed to give bright students from non-privileged homes a sample of life at leading universities like Bristol, Nottingham and Cambridge], says Sam, who is 17 and a student at JFS, a mixed comprehensive in Harrow, London.
"I've also arranged a placement in the rehabilitation unit at Finchley Memorial hospital – I'm really keen to further my passion for medicine. Plus I'm attending weekly science lectures for sixth-formers at King's College London." Sam, who is studying chemistry, biology, English literature and geography ASs and is the first in his family to apply to university, is also turning to the internet to research his medicine course options.
"I have spent the last few weeks on the Ucas website, researching the various courses and universities on offer," he says. "For me, the most important attribute of a university is the teaching style, facilities and course content. Uni is a huge topic for me and my friends. We regularly talk about our future prospects and all the various options. "My biggest worry is not making the final cut. I fear university is getting harder to get into and more people are being turned away each year."
Away from cyberspace, Sam is checking out universities in the real world, too. "I've visited a few, including Birmingham and St George's, University of London," he says. "And last week, school took us to Oxford, where we had a fantastic insight into the college system and city life. Walking through the grounds and seeing the facilities for myself really gave me a taste of what university life is going to be like."
At the other end of the university application experience, Christopher Howarth, 17, is lamenting his lost opportunity to take a gap year.
"I would have loved to take a gap year before university, but with the raised tuition fees for 2012 entry, it sadly isn't a price worth paying," he says. "What teenager, regardless of background, wouldn't be phased by the £80,000 of debt some commentators have cited for what once cost students nothing?"
By forgoing a year out and starting university this September, Christopher, who is in year 13 studying English literature, Latin and chemistry A-levels at the private Haberdashers' Aske's boys' school in Hertfordshire, will be part of the last cohort to pay the current, lower tuition fees for university. His first choice, Cambridge, has already announced it will charge £9,000 a year under the new regime, the highest possible fees.
"That was predictable, given Cambridge's loss of funding, but it's undoubtedly going to change the student demographic," says Christopher. "We could very quickly create a two-tier system where you can have either a cheap, low-quality education or a fantastic one that breaks the bank. The education budget cuts and tuition fee increases are extremely unpopular – as witnessed by the various uni occupations and the plethora of Nick Clegg jokes on Facebook."
Overall, however, Christopher is currently feeling relieved: not just because he escapes higher fees, but also because he has just been offered a place to read classics at UCL. The London university was the last of his five preferences to respond, and he now has a full house of offers, having heard back from Durham, Bristol, St Andrews and Trinity College, Cambridge.
"It's great to know that everything's paid off, but the offers are fairly steep," says Christopher, who will follow in the footsteps of his parents, who work as a civil servant and school administrator, by heading to university. "Cambridge is asking for A*AA, plus compulsory attendance on a Greek summer school because I'll be starting it from scratch. So the pressure will be on." The sixth-former says the new A* grade means he'll have to work harder this year than otherwise. "A couple of years ago, it was the AS year that mattered since AS grades go on the Ucas form, but now it's important to work equally hard for the A2s – getting that 90% can be the difference between whether or not you make your offer."
While he says he's definitely going to put Cambridge as his first choice, Christopher hasn't yet decided on his insurance option. "I have until 5 May to make up my mind," he says. "I went to UCL's classics open day recently, and though I can't make Durham's, I'll be listening to the advice of others applying there for my subject." In his spare time, he has also started checking out student funding options. "The paper trail is slowly mounting," he admits.
"The student loan process seems straightforward enough, but the priority at the moment is deciding which offer to take as my insurance. If I choose St Andrews, a substantial part of my student loan would be spent travelling backwards and forwards. But if I choose to live in London, that will cost more than elsewhere in the country."
There will be more time to think about it when study leave begins next month. "Before then, there is the usual rush to get the syllabuses learned," he says. "And revision guides are starting to disappear from the library. University's been a preoccupation for almost two years now, with everyone desperate to get into the best institutions. Now it's time to ensure we meet our offers."
The demise of history, and closing the door to vulnerable students
After Jamie's Dream School we now have the musings of Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson (Reduced to odds and sods, 29 March). Ferguson might have mentioned primary schools, where just 4% of curriculum time is devoted to the subject. He quotes extensively from Ofsted: this is a bit like asking a serial killer to advise the homicide squad. Testing, league tables, the resultant narrowed curriculum, all of this enforced by the Ofsted inspectors. Ferguson's view of history is narrow and reductive, but despite that, some history, any history would be welcome.
Richard Knights
Liverpool
• To Niall Ferguson's four facts he might have added a fifth: that, according to a survey by The Historical Association, the schools where the subject is at greatest risk are the academies, those institutions so beloved of Michael Gove.
John Till
Voice, Derby
• I am pleased our report has generated such interest. But I must take issue with any interpretation that Ofsted is soft on the teaching of secondary school history. Despite finding a lot of good practice, we highlight that all is not well. We are particularly critical of the fact that whole-school curriculum changes have affected teaching for 11- to 14-year-olds, that children are stopping history too early, and that there is too much spoon-feeding of facts and set texts.
In primary schools, we found pupils knew about particular periods but found it difficult to understand them in relation to a long-term narrative.
We recommend that the national curriculum review should ensure that primary school pupils experience history as a coherent subject that develops their knowledge, thinking and understanding, especially chronological; and that all secondary students should benefit from a significant amount of history.
Richard Brooks
Director, strategy, Ofsted
Nick Linford (Great idea: let's put education out of reach of those who need it most, 29 March) highlights the catastrophic effect of the end to fee remission for vulnerable adult students not on "active benefits", but fails to mention a group who will almost certainly disappear from colleges: adults with learning disabilities.
At my college, we anticipate that no more than a handful of students will be able to pay the expected £1,000 costs for a part-time course next year. Despite students categorised as "LLDD" (learner with learning difficulties or disabilities) being entitled to education until 25, the Young People's Learning Agency has not extended fee remission, so these students, too, will be asked to pay. Even if some students do pay, the volume of work will be so small that it will be unviable for courses to run.
After 21 years of working with disabled students to develop their basic communication, practical life skills, decision-making and autonomy, I am heartbroken at the prospect of the end to these opportunities (and expect to have to change area or lose my job). These funding changes will force people with learning disabilities out of further education: surely they are the people who really need it?
Caroline Gray
Sparkbrook, Birmingham
Why do some sheep cling together, and others take off on their own?
To know why certain sheep cling to each other while others split off on their own, a person would need to know the size of the group, and also something about the personalities of the individual sheep. Scientists at the Macaulay Institute in Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, sought this very knowledge when they looked at the loiterings of sheep.
Pablo Michelena, Angela Sibbald, Hans Erhard, and James McLeod (the names of the scientists, not the sheep) wrote up their study, Effects of Group Size and Personality on Social Foraging: The Distribution of Sheep Across Patches. It appeared in 2009 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.
The four scientists observed the meanderings of 58 female Scottish Blackface sheep in fields, under tightly controlled conditions. First they gave each of them a personality test, noting which were bold enough to explore objects with novel smells (lavender, mint, thyme, marjoram, garlic, or coffee) and exotic shapes (a baby's rattle, a bottle brush, and various baby's teething rings).
Then they let the sheep loose, in groups of two, four, six, or eight, in grassy arenas that each had some patches of especially desirable (in the scientists' opinion) greenery. That extra-yummy fodder, sprung from extra-fertilised soil, was allowed to grow especially long so as to be extra-noticeable to the sheep.
In the scientists' view, the sheep faced a dilemma: "In our study, sheep faced a trade-off between maximising their access to a preferred, but limited, resource and staying together as a group."
More often than not, groups broke apart. And here personality came to the fore, say the scientists: "bold sheep ... tended to split into subgroups at smaller group sizes than shy sheep". That was the study's major finding. The scientists discovered that after a split, the n ew, little groups would often be of equal size.
The idea that each sheep might have a uniquely distinctive personality is quite modern, academically speaking. Until recently such individuality in non-human animals had never been documented by scientists.
Michelena, Sibbald, Erhard and McLeod write about the newness of the notion. They say: "Comparative psychologists and behavioral ecologists have recently documented consistent intraspecific differences between individuals in traits such as aggressiveness, activity, exploration, risk taking, fearfulness, and emotional reactivity."
When they say "recently" they mean 1998, when a treatise in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London persuaded many biologists that some pumpkinseed sunfish are shy, and others are bold.
Michelena, Sibbald, Erhard and McLeod note that earlier studies did point the way towards these personality insights. A prime example, they say, is the distractingly named The Relation Between Dominance and Exploratory Behavior is Context-Dependent in Wild Great Tits, which delighted ornithologists in 2004.
Marc Abrahams
Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
The US higher education system is said to be the best in the world, so why is it not able to train the doctors the country needs, asks Jonathan Wolff
There is one thing we can all agree on, surely. The US system of higher education is the best in the world. Harvard, MIT, Princeton and the rest dominate the league tables. Of course Oxford and Cambridge poke their Hogarthian noses in too, but all surveys suggest that around 75% of the world's best universities are in the US.
But what do these universities do so well? Publishing attention-grabbing research, and raising money from alumni, obviously. What they don't seem so good at is supplying the needs of the US high-skill labour market. The US relies on soaking up talent educated elsewhere, as a book entitled Give Us Your Best and Brightest by Devesh Kapur and John McHale amply demonstrates. For example, of Indian-born residents of the US, about 40% have a graduate degree – many in science and technology – compared with about 10% of the "native-born" group.
And the picture is even clearer when it comes to medical education. A recent report in The Lancet shows that the US simply does not train enough doctors to meet its voracious appetite for medical attention. Each year many more doctors retire than graduate from its medical schools and so the US is compelled to raid the world to make up the difference.
