The latest government report on prison education recognises that employability is the key to rehabilitation, but there remain difficulties that may let offenders down
In many ways, the latest government report on prison education has great potential. Based on the compelling correlation between employment and reduced reoffending, Making Prisons Work recognises prison education as the key to enhancing offenders' employability, and the cornerstone behind the much-heralded "rehabilitation revolution".
Many offenders enter prison with an entirely negative experience of education and work; almost half were unemployed in the year before arriving in custody, and 80% have the literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old. Prison can provide a stable environment in which prisoners develop the skills that will enable them to follow a life in employment and out of crime.
Yet, while efforts to place offender learning at the heart of the prison regime are laudable, three main difficulties permeate the vision – each potentially undermining the government's entire rehabilitative mission.
First, numerous promises in the report have been made and broken many times before. Since 2004, prison education has purportedly been a key government priority, and funding for offender learning almost trebled between 2001 and 2005 to £151m. Nevertheless, much has been wasted, absorbed by a catalogue of institutional obstacles and misguided targets. In a number of core areas, Making Prisons Work tackles the symptoms rather than the causes of these barriers that have long suffocated reformative efforts.
For instance, the perpetual movement of offenders between different prisons causes tremendous disruption to work and education. Yet the report makes no attempt to reduce this "churn" directly. Dismissing such movement as "unavoidable", it seeks only to mitigate its effects by coordinating learning across prison "clusters".
Additionally, while the report identifies the need to involve a wider range of providers, there is no guarantee that sufficient work will be sourced. Prison industries currently offer approximately 9,000 places a day for prisoners – a far cry from the number needed for the 80,000-strong prison population.
Even if enough employers can be tempted into prison work, the prisons may be unable to accommodate them. Furthermore, creating a prison regime that imposes real-world expectations on learners will place demands on prison staff that, without substantial additional funding, they will simply be unable to meet. The current average working week in prison – some 22 hours – is self-evidently insufficient.
In the absence of enough work places and staff support, some offenders will continue to slip through the net. Worse still, those at highest risk of reoffending are liable to be most neglected. Vulnerabilities within payment-by-result schemes risk creating perverse incentives to skew provision towards those least likely to reoffend. More prolific offenders could be left by the wayside, deemed not worth the investment gamble, given the diminished chance of a successful outcome. This situation can only be exacerbated by the nonsensical reluctance to bring prisoners serving fewer than 12 months under post-release supervision.
A further risk is that interventions will be chosen for financial reasons. While the paper recognises the invaluable role of the Virtual Campus, the secure intranet service that has been successfully piloted in two regions, this will be implemented only "as resources permit", it says. Given the immense difficulties engendered by limited ICT access, both in custody and after release, the roll-out of the Virtual Campus should be made a funding priority.
Prison education can have substantial financial benefits for the public purse; the Ministry of Justice has calculated that vocational interventions can result in savings of up to £97,000 per offender. But money spent must be understood as an investment; it is imperative that the government does not follow the false economy of choosing provision based on cost, rather than on learners' needs.
In placing employability as the goal of punitive incarceration, Making Prison Work undoubtedly sets the right agenda. What is less certain, however, is whether these plans will translate into reality.
Without rehabilitation, prison offers no long-term social remedy for the reoffending epidemic. Having identified the crux of how to reduce recidivism, the coalition's vision must now take the next steps where previous government initiatives have stumbled, and end the long-standing paralysis in reform of prison education.
• Carolina Bracken is criminal justice research fellow at Civitas thinktank
These are university rankings with a difference. They order institutions according to what they are doing to reduce their impact on the environment
There's something a bit unnerving about the lifts at Nottingham Trent University, once you're inside at least. Your fingers reach towards where the buttons for the 10 floors should be, only to discover there aren't any. Panic. Then you remember that you already picked the floor you wanted when you called the lift. "It is a bit disconcerting, at first," the environmental officer, Grant Anderson, concedes.
But it's all in a good cause: the "intelligent lift" system minimises the distance the lifts travel by sending one that is close to the floor you're on and is already carrying others to the same destination, cutting down on wasted journeys, and, in turn, wasted energy and the university's carbon dioxide emissions.
A tour of Nottingham Trent reveals countless other thoughtful innovations and moderations: Victorian buildings once modernised into mazes of small windowless rooms have been opened up to make best use of natural light; ranks of white and green-liveried bicycles that can be hired full-time for just £35 a year; windows that open and close automatically depending on the temperature inside.
And the crowning glory, the "green" sedum roof – actually more of a russet colour – on the Newton building, which acts as a natural insulator, helps prevents flash flooding and provides a haven for birds, bees and butterflies. High above it at the top of the listed 1950s Portland stone tower incorporated into the newly constructed modern part of the building, four peregrine falcon chicks await the return of their parents to the nest that has been kept secret for 10 years to protect them from thieves.
It seems no stone has been left unturned in the university's bid to green its operations, so it's no surprise that NTU has just topped the People & Planet Green League of UK higher education institutions for the second time in three years.
Its vice-chancellor, Professor Neil Gorman, puts it down to staff – including, crucially, the senior management team – ensuring environmental issues are on a par with other key tasks, such as deciding which courses to offer and working with business.
"It's not a 'nice to do'," he says, sitting in his office equipped with state-of-the- art video-conferencing equipment (he refuses "to go to Australia for 45 minutes" to deliver a speech). "It's an equal partner."
Yet for all the successes, one critical area remains a major stumbling block for the university, and it is not alone. Despite setting an ambitious target to reduce its carbon emissions by 48% between 2005 and 2020, and 10% by 2012-13, they have actually gone up by 24% so far.
The story is the same across large swaths of the sector, this year's Green League reveals. A sector-wide target calls for a 43% decrease in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, but at 63% of universities in the tables they've actually gone up. The average increase per university is 7.4%, and total emissions from the institutions giving figures have risen by 3.9%. All this is despite the fact that their capital funding, in England at least, is now linked to the reductions they can achieve against sector targets.
