No new community schools can be created under coalition policy … or can they? Dorothy Lepkowska meets a group of parents who have found a way, and wonders whether others could follow suit
Sixteen little heads sit bowed over their desks, hard at work, the children's purple and silver uniforms almost a perfect match with the classroom furniture. The colours were chosen, parents say, so they didn't clash with those of any other school in the city.
All Saints junior school in Reading opened as a free school in September. Over the next five years, its roll will rise annually until it reaches a capacity of 120 pupils. It currently comprises a single class of year 3s, learning in a room in a church hall that has been converted into a classroom through a transitional grant of £40,000. With its interactive whiteboard and bright wall displays, it could be a typical class in any school in the country.
Which is exactly what the parents want it to be. "We are completely apolitical," says Katherine Knight, whose daughter Isabel, seven, is a pupil. "We aren't interested in ideology, or creating some sort of exclusive school, or enticing pupils away from others. We just wanted a junior school that teaches the national curriculum, and that our kids could move to straight from the infants'."
The 25-strong group of parents, community members and teachers who spearheaded All Saints have created a community school out of a piece of legislation that many believed would cause divisions and disrupt local education provision. In this area of central Reading, it seems, it is doing the complete opposite.
While some free schools face claims of elitism – such as Toby Young's West London Free school, where Latin is compulsory to the age of 14 – there is nothing quirky about All Saints. This is a community school for local children.
"It had become harder and harder to find places for children from the infant school," Knight says. "Pupils were dispersed all over the city to schools that had places, but it led to friends and even siblings being split up, creating a huge amount of angst and distress. Last year, five children didn't get a junior place at all."
Hopes were raised three years ago when a local authority-owned building became vacant opposite the infant school. "We asked the council to convert the premises, but they said they didn't have the money and neither did the diocese," says Dorothy Yuille, a mother of four, whose daughter Eva, seven, attends All Saints. "But they said we could have it if we raised £500,000.
"We knew we could never afford it, but we set about fundraising anyway. We even managed to secure a mortgage but, realistically, unless something drastic happened we would never have been able to meet the repayments."
As the election approached, and with little more than £2,000 in the fund, parents realised that the only way they were going to get a school was through the Tories' free schools policy. "We were running out of options," Knight recalls. "Reading council said they were going to put the property on the market within a few weeks if we couldn't find the money."
At around that time, the local vicar, who was a member of the campaigning group, met with representatives from the CfBT Education Trust, a charity that also provides school services and runs independent schools. The meeting had been set up by the warden at the local church, who worked for the chief executive of the charity. It could not have been more timely. "That meeting and the outcome of the election changed everything," Knight recalls. "The CfBT became interested in coming on board to help us run the school and, because of their input, the council gave us until November to come up with a free school proposal.
"The charity had given us credibility and our vision and philosophy coincided, so there was no conflict. We wanted a school that would be strong on discipline and teaching literacy and numeracy, and they shared that ethos."
CfBT, which has published a guide for those seeking to set up a free school, helped the Reading group with their application. The proposal was sent to the Department for Education in September 2010, but official approval was not confirmed until April this year. During that time, parents with children at All Saints infant school were faced with the dilemma of whether to seek places for their children at other junior schools around Reading, or to risk applying to a school that did not yet exist.
In the event, 16 families took that leap of faith, and two days after the notification of places was sent to parents, All Saints juniors was given the go-ahead. The school currently employs a headteacher, one full-time qualified class teacher and a teaching assistant. More staff will be appointed as pupil numbers grow, and it will move into the former council building down the road in September, refurbished at a cost of about £1m.
Coalition policy dictates that all new schools must be either academies or free schools; no new community schools can be created. But could other parents and community groups use the free schools model to create a community school by the back door? All new schools will be able to choose how closely to collaborate with town halls and maintained schools.
Critics of the free schools policy, such as Melissa Benn, have doubts over whether free schools can really promote community cohesion. "You can't blame parents for wanting the best and for reacting to a government that says 'this is the best way to get what you want'," she says.
"We are being told that free schools are being created through community organisation, but what is really happening is that semi-private organisations are coming in and who knows where that will lead. What happens when parents decide they no longer like the way their school is being run?
"Free schools also utilise a model which gives them certain dubious advantages over other schools, for example in terms of admissions and exclusions, or the power to hire non-qualified teachers. But where the freedoms genuinely promote innovation, then surely they should be given to every school?"
Parents at All Saints are aware of the negativity and the fact that it may take a while for attitudes to change. "There remains a general belief that we are taking money and resources from other schools," says Yuille. "But we aren't. We are fulfilling a need in the area and doing the best for our children. We are also helping to solve a serious problem over junior school places that all schools should benefit from."
CfBT is providing services to the school as it evolves, but Knight says the school will be under no obligation to continue with this arrangement in the future and it plans to use services provided by the local authority wherever possible, particularly where these are linked to those already being provided to the infant school, to encourage continuity, stability and value for money.
The junior school has already negotiated to rent some under-used playing fields from the council for PE and games lessons, and it is represented on Reading's schools' governing body association. All Saints will be also included in Reading's schools admissions process like every maintained school in the city.
Even with their school up and running, parents believe it is too soon for celebration – though a 100% satisfaction rate in a recent survey was encouraging. "The children are flying and love it here," Yuille says. "But it's too soon to rest on our laurels as our work isn't done yet. It is safe to say that the school has rejuvenated the whole area."
They also acknowledge the scale of the responsibility they have taken on. "We have to make sure it works because we have taken public money and we have to be accountable for it," says Knight. "It all has to be done properly – even if we don't always know what 'properly' means."
The new admissions code contains a loophole that could see a return to the unfair practices of the past
Some months ago, the government began a consultation on the new school admissions code. It came after months of nods and winks about the need to streamline the overly bureaucratic regulatory framework of the Labour years.
Since its introduction in the late 1990s, the admissions code has undergone several incarnations. All have tended to strengthen its stated aim of ensuring that admissions practices are fair, clear and objective, and enable parents to understand easily how school places are allocated. And that is vitally important. On paper, school admissions may look dry and technical, but in the real world they are a highly political issue and go to the heart of parent choice, social justice and community cohesion.
Sadly, there are still too many discrepancies between the code's intentions and what happens in practice. Schools can find convoluted ways to baffle parents and weed out the least desirable children, often the poorest, using an array of criteria that are discriminatory, opaque and unfair, such as complicated catchment areas, own-school "banding" systems or devious faith-based points systems that rank parents and pupils according to their willingness to ring bells, arrange flowers, count the collection money or clean the church.
They are usually practised by schools that are successful (partly because of their intakes) and therefore formidable lobbyists. Moreover, they tend to remain in place for years unless there is a successful objection to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. So it was a pleasant surprise to note that the consultation document appeared to increase the opportunity for complaints.
However, something very sneaky happened between the end of the consultation period and the publication of the new code, which was laid before parliament earlier this month.
A new clause has been inserted, which bans objections in two key areas: where governing bodies have decided to increase their planned admissions number (PAN) and where independent state schools have been allowed an "agreed variation" to the requirement that they follow the admissions code in their funding agreements.
The freedom to opt out of the admissions code has been theoretically possible from the moment the first "independent" state school was established, and is one reason I have always opposed them. The whole point of independence is to escape the legislative ties that bind maintained schools and to benefit from an altogether looser contractual agreement, which can be easily changed, between the founder or sponsor and the government.
Free schools, most of which like to publicly proclaim their adherence to the admissions code, actually have their own special "model" funding agreement with an annex that allows them to opt out of it. Several of the first 24 have already taken advantage of this, but their dogged refusal to publish these documents means that we (the people who pay for them) can't see how.
