Children in care could go to the best schools – but they hardly ever do. Why is the system failing them?
Dan is 11. This month he started at secondary school. He lives on the poorer side of town and his carers are sending him to the high school round the corner. It's in special measures and is undersubscribed, with results that are nothing to write home about. But Dan doesn't know that.
Dan has been in local authority care since he was a tot. As a looked-after child, Dan could have gone to any local authority school he chose. Children in care have had the "highest priority" in admissions since 1998. It's an entitlement the government insists it is preserving, but critics warn that it will be undermined by the greater control academies and free schools are being given over pupil entry.
Even as it stands now, "highest priority" hasn't got many of these vulnerable children into outstanding schools. England's 64,500 looked-after children, some of the most fragile in society, are paradoxically still far more likely to go to failing schools than their peers, as revealed by Department for Education figures.
A total of 16% of children in care, compared to 10% of their peers, go to the lowest-attaining primary schools, according to the DfE's new data tool for local authorities. At age 11, 10% go on to secondaries where fewer than 35% of pupils get five good GCSEs including maths and English, compared to 6% of all children.
Once there, many of them flounder. Last year, 49% of looked-after teenagers failed to get five GCSEs, compared to 7% of all pupils. While the situation is improving, the Adolescent and Children's Trust (Tact) estimates that it will take this fragile group 50 years to match the average achievements of other 16-year-olds. At age 18, the statistics are just as gloomy. Only 7% of looked-after young people make it to university, compared to 40% of their peers.
The admissions battle may have been won on paper, but not yet in reality, says Kevin Williams, chief executive of Tact. And it won't be won until foster carers and social workers develop the aspirations of "sharp-elbowed" middle-class parents.
Dan's carers, like many who provide temporary homes for the rapidly rising number of children in care, didn't flourish themselves academically. They view schools as all the same and books as boring. They don't press him to do his homework as "the poor lad's got enough on his plate already". Besides, they don't think he's going to be with them for long, as they're finding his behaviour challenging.
What Dan needs is a stable placement with carers who believe in education. "They must focus on education from day one. It's never too early to start talking to children about going to university," says Sonia Jackson, emeritus professor of social studies and education at the Institute of Education, London.
Sue Hains shares Jackson's aspirations. Head of Cambridgeshire's virtual school, Hains and her team of 15 teachers oversee the education of the county's 650 looked-after three- to 18-year-olds. These virtual "schools" – organisation tools, rather than buildings filled with pupils – were promoted by the last government. The pilots were evaluated positively in 2009, and they were praised for their valuable role.
Despite this, Hains returned to work this month with only half her team, courtesy of public-sector cuts. She is making the best of it, talking of working smarter and refocusing. But her teachers will have less time for face-to-face meetings with their vulnerable pupils. They'll have to prioritise the children who are struggling and keep their fingers crossed for the rest.
Such cutbacks anger Jackson, one of the team who evaluated the virtual school pilots in 2009. "Almost everything this government has done shows that it is completely unaware of the needs of looked-after children, indeed of all disadvantaged children," says Jackson.
Virtual schools like Hains's are at risk, she says, yet their relentless focus on looked-after pupils is making a difference. Central to their success is that most of them are led by staff from education rather than social services. "This gives them real clout … they can talk to heads of secondary schools on equal terms."
Clout matters when it comes to school admissions – an area where Michael Gove's education bill, currently going through parliament, is loosening up the rules. Looked-after children like Dan may remain top of the admissions list, still entitled to go to any school they wish. But the reality, says Hains, will be different.
"Increasing schools' autonomy over admissions will make life more complicated. Instead of dealing with one person in the authority, we're going to have to deal with each individual head. Some schools are cagey now when we're trying to place a difficult child. It can only get worse."
The charity Barnardo's also has worries – and not just about the education bill. Cutting back on the education of looked-after children is regarded as an "easy win" by some local authorities desperate to save money, says Louise Bamfield, its assistant director of policy and research. "Quality of service is going to be hit, resources are going to be stretched."
Already sacrificed is the looked-after children's personal education allowance (PEA), worth £500 a year, which was abolished in March. Many authorities used it to pay for "extras" such as school trips, music lessons and one-to-one tuition. Such extras are vital, says Hains, whose team also monitors out-of-school activities. What looked-after children do on Saturdays matters as much as what they do on Mondays if they are to have a chance of leading a fulfilling life.
Peter Doyle, head of Lancashire's virtual school, says he is lucky in that his county voted to keep paying the PEA. Elsewhere, he worries that the new pupil premium will not bridge the gap. As heads try to balance frozen budgets in the face of rising costs, he says, it risks being swallowed up in the general school pot – or used to promote academic achievement in the era of the English baccalaureate – rather than being spent on disadvantaged youngsters.
Barnardo's and Tact also fear that the education bill, in giving heads more power over exclusions, will be to the detriment of looked-after children, who are already nine times more likely to be excluded, according to Tact's response to the bill.
Ultimately, says Jackson, it's in heads' interests to throw out children who are disruptive or underperforming. If the bill gives heads more authority, they are more likely to do so. "They won't if they're a good person, but you aren't necessarily a good person just because you are a successful head. We're going to be going backwards to the era of Thatcher, with more homelessness, more beggars on the streets, more school exclusions."
On the Guardian Teacher Network this week you can find useful resources linked to the UN's International Day of Peace
In an unsettled world, the UN International Day of Peace on 21 September is an opportunity to reflect on peace and reconciliationboth globally and in our personal lives at school and home. It is also a day of practical action, to make acts of peace and observe a day of worldwide ceasefire and non-violence.
We have some powerful resources on the Guardian Teacher Network to use on Peace Day and beyond.
Peace One Day (POD), founded by filmmaker Jeremy Gilley, has some stirring and engaging resources. POD is launching its 365-day countdown for a Global Truce 2012 tomorrow and you can find its lesson aimed at secondary-school aged children here. Action led by POD resulted in a 70% reduction in violence in Afghanistan on Peace Day 2008. Students can talk face-to-face with Gilley over Skype, part of POD's outreach programme. Visit www.peaceoneday.org/en/education to find out more.
Amnesty International has produced resources on child soldiers aimed at 11- to 14-year-olds, which focus on the story of Ishmael Beah, who became a child soldier in Sierra Leone when he was just 13.
The People's History Museum has produced a citizenship lesson on campaigning for a cause, focusing on the birth of the British Peace Committee and of course making use of fascinating original sources.
And we have a set of assemblies by Christian Aid.
War Child has produced a powerful lesson on the impact of war.
See this Red Cross lesson on child soldiers and one exploring the recent and ongoing conflict in Libya.
Also see the UN's official International Day of Peace website's practical examples of actions and projects.
The Association of Citizenship Teachers (ACT) works hard to help the teaching of citizenship in school, giving practical advice and best practice recommendations.
• The GTN offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. More than 42,000 teachers have registered; go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free: schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk
This year's runner-up in the Max Perutz Science Writing Award explains how his backroom work on measurement error can make the difference between a cure and a wrong conclusion
Hi there – I'm your friendly neighbourhood statistician, and I've got a few questions if that's all right. First up, how old are you? OK, and how much do you weigh? Good, good, now how many calories do you eat on an average day?
