The centre contains a current awareness collection focusing on the LIS sector and the needs of the LIS professional, and includes:
The Centre is WiFi enabled - ask reception or the Information and Advice Team for a password.
A photocopier and printer is provided (10p per sheet).
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HEFCE and JISC are moving forward in delivering cloud-based services for UK education and research.
Since announcing a £12.5 million fund in February that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better value for money by working together more effectively (note 1), HEFCE and JISC are now able to confirm the projects and partners appointed to deliver the two parts of this work: a national cloud infrastructure and supporting services.
JANET (UK) will deliver the national brokerage to aid procurement of cloud services between higher education institutions and commercial suppliers and Eduserv will provide a pilot cloud infrastructure for higher education institutions. Other partners include De Montfort, Exeter, Edinburgh, Kent, Liverpool John Moores, Oxford, Leicester, Southampton and Sunderland universities (see note 2 for a full list of partners).
So that colleges and universities can gain the most benefit from this new cloud-based infrastructure, four new services will be developed to drive its adoption:
• A new specialist team set up by JISC Advance to provide support for procuring and implementing administrative systems and services.
• A shared service to help universities manage the administration of their research operations, from research proposal through to project completion.
• A service to support the secure distribution of graduation documents and transcripts for the benefit of students and prospective employers.
• A service to support libraries in the administration of their electronic resources, which will include the management of their licensing and subscription of electronic journals.
David Sweeney, HEFCE Director – Research, Innovation and Skills, explains the value this suite of work will have once complete, "In the current economic climate all education organisations are looking for further ways to work together, share resources and reduce costs. This programme of work will provide data management and storage services, plus a suite of tools to help universities and colleges, researchers and administrators work more effectively across the research management lifecycle. This will reduce duplication and increase the efficiency of administrative and research processes."
David Utting JISC Director of Service Relationships commented, "Cloud-based services have the potential to bring enormous efficiencies and benefits to higher education institutions and we look forward to working with them to realise these. But we acknowledge that it is vital to demonstrate to users the security and robustness of working in an education and research cloud.
"There have been a number of high-profile issues with data being stored in public clouds, which is why we are working with JANET (UK) to deliver a private higher education cloud to ensure universities can trust that their information and data will be secure."
For further information visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/umf.aspx
Notes
1. This £12.5 million is part of the University Modernisation Fund. For further information see ‘Shared services in cloud computing to be funded by HEFCE’
2. Who is involved?
The University of Exeter will lead the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) work between the universities of Exeter, Kent, and Sunderland to procure, develop and implement a cloud-based research management and administration system based on a need identified by earlier feasibility studies funded by HEFCE.
De Montfort University is developing an enterprise service bus (ESB) solution to demonstrate interoperability between local and cloud systems for shared administrative applications, starting with RMAS.
JISC Collections will manage the electronic resource management support service which builds on work by JISC and the Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL).
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at University of Edinburgh will develop data management tools and training capability. This will support the production and implementation of data management plans for universities and their researchers to preserve data for sharing, re-use and citation.
A consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University will develop the secure document service.
Four projects will produce software applications which can be delivered as a service from the cloud. They will support researchers with their work and data management and comprise:
• Leicester University is providing support for joint NHS and university research teams working with tissue samples and anonymised patient data.
• The University of Oxford is providing a database to a wide range of researchers in the arts, humanities and other disciplines. Oxford will also provide an integrated set of tools to manage data within Life Sciences and other similar research projects. This will make it easier to submit data for longer-term storage in an appropriate standards compliant data repository.
• The University of Southampton is providing electronic lab data management and collaborations tools.
via Jisc news
Do you like a smoodge or a swallie, and do you stagger after a Mick Jagger? Wherever you are in Scotland your weather is bound to be oorie, chilpy or dreich. Scots Words and Place-names wants to hear about how people are using Scots words – this is all about your contribution to a totally new, interactive way of collecting the language you speak.
The JISC-funded Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP) project , launching on 21st June and based at the University of Glasgow, is trying to find out more about the language that people speak in their everyday lives in different parts of Scotland.
SWAP will use social media to encourage the public to talk about the Scots words they use, helping create the next Scots dictionaries. There is a Facebook page and Twitter feed (@Scotswap) alongside the SWAP website.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said, "Websites that ask for public contributions, like the BBC's NatureWatch, work best when their goal really resonates with their audiences. In the Scots Words and Place-names project, University of Glasgow researchers have found a fantastic way of using technology to open up and share the everyday words of the Scots population."Contribute the words you know on the Facebook page and Twitter feed (@Scotswap) or via the SWAP website.Scots is largely a spoken language, yet research into the way people speak it relies mainly on books and other written sources. The SWAP project is the public’s chance to get involved with academic research. They want contributions from anyone who uses Scots words and the resources available on the website will grow as the public add their own knowledge.
The results will add to the word collections of Scottish Language Dictionaries, helping form new Scots dictionaries, and contribute to knowledge of Scots place-names, enhancing the work of the Scottish Place-Name Society. Information gathered will be added into a Scots place-name glossary to supplement the dictionary-based research which was used to create it.
The project is also running a competition throughout June on Glow, the Scottish schools intranet, with judges including the novelist Louise Welsh. This aims to get children and teachers using Scots in schools. The entries have been enlightening so far, including discussions of Scots words from ‘dumfoonerin’ to ‘bahookie’.
Professor Carole Hough of the University of Glasgow, principal investigator of the project, said, “Research into the Scots language, and Scottish place-names, has really taken off in recent years. This project is a great opportunity to share it with the public, and to get more insights from local knowledge.”
[image designed by 20:7 Design ]
via Jisc news
CILIP CEO, Annie Mauger, spoke today about professionally led library services in the Big Society. Annie stressed the importance of librarians working in collaboration with communities:
“The Big Society is all about involvement. It’s about communities working with professionals to make sure they get the best services. It’s about those decisions being based on understanding and knowledge of what the options are, the opportunities and potential of library services to open up doors to education, information and literacy in a safe and impartial environment.”
Annie stressed that professional staff understand the information needs of the communities they serve, and can plan to meet them. That librarians are trained to deliver impartiality, neutrality and safety. As a result libraries are an impartial and trusted source of information.
She had words of caution for Councils considering completely handing over the running of libraries to local communities. That training, co-ordinating and supporting volunteers would need increased capacity. Also, that volunteer-run libraries will only work in communities where people have the time, skills and access to funding to do so. In communities where people and families are struggling, where public library services are so vital, they are the least likely to be able to volunteer.
Also speaking at the conference were Libraries Minister Ed Vaizey, Chief Executive of Arts Council England Alan Davey and Natasha Innocent, Public Sector Partnership Manager for Race Online.
-ends-
Press contact:
Mark Taylor, Head of Corporate Marketing and Media Relations, CILIP
Tel: 020 7255 0654
Mobile: 07792 635 305
Email: mark.taylor@cilip.org.uk
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From Hackney Downs to AC Grayling
It was nice to learn that Michael Barber is making world-class money working for Pearson (Mad professor goes global, 14 June). But it's sad that he is still quoted as defending the closure of Hackney Downs school in 1995 as some kind of triumph. The hurried closure of the school in December 1995 had a disastrous effect on the education of many of the boys, especially those in their final GCSE year. The history of the closure is one of educational neglect, political machinations and deionisation of the school, teachers, students and their families. Perhaps Barber was right to boast that the stand taken became the foundation of New Labour's education policy. It could stand as a metaphor for the increase in inequalities in the education system and the continuing punitive measures aimed at schools in poorer areas.
Professor Sally Tomlinson
University of Oxford
• Peter Wilby misses one of Michael Barber's greatest successes. Barber was also a member of Lord Browne's review of higher education funding. He was not the only horse out of the McKinsey stable involved in the review. There was also Peter Sands, the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank, who spent 13 years at McKinsey. Indeed, there are many of us who believe that Browne's report would have been much more honestly entitled "the McKinsey report", but this would have drawn attention to the privatisation agenda underlying its recommendations.
Professor John Newsinger
Bath Spa University
Yup, James Dyson is the obvious choice to spearhead the revival of British manufacturing by repurposing design technology education ('It's not about banging nails into wood', 14 June). You conjure up problems: disappointment that the wheel on your wheelbarrow is not a bright orange plastic football; the frustration of not being able to watch the muck you've hoovered up whizzing round inside the machine. And then, having built a business out of that, you dump a big chunk of your workforce and send their jobs overseas. To me "British manufacturing" means people employed in the UK, paying UK taxes to finance, among other things, design technology education.
Root Cartwright
Radlett, Hertfordshire
Sue Littlemore asked whether vice-chancellors are becoming heads of customer sevices, following a rise in student complaints.
When you pay, you've got rights to complain. When you pay a lot, you've got rights to complain a lot.
jekylnhyde via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Student anger should be directed at the government, which has cut university funding and is making students pick up the bill. The universities will have no more money, while being expected to deliver enhanced services.
coffeetable via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Harriet Swain wrote a step-by-step guide to starting your own university in the manner of AC Grayling.
I find it difficult to see what the fuss is all about. AC Grayling is only doing this to highlight the cuts that humanities departments have suffered.
beth23 via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• A perfect skewering. (I'm still chuckling as I'm typing.)
2baz via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Journalism of the lowest order.
Lionel via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Could the work of an heiress who recreated miniature crime scenes in fantastic detail have anything to teach today's detectives?
Frances Glessner Lee, the giant astride the world of miniature crime scenes, died nearly 50 years ago. Lee built a collection of what she called "nutshell studies", each a tiny, high-precision recreation of a room in which a murder had been committed.
Each featured a little victim, in or on whom the wee murder weapon was embedded or enwrapped. The many lavishly grim elements of each diorama were, mostly, copped and composited from stories of real crimes.
Lee and her nutshell studies have a context. She endowed an entire, entirely new programme at Harvard Medical School: the department of legal medicine. The concocted crime scenes served as its mesmerising centre of activity.
The authorities know that Lee manufactured her evidence from whole cloth, sliced wallpaper, glass, wood, paint, and other materials. They know that she bankrolled the entire operation. They know that she enlisted the aid of a carpenter, a pricey interior decorating firm, and a company that makes dolls' houses. They know that she conspired with a large number of police officers, whom she plied with lavish meals and strong drink. No one has entirely figured out her motive.
Lee, the heiress of a wealthy Chicago farming-equipment manufacturing family, chose the department's first (and only) leader – a dashing male doctor, her brother's Harvard classmate, whom she had kept very much in mind during the decades that preceded her inheritance.