It is pretty obvious why this is the thin end of a very long wedge. There are already thousands of independent state schools and technically there is nothing to stop any of them reinstating an array of dodgy admissions practices that years of campaigning managed to outlaw, if the secretary of state will permit it.
How long before interviews, lengthy supplementary forms, primary school records, priority places for certain groups (like the children of founders and governors) and even feeder schools in the private sector start to resurface in some schools' entry criteria?
Even more worrying is the potential for the gradual expansion of academic selection. Grammar schools can now expand at will, and it is not inconceivable that a future Conservative secretary of state could give non-selective schools the permission to introduce partial or even total academic selection, which always favours the better-off, via the funding agreement route.
By the same token, a future Labour government could cease funding selective schools that have converted to academy status unless they phase out existing selection, but I won't be holding my breath on that one.
One of the first articles I wrote for this paper, in 2003, was about school admissions. The words of the then schools adjudicator, Philip Hunter, have rung in my ears ever since. "Left to their own devices," he said, "schools invariably drift to the posh." The government claims to be skewing policy to favour the poor. Not for the first time, what they do is very different from what they say.
• The Local Schools Network is interested in examples of schools in your area that might be breaching the spirit and the letter of the school admissions code.
If the same fees apply for all subjects, humanities departments may benefit, says Jonathan Wolff – but creative arts and some social sciences may suffer
In one of the first columns I wrote for this newspaper, back in 2006, I recounted the curious story of the unintended expansion of university philosophy departments throughout the 1990s. In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's government introduced a form of internal cost-accounting in the universities, and everyone expected the arts and humanities to grind to a halt when our baleful effect on university coffers was revealed. But to the perverse delight of those of us in the humanities, the sums showed that you could turn a nice profit by teaching classroom-based subjects such as English, history and philosophy. This fuelled a little boom in which some departments even doubled in size.
It took the Labour government to return things to their natural order. A decade of fiddling with fee banding and rejigging of research funding returned most arts and humanities departments to deficit. We walked through the cloisters with our heads hung low. We got tummy aches before meetings of finance committees, where we mumbled our gratitude to our science and medical colleagues for dropping pennies in our begging bowls. Vice-chancellors claimed that it was worth subsidising us in order to preserve the ancient idea of the university, whatever those philistines in government wanted.
In truth, though, arts and humanities departments have always attracted the most students. We still produce internationally admired research, and some of it is even read by that semi-mythical beast, the educated general reader. But what's going to befall us when the next round of cuts bite? Can we still be bailed out? If the humanities go, we'll take the sector down with us. Or at least we'll try.
But blow me down, I've visited a few universities lately, and despite what we read in the papers, including, sometimes, this one, the whispers are not exactly what one might expect. Financial officers are finding some simple arithmetic rather exciting.
What the sums show is that although we will no longer get any money from the government for teaching arts and humanities students, in charging the same fee for everyone, whatever subject they do, there's gold in them there humanities. And with universities able to admit an increasing number of highly qualified applicants, there is reason to expand once again. The creative arts, and some social sciences, tragically, won't fare so well, as they can be as expensive as science to teach, but will get no extra funding. There is a potential crisis brewing here.
So what do the next few years have in store? Oxford and Cambridge will have great difficulty taking more students, unless they stop promising rooms to undergraduates and start building new halls of residence. The rest of the Russell group can be expected to try to expand in the humanities. But the inevitable effect is that humanities departments further down the pecking order are going to struggle to attract students with decent qualifications, and below that there could be serious problems of recruitment, as the supply of places at the top increases.
And there is another factor to give us the shivers. Ordinary market economics tell us that where there are above-average profits to be made, greedy new providers will rush in. In the 1980s, this would have been unthinkable, but now the private sector is at the door.
Whether the prestigious branding of the major universities will ward off competition remains to be seen. Maybe things won't be very different. Or perhaps we really are about to enter a period of unprecedented change. Either way, we are at the beginnings of a case study for future business studies undergraduates. If there are any, that is.
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London
Rising student fees and increasing competition are putting universities under pressure to market themselves more aggressively
Until recently, the University of Kent prided itself on its friendly image. Not any more. Over the past few months it has been working hard, with the help of media consultants, to downplay its cosy reputation in favour of something more academic and serious.
Kent is not alone in considering an image revamp. Changes to next year's funding regime are both forcing universities to justify charging students up to £9,000 in fees, and increasing competition for students with AAB or above at A-level, which is putting institutions under pressure to argue they offer something better than the rest.
Paul Starkey, research director of Heist, a higher education marketing consultancy, which for the first time this year will include an award for a corporate campaign in its annual awards, says: "We are starting to see universities putting much more of a focus on their brands and what their value propositions are, and there has been a move in the last six months or so at looking at refining those brands, particularly for the undergraduate market."
He says that while in the past universities have often focused on student social life and attractions of the university town in recruitment campaigns, they are now concentrating on more tangible attractions, such as employment prospects, engagement with industry, and lecturer contact hours, making clear exactly what students are going to get for their money.
The problem for universities is that if those benefits fail to materialise, students notice. That worries Rob Behrens, chief executive of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), which deals with student complaints. "Universities need to be extremely careful that … they describe the reality of what's going to happen to students," he says. "Because competition is going to get greater for attracting students, there is a danger that universities will go the extra mile."
One university told prospective engineering students they would be able to design a car and race it at Brands Hatch, which never happened, he says. Others have promised use of sophisticated equipment that turned out to be broken or unavailable. He has also received complaints in which over-enthusiastic marketing or descriptions of courses by overseas agents have given students false expectations.
"If universities spent as much money on handling complaints and appeals appropriately as they spend on marketing, they would do better at keeping students, and in the National Student Survey returns," he says.
Starkey says ongoing research by Heist tracking prospective 2012 students suggests that they are not only becoming more sophisticated in thinking about what they want from a university, but are also spending more time researching evidence to back up institutional claims.
Hence the growing importance of the student survey and league tables. From next September, all institutions will also be expected to publish on their websites key information sets, allowing easier comparison between institutions – and between promises and reality – of student satisfaction levels, course information, and the types of jobs and salaries graduates go on to.
And then there are unofficial online sources of information, such as Facebook and The Student Room website, as well as more random searches.
Last year Ian Benson, a business broker specialising in media, who runs a website making freedom of information requests on academic issues, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the University of Plymouth using the strapline "the enterprise university". He had obtained FOI data showing that of the 10,000 students who graduated from Plymouth in 2008, only two went on to start a business with the university's support.
The ASA rejected his complaint, agreeing with the university that it was a "visionary and inspirational phrase" rather than one of objective substantiation, and that readers were likely to interpret the claim "merely as a statement of the university's ethos and ambition".
Donald McLeod, chair of the Higher Education External Relations Association, says much more information is now available to students that has not been mediated by marketing departments, which means institutions are having to be especially careful about what they claim.
At the same time, according to Starkey, marketing departments are expanding, and becoming increasingly involved in corporate decision-making, influencing the kinds of courses and student experience offered.
Richard Taylor, director of corporate affairs at the University of Leicester, says it is hardly surprising that universities are beginning to change the way they market themselves since the pricing structure has changed so radically. "Some universities assume that a market where everyone charges £9,000 will behave in the same way as one where everyone charges £3,000," he says. "I fundamentally disagree."
He believes that while the best form of marketing for institutions is to be good at what they do, they also need to be clear about how they are different from others.