If you're anything like me you'll have had a mixed response to that lot. It starts off OK – I'm pretty sure I'm 24 – but it goes downhill from there. I don't have a pair of scales to hand, and I can barely remember what I ate yesterday, let alone work out an average.
Welcome to the world of measurement error, a place I have lived for the last three years of my life while working towards a PhD in statistics. I'd come into it off the back of theoretical training, but then I found out about this pesky thing called the "real world" where weighing scales aren't perfectly calibrated and people don't keep a record of precisely how many cups of tea they've drunk. Unfortunately, all the statistical models I'd studied relied on being fed data that are 100% accurate. For instance, when you see a headline about how eating red meat increases your risk of cancer by some percentage, this result will be (at least partially) based on asking real people how much red meat they eat. Unless you have a lot of money to spend it's unlikely your data will be perfectly accurate. If you blindly feed inaccurate data into statistical models you can end up coming to drastically wrong conclusions: the effectiveness of a drug could seemingly disappear, or we might mistakenly find that something causes heart disease when it doesn't. It's important, then, to be aware of the problems measurement error can cause and, if necessary, take it into account.
So what can we do? As is so often the case in statistics, we collect more data. In some cases we might be able to stretch our resources to get some really precise measurements on a small group of people, or we could measure some people more than once. Both of these methods give us more information about the measurement error: if you measure someone's weight twice and get 79.5kg and 80.5kg, that suggests the amount of error is pretty small, whereas if you got 60kg and 100kg, you might think differently. The error is just another unknown in our equation, and by collecting these extra data we can learn more about it. From here, there are all sorts of algebraic tricks that help us to turn this information into something we can reliably use, and it's at this point that I come in.
Despite being a relatively new area, there's already a mind-bogglingly large range of different models and methods for dealing with measurement error. As you may imagine, this can make it quite hard to know where to start if you've got measurement error and don't know how to deal with it. My work is, at its most fundamental level, about making these methods accessible. I look at things from the perspective of the non-statistician, trying to answer the questions they would want answering, as well as making it easier to act on any recommendations I might have. Primarily this involves writing computer programs that make implementing these complex methods in a general setting more straightforward, but I also look at some specific types of scientific study to try and provide more tailored advice.
By this point you might be wondering exactly what it is I do all day, and I'm the first to admit that a statistician's life is as glamorous as, well, as glamorous as you'd expect. I spend most of my time at my computer either writing code or playing with datasets. If it's a really exciting day, I might get some paper out and do a bit of algebra. My work may not appear as dramatic as that of my more practical colleagues, but my results have the potential to be just as significant. Statistics are the bedrock of almost every scientific study: get your stats wrong and everything else is basically useless. Measurement error is an often inescapable problem, and so a study that makes use of my results is one that can (I hope) stand up to greater scientific scrutiny.
So next time you see a headline about a groundbreaking medical discovery, spare a thought for the statisticians working behind the scenes. We might not be finding a cure for cancer, but we're the ones who can tell you if someone else has.
• Michael Wallace is based at the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The winner of this year's Max Perutz Science Writing Award reveals her work to combat a deadly illness
It is the start of an invasion. There are no gunfire or explosions, just the mundane tickle of a fly landing on your skin. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this moment can be just as deadly as bombs and guns if that tickle is a blood-sucking tsetse fly. As the fly bites, the tiny protozoan parasites that cause sleeping sickness rush into your blood stream. What was a brief brush of legs and wings is suddenly a potential death sentence.
Your body is now a battlefield. The parasites begin to multiply and overwhelm your defences, causing waves of fever as you try to fight back. If you are lucky, you get an accurate early diagnosis and access to one of the two drugs available for the first stage of the disease. If you are unlucky, you are diagnosed late, when your brain is already crawling with the parasite and you begin to lose your mind.
The most commonly used drug of the three licensed for the second stage was discovered 90 years ago and is based on arsenic. There is a 10% chance the drug will kill you because it is so toxic; but what choice do you have? It's a hopeless war; sleeping sickness invariably progresses to coma and death if you do not get treatment.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the chances are you will not receive safe, effective drugs, and you will die from the disease or its treatment. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are between 50,000 and 70,000 people with sleeping sickness in Africa, and that millions more are at risk. Even if a person isn't infected with the disease it still devastates lives, because it infects and kills livestock, too. Sleeping sickness is a disease that is crying out for more research and better drugs. However, if we are to outwit the enemy, we need to understand what makes it such a lethal foe.
The sleeping sickness parasites are superbly designed for stealth; to succeed they must evade the defences of the human immune system. The shock troops of the innate immune system rapidly and indiscriminately attack foreign cells, while the adaptive immune system learns the signature of each invading pathogen, and launches powerful, surgical strikes. But the surface of the parasite bristles with an incredibly sophisticated coat of armour that is made up of millions of protein chains anchored to the cell surface. The armour repels the barrage of the innate immune system, and by the time the adaptive immune system has locked on to its target, the parasite has shed the old armour and replaced it with new, different proteins. The surgical strikes never find their target. The parasite flies under the immune system radar, allowing it to silently multiply and invade the body.
But what if we could strip the parasite of its armour? The parasites would be visible and vulnerable to the immune system. My research focuses on the anchor that holds the armour's protein bristles in place on the surface of the parasite. If the parasite cannot make the anchor, then it cannot make its coat of armour. The parasite has a production line for assembling the anchor; it is built up, piece by piece, by a series of molecular machines known as enzymes. I design and synthesize molecules that mimic the anchor at a particular stage of its production. The mimics fit into the enzyme, but instead of allowing it to add the next piece of the anchor they jam the machine and stop it working. Once the anchor production pathway is shut down, the parasite loses its armour.
Making these anchor-mimic molecules is slow and laborious because we do not know the structure of the enzyme we are trying to inhibit. It is like trying to guess the structure of a lock by making many different keys and seeing how they fit. But every molecule I make brings me closer to stripping the stealth armour from the sleeping sickness parasite, and finally letting the good guys win.
• Amy Capes is based at the division of biological chemistry and drug discovery at the University of Dundee. The runner-up was Michael Wallace, of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with his article Making statistical sense of an imperfect world.
Now in its 14th year, the Max Perutz Science Writing Award encourages Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists to communicate their research to a wider audience. The 2011 competition received over 100 entries from MRC facilities and universities across the country. Twelve essays were shortlisted and judged by the MRC chief executive, Sir John Savill; the Guardian's science and environment correspondent, Alok Jha; science writer, author and broadcaster Georgina Ferry; director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, Professor Max Parmar; and the 2010 Max Perutz competition winner, Nicola Illingworth.
Researchers assumed that men who have sex with animals are of below average intelligence, until they heard from a fellow scientist
Between the yin of devoted love and the yang of bestiality lies the curious jumble of human behaviour reported in a monograph called A Case Study of Preferential Bestiality, published two years ago in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Psychologists ML Lalumiere, of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, and CM Earls, Montreal University, take us on a journey of what they hope will be understanding. They describe a "case of zoophilia that challenges the assumptions that men who have sex with animals are generally of below average intelligence and come from rural areas".
Five years earlier, Lalumiere and Earles had published a paper about "an incarcerated inmate who presented not only a strong sexual interest in horses, but also a preference for sexual interactions with mares over humans." At the time, they argued that such cases "are rare and often involve individuals suffering from mental retardation".