Several times a year, she would invite and fund police officers and medical examiners from across the US, 30 or 40 at a time, to travel to her Harvard seminar in homicide investigation. Everyone would examine and discuss the miniature rooms, then go and dine together in splendour at one of Boston's finest hotels. Lee even bought the hotel a costly set of china for use exclusively at these dinners.
Author-photographer Corinne May Botz crafted a book called The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Published in 2004, it shows appropriately disturbing close-up photos of the artificial crime scenes.
Botz also reproduces the short descriptive texts that each visiting law-enforcement official was expected to read in connection with his (they were, apparently, all men) visit to Lee and her educational programme.
The US National Library of Medicine has put several of Botz's photos online. A documentary film, Of Dolls and Murder, is scheduled to come out this summer, with creepy John Waters narrating.
Lee-style fantastically detailed miniature crime-scene recreations never became a standard tool for crime-scene investigators. But their spirit lives on. There is now something of a police vogue for crime incident diagramming software, polyflex forensic mannequins, and mini tubular dowel crime-scene reconstruction kits.
The Harvard department of legal medicine did not long survive the passing of its founder and funder. Its crown jewels, the little rooms, went south and now reside at the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office in Baltimore.
(Thanks to the Meusey/Baguley family for bringing this to my attention.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Andrew Adonis is championing a technical baccalaureate for all schools
Susan's best subjects are PE, ICT and art. But, despite showing talent in all three, the 14-year-old has been told by her teachers that she can only take one as part of her GCSE courses next year. Her school is keen to get as many of its pupils as possible to achieve the new English baccalaureate, or Ebacc.
To do so, pupils must obtain A*-C grades in five GCSE subjects specified by ministers: English; maths; two sciences; ancient or modern history or geography; and a modern or ancient language.
With teachers diverted to these subjects, the school can no longer offer many of the more vocationally oriented subjects that Susan and her friends had hoped to take.
It's something Andrew Adonis, the former schools minster, takes issue with. Adonis says it is "extraordinary" that a government that believes in decentralisation "should be dictating from the centre that it is more important to study modern history than engineering".
"Competence in vocational skills is at least as useful as knowledge of the Tudors and Stuarts," he says, ahead of Vocational Qualifications Day tomorrow. "And that is effectively the trade-off." The Ebacc neglects "crucial" areas of the economy, such as information technology, he says, when these are "huge employment sectors".
On the other hand, it's important to keep a sense of balance, Adonis warns. The Ebacc is just five subjects and most pupils take eight, nine or 10 GCSEs. Besides, there is scope for developing vocational elements within the five subjects of the Ebacc. Modern languages could include an option of business language skills rather than literature, he suggests.
"The Ebacc is perfectly compatible with a technical curriculum because it's only five GCSEs and within them it is possible to study subjects in a more applied manner," he says. "However, there is an argument that the Ebacc is too rigid. There is a case for reforming it."
Ideally, Adonis says, a technical baccalaureate should be offered alongside the Ebacc.
The education charity Edge, which promotes technical and practical learning and of which Adonis is a trustee, is working closely with the Baker Dearing Educational Trust to come up with such a qualification. Under the plans, seen exclusively by Education Guardian, pupils aged 14 to 16 would spend 60% of their time studying for GCSEs in English, maths, science and another subject. The rest of their time would be taken up with a technical qualification, such as an engineering diploma or a construction course. They would also be expected to study a language, but not necessarily to GCSE standard.
This would be known as a Professional Technical Baccalaureate, and the organisations hope it would be used as a measurement in school league tables, as the Ebacc is now, and offered in all schools. The pupils who take it might well go on to further education colleges after their studies.
The new university technical colleges would be the first to teach it. These are new schools for 14- to 19-year-olds that will teach engineering, product design, health sciences, construction, environmental services and food technology. Their school day will be longer than most, and pupils will also be expected to study English, maths and science, as well as humanities and foreign languages.
One of these schools has already opened in Staffordshire – across the road from its sponsor, the big machinery maker JCB – and there is government support and funding to set up another 15.
Further education colleges may want to be involved in teaching the new baccalaureate, too. They can provide vocational education to a far greater number of students than the university technical colleges can on their own.
Adonis says he is "strongly in favour" of this alternative baccalaureate because a high degree of competence in vocational skills "enhances the employability of young people and their success in life".
Peter Mitchell, chief executive of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, is convinced that the Professional Technical Baccalaureate would raise the standard of general and technical education in the UK to that of its international competitors. It would also address the shortage of highly skilled technicians the country has "up to and including at graduate level", and the need to grow the engineering and technical elements of the UK's gross domestic product.
"The Professional Tec Bacc would consist of a demanding education with high-quality, rigorous technical qualifications at its heart. We hope that the achievement of this Bacc would be shown alongside the English Bacc in school and college performance tables," Mitchell says.
Sue Betts is director of Linking London Lifelong Learning Network, which is based at Birkbeck, University of London, and which helps those who take vocational courses to go to university. She says that if the Professional Tec Bacc and the Ebacc were given equal standing, the idea could be a success. Too often, vocational courses are considered inferior to academic ones, she says.
But she worries about which courses the Professional Tec Bacc might displace. "There are tried and tested qualifications, such as BTecs in IT. "These are known to be as good a route to university as A-levels are," she says. "We don't want to destabilise the qualifications that work."
In his foreword to Professor Alison Wolf's review of vocational education, published in March, Michael Gove, the education secretary, says that wasting the talents of young people is a "special tragedy because we know that encouraging genuine, high-quality, vocational education can guarantee access to further and higher education and rewarding employment".
Gove says the kind of courses that lead to a "passionate understanding of, and commitment to, the joy of technical accomplishment are immensely valuable".
It is enticing to try to invent ways into this kind of rewarding employment. But some people will wonder whether we need yet another vocational qualification, when the number of them has increased already by 4,000% in the last six years, and Wolf is in the process of sorting out which vocational qualifications should no longer be deemed equivalent to GCSEs.
Twenty years after graduating from Cambridge, Mary O'Hara talks to students who benefited from Oxbridge outreach schemes, but think more work needs to be done
Listening to Michelle Obama tell a group of inner-city London schoolgirls last month that they have as much of a right to aspire to Oxbridge as anyone, it all came flooding back: the many times when I felt – or was told – that the hallowed halls of Britain's top universities were not "for the likes of me".
There was the time a bloke trying to chat me up in a pub in Belfast almost choked on his pint when told I went from a comprehensive in a deprived part of the city to Cambridge. "People from St Louise's don't go to Cambridge," he spluttered. "They do now," I said. Or when my teachers first suggested I apply, and I felt mortified at the prospect of going somewhere I believed would be stuffed with privileged kids who would look down on me. And then how I was so out of my depth at the interviews I was left feeling stupid and inadequate. I may have been a bright, hardworking student, but unlike my equivalents at private or selective schools, I wasn't "groomed" to get into Oxbridge, and it showed.
I recalled the time a student from a wealthy background asked me after my arrival at Cambridge why I was there if my father hadn't been there. And the time I was dining in "formal hall" and a revered academic told the assembled crowd how important tradition was and that colleges should do what they could to make sure "our" children attend in later years.
That was 20 years ago. Just last week a report from the OECD showed that the UK today performs poorly in an international league table showing how many disadvantaged pupils succeed "against the odds" at school. I was one of the lucky few.
As it turns out, regardless of coming from a low-income background (my father, a bricklayer, lost his job in the early years of Thatcher and never worked again), and despite being the first from my school to get to Oxbridge and the only person from my family to attend university, I loved my time at Cambridge. There may have been episodes of abject snobbery and the galling sight of over-privileged hoorays sauntering around with their whiff of entitlement – the very thing that almost put me off applying in the first place – but there was also a first-rate education, a stimulating environment and the opportunity to mix and make friends with people from right across the social spectrum.
I'd earned my place and knew that I, and others like me, had every right to be there. The problem is that having a right to go – these are public universities after all – is not the same as having an equal opportunity to go. Or, it turns out, an equal opportunity to reach the upper echelons of a profession upon leaving.
Perhaps Michelle Obama's speech resonated because it was 20 years ago this month that I graduated. But it's more likely due to the toxic debates around Oxbridge access and social mobility dominating the news in recent months, and the glaring absence of the voices of those of us who made it to the "elite" universities despite the heavy odds stacked against us.
So what is it like now to be one of those (still) very few students from a disadvantaged background who make it to Oxbridge? And, importantly, what, if any, difference does it make to social mobility when the numbers getting in are so small? According to the latest statistics from Oxford, just under 10% of undergraduates come from families with an annual income of less than £16,290, the level for free school meals. Research shows that the professions – particularly the upper echelons – are dominated by Oxbridge, but especially by the privately educated. What signal does that send from the outset?
For the last few weeks, I've been interviewing current Oxbridge students and graduates from low-income backgrounds. First, I canvassed their views on access. Second, I wanted their views on how an Oxbridge education affects social mobility. Is it a one-way ticket to the top?
On access, the universities both do extensive work in this area, but our interviewees were almost in total agreement: Oxbridge needs to do even more to reach out to children and schools in deprived areas. Everyone I spoke to was worried about the end of Aimhigher, the national scheme aimed at raising university aspirations, which officially winds up next month. New access agreements for all universities are due to be published on 11 July.
Rebecca Creamer, a student at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, describes her background as "modest". She went to school in Failsworth, Manchester. She says the interview process intimidated her more than she expected and that when she met other candidates it "opened my eyes" to how privileged some other applicants were. It took her "ages to adjust" and she felt that the culture shock was "huge". She also felt for a long time that she didn't fit in, and that there was an extremely visible cohort of public school people. "Everyone else seemed to have this public school confidence". Creamer believes some of the outreach work that is done is misdirected and more should be targeted at schools where applications to top universities are not necessarily considered. "It needs to be better concentrated on people who wouldn't necessarily think of applying."
Creamer says it doesn't help that the universities defend themselves on access with a false dichotomy between "private" versus "state" school ratios (both universities point out that more than 50% of intake is now from state schools) rather than addressing the discrepancies between inner-city or underrepresented schools and selective state and public schools.
Aimee Cliff, currently at Keble College, Oxford, agrees, saying that while outreach "is always important" it is "fundamental" that those who most need it are reached.