But Chris Chapleo, senior lecturer in marketing at Bournemouth University, who has researched marketing and branding in higher education, says differentiation for differentiation's sake is difficult, especially when most universities essentially offer similar things. As publicly funded organisations, he argues, universities also have to be particularly careful of narrow or frivolous branding.
Taylor admits there are dangers. He says that once an institution claims to be particularly good at something, it must live up to it. "The moment you position yourself, you become exposed because you have played your joker, and if you fail in that you are in trouble," he says.
And increasingly, students will not put up with this kind of failure. The OIA's annual returns increased by 30% last year. "They will be at a record level again for 2011," says Behrens. "I'm clear that student complaints are on the rise."
Charity singles tell us about changing concerns and how society responds to need, says historian
Dr Lucy Robinson describes herself as a contemporary historian. But rather than poring over parchment dredged from dusty archives, she's more likely to be found in her office at Sussex University listening to pop music. She is currently researching the history of the charity single as part of a wider study of the politics and cultural heritage of the 1980s.
Robinson has tracked the chart history of 65 singles released in the UK between December 1984 and 1995, as well as a number of protest and benefit singles, charity albums and some local releases that either failed to chart or were sold only on an independent basis. "I've analysed their lyrics, videos and marketing as well as the ways in which they solicited donations to charities."
Why would anyone put themselves through such a test of aural endurance? "Some of it has been absolute agony," she concedes with a grin. "But I've enjoyed most of it more than I thought I would. I'm now a big defender of the charity single as a musical genre. Not necessarily, though, as a way of solving social inequality or responding to humanitarian needs."
The reason that charity singles are worthy of academic study, she explains, is that they can tell us much about attitudes to society and to need. "I'm interested in the relationship between popular culture and politics. Charity singles are part of this story. At certain points in the last few decades, they've dominated the charts, often vying with each other for top positions. The singles serve as a way of gauging changing concerns more widely."
As an example, she cites Margaret Thatcher's support of "traditional family values" and the insertion of Clause 28 into the Local Government Act, 1988, banning local authorities from "promoting homosexuality". "It meant that British artists and organisers found it difficult to launch campaigns around Aids research and education." This changed with the death of Freddie Mercury in November 1991, she says. "After that point you can see a run of releases raising money for Aids charities, including George Michael and Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me, suggesting a shift in the level of public discussion about HIV and Aids."
Robinson was 19 in 1988 and remembers feeling that Clause 28 was "trampling on the liberal gains of the 1960s". Now she looks back at those days more analytically. "I'm sure I'm not the only one viewing the '80s as a way of to trying to make sense of what's going on now," she says. But she is almost certainly the only one doing it through the prism of the charity single. Her research will provide a chapter in her forthcoming book on the '80s, alongside such definitive events as the Falklands war and the miners' strike.
The charity single had a particular resonance with the Victorian values of Thatcher's Britain, Robinson argues. "Victorian philanthropy was not just a way of raising funds for a cause. It viewed charitable donations as a means of raising awareness – identifying the deserving and the undeserving and building a sense of identity, importance or community in the donor."
She even goes so far as to compare those '80s icons Sting, Bono and Bob Geldof with "the great men of Manchester" – the benevolent 19th-century industrialists, in other words, such as Richard Cobden. "Their causes were moral rather than political," she points out, before going on to list some of the beneficiaries of charity singles. "They supported sick children and humanitarian crises as well as relatives of the victims of sporting disasters, such as Hillsborough and Heysel, the Hungerford shootings and the sinking of the Zeebrugge ferry."
Nothing there that anyone could argue with, she suggests, before drawing parallels with the current Conservative-led government, rolling back the frontiers of the state while encouraging individual donations to deserving causes. "There is a counter side to all this," she warns. "The underlying implication is that if you behave, you may be in line to benefit from a charitably funded community project; if not, we'll take away your mother's council house. The human drive for compassion is central to our humanity and that has been a driving force of this phenomenon from Band Aid to the X-Factor charity single. But you have to be aware of the political context."
She hastens to add: "That's not a criticism of Band Aid. Do They Know It's Christmas was the fastest-selling UK single of all time when it was released in 1984." As well as raising awareness and a lot of money for starving people. "Quite. But I'm interested in how that became a model for, among other things, making up for a lack of funding for children's medical care."
And what about the X-Factor Christmas single?
"This could be seen as the more cynical end of the market," she says. "The songs are always cover versions that fulfil the sentimental and inspirational end of the charity brief and are designed to showcase the individual voices within the X-Factor collective. So the awareness raised is ultimately for the X-Factor brand as much as for the recipients of the donation."
Whatever else he is, Simon Cowell seems unlikely to be compared to "the great men of Manchester" just yet.
Research on cattle behaviour shows that they like to eat, stand and lie down at the same time as others
A British-American team of scientists has produced a study called A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronisation of Cows. They were driven partly by the intellectual challenge, and at least a little by an EU council directive, which mandates "that cattle housed in groups should be given sufficient space so that they can all lie down simultaneously".
Their key insight, the team says, was to realise "it is biologically plausible to view [cattle] as oscillators … During the first stage (standing/feeding), they stand up to graze but they strongly prefer to lie down and 'ruminate' or chew the cud for the second stage (lying/ruminating). They thus oscillate between two stages."
The researchers "modelled the eating, lying and standing dynamics of a cow using a piecewise linear dynamical system … We chose a form of coupling based on cows having an increased desire to eat if they notice another cow eating and an increased desire to lie down if they notice another cow lying down." This, they say, led to at least one unexpected discovery: "[We] showed that it is possible for cows to synchronise less when the coupling is increased."
The researchers – Mason Porter and Marian Dawkins at Oxford University, and Jie Sun and Erik Bollt at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York – published their work recently in the physics journal Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. In the 31-year history of that journal, this is the only article specifically about cows. (Cows do have an accepted, very humble place in the history of physics: an old joke, beloved by physicists and a few others. The joke starts (usually) with a physicist offering to solve a dairy-related problem for a desperate farmer. The physicist walks to a blackboard, and draws a circle. "First", he says, "we assume a spherical cow ...").
The team built upon the work of earlier, fully serious bovi-mathematical scholars.
In 1982, PFJ Benham of Reading University published an innovative study called Synchronisation of Behaviour in Grazing Cattle. Brennan studied a herd of 31 Friesian cows, recording the behaviour of each every five minutes during daylight for 15 days. His short paper – it's only two pages long – ends with the declaration: "Studies of behaviour synchronisation are evidently relevant to the management of grazing cattle."
Porter, Dawkins, Sun and Bollt also looked beyond the bounds of cow analysis, gaining insight from a 1991 monograph by AJ Rook and PD Penning of the AFRC Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Hurley, Maidenhead. Rook and Penning called their report Synchronisation of Eating, Ruminating and Idling Activity by Grazing Sheep, and published it in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. They reached four conclusions. I will mention only one, as it has wide applicability: "Start of meals was more synchronised than end of meals."
Thanks to Ig Nobel prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan for bringing the cow synchronisation research to my attention.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Further information including advocacy resources, policy statements, consultation responses and links to other organisations.
The value and impact of school libraries and school librarians
What contribution can effective school libraries make?
Policy is a core activity for CILIP. We promote a strong CILIP presence on matters of professional policy. We also comment authoritatively on relevant issues of the day. Recent policy statements relevant to school libraries include:
School Libraries - A right [Feb 2011] No to age banding on books [Oct 2008] Statement on libraries and learning [Apr 2008]CILIP responds to consultations undertaken by Government on matters of professional concern.