For decades about 25% of doctors practising in the US received their training elsewhere. This now amounts to close to 200,000 doctors educated abroad. Around 5,000 were trained in sub-Saharan Africa; predominantly Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, but also elsewhere. In 2002, there were 47 Liberian-trained doctors working in the US, and just 72 working in Liberia. And even when a doctor is recruited from Canada, Canada then looks to South Africa, and South Africa to wherever it can. The poorest will always lose out.
In most countries, especially in the developing world, doctors are trained at public expense. If a doctor from Ghana is recruited to the US, not only does Ghana lose its doctor, it loses the money paid for the training. It may be that the doctor is likely to send a portion of earnings back home (known in the development business as "remittances"). But this is scant compensation. In sum, the US is receiving a massive subsidy from the developing world in training its medical staff.
But why am I picking on the US? Are we not even worse in the UK? Nigel Crisp, former head of the NHS, points out that, historically, we were, but the picture has largely changed now. Recently, we woke up to the damage we were doing and agreed a code of practice with other Commonwealth countries, and opened more medical schools.
Why the US doesn't supply its own needs may seem a bit of a mystery. After all, doctors in the US are not exactly badly paid. But training is long, arduous, and, of course, expensive. Apparently, a newly trained doctor graduates with about $200,000 of debt. This is a serious business, and, unlike lawyers and bankers, of which there are no American shortages, doctors lack the opportunities to earn immense salaries immediately and pay it all back.
Furthermore, unlike in the UK, there is no central planning of higher education. How could a decision to open up new medical schools be implemented? No doubt there are ways, but the political process would be tortuous. In the UK, it was decreed and it was done. Well, the medical profession, bless them, having first identified the problem, moaned a bit about the new proposals, but subsequently fell into line.
So while we look with envy at the wealth and achievements of the top American universities, we should bear in mind that not all is as well as it seems. In fact, it may be that the weakness of the US higher education system is contributing to the health and development crisis in some of the world's poorest regions.
Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly
Queen Mary's Mile End Group is bringing in political stars to enliven its teaching of history – and attract funding
On a shiversome winter evening a few weeks ago, a most unlikely gaggle packed out the People's Palace, Mile End, drawn by an even more unlikely crowd-puller. Young history students and (mostly) old power brokers – including David Owen, Nigel Lawson and David Miliband – rubbed shoulders and listened to the nonagenarian Denis Healey give his thoughts on the chancellorship. The man who helped the ancient statesman's star shine that night is Jon Davis, of Queen Mary, University of London.
Blunt, business-like and irrepressibly upbeat, Davis is the antithesis of the caricature historian, and worked in investment banks before the bubble and bust. But his passion was always "making sense of politics past", and he won his spurs amid the "dusty annals" of the national archive at Kew, completing a doctorate on prime ministers and Whitehall in the 1960s under the supervision of Professor (now Lord) Peter Hennessy, the British constitution's most celebrated scribe and a popular political author.
The Hennessy brand of contemporary history has always drawn heavily on gossip with those who were actually involved – one of his footnotes cites a chat with former prime minister Edward Heath "while peeing in adjacent pedestals at Glyndebourne" – and now Davis is steadily institutionalising the professor's formidable network, through a quirky ouftit known as the Mile End Group. The group draws big political names such as Healey, Sir John Major and Michael Heseltine to its decidedly informal history seminars – and it brings in some serious corporate money in the process.
History's thirst for funding has never been greater. The Browne review has effectively withdrawn the direct subsidy for teaching humanities at undergraduate level and, even before that, budding historians often found it impossibly difficult to fund their graduate work. In each of the last couple of years, only about 10 students in the whole country have secured public funding for a master's in political history via the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Even for those with a first-class degree, the odds are horrendous.
At Queen Mary, however, there are other options. The IT giant Hewlett Packard pays the fees for four MA students and makes a contribution towards their living expenses in return for their becoming assistants to the Mile End Group. Michelle Clement, 21, has landed the event organisation role, while researching the aftermath of the 2010 general election. She explains: "I'm one of six children from a half-Pakistani, half-Glaswegian family. Without the financial support, I simply could not have done the course. But much more than that, the group's events have opened doors, and enabled me to meet top mandarins, some of whom I'm hoping will provide invaluable insight for my dissertation on the coalition talks". Another assistant, 55-year-old Phil Horscroft, came to Queen Mary as a mature student after working as a financial adviser abroad. He agrees the "money and networks have made all the difference", and after completing a dissertation on the Falklands war, he hopes to go on to a PhD.
They are all emphatic that Hewlett Packard has no influence on their work, and for Davis corporate support is an unalloyed "cause for celebration". He has also pulled in a small amount of cash from the civilian and military engineers Babcock, and has his eyes on other major partners. Previously, Queen Mary persuaded the arms company BAE Systems to fund a group assistant through a PhD on the procurement of Polaris, which he is currently undertaking.
Some of these corporate names raise instinctive suspicion, and after Col Gaddafi's donations to the LSE landed it in hot water, the president of the Queen Mary's student union, Vratislav Vraj Domalip III, emphasises the need to be careful. "It's the duty of universities to check any company they are taking money from, to ensure it follows a sound ethical code. But at a time when budgets are being savaged, there's a real need to diversify income and tap new funding streams to ensure the quality of students' academic experience."
Characteristically, Davis's pragmatism is less qualified. "Of course we need to guarantee total academic freedom, none of us would have it any other way. HP well understands that, but can nonetheless see a real shared interest. They value the chance to mix with the great and good, who happen to be very interested in what we do. From our point of view, with their help in terms of hospitality and the rest, we can pull in bigger names."
With many public-sector clients, the networking is no doubt valuable to HP. Its director of strategy for government business, James Johns, says: "Of course it's valuable for us to forge relationships with top people, but as a business we are also serious about learning lessons from the past."
"For the students to meet the names in their textbooks," Davis says, "brings the whole subject to life, and for those on the lecturing side, the big beasts provide not merely insight for research, but a practical teaching resource." The latter is indisputable. Together with the Independent on Sunday's John Rentoul, Davis has developed an undergraduate course that teaches the "Blair years" as history – it is about to be promoted to a master's. He signed up star lecturers, including Blair's right-hand man, Alastair Campbell, as well as the former top defence mandarin Sir Kevin Tebbit, and the former GCHQ boss Sir David Omand. "Using our networks we can make the constitution, and particularly its most secretive corners, flare into life in the classroom", Davis says.
Looking ahead, Davis anticipates other shared interests, and not just with big corporates, but with Whitehall. "Thanks to faster job turnover, and outside recruitment, the British civil service is no longer the truly permanent government it used to be – the institutional memory is fading. That is where contemporary historians can help." Officials certainly seem to agree, and Sir Humphrey is well represented on the board of the Mile End Group. The Queen Mary historians' penchant for proper documentation may make them nostalgic for the lost ways of SW1 – the group has just bagged the official paper copy of the UK's historic Cabinet minutes, after the Public Records Office digitised them.
Looking ahead, Davis is eyeing the potential of putting his young historians to work on a consultancy basis. "There are no end of thinktanks, which roll forward, powered by partisan links. What we want to do is to offer a context unit, a non-partisan outfit that can use its expertise to guide policy-makers through the recent past." Advice on departmental re-structurings, which are so often botched, is only one area where the present public authorities would greatly benefit from an injection of expertise about the past.
Davis is also convinced that a historical training can pay dividends in the world of work. Most of the first few Mile End Group assistants have found jobs, many in public policy – one is working for the Labour party, for example, and another for the Whitehall and Industry Group. HP itself has just hired one former group assistant, Charlene Brennan, 23, on a consultancy basis, on account of her "research/summation/presentational skills", which were developed through studying history, but which HP believes will be equally applicable in context of the non-historical analysis that it requires.
It seems that companies like HP, who have close and sometimes controversial relations with government, are keenly aware of the value of understanding the past. Until such time as the government itself understands the same thing, it could fall to such corporations to foot the bill for making history.
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network, a lesson to get pupils thinking about the monarchy
The average 11-year-old probably knows more about King Henry VIII than about today's royal family. But all that could change big time with the royal wedding – and even a day off school – coming up. What a golden opportunity to talk to children about what the monarchy is, how it is embedded into the running of our country – and to discuss with them whether we need a monarchy at all.
On the Guardian Teacher Network, our new resources site, you can now find a one-hour PowerPoint lesson ideal for classrooms or homes to get children thinking about the constitution of their country and whether it needs to be reformed. The lesson explains the current powers and prerogatives of the Queen. Inherited rule comes as a shock to many children and the lesson will explain how even "commoner" Kate Middleton can only become queen in name, without any constitutional power.
Although this is a citizenship rather than a history lesson, it was impossible to resist adding a link to Horrible Histories' hilarious song about the King Georges, Born 2 Rule ("Born to rule over you, Georges I, III, IV and II; people hated us and we hated them too..."), to help get the debate flowing
Children will be given the tools to discuss whether the royals are beyond class or whether their presence helps to keep the class system alive. The PowerPoint gives them the vocabulary, information and spark for their own ideas to ready them for the final challenge: should the monarchy be abolished?
Find the lesson plan at http://bit.ly/hrfKOg. Let the debate commence!