Andy McGowan, a young carer of two disabled parents from the age of six, who got a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 2007 and who is now an access officer at Cambridge University Students' Union, says the image of Oxbridge as elitist still puts young people off whatever outreach is being done. "I think a big thing is not thinking it is for 'people like me', which is what I hear time and time again. It isn't helped by some politicians going for the easy target and attacking Oxbridge."
Fahim Alam, who studied law at Oxford from 2004 to 2007, goes further. He says the activity around promoting applications from poorer children including outreach and visits to colleges are mere "peripheral interventions" and "too little too late". Too much focus being put on what the universities do, Alam argues, means that systemic problems with the wider education and social system are left unaddressed. Like others, he is adamant that the wider education system needs to improve dramatically if more youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds are to get in to university, let alone Oxbridge, both in terms of generating competitive grades and in preparing children adequately.
"Interventions [such as outreach] aren't enough to correct a system of education which privileges some over others," he says. "Furthermore, access is predicated on having social and cultural capital in order to navigate a way through a system that is completely alien to people from a non-traditional background."
It is this lack of cultural and social capital – the family contacts, exposure to professional networks and carefully honed social skills – that many students and graduates believe (and researchers conclude) is the crucial missing link in the social mobility chain. Alongside issues of access, many argue it is this that directly affects the longer-term prospects and social mobility of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, including the few who have an elite education under their belts.
Rob Berkeley, who matriculated at Oxford in 1993 and is now head of The Runnymede Trust, encapsulated what many of those interviewed said. "I felt socially inadequate and that my life experience was far from normal," he says, speaking of the well-connected, hyper-confident public school contingent he encountered who were consummate networkers. "There is a great deal of conspicuous wealth on show. One morning, the hunt left from outside college. These are not normal experiences." Berkeley enjoyed his time at Oxford, thanks to the quality of education and the variety of people he met, but his experience nevertheless caused him to question the wider system.
"The problem is when these networks become the people running the country and it is clear that they have had very little contact with people who have experience of marginalisation."
Cliff says she worries that broader inequalities in society play such an influential role in overall outcomes for students. "I do think the system is unfair sometimes. That [where you end up] is determined by where you were born." Creamer adds that while graduates from less-well-off backgrounds probably are helped by having an Oxbridge degree, she is "unconvinced" that it is a genuine springboard to the top of the professions.
Alam, now a freelance researcher, says that the wider social problems around race, identity and poverty and how these play out in the education system and beyond deserve greater attention. The lack of "brown faces" at Oxford was a shock for Alam, but he stresses that this was only one aspect of the difficulties some young people face before, during and, crucially, after university. "Every child needs to be nurtured from a young age. Children who come from poorer or racial/ethnic minority backgrounds have so many traumas behind them and so many obstacles in front of them."
The evidence seems to suggest that the same things which deter youngsters from less well-off backgrounds (and indeed many from families on modest incomes) from applying to Oxbridge are the same hurdles blocking their path to the top after graduation.
David Johnston, chief executive of The Social Mobility Foundation, a charity that helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to aim for Russell Group universities and the professions, says the impact of feeling that Oxbridge "is not for the likes of us" can't be emphasised enough. Research among the youngsters the foundation helps found that just 14% cited financial reasons as an obstacle to Oxbridge application, but 48% said "not being for them" influenced decisions.
On top of this, Johnston argues, the lack of connections or exposure to people in the professions serves to reinforce the educational and social divide. And, he says, it is frequently the lack of long established connections as well as networking and carefully honed "social skills" that hinder young people from poorer backgrounds in entering the professions. "Children who go to public schools have connections. They tend to be groomed for Oxbridge. The top professions – law, the media, banking and finance – are the hardest to get into without connections. We are working with firms to try to change this."
Studies by The Sutton Trust, which among other things runs summer schools for disadvantaged youngsters, reinforces Johnston's conclusions. "Many non-privileged children still exhibit an 'Oxbridge is not for the likes of us' attitude", says Lee Elliot Major, its director of policy and research. "We shouldn't underestimate the often stereotyped perceptions of Oxbridge that persist." The trust will publish a new study soon that shows family background is a major influence on attainment at age 15. "This underlies the fact that attainment at school drives much of the admission trends at Oxbridge."
Elliot Major says that if young people from less-well-off backgrounds are to make their mark in professions later in life, the issue of attainment well before university has to be a priority. "Half of state school teachers said they wouldn't advise their brightest pupils to consider Oxbridge. Advice and guidance in state schools, meanwhile, is in urgent need of reform."
Twenty years on from my graduation, it is upsetting that many of the barriers my generation faced are so prevalent for poorer youngsters today; that they are still so underrepresented in our top universities, and that those from privileged backgrounds retain their stranglehold on the professions. Just 7% of children are privately educated, yet they account for more than half of top doctors, judges and barristers.
Would I advise young people from my background to apply to Oxbridge? Absolutely. If left unchallenged, elitism will continue. But with the best will in the world, placing the responsibility for change on individuals pushing for the top despite an education system that favours the privileged won't cut it. While well-meaning and inspiring, Michelle Obama was wrong to say that hard work is enough. Our society is rife with inequalities. As long as these endure, too many young people will continue to see both the top universities and the top jobs as "not for the likes of me".
• Mary O'Hara is a journalist and Alistair Cooke Fulbright scholar
• This article was amended on 21 June, to correct the name of Fahim Alam's university.
Will the long-awaited white paper give private colleges the boost they are looking for?
As the dust settles on the launch of AC Grayling's New College of the Humanities (and rarely can so much spin and marketing have generated so many column inches), attention turns to the more serious business of the higher education white paper, expected soon.
The two are linked since this much-delayed policy paper should determine how far the government intends to push its mission to boost the private higher education market. The direction of travel was set soon after the general election, when ministers granted university college status to the BPP University College of Professional Studies.
BPP is owned by the for-profit US education corporation, Apollo Group, which runs the fast-growing Phoenix University, where student enrolment has mushroomed from about 20,000 to almost half a million over 15 years. Does the future lie with multinational, for-profit, education companies? Compared with the booming echo of the expansion plans of this commercial giant, the New College of the Humanities is muted sherry party chatter.
There is potential for the private market to expand in Britain. Globally, private institutions deliver about 30% of higher education, yet in the UK it is much less. Exactly how much less is hard to say as, according to a recent report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), private providers are not required to report student enrolment numbers.
BPP is currently one of only four private providers with their own UK degree-awarding powers. And, although the private sector already operates in higher education in other ways, it remains niche, providing mainly professional, graduate-level qualifications in business, management, law and finance.
So looking to the market to expand mainstream undergraduate teaching requires a leap of faith. But as well as its ideological commitment to the market, the government (or at least the Conservative bit of it) desperately wants to find ways of boosting the supply of undergraduate places at little or no cost to the taxpayer. It also hopes that competition from private providers will reduce unit costs among traditional universities.
The for-profit sector certainly sees opportunities in the UK once the cap on tuition fees rises to £9,000. The principal of BPP, Carl Lygo, told a parliamentary committee last month he has "aspirations to make a wider subject offering" than the current focus on business, law and health. He noted that Apollo already runs universities in arts, communications and wider health subjects, and that "is certainly the aspiration for BPP".
So what does the white paper need to do to boost the private sector? A big risk for private universities is that their degree-awarding powers are only granted for a six-year period. If they lose those powers, their entire business case collapses. Extending that period, or making it permanent, would encourage market entrants.
The other big issue is public subsidy. In the US, for-profit private universities rely almost entirely on student fees since they lack endowments or direct public funding. However, as a recent University and College Union study of the US model showed, there is an indirect public subsidy behind their fee income since students at private universities in the US are eligible for federal student aid. Indeed, it has been claimed that without this indirect subsidy the model would barely be profitable.
At present, in the UK most students at private institutions do not receive state financial support, although they are eligible under certain circumstances. As Lygo told MPs last month, this area is "opaque and obscure, so it is not surprising that the whole of the private sector does not know about that particular source of potential funding". Any white paper measures clarifying this could be a shot in the arm for the private sector.
But what are the risks of opening the taps to greater private provision? The universities minister, David Willetts, should know since his department received a private warning from Hefce last July and that advice has subsequently been published.
In it, Hefce highlighted the risk that private providers could cherry-pick profitable courses, ignoring the high-cost science and technology subjects the country needs. This brings the further risk of destabilising existing universities that, more altruistically, attempt to offer the full range of courses.
Hefce concluded that, taken together, the dangers of greater private sector involvement "may amount to a reputational risk for UK higher education". So, if the white paper does herald a rush to the market, ministers cannot say they were not warned.
Saturday art clubs – a reincarnation of a 1970s idea – are inspiring disadvantaged children
See their work in this gallery
The young boy looks wistfully out of the window at the huge green expanse beyond, the darkness of his clothing – layered with tiny strokes of coloured pencil – contrasting with the airiness of the never-ending countryside.
This extraordinary drawing – which goes on show this week in a new exhibition at London's Somerset House – is not the work of a professional artist, but 14-year-old Leeds schoolboy Hafizullah Karim.
The exhibition spotlights the potential of more than 400 young people aged 14-16, showcasing their work in disciplines from drawing, painting and sculpture to photography, print-making, ceramics and digital graphics. All have taken part this year in the fledgling National Art and Design Saturday Club scheme, receiving free specialist tuition from their local art college.
The Saturday club is a modern version of an earlier incarnation, which bit the dust in the 1970s. The aim was – and is – to encourage disadvantaged youngsters to consider careers in the creative arts. So on Saturday mornings 14 art colleges – including Leeds, Plymouth, Hereford, Grimsby and Hastings – have been throwing their doors open to this group of young people who often struggling lengthy distances by public transport to get to the lessons.
Hafizullah seems surprised by the huge interest in his work since he won a place last year on the club run by Leeds College of Art. "I love art," he says. "It is my favourite subject at school, but I have learned so much from the Saturday Club. My tutors have encouraged me to be more adventurous in my style. In art, the more you do, the better you are. I have worked with clay, done graphics and also used watercolours." He explains that for this work, he originally took a photograph of himself sitting by the window at home but adapted it for the drawing – which he completed in about a week and a half – substituting the urban views outside for countryside. "The outside world and nature are so important to us all," he says, declaring himself an admirer of the Impressionists.
His love of the outdoor space may reflect the earlier restrictions in his life. Hafizullah's family left Afghanistan when he was three to live in Pakistan while his father went to find work in Leeds. The youngster honed his drawing skills at the afterschool Ghoighola Art Class in Quetta, which he attended for four years.