CILIP's submission to Ofsted: Inspection 2012 - Proposals for Inspection Arrangements for Maintained Schools and Academies from January 2012 [May 2011] CILIP's submission to the Department for Education: National Curriculum Review - Call for Evidence [April 2011] CILIP's submission to the Education Select Committee Inquiry: participation of 16-19 year olds in education and training [March 2011] CILIP's submission response to the MLA and NLT's School Library Commission [March 2010]
Youth and School Libraries Joint Committee
This Committee advises CILIP, develops policy and promotes good practice in relation to library and information services for young people.
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With your help our advocacy work can achieve more. Find out how you can get involved in CILIP's advocacy work on school libraries and schools' library services.
Find campaigning resources including ideas for activities and letter templates on the SHOUT ABOUT School Libraries Campaign page.
Tweet about why school libraries are important using the #SHOUTABOUT hashtag and/or leave a message on the CILIP Facebook page.
Contact your local MP and tell them about your local school library and/or school library service and our SHOUT ABOUT campaign.
Get involved in one of CILIP's special interest groups - attend events and training, meetings and take part in discussions. Or if you want more influence, why not contact a group and ask about joining their committee?
Why not tell us what you think by commenting on school library-related postings on our blogs and forums? And you could respond to calls for information and involvement in advocacy activities from us or from your branch or group.
CILIP responds to government consultations relevant to school libraries and school library services. We also welcome comments from CILIP members.
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CILIP advocates the value of school librarians, school libraries and schools library services. We lobby government and work to increase awareness with head teachers, school governors and parents.
'SHOUT ABOUT school libraries' is our campaign about the value of school libraries and schools library services.
Launched in October 2011, this is a joint campaign with the Association of Senior College and Education Librarians (ASCEL) and the School Library Association (SLA). We want everyone to start SHOUTING ABOUT school libraries and school library services.
In February 2011 we issued 'School Libraries - A Right', a statement on the role and value of school libraries. It sets out the core entitlements that every child, school's teaching team and wider school community should expect to receive. It provides the case for a properly resourced, professionally staffed school library.
Over 1,500 secondary, middle, special and independent schools, along with 655 primary schools, responded to three related surveys of school library provision and use in the UK.
Major findings:
87% of qualified librarians are contributing to information literacy work in their school
59% of qualified librarians are contributing actively to the school Virtual Learning Environment, learning platform or website.
School librarians support literacy and encourage reading for pleasure
Too many school libraries are staffed by unqualified people who lack the skills and knowledge to work effectively with teachers
There is a growing gap between the best services and the rest in terms of funding levels, staffing and services
The vision and support of senior management is vital to school library success.
CILIP endorsed the Campaign for the Book’s call to "make school libraries, run by properly qualified staff, statutory". There was also an e-petition, which was signed by 5,707 people. The Government's response to the petition was that it had no plans to change legislation to make school libraries statutory.
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Researchers have today unveiled a new interactive map that reveals London’s social history in unprecedented detail, enabling users to explore everything from the world’s first gay scene to eighteenth century riots.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are turning increasingly to geographical analysis as a way of bringing the facts and figures to life. What’s exciting about this resource is that the existing data you can explore today is just the start – the interface could be expanded to include new data sets and new maps, making it potentially useful to scholars in dozens of different disciplines. JISC’s commitment to funding open source projects means that other universities are already looking at how they might reuse the programmes that the Sheffield team has developed.”
Trial accounts from the Old Bailey, tax and population data, and even archaeological records can all be uploaded onto John Rocque’s famous 1746 map of London, now fully referenced to modern geographical coordinates by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).
Locating London’s Past is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of London.
Using the new website, people are now able to explore fully geo-referenced detail using Google maps technology to reveal the distribution of crimes, wealth and poverty, mortality, archaeological finds, voting records and much more.
Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Hertfordshire commented: “This project has allowed us to add a new, third dimension to our understanding of the first ‘World City’. Text on the page can now be reconfigured around place and space to create a new historical landscape to reveal pockets of crime and poverty, wealth, and illness. It allows us to know the past in a new way.”
18th Century riot trials
Professor Robert Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield’s Department of History commented: “Locating London’s Past makes it possible for the first time to map a wide variety of data from London’s past onto fully geo-referenced historical maps of the metropolis. For me, the most exciting findings concern the spread of crime locations from Old Bailey trials. Rather than simply reflecting the distribution of poverty (or wealth), criminal prosecutions took place in mixed areas, where social tensions were highest. These and other discoveries will transform our understanding of the historical development of Europe’s first modern city.”
Dr Matthew Davies, Director of the Centre for Metropolitan History at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, commented: “The project’s website provides a new tool for understanding the relationships between the people and places of pre-modern London. It will enable the visualisation through maps of important characteristics of the metropolis during a time of rapid growth, from everyday patterns of family, home and work, to the interactions between inhabitants and institutions such as the parishes, hospitals and city companies.”
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CILIP, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, is the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. We provide practical support for members throughout their careers and speak out on behalf of the profession.
An exciting opportunity has arisen for a highly organised and enthusiastic Events Co-ordinator, to join us on a part-time basis for 21 hours per week to support our Marketing and Events team in the delivery of our varied events programme.
As an Events Co-ordinator, you will assist in supervising and co-ordinating events and training activities, liaising with speakers on their travel and equipment requirements and ensure they have all necessary programme information. You will also be involved in the preparation and distribution of marketing material and statistical information whilst assisting with general administration of events and training activities.
The successful candidate will have previous experience of event administration and be confident liaising with venues, suppliers and speakers. We are looking for a highly professional, personable and self motivated individual who has a high regard for customer service and that is comfortable working under pressure and to tight deadlines.
If you think you have the skills, experience and attitude to make a success of this role – we want to hear from you...
For more information email: personnel@cilip.org.uk quoting job reference: EC/511
Closing date: 9 January 2012 Interview date: mid January 2012
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A non-exhaustive list of some of the potential benefits to individuals and their employers/line managers of attending an IFLA conference.
International activities can be used to improve the library’s image by raising the library’s profile within the organisation and outside, especially if you can identify solid achievements made by your staff as a result.
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This video shows the contribution an effective school library can make to the educational, creative, emotional and reading development of children and young people-and the aspects of design that can enable this. It also signposts case studies and practical guidance to support library design.
This is for all school librarians involved in school library design and development, especially a new build.
Funded by CILIP School Libraries Group and the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Council).
View here (WMV, April 2007 - 27 minutes)
Accompanying the video are brief, practical 'find out more' information sheets.
Topics include:
NB. The video was previously available in a DVD format.
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A study of 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the riots has found that politicians and other commentators were wrong to claim the website played an important role in inciting and organising the disturbances.
It is published today (8 December) in the Guardian newspaper as part of its Reading the Riots investigation.
Professor Procter, who is based at The University’s Manchester e-Research Centre, said: "In August this year, social unrest spilled over onto the streets of English cities and the summer riots were the largest public disorder events in recent history.
"Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again.
"But our analysis found no evidence of significance in the data we have analysed that would justify such a course action in respect to Twitter.
"In contrast, we do find strong evidence that Twitter was a valuable tool for mobilising support for the post-riot clean up and for organising specific clean up activities."
Also according to the research team, rumours 'break' quickly in Twitter and the mainstream media lag behind citizen reports.
Examples include rumours the London Eye had been set on fire and animals had been released from the London Zoo – which both turned out to be untrue.
Other stories turned out to be true such as the burning down of a Miss Selfridge shop in Manchester.
Professor Procter added: "Only after a period of time does the influence of mainstream media organisations become critical for determining a rumour's credibility.