• Emily Drabble is editor of learnnewsdesk, the Guardian's news service for nine- to 14-year-olds. Her book, What's the Big Idea: the Monarchy, is published by Hodder. The Guardian Teacher Network offers free access to 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This content is being added to every day by teachers and specialists. 20,000 teachers have signed up already. To see (and share) for yourself, go to teachers.guardian.co.uk
According to Ofsted, history is successful in schools. Not so, says controversial historian Niall Ferguson: the inspectors are missing the ruination of the subject
Is there a crisis in the teaching of history in British schools? Not if you believe the conclusions of History for All, the report published earlier this month by Ofsted. Based on evidence from inspections conducted between 2007 and 2010 in 83 primary schools and the same number of secondary schools, the report begins on a reassuringly positive note. "There was much that was good and outstanding" in the history lessons the inspectors observed. "Most pupils enjoyed well-planned lessons that extended their knowledge, challenged their thinking and enhanced their understanding."
In secondary schools, we are assured, "effective teaching by well-qualified and highly competent teachers enabled the majority of students to develop knowledge and understanding in depth". In short, history is "generally a popular and successful subject, which many pupils enjoy". Attainment at the secondary level is "high and continu[ing] to rise".
Well, that's all right then. Clearly, all last year's talk by Michael Gove, Simon Schama, myself and others about the urgent need for reform was mere alarmism, doubtless actuated by some sinister political motive. Or was it? A closer look at the main body of the report suggests that there are indeed grounds for concern.
First, it can hardly be a cause of celebration that students in independent schools are almost twice as likely to study GCSE history as those in maintained schools. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history.
Second, as the inspectors' report acknowledges, England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory for students beyond the age of 14. Worse, many state schools now offer a two-year key stage 3 course, which allows some pupils to stop studying history at the age of 13.
And here are four more facts that are not in the Ofsted report:
• 25% of all schools no longer teach history as a discrete subject in year 7
• 30% of comprehensives spend less than one hour a week on history in the years up to age 13
• More GCSE candidates took design and technology than history last year
• More A-level candidates took psychology.
It is a paradox indeed. History has never been more popular outside schools than it is in Britain today. Yet history has never been so unpopular in British schools.
Even more disturbing is the evidence of widespread historical ignorance among school-leavers. A recent survey of first-year undergraduates reading history at a reputable UK university found that: 66% did not know who was monarch at time of the Armada; 69% did not know the location of the Boer war; 84% did not know who commanded British forces at Waterloo (a third thought it was Nelson); and 89% could not name a single 19th-century British prime minister.
Such evidence should make us very sceptical indeed about Ofsted's claim that history is "a successful subject in schools".
How did we get here? The problem is surely not poor teaching. Rather, it is the stuff that teachers are expected to do, which is the product of an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists, not forgetting over-mighty examination boards. The politicians ranged from Kenneth Baker, who vainly hoped that a new national curriculum would force schools to teach a rather traditional kind of history, to Gordon Brown, who decided (Scotsman as he was) that schools should be pressed to teach British rather than English history, in order to promote a sense of "Britishness".
Such initiatives from above provided the proponents of a so-called new history with a golden opportunity to reshape historical education. Historical "skills" such as source analysis, they argued, should be elevated above mere factual knowledge. And "discovery" by children should count for more than dusty old pedagogy.
The result was a national curriculum designed to instil in schoolchildren all kinds of "key concepts" like "chronological understanding", "cultural, ethnic and religious diversity", "change and continuity", "cause and consequence", "significance" and "interpretation".
And these were to be taught with reference to an impressively wide range of subject matter.
Who could possibly object to such an enlightened scheme?
The trouble is not so much with the theory as with the practice that has evolved in too many schools. As Ofsted admits in a damning passage on primary pupils, "some … found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together." The only thing wrong with this observation is that Ofsted seems to think it applies only to primary school pupils, whereas it could equally well be applied to those in secondary school – and students at a good few universities, too.
In fact, as the inspectors concede elsewhere, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited, "students' chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had … a poor sense of the historical narrative". This is hardly a minor deficiency. It's a bit like saying that maths is a successful subject in British schools, apart from the fact that pupils in half of schools can't count.
I have complained before that it is possible to leave school in England knowing only about Henry VIII, Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. This is a caricature, admittedly, but it is not a wholly unfair one. Commenting on a not untypical primary curriculum, the authors of History for All say that "its principal weaknesses are the disconnected topics and the potential for the pupils to be left with a fragmented overview". You can say that again. Consider this list of topics spread in this order over four years:
• Romans and Celts – why have people invaded and settled?
• Ancient Egypt – what can we find out from what has survived?
• What can we learn about history by studying a famous person?
• Why did Henry VIII marry six times?
• Tudor times – rich and poor; exploration
• What was it like to live here in the past?
• Victorian children
• Victorians – how your area has changed since the Victorian era
• The second world war
• Ancient Greeks
• Britain since 1948
The word smorgasbord doesn't really do justice to this random assortment. Lost, as Simon Schama has justly lamented, is the "long arc of time", to be replaced by odds and sods. And some of those odds really are odd, especially if you go on to GCSE and A-level, where the "methods" become ever more idiosyncratic. If you really want to understand what's going wrong in English schools, take a look at some of the lessons Ofsted singles out for praise...
"Students in year 8 analysed the changing attitudes towards Oliver Cromwell from the 17th to the 20th centuries and, in year 9, they looked at changing attitudes to the British empire. The work on Cromwell used the writings of Victorian and 20th-century historians as well as contemporary historians. In the work on the British empire, the students designed an empire plate, having looked at contemporary and modern sources of information, including the work of historians such as Niall Ferguson ..."
I am of course flattered to be cited, but an empire plate? Or how about this:
"Year 11 students were studying the treatment of the Sioux Indians as part of the Schools History Project depth study on the American west. An effective activity at the beginning of the lesson reminded students of what they knew so far about the homes and lifestyle of the Sioux Indians, especially in relation to buffalo hunting. Using this knowledge, students, working in groups, devised criteria to judge any modern interpretation of what happened to the Sioux. In this case, they considered a Hollywood film."
Well, I suppose it beats a plate.
History is emphatically not being made available "to all" in English schools. Too few pupils, especially in the state sector, spend too little time doing it. And what they study lacks all cohesion.
The challenge for the education secretary, Michael Gove, is to make sure that he is not the latest in a succession of politicians to see his plans for reform subverted by an educational establishment – here exemplified by Ofsted – that is still in deep denial about the damage its beloved "new history" has done.
Download the lesson plan from the Guardian Teacher Network at http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/resources.aspx?q=niall%20ferguson
Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard University
Wikipedia is surveying academics to find out why many seem reluctant to donate their expertise
Mike Peel began editing Wikipedia – the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit – after a physics entry made him mad. It was 2005 and the then undergraduate was reading around a course when he became "irritated by a grammatical mistake". He hasn't looked back since. For Peel, now a 26-year-old post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank centre for astrophysics, is not only the secretary of Wikimedia UK – the local volunteer chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project – but also one of the more prolific contributors among UK academics.
Though it is impossible to say who holds the top spot – academic wikipedians are not ranked per se – Peel estimates he has made more than 16,000 edits, contributed to approximately 1,500 pages and started over 50, mostly within his area of expertise. If you Google "Big Bang", the Wikipedia page that is the first result to pop up owes its thoroughness, at least in part, to the work of Peel. His main reason for contributing is one of public good. "Everyone goes to Wikipedia, and, because most people are using it and learning from it, we need to make sure they get the right information," he says.
Yet Peel is also a rare breed among academics, who seem less inclined to make contributions to pages than gaze on them. Scholars have mostly now joined students in accepting that Wikipedia – the fifth most visited website in the world – can be a valuable starting point for inquiry, but it appears that when it comes to actually contributing to the articles within their area of expertise, there is a hole. "Academics are trapped in this paradox of using Wikipedia but not contributing," says Dario Taraborelli, a research analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation. "While there might be pockets of academics running very advanced projects and lots of academics contributing outside their fields of expertise, not enough are contributing to scholarly articles within their fields."
The issue is certainly concerning the Wikimedia Foundation. Taraborelli is currently one of three members of its research committee running a survey of experts to try to understand both why they do – and don't – contribute to Wikipedia and what could be done to help. Academics, scientists, research students and working professionals are all invited to participate. Part of the purpose is simply to try to turn the many anecdotes about expert participation into data, says Daniel Mietchen, who is also running the survey and is the managing editor of Citizendium, a Wikipedia-like project with a special role for experts. "It is the first real attempt to investigate the motivations for experts contributing or not, and we are honestly interested in answers to both."
The foundation wants to raise the level of expert participation – be it fully fledged editing or helping editors identify inaccuracies – to improve the quality of pages, cover more scholarly and encyclopaedic knowledge, and increase the diversity of participants, says Taraborelli. But, issues of lack of time and unfamiliar technology aside, the biggest barrier to more participation may be the academic ego.
Academics get ahead primarily by writing papers and winning grant proposals. "Unfortunately, there is no reward system set up in academia for us to contribute our knowledge in Wikipedia," says Mark Graham, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute currently studying geographical aspects of Wikipedia.
Likewise, on Wikipedia, no one knows they are experts, causing fears that contributions will be edited out. Suzie Sheehy is a researcher at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, who does plenty of public outreach but has never contributed to Wikipedia. "I worry about genuine, well-researched contributions being changed or overwritten by others," she says.
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking at how it might capture expert conversation about Wikipedia content happening on other websites and feed it back to the community as a way of providing pointers for improvement, says Taraborelli. And it takes on the Wikipedia model that better-value academic contributions do exist. Citizendium – launched in 2006 by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger after an acrimonious split with fellow co-founder Jimmy Wales – requires contributors to use their real names and contains expert-approved articles, though it doesn't have the breadth or ubiquity of Wikipedia.
So what is in it for academics who do get over these barriers and engage? One of the most rewarding aspects can be in helping shape the public image of their field, say contributors. For many subjects – including scholarly topics – it is very often Wikipedia pages that are the top hits on Google, and for scholars who want their field represented accurately or interestingly, contributing to Wikipedia can help. The Association for Psychological Science in the US is currently running an initiative to match up psychology pages that need fixing with the academic experts who have the necessary knowhow. Clearly there is a role for learned societies.