Then they stumbled across the new case. It shook their naïve and, they now feel, haughty view.
After their first paper came out, Lalumiere and Earles say, they received letters "from individuals who, themselves, were currently engaging in such relations. And some of these letters appeared to come from highly educated professionals."
One letter-writer was a 47-year-old man who "has published numerous scientific papers in well-known, peer-reviewed journals ... drives a luxury sports car and owns a small farm on the outskirts of a major city."
His romances had begun at the age of 17, when he had his first sexual encounter with a horse. Subsequently, "he purchased a mare, took riding lessons, and had numerous sexual interactions with her. He described his first encounter as involving a long courtship."
He had married a human woman and had two children with her, but his heart remained elsewhere. He felt saddled to the wrong wife: "Even closing my eyes and pretending she was a horse didn't work after a while."
So the man bolted. "I moved to my own house and land, taking my two mares with me. They are my mare-wives now, each day I can get out of bed, look at them out the window, and instantly see them. They come up at night to be fed. I can go out and sit with them, or stroke them or hold them or be with them at any time I want. Life's good."
Lalumiere and Earles say that, earlier, "we, like others, had presented a stereotypic but erroneous image of zoophilia".
(Thanks to Alexandra Basford for bringing this to my attention.)
Marc Abrahams
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Read the latest Information and Advice blog post from CILIP Councillor Liz Jolly.
"CILIP believes that the results of publicly funded research should be freely accessible, not only to the academic and research community but to the public as well."
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Graduate level qualifications from the USA, Canada, Australia and the EU member states are accepted in the UK. Other qualifications will have to be individually checked by CILIP.
CILIP's recriprocal agreement (pdf 139kb) with the Library Association of New Zealand allows Chartered members of CILIP who are also members of LIANZA to use the postnominal letters RLIANZA. Likewise, all LIANZA members who have achieved RLIANZA will be entitled to the use of the post nominal letters MCLIP if they join/re-join CILIP. This will apply regardless of whereabouts in the world that they work.
Also CILIP has a reciprocal agreement with the American Library Association (ALA) and the Australian Library and Information Association which means academic qualifications accredited by those bodies are accepted in the UK. This allows graduates holding American, Canadian and Australian Bachelors and Masters degrees and Graduate or Postgraduate Diplomas in library and information studies to apply for posts asking for qualified librarians and information professionals in the UK.
Library and information qualifications from EU member states are also accepted in the UK for employment purposes, provided they have been assessed as being at UK degree level or equivalent.via RSS Feed
Would you like to help save the UK’s horse chestnut trees from a destructive moth?
A JISC-funded smartphone app developed by the University of Bristol and Hull University, will appear on the BBC’s One Show this evening to encourage everyone to help save conker trees by using their mobile devices.
Horse chestnut trees, whose conker seeds are responsible for hours of autumn fun, are under attack from a moth which arrived in London in 2002 and now covers half the country. The moth’s caterpillars eat the tree’s leaves from the inside.
The research teams at the Universities of Bristol and Hull have devised a mobile phone app allowing people to upload a photo of any horse chestnut leaves they come across, either with or without the indication of alien moths, which will pin-point their location and help to build up a picture of which areas of the country are suffering most, and how bad the problem is.
Dr Darren Evans from the University of Hull said: “This is an exciting opportunity to take part in a real scientific experiment on a national scale. It’s a big mission for which we’re reliant on the public’s help. Dr Michael Pocock from the University of Bristol added: “We’ve developed the mobile phone app to make it even easier for people to take in this research project. We have over 8000 people involved so far and we’re hopeful that they will play their part in discovering more about the threat to the future of our much cherished conker trees.
“We know that the moth moves at about 30 miles a year across the UK’s horse chestnut tree population. We’d like people in south west and northern England, Wales and Scotland to take part our conker tree science project so we can understand how far the moth has travelled, and people elsewhere else to report how bad the damage is in their area,” added Dr Pocock.
David Flanders JISC’s programme manager for the project says: “Science is for everyone and now anyone carrying around a smart phone can take part. The power of involving citizens scientists by utilising new technologies is only going to get more exciting in coming years as every one of us will be carrying around scientific tools in our pockets, which means we can help scientists and have fun doing it.
“The conker tree science - leaf app demonstrates how scientists are going to need to innovate new science techniques around tools like GPS (Geospatial Positioning Software) in combination with their science so we can all be citizen scientists working in a laboratory (virtually) beside them.”
Stephen Fry, one of the most prolific and followed twitterers with just under 3 million followers, tweeted about the app last month.
The study, the largest of its kind in the UK, will give the most up-to-date picture of the spread of the moth. The records will be checked by the project team and then passed to Forest Research to add to its national database, which has been recording the spread of the moth since its arrival and now covers half of the country, including most of south-central England, East Anglia, the Midlands and has most recently spread to Tyneside and Cornwall.
Take part in the experiment and download the app from the project website.
Conker Tree Science is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (www.nerc.ac.uk) and the development of the Conker Tree Science app is supported by JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk).
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JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
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The introduction of online renewals will help save our members time. No more paper forms to fill out and return.
If you are already registered on the website:
Log in on the website using your username and password. Once you have logged in, you should see a pink "Renew your membership" button at the top of the page.
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If you want to pay by invoice or cheque, the online renewal process allows you to update all your details, including choosing your SIGs and rate. Then, instead of taking a payment online, you can print out a Renewal Sheet with all your updated details to send to us by post with your payment.
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If you are not registered yet on the website, go to http://www.cilip.org.uk/register, and create an account. You will then be able to renew online as above.
If you need more help with renewing your membership you can contact the Membership Team by phone on 020 7255 0600 or by email on membership@cilip.org.uk.
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CILIP is introducing online membership renewal. If you have any questions, please see our frequently asked questions below.
How long will the testing phase take?
Providing the testing phase runs smoothly and is successful, we aim to have the system fully operational in time for January renewals. All members renewing from January 2012 onwards will have the choice to renew online.
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Yes, members due to renew in January can indicate a preference to renew online and no longer receive a paper membership renewal form. If you would prefer to renew online, please tell us by filling in this form by the 24th October 2011.
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Yes. If you do not let us know that you would like to renew online and you are due to renew in January, you will still be able to renew online, but you will also receive a paper renewal form by post this year.
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If I can renew online without indicating a preference to, why do I need to notify CILIP?
This is so that we don't send you a paper form. Our top priority is to ensure that the move from paper to online renewals is as smooth as possible for CILIP members. Paper renewal forms will be posted to all members who do not indicate a preference in advance to renew online. Renewing online helps the environment by reducing the amount we print and also helps us work more efficiently. Paper based renewal forms are sent at least one month prior to the renewal due date. With over 10,000 members due to renew in January, indicating a preference to renew online in advance will help save CILIP time and money.
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Yes. All members can indicate a prefence to renew online and no longer receive paper renewals by post. If you would prefer to renew online from now on, please let us know by filling in the online form here.
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Will I still receive a paper renewal form if I indicate a preference to renew online?
If you have indicated a preference to renew online and no longer receive a renewal form by post, you may still receive a paper renewal form this year. Further renewal notifications will be sent by email.