"But we do find the mainstream media is perfectly capable of picking up and publishing unverified information from social media without adhering to the usual standard of fact checking.
"Consequently, some stories of this nature, though never verified, go unchallenged."
The research team of the Universities of Manchester, Leicester, St Andrews, Wolverhampton and UCL, draws on the expertise of a wide range of disciplines within the social sciences and computer science.
Dr Torsten Reimer, JISC programme manager, said: "The influence of social media on society is growing rapidly so we need a much better understanding of their impact on people's lives.
"In the case of Twitter this means analysing gigantic amounts of data, constantly created by millions of people, - a task that requires new tools and methods, supported by a broader digital infrastructure for research.
"We are pleased that we had the chance to support the project team working in collaboration with the Guardian to demonstrate how this infrastructure can be used to understand what happened during the riots in August."
The analysis of messages exchanged on Twitter during the riots was undertaken through a larger, JISC funded project called NeISS: National e-Infrastructure for Social Science Simulation.
The NeISS project aims to introduce social scientists to new ways of thinking about social problems.
Find out more about the NeISS project
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Information relating to events from before the years displayed is available on request by contacting the CILIP events team at events@cilip.org.uk or 020 7255 0540.
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The Guardian Teacher Network this week looks back to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base, with lots of resources to help pupils understand the reasons – and consequences
Seventy years ago tomorrow, Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii, with the loss of more than 2,400 lives.
The Guardian Teacher Network has a wealth of materials to help pupils investigate why the attack happened and what some of the consequences were, including the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Battles of World War II – 1941 is a history lesson for KS3 that uses interactive questions, maps and photographs to explain the course of events before, during and after the attack. Pupils are encouraged to put themselves in the shoes of a newspaper editor to explore the American response to Pearl Harbor, and to ponder what they would usually be doing at 8am on a Sunday morning, the time of the attack.
For KS2, the lesson Asking Questions About the Second World War includes a timeline of events showing the attack on Pearl Harbor. For KS3 and KS4, Encyclopaedia Britannica has produced a set of four worksheets about the Second World War that are useful for studying the key events.
The attack on Pearl Harbor led directly to America's entry into the Second World War and this is explored in the KS3 lesson Battles of World War II – 1942-1945. Pupils examine the end of war in Europe, the escalation of war in the Pacific, the increasing role of Japanese kamikaze pilots, and the development of atomic weapons including the role of scientist Albert Einstein, a Jewish German.
The KS4 history lesson Second World War looks specifically at the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Using photographs from the Imperial War Museum and articles from the Guardian and Observer newspapers, pupils are asked to consider why Harry Truman, the US president, ordered the attacks, estimated to have caused around 200,000 deaths. Primary sources of information used in the lesson include an interview with a Hiroshima survivor who describes the death of her daughter from radiation sickness.
After Hiroshima, President Truman threatened "a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth" if Japan did not surrender. Details of the Nagasaki bombing three days later and Japan's subsequent capitulation are covered in this KS4 history lesson.
In March this year, following the devastating effects of a massive earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Can, said his country was facing "its biggest crisis since the Second World War". After the Wave is an English lesson that focuses on the aftermath of the disaster, with tips and ideas to help pupils write their own newspaper reports.
• The Guardian Teacher Network has more than 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise for free on schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk
A new report on truanting will make uncomfortable reading for the government. For some young people, truancy becomes a way of life, and punitive measures would make no difference
It's two o'clock on a damp Tuesday afternoon, and at the Huddersfield Central Youth Club a dozen teenage boys are knocking balls around on the pool tables. Above their heads, Hollyoaks is showing on a big wall-mounted television, and a few girls are staring at it intermittently from a slightly worn leather sofa; one of them languidly fiddling with the remote control, another with her phone.
Most of these teenagers have missed huge chunks of their schooling, and all of them have now been excluded from their mainstream schools. But their presence here today represents serious progress. This scene may look purposeless – a small group of boys are hanging round the front entrance, chatting with fizzy drink cans in their hands – but actually, this is authorised chill-out time after a full morning of learning to use spreadsheets and working on a project about "Life in the Wild".
"Sometimes I used to just lie in bed and think, 'Shall I get up today, or not?'" says Dominique St Hilaire, the girl with the remote control. "School just seemed to pull me down, and make me depressed."
Like all these teenagers, 15-year-old Dominique is now enrolled on a programme called Choices, run by the Rathbone charity as an alternative to mainstream school. And, along with several of her classmates, she has recently taken part in the first national survey of persistent truants, run by the charity. It asked 300 young people why they missed school and what types of intervention might have persuaded them to turn up regularly.
The results will make uncomfortable reading for the coalition government. This autumn, David Cameron announced that he had asked his social policy review, set up in the wake of the summer riots, to consider cutting the benefits of parents who fail to make their children go to school. But seven out of 10 respondents to Rathbone's survey said such measures would make no difference to them at all.
Just over half those surveyed said their parents were aware they were truanting, and just under half said their friends encouraged them to miss lessons. One fifth had been stopped by the police while truanting, and 55% had been excluded from school at some point. A quarter had missed school to care for a relative; many were coping with chaotic family backgrounds, and most with the sense that school just really wasn't for them.
Dominique, her thick hair partly dyed red and pulled back from her face, tends to look down when she talks, but underneath the awkwardness there's a spark about her. Her secondary school never gave her a chance, she says. With seven half-sisters, six half-brothers and a raft of cousins, some of whom weren't model pupils themselves, she thinks they just saw her coming; stamped her with the label that tends to get stuck on all the St Hilaires around here.
"They assumed I was just thick, and wouldn't get anywhere," she says. "Most of my brothers and sisters and cousins went there, and most of them missed school, too. Quite a few of them had ADHD. When you've got a name for skiving, if you ask for help they just tell you to get on with it."
In year 9, Dominique started skipping lessons; going out in the mornings as if she was going to school, but then ending up at a friend's house, or hanging out in the town centre. Then one of her half-brothers died, and her life went off the rails. She hated people at school asking her about it, she says. "My mum was always being called to meetings at the school. She didn't like it, but what could she say? She did it herself," Dominique says. Fines and court appearances were talked about, but she never believed in them: "I've never known it to happen. I didn't believe in it." And if her mother had had her benefits taken away? "I'd have said I was going to school, but I wouldn't have. Anyway, my dad gives my mum money."
At Rathbone, they do have procedures for dealing with persistent absence, and theoretically they could end in court – but in the decade the centre has been open that's never happened, according to its manager, Rechelle Boothroyd.
"You've got to understand the difficulty that parents have," she says. "They can't physically drag kids out of bed – they know they're within their rights to call child protection if they do that."
The main strategy here is to engage the children – about 30 of them at present – in a way their previous schools have usually failed to do. The basics are taught through projects and games, and lessons have been renamed "sessions" so the pupils won't have their usual negative reaction to them. And to a large extent, it works – the attendance here is 70%, which, while not brilliant, is a lot better than most of these pupils were managing elsewhere. The charity's survey found that more than half of persistent truants would skip school in order to miss specific lessons they didn't like – PE being the biggest turn-off, followed by maths.
But the major reason why young people miss school, according to Rathbone's spokesman Peter Gibson, is that it just doesn't seem relevant to them.
"We read a lot about how local authorities and the police are 'cracking down' on truants, but very little about what they're doing to prevent truancy in the first place. The number one reason our respondents gave was just 'I hate school'. We get a real sense of them not being in touch with the academic, and wanting to do practical things. They just don't think school's relevant to them."