"It's incredibly worrying," says People & Planet's climate campaigns and communications manager, Louise Hazan. "The planning is there, the policy is there, to a certain extent the resourcing is there, but the performance is just lagging behind.
"Over the next couple of years I would expect to see that change quite rapidly. But it's not looking terribly encouraging at the moment – on current trends the sector is nowhere near reaching the emissions cuts required of all public sectors by the Climate Change Act."
Andrew Smith is the Higher Education Funding Council for England's (Hefce) head of estates and sustainable development. "This is a really pressing issue," he says. "We've got a load of plans and strategies, but what we really need now is delivery."
In some areas even the planning was not up to scratch. More than a fifth (22%) of universities who took part did not have a publicly available carbon management plan setting out targets for reducing emissions at the time the research was conducted.
Given that universities can save cash through greater energy efficiency and risk losing funding by not getting their act together, as well as alienating increasingly climate-conscious students (a 2009 study found that more than a third consider the environment to be important in their choice of university), Hazan says it's time for them to get smarter about how they spend their money. "Quite simply, it just makes financial sense for institutions to start investing as soon as possible. There are universities saving massive amounts of money on energy bills from really relatively small investments upfront."
Nottingham Trent's experience reinforces this: Anderson describes its chief financial and operations manager, Stephen Jackson, as "like a pitbull" in finding funding for projects that save energy – and money.
The Green League looks a bit different from your average university ratings table. Newer, teaching-focused institutions tend to be at the top, while research-intensive Russell Group members are hardly to be seen in the higher echelons. None makes it into the top 20, with the London School of Economics the highest Russell Group institution placed at number 22. That earns it a "first", in the table's degree classification style. Only five Russell Group members get 2:1s, 10 receive 2:2s and three – Oxford, Sheffield and Liverpool – only manage thirds. Cardiff, coming in at number 130, is deemed to have failed.
Carbon emissions have increased since 2005 at three quarters of Russell Group universities, and by as much as 51% at UCL. There are four Russell Group members among the 31 institutions lacking a publicly available carbon management plan.
Why aren't these universities measuring up? "For non-Russell Group universities, being green is definitely a selling point and a way to attract students," Hazan says. "That's not so much the case for Russell Group institutions."
Being research intensive, she points out, means they are bound to be using lots of water and energy compared with teaching universities. But she adds: "In terms of policy, I think it could be said, for some institutions, to come down to a certain arrogance that this is not a priority for them."
Wendy Piatt, the Russell Group's director general, disputes that. "Environmental concerns are taken very seriously," she says. "All of our universities treat their environmental obligations, policies and goals as high priorities."
Research in science and engineering, particularly, involves a relatively high level of energy consumption, she says, and important work in the environmental field is being carried out at Russell Group institutions.
"Researchers are working on new low, carbon energy technologies at Imperial College London, for example, the development of greener aircraft at Bristol, and catalysing cleaner fuels at Oxford," she says. "Such initiatives are crucial if the UK is to remain a world-leader in global efforts to deal with climate change."
So where are those institutions that are doing badly, going wrong – and why?
Queen Mary, University of London, previously ranked in 87th place, this year slips to 135th in the league.
Its newly appointed head of energy and environment, Rebecca Maiden, says it struggles with its buildings, but knows it needs to raise its game, especially in regard to turning policy into action. Part of that has been the creation of her post – she's been there for just four months – and another position the university is currently recruiting for.
"In the past 12 months there has been a real acknowldgement that the environment is an area we need to improve on," Maiden says. "It's been about setting up for the next 12 months, which will hopefully see a major improvement."
Cardiff's spokesman says the university takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously, with senior staff committed to "continually driving forward" existing and new policies to improve performance. "The league table does not reflect the tremendous practical efforts made by staff and students to reduce carbon emissions, promote sustainable development, and embed sustainable development in our operations," the spokesman says.
"We acknowledge that we have a significant challenge with regard to carbon management as a consequence of our substantial research agenda. People & Planet continually fail to credit Cardiff University for the number of core staff we have with designated environmental responsibilities, seemingly because they are not purely dedicated to environmental issues."
There are plenty of success stories in this year's results too. Given that almost a third of the UK's greenhouse emissions come from food production, People & Planet is encouraged that 49 universities - 34% of the sector - now have a publicly available sustainable food policy, an increase of 10 percentage points on 2010.
One in 10 institutions is now purchasing significant amounts of renewable energy (compared with 8% last year), and the sector is recycling 45% of its waste on average - including construction waste. That's a significant increase on last year's figure of 37%, says Hazan.
This year, two new areas are also being considered: ethical procurement and curriculum content. Universities have massive purchasing power – more than £8bn is spent each year on goods and services, through lots of different supply chains, and they've got a responsibility to ensure they're not causing human rights abuses through those chains," Hazan says. Although 68% of the sector is now accredited with Fairtrade status, no universities gain full points in the ethical procurement section.
Only 16 institutions scored full points for integrating sustainability into their teaching and research activities, a move necessary not just to promote behaviour change, but also to give graduates an understanding of environmental and social issues that will be crucial in the future, according to People & Planet.
"Students who are now being asked to pay on average £9,000 a year are demanding that their universities prepare them for entry into the fast-expanding low-carbon workforce and marketplace," Hazan says.
A commitment to including sustainability in the teaching on every course has been NTU's big triumph this year. University is about building the individual, Gorman believes. Putting the underlying environmental challenge at the heart of all the institution's projects has been the key to getting buy-in from students and employees, he says. "That's how we have embedded it across the culture. I don't think you can achieve this just by saying 'thou shalt'."