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In the left hand menu you will find a selection of resources for the information ethicist.
The appearance of a resource in this list does not necessarily indicate an endorsement by CILIP and not all resources have been seen by us.
CILIP's Policy Department would be grateful for notification of any errors in bibliographic data or hyperlinks. Contact us
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One of the hallmarks of a profession is the framework of values that underpin the work of practitioners in the sector.
CILIP has developed a set of Ethical Principles and a Code of Professional Practice for Library and Information Professionals. They are available as web versions and downloads.
Download PDF version of the
Ethical Principles
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On these web pages you will find:
Ethics Blog
The Information Ethics Blog offers a point of reference for CILIP members to relate their practical experiences to the Institute's Ethical Principles and Code of Professional Practice. It provides case studies arising from the Principles and Code and encourages member discussion of ethical dilemmas in the workplace.
You need to log in or register with the CILIP website to access this blog.
Ethics Panel
CILIP also has an Ethics Panel, currently chaired by Margaret Watson, to keep the Ethical Principles and Code of Professional Practice under review and to be a source of confidential advice to members facing ethical issues in their work.
A consideration of ethical issues is an essential quality of the 'reflective' practitioner. There are rarely right or wrong answers to ethical dilemmas but more often balances that have to be found between conflicting principles.
If you have any queries relating to professional ethics, contact CILIP's Ethics Panel: ethics@cilip.org.uk.
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New title on strategies to engage children and young people in reading for pleasure.
A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust showed that only one in six UK children between eight and 17 years of age read a novel outside class every month and that 10% of the 18,000 surveyed “do not enjoy reading at all”.
Read to Succeed covers the very best innovative practice in reader development for children and young people from birth to adulthood, both in the UK and abroad. It is full of practical suggestions and inspirational ideas that can be replicated by teachers, librarians and educators.
The book is edited by Joy Court who is the national coordinator for CILIP’s Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Children’s Book Awards. Joy said, “At a time when the role of children’s librarians in both schools and public libraries is under threat I felt it was vital to have expert testimony from academics and educationalists about the importance of the contribution that libraries can make to a child’s literacy. They demonstrate that confident, successful readers cannot be grown in the classroom alone. This will, I hope, be a very timely message to deliver to the powers that be!”
This edited collection contains contributions from expert practitioners and includes a Foreword from best-selling children’s author Alan Gibbons, who paraphrased Bill Shankly and said, “Reading is not just a matter of life and death; it is much more important than that”.
There is a launch for the book on Thursday 15th September at CILIP in London, please contact James Williams to request an invite or to request a review copy.
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Press contact:
James Williams, Marketing Manager, Facet Publishing
Tel: +44 (0)20 7255 0597
Email: james.williams@facetpublishing.co.uk
Notes to editors:
1. Read to Succeed: Strategies to engage children and young people in reading for pleasure (August 2011; 288pp; paperback; 978-1-85604-747-0; £44.95) is published by Facet Publishing. It is available from Bookpoint Ltd, Mail Order Dept, 39 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4TD | Tel: +44 (0)1235 827702 | Fax: +44 (0)1235 827703 | Email: facet@bookpoint.co.uk | Web: www.facetpublishing.co.uk. The book is available in the US and Canada from Neal-Schuman Publishers www.neal-schuman.com
2. Joy Court is a Past Chair of CILIP Youth Libraries Group, a CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal Coordinator, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the National Council of UKLA.
3. All titles are available at 20% discount to Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals members. Remember to quote your Membership Number if claiming the discount.
4. Facet Publishing, is the commercial publishing and bookselling arm of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, is the leading publisher of books for library and information professionals worldwide. At the forefront of library and information development, Facet Publishing has a comprehensive list covering all the major areas of professional activity.
5. CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. CILIP’s vision is a fair and economically prosperous society underpinned by literacy, access to information and the transfer of knowledge. CILIP is a registered charity, no. 313014. Visit www.cilip.org.uk for more information.
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The testing phase for online renewals is about to begin. For further details please click here or visit our frequently asked questions page.
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JISC is live streaming its research integrity conference today, 13 September, looking specifically at the importance of good research data management.
The aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.
You are welcome to participate by submitting questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 or emailing jiscevents@gmail.com and your questions will be put to our panel.
There’s no need to register – simply join us online today from 09.45.
View resources and information about how JISC is supporting research excellence
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Autumn term is under way, and spending cuts in schools are starting to bite. Are children bearing the brunt of the coalition's austerity policies?
They are widely seen as having improved education for the children they have served. Some have been particularly praised for their support for disadvantaged young people. But, as the new term gets under way, and as government cutbacks across education and local government begin to bite, a host of projects for school-aged children are facing cuts, uncertain futures or even, in some cases, outright closure.
One highly praised project aiming to help children who are struggling with their reading is even expected to run in hundreds fewer schools this year.
Last autumn, as the chancellor prepared to deliver a speech setting out public sector spending for the next four years, England's education sector held its breath. Would school budgets be cut, as the coalition sought funding reductions from across the public sector, or would ministers decide that investment in education had to be prioritised?
In the end, George Osborne's comprehensive spending review announcement generally brought sighs of relief, as money was found to preserve school budgets, in real terms, until 2015. But beyond the headlines, many individual projects face a difficult time, particularly as schools appear to be being asked to do more with budgets that are essentially standing still.
There are at least four ways in which specific education schemes are now feeling the wind of austerity. First, ministers have removed individual "ringfenced" funding for specific education initiatives.
This money, they say, has been passed on to schools for headteachers to decide how to use it. But it is clear that individual schemes will face a fight for individual headteachers' support, given that overall budgets are not rising.
One such project is Every Child a Reader. Launched under Labour in 2008, it has offered extra catch-up teaching support for tens of thousands of infant children who are behind with their literacy. But it will be running in hundreds fewer schools this year because of the funding changes, says Julia Douetil, the scheme's national leader.
The scheme, which was praised in an independent evaluation this year for bringing demonstrable improvements to children's reading and writing, was offered for 29,020 children in 2,500 schools in 2010‑11. Douetil, an academic based at London's Institute of Education, estimates the number of schools taking it up in 2011‑12 will only be two-thirds of that figure.
Under ringfencing, money was passed from the government to individual schools identified as having children in need of extra support, who were told that they had to spend it on this particular project to support children's reading. Local authorities also received cash to employ specialist teachers to oversee the project across schools in their area. The removal of the ringfence means that money notionally allocated to the scheme nationally is now simply passed into schools' general budgets, via local authorities.
Douetil says in some areas of the country local authorities decided simply to divide all of the cash from Every Child a Reader equally among their schools. This suggests that those with large numbers of pupils needing extra support will have lost out, as funds were allocated to others whose needs were less acute.
In other local authorities the funds were passed on by councils to individual schools based on need, as they had been in previous years. But, with schools now free to spend this cash as they choose, and with budgets tight, some have opted not to go with Every Child a Reader. The overall result is the drop in numbers, expected to be confirmed later this month.
Headteacher Ann Politowski says she is "very, very sad" that her school is losing its Reading Recovery programme for year 1 pupils who are struggling with their literacy because of a shortfall in its budget. Reading Recovery is a part of Every Child a Reader, and offers half an hour a day of one-to-one tuition to each child on the programme, over 20 weeks. It also trains parents to support their child's reading.