Meanwhile, the rhetoric from politicians tends to go in the opposite direction. Cameron's suggestion that pupils should be forced into school by tougher sanctions on their parents is not a new one. It was first mooted by the Labour government in 2002, but was quietly dropped again.
The truth, as evidenced by the government's own official statistics on truancy, is that absenteeism, like so many educational ills, is closely linked to deprivation. Of those pupils defined as persistent absentees – that is, those who miss more than 15% of their education –more than a third are eligible for free school meals, one in seven do not have English as a first language and four out of 10 have special needs.
The Department for Education makes few concessions to these factors, though it does concede that pupils often miss school because they're falling behind. A spokeswoman for the DfE said it was up to parents, as well as schools, to clamp down on persistent absence: "Even one day missed from school without very good reason is one too many," she said.
"Parents must have a real stake in their child's education, and they need to face real consequences if their children continually skip school. That's why we're looking at whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant."
Rathbone's findings come as no surprise to headteachers, though. Joan McVittie, headteacher of Woodside high school in Haringey, north London, and also president of the Association of School and College Leaders, says the key is to ensure that school is interesting – and relevant – to pupils. Overall attendance at her school has risen from 87% in 1995 to 94% today.
"The key thing to do is to get yourself in a position where the children enjoy coming to school, where you make lessons not just interesting but fun, so they see the point of what they're learning," she says. "But we do recognise that there are some children who by the age of 15 have really outgrown school completely."
• This article was amended on 7 December to include a link to the Rathbone report, which was previously unavailable.
Katie Holmes, 15
"I was OK till year 8, but after that the teachers didn't respect me, so I'd swear at them and interrupt the class. If they sent me home, I wouldn't go back the next day. I used to wake up in the morning and think I just couldn't be bothered going to school. I think really I did it because I was trying to make myself look hard."
Josh Jessop-Woodhead, 15
"I've got dyslexia, and that's why I messed about and missed lessons, because I didn't know what I was doing. Mostly I used to miss geography because my teacher talked to me like I was an idiot. The school used to ring my mum and she'd shout at me. I just needed a bit more help."
Dominique St Hilaire, 15
"All my friends used to skive. Sometimes we'd go to school and go home at dinner time; sometimes we'd just not go at all. My mum used to tell me off about it, but she understood because she did that herself."
Academy chains swoop on failing schools, and the rich Oxford colleges that pay their 'scouts' poorly
Wild West in Kent
With just 14% of students achieving A*-C grades in English and maths, the Marlowe school in Ramsgate was among the worst-performing secondaries last year.
So it came as little surprise when its headteacher resigned in September. While his sudden departure quickly became common knowledge, the fact that the school is now in effect being run by one of the big academy chains has not been so well publicised.
The Academies Education Trust (AET), which sponsors 14 schools in England, has confirmed that it has been contracted by the Young People's Learning Agency (the government body that funds academies) to provide "a significant level" of support to the Marlowe academy for a full academic year – including the appointment of a new head and deputy head.
Yet there is no information about this partnership on either the AET or the school's website. In fact, it doesn't appear to be in the public domain at all.
According to one headteacher, who did not wish to be named, since the government announced it was raising floor targets (the minimum standard of attainment) for schools earlier this year, academy chains have been "lining up" to get business from failing schools.
"With higher targets, more schools are now at risk of failure. [The academy chains] are watching closely, ready to swoop in on vulnerable schools. It's like the Wild West out there."
The DfE made no comment at the time of going to press.
Looking out for Oxford scouts
It may be one of the wealthiest universities in the world, but an investigation by student journalists at Oxford has found many of its cleaning staff – or "scouts" – are hard-up and fed-up.
Oxford is one of the most expensive places to live in the country, but figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that 15 of the 21 Oxford colleges that responded pay scouts less than the living wage of £7.20 an hour.
One of the worst offenders (and the richest colleges) is St John's, which, according to the Oxford Student's associate editor, Lizzie Porter, gives its students "free stuff galore", but pays its cleaners as little as £6.49 an hour. Porter is so outraged, she has launched a petition.
Reading the riot act
The former children's laureate, Michael Rosen, is not happy with the way reading is being taught in schools. Rosen says he recently received a letter from a teacher who claimed to have been "harassed" by an Ofsted inspector for running a "reading-for-pleasure" session during school time. Ofsted inspection guidance contains no mention of "books, provision of books, reading for pleasure or anything related," he says.
The poet claims that because the government is offering up to £3k a year of additional funding to schools following its approved teaching methods many classrooms now have only books from the government's synthetic phonics scheme. Says Rosen: "No one dares reveal that this is going on, but I've heard of many headteachers who no longer have 'real' books in their classrooms."
Jean Humphrys, of Ofsted, said: "Ofsted absolutely recognises and celebrates the importance of reading for pleasure … For children to get the most out of reading it is essential that they have the basic building blocks of reading skills. That is why we also emphasise the importance of systematic teaching of phonics. It is not a case of either or, but both."
• This article was amended on 9 December 2011. The original gave an incorrect figure for the Junior Common Room entertainment budget at St John's college. This has been removed.
Universities are becoming increasingly angry about the government's assault on academic values and its indifference to the social consequences, says Peter Scott
With most reforms, even the most controversial and contested, there finally comes a time for acceptance. But that time has not yet come for the government's plans to slash public funding and triple fees in higher education.
University managers have had no choice but to prepare for next September, setting fee levels and, for more than 20 institutions, re-setting them to come under the £7,500 threshold that allows them to reclaim some of the student places they have lost.
But the anger is not abating. Students, of course, have been supremely ungrateful from day one despite being placed at "the heart of the system" (to quote the white paper's title), although police tactics have curbed street protests. Now large sections of the academic community – from young researchers and lecturers to the stars of the profession – are finally waking up to the challenge posed by the government's reforms.
There have been three responses. The first is that there is no alternative. Labour started down the track of higher fees; the coalition is simply following. The state won't pay, so students must. Public expenditure has to be cut to reduce the deficit. Luckily, back-doors public funding via state loans to pay these higher fees can compensate higher education.
The second is that the initial proposals were unworkable. So what started out as privatisation is beginning to look more like nationalisation. Not only has the government frozen student numbers, it is now telling universities which categories of student they can freely admit. Far from fading into history, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) is now to be the "lead" regulator.
The third is to regard the government's reforms as heralding the death of the university as a public and liberal institution. Key academic values are under attack, whether scholarship in the humanities or curiosity-driven science. So are key social values such as widening participation.
The first response has come from a largely craven university establishment. As a result, vice-chancellors risk joining bankers as objects of public disdain – even if their salaries are somewhat lower. The second response, interestingly, has come from the policy establishment, although those who work for Hefce and other agencies have been forced to use coded language to express their criticisms of government policy.
It is the third response that seems to be gathering force. No longer confined to the "usual suspects" such as the National Union of Students and the University and College Union, it is gradually becoming established as the dominant response among the academic rank-and-file and high-profile public intellectuals. Not so long ago, the much-despised "chattering classes" shared the politicians' low opinion of universities; now they are rallying to their defence.
The reasons for this deeply significant shift are various. One is the growing unpopularity of a government that, more clearly every day, has made a disastrously wrong call on the economy. A second is that people are beginning to join things up. Grimly, the fates of higher education and of the national health service are now seen as linked. Both are grand 20th-century social projects under neo-liberal fire.
A third, of course, is that the government's reforms are now better understood. Paradoxically, the more they unravel as workable solutions to the challenges facing universities in the post-crunch era, the more their ideological foundations are exposed. It is the illiberality and philistinism, reductionism and instrumentalism, which so offend the silent majority with higher aspirations and nobler ideals.