And while he still gets the odd email complaining about having to queue at shared printers, the kudos the university gained from its previous Green League win, in 2009, seems to have inspired a cross-campus sense of pride and eagerness to do more, right down to reception officer Michael Wells's obsession with checking the webcam trained on the peregrine falcons.
Coming top was a watershed moment, Anderson says. "Since then it's always been an open door with new ideas."
He and Gordon accept that institutions with historic buildings that are all but impossible to make more carbon efficient face tougher challenges. But with so many other critieria to gain points in, they say that shouldn't be a barrier to achievement.
Hazan agrees. "There are lots of things you can't get around, but there's an awful lot that universities could be doing that they're not yet doing."
The chief executive of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge, says the targets set by the sector are meant to be challenging. "We recognise that there is more work we need to do," she says. "But it's important to focus also on universities' wider and invaluable contribution to the green agenda in terms of their environment-related research and teaching."
People & Planet says action is going to be required from the government. "There's been no high-level acknowledgement of the importance of this at all. We want to see this is an issue that's being looked at and that they're taking note of quite serious shortcomings," says Hazan.
"For the universities minister, David Willetts, in particular, the recommendation is clear: show more leadership and vision for a sector-wide low-carbon transition plan within the next 10 years and prioritise the resources to help universities achieve it.
"This should be a wake-up call to government and the sector to act faster and deeper in the face of a looming climate crisis and funding cuts."
1 Lack of a transition vision
By 2011, every institution should have a publicly available carbon management plan that sets out how it will reduce its emissions. Without clear targets, universities struggle to devote the necessary priority and resources to tackling the challenges of climate change and sustainability. A fifth of all universities have yet to publish their strategies.
2 Failure to engage students
Universities are missing a trick if they're not doing everything possible to engage their students and to influence student behaviour. Given the rise in tuition fees, it's also inexcusable for students not to be involved in shaping universities' future and priorities.
3 Not employing sustainability staff
Without professional staff dedicated to environmental management, it has been consistently demonstrated that green initiatives are unlikely to be systematic, well-co-ordinated or sustainable.
4 Lack of action on carbon reduction
It's unacceptable for institutions to lead the way on climate change research globally while continuing to increase their own emissions. Serious investment in energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy generation is needed now to have any hope of meeting government targets.
5 Not telling the whole story
Universities spend around £8bn a year on procuring goods and services but the majority do not monitor the emissions arising from this. As this can account for more than 50% of an institution's carbon footprint it's essential that they be monitored … and reduced.
Louise Hazan, Climate campaigns manager, People & Planet
• People & Planet is a student campaigning network originally set up in 1969 to raise money for overseas aid. Recently it has campaigned for Fairtrade school uniforms and against sweatshops, and for ethical investment by pension funds. People & Planet is also behind the Transition University initiative, which enables institutions to improve their environmental performance. There are People & Planet groups at 71 universities and colleges.
This is the fifth successive year of the People & Planet Green League and the first time the organisation has teamed up with the Guardian. This year more universities than ever have participated: 142 institutions provided enough information to be entered into the league table.
Universities have been ranked according to 13 criteria, which are explained here
The table above shows the overall ranking of universities and what "grade" they have been awarded. The People & Planet Green League 2011 ranks institutions according to 13 criteria designed to assess their policy and senior-level commitment to environmental management (40 points), as well as indicators of performance against policy commitments (30 points).
The criteria
1. Environmental policy (5 points)
Full points are awarded for a publicly available environmental policy that sets clear targets for reducing key impacts. Must be reported on annually at senior level.
2. Management staff (8 points)
Points for having between at least 0.5 and two full-time equivalent staff members devoted to environmental management. Calculated based on number full-time equivalent staff per 5,000 students.
3. Environmental auditing and management systems (8 points)
Includes 4 points for auditing procedures to establish impacts in key areas such as waste, water, procurement and biodiversity.
4. Ethical investment (3 points)
Full points for taking into account the environmental and social impact of investments. Must include clear evidence that ethical investment action has been taken as a result of the policy.
5. Carbon management (7 points)
How strong and ambitious are universities' carbon management plans and carbon reduction targets? Bonus points for targets that include the full scope of climate emissions.
6. Ethical procurement (2 points)
One point for achieving Fairtrade University status, one point for considering human rights impacts in other supply chains such as garments and IT.
7. Sustainable food (2 points)
Points awarded for having a publicly available sustainable food policy, as well as key actions such as using 100% free-range eggs and seasonal ingredients.
8. Staff and student engagement (3 points)
Rewards those doing the most to encourage behaviour change in diverse and creative ways, from Go Green Week to formal student and staff union representation.
9. Curriculum (2 points)
Full points for taking steps to integrate sustainability into all teaching and research.
10. Energy sources (6 points)
Compares the amount of renewable energy institutions purchase and generate on-site against each other.
11. Waste and recycling (8 points)
Compares the amount of waste mass per head each institution generates and the percentage recycled.
12. Carbon reduction (10 points)
Compares the total carbon emissions per head and ranks institutions according to the actual level of reductions achieved since 2005 compared to sector-wide targets.
13. Water reduction (6 points)
Compares institutions' water use per head and percentage of grey or rainwater used.
• See a more detailed table at
• To see all the data go to
• Find the full methodology on the People & Planet Green League website: http://peopleandplanet.org/greenleague/methodology-2011
Academies, young offenders, the French in waiting
Much as the title suggested (Do-it-yourself conversion, 31 May) your article presented some tips to schools thinking of going for academy status. But an opportunity to explain the problems with academies was lost.
A visit to some of the failing or under-performing schools in Devon might have shed some light on the situation. Outstanding schools often complain about the service they get from local authorities, and your piece strengthened the impression of local authorities as inflexible and inefficient bureaucracies. What these heads fail to say is that the 13% of budget held back was never intended to be used on their schools only. Education authorities spend money on schools (and therefore children) in greatest need and they use pooled funds to meet those needs. Schools that have benefited from such funding and who may need it in the future are opting out of what is in effect an insurance scheme.