Paul Goldberg, a professor of computer science at the University of Liverpool, dabbles in editing Wikipedia pages. He has added entries on specialist mathematical concepts and admits to creating the entry on the research excellence framework. "It does give a sense of importance to these rather abstruse topics you happen to be working on," he says.
When history researchers on Project Volterra at University College London discovered fragments of a lost Roman law code, they were so keen to ensure journalists got the story right that they penned pages on the code before they released details of the discovery to the press. "We suspected that any journalist would be likely to look at the Wikipedia pages as an initial resource," says research fellow Simon Corcoran. The idea that the group would spend a lot of time just generally editing pages is "not realistic", he says, but with a specific need it made sense.
Yet editing Wikipedia isn't the only way academics can contribute. From Wikipedia evangelists such as Peel, to the Wikimedia Foundation, to the first UK Wikipedia student society – the newly formed Wikipedians at Imperial College – the dream is to see Wikipedia embraced as a learning and teaching resource in the classroom, with lecturers setting new types of assignment where students edit pages as coursework.
However, according to the Wikipedia page that lists them, there is currently only one such project in the UK. Toni Sant, director of research at the University of Hull's Scarborough school of arts and new media, gets his third-year applied and interactive theatre students to write or update pages about practitioners and broad concepts in the field, grading them partly on how their pages are received by other Wikipedians. It teaches students concepts such as collaboration and how to distinguish between the reliability of sources, says Sant. "Some of my colleagues think it is mad. The general feeling from teachers at all levels of education is Wikipedia is the devil. But it is so popular with students, they are going to use it one way or another so we may as well find ways to embrace it and integrate it into the curriculum."
• The survey, Expert Barriers to Wikipedia, is open until 15 April. Dr Panagiota Alevizou, a post-doctoral researcher at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology, is also running it.
• This article was amended on 29 March. The original omitted the inclusion of Dr Panagiota Alevizou's contribution.
It should have been good news, but mistakes made by the government have resulted in an unfair student loan system for part-time undergraduates, says Claire Callender
Part-time undergraduates, who make up a third of all undergraduates in England, are for the first time to be eligible for student loans to cover the costs of their tuition fees, just like their full-time peers. Come 2012‑13, an estimated one-third of part‑time students will qualify for non-means-tested loans. This gives part-time study the potential to expand, and to fulfil the government's objectives of reskilling and upskilling the workforce, while meeting the needs of students, especially those who work and have family commitments. This good news, however, has turned bad because the government has failed to get the terms and conditions right.
The idea of extending loans to part-time undergraduates is to level the playing field. Currently, the funding system favours full-time students and provision, and there are clear incentives for universities to grow their full-time provision and run down their part-time programmes. This has contributed to a decline in part-time undergraduate enrolments. The aim of the reforms is to help eradicate many of the disincentives for universities to provide part-time courses. But, if the student loans are not attractive, students may not take advantage.
The government has made two mistakes. First, only students studying above 25% and up to 75% of a full-time course can get loans to cover all their fees. Why the upper limit of 75%? What happens to the student who one year decides to accelerate their learning and studies, say, 90% of a full-time course? Surely they should be rewarded for this additional effort and their desire to speed up to completion? But, such a student would be penalised. In essence, the government is putting a ceiling on the amount of loan a part-time student can get. There is no similar limit for full-time students.
The second problem concerns when students start to repay their loans. Full-time students do not have to pay until they have graduated and are earning at least £21,000. For most full-time bachelor's students, this means that repayment does not kick in until at least 3.5 years after starting their course, and for those on longer courses (about 30%), such as medicine, until 5.5 years after. A different set of rules is being applied to part-time students. They are being asked to start repaying their loans 3.5 years after starting their course, or sooner if their course lasts less than three years.
This may look like a fair deal – however, the reality makes it anything but. Students who take short one-year undergraduate courses, often aimed at encouraging them to progress to a degree, would start repaying their loans once they completed that course, assuming their income was above £21,000. If they then decided to take a bachelor's degree, they would be repaying their loan for their previous course while still studying. In fact, all part-time students taking a bachelor's degree will have to start repaying their loans while studying because it will take them more than 3.5 years to complete their degree.
Ministers justify their approach because of the high interest rates that accrue on student loans while they study. From 2012-13, the day a student takes out a loan, they start clocking up interest rates of inflation plus 3%. Only once full-time students graduate – or, in the case of part-timers, 3.5 years after starting their course – are interest rates linked to income, and even then such a high level of interest is only paid by those earning more than £41,000. (Graduates earning between £21,000 and £41,000 will be charged interest on a sliding scale up to a maximum of inflation plus 3%.)
The government argues that its proposals for part-time students will reduce the amount of interest accrued on their loans. But this needs to be weighed against part-timers having to start repaying their loans while still studying.
A fairer solution would have been for part-timers to start repaying their loans 4.5 years after starting their course. This would have meant most part-timers taking a first degree would have repaid their loans once they had completed their degree.
These provisions make a mockery of the ideas informing the reforms of student funding – that higher education is free at the point of consumption and that tuition fees are covered in full by loans. Moreover, the planned changes add to the complexity, making it difficult to promote a clear and simple message about the advantages of student loans for part-time students. It would not have taken much to ensure that financial support for part-time students remained a good story instead of a bad one.
• Claire Callender is professor of higher education at Birkbeck and the Institute of Education, University of London.
The decision to stop full funding for people on 'inactive benefits' will make education and training inaccessible to many trapped in poverty, says Nick Linford
People across education have been making their voices heard. The proposed rise in tuition fees and cuts to the education maintenance allowance, lecturers' pensions and benefits, and funding for Esol (English for speakers of other languages) have fuelled anger and prompted people to take their protests to the streets.
But lurking in the shadows are more casualties of the cuts. Their voices aren't being heard. There's no Facebook page for this group, no Twitter campaign, but college principals know who they are.
From August, the skills funding agency is to stop fully funding people on "inactive benefits" – that is those on low incomes who rely on government help in the form of income support and working tax, pension and housing credits. It is a move that will actually make education and training inaccessible to those who need it most. In addition, although it has yet to be announced, it is likely that asylum seekers will also lose out.
Take working tax credit, which was designed to help support those on low incomes and their families, as an example. If a single person works 30 hours a week on minimum wage, their income is just £9,050 a year. How many would be able to pay further education and training fees on this kind of salary?
But these are exactly the people who would benefit. It could help them to boost their earnings, progress their careers, and provide better lives for themselves and their families. The benefits would be felt across society.
From August, colleges and training providers, in the main, will receive only half the cost of courses for these kinds of learners. Colleges, already trying to absorb rate and budget cuts, will be expected to stump up the rest (approximately £1,400 for a full-time student), or extract it from the learner. These learners are unlikely to be able to pay, so how exactly are colleges and training providers expected to make up the shortfall?
The government's reasoning doesn't stack up. It believes that employers should and will contribute to the cost of educating the least well-off in society. But government policy has never supported this ambition, and it has never been easy to get employers to foot the bill for education and training. What makes the government think things will be different this time round?
Colleges have been told they have the freedom to waive fees for vulnerable learners, but with many already being asked to deliver more for less, will they have the resources to do that? Freedom is a great thing, but it will not protect them from financial failure and job losses further down the line.
Only now, as colleges plan their courses for the next academic year, are they realising the full impact of this policy on their resources and learners.
I recently sent all further education colleges some software to help them calculate the size of the problem; the data was published last week as part of an Lsect adult funding conference. The results were painful. The data, for example, shows that three medium-sized colleges, chosen from the north and the south-east, currently receive specific funding worth around £14m attached to learners on "inactive benefits".
I'm estimating that around 25% of adult provision, or 300,000 adults, will be affected. Having said that, it is impossible for the government to know what the real impact of this policy will be because of the way colleges' data is collected. There are serious accuracy limitations. When learners enrol they only tick one box to indicate income, and yet learners' income is often more complex.
From my discussions with principals I know they have been expecting a government U-turn, but that's now looking unlikely. It is yet another example of the coalition government's lazy "act now, think later" approach to policy-making.
Further education is about improving life chances, raising skills levels and helping people to move on in their lives. If any sector could fully embrace Cameron's "big society", FE could.
Education has always been a way out of the poverty trap. It still is … if you can afford it.
Nick Linford is managing director at Lsect, a company specialising in post-16 funding, performance and data, and author of The Hands-on Guide to Post 16 Funding
Fran Abrams visits a school that has been sent 154 new pupils since September, thanks to mid-year admissions policy
John O'Donnell, headteacher of the Radcliffe school in Milton Keynes, is pointing to a colour-coded wallchart on which the progress of this year's GCSE students is mapped. There's a photograph of each, next to his or her name – or at least there should be. The chart is pitted, rather eerily, with blanks – almost half the 45 pupils in the "grey" group, those causing concern, weren't at the school when the photographer last visited, three years ago.
It's a neat demonstration of an issue that has caused a furore in the town – and in many others – in the last six months. In the past, when families moved house during the school year, they simply applied to a school for a place. Since September, the job of co-ordinating these admissions has been handed to local authorities.
The measure has led to such a slew of complaints that the schools minister, Nick Gibb, has been forced to rethink it. Schools have complained of bureaucratic delays that have left hundreds of pupils sitting at home, and of children being "dumped" in schools with surplus places, miles from home. The move has also led to a wider debate about how these transient pupils, who are often from deprived or disrupted families, are treated in the education system.