In February last year, he and the rest of his family moved to the area and he joined year 9 at City of Leeds high school. He won a place at the Saturday Club after the school's head of art, Catherine Walsh, recommended him as exceptionally gifted.
This year, more than 400 young people attending 100 schools in the UK have taken part in Saturday Club – funded predominantly by the private Sorrell Foundation to the tune of £150,000 a year – but it is hoped to increase this number to 500 next year. It is estimated that there are a further 100 UK colleges that could offer the programme using existing facilities, and the aim is to "scale it up" each year to allow more young people to take part.
The scheme targets 14- to 16-year-olds who have already shown evidence of artistic talent – many from challenging social backgrounds – who are still weighing up their academic options after GCSE and are yet to decide whether to pursue further or higher education. While the regular classes offer the kind of tuition and facilities that most secondary schools could only dream of, they are supplemented by "Master classes" given by renowned artists and designers such as Antony Gormley, Thomas Heatherwick and Naomi Cleaver. This brings the best of inspirational British art and design talent to youngsters from poorer backgrounds who might not otherwise be able to tap into such creativity, along with opportunities for longer-term mentoring. All students are also taken to London for a day – for many their first visit – for tours of major galleries.
Also studying at the Leeds club is Nida Mozuraite, a 16-year-old student at Morley Academy, who came to the UK with her family from Lithuania six years ago. She has been getting up regularly on Saturday mornings at 8am to travel to Leeds for the three-hour sessions. "I have got used to getting up early and I do it because I enjoy it," she says. "I have made lots of new friends and also been introduced to techniques I would not have been able to use at school. The tutors treat you like grownups, not children." Nida is just finishing her GCSEs and plans to study full-time at the college on its BTec national (extended) diploma in art and design in September.
The clubs' success is reflected in high attendance rates – no mean feat given that Saturday mornings are a time when you would expect most teenagers to be chilling out or hanging around with their mates – if they manage to drag themselves out of bed at all. Last year, Leeds College of Art received 80 applications for just 25 places, while at Plymouth College of Art some students happily undertake a 60-mile round trip to attend classes.
The clubs use existing resources, but the art college lecturers (helped by student volunteers) have to give up their valuable time on a Saturday to teach – a considerable sacrifice at the end of a busy week.
The drive to expand the programme into a fully national one is given extra impetus given the cuts to arts education funding that threaten to constrict the supply of talent to colleges, universities and, ultimately, the creative sector in the UK. Similarly, many teachers fear that art GCSE is at risk if schools have to comply with the new EBacc curriculum – which for the same reasons could also lead to design technology being downgraded.
Plymouth College of Art's club has been running for five years, and last year 38% of club members went on to take up courses at the college. An enthusiastic "veteran" is 15-year-old Ben Lintell, whose striking photographic work for a magazine project features in the exhibition. "I have done everything from old-style poster printing to pinhole photography, which has been great," he says. "The sky's the limit in terms of what you are taught, and I have also enjoyed the chance to work collaboratively."
Fellow member 14-year-old Eleanor James-George says: "I would very much like to go on to study at Plymouth College of Art. I have really enjoyed screen-printing T-shirts with photographs, and using darkroom equipment, enlargers etc that we do not have at school."
Alumni of the original 1970s art clubs included designers John and Frances Sorrell (who went on to form design consultancy Newell and Sorrell and who set up the Sorrell Foundation) and advertising genius John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
Sir John Sorrell reflects: "This strikes me as something the government should support as it is all about localism in action. Frances and I were lucky that we could start our careers in a Saturday morning art and design class when we were 14 years old, and by the age of 19 I was running my own business. We believe the club offers a real pathway for youngsters to develop their skills and confidence, and find worthwhile and rewarding careers. Just as we did."
• The exhibition is open until 17 July, admission free.
Giving everyone digital skills is a key factor in tackling long-term unemployment, argues Martha Lane Fox
Last week, the CBI pressed the government to apply the same rigour to tackling long-term unemployment as it has shown to reducing the deficit. The scale of the challenge certainly warrants such a focus. In the UK, 2.46 million people are unemployed; 5 million people of working age are on benefits and 2 million children live in households where nobody works. These statistics carry a huge economic and social cost: for society and government, for families and for the individual.
Education and skills professionals are at the frontline in tackling a key cause of worklessness. This work, if the CBI is right, will only become more urgent as the UK moves further towards a high-skilled jobs market, and opportunities for those without qualifications fall sharply.
Digital skills are now vital for education and employment: we know that you're 25% more likely to get work when you have web skills, and, once in that job, you'll earn 10% more. Unison, the biggest public sector union, has just conducted a skills survey of some of its 1.3 million members. Almost half of middle-aged, low-paid women (cleaners, catering staff, carers) argued that lack of digital savvy was their most serious skills gap. Our figures show that 4 million of the 8.7 million UK adults who have never used the internet are from our hardest-to-reach groups.
At Race Online 2012, we are pushing to build a 100% networked nation in the UK by the time of the Olympics. We now have more than 1,100 partners, and many of them have worked with us to recruit a 100,000-strong national volunteer force of "local digital champions" to inspire and encourage people in their communities to go online. This is key, because peers and family members are best placed to encourage the 64% of people who say they have never been online due to lack of motivation. Other partners are working with us to remove the other key obstacle – the cost of kit – by taking part in our national scheme to get high-quality but low-cost recycled PCs to low-income groups for as little as £92. The Trades Union Congress's learning affiliate, Unionlearn, is working with employers and us to ensure that anyone facing redundancy, early retirement or redeployment in the current downturn has these vital skills.
Connecting more people with the web is a vital first step. But the close correlation between disadvantage and digital skills underscores what a vast untapped market there is for great, innovative educational tools to reach and engage our hardest-to-reach groups.
There is a large and growing body of evidence that shows that technology can transform people's experience of education. The clever use of technology lets students study at their own pace, using interactive, collaborative, conversational teaching modules, supported by teachers who can tailor their support to individuals' needs. This is hugely significant, especially for those who might have had bad experiences of the traditional classroom environment first time around.
In the UK, we have a few notable success stories of traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions that are already putting technology at the heart of how they design education for the 21st century, such as the Open University's expansion into digital with its iTunes and OpenLearn channels. We also have innovative platforms such as the secure prisoner learning intranet, Virtual Campus, whose roll-out should be a key plank of the "rehabilitation revolution". Both represent tremendous opportunities to widen access to education.
However, educationists in India and the US are a step ahead in really seizing the chance these new and powerful tools provide to tackle educational inequality. Back in 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra put a computer in a lean-to in the centre of a New Delhi slum. His experiment proved how quickly anyone could master basic computer skills, and showed that with the right content you could inspire the unlikeliest of demographics to engage with informal learning. The results were so convincing that the computer kiosks have been rolled out across the slum and into India's villages.
Technology is helping to shake up formal learning environments, too: in New York, when he was city schools commissioner, Joel Klein pressed relentlessly for people to reimagine schools for the 21st century, particularly concentrating on failing schools. The New York department of education is now embarked on a technology programme, both for education professionals to share strategies to tackle stubborn problems, and to really exploit digital learning tools to improve student attainment.
A good example of that type of thinking is the Khan Academy – a tiny education charity that didn't even exist five years ago, but has now delivered 59m lessons online. The charity grew from Salman Khan's decision to upload chatty, personalised maths seminars on to YouTube so he could coach his 12-year-old cousin in maths. The academy now has 2,100 free learning videos and a grant from the Gates Foundation.
We urgently need education professionals to connect our hardest-to-reach groups with technology. But if we're to build the skills we need for UK plc to stay relevant in the 21st century, we should go further and be bolder. This is not about wiring up more classrooms, but about rewiring our brains to think internet-first in education, so we realise the opportunity to reinvent our institutions of learning for the modern age.
• Martha Lane Fox is the UK's digital champion. To find out more about how to be a digital champion go to helppassiton.co.uk
This week on the Guardian Teacher Network you can find resources for Wrong Trousers Day, which raises money for the Wallace and Gromit Children's Foundation
It's Wrong Trousers Day on Friday – the charity fundraising day that invites children (and adults) to pay £1 for the right to look "wrong" in a pair of wacky or weird trousers.
All the money goes to the Wallace and Gromit Children's Foundation, set up with the support of Nick Park, at Aardman Animations, who created the loveable pair. The foundation raises funds to improve the quality of life for sick children in hospitals and hospices in the UK.
On the Guardian Teacher Network we have pulled together resources for the day and beyond to use at school and home. The education website Pencil Street has created worksheets for primary school-aged children. You can find them all here.
From acrostic poems to sorting jumbled words, to codework in numeracy, to designing trousers for Wallace, these worksheets do the job. There's also a series of PDFs that print out into a ready-made wall display.
Out of school, children will also find some advice from Nick Park on how to draw Gromit on the Wrong Trousers website, as well as information on how to join in on the day. There are also a series of useful ready-made assemblies and seriously funny videos.
The Victoria and Albert Museum has resources on the history of textiles and fashion, exploring cultural and gender-specific issues surrounding clothing. Using the dress collection and textiles are two of the gorgeously rich online resources supporting the art, textiles and technology curriculums from upper primary right through to A-levels.
Children are encouraged to think about the uses to which fabric is put. Go to Search the collections to view exhibits. If you're planning a visit, then be warned that the fashion galleries are currently closed as part of the V&A's Future plan project, but schools can book a fashion design workshop or tour at the V&A by emailing bookings.office@vam.ac.uk
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers free access to more than 70,000 pages of lesson pans and interactive materials. This content is being added to every day by teachers and specialists. To see (and share) for yourself go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also nearly 2,000 jobs on the site and schools can advertise: free schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk
Universities have a new weapon in the battle to protect their reputations: the friendly student blogger
A few days ago, Vshuf, an international student, posted a message on the Student Room discussion site. He/she wanted to know which university – Glasgow, Birmingham, Warwick, Nottingham or the Institution (sic) of Education would be the best place to study business. The academic reputation of the institution was important, but there was another consideration: "How are people like in these universities?" the post asked. "I have watched some videos about Warwick on YouTube and it seems to me that the people are snobby and arrogant in contrast to those from Nottingham." Members were quick to defend Warwick, but Vshuf remained unconvinced.
The thread highlights the difficulty that universities face in the age of social media. At a time when reputation is more important than ever because of higher student fees and greater global competition, the ability to manage their reputations is increasingly falling out of their hands.