As a result, the contest is moving on to new ground. Very few people now expect these arrangements to produce an enduring settlement. In just over a year, the original proposals of the Browne committee have already been modified almost to death. Lots more "adjustments" are likely, sooner rather than later.
But it is the government's ideological assault on academic values, and its indifference to the social consequences of its policies, that have provoked the growing anger. Those who are attached to old academic habits and those who care deeply about higher education's social purpose have joined together in a strengthening opposition.
At a recent conference, the distinguished historian Keith Thomas called for the creation of a "society for the protection of English universities". The fact that such an organisation is now thought to be necessary shows how much the ground is shifting.
Headteachers are divided about the ethics of academy status. But how many now feel they have little choice?
In September 2010, 32 schools in England started term as shiny new "converter" academies. By the start of the 2011 academic year, there were 981, and by 1 December, a further 163 had made the switch.
Given that there are 20,000-odd schools in England that might not seem a lot. But the pace at which governing bodies in certain local authorities have decided to opt for academy status meant that by September, in 50 council areas, over a quarter of the secondary schools had already converted. More are in the process of doing so and more still are awaiting a decision as to whether they may. That has resulted in some headteachers feeling under great pressure to ditch their local authority maintained status, even if they have serious reservations about doing so. The question now being asked is: will a tipping point be reached, when heads feel they have no options left, and all the dominoes fall?
"I think [Michael] Gove has been incredibly clever to equate the new academies with 'outstanding', so outstanding schools were chasing the money and the kudos," says one headteacher.
There is a fear expressed by some heads that once a certain number of neighbouring schools have opted out, theirs could been seen as less attractive by parents. "We felt that with an increasing number of schools in Surrey that had converted or planned to, there was a potential tipping point being approached," says Alex Russell, headteacher at Epsom and Ewell high school, which made the switch at the start of this autumn term. "That raised concerns for us as to what centralised support would be in place once that had happened." Surrey has 53 secondary schools, of which around 30 have either converted or are considering the option.
In 23 local authority areas, over half of secondary schools had converted by September, but in a few – Warrington, Knowsley, Bury and Blackpool – not a single secondary had chosen to opt out. That has now changed, with only Blackpool secondaries still resisting academy conversion.
In London, some boroughs have no converter academies and others have several. Kate Frood, headteacher at Eleanor Palmer primary in Camden, says resistance to the policy is strong and she has "no sense of anyone being at tipping point yet".
"There is a real collegiality and commitment to our highly effective officers and supportive council and diocese, who have always prioritised schools funding," she says. "Issues such as SEN placements, exclusions and equity of building improvements are well managed and you get a sense that governing bodies genuinely work for the community of schools."
But, she adds, if one decides to switch, things could change. "As soon as some schools go, the worry is that they will inevitably become more selective or more attractive to parents and those left will become the poor relations – in terms of admissions and SEN overload, for example."
One head who won't countenance the idea is Elliott Furneaux. He leads the 'outstanding' Heathfield community school in Taunton, and for him, it's a question of doing right by the most vulnerable children in the area. "We feel we have a responsibility beyond our catchment," he says. "The governors felt from the start that for us, it was morally not possible to take a decision that massively advantaged us at the expense of others. And the overwhelming majority of teachers feel that the new system will not benefit vulnerable children."
And if his governing body felt at some future point that resistance was futile? "I would resign at that point," says Furneaux, "because you can't lead something convincingly that you don't believe in."
Another secondary head at a school in West Yorkshire says: "I fervently hope that we don't reach a tipping point." After "a huge amount of thought" he and his chair of governors are likely to recommend no conversion for the coming year, "but should the local picture change to leave a 'rump' of maintained schools, and particularly if our closest 'competitor' were to convert, it would be difficult to resist."
If schools feel under pressure to convert without being expert and stable enough to manage their additional responsibilities, it could be a disaster for pupils, staff and community alike, he points out. Not all schools – even good ones – have the capacity to employ staff, run buildings and manage their finances. Of course, there's extra money to buy in support from private providers, but the Department for Education has made it plain that the enormous sums dished out in the early days of academy conversions are no longer on offer.
All the same, it seems some schools are so desperate to avoid the cuts that they are converting to academy status simply in order to get their hands on the pooled element of funding that is "given back" to them from the local authority pot.
In a survey of 1,471 schools earlier this year by the Association of School and College Leaders, 72% of those planning academy conversion said they were doing so to avoid budget cuts. Admitting as much has caused uproar; at the comprehensive Prince Henry's grammar in Otley, near Leeds, teachers have taken repeated strike action and half the governors have resigned in protest at plans to become an academy, which even supporters acknowledge is primarily for financial reasons.
At St Dominic's primary school in South Woodchester, the headteacher, Margaret Smith, says that she was only persuaded of the merits of conversion because of the opportunity to forge stronger links with a big Catholic secondary in nearby Gloucester, St Peter's, which was was also going for academy status.
Smith makes the point that in Gloucestershire, "an awful lot of the schools have already gone". She's right – approaching two thirds of the county's secondaries have converted – and they've taken a large proportion of the collective pot with them. With yet another big secondary school about to make the switch, Smith was concerned at the future funding for her small rural primary, particularly given that Gloucestershire may soon operate "needs-led" funding. This means that St Dominic's could face cuts: a significant benefit of becoming an academy will be that Smith is allowed to carry forward more than the 8% of any unspent budget she's currently permitted to retain. That simple fact means she can now guarantee the school's staffing levels for the next three years.
Philosophically, however, says Smith, this was "not the way I'd have wanted to go, because I think the local authority was the sensible way of sharing the money. I've always had high regard for the county, they've always been very good to us, and we will still be buying in their services."
If schools are looking to their local authorities to give them reasons to resist the pressure to convert, however, it seems they may not get them. "At no time has the local authority come banging saying if you don't go, we'll do this, this and this to help you," comments one headteacher. "There's a resignation towards it. There's a feeling of 'where's the leadership from the local authority?'"
Despite reservations, he chose to recommend academy status for his school, and says he sees undoubted benefits. But he worries greatly about what safeguards exist to ensure the new academies maintain support for the most vulnerable children.
In public, he says, he now has to champion academy status and make it work for his pupils. "But privately," he says, "many of my colleagues feel that this is driven by central government dogma, and we have no alternative but to comply."
Mary O'Hara meets a Cambridge historian who is among the government's fiercest academic critics
Simon Szreter has much to say on many subjects, but when making a point he regards as significant, the Cambridge historian and higher education activist doesn't waste a word. "Its not possible yet to buy your way into the Russell Group universities – you still have to do extremely well in exams. But it is possible of course to [get an] extremely well resourced education and hope that does the trick."
Szreter is recollecting a time in the early 1990s when he was conducting research on how the UK's long-term economic performance is shaped by factors such as the education of its workforce. While "fishing around" for measures of investment in education, he stumbled across data showing that there had been "an enormous disinvestment" in state schools, with tens of thousands of teachers laid off during the 1980s.
"I wasn't aware that this had happened," he says. "Then I looked at the private schools and that's when I got … angry about this, because I realised that actually the private schools had been going in the opposite direction. By the time Labour took power in '97, it was true that private schools had almost exactly twice the numbers of teachers per pupil in their staff rooms as state schools had. They always had an advantage, but this advantage had now doubled. That's never been revisited," he adds.