Attempts to give local authorities more control over schools admissions were meant to ensure even the most popular schools still had to take their share – but according to many headteachers, this particular measure hasn't worked.
As one of only a few secondaries with vacant places in Milton Keynes, a town whose population is shifting and growing, the Radcliffe has always had to deal with large numbers of new arrivals. But this year, the situation is much worse, O'Donnell says. The council has sent 154 pupils to the school since September – compared with just 70 who arrived mid-year last year.
"I have youngsters joining me from six or seven miles away," O'Donnell says. "Only 29 were from pupils living in our area. I never turn anyone away, but it's very unfair on them and their families – if they're making a seven-mile journey, they have to be disadvantaged by that." He tries to see all these pupils before they start school, to ensure they understand the school's ethos. This year, the process has often taken up a day a week. Council delays have also led to pupils being out of school for long periods.
The Eferakorho family moved from Bradford to Milton Keynes last September. Their daughter, now just 12, was turned down for three local schools and instead was offered the Radcliffe – seven miles from home. Jite Eferakorho, an educational consultant, said his daughter had been out of school almost six months and was terribly distressed. "I went on the public bus, to get a sense of what my daughter would be in for – it took me more than 70 minutes. She would have had to leave home at 6.50 to be at school before 8.40. "
The family are now taking their case to the local government ombudsman. "I think it's grossly unfair for an 11-year-old to be asked to travel seven miles to school in 21st-century England," Eferakorho says.
The MP for Milton Keynes North, Mark Lancaster, has received so many complaints that he has raised the issue in a parliamentary debate. MPs from around the country related similar tales of woe.
The new rules seem to have exacerbated an already complex and fraught process, Lancaster says: "The Radcliffe is becoming almost a default community school for the whole of Milton Keynes." He also picked up on another issue, which is concerning schools in other areas: the increasing success of academies. The new Milton Keynes academy admits 240 pupils each year, while its predecessor school admitted 300 – and that means it's full, so it doesn't have to take these transient pupils.
Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, believes the scramble for places is bound to get worse as more academies and independent free schools open. "This will be even more of an issue as the system becomes more fragmented. New schools are likely to set lower admissions numbers – therefore they won't have surplus places. There's a real need for school places to be planned strategically in a local area. Otherwise we will end up with a massive challenge, and with many of these mobile pupils being lost to the system," he says.
Across the country, even in towns where the new academies have not set lower admissions numbers than their predecessors, similar situations have arisen. Martin Horwood, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham, was one of those who spoke in the parliamentary debate. There, too, children, including new arrivals, are being bussed from the south of the town, where the two secondary schools are full, to a school in the north, he says. "People are arriving in the area and finding they can't get a school place. Families are being allocated to the most undersubscribed school in a different part of town."
MPs from areas as diverse as Stockton, in the north-east, and Colne Valley, in West Yorkshire, have described similar problems. The schools minister, Nick Gibb, told MPs he had received a steady flow of complaints about the new system since its introduction. "Admissions processes are an imprecise science but, having received representations from admissions authorities and members of the public, I am convinced that we have to look again at this issue," he said. "A reform is now being considered as part of an ongoing review of the school admissions code."
That code will be published in the next few days, and is understood to contain a reform of the measure controlling in-year admissions, designed to hand back more say on the issue to schools. It will not prove universally popular, though. The Association of Directors of Children's Services has been pressing the government to let local authorities continue to co-ordinate new arrivals. Marion Davis, the association's president, says it is important for local authorities to be able to keep track of these often vulnerable children.
"There may be more work to do, but we believe the systems support a vital function in keeping children safe," she says. "Children removed from school or looking for school places in the middle of the academic year may be vulnerable for a number of reasons – they may have begun to be looked after by the local authority, may have health problems or have had problems in their previous school."
Meanwhile at the Radcliffe school, O'Donnell's diary is still filling up with appointments to meet prospective pupils. He'd like to see local authorities required to fund "ghost places" in schools like his that are regularly asked to take a lot of pupils after a school year has started. That way, he says, he could ensure he had enough staff to cope, and that pupils arriving after GCSE courses had started did not have restricted options.
His governors have proposed solving the problem by cutting back the number of places at the school – O'Donnell says this is necessary because a growing demand for practical subjects means the school requires more space per pupil. In the longer term, he says, the solution lies elsewhere.
"There needs to be a long-term strategy to deal with this. We can't continue to have schools in the position we've been in this year," he says. "We want to work with the local authority to deal with this, because this is an issue for local people – though we recognise that can be a difficult conversation."
Michael Gove is keen to see what we have to learn from education systems internationally, but the lessons may not be as straightforward as he thinks, says Valerie Hannon
Last week I saw a report that a US congresswoman wanted to change the official value of pi to precisely 3 as a way to help US 15-year-olds, after they came 25th in maths in the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's world study. The story was a hilarious spoof, but it well illustrates the strength of feeling about these global rankings.
Recently Michael Gove has stressed the importance of comparing education systems internationally, as seen in the OECD's Pisa studies, and of learning from the most successful nations. But what should our response be?
The education secretary enthuses about Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD, calling him the "most important man in English education" for the insights his work confers. Schleicher's analysis, according to Gove, shows, first, that "we [England] are falling further and further behind other nations"; and second, that the key to success is "to recruit the best possible people into teaching and provide them with high-quality training and professional development". This is true – as far as it goes. But it is a partial analysis.
What else have successful systems to tell us about the issues we face today? Schleicher's work demonstrates compellingly that demand for the competencies 20th-century school systems were good at imparting (routine cognitive and manual skills) is falling sharply among employers across the world. He shows that 21st-century systems need to prepare young people with the skills to undertake non-routine analytic and, especially, non-routine interactive tasks. Schleicher's conclusion is: "The skills that are easiest to teach and test are also easiest to digitise, automate and outsource."
The implication of these findings is that systems need to prepare students "to deal with more rapid change than ever before … for jobs that have not yet been created … using technologies that have not yet been invented". This is about learning how to learn, and new ways of thinking that involve creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making. It is in sharp contrast to an emphasis on the capacity to reproduce facts. Reducing the debate into a "skills v knowledge" dichotomy is manifestly false. The issue is the right balance between content acquisition, and the skills and dispositions needed to succeed in fundamentally changed conditions. This is the key message of Schleicher and the OECD's work. It is to be hoped that the current curriculum review is permitted to take this wider view.
For this is the perspective being adopted by the world's leading systems. Rather than relying on past achievements, they are reconceiving how they approach the future. Take Finland – always at or near the top of the Pisa rankings. The director of the Finnish board of education has described how their system has identified the key competencies for lifelong learning, and is setting about transforming their system to ensure they're acquired. Critically, this entails enabling learners to "undertake meaningful problem-based inquiry, which might be multi-disciplinary, supported by blended teaching methods and hybrid resources". The Finns aren't giving up on acquiring knowledge. They just know it's not enough.
Then there's South Korea, another "top performing" system. Perceived as exam-driven, cramming its students, Korea is set to change. Exploring the work of its very best schools has revealed that they focus on providing concentrated time for some subjects (rather than shallow drip-feed); on personalising learning; on evaluating creativity; and on experience-based learning. South Korea is basing its innovation agenda on the "three C's": creativity, collaboration and character.
And finally, take one of the most improved cities in the world in terms of education performance – New York City. Gove recently hosted the former chancellor of the NYC school system, praising the rapid progress made by the city. What he omitted, however, was that NYC has acknowledged its current set of school improvement initiatives is inadequate to deal with the challenges young people face. So it has a launched an Innovation Zone, comprising a distributed network of schools, specifically to test and refine new approaches to learning and teaching that are more personalised and emphasise higher-level skills.
So yes, let's join the global education community seeking out the best ways to make learning engaging and relevant to young people in the digital age. But let's do it with open minds, and attention to all the evidence.
Valerie Hannon is a board director of the Innovation Unit
Dovegate prison in Staffordshire runs first workplace foundation degree in offender management
In a lecture theatre in Staffordshire, 15 students are at an induction session for a new foundation degree. They talk about their upcoming modules, which include law, crime and criminal psychology, while nearby all the usual campus facilities – library, medical centre, gym, football pitches – are filled with people. But this is a far cry from the UK's other seats of higher education: the residents at this site include murderers, rapists and thieves. This is Dovegate prison in Staffordshire, and the undergraduates are prison officers embarking on Britain's first workplace foundation degree in offender management, run by Staffordshire University and Stafford College.
The group includes prison custody officers and an assistant director. Some are bosses, others junior members of staff, but all are having to switch from barking orders all day to listening to instructions in the classroom.
"It's going to be a bit of a challenge," admits Gillian Curtis, 29, a custodial officer at Dovegate. "Switching from organising prisoners, being in charge and running their lives, to going back to school will be difficult. I'm going to be the one who has to listen and produce the work demanded of me, plus ask for support and advice, rather than giving it out to prisoners all day, as I'm used to."
Yet Curtis is filled with excitement at the prospect of starting the degree. "I left school at 16 and worked as an administrator at a car finance firm, but always regretted missing out on university," she says. "I've done NVQs in custodial management while working at the prison, but it's something completely different to get a degree. I'm a bit scared but mostly can't wait to start studying."
The officers attend lectures at the prison's learning suite during working hours. And with all their course fees and textbooks paid for by Serco, the private company that runs Dovegate on the government's behalf, the students hope they can use the degree to ultimately boost their own earnings. Damian Holdcroft, 34, a unit manager at the prison, explains: "I hope [the degree] will give me a better understanding of how we and external agencies like the probation service might work together. The government is very keen on performance-related pay – and if we can work together to better rehabilitate offenders, then everyone benefits."