How to reach an increasingly networked generation that is more inclined to trust the opinion of their anonymous peers on the internet than official bodies such as universities was a problem discussed at last week's Youth Strategy Marketing Conference 2011.
Helen Pennack, head of marketing communications at the University of Leicester, says students now post queries on Facebook or the Student Room about open days or where to find their timetables, rather than simply contact the university directly. "When we do relationship marketing communications, we are trying to strike up a two-way dialogue with students and they are taking the conversation away from us and having it with other people," she says. "How we make ourselves part of that conversation again is quite a challenge."
Her university has responded by setting up a system that allows students to sync communications from Leicester with their Facebook account. But she says universities also need to be present in other web spaces used by students, such as Twitter.
Warwick, which appointed a digital and online communications manager last year, knows well the benefits of having a social media presence. "A year ago, an applicant tweeted, 'Oh, no. I hear the University of Warwick is closing, what am I going to do?'" says Warwick's spokesman, Peter Dunn. While this tweet could have caused huge problems if spread, the university was able to tweet back, "We're still here, honest".
He says the communications team check what is being said about the university on social media once or twice a day, and responds if someone is confused or asking for information. But it depends on the forum. "If they are on the Student Room we assume they want to bitch about us behind our backs," he says. "If it is on a much more public space like Twitter or Facebook, someone like us can see it and respond."
The challenge for universities is not only to know where to respond but when, and getting the tone right. "We are always careful about proactively intervening in the conversation because that would be seen as rude," says Pennack. "What is much more effective is if one of our students wades in there and puts somebody straight."
Some universities have already responded to this, she says, by having a group of students "primed to some extent to join the conversation and correct people where it is appropriate to do so". It is not something Leicester has tried yet, but, she says, "we may consider it".
While Imperial College does not prime students, it does recruit a team of official student bloggers to write regularly about their experiences at the university. They are not paid or moderated, and are free to blog about whatever they like. But there are occasional prizes for the most frequent bloggers. Pamela Agar, head of digital media at Imperial, says the college could potentially ask them to blog on a particular subject, but had not done so yet.
"They can and do say negative things about us," she says. "When they do, it's useful feedback." It can also make the blogs more authentic, she says – something that is particularly important to the social media generation.
Chris Fonseka, a third-year information systems student at Imperial, says he applied for a student blogger role because he was attracted by the idea of having a voice around campus. He blogs about his general activities at the university, including his membership of the chocolate society. He also receives regular emails from students and prospective students anxious to put queries about accommodation or finances to a real student.
He says he has never felt restricted in what he writes. "I think there's possibly a line that you cannot cross, but you would have to be pretty determined to cross it," he says. "If I honestly felt negative about Imperial, I would write about it."
Tom Ridgewell went a step further. While studying media at the University of Lincoln, he decided to create a television advert for the university and put it up on YouTube. "While television and parents prefer elevator music and false smiles in university propaganda, the internet and those who inhabit it prefer explosions and dinosaurs," he says. (His advert contained both.) "I labelled the videos as 'banned' simply because it's funnier to imagine that I actually showed them to a board of directors and got thrown out of the room. Also, videos generally do a little better with an exaggerated title."
Ian Richards, press officer at Lincoln, says the university only became aware of the adverts once they were an online hit and Google alerts showed people were blogging about them. "We didn't know what to make of them, but when students were talking about them on open days we felt it was something totally left field, but a bit of a blessing for us." Ridgewell has since been commissioned to carry out work for the marketing department.
How far universities should try to control what members of their community say about them on social media is something some have already faced with academic bloggers. In 2006, Erik Ringmar resigned from his lecturing post at the London School of Economics after the university objected to him posting a speech critical of the university on his blog. A year later David Colquhoun was asked to remove his blog from the University College London site after complaints from alternative therapists.
But, while institutions are paying increasing attention to what is said about them on the web, most recognise that there is little they can do about it. "Is it realistic to control every word that's out there about us?" asks Richards. "I don't think so."
Fundraising is increasingly keeping schools afloat in affluent areas. What about the rest?
How much would you bid for a bucket of manure? A day in a beach hut near Bournemouth? Or lunch in the House of Commons with the home secretary?
Such an eclectic mix of items is typical of that sold every term through schools' auctions of "promises". Amid the standard offers of babysitting, ironing and cakes, parents have also pledged powerboat rides, loans of holiday villas, teenagers to polish your silver, the chance to be a zookeeper for a day (including mucking out a zebra), and two female apricot ducks.
Auctions of promises are big money-spinners for parent-teacher associations, but they are not the only ones. Families from Kilmersdon primary in Radstock, Somerset, are poised to spend their 13th year selling baked potatoes at Glastonbury music festival. Their annual effort, recognised with an award this month from the National Confederation of PTAs, raises about £8,500.
Another NCPTA winner, Dr South's primary in Islip, near Oxford, raised £40,000 between 2008 and 2010. It expects to make £20,000 this year – thanks mainly to a sponsored 65-mile bike ride and its auction of promises plus hog roast held earlier this month.
"We get the community involved and we go with the calendar," says Fiona Forbes, PTA chair at Dr South's. "Our summer fete is coming up and we always mark Halloween, Easter, May Day … Even selling refreshments after the nativity concert makes a little, plus it is a lovely thing to do."
But it's hard work, especially as most of the women – and it is mainly women – combine their voluntary work with jobs and childcare. "Sometimes it's exhausting," says Fiona, "but we care passionately about giving the children the best springboard possible. It's no good sitting on the sidelines and saying why hasn't the school got this or that – you've got to get involved."
Claire Sage, chair of Kilmersdon PTA, agrees. Her association starts planning for Glastonbury in January. Some parents take a week off to attend. Once there, they might have to work from 9am until midnight, although "perhaps the biggest commitment is proven by those who hold in any desire to go the toilet".
Across the country, parents are raising more money than ever before, according to David Butler, chief executive of NCPTA.
He estimates that the 13,000 associations – 10,000 primary and 3,000 secondary – raised £100m in 2010-11, up from about £79m in 2009, despite the recession. This works out at an average £7,700 per school – tiny in comparison with a typical secondary-school budget, but valuable because heads can spend it as they like, says Butler.
Primary PTAs usually say their role is to put the icing on the cake. Some schools, like Dr South's and Kilmersdon, manage the marzipan as well. This term, Dr South's PTA spent £10,000 on 16 top-notch laptops. It pays for a sports coach, sports equipment, blinds and additional books. And it is funding a website redesign as well as the vegetable garden and the chickens that roam around it.
Kilmersdon PTA has contributed to a £25,000 amphitheatre. It has also funded a garden, a pond and a polytunnel, as well as paying for school trips. "We want to provide the children with memories," says Sage.
PTAs are not the only source of icing. Larger-scale fundraising is common, with heads applying for donations from companies or making bids to charitable trusts and the Big Lottery Fund.
Bob Jennings is an expert in this field. A former director of community development in an inner-city Bristol school, he now runs the Progress through Partnership consultancy. PtP, which claims a 100% success rate, specialises in fundraising masterclasses for schools.
Last week, Jennings was enjoying the delight of a Sedgefield primary-school bursar just awarded £30,000 from the Big Lottery Fund. "The money's still out there," he says. "Some funds have been dented a little by low interest rates, but the capital is still there. You just need to know how to ask."
He says he is often called in to run classes for schools by local authorities, but central government is not interested. "Any recognition of what I do would essentially be an admission that schools aren't funded properly."
Like PTAs, businesses and charitable trusts prefer to fund the icing on the cake. "They don't consider it's their business to fund the curriculum. They're not interested in putting sticking plasters over a failing education system."
But, with school budgets under pressure, many PTAs fear they will end up paying for the sticking plasters. Capital grants have been severely cut, and many pots of money such as funding for specialist schools, ICT and the Reading Recovery programme have been drained.
Alison Peacock, head of Wroxham primary school, Potters Bar, and leader of the Cambridge Primary Review network of schools, says in the past her PTA has raised money for the library and to create a quiet garden. Now she has had to ask them to replace the interactive whiteboards.
"Our capital grant has been slashed and the ICT grant has disappeared, but our boards need replacing. That's a massive piece of infrastructure, and we haven't got the resources, short of losing a member of staff. Our association has agreed nicely, but reluctantly, because they don't think it's their job to pay for this."
Her school is in a relatively affluent area and has a good relationship with its PTA. She fears for those who are not so lucky. "Are schools going to have to set budgets relying on external fundraising? If this money becomes a necessity, suddenly we are in a whole different ballgame and some schools will lose out."
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, agrees. "Inequality is the key concern here. Many schools in challenging areas relied on government grants. Hoping that fundraising will replace them is difficult. It's unpredictable and will only exacerbate divisions. The most disadvantaged will lose."
Fundraising is time-consuming, whether it's organising a summer fete or filling out a grant application. Peacock says there is an issue of capacity. "An outstanding school that is not fighting for its life has the time to make these bids. So schools that already have are far more likely to get."
An outstanding school is also more likely to employ an effective business manager who sees bid-making as a key part of the job. The role represents a professionalisation of school fundraising – something that concerns Rob Paton, professor in social enterprise at the Open University.
Joint author of Thoughtful Fundraising, Paton says he is a sceptical friend of an industry he has watched develop over the decades. In the 1960s and 70s, he says, fundraising gradually became a career choice for marketing professionals or creative types keen to work for a good cause.
"Now every school feels it ought to have a fundraiser. They're creating yet another management job and another school overhead – and they're all chasing the same pot of money," he says.
He agrees that some schools will be far more successful than others. "A little inequality is acceptable if it fuels dynamism, creativity and energy. But if the inequality becomes too great, all kinds of processes, like, for example, admissions policies, can become dysfunctional."
PTAs are vital sources of social capital, says Paton. "They get parents involved in schools, they ease communications with staff. I don't care if they only raise £400, though professional fundraisers would cringe at this as they only have pound signs in their eyes."
Sadly, it is the pound signs that seem set to matter most over the next few years.
Find it tricky to remember faces? Perhaps you, like Duncan Bannatyne, suffer from prosopagnosia
Earlier this year, millionaire businessman Duncan Bannatyne told his 350,000 Twitter followers that he suffered from prosopagnosia, or "face blindness" – a condition that can leave sufferers struggling to identify their own close friends or family. Some were surprised: according to every business handbook for success, the Dragons' Den star would need to be a networking wizard to create the string of successful businesses that have seen him valued at £320m. But Bannatyne confirmed the diagnosis, and told his followers: "I would like prosopagnosia to become more known as it cause[s] sufferers to be thought of as rude … Google prosopagnosia, you might suffer from it … or have a friend who does."