Last year, the 150-pupil Riddings infant and nursery school, near Alfreton in Derbyshire, received £14,000 for Every Child a Reader, and another £14,000 for the similar maths programme, Every Child Counts. It used some of its own funds in addition. This year, with the formerly ringfenced funding now distributed across Derbyshire primary schools, this £28,000 shrank to £3,000. The school's overall budget has fallen by 1.5%, meaning continuing with the schemes was not an option.
Politowski says: "I'm very very sad that what was proving to be a very effective programme has had to disappear, because we were seeing the impact on individual children. First and foremost, Reading Recovery gave the children confidence, as they made so much progress: it helped them not just with reading but with all their schoolwork.That is something we really valued."
Douetil says, where once Labour provided earmarked funding for schemes it backed, this government wants to set up a "market" in improvement approaches, from which schools would choose.
"The government has challenged us to make Every Child a Reader a market-led programme," she says. "We know it's going to be a struggle because it is a major shift from something which in the past was simply provided to schools. But we have a solution which schools clearly need, so we are feeling positive."
Other education schemes that have had the ringfence around their funding removed over the past year include the related Numbers Count scheme, which offers support for pupils struggling in maths; one-to-one tuition in English and maths for seven- to-16-year-olds; "extended schools" schemes (health, childcare, after-school and breakfast clubs); and the ethnic minority achievement grant, which funds local authority support teams working with specific groups of pupils.
The second way in which education is feeling the pinch is due to local authority funding being reduced by 28% over four years. Youth services are a well-documented area of cuts. In June, MPs on the education select committee published a report saying that local authority "open access" youth services were being cut by between 20% and 100% across England. The report criticised ministers for placing their faith in a new National Citizen Service as the government's "flagship" new development in this field.
Local authority organised music services, supporting music teaching and offering pupils subsidised instrumental tuition and access to local authority-wide orchestras, are also vulnerable in some areas. Ringfenced national funding – at £83m a year – has been retained, at least for this academic year. National policy on the longer-term future of the services will not be known until the government publishes a national music plan later this term.
However, music services are funded by a combination of national budgets, local authority support and fees charged to parents. And, given the severe pressure on local authority budgets, some music services have faced major cuts. Last month, all 130 staff at Warwickshire music services were reportedly made redundant as the county scrapped its subsidy.
A third type of cut has been to schemes introduced under Labour. Careers services in schools and colleges seem likely to be reduced after the government replaced the Connexions service, which offered one-to-one advice focused on disaffected pupils, with telephone and web-based advice.
And the school sports partnerships scheme has been drastically reduced. Michael Gove, the education secretary, planned to scrap the £162m initiative but was forced into a partial U-turn last December. Now there will be £65m of annual funding until 2012-13, with efforts focused on a new school games competition. Some school sports co-ordinators have lost their jobs, and the amount of time devoted to the project has been reduced.
Finally, Creative Partnerships, which had been linking 2,500 schools a year with creative professionals to enliven the curriculum for pupils, was quietly wound up in July after its funding was axed. It was funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport via the Arts Council. Its funding was abruptly scrapped last October as part of severe cutbacks in the Arts Council's budget, and there was no compensatory funding from the Department for Education (DfE).
Paul Collard, chief executive of the charity Creativity, Culture and Education, which ran the scheme, says: "The Arts Council has taken the view that it does not really 'do' education, and the Department for Education has taken the view that it does not really 'do' culture, and we have fallen between two stools. We worked through a network of 24 organisations locally. Most of those are now closing down."
So the cuts affect projects that contributed to most facets of children's education. Their full impact will begin to be felt this year. But to critics, such as Collard, they are further evidence of young people bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the government's drive to cut the deficit.
He says: "There is a general theme right across government that funding for young people has been targeted for cuts. They are pulling up the drawbridge on young people."
The DfE says: "We're committed to ensuring that programmes designed to best support less able pupils are still available. But we've always been clear that it's for local authorities to manage their funding so that frontline services are protected – because we believe that heads of schools know how best to support their students – without unnecessary meddling from government.
"Every Child a Reader is still up and running and the money available for it is still going to schools. We're simply untying heads' hands so they can spend the money as they see fit. Over 29,000 pupils have been supported through the programme in 2010-11 and we want to see this success continue.
"Likewise, we've been clear that we want to see music education flourish. We've actually protected £82.5m funding for music services this year and are reforming the system so money is targeted where it is needed most in future."
Building Schools for the Future Labour's £55bn scheme was scrapped last year. In July, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced plans for a £2bn replacement.
Education maintenance allowance Labour's £560m scheme, offering means-tested grants to 16- to 18-year-olds of up to £30 a week, has been replaced with a £180m fund.
Sure Start Ministers say funding for Sure Start has been protected. But it is one of several schemes, now funded as part of an "early intervention" grant, whose overall funding was cut 11% this year.
School sixth-form funding Will be cut to bring it in line with that in colleges by 2015.
Booktrust schemes Funding through which the charity offers free books to children will be cut from £13m to £6m by next year.
Fiona Millar says her investigation, published in A New Conversation with Parents, shows what parents really want for their children and from their schools
The autumn term invariably starts with a mix of emotions, notably for parents with children starting a new school. My situation is slightly different. After almost 24 years as a parent, I am watching my youngest child start her final year.
In one sense it feels liberating, but in another sad. I know I will miss no longer having personal experience of seeing schools being transformed before my eyes, of meeting inspiring teachers, of knowing how hard today's young people work and of watching their characters being formed, in a positive way, by growing up with and learning from a wide cross-section of their local community.
In the torrent of often highly subjective, anecdotal comment and analysis on this subject, the experiences of the majority of parents seem to be rarely heard, which is why I was intrigued to be given the chance earlier this year to work with the charity Family Lives and the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning on a project delving into what parents really want for their children and from their schools.
Our report, published today, provides insights and challenges for schools and policymakers. On one level, it suggests that successive governments should be receiving a collective pat on the back. Nearly all the parents we polled and met, from a wide range of backgrounds and regions, were discerning and knowledgeable, getting their children into their first choice of school and feeling broadly satisfied with the provision once there.
They are exercising choice, but in a much more sophisticated and realistic way than was originally envisaged. Hard data about inspections, and test and exam results are being used, but as part of a complex, impressionistic mix of information in which proximity and "soft" local knowledge are just as important.
But in other ways, parents are moving swiftly ahead of government. The conversation inside the Westminster bubble appears largely irrelevant – very few parents had even heard of the English baccalaureate and only a tiny minority were keen on starting their own schools if dissatisfied with local provision. The majority preferred to try to improve the situation at their existing schools.
And a very clear, almost unanimous picture emerged of what that good local school should be like. Academic qualifications, good teaching and well managed behaviour matter hugely, and good levels of literacy and numeracy are particularly significant, but so too is the social and emotional development of pupils, their wellbeing and the opportunities to develop according to their specific personal or special needs.
There was a keen awareness that if children are not academic, they need to be offered other productive, engaging pathways, especially if these lead to fulfilling employment. Great importance was also attached to qualities like confidence, self-esteem, respect for others, manners, politeness and practical skills – such as being able to cook, manage a budget, understand nutrition, health and personal hygiene.