The new tuition-fee regime for undergraduates to be introduced next year means universities are increasingly focused on developing workplace degrees in conjunction with businesses, according to Michelle Hammond, a law lecturer at Staffordshire University, who wrote a module on the offender's journey through the criminal justice system for the Dovegate degree. "This is definitely a developing area for our sector," she says. "Working with employers and organisations to develop courses also widens access to education for people who would not automatically consider going into higher education, and helps students who haven't been involved in education for a long time."
Alex Benton, 35, one of the Dovegate undergraduates, joined the prison in September after being made redundant from his job in sales. "I come from a normal working-class family, and going on to college when I was 16 just wasn't an option," he says. "I needed to bring in money for the house. I started working in sales aged 16, and worked my way up for the next 18 years. But my world crashed around my feet during the recession when I was made redundant. I've got two children and a mortgage. I was desperate."
Benton got a job as a security officer at Dovegate and worked his way up to prison custody officer. He now looks after up to 96 prisoners, unlocking their cells in the morning, organising their meals, work and exercise, and locking them up at night. But he hopes for more career progression with the help of his degree.
"As soon as I arrived at Dovegate I was presented with training opportunities and NVQs," says Benton. "It was great – I never dreamed of a job where people would actually be willing to work with you and help you improve yourself. This degree is a huge deal for me. I always wanted to go on to higher education but never had the opportunity before. Now, I'm going to work so hard on this degree. As much as the lecturers are willing to give me, I'm willing to give back. I'm putting all my hopes in it to better my prospects."
Employers are worried about new rules on the number of hours that apprentices must spend being taught
While schools and universities have been stung by recent budget cuts, vocational learning has fared somewhat better. Since the coalition government came to power last May, there has been sustained investment in apprenticeships, starting with £250m to fund 75,000 new adult apprenticeships, announced in the 2010 spending review.
In last week's budget, the chancellor, George Osborne, announced a £180m package for a further 50,000 apprenticeships, aimed at helping young people into work or training. While the investment is welcomed by colleges and training providers, they now face the challenge of finding employers to take on all these new apprentices. But convincing employers, particularly those in small- and medium-sized businesses, to invest their time and money in training has never been easy.
New government regulations, due to come into force next month, could make it even tougher. The Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England (Sase) will require every apprentice to receive up to 280 hours of guided learning (time in education and training, away from their usual duties) each year.
Some employers are worried. Jonathan Morcom, operations director at the Duke of Cornwall hotel in Plymouth, is one. The hotel sends its apprentices to City College Plymouth for one day a week. Squeezing in more training time wouldn't be practical, he says. "It's important apprentices have time offsite with a learning provider, but 280 hours is excessive. Smaller employers, especially, will not be able to justify having their apprentices out of the workplace for that amount of time."
Grahame Howe, head of employer engagement at West Nottinghamshire College thinks this "one size fits all" approach will not work for apprenticeships. "While some sectors, like engineering, might require a lot of hours doing theoretical work in the classroom, others, such as some parts of the service industries, will need much less. We work with a big leisure company that is very good at training its staff away from the work environment. But even they are telling us they will find it difficult to arrange 100 hours of off-the-job training."
City of Sunderland College principal Angela O'Donoghue thinks setting a minimum number of guided learning hours is important for 16- to 19-year-olds, but feels placing the same expectations on adult apprentices is a mistake. "Young people need that support, that time to develop and grow, but for adults who may already have been in the workplace, is it really necessary? It's difficult enough for us to persuade employers to take on adult apprentices. Those who do it want a full-time employee not a four-day-a-week person. I'm worried this will make our job even harder."
But Chris Kirk, head of apprenticeships at City & Guilds, thinks fears about guided learning hours could be down to semantics. Some of the government documentation for Sase uses the phrase "off the job" to describe guided learning, which may have been misleading. A more accurate phrase might have been "away from your workstation", he argues. "The problem is that these government documents are often written by educationists with theoretical knowledge, but no hands-on experience of working in the sector. When you drill down into the guidance, only 30% of the 280 hours have to be spent away from everyday duties."
But he can understand why small- and medium-sized employers are worried. "We work with lots of big supermarkets that have their own training departments, so guided learning can be done inhouse with minimal impact. But in a smaller outfit, you can easily see how a couple of hours with travel time could easily turn into a day, which could impact on the business."
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has now clarified what it means by guided learning as "traditional classroom learning; e-learning; distance learning; coaching; mentoring; feedback; collaborative/networked learning with peers; guided study; planning and review". This must offer access "as and when required" for the learner either to a tutor, mentor, supervisor or manager.
A BIS spokesperson says: "The new specification of apprenticeship standards will enshrine and enhance the quality of the apprenticeships programme, guaranteeing a minimum allocation of 280 hours of guided learning to equip every apprentice with the specific skills employers need."
But Paul Warner, director of delivery at the Association of Learning Providers, feels there is still potential for confusion. "If an electrician goes out on a job with his boss which throws up the opportunity to try out a new technique or concept, can this be called guided learning?" While supportive of the government's attempt to introduce a quality benchmark, he believes a minimum number of guided learning hours could simply be introducing an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
Traditionally, sector skills councils (employer-led organisations responsible for developing skills and standards in different sectors) have set the minimum number of hours necessary to complete a particular apprenticeship (many of which exceed 280 hours anyway), which are used by awarding bodies when they design qualifications.
If colleges and training providers also have to provide evidence they have met the standards, it could mean doubling up on paperwork, says Warner. "Providers may well end up spending extra money on administration – money that could be better directed at the learner." He highlights another potential sticking point. Under the new rules, guided learning hours have to be completed within contracted working hours, which could be particularly problematic for apprentices in customer-facing sectors. The trainee chef who gets to work early to practise a new technique, or the hairdressing apprentice who wants to take part in a training session when the salon is closed to the public, may find their efforts cannot be counted as guided learning.
The new standards have been introduced in response to the Apprenticeships, Skills, Learning and Children Act, which was set in motion by the previous Labour government but came into force last September. Despite the 18-month build-up, getting through red tape means many sector skills councils and awarding bodies do not yet have everything in place for April, when the new standards are introduced.
Terry Watts, chief executive of Proskills, the sector skills council for process manufacturing, says many employers feel as if the changes have been rushed through at the last minute without any real consideration of "how things might work on the shop-floor".
Charlie Mullins, director of Pimlico Plumbers, agrees: "On paper it's a positive move back to the way things used to be; the way they should be if we're going to tackle the UK's skills shortage. The problem we face, of course, is that it's great to fund all these 'new apprenticeships', but each and every one of them requires a job so the apprentice can put in their hours while they're training and that's where things come unstuck."
How will local authorities ensure every child has a school place under the new admissions rules, and the review of the national curriculum
Last week Warwick Mansell reported on concerns that new admissions rules will make it easier for schools to be selective.
The easiest way for a school to improve its position in the performance tables is to "adjust" its admissions. And the pressures are huge, so schools do fall prey to temptation. The interesting thing is that the duty to ensure that every child has a school place remains with the local authority and it is increasingly difficult to see how local authorities can implement this if all the admissions arrangements in an area are independent.
When I was a director of children's services I never had any difficulty finding places for middle-class children, but for children with challenges it was a real issue. If (as the government hopes) all secondary schools become academies, how will local authorities make sure that every child has a school place – even if they have special needs, are from a disorganised home, are young carers, or just generally low achievers?
JohnCFreeman via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• You suggest the education bill abolishes the rights of parents and pupils to complain to the local government ombudsman if they are unhappy with a school's admissions process. This is not the case. We will continue to provide independent investigation of complaints free of charge. We will also continue to have jurisdiction to consider complaints about special educational needs and exclusions. The proposal in the bill is to remove an extension to our jurisdiction which allows us to investigate internal school matters. This was introduced last year on a trial basis in 14 authorities and provides a route for parents and pupils to complain to us if they are not happy with how a school has handled an internal matter such as bullying.
Dr Jane Martin
Acting chair of the Commission for Local Administration, London SW1
Estelle Morris is right to question which subjects are relevant to today's young people (Opinion, 22 March). This is precisely what the national curriculum review is about and why it is so important to hear the views of all interested parties by 14 April. It is a forward-looking review, which will be informed by what parents, teachers, employers and others tell us children need to learn to succeed at university and in employment.
We will also consider how the best international education systems work. Previously, England has not engaged in the intensive "system benchmarking" – a process of international comparison which feeds into significant improvement of their education systems. This is a distinctive and progressive feature of the curriculum review.
Tim Oates
Chair of the expert panel leading the review of the national curriculum
How the brain responds to the destruction of vast amounts of money
If you have never watched someone rip up large amounts of cash, you may be unsure as to how the different parts of your brain would respond in the event that you did see someone tearing valuable banknotes into tiny, worthless shreds. A new study may help you how to predict what would happen.
The study is called How the Brain Responds to the Destruction of Money. It tells how the brains of 20 Danish persons, all of them adults with no history of psychiatric or neurological disease, responded as they watched videos of somebody destroying lots of Danish money.
If you are not Danish, you might now expect that your brain would respond in rather the same way, were this to involve your own native currency (pounds, euros, dollars, or whatever). The study makes no specific claims for non-Danish brains or money, however.
This neuroscience research was performed by Uta Frith and Chris Frith of University College London, together with Joshua Skewes, Torben Lund and Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University, Denmark, and Cristina Becchio of the University of Turin, Italy.
Here, in the scientists' words, is what the volunteers saw: "A series of videos in which different actions were performed on actual banknotes with a value of either of 100 kroner (approximately 13 euro/$18) or 500 kroner (approximately 67 euro/$91), or on valueless pieces of paper of the same size ... We contrasted actions that were appropriate to money (folding or looking at valuable notes or valueless paper) and actions that were inappropriate (tearing or cutting notes or paper)."