The obscenity of the new academy programme is that it drains funding from under-performing schools. The programme requires new academies to support other schools, but it is currently up to the school which institution it supports. In the case of my own local school they have chosen a feeder primary with few serious difficulties and not one of the county's more difficult secondary schools.
It is hard not to conclude that long standing opposition to local education authorities is driving this policy. As the new academies cherry pick the easy schools to support, problems will be left flapping in the wind. This massive hole in education policy needs to be exposed.
John Eglin
Primary headteacher and parent Maesbrook, Oswestry, Shropshire
As the union representing most teaching and training staff employed by the Manchester College in its offender learning programme, the University and College Union supports the call for an inquiry into operations at Wetherby Young Offender Institution Prison (Prison education provider faces further questions, 31 May). But we would point out an underlying problem in the current funding system, which is based on crude targets and payment by results.
The truth is that many offenders are prevented from finishing courses by the nature of the prison regime, including the high levels of transfers between institutions. We hope the further education minister will confront the inherent problems with the funding approach.
Sally Hunt
General secretary, UCU London
Last week Jonathan Wolff wrote that current government policies threaten UK universities' standing in the world.
I've recently returned from a conference in France (not paid for by the taxpayer), and they're expecting UK universities to implode, that the job market will be awash with good previously UK based academics. They are anticipating the rise of French academe.
DrzBa via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Our BTec student can relax for a bit longer, but for others, it's time to get nervous about the exams
Buried in revision notes and stressed by exams, the five students Education Guardian is following through A-levels and university applications were hard to get hold of. But despite being surrounded by frazzled friends, 17-year-old Danielle Fox, who is midway through a two-year BTec diploma in art and design and a photography A-level course, is feeling relaxed about her own final few weeks at school before summer.
"Exams are already over for me as I had only one eight-hour photography exam for my A-level, because my BTec in art and design doesn't require an exam," explains Danielle, who is a pupil at Plymouth Marine academy. "I'm glad now that I opted to do a BTec, because coursework is easier to handle and not as much stress. I have a few friends with lots of exams and not much space in between each of them. They're finding it quite tough, but my one exam didn't require much revision. I managed to complete it in time, and it went better than I'd expected. It helped that I'd made a plan on how to spend my time. Now I just have to wait for results, which I'm really nervous about."
It's a different story for Christopher Howarth, a student at the private Haberdashers' Aske's boys' school in Hertfordshire, who hasn't yet begun his A2 exams in English literature, Latin and chemistry. With his place to study classics at Cambridge University on the line – he needs to match its offer of an A* and two As – 17-year-old Christopher is feeling nervous about his first exam in Latin verse literature next Monday.
"The fact that A2 exams are later than ASs has allowed for a little more time to prepare, but I wish I could have a couple of weeks more – and that I'd started the 30 pages of Latin vocab on my desk a little earlier," he says. "That's especially true as my Cambridge offer requires an A* grade, which is based solely on A2 performance, and means getting 90% or more, which is a high target. But I haven't had any nightmares, I'm trying to keep it all in perspective – though it's important to squeeze in every ounce of work."
Revision apart, Christopher has started to get excited about university. "I've applied for funding from the student loans website, and last week I got a letter from my prospective Cambridge college – Trinity – giving information about accommodation. Some of my friends are starting on their course reading lists already. One with an offer to study English has received a reading list from his Oxford college that simply listed authors: the entire [Charles] Dickens, the entire [James] Joyce ... but I haven't been set anything so far."
With another year to go at school, university decisions are still on the back-burner for Danielle, who remains torn between her favoured courses of Japanese studies at Leeds University and illustration at Falmouth University. "I haven't made any further inquiries about uni, I think I'll do so only when my big BTec project – designing a sculpture for the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth – is over," she explains. "But teachers at school have been talking to us about Ucas quite often – we've had hour-long sessions once a week to show us how to write a personal statement and what good ones look like, plus how to search for subjects at different unis, and what kind of Ucas points and grades we need."
At home, Danielle has also been talking through undergraduate options with her parents. Her mum, who is unemployed, and dad, who works for contractors installing power cables, didn't go to university, but are keen for their daughter to do so.
"They think my current workload is appropriate and say they're happy with whatever decisions I make," the sixth-former adds. "But the biggest issue is still tuition fees. Starting uni next autumn, I'll be part of the first group to pay the new high fees. I just think they are too much, especially since the government is taking away EMA [the education maintenance allowance, scrapped last year, which paid low-income students up to £30 a week to help them to stay on at sixth forms and colleges]. Right now I get £30 a week, and put £20 aside to help towards uni. But future students won't get that. I've also had to shell out for materials for my exam. I'm thinking that if I continued art at uni then I'd need even more materials and it would cost more than other subjects."
Danielle still wants to go to university, as she believes it's the best route to employment. "I think with a degree I'll be able to start a really good job in a few years' time. But I do feel it's unfair that students a few months older than me don't face the same level of worries about tuition fees. I wish I was born earlier so that I wouldn't have to face this. I didn't vote for the government, but nothing they've done has helped anyone for the better and their tuition fee rules aren't fair to anyone."
Christopher, meanwhile, comes from a background with a tradition of going to university: both his parents – his dad is a civil servant and his mum works in a school's admissions office – are graduates. And starting university this September, he won't have to pay the higher course charges. But he still agrees with Danielle's views on tuition fees. "Education is not a commercial product, and to my mind that means it should be free," he says.
Ahead of his own A2 papers, Christopher is also worried about news reports of under-qualified exam markers as well as A-level grade inflation. "It is a bit galling to find that your paper won't necessarily be marked by people qualified in the subject," he says. "Go into too much depth in your chemistry answers and you're liable to lose marks, not gain them. I think the main problem with A-levels isn't with the qualification itself, but with an education system that requires so much to be taught 'for the exam' rather than for love of the subject."