And there is a clear hunger for more and different information than a league table or government data set will ever be capable of providing. Parents want a more rounded, balanced picture of how their children and their schools are performing and not just academically. Bullying, exclusions, behaviour management, the personal development and happiness of pupils, the views of other parents and even the CVs and qualification of heads and teachers were mentioned. Moreover they want that information regularly, in an easy to digest format, preferably directly from the school, either by text, email or via the school website.
One mother of two primary-age boys told us she considered the business of educating her children to be a "puzzle". Ofsted reports and test and exam results were important, but just one small part of the picture. She summed up the views of many more parents when she said she wanted to be able to see "the whole picture".
In my 20-plus years as a parent, much has changed and for the better. Schools have improved and become more accountable. But if that process is to continue – and with parents in the driving seat, as we are constantly told is the priority – we need to think carefully about what that "bigger picture" will look like.
Schools will need to be more outward looking and open about their strengths and weaknesses, and everyone from headteachers to government ministers will need to listen carefully to what parents really want, rather than what they think we should have.
• A New Conversation With Parents: How Can Schools Inform and Listen in a Digital Age? by Fiona Millar and Gemma Wood, is published by Family Lives and the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning
Higher education should be publicly funded because it benefits us all, says Simon Marginson. Every other country's education system subsidises university teaching
Last December, when the coalition government decided to triple student fees in higher education, create economic markets at the upper and lower levels of the system, and abolish government funding for teaching in the arts, humanities and social sciences, it sent shock waves around the world.
Fees in England will be the highest anywhere, except for the US Ivy League. Will the product be better than before? Don't hold your breath. Market competition in university education sets institutions against one another, takes the heat off government because institutions and not the minister become responsible for better quality, and steepens the degree hierarchy. But there's no hard evidence to show quality improves.
These are not normal markets. Prestige institutions dominate by virtue of age and opacity. The consumer is poorly placed to arbitrate product quality and benefits more from better information than from competition. When education becomes a shopping mall, the noise of huckstering goes up, taking resources out of the classroom, while families with the greatest private wealth tend to win.
Higher education systems and their students everywhere are worried that something like the English market experiment will be introduced in their countries. Britain has been a thought leader in higher education policy. All Treasury departments are looking for an excuse to make savings.
What makes the new English higher education system especially unusual (apart from high tuition fees) is the government's belief that certain fields of knowledge create no public goods and therefore should not be publicly funded. Every other system provides taxpayer subsidies for teaching in all programmes. This is because all higher education programmes create public goods, known in economics as "externalities" – benefits received by persons other than the individual paying the fees.
In his book Higher Learning, Greater Good, US economist Walter McMahon finds the additional private earnings of graduates – usually cited in support of higher fees – constitute only 30% of the total benefits of higher education. On average, private non-market benefits received by graduates, such as better personal and family health, broader life choices and lower welfare dependence, outweigh the earnings benefits. On top of that, 50% of all benefits of higher education take the form of social externalities.
The list of these is long and includes more stable, cohesive and secure societies, more flexible labour markets, stronger civic institutions, greater cultural tolerance and enhanced democracy. Many of these collective benefits are generated in general education programmes – in humanities and sciences. These increase literacy and are a platform for vocational training at later stages. Without prior general education, vocational education is impoverished. Its graduates are less productive at work, and the people they work with are less productive too.
All societies need general education programmes. All other societies support them.
These programmes do not lead to lucrative private incomes. Yet by abolishing public subsidies in the humanities and social sciences, the government expects private graduates to finance the public goods themselves – goods that manifestly benefit employers and society. As the Americans say, "go figure".
• Simon Marginson is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne University. This article is taken from his address to the British Educational Research Association conference in London
Could Scottish students lose out as university places are offered to English school-leavers with lower A-level grades?
Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, a couple of signatories of the American Declaration of Independence and Gordon Brown all graduated from Scotland's premier university – Edinburgh. A degree from the ancient institution – recently ranked 20th in the QS world rankings, above Berkeley, California, and the London School of Economics – is the gold standard of Scottish education. But some fear that next year the creme de la creme of Scottish schools could miss out on places, turned away in favour of students prepared to pay English gold.
From next autumn, under legislation currently going through parliament, Scottish universities will be able to accept as many English, Northern Irish and Welsh students ("rest of the UK" – RUK – students) as they want – and Edinburgh recently announced it will charge them £9,000 a year in fees for up to four years.
The Scottish government will pay only £5,000 a year for Scottish students studying on many courses, and the university will have to make up the shortfall from investments and business opportunities. RUK students are seen as a way of closing the funding gap. But it may also be that the calibre of those applying to Edinburgh declines. Next year, all of England's straight-A students are to be removed from caps set by Westminster, and English universities will be "bidding" for them with scholarships and bursaries.
Currently, the prospectus minimum for entry to Edinburgh is three Bs at A-level – at the moment, this kind of offer is only made to students who are from underperforming schools or who are the first in their families to go to university. Most Edinburgh students have straight As. But, next year, offers made to RUK students may be lower than they have been in the past.
One academic, who did not want to be named, says: "One worry is that English universities are going to be offering very attractive bursaries to students who do very well in their exams, so the cream of the crop will have gone. The English students who do apply will be bringing £9,000 of funding with them and we have been told that three Bs is likely to be more of a real bar than it is at the moment."
Applying to Edinburgh would usually involve an extra year of cost plus the potentially uncomfortable situation of paying for a course that most students get for free.
Edinburgh University's vice-principal, Professor Nigel Brown, says: "Students and families will have to make their own decisions but we hope the calibre of education we offer will continue to attract the brightest students." He says the university would never deliberately set different criteria for non-Scottish students – but he admits that differences between the intakes could result as an unintended consequence of the two-tier system.
"We are in uncharted territory. We will be as careful as we can be to ensure that the quality of students we take continues to be at the highest level," says Brown. It is "highly probable", he says, that, in 2012, straight As at Scottish higher (equivalent to A-levels) will not be enough to guarantee a place at Edinburgh. "We will have to turn some very good students away."
The situation is likely be worse than usual because fewer Scots will be applying south of the border due to the fee situation. Brown is "concerned" about a proposal for some of Edinburgh's funded places to be redistributed towards lower-ranking institutions – to make up for the fact that they simply don't have the option of attracting RUK students to raise cash. Glasgow and St Andrews are likely to be in a similar situation.
The proposal to lift the cap on RUK student numbers is contained in draft legislation by the Scottish government. This should be submitted for parliamentary approval in the next few weeks.
Sir Andrew Cubie, the author of a seminal report into higher education funding in Scotland, which argued that free higher education was unsustainable, says he is concerned about the Office for Fair Access's lack of remit in Scotland. "I hope individual institutions will try to maintain the principal of equality of access for students coming from the rest of the UK as well as from Scotland," he says.
The president of Glasgow University student union, Christopher Sibbald, said: "It seems inequitable that students from Northern Ireland, Wales and England could get places here with lower marks. That will cause a lot of disquiet. At the same time, I feel sorry for them because they will be having to pay these huge tuition fees."
Edinburgh University student association's president, Matthew McPherson, said: "We call on the governments at Westminster and Holyrood to fund the education sector in a way which has fairness to access at its heart, not as an afterthought."