The Danes had their heads inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (fMRI), which recorded their brain activity. The researchers also asked each volunteer some questions, including, "How did it make you feel?" All of this, says the document, "confirmed that participants felt less comfortable during observation of destroying actions performed on money".
An additional finding: the volunteers felt more "aroused" when watching anything happen to money than when watching the same things happen to worthless paper.
The scientists find the brain scans to be especially interesting. The activity patterns, they say, are similar to something they have seen before. The "use of concrete tools, such as hammers or screwdrivers, has been associated with activation of a left hemisphere network including the posterior temporal cortex, supramarginal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and lateral precuneus. Here we demonstrate that observing bank notes being cut up or torn, a critical violation of their function, elicits activation within the same temporo-parietal network. Moreover, this activation is the greater the higher the value of the banknote."
They caution that the story must be more complex, that your brain probably regards money in several – differing – ways. They note the existence of published studies that "suggest that money can also act as a drug".
(Thanks to Martin Gardiner for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Is institutional racism in the boardroom the reason so few black players make it into management?
Glance at the average football pitch and you might conclude racism in Britain's favourite sport is dead. Team-sheets from the Premier League down have players of all ethnicities, and organising bodies host myriad anti-racism events. The discrimination bound-up with the game in decades past appears to be over. Until you look at the people shouting to the players.
In 2007, about a quarter of all players were black, but only two out of 92 league clubs had black managers. Today, there are still only two black managers in all four leagues: Paul Ince, manager of Notts County, and Chris Powell, of Charlton Athletic. Football management is still overwhelmingly white. Now academics at Staffordshire University, who have undertaken major research into the subject, report a strong call among black and minority ethnic (BME) football fans for the introduction of positive discrimination.
The research, by Ellis Cashmore, professor of culture, media and sport at Staffordshire, and his colleague Dr Jamie Cleland, senior lecturer in sociology, involved 1,000 football fans, professional players, referees, coaches and managers revealing their views on the dearth of black managers. More than 56% of those polled said there is racism at the top of football's hierarchy; among BME respondents, that figure was 73%. Most radically of all, over half of BME fans called for a policy similar to the Rooney rule in the US, which stipulates that all shortlists for management and coaching jobs in the National Football League must include at least one minority candidate. The Staffordshire academics report that a third of the polled football fans encouraged this type of reform.
"We didn't expect support for reform," admits Cashmore. "We thought that, as British culture tends to oppose any type of compulsion, the fans would resist a policy. But, in the event, they showed a clear recognition that the paucity of black managers has become an embarrassing anomaly that needs radical attention." The comments made by the surveyed football fans included: "Until you force something like the Rooney rule, the situation will not change"; "The US is now seeing the success of diversifying upper management"; "There are numerous white managers who have failed, but their name always crops up on a short list and they get given jobs. When you are black you get one chance and if you mess up, that's it."
The academics believe that while black former players like Ruud Gullit and Patrick Vieira helped combat racism in football by showing off their skills, football management escaped that development. "From the early 1980s, black players earned their place on teams on merit, and resentment subsided. But management is different. Skill isn't so self-evident – a manager needs an opportunity and a period of time to prove his worth," says Cashmore. "In the 1980s, football's upper echelons were tut-tutting about the unruly fans who still harboured racist views. Now the tide has reversed: over half of the fans are complaining that football's rulers are racist."
The academics report that fans believe "institutional racism" – where people do not consciously discriminate against minorities, but fail to challenge old assumptions and stereotypes, meaning a pattern of operations continues – is relevant in football management. One survey respondent said: "People appoint people like themselves. White chairmen appoint white, male managers. The cycle is not easily broken." Dismissing the idea that black managers will come through as the higher numbers of black players mature, another said: "Football boards have very few ethnic minorities on them – that's more likely to be the issue than the players or backroom staff. It's an old boys' club that is unlikely to bring in people from outside their peer group."
Cashmore agrees. "Succession in football management seems haunted by images of celebrated managers of the past and present – and they're all white," he says. Britain's first black football manager is believed to be Tony Collins, who managed Rochdale for seven years from 1960 – although most people assume it was Gullit, who managed Chelsea in 1996. Gullit, Cashmore adds, "retains the distinction of being the first football manager to have dreadlocks".
One insider response to the Staffordshire University research came from a black former league manager who no longer works in the UK. He said: "I had to keep reminding myself how much of a niche industry football management is – there are only 92 jobs. When a manger loses his job, within hours someone already on the management merry-go-round is installed as favourite without considering the merits of an outsider. That's the appeal of the Rooney rule – it opens up the field."
Evidence of continued racism came from the survey respondents' additional comments. One fan said: "The lack of black managers in football reflects the football view that while black men can play, they are not competent to manage."
"The research indicates that fans sense that there's an issue in British football," says Cashmore. "The majority is in no doubt that there is racism in the boardroom – that in itself demands attention." But he is gloomy about the prospect of change. "We sent the results of the our Topfan gay footballers project (on homophobia in football ) to the Football Association, Premier League, Football League and Professional Footballers' Association, but none expressed interest in acting on our results," he says. "So we don't hold out much hope that they will respond positively to the latest findings."
• Ellis Cashmore will discuss his research on BBC Radio5 Live's Total Blackout on Wednesday, 30 March at 8pm
Warwick Mansell investigates what lies behind the shock resignation of the chief schools adjudicator
In the intimate world of education politics, it came as a major shock. Two weeks ago, Ian Craig, the widely respected official who for almost two years has overseen England's complex and often anxiety-inducing school admissions system, unexpectedly announced plans to stand down.
What lies behind his impending departure as chief schools adjudicator? And what are the wider issues behind school admissions arrangements, which are due to go through a number of what, to critics, are subtle but potentially significant changes in the current education bill?
These reforms appear to be of concern to a diverse group of people, from a headteachers' union to the children's commissioner, governors and charities, and even to Craig himself. Some dissenters claim the changes will hand schools greater power to "covertly" select the pupils they want, and to push out those they do not – typically the disadvantaged. Ministers reject this criticism.
On 10 March, news broke that Craig was going to stand down in October, even though his contract does not end until April next year. A statement from the Department for Education said the early announcement would allow his successor to "get up to speed" before a new admissions process begins next year.
Craig issued a statement to similar effect. However, there is widespread scepticism at this official version of events. The BBC links the departure to comments Craig made last year on government moves to slim down the admissions code. The code is the rulebook governing admissions. Last autumn, ministers said they wanted to "simplify" it, to make the code easier for parents to understand. Craig said this risked "throwing the baby out with the bathwater": simplifying it too much could make it a "useless document".
Did this create an unworkable position for Craig? Education Guardian understands that not only did the chief adjudicator's contract run until next year, but it had the option to be extended for a further three. Something, then, suggested to him, or to ministers, that the time was right to go.
An appearance by Craig in front of the Commons education select committee last month provided further evidence of a difference of opinion with the government. There, Craig mentioned three changes forthcoming in the bill which, he said, he would not make.
First, the adjudicator's powers to investigate and order changes to school admissions policies are being reduced.
Currently, where parents – who made up 92% of the 387 cases considered by the adjudicator last year – or others go to him about an admissions policy, Craig's office has the ability not just to investigate the specific allegation, but to look at the entire policy and order any change it sees fit if it believes a school or local authority is not following the code.
Craig's annual report says parents have complained about the way schools use aptitude tests to select pupils; about admissions authorities drawing up rules for sixth-form entry without consulting; and about faith schools' admissions criteria. His office also upheld a complaint last year from parents in Surrey who said rules there were making it hard for those living in a particular area to gain places.
Craig told the committee this wider investigatory power was used in 43% of cases considered last year, and was very useful. Now, the adjudicator will only be able to take action in relation to the specific allegation made by the complainant, and not to require that an admissions policy changes in a particular way. The government's own notes to the bill say this change "restricts the powers of the school adjudicator".
Second, the bill will see compulsory local admissions forums scrapped. These bodies are made up of parents, headteachers, faith group representatives, and local authority and academy staff, and consider the fairness of admissions arrangements across an area. Local authorities will still be able to establish these groups, but there will be no requirement to do so.
Craig told MPs that admissions forums were needed "more and more" now, with growing numbers of schools moving to become academies that will operate their own admissions policies, rather than policies being set by local authorities with responsibility across an area.
Third, local authorities will no longer be required to provide annual reports to the adjudicator as to how school admissions are working. Craig said this would mean his office "would not be able to maintain an overview" of how admissions were operating nationwide.
The education bill also abolishes the right of parents and pupils to complain to the local government ombudsman when they are unhappy, replacing it with a complaints procedure via the education secretary, Michael Gove.
Craig said he was happy with one change under the bill: to bring the admissions arrangements of academies into the adjudicator's realm, alongside those of traditional state schools.
The mystery as to what is going on is further compounded by the non-appearance of the government's new version of the admissions code. A white paper in November said it would be published "early in the new year", while Education Guardian understands that MPs on the committee scrutinising the bill were told it would be with them for the start of that process. More than two weeks later, it had yet to appear.
All of this begs questions. What is going on with admissions, and why are the adjudicator's powers seemingly being downgraded?
Evidence submitted to the parliamentary committee suggests fears that these moves will lead to power shifting away from parents choosing schools towards schools choosing parents. To the sceptics, the admissions code and adjudication system seek to guard against the risk that schools, anxious to raise their results, do all they can effectively to select middle-class children who are seen as easier to educate.
This has been much debated. Craig himself provoked stories last year that faith schools could favour middle-class parents who might ring church bells or clean the local church, after comments he made on the publication of his annual report about admissions arrangements in a "small number" of institutions. He told MPs he regretted the way his comments had been reported. He said he didn't think many admissions authorities went "out of their way" to evade the code or regulation. But evasion by schools is far from unknown.