A scary inflatable doll was invented to protect fearful hikers against aggressive animals such as a bear or moose, but sadly the patent never saw the light of day
When a big bear approaches, some people choose to quietly stroll away. To give them an extra measure of safety, Anthony Victor Saunders and Adam Warwick Bell invented what they call a "pop-up device for deterring an attacking animal".
Saunders, a London-based mountain climber, and Bell, a California patent attorney, applied for a patent in 2002, but later abandoned it. They would equip hikers with, essentially, an inflatable doll "meant to scare away an attacking or aggressive animal such as a bear". The frightful balloon could also be used against "elk, moose, mountain lions, buffalo, hippopotamus, rhino, elephant, boar". They explain that it "works on the principle of maximising the apparent size and ferocity of the human, intimidating the bear".
In the patent application, Saunders and Bell refined their thoughts. Here's how they decided the device must deploy quickly: "The figure should be fully inflated within less than one minute, or within less than 30 seconds, or preferably within less than 10 seconds, or most preferably five seconds."
The device can be "incorporated into clothing or luggage [or] into the hilt of a walking-stick" and activated "by pulling a cord. The figure would inflate and pop up out of the back-pack, presenting the attacking bear with a huge and frightening opponent".
The bear then gets an escalating series of surprises, beginning with "one or more explosive 'bangs', a fog-horn, or a loud roaring or screaming sound".
The noise is augmented with smells. "The musky odour of a bear helps convince the attacking bear that he is being faced with a powerful, aggressive and musky opponent."
Then would come "an odorous or noxious gas or liquid".
There's also smoke: "from a typical 'smoke-bomb' type of device".
Some bears are not easily deterred. So "the deployment of the device may be accompanied by the launching of projectiles. [This] would further confuse, scare and disorientate the bear. Such projectiles could be launched from a mortar or mortar-type device".
The whole thing, they say, is "detachable and may be left between human and bear as the human retreats".
(For a different way to greet bears, consult Troy Hurtubise, whose book about building grizzly-bear-proof suits of armour I discussed here recently.)
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Exasperated academic completes study on the faults in home entertainment technology
It's one of the 21st century's biggest frustrations. You excitedly unwrap your latest technology purchase, plug in the flashy TV, charge up the pristine smartphone or unbox the new laptop. The screen remains pitch black, so you wait. And wait some more. And then furrow your brow as you try to work out exactly how to turn the thing on, what the thicker-than-the-Bible book of instructions means, and why the hell you bought the thing in the first place.
Next time, know this: you're not alone. In fact, the paradox that technology which is supposed to make life easier can in fact be fraught with frustration is so common that one academic is devoting his PhD to investigating it. Philip Ely, head of the business and community school at the University for the Creative Arts, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Surrey's Digital World Research Centre, has even come up with a name for the hours sapped from our daily routines by technology: digital DIY.
Ely's interest goes back to his time working for the broadcaster Granada, where he designed new sites for the likes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale. "I was struck by how engineers, designers and marketers privilege their own views on technology development at the expense of the people who use them," he explains. "The obsession in government policy and the City with technological infrastructure and the digital economy has neglected the real challenges people face when living with these technologies."
So he decided to investigate Britons' problems with installing and working with the latest technology, and consider how much of the difficulty could be blamed on manufacturers. Ely began tracking families from different backgrounds over 18 months, interviewing, recording and photographing their digital DIY experiences. "The study focused on three areas – how people actually use, maintain and repair home entertainment, information and communication technology, the home ecology – all the devices and services in the context of the domestic setting, with its walls, tables, chairs, sofas and other people –and individual values and self-identity," Ely explains. "To that end, I visited the families during the course of a year, just after they had moved home or had new arrivals into their homes."
As well as interviewing households and photographing their homes, the academic asked participants to draw a plan indicating where all their technology was located. They were also asked to create a "social network map" to identify the main friends, family or professional IT workers who had helped them to buy, install and use technology. Later in the year, participants were asked to redraw the maps to reveal how computers and other hardware had moved around, and who had helped to maintain and install it.
One of Ely's key observations was that it was often the less obviously important computing gizmos that families found most frustrating. "I found that mundane artefacts such as USB cables, internet infrastructure, and even doors, walls and sofas often prevented households from sharing music or pictures for months on end," he says. "Individual devices became redundant for even the most trivial of reasons, like losing a cable. I realised that manufacturers tend to forget just what a 'messy' and contingent place the home can be."
Ely also found that although home technology has the potential to be more and more interdependent, the reverse is actually happening. "Brands such as Apple, Sony, Samsung, and Hewlett-Packard sit alongside service providers such as Sky, Tesco, BT, Orange, Amazon, John Lewis, Google and the BBC, and software, component and peripheral manufacturers such as Adobe, 3M, Epson or Belkin," he says. "But many pieces of home technology don't work together. Competing companies use technical protocols to inhibit the compatibility of their product or services. They have their own agendas. Making things easier or enjoyable is only important if it 'locks' users into that particular brand or company. But in this political tussle between competing interests lies the end user, who is not working with simply one computer, as they may have done only 20 years ago, but many computing devices."
As a result of his research, top of Ely's hall of blame is Apple's iTunes music software. "It is not people-centred, but revenue-centred," he explains. "I'd like it to connect to all devices, managing all of your music, videos and picture libraries without the constant updates, authentications and processor-hungry demands." Even this IT specialist has suffered iTunes exasperation: "If there was a micro-payment system for every time I shout at iTunes, when it doesn't work properly or is too slow, someone would be a millionaire," he says.