He is right: face blindness is more common than it sounds. According to Sarah Bate, a psychology lecturer at Bournemouth University who is devoting her career to investigating the condition, medical research over the last 10 years has thrown fresh light on prosopagnosia.
"One study has suggested that as many as 2.5% of the population might have developmental prosopagnosia," Bate explains. "Even if that's an overestimation, thousands of people in the UK must suffer."
Face blindness affects sufferers in different ways, ranging from those who struggle to put a name to an acquaintance to those who cannot recognise their own children coming out of school – or their own faces in photos. Prosopagnosians may also have difficulties with related problems, such as identifying other people's emotional expressions, or judging age or gender of faces.
Bate first heard about prosopagnosia in a lecture in the second year of her undergraduate degree. Finding it to be under-researched, she decided to examine it further for her PhD, and has continued doing so after completing it two years ago. Bate is particularly interested in whether face blindness is hereditary and physiological rather than psychological, as many had previously assumed. She explains that cases come in two categories: people with developmental prosopagnosia have usually failed to develop the processes for normal face recognition from birth, while others acquire problems later in life due to brain damage, for example after a stroke.
While some sufferers find prosopagnosia to lead to occasional embarrassment, for others it affects their social aptitude and employment options. "They might withdraw from social events, and work in jobs that avoid the need for face-to-face interaction with colleagues and clients," says Bate. "The condition can cause much anxiety and even depression. One young man told me about a time when he met a girl at a party and asked her out on a date. She agreed and then went on her way after giving him her number, but he then asked her out again later in the evening, thinking she was a completely different person." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bate reports that the girl cancelled the date.
"Another of the individuals with face blindness I'm in contact with has suffered from the condition since childhood. His failure to recognise faces had been a long-standing joke in his family, and when he heard about my work he asked to be formally assessed. He turned out to be severely prosopagnosic, and found much relief in realising that it is a recognised condition and that many other people suffer from it."
Bate reports that some sufferers "cope remarkably well, and develop elaborate compensatory strategies that help them recognise people".
Teachers with face blindness, for example, often devise seating plans in the classroom. Others become very perceptive at recognising people from non-facial cues such as their gait, hairstyle or clothing – or even informing their colleagues, family and friends, and asking them to introduce themselves each time they meet.
"These strategies might work some or most of the time, but occasions do occur when a familiar person is met out of context and the strategy breaks down," Bate explains. "It's difficult to imagine how young children might cope with the disorder, particularly as most are required to wear school uniform and obey strict rules regarding their appearance at school."
Keen to find out more about the different sub-types of face blindness, the academic realised she needed to find a way to build a large pool of research participants, and took to the internet to launch prosopagnosiaresearch.org, a website designed to both inform the public and recruit candidates for research. The site hosts an online test where participants are shown 20 male bald faces and then repeatedly asked to identify them from a choice of three. Nearly 4,000 people worldwide have taken the test so far, with more than 300 registering to participate in research, and about 20 who live in southern England are travelling to Bournemouth to undergo the latest tests and analysis.
"When a new participant makes contact, I arrange a meeting at the university to carry out a screening session," Bate explains. She has used eye-tracking technology to assess how prosopagnosics take in faces visually, but so far that hasn't yielded conclusive results. "I've found a conflicting pattern of findings – while eye movements appeared normal in some cases, other individuals were ignoring the key inner features of the face – eyes, nose and mouth – which are critical for recognition," she says.
The academic is also working with genetics researchers to test families of prosopagnosics and examine any links. "Some individuals who have prosopagnosia suspect other members of their families suffer from the condition," she says. "We are attempting to test as many members of each family as possible – including those who believe they have normal face-processing abilities – to confirm that multiple members of the same family suffer from the disorder. The next step is to take samples of each person's DNA, by simply taking saliva swabs. But to collect meaningful data we need to identify more families of prosopagnosics who are willing to participate in this research."
Early findings suggest the condition "certainly does seem to run in some families. But some individuals suffer despite no apparent familial connection. It's important to understand the different causes and sub-types to develop appropriate treatment techniques, and then pick up prosopagnosia and its related deficits in children," she says.
"With prior knowledge about which children are at risk of developing the condition and the range of difficulties they might confront, we'd have a much better chance of successfully reducing these difficulties."
• Test yourself for face-blindness at www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org
A list of courses in Brighton accredited by CILIP.
Division of Information Management, University of Brighton, Watts Building, Moulsecoomb, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4GJ
Tel: 01273 642428; Fax: 01273 642405
E-mail: m.r.d.saulles@brighton.ac.uk
www.brighton.ac.uk/cmis/prospective/information/
MA Information Studies. Full-time & part-time.
Next accreditation May 2016
MSc/PG Dip Information Management (Post-experience course). Full-time and part-time. Next accreditation March 2013
No longer recruiting. Successful graduates are eligible to proceed towards Chartership.
MSc/PG Dip Information Management (Health) (Post-experience course). Full-time and part-time. Next accreditation March 2013
No longer recruiting. Successful graduates are eligible to proceed towards Chartership.
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Read the Qualifications Blog and follow Qualifications on Twitter. You can contact the Qualifications and Professional Development team on 020 7255 0610 or quals@cilip.org.uk
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Details of all the consultation responses CILIP has responded to in 2009.
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March 2009 (PDF, 48.19 KB)
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March 2009
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This policy area covers the contribution that library and information services in all sectors make to the promotion of health and patient well-being.
Ambitious NHS change only possible with the right information strategy, says CILIP.
CILIP's response to the White Paper - Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, October 2010The response was put together by the Health Libraries Group on behalf of CILIP. In the response we welcome the emphasis put on information – described as an “information revolution” – and its importance to delivering efficient and quality services. Our members work across the NHS and the healthcare sector more generally, meeting the information requirements of patients, clinicians, managers, commissioners and students. This expertise, and that of other information professionals, needs to be recognised, properly focused and developed to gain the maximum benefit.
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By Tim Coates
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As New Labour's backroom boy, Michael Barber had lots of influence but very little publicity. Now he has his dream job, he tells Peter Wilby, with 'the world's leading learning company'
Sir Michael Barber was New Labour's mad professor and master of the flow chart, the man responsible for the literacy and numeracy strategies of the first term and, later, when he worked for Tony Blair as head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, for top-down targets across the public sector. He moved in 2005 to the world-renowned management consultancy McKinsey, and its unofficial motto could be his own: "Everything can be measured, and what is measured can be managed".
If teachers hated the Whitehall commands of the New Labour era, they should blame Barber as much as Blair and his education secretaries. On the domestic front, he was the nearest thing to a New Labour guiding spirit, more consistently influential than any of the intellectual gurus Blair briefly took up with. He helped to write Blair's first speech on education during the 1994 leadership contest and, in 1996, published The Learning Game, which was virtually a handbook for Labour education ministers. The phrase "standards, not structures" was his, as was the focus on failure: failing councils, failing schools, failing pupils. "Serious debate about failure," he said in 1995, "is … a precondition of success."
But Barber was the backroom boy, absorbed in graphs and charts. Newspapers hardly mentioned him, except to mock or denigrate. The columnist Simon Jenkins called him "a control freak's control freak", while the Mail's Quentin Letts compared him to the speaking clock. When he gave PowerPoint presentations on "delivery" before Blair's monthly press conferences – described by one Downing Street official as "excellent punishment for the hacks" – one journalist muttered "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" throughout.
Now Barber and his graphs have gone global. As McKinsey's hubristically titled "head of global education practice", he has set up a US Education Delivery Unit (albeit as a private sector rather than government venture), co-authored books that claim to identify what makes national education systems successful, and taken the joint chairmanship of a taskforce in Pakistan to establish "national standards" in basic subjects. Now he's becoming chief education adviser to Pearson, owner of Penguin Books and the Financial Times and also, in its own description, "the world's leading learning company", with interests in 70 countries, including English language centres in China, primary education in Kenya and higher education in South Africa. In the UK, it owns the exam board Edexcel and operates the driving theory test.
To Barber, now 55, who as a young idealist went to teach in Zimbabwe when it seemed a great hope for African development, it's a dream job. "The world is going to change dramatically in the next five to 10 years. School systems will have to innovate, and innovation will come from the private sector or public-private partnerships, rather than government." Why? "First, because sometimes you need to invest serious capital in innovation. Second, because, in the modern, transparent age, it's harder for governments to take risks. There's a long gap between deciding to do something and making it work. In that gap, it often looks as if it's failing."
More surprisingly, Barber nearly became the top civil servant in Michael Gove's education department this year. The prospect caused panic in Whitehall, where officials feared a return of his top-down regime. But the mad professor clearly regards England as too small a laboratory for his ambitious experiments. His decision to decline the job was no reflection on Gove, he assures me when we meet just before his move to Pearson is announced. "Broadly, Gove's doing the right thing," he says, "particularly the theme of devolution, encouraging schools to take control of their own destiny."
He goes on to explain how it is possible to support both the dirigiste New Labour approach and the more libertarian Tory attitude. "If you're moving from poor to fair, as we're doing with Pakistan's schools and as we did with some failing schools in England, that's one set of techniques. If you're moving from good to great, that's a different set. When you're improving a bad system or bad schools, you need to be really clear: here's what you teach, here's the lesson plans, here's the training. But when a system gets really good, you need to be significantly less prescriptive."
You may notice that Barber applies a four-point scale to education systems – poor, fair, good, great – and he probably dreams in four-point scales. But it would be unfair to pigeonhole him as a soulless automaton, lacking humanity. He is a more nuanced character than that. He was born in Liverpool to a prosperous Quaker family and went to a Quaker boarding school. His father, a pacifist, refused military service in the second world war and ferried medical supplies around China instead. A trained accountant, he later became chair of Oxfam.
Though Barber doesn't believe in God and rejects outright pacifism – a loyal Blairite, he insists that invading Iraq was "the right thing to do" – he says Quaker values still guide his life, particularly the belief that "you're on the planet to make a difference".