One chair of an admissions forum says he is aware of a secondary school that had leafleted parents at "middle-class" primary schools to encourage them to get their children to take an aptitude test to enter the secondary, but not leafleted schools serving council estates. Others had expensive school uniforms, which made it hard for poorer pupils.
Maggie Atkinson, the children's commissioner, has already been reported as warning, in oral evidence to the committee scrutinising the bill, that its changes risked "adding to the social segregation and stratification of schools".
Written evidence submitted to the committee from organisations including Save the Children, Mencap, the admissions campaign group Comprehensive Future, Oxfordshire Governors' Association and Accord – a coalition of faith and non-faith groups – make similar points.
Sir Alan Steer, the Labour government's behaviour adviser, wrote: "Most school leaders behave honourably and in accordance with the admissions code. Some do not, and in a culture of high accountability it is naive to assume that poor practice will not increase."
Even the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents institutional managers, said in evidence: "We are concerned that there may now be a void in policing admissions".
An admissions source alleges that ministers are deliberately seeking to make it easier for schools to favour middle-class pupils. The source says: "People running schools want to be able to select the nice kids who are easier to teach, and to keep out the 'oiks'. These changes will make it easier for them to do that."
Ruth Greenan, a parent on East Sussex's admissions forum, says: "If admissions forums go, we are going to see an explosion in the numbers of children who are vulnerable missing out."
Asked for his own explanation for the changes, Craig told MPs the government simply wanted to trust admissions authorities more. Cost factors have also been put forward. Craig's office cost £920,000 last year, employing 16 staff, although critics say this is relatively small – 85 civil servants are working on the government's free schools policy, it was revealed last week.
A Department for Education spokesman says: "The bill does not erode the adjudicator's powers. Parents will still be able to make complaints about any aspect of school admissions they feel are unfair, and the adjudicator retains the power to investigate those complaints. The adjudicator is [also] being given more power through his new role in considering academy admissions as well as those for maintained schools. Ministers are clear that admissions must be fair. We will make the admissions code simpler, fairer and more transparent, and reduce its bureaucracy so that it is easier for schools and parents to understand. We will launch a consultation shortly."
Craig himself could not be reached for comment, meaning this riddle has no definitive answer. But admissions is an aspect of education policy that is certainly worth watching.
Speakers at Guardian Higher Education summit were surprisingly upbeat about the financial health of the sector, even as their grants were being slashed
If delegates to the Guardian's Higher Education Summit in London last week had been expecting a gloomy start to the event, they were wrong. While elsewhere all but five universities in England were hearing that their grants were being slashed and MPs were warning about the effects of immigration changes on the international student market, Steve Smith, president of Universities UK, was surprisingly chipper. Higher education was in a strong position when a high skills, high research-based economy was the only option for the future, he said. Demand for HE remained strong, with 98% of mothers of children born in 2000 wanting a university education for their child. And the moneywas OK too, with funding increasing, not decreasing, he said. "When I see ministers, they say, 'What are you complaining about?'"
The universities minister, David Willetts, was equally upbeat, insisting students were still quids in, in spite of increased fees. The employment rate for university graduates was far higher than for those with lower-level qualifications, lifetime earnings of graduates were higher than for non-graduates, and graduates were in the best position to make the most of the early stages of recovery in the labour market. "The perception that going to university is a bad deal is wrong," he said.
Even Aaron Porter, president of the NUS, said all was not yet lost. "We should remember that all that has passed through parliament so far is that the two fee caps should be £6,000 and £9,000," he said. "Everything else is still to be decided."
But, as became increasingly clear during the summit, HE is becoming a market, and in a market it doesn't do to be too gloomy or you could put off the customers.
Smith's main concern was that all the talk of high fees and debts could deter students from poorer backgrounds who might think university is not for them. He called on universities to work with the NUS to get across the message that students would not have to pay upfront.
Porter said overseas institutions with courses delivered in English were already planning how to attract bright UK school-leavers unwilling to study in the most expensive public university system in the world, while other speakers and delegates expressed fears that downbeat reporting of what was happening in the UK could affect the UK's recruitment of international students.
"Welcome to my world," said Carl Lygo, chief executive of the private higher education provider BPP Holdings. He said his was a world of uncertainty, in which he never knew how many students he would have from one year to the next, or how many resources he would have to support them. But he insisted that it was a world in which it was possible to prosper.
With growing demand for higher-level skills there was plenty of room for everyone, he said – FE, private providers and public universities. But old ways of working would have to change. "I look at universities that are effectively transferring their cost base on to students and not addressing that cost base, and I think that's dangerous," he said. "What I worry about is whether we are continuing to build mausoleums to a 19th-century method of learning." Instead, he predicted a bigger role for more alternative and flexible ways of studying, away from the traditional campus university.
Other speakers made clear that these kinds of changes were happening already. The summit was billed "2011 A Year of Transition, 2012 A Year of Unknowns", but, as Jeremy Lindley, director of finance at the University of Exeter, put it, "The sector has been transitioning for many years", and for those institutions that have not embraced change it is a bit late to start.
This year, universities find themselves in a financial gap between falling revenues from the funding councils and income from graduate contributions, which will only arrive in the 2012-13 academic year. But many have already reduced costs, increased incomes, created cash balances and negotiated with the banks, and Lindley is confident that most will meet the year with strong finances. Options did still remain for those who were less prepared, he said, although these did not include staff cuts or outsourcing services, which would take too long. Nor would appealing to alumni provide a quick fix, since: "I'm not sure that alumni are generally convinced by requests for money to save us from insolvency." More uncertain, he said, is how universities will position themselves under the new system.
While Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrats' deputy leader and the government's advocate for access to education, begged them to keep fees low – "If you can, do. If you think you cannot, try harder," he pleaded – all the evidence, and inclinations, presented at the summit seemed to point to fees at the higher end of the scale.
Anna Vignoles, professor of the economics of education at the Institute of Education, said there was bound to be a certain amount of gamesmanship in the early years of the new system as universities gauged what their competitors would be charging. But she said she expected a high proportion to plump for the maximum.
"This isn't even close to a market system," she said. "It's massively limited by the large subsidy that comes alongside the fee." Because much of the debt would be written off, students would be less sensitive to whether fees were £7,000 or £9,000.
Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said huge latent demand for HE meant that the government would either have to moderate the level of fees or regulate the number of students eligible for university, neither of which would be consistent with the free market ideology underpinning its policy. His address ended the summit on a less cheery note. HE is in a bind, he said. "These are extraordinary times."
Steve Smith explains why the university landscape is not apocalyptic
This year's Hefce funding announcement was made the day after the summit. Let me be absolutely clear, while UUK supports Hefce completely in its attempts to smooth the transition to the new funding regime, there can be no doubt at all that these cuts, a year before the new source of funding comes on stream, are damaging.
The fact that institutions are now having to plan how to deal with real-terms reductions averaging about 7% in their Hefce grant is going to colour the debate about the new funding regime. This, in turn, encourages a number of myths that tend to go unchallenged and, in my contribution to the summit, I tried to look at some of these. I will deal with the two most controversial.
While I do not wish to minimise the problems the Hefce funding announcement will cause, I do think it is important to be clear as to the trajectory of the funding regime over the next four years.
The first myth is that funding for higher education has been reduced. As president of Universities UK, I argued long and hard that the government must not leave universities with a massive gap in funding, which was a very real danger. The HE sector has done better than any other area in receipt of public funding. This is so according to two separate measures: how much do institutions receive, and how much cash does government outlay on HE?
On the first measure, if we assume an average fee level of £7,500 (and many expect it to be higher), the HE sector receives about 10% more cash by 2014.
As for the second measure, more surprisingly, actual outlay on HE increases significantly as a result of the changes to the ways in which funding is routed. While funding to Hefce reduces by about £3bn by 2014, public spending on fees and maintenance loans is expected to increase by about £4.3bn – and spending on student grants is also likely to increase by about £0.6bn. This equates to an increase of about £2bn in public spending on HE by 2014.
That is a truly radical shift that is driven by a clear political aim: to introduce more market incentives into the system. Those market drivers mean that universities have to be clear that we offer a high-quality product, and we have to be clear that we are providing skills and experiences that will directly benefit the student.
The second myth concerns the funding of the humanities and social sciences. Whereas it is common to claim that they are no longer being funded, the reality is that they are being funded at least as fully, but via a different route for teaching funding. On research funding, the research councils have had their cash allocation preserved, and quality-related research funding has not only been cut by a much lower percentage than teaching funding, but it has also been cut across the board.
I do not think that the sector faces financial meltdown. The current climate is tough, with cuts to funding that will drive difficult decisions even before the new funding regime kicks in. But, overall, the landscape does not look apocalyptic.
The obvious worry, of course, is that the new system of funding will mean that we face a form of financial apartheid both in access to HE and in the financial fortunes of institutions operating in different parts of the sector. Avoiding both of these outcomes should be the criteria on which we are now judged. No one should be deterred from going to university by fear of the costs. Worst of all would be for anyone to be deterred by a misunderstanding about the costs.
One thing is clear: that quietly wishing nothing will change is not an option. I have great confidence in our university leadership teams and, once again, in the quality of what we offer students. I have confidence that students will continue to see the value of that offer once the new funding regime is in place.
We need the government to make the right choices to support participation and develop skills. But, as the political storm passes, we should aim to create a university system that is even more relevant and even better equipped to deliver the best possible higher education to the students of tomorrow.
• Professor Steve Smith is president of Universities UK, the vice-chancellors' body