Interestingly, Ely's findings contradicted the common view that technology is isolating. He found most households contacting others on online forums for IT help. "Users are now relying on each other to provide valuable technical support," he says. "People support each other through technology problems both online and via face-to-face communication. None of the households I visited could have relied purely on a digital-only interaction – homes have become a lot more open not because of the intrusions into private life by online media, but because people are having to work with wider social networks to help support the everyday problems they face with technology.
"Just as in traditional DIY, people share hints, tips, shortcuts and even 'gift' each other technologies; people enjoy helping each other, and helping with home technology is a rewarding and socialising force."
Ely says his research also proves that the young generations of digital natives – those know-all kids who grew up with the internet and other new technology – can still find things to learn about from their parents. "In households with children there was an exchange of knowledge between generations," the academic reports. "Parents teach children how to download images from cameras, children teach parents how to purchase and download apps and music."
Ely now hopes to use his findings to set up consumer advocacy groups, both to influence government policy and to inform technology firms' innovation processes.
In the meantime, his research has had an expected consequence. "When I tell people about it, they often start telling me how so-and-so spent ages setting up the new digital TV, or recount a lengthy conversation with a helpline in India," he says. "It seems to be cathartic for them and I think they expect me to know the answers to their problems. But really that just reveals exactly how widespread the issues of working with home technology are."
JISC’s head of innovation Sarah Porter will today (Friday 3 June) lead an online Guardian debate about the future of the internet in academia.
Sarah is one of ten panellists leading the discussion about how higher education could better embrace the web and what that transformation would look like.
Sarah said: “JISC’s active research in universities shows that not only has the internet changed the way people conduct their research, use university libraries, teach and administer services – but that it’s also benefitting the impact that institutions have outside their own campuses.
“I’ll be really interested to see in this debate whether we can come to some conclusions about changes that need to happen in universities to make even better use of the internet.”
All comments are welcome on the Guardian higher education network blog between 1-4pm.
To stimulate the debate, Guardian journalist Eliza Anyangwe posed some questions: “Are universities only touching the tip of the iceberg of possibilities the web offers in teaching and research? And what about in HE management and administration; how is the web changing service provision here? Is it being used enough?”
Find out more about the debate and join in at 1pm
Follow @GdnHigherEd on Twitter for highlights from the discussion
via Jisc news
Cardiff University has developed the first generic system in the UK to help education institutions assess the popularity and use of their electronic resources viewed via access management software.
The JISC-funded RAPTOR project, led by Cardiff’s information services directorate, enables institutions to view usage statistics from different access management systems, with a particular focus on federated access systems.
The RAPTOR system automatically analyses the log files created by an institution’s access management systems, and shows information about the resources that users have accessed in easily understandable graphics.
The system has been designed to be easy to install and configure, to appeal to institutions with limited technical expertise or resource. It should also be easy to use for the non-technical staff who may require this information.
Martyn Harrow, director of information services at Cardiff, said: “The strength of the RAPTOR tool at a time when education budgets are being squeezed is in providing the evidence needed for academic schools to assess the e-resources subscriptions that are in place. Universities using this system will be able to prove the impact of the e-resources they provide, and ensure that they continue to deliver the best possible value for money for individual academic schools and entire institutions.”
Chris Brown, JISC e-research programme manager, said: “The JISC funded RAPTOR project has produced a tool that has the potential to become extremely important both for institutions and the UK federation. In these times of not just cost savings but looking at improving efficiencies, the RAPTOR tool provides valuable statistics on resource usage. It can analyse a variety of log files and present important information, not only promptly, but most importantly, in an easy to use way. The team at Cardiff have used their wealth of experience in this area and incorporated user feedback to build a tool that is easy to install and use but also extremely powerful.”
Dr Rhys Smith, engineering consultant for identity and access in the information services, said: “RAPTOR’s ease of use has been one of the central considerations in developing the system. This development will give non-technical staff the flexibility to independently produce these statistics whenever they are needed. Users can access the statistics in as much detail as they require (for example, you can view usage by individual department) and the system then presents the figures in an easily understandable way, which can in turn be exported into presentations or reports.”
A further feature of RAPTOR includes providing UK-wide statistics for the JISC Monitoring Unit on the take-up of federated access management across the UK. RAPTOR could also be applied in the US, Europe, and beyond, with potential partnership opportunities between Cardiff and other institutions already being identified to further develop the system.
RAPTOR is now available to the higher education community. The project has secured further JISC funding of £20k to develop the project in consultation with external partners and its users to evaluate and improve the software.
JISC is now funding RAPTOR further to help standardise the code and establish a community of early adopters. This work will help to show the benefits of the tool, build a community and give feedback to the team on potential improvements.
Visit the RAPTOR website for more information
via Jisc news
Publishers, researchers and librarians met this week to debate the global and UK position for scholarly communications including the transition from traditional journal publishing models to open access for academic research.
Discussion Tag:
#scholarlycomms
JISC hosted the roundtable discussion which saw experts gather to share their views on the benefits and international challenges facing higher education in making academic research more widely available, for example through open access routes.
Mark Patterson - Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science explained that he saw that there have been, "significant changes in the publishing world with several open access titles launching over the past 18 months." He also added, "We are seeing a publishing system evolving and adapting to online and digital media. However, it is not just access to research articles and papers that is important it is also being able to reuse and share the content of those articles so new knowledge can be created."
What is clear from the debate is approaching online publishing models for research with a one size fits all approach would be dangerous and care needs to be taken to ensure the models suit the research disciplines. Neil Jacobs JISC’s programme director for digital infrastructure leads JISC’s work on open access and says: “In some areas of physics, where a pre-print culture is normal, open access has been built around that. In other disciplines, such as in some areas of the life sciences, there are major open access journals and repositories. Open access is not yet common in chemistry, and the importance of monographs presents different challenges in the humanities.”
The debate looked at the possible paths to transition from the traditional journal model through to gold oa as well as talking through whether a hybrid model was also the way to go. There was agreement that peer review must remain a cornerstone of scientific publication, to ensure author’s reputations and the credibility of the research. It also contributes to the prestige of some journal titles, which are likely to remain as important brands within scientific publication.