Despite giving off a sense of restless energy, he seems wholly comfortable, even serene, in his own skin. "What's wrong with counting beans?" is his response to those who dismiss him as a mere bean-counter. Even among critics who thought his ideas wrong, he has no real enemies. Estelle Morris, a Labour education secretary, says "he's the least machiavellian person I've ever known". In New Labour, he was one of the few who got on with both Blair and Gordon Brown, and Peter Hennessy, Queen Mary, University of London professor of contemporary history, says his achievement in negotiating the treacherous tides of Downing Street "verged on the miraculous".
After school, he studied history at Oxford, where he became president of Queen's College JCR (student union). Later, he trained as a teacher and taught in Watford, in Hertfordshire, and Zimbabwe. On his return to England, he joined the education department of the National Union of Teachers. He also enlisted in the Labour party in Hackney, east London, then ruled by a notoriously "loony left" council. He became chair of the council's education committee and fought the 1987 election for Labour in Michael Heseltine's Henley constituency. The battle was so unequal that he broadcast the latest cricket scores from his loudhailer instead of party policies. That was the end of his attempts at a political career; he was probably too diffident and professorial in manner to have much hope of success. Promoted to a senior role in the NUT, he left Hackney council in 1990.
He helped to organise the union's boycott of tests in 1993 when, he says, the issue was flawed government implementation. But he was increasingly uncomfortable with the large body of NUT opinion that opposed tests in principle. Later that year, he left for a professorship at Keele University and wrote in the Times that the union had to choose between accountability and oblivion. "Their position," he explains, "was to say to the government that, if you give us more money, we might improve the system. They should have said that we're going to improve the system and then you'll see we're worth investing in."
Such views made him a natural New Labour bedfellow, and an obvious choice as adviser to David Blunkett, then shadow education secretary. The two men talked often when Barber joined a "hit squad", set up by the Tories, to sort out the "failing" Hackney Downs comprehensive. Though the school had passionate defenders, it was recommended for closure, a decision that Barber, the squad's only local resident, publicly supported. "The stand we took on Hackney Downs," he wrote later, "became a foundation of New Labour's education policy."
Reflecting on the literacy and numeracy strategies, he says it was a mistake to underestimate their negative effect on teachers. "I thought being enabled to do their jobs better and see children in their classes doing better would have a transformative effect. I thought teachers would say: that's great." Which seems an odd misunderstanding for one who worked inside classrooms for six years and spent eight years in the largest teachers' union. But though he's a good and polite listener, he is apt, I think, to hear what he wants to hear and, like many people who derive their values from religious belief (even, in his case, an undoctrinaire religion, to which he no longer formally adheres), is a little too confident of his own rightness. "I've always enjoyed bouncing ideas around with him," says Tim Brighouse, former chief education officer of Birmingham and Barber's predecessor at Keele. "But I could never be as convinced as he is that my ideas are right."
That, perhaps, is the nature of government where, as Barber often observes, the relentless media scrutiny doesn't allow for doubt or hesitation. If, as one former colleague suggests, he designed simple solutions that provided the headlines ministers wanted, it is hard to dispute that schools were yanked in the right general direction, however clumsily. Some friends were sad to see him move to the private sector (Barber says he needed money to help his middle daughter after a serious accident), but they are reluctant to criticise explicitly.
But, Barber argues, Pearson is doing vital work in the developing world where, because government is often weak, the best hope lies with the private sector. He is still, he believes, fulfilling his mission to make a difference. Since he was always among the least cynical of New Labour acolytes, one must surely give him the benefit of any doubt.
After five years in existence, is the University and College Union proving to be a good match for further and higher?
'Tonight is the night when two become one," said the University and College Union's joint general secretary, Paul Mackney, quoting the Spice Girls, at a party held at the British Library in June 2006.
After a long and stormy engagement, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (Natfhe) had finally tied the knot.
Not everyone was convinced it was a match made in heaven. One of the biggest fears was that further education, which was in the minority in terms of membership, would be sidelined in favour of higher education.
After a year as joint general secretary with Mackney, Sally Hunt (from the AUT camp), defeated Roger Kline, the chief universities negotiator at Natfhe, by a narrow majority to become general secretary. Kline had stepped up to the plate when Mackney (of the Natfhe camp) decided not run for the top job due to ill-health.
In her election campaign, Hunt pledged not to let FE get sidelined, but five years on, has UCU delivered on that promise?
Negotiating national pay agreements has been effective in Wales, where the gap between school teachers' and FE lecturers' pay has completely disappeared. Although progress has been slower in England, the gap has narrowed from 9% in 2005 to 6% in 2010, the union claims.
The campaign has made principals wary of the union – something any union leader might take pleasure in. One college chief, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian: "Colleges can't afford to carry poor staff with poor attendance, but they don't relish taking on the UCU. Few principals who have the guts to take them on are around to tell the tale a few years later."
"I take that as a compliment," says Hunt. "Because colleges have control of their own funding, they don't feel bound to national pay agreements. Some simply ignore them. Some of them [colleges] are little chiefdoms and the principal is God. I'm not surprised that God is sometimes a bit upset if we come and knock on his door because we are not terribly impressed."
But the last five years have not always been easy. Hunt faced strong opposition in 2008 when she put forward proposals to restructure the union that involved replacing the eight departments in the union with three new ones.
Executive members complained that under the new plans, national negotiations jobs – then held by top officials – would become relatively junior roles. FE lecturers – already a minority in the union – were concerned this could weaken their position further.
"I'm not going to pretend there weren't teething problems, because there were very different cultural ways of organising things as well as political ways," says Hunt. "The joke used to be that Nafthe had all the policies and AUT had all the practice. Now you put those things together, there is always going to be some tension, but I don't think it's as bad as it could have been."
Hunt had to compromise on the restructuring, "getting 70% of what I wanted and dropping the 30% I was wrong on." But that is just how it works in unions, she says.
She insists that the voices of UCU's FE members are heard. And if it doesn't always seem that way, that's because much of what goes on does not get reported. "Schools and higher education will always get coverage, but FE, for reasons I find more and more incredible, doesn't."
While rumours abound of squabbles and infighting, those members Education Guardian spoke to were positive about the merger. "I think it has gone as well as could be expected," says Mackney. "Of course, there will always be people who say they feel marginalised, but that's normal. Most people I speak to in FE identify strongly with UCU and that doesn't always happen with mergers."
Sean Vernell, vice-chair of UCU's FE committee and lecturer at City and Islington College, says: "Sometimes people do feel as if higher education is getting more attention and members have to speak up to make sure further education isn't marginalised, but this does not detract from the considerable achievements of the merger."
But he thinks Hunt scored an own-goal with a speech at the annual conference last month in which she launched an attack on factionalism, implying that small groups of members were trying to dominate proceedings and shape the agenda, which she said had exposed the union to divide-and-rule tactics.
Rival candidate
"Many people were cross with that speech," says Vernell. "It was childish mud-slinging ... because she desperately wants to re-stand as general secretary." Elections are due to take place next spring, with campaigning starting in the autumn. The UCU Left has said it will definitely field a candidate against Hunt.
If Hunt is elected for a second term, she wants to slim down the union's national executive committee (NEC) and re-direct resources into building up local branches. With 68 members, NEC is still bloated (it has the same number as Unison, which has more than 10 times as many members) and many of these seats have been uncontested every year since the merger.
Hunt also complained at the conference that, over the last year, head office staff had produced 900 committee papers – time and money that could have been better invested on the ground working with members, she said.
One issue that has the potential for controversy is the expected growth in the number of higher education courses on offer at further education colleges.
The government is intent on opening up the market to a greater range of providers, so in addition to delivering degree courses on behalf of universities, colleges could be given their own degree-awarding powers. It's a thorny issue, because if colleges – and indeed private providers – can offer a more attractive alternative to university degrees, there is the potential for redundancies at universities.
Until now, the fight in further education has been focused on creating parity between school and college teachers' pay and conditions, but with many colleges now offering degree-level courses, college lecturers could end up taking on similar roles and responsibilities to university lecturers for less attractive salaries and employment conditions.
Hunt admits that UCU still has some way to go in supporting its members in further education. "I think we have delivered on what we promised, in terms of making our ability to represent our members better, stronger, more coherent." But as long as there are members who are struggling in disputes with their employers, she would not say she has done the job she set out to do.
"I'm not going to pretend everything's OK when it's not, but if we were two separate unions and we had FE as a minority of what was half of UCU … not a chance in hell. At least now we are in the position where we have the ability to try."
Hunt says her election campaign will centre on the need to put members' interests at the heart of the union, to get their views on what the union's priorities should be, instead of the current "top-down" approach from the national executive. "UCU must be a union that reflects what members see as important, rather than one that assumes it knows best."
education.letters@guardian.co.uk
With the right Oxbridge connections and lots of publicity, you too could set up your own college
Last week, AC Grayling and other distinguished academics announced that they were setting up an independent university college, the New College of the Humanities. It's just possible others could be interested in doing the same. Here is a 10-point guide for those who think this is finally the answer to making the kind of money that their peers in the City have earned for decades – or a bit of extra cash for a loft conversion.
Your institution will need a strong USP. Nobody is going to pay that little bit – or preferably a lot – extra for just another college providing private tuition to pass external degrees accredited by another university. Attend lots of dinner parties with other intellectuals, people in the media and the very rich from both sides of the Atlantic. Make sure as many of your fellow guests as possible are from a golden age when you had to pass Latin O-level to get into Oxbridge, which, naturally, most of them should have attended, unless they are the ones backing your initiative. In that case, it's OK if they just wish they had gone to Oxbridge. Discuss how the priceless benefits of a UK higher education are potentially being lost for your children's/grandchildren's generation. This has the added benefit of being an excuse to boast about going to Oxbridge. Bemoan how intellectually moribund and cash-obsessed the current government is – in fact all politicians are. Swap stories about the ridiculous sums that wealthy Americans are prepared to pay for university and how the UK is heading the same way. Speculate on who in the UK is set to make a lot of money out of all this …
Your subject, of course, then anything else that regularly comes up in conversation. Young people don't seem to be able to think properly these days and their morals are all over the place, so a bit of logic and ethics wouldn't go amiss. Employers seem to think that learning time-management and teamwork are as important as an in-depth knowledge of Wittgenstein, so you'd better offer these too.
Don't bother with science. It involves lots of expensive equipment and your professors would have to spend time with students in the lab rather than just pop in for the odd lecture. It also has much less publicity power – few people in the media studied it and even fewer can envisage their dyscalculic kids in a lab coat. Also, Brian Cox is likely to be too busy. Science literacy is a good compromise and might help students understand In Our Time.