A St Andrews University spokesman said: "We are looking into ways in which we could increase the number of Scottish-domiciled students we accept. I can't say more than that at the present time." Glasgow University declined to comment.
A Scottish government spokeswoman said: "It is up to individual universities to manage and set their fee levels for students from the rest of the UK."
Economists warn of likely stress and absenteeism among staff when the school leaving age is raised
It's the start of the new school year. The bell's gone, 30-odd pupils have shuffled into class and you're now facing a roomful of stroppy 17-year-olds who very vocally don't want to be there.
As a teacher, this may well be your daily reality in 2015, when all young people up to the age of 18 will have to be either in full-time education or work-based training.
And based on what happened in Spain when the school-leaving age was raised from 14 to 16 in 1998, new research from economists at Lancaster University warns that schools could be hit with mass absenteeism when teachers find themselves unable to do their job because half their class isn't interested.
Colin Green, senior lecturer at Lancaster University management school, says evidence from Spain shows that raising the compulsory "participation age" is likely to result in lower job satisfaction for teachers, greater problems with stress, and and more people leaving the profession.
Employers, he points out, will have a choice as to which young people they take on. Schools, by contrast, will have a duty to accept all comers. This means there is likely to be a large cohort of teenagers who would much rather have left school, but who will be required to spend two years more with their heads in a book.
For sixth-form teachers, who have till now looked forward to lessons with keen-as-mustard – or at least moderately willing – A-level students, the dynamic of every class is likely to change dramatically, and is unlikely to be conducive to better learning outcomes for any of those involved.
Given this prospect, says Green, teachers should pay attention to how their day-to-day working lives will be affected when the school-leaving age goes up.
The study, done in collaboration with his research associate Maria Navarro, shows that as soon as Spain raised the statutory leaving age, "secondary school teacher absenteeism rose sharply – on average, by between 15% to 20%".
"And it wasn't a one-off," Green says. "Absence rates have stayed high in all the years following the reform. And the increase in teacher absenteeism has clear implications for the quality of education that students receive."
A particularly troubling finding, he notes, is that increases in teacher absence was even higher in areas where fewer children traditionally stayed on in school, reaching 40% in the worst areas."Teachers in these schools faced the largest change in the mix of students after the policy was implemented."
Of course, it's the areas with larger proportions of teenagers who would prefer to leave school that most need extra professional support. But instead, because teachers will find themselves under more pressure, classes are likely to be more disrupted, and absence rates will shoot through the roof. "There's a real danger," Green says, "that the policy will decrease the quality of education and training provision."
Green is not scaremongering. Previous research has shown that teacher absence is a cause of poor pupil achievement. Worse still, the negative effects of teachers being absent in large numbers for long periods are more severe for poorer pupils.
Given growing concern about the large numbers of young people in England who leave school with few qualifications and prospects, Green observes that the raising of the school-leaving age was virtually inevitable. "The profile of the August rioters will have added further steel to the commitment to keep under-18s inside one system or another," he says.
The problem the government faces, however, is that while many working in education might share the view that it's better for young people to remain in education or training, forcing reluctant teenagers to stay on at school may have the opposite effect to the one ministers intend. "The potential for a direct effect is clear: more students in schools and colleges will lead to more teaching hours and, in the absence of more teachers as a result of tightening budgets, either to an increase in teaching workloads or an increase in class sizes," says Green.
"All the evidence suggests that teaching and managing these students, and combining their needs with those of young people who would have chosen to stay on already, is likely to present new and difficult challenges."
Absenteeism on the scale observed by Green and Navarro in Spain is only one indicator of the impact of raising the participation age that ministers need to take note of. Green suggests that, like all employees, if teachers are not compensated in some way for a significant change in the essential nature of their work – through improvements in working conditions or increased pay – it's likely to have a negative effect on how they feel about their professional purpose.
For the policy of raising the compulsory leaving age to be successful, ministers will be heavily dependent on teachers' willingness to flex and adapt and, put bluntly, work harder in more difficult conditions.
Green suggests that the government would do well to find out what teachers feel would recompense them for the changes they'll have to make to their professional practice.
If nothing is done, he warns, "all these factors add up to the same thing – a poorer quality experience and level of opportunities for young people. There is the danger that schools will become not the hoped-for platform for development, encouragement and inspiration, but instead a 'holding' camp for a growing number of disengaged young people."
The government has done a U-turn over the funding of English classes for immigrants. But the bad news is that the timing leaves colleges in chaos
As the peak month for enrolments, September is always a busy time for colleges. But after a government U-turn on funding for English classes for immigrants (known as Esol), this year is proving chaotic.
Funding regulations announced in last November's skills strategy set out government plans to focus fully funded Esol courses on those actively seeking work, such as those claiming jobseekers allowance and employment support allowance. Learners claiming income support, working tax credits and housing benefit – who had previously been eligible for fully funded English courses – would have to pay at least half the cost of their lessons or have them funded by their employer. Many in the sector feared it could make education and training – and ultimately employment – inaccessible to those who needed it most, particularly mothers with young children, who represent a good proportion of those on inactive benefits.
But last month, just weeks away from the start of the new academic year, it emerged that the government had changed its mind. There was no big announcement; the news slipped out quietly via funding guidance documents published on the Skills Funding Agency's website.
And while the U-turn has been largely welcomed by the sector, since the news hit home at the end of August, staff in colleges up and down the country have been working flat out to manage the fallout.
Like many other institutions, London's City and Islington College had attempted to get round the proposed funding changes by devising replacement courses to attract funding from elsewhere.
The college, which generally has about 2,000 part-time Esol learners, created up to 60 new "functional skills" courses that combine vocational learning with basic literacy skills, for those who ordinarily would have done Esol courses.
Since last month's surprise announcement, the college has been trying to turn some of these new programmes back into Esol courses, but this has increased the administrative workload at an already busy time of year.
As Grant Glendinning, the college's director of lifelong learning, explains: "We've had to scrap all our original enrolment forms and invest in emergency training for our registry staff. We've also had to produce new forms for learners to declare they are actively seeking work – they need that to get the funding. It's been very time-intensive and a bit wasteful really."
But despite the hassle, he is keen to stress how pleased he is about the U-turn. What worries him most is that there may be students out there who have no idea that they are eligible for fully funded courses. "From June and July we were telling people they were not going to be eligible. How do we get the message to them that they are now eligible for Esol and get them to come back to us?" he asks.
Having found themselves in a similar predicament, staff at Bournemouth and Poole College have been pounding the streets to spread the word. Knowing that the new funding guidance would leave many students unable to pay for courses, Sue Sharkey, director of skills for life at the college, had reduced numbers for Esol classes by 75% and let go agency teaching staff (who used to make up 50% of the workforce) at the end of last term. Since the big U-turn she has been desperately trying to recruit new staff.
Over the last few weeks, teachers have been leafleting local shops, restaurants, cafes and children's centres. "At this stage in the term, we'd usually be planning lessons and drawing up class lists. Instead, we've been assessing and enrolling students from 10am to 7.30 every evening. There is a real need in the area, so we are willing to do this to expand our student numbers. But if only we'd known about it earlier ..."