It is over a decade since the research, but that it galvanised Szreter to dig deeper into the education system is unmistakable. In the years since, he has, among other things, made his way to a professorship and founded the History and Policy website, an initiative designed to inject greater historical insight into policymaking, but it is his forays into education activism that have set him apart.
Szreter, based at St. John's College, Cambridge, has emerged as a leading light among academics protesting against the coalition government's higher education policy and, in particular, the controversial trebling of tuition fees. As a co-author of the "alternative white paper" earlier this year, he was pivotal in publicly articulating a series of pointed criticisms of current policy, namely what many regard as the privatisation of higher education by transferring the cost of funding from the public purse. In a newspaper article, he stridently disputed claims that tight public finances are a justification for cuts by drawing heavily and convincingly on historical precedent.
"Despite a postwar austerity far harsher than the one we face today – and a level of national debt over twice as high – the nation found the resources to massively expand and publicly fund its secondary schools and their teaching staff."
Since the financial crisis of 2008, he has become noticeably more outspoken, accusing the coalition of "paying for the profligacy of the banks" while systematically undermining higher education by radically withdrawing public funds, and of "cutting at both ends" the state primary and secondary education sector by abolishing the EMA [education maintenance allowance] for 16- to 18-year-olds and closing Sure Start for infants.
"The big story," he insists, "is undoubtedly higher education and further education". The raising of university fees may be a clear focal point for protest, but what seems to exercise him most is what underlies it: the long-term shift from financing higher education directly out of general taxation towards raising funds via "risky" private finance.
"There have been 20 years in which governments have very happily expanded the higher education and further education sector rapidly … but they have put nothing like commensurate resources into the system," he says. The corresponding "managerial revolution", which encouraged universities to be more corporate and show they are offering value for money, has starved it of essential resources, he argues.
But it is the over-reliance by successive governments on structuring student loans through "complex financial instruments" that could prove most devastating for the future of higher education, he says, and it is this that people need to pay attention to. Talking about the fallout of the financial crisis, he says emphatically: "We are not even over this [crisis] and the government is already quite happily talking about packaging up our younger generation's futures into a set of complicated loan instruments that it will place with the very sector of the economy that's caused all this."
This is all the more critical, he suggests, in the context of government ministers drafting radical policies based on what he believes to be ill-thought-through, "flimsy" consultations. He is particularly scathing of the "feeble" higher education white paper and the Browne review on tuition fees. "They don't have reasoning in them. They don't have evidence of any compelling nature in them. They have assertion and belief. It isn't just scary, it's fundamentally undemocratic, it's fundamentally dishonest and its unworthy of any government to be legislating on these kinds of documents because it hasn't taken the trouble to consult. It's acting as if it knows the answers in a very brazen way."
He reserves particular ire for the way in which the coalition government apparently calculated the projected average annual fees students would have to pay (£7,500 as opposed to the top fee rate of £9,000, which the majority of institutions originally opted for). Referring to a recent interview with the universities minister, David Willetts, in this paper during which the minister failed to explain the calculations, Szreter says: "[It is a] dreadful hypocrisy that Willetts can casually acknowledge that, with all the analytical fire-power of a government department of specialists including economists at his disposal, that he took some kind of punter's guess at the fee levels to set." Not mincing his words, he adds: "Breathtaking irresponsibility, moral vacuosity and, given his attempt to portray himself as a bleeding heart for The Pinch generation, a rank hypocrite."
If students and a few academics have been at the forefront of protests, when it comes to how universities have responded to government policy, Szreter believes they have been slow to fully grasp the ramifications of recent policy – although he thinks this is changing.
"I think the university world can look to itself and take some responsibility for having become a little too disconnected [from] ordinary people's cares and worries and with what is going on in the economy. I think it is now waking up to the fact that it has to engage with this because its own institutions and ways of doing things are being very severely put under pressure. I think it's correct that academics have only finally, in this last 12 months, woken up to what has been an extremely gradual process."
He insists he feels supported by his university and has never felt pressured to back off from protesting. When it comes to individual academics, he says many are largely ignorant of the true nature of the challenges, which might explain the lack of a groundswell of activists. "To be brutally honest, I think it's still the case that most colleagues don't really know much about this. After all, most academics are fairly obsessed with their own research subjects and they're busy with their teaching. You've got to invest a lot of time to find out what's going on. I think most colleagues are probably at least concerned if not very well informed."
Szreter is perhaps at his most passionate talking about student activists with whom he is undeniably closely aligned. He was on the London march in November last year when thousands of students were subjected to kettling and saw first-hand what he regards as police intimidation. "You had government ministers talking about how we supported the protesters in Cairo and how we were standing at one with them, but we might have to use water canon on our own students. The naked hypocrisy of it is just unbelievable."
He says it was "a very heartening experience" to be alongside students in Cambridge during an occupation in November 2010 of the university's Senate House. "They were asking me to wear my academic gown, because they said it made them feel more secure that some of the senior members of the university were there in a supporting role. In some ways, I thought it was the first time my academic gown had served a really useful purpose."
So what, if anything, will actually halt the current policy juggernaut? Szreter says there is a need to keep arguing and to "use reason and evidence" to highlight what's wrong and to make recommendations for how it can be fixed. Ever the historian, he points to the fact that in the past, momentous progressive changes to the education system – such as the provision of universal secondary education – were brought about despite ideological objections or cost.
Coming back to the spectre of fee hikes and private finance, he says the danger is that universities will lose their role in society as places of critical thought, instead becoming more like "sausage factories" churning out unquestioning people to meet the demands of the market. He concludes with an enigmatic reference to a blockbuster movie where citizens are oblivious to the reality they inhabit. "If you follow the logic of the markets, you end up in The Matrix."
Full details of successful events organised by CILIP Events for library and information professionals can be found by clicking on the relevant archive year in the left-hand menu. Many have retained supporting information, including programmes and speaker biographies.
Links to 2008/09 events have now been removed from the site and are available on request by contacting the CILIP events team at events@cilip.org.uk or 020 7255 0540.
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CILIP is a founder member of IFLA - The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions- the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. IFLA is the global voice of the library and information profession. As such, it is very important that CILIP is involved in IFLA and supports it.
CILIP seeks to ensure that the views and aspirations of UK LIS professionals are well represented in this vital international organisation at all levels, including the Governing Board, Professional Committee, Core Activities (Committee on Copyright and other Legal Matters [CLM] and Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression [FAIFE]).
CILIP works with and through IFLA on important international initiatives such as the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, where IFLA has an official delegation lobbying on behalf of the LIS community worldwide.
We also seek to provide opportunities for CILIP members to enrich their professional lives. Helping CILIP members to become elected to IFLA Sections (Special Interest Groups) and facilitating their involvement with them is one of the main ways of doing this. In addition, Several CILIP members are committee officers which offers further scope for CPD.
CILIP both sends a delegation and financially supports a group of members to each annual conference. Since 2000, this has included the full sponsorship of around three members to attend their first IFLA conference. The delegation includes a small number of CILIP staff working on international matters impacting on CILIP and its members with IFLA, including representatives of the Home Nations.
CILIP's IFLA membership number: GB-0001
By providing travel grants to attend these conferences, we aim to:
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In 2011 CILIP awarded a first-timer's grant to Sue Roe to attend the 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly. Sue Roe is the Children's Services Librarian at Wirral Libraries.
The conference took place in San Juan, Puerto Rico between 13 and 18 August 2011. Sue found the conference: "fascinating, thought-provoking, lively". She took a place on the Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section Standing Committee and gave those meetings and sessions priority.
Sue's report introduces us to the theme and tracks of the conference and reports on the sessions she attended.
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School Libraries - A Right