Have a think about who you bumped into at last year's Hay festival and/or flick through the Radio Times to identify the world's most distinguished academics. Promise them generous rewards in return for a few lectures. Persuade a handful of former colleagues that this is a new and exciting venture that will pay handsomely and could present opportunities for them to appear on TV.
Either Oxford or Cambridge would be good, but they might involve a long-ish taxi ride after a transatlantic flight. A London location would mean your professorati could still be easily available for book launches and Television Centre. The capital will also seem cool and edgy to students. Why not choose Bloomsbury, which carries just the right connotations of intellectuals, artists, philosophers and nicely patterned wallpaper?
Think of the sum most UK universities are about to start charging, and double it.
Emphasise employment and internship opportunities, but also hint that it is OK to just travel and hang out for a while before starting a career. Let students know that while you want them to have three As at A-level, this is a very general guide and they will be assessed as individuals. As long as they meet the minimum requirements for your linked university's external degree programme – two A-level passes – this will be fine.
Stress that most students will have to have three As at A-level. Keep mentioning Oxbridge, one-to-one tutorials, the very distinguished professors that they will have seen on the telly and your extensive contacts with lucrative employers.
Don't worry if lots of other colleges are doing the same thing. Just say the word "new" a lot. Maybe even use it in the title. You may recall the Labour party once did this very successfully. Go on about how ground-breaking your initiative is. But not too much. Remember to hark back to a time when higher education was just better, which meant that society in general was better, too.
Keep mentioning Oxbridge. Try to launch your venture on a quiet Sunday – the end of a half-term week would be perfect. Have your hair trimmed in preparation for possible TV appearances.
Make sure that at least some poor, but worthy, students can attend by charging the others so much that there will easily be some money left over for scholarships and bursaries. Comfort yourself with the fact that some students could actually be better off studying with you than elsewhere, thanks to shockingly high tuition fees caused by successive governments selling out on higher education. Ignore snide articles in newspapers like the Guardian, and start planning that loft conversion.
With student complaints at a record high, universities will have to raise their game once tuition fees rise
Two universities that have broken official rules for dealing with student complaints are named today in the independent adjudicator's annual report. The two, Southampton and Westminster, are the first to be exposed in this way – yet another sign of the new era in which universities are expected to be more accountable to students who expect to be treated as customers.
The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), which reviews complaints when students have exhausted their university's procedures, also reports a record rise in the number of cases. Last year the office received 1,341 complaints against universities in England and Wales, the highest number ever and an unprecedented rise of one-third on the year before.
As the adjudicator himself, Rob Behrens, points out, 1,341 complaints represents just 0.05% of higher education students, and 53% of those were not justified. But, he also observes, the proportion of justified and partly justified complaints has grown for the first time in several years. He predicts the increase in complaints will continue. "It's to be expected where you have rising tuition fees, where students are being invited to behave like consumers and where the labour market is difficult so students will do what they can to ensure they qualify."
He says his decision to expose the universities of Southampton and Westminster is not "naming and shaming, with all the associations of moral censure that term implies". He was, he explains, simply following OIA rules – something those two institutions failed to do.
Westminster fell short in its handling of two complaints. One was from a student who argued a disability hadn't been properly taken into account. The adjudicator agreed. The other student claimed that an exam question and its marking scheme had been unreasonable. In both cases the university broke the rules by failing to resolve the cases, as recommended, promptly and in full.
At Southampton University, four months after the OIA concluded that an undergraduate had a justified complaint about their experience on a placement, the university continued to oppose the decision and was refusing compensation.
In a second case, the university also failed to comply with the adjudicator's decision. And in a third one, although the complaint turned out to be unjustified, for 10 months the university delayed the investigation by failing to provide evidence despite the adjudicator's repeated reminders.
At both universities, it was only after the adjudicator involved the vice-chancellors that the complaints began to be resolved.
Behrens is pleased the relationships between his office and both universities are now much more positive. "As the government places more emphasis on the student experience, complaints have an important role in safeguarding that," he says. "Universities must see complaints as feedback to become more professional."
Both Southampton and Westminster universities want to charge undergraduates annual fees of £9,000. There is an expectation, not only from ministers, but importantly from students and their families, too, that all universities wishing to increase charges will move to increase student satisfaction as well.
Before making an investment of £27,000, for example, each student will ask, "Is this good value? Is the teaching good? Is this the best route to a successful career?"
Universities are being encouraged, some may say pressurised, to become more transparent and accountable in a number of ways.
The government is urging all universities to publish a student charter, a sort of statement of terms and conditions to remind students of their responsibilities and their rights. Universities are also expected to publish "key information sets" by September 2012. These will enable students to shop around by providing the same 17 pieces of information about each institution, including, for example, the proportion of "contact" time and group work, and the careers and starting salaries of previous graduates.
The OIA is already looking at creative ways to cope with both finite resources and likely further rises in student complaints. Settling more disputes by phone is one option; helping universities to install an independent ombudsman on each campus – an idea borrowed from the Netherlands and the US – is another.
The question is, are UK universities well prepared for the new consumer culture where the deal is if you pay more, you expect more, and if you feel you're not getting it, you'll complain?
The question is particularly pertinent for the universities of Southampton and Westminster on the day they are exposed for dragging their feet with a legally established adjudicator. Both vice-chancellors were unavailable for interview.
In a statement, Professor Debra Humphris, Southampton's pro-vice-chancellor, education, said the vast majority of the small number of student complaints are dealt with swiftly, described the dialogue with the OIA as "constructive and supportive" and said that an improved complaints procedure will be in place this autumn.
In a more defiant statement, Professor Geoffrey Petts, vice-chancellor at Westminster, points out that the university is working with the OIA towards compliance with its recommendations: "The University of Westminster was disappointed to have been cited in the OIA report. The university has robust procedures for handling the very small number of formal complaints which it receives from students."
Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, has welcomed the new step of naming universities that don't fully co-operate with the adjudicator. "In an environment where students are paying higher fees and will therefore raise expectations, they need to know which institutions stick to the rules."
He also makes this warning: "Faced with increasing competition to recruit students, many universities are being tempted to make grander and grander claims. They need to improve their offer, but they need to be honest in what they promise."
The advice is echoed by Steve Smith, president of Universities UK and vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter. He sees, in the adjudicator's annual report, a sector getting to grips with a new world where students are more demanding and will make sure universities correctly follow procedures. "It is vital that institutions are upfront and transparent about what students can expect from their courses. In an age of marketing, don't oversell. Any institution will have to make sure they do what they say."
Meanwhile, Behrens is monitoring reaction to the naming of Southampton and Westminster to help him decide whether his office needs more coercive powers. Before he answers that, he makes one more announcement today: from January, where it is in the public interest, he will publish summaries of a number of his formal decisions about both justified and unjustified complaints. Individual names won't be revealed, but the universities will. Watch this space.
New research taken up by the Tory right is sneakily reintroducing the idea of 'innate' intelligence
Agreement over education policy may be rare, but the need to address persistent gaps in attainment and vastly differing life chances between children from different backgrounds has attracted significant all-party attention. The remedies may be disputed, but no one would now seriously question the need to eradicate what is undeniably a scar on British society. Or would they?
One piece of academic research has been particularly emblematic of the "gap" problem. Written in 2003 by Leon Feinstein, then a researcher at the LSE, it crunched the results of the 1970 Birth Cohort Study, which tracked the development of British children at 22 months, 42 months, and five and 10 years.
Feinstein's conclusions were stark. Children's test scores at 22 months could predict, though not determine, educational qualifications at 26 and were related to family background. The offspring of educated or wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests had a tendency to catch up, whereas the low-achieving children of worse-off parents were unlikely to. Early high-achievers from disadvantaged backgrounds were gradually overtaken by early poor-achievers from advantaged families.
Over the years, Feinstein's graph, illustrating the last point, has been heavily used by the left and right. It featured in David Willetts's controversial speech repudiating the idea that selective education was socially progressive, because gaps in attainment by 10 meant that children from wealthier backgrounds would always do better in any 11-plus.
It is quoted frequently by Michael Gove; most recently, and crudely, to MPs in defence of the hasty passage of the 2010 Academies Act. Inequality, he explained, was so entrenched that "rich, thick kids" achieve more than their "poor, clever" peers even before they start school.
Then, earlier this year, the graph took pride of place in Nick Clegg's social mobility strategy and a lot of policy initiatives now appear to ride on it: investment in early years; Tory conversion to comprehensive education; proposals to rebalance access to top universities using contextualised data; and repointing internships towards the have-nots.
Maybe not surprising, then, that a recent, rival piece of research taking issue with the graph's findings has, according to reports in this paper, found a hearing among restive Tory MPs. The alternative argument, made by Anna Vignoles and John Jerrim, suggests that Feinstein's work is flawed, because over time, and with repeated testing, the children's scores would have regressed to the mean, implying that the bright, poorer children were probably misclassified initially, thus didn't lose ground as they got older.
Feinstein, on loan to the Treasury, has not yet responded publicly, but in private is sticking robustly by his original paper, insisting that the statistical basis is sound, that his fellow academics overestimate the extent to which repeated testing would level out results, and that their work makes spurious assumptions about ability, leading to a dangerous conclusion that ability gaps are "innate", which may account for its appeal to the Tory right.
While it may not be wise to categorise any child as "bright" or "thick" on the basis of a few tests, the longer-term outcomes of the children in the original study appear to back up Feinstein's deeply held view that the potential of the least privileged in society is routinely squandered. Anyone familiar with his later work will know that he, and others, have also probed why it is that some children fall back in relation to what they are capable of achieving.
Schools do have a part to play in breeding academic success, vital personal skills and attributes. But money, parenting, relationships, culture and community also matter. Bright children can easily lose competitive advantage if they are battling with poverty and chaotic home lives in poor neighbourhoods. Others can develop ability and confidence if they have aspirant, supportive parents, good schools, cultural capital and (often) private tuition.
None of this is rocket science to those working with children from a range of backgrounds. The real question is why there might now be a political class searching for evidence to undermine such a powerful and widely accepted basis for more progressive policies.
My own theory is that we are moving into an era in which what Willetts once described as the "parental arms race" will be increasingly fierce and give rise to a mean, rancorous streak. The better-off already fight like tigers to protect what they perceive to be their children's right to a place at the top. What better way to up the ante than by sneakily reintroducing the idea of "innate" intelligence, subtly linked to family background, restoring the idea of a natural order, which social policy cannot interrupt.