Lorraine Estelle CEO of JISC Collections raised the point that, "there is likely to be a mixed economy for quite some time yet because of course it is a global issue and unless the whole world moves to open access in a particular discipline, there is going to be some subscription for those articles that are coming from other countries."
The debate concluded that there was a strong agreement across the delegates to work together to address these challenges to benefit research and UK plc.
View and listen to JISC’s roundtable debate heading towards the open road for UK research:
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
Sections:
During his speech to the Association of British Science Writers recently David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, outlined the joint commitment RCUK and HEFCE are making to ensure that open access becomes a reality.
Willets said: “Transparency is at the heart of the Government's agenda, and this also applies to published research. In a recent discussion with members of the research community and publishers I stressed the importance of open access to this information for everyone, and I'm delighted that the Research Councils and HEFCE have committed to taking this forward."
Roundtable delegates:
James Milne - Editorial Director and Acting Managing Director, RSC Publishing, Royal Society of Chemistry
Neil Jacobs - Programme Director Digital Infrastructure, JISC
Debby Shorley - Director of Library Services, Imperial College London
Lorraine Estelle - CEO, JISC Collections
Richard Gedye - STM Director of Outreach Programme
Lorraine Estelle - CEO, JISC Collections
Mark Patterson - Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science
Philip Schofield - Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, UCL
Find out more about JISC's work in scholarly communications and how it is part of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG).
via Jisc news
Young children in inner-city areas often have to face knife crime in their neighbourhood. Does it help them to tackle the issue head-on at school?
In a classroom at St Ignatius Roman Catholic primary school in Tottenham, London, Alvin Carpio sits amid a circle of children, 24 pairs of eyes intently focused on him as he talks about his own childhood, a few miles away in east London.
"Whoever stole the most, or had the biggest knife, was the biggest man there. And you wanted to be that guy," he says. "We thought it was cool to steal – we really weren't making the right choices."
Choices are the theme of the day for this class of nine- and 10-year-olds. Carpio, social outreach co-ordinator of the church next to the school, has been invited in to lead a drama workshop about good and bad decisions. The class have been acting out little scenarios: pick up that purse and take the money, or take it to the police? Bully the new kid at school, or make him a friend? But they know there's a darker theme underpinning the exercise. Carpio's visit is part of a class project on knife crime, and the aim is to make them think about decisions they may one day have to make about whether to carry a weapon.
St Ignatius is among a growing number of primary schools that have decided to tackle the issue head-on – often prompted by their pupils. According to the Citizenship Foundation, under whose auspices this class are running their project, knife crime is one of the top three issues named by this age group as their most pressing concerns, along with the environment and health. And although the charity hasn't yet assessed what proportion of schools taking up its "Make a Difference Challenge" – under which children choose a topic to tackle in their local communities – are looking at knives or other violent crime, it says a very significant proportion have done so.
It is certainly a topic in which this class is interested, not to say fascinated. They start off shy – "Why am I looking at three hands when I have 24 children in front of me?" exclaims the class teacher, Justa Fernandez. But within minutes there's a sea of waving hands and voices crying: "Miss! Miss!" Everyone has an opinion. Some have suggestions about how to avoid getting involved: "Sometimes you just have to say 'no' to people," Naysha, 10, suggests. Some want to share their experiences: Evita, 10, tells a story about how her brother was mugged three times for his mobile phone. "It was because he lived in N16," she says. And some, particularly a few of the boys, just really want to share their knowledge on the subject. "People just want you in their gangs, so they don't get in trouble – they stab people and run away," says Jezreel, nine.
And that's hardly surprising: these children could hardly be unaware of the effect of knife crime in their local community. On the front of the church next door to the school hangs a huge banner, which reads: "Isaiah 2:4: They will hammer their swords into ploughshares". Underneath it is a knife amnesty bin into which people can place their weapons, dedicated to the memory of two young local men stabbed to death recently in separate incidents. One of them, a talented 17-year-old footballer named Godwin Lawson, who was killed last year, was a former pupil at St Ignatius, and some of Fernandez's class knew his siblings.
Nationally, knife crime is on the wane – there were 210 murders involving knives or other sharp instruments in 2009-10, compared with 270 two years earlier. Yet there's no denying it's a real issue for the children at St Ignatius. The children chose the project themselves after drawing up a list of things they'd like to change about their area. The final choice came down to a vote between knife crime and pollution – and crime won hands down.
Over the last three months, they've been building the subject into their normal lessons. Work on persuasive writing produced a list of slogans, now pasted boldly on to the white board: "If you use a knife, you could delete a life", "Drop that knife – don't waste my time". A surgeon has been in to talk about her experiences of treating knife-crime victims, and the local police have also been invited.
The subject has clearly caught the children's imagination. Yet there's no suggestion any of these pupils have been tempted to get involved in gangs or knife crime themselves. So why are they so seized by the issue?
Fernandez says it's often on their minds: "It's all around them; it's on the news. They'll often come in on a morning and say, 'Did you see the news last night?'" she says. "Godwin Lawson went to school with one of our girls' older brothers. She said in class that it made her sad when she heard his name mentioned."
But while St Ignatius is in a high-crime, inner-city area, pupils from other districts are concerned, too. Marguerite Heath, director of Go Givers, the Citizenship Foundation's main programme for primary schools, says it's important to address their fears head-on.
"I think a lot of children do get quite concerned about this type of thing, particularly when they start to move on to secondary school," she says. "When they start to travel around on their own, rather than going by car. And I think on the whole we try to protect them too much, actually. A lot of this is to do with peer pressure – children get pressured into belonging to gangs, and this kind of programme gives them opportunities to rehearse the skills and practice the values they need to overcome that."