Things are also chaotic at City College Brighton and Hove, which has replaced almost half of its Esol classes with newly created "functional skills". "We'd love to switch some of the new courses back to Esol, but doing that at this late stage in the day would be like turning round a juggernaut," says Simon Chandler, team leader for Esol at the college.
Chris Taylor, programme director at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, is not surprised to hear colleges are feeling the pressure. "What we have now is a fairly confused picture, with many providers at different stages in terms of understanding the latest advice and guidance," she says.
Glendinning says the timing of the U-turn is potentially damaging to colleges' credibility. "A lot of our students hear about courses via word of mouth so it could look like we've been telling them porky pies. And our planning – which was actually very good – looks a bit undermined."
A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "The government has repeatedly taken action to lessen bureaucratic restrictions on colleges. The introduction of some additional flexibility for colleges to provide subsidised training for people on a wider range of benefits is a continuation of this process.
"English language training can be a vital step towards finding employment, and the government is committed to effective local provision."
But given the fact that an extensive campaign against the changes had been running since the start of the year, led by Esol teachers, what college staff really want to know is why it took the government so long to arrive at a decision.
On the Guardian Teacher Network you can find resources for Roald Dahl Day, which this year marks 50 swishwiffling years since James and the Giant Peach was first published
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network
13 September is Roald Dahl Day, celebrated every year on what would have been the writer's birthday. This time, it is 50 swishwiffling years since Dahl's classic tale James and the Giant Peach was first published and you can find resources to help the day go with a swing on the Guardian Teacher Network.
You can download everything needed to hold your own Peach Party. The pack includes well thought-out and imaginative activities specially created by Puffin Books.
The teachers' resource pack has ideas on how to teach the Peach, including how to use the book to explore themes of friendship, nature and travel.
Children can join the mission to roll James's Giant Peach around the world by sending their own Peach-gram, mirroring the incredible journey James and his friends made in the book. A print-out can be downloaded. More information here.
Schools and families can book visits to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden and see the Gipsy House garden where Dahl wrote many of his tales.
Quentin Blake, Dahl's principal illustrator, will talk, draw and answer questions live on 28 September from 2.15 to 3pm. The event is taking place in front of 2,000 school children in the Royal Festival Hall, and you can join them online if you register on www.quentinblakevirtuallylive.co.uk.
New for Roald Dahl Day 2011 is Dahlicious Dress-up Day, when school children are invited to dress up as their favourite Dahl characters on Friday 30 September to help raise funds for Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity. For more information see www.roalddahlcharity.org/schools.
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This is being added to every day: more than 40,000 teachers have already registered. To see (and share) for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are hundreds of jobs on the site and schools can advertise free: schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.
Does it benefit premature babies to be held close up to their mother while listening to the strains of a harp?
You might think that an Israeli Medical Association report called Combining Kangaroo Care and Live Harp Music Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Setting is the first medical study of the combined effects, on newborns, of kangaroo care and music therapy. Not so.
The invention of kangaroo care (also called kangaroo therapy) is widely attributed to a pair of doctors in Colombia in the late 1970s. Initially, both the idea and the name triggered scepticism. Thus the appearance in 1990 of a paper called Kangaroo Care: Not a Useless Therapy, in a magazine published by America's National Association of Neonatal Nurses.
The idea of kangaroo care is for premature babies to spend most of their time being held or pressed against the mother, the two maintaining direct "skin-to-skin" contact. This was meant as a substitute for incubators in places where those were unavailable. Later, some doctors and nurses began recommending that even the most modern hospitals adopt the practice.
Eventually came attempts to see whether – or not – kangaroo care produces good effects. Research journals began publishing studies, including the provocative Kangaroo Care Modifies Preterm Infant Heart Rate Variability in Response to Heel Stick Pain: Pilot Study.
Then someone got the idea of adding music. Researchers at several institutions in Taiwan combined forces to performed an experiment, documented in a 2006 paper, Randomised Controlled Trial of Music During Kangaroo Care on Maternal State Anxiety and Preterm Infants' Responses, in the International Journal of Nursing Studies.
The Taiwan experimenters had mothers and premature babies snuggle skin-to-skin while listening to recorded music emanated, for 60 minutes, from a Philips AZ-1103 ghetto-blaster. At the same time, other mothers and preemies neither snuggled skin-to-skin nor heard recorded music.
The researchers found that the kangaroo'ed babies slept a bit more than the non-kangaroo'ed babies, and cried a bit less. And, they say, the kangarooing mothers gradually felt ever-so-slightly lessened anxiety.
As for the babies' health – the main reason people recommend kangaroo care – they reported "no significant difference on infants' physiologic responses" between those who got kangarooing and music, and those who did not.
The new Israeli kangaroo-plus-harp-music study also reports that their particular "combined therapy had no apparent effect on the tested infants' physiological responses or behavioural state".
But a similar study – which the Israeli study does not mention – done in Finland and published online a year earlier by the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy reported that kangaroo therapy accompanied by live harp music "did" affect the medical state of the child. The Finns say that it "decreased the pulse, slowed down the respiration and increased the transcutaneous O2 saturation", and "affected the blood pressure significantly".
And so doctors and nurses must await further research before they know the value of prescribing kangaroo care with live harp music.
(Thanks to Andrea Halpern for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
• This article was amended on 13 September to include a credit at the end
While many candidates for Chartership find suitable mentors quickly and with reasonable ease, some find it more difficult. The following information and advice should help all candidates to find a mentor in the shortest possible time:
About the mentors
CILIP mentors are volunteer professionals with demanding day jobs but willing to give of their own time to help fellow lis workers working towards the CILIP qualifications. The CILIP Mentor Register has over 600 mentors already working with mentees but currently with capacity to take on 600+ additional mentees. New mentors are being added all the time. They all undertake mentor training and are in contact with other mentors to share ideas and issues. The majority of mentors are willing to mentor candidates from any organisation in any sector.
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The mentor list
Names and contact details of mentors can be found on the CILIP website. Log in as a CILIP member to view the regional lists.
Mentors are encouraged to put their profile on CILIP Communities for potential mentees to view. Those who have will be accessible via the 'mentor profile' link.
The mentor should email the Quals team quals@cilip.org.uk to inform them that a new mentoring relationship has been entered into.
We aim to ensure that the list is up to date at all times. Please contact us if you are unable to find a mentor.
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Preparing to search for a mentor
Don't take a narrow approach
Be aware that:
Approaching a potential mentor
If you experience difficulty in finding a mentor
... don't let time drift on - if you have followed the guidance, have really been trying and have still not found a mentor do what the Mentor Scheme Guidelines tell you to do and contact QPD by e-mailing quals@cilip.org.uk. We can make some direct approaches and/or put out a plea on the mentor e-discussion list.
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Growing your own mentor
If you know someone through your workplace, your CILIP Branch or a special interest group, who you think would be a suitable mentor, why not ask them if they would be willing to mentor you? They can register, undertake training and go on the Mentor Register either as a "one-off", i.e. just mentoring you, or as a mentor willing to take on other mentees.
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... and while you are waiting to meet up with your mentor ...
Make sure that you have read the Chartership Handbook, downloaded the templates and forms, looked at examples on the CILIP website and started to reflect on your development and how you can present it in your application - this will get you off to a good start and enable you to get the maximum benefit from the mentoring relationship.
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