Leading campaigners on knife crime have argued that all children should learn how to make themselves safe – and should do so as early as possible. Earlier this year, Brooke Kinsella, the former EastEnders actress whose brother, Ben, was stabbed to death during a night out in north London in 2008, produced a report on the subject commissioned by the Home Office. It argued that all pupils should learn about knife crime during the last years of primary school, as the St Ignatius pupils have done this year.
But some sceptics say these efforts could prove counterproductive. Dennis Hayes, head of the Research Centre for Education and Career Development at the University of Derby, argues that there is a lack of solid evidence showing the effectiveness of such programmes.
"I think that unless they are thought through, initiatives with the best intentions can do a lot of damage," he says. "For most kids, knife crime isn't really an issue. Making them think about it is a bit like making people think about suicide. The message they get is that knife crime is a real problem, so perhaps they should carry a knife."
Heath does not agree: "I think if you don't address these issues that the children are thinking about, then misunderstanding grows and they can't get on top of it," she says. "The idea of the 'Make a Difference Challenge' is that they are finding a way they can actually do something about it, so they feel empowered, and once you feel on top of something, it's no longer frightening."
Some of the class have brought their own personal experiences in to share during the last two months. During our discussion, Olivia, 10, has been sitting with her hand up, but perhaps too shy to push herself forward. Eventually, Fernandez invites her to speak. "Not long ago," she says, "someone stabbed someone near my house. And that made me think about knife crime. I felt that person's family must be really sad about what happened."
The bilingual support assistant, Maria Miele, prompts her: "Tell me what you told me when you came in that morning."
"I thought maybe I would see them," she says. "And maybe they could do something to someone I knew."
The headteacher, Con Bonner, says it's hardly surprising the children are frightened by such incidents when they happen so close to home: "It's the environment where they're living," he says. "It's a topic that's discussed among young people generally. Literally in the streets they walk up and down, these events take place."
Government policies are threatening the dominance in Europe of British universities
In the days not so long ago when British universities were full of optimism and self-confidence, and the smell of fresh paint was everywhere, I received a visit from an academic working in France. He was on a mission to find out why the UK higher education sector was doing so well compared to our European counterparts. He showed me a world ranking table, which listed 29 UK universities in the top 200, compared to Germany, with 14, and France, with three, just above Spain's two and Italy's zero. His beloved Sorbonne, perhaps the one university in continental Europe that the man on the Clapham omnibus can name, was nowhere to be seen. What could they do to catch up?
Before answering that question, a bit of wallowing and boasting seems in order. At the end of the second world war the UK, with the US and USSR, was one of the three world super-powers. World influence, empire and economic strength all faded, but academia, alongside snooker and darts, is one of the few areas where we retain world-class status.
Speaking English, the international language of scholarship, must be a huge advantage. I was once told that America once debated whether to adopt English or German. This is a load of nonsense, apparently, but it raises a fascinating question. How would things have turned out if America had adopted German? One thing's for sure: our university world rankings would suffer, though I doubt that this would be the biggest story.
But speaking English is not all there is to it. Like it or not, the research assessment exercise changed attitudes to publication. League tables and research assessment, both crude and potentially distorting of academic values, are made for each other.
In addition, the government understood that if you wanted a flourishing university system it would cost money. True, we were "comfortable" rather than wealthy. Money always was tight, but if something was important, funding would be found. New buildings, equipment, conferences, academic travel, and a couple of bottles of wine for the postgraduate seminar all appeared when needed.
Finally, we benefit enormously from the incredible openness of the UK academic job market. Although we can't quite match football's Premier League, even small departments will typically have several overseas players in their squad. Compare this to almost all other European countries, where the tradition is to appoint locals, often groomed for the job. An international recruitment strategy widens the talent pool, and allows a department to develop in new and unexpected ways. But it also creates opportunities for international connections, which in turn generate energy, intellectual stimulation and a sense of going places.
So that was my story. I've just received a follow-up email, asking me if the UK will be able to sustain its European pre-eminence given recent government policy. Well, I didn't take this question seriously, until I started to think about it.
Luckily we still speak English. But then so do European academics, and they are increasingly choosing to publish, and even teach, in English, too. We still assess research, but other countries have copied us here as well.
And, what's more worrying, money and international recruitment are under pressure. In anticipation of big financial cuts to come, "adjustments" are being made here and there. That little bit of cash lubricating the system, making small but highly valuable things possible, has disappeared. Like sensitive children, we no longer ask, for fear of disappointment and mutual embarrassment. And the government's promise to "get tough" on immigration has repercussions for international staff recruitment. The number of work permits is being limited, and what was already a drawn-out and nerve-racking process may well just become more trouble than it is worth.
Could it be that our super-power status is under threat? As continental Europe tries to bring about economic growth by investing heavily in higher education, we are dimming the lights and shutting the doors. We just have to hope that our effortless superiority carries us through.
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His new book, Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry, will be published by Routledge at the end of this month
Faith schools will continue to foster ethnic segregation, argues Peter Wilby, no matter how much religious leaders promote understanding
Nothing has changed in Oldham. After the three days of Bank Holiday riots that shocked the country exactly 10 years ago, inquiries concluded that it was one of the most segregated towns in England, where whites and Asians led "parallel lives". The schools, according to research by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University, were "the most ethnically polarised in England". Now a new study from the centre, reported in the Guardian last week, finds "little evidence of change". Segregation has declined, but only very slightly. It doesn't help, the centre suggests, that Church of England and Roman Catholic faith schools account for more than a third of the primaries and 40% of the secondaries.
I last visited Oldham in autumn 2007, when the council was planning three secondary academies, physically located to bring the communities together. They opened in September, but nobody can yet judge whether they will achieve greater ethnic mixing, not least because they have still to move on to permanent sites. My discussions four years ago with teachers, council officials and particularly faith leaders did not, I regret to say, fill me with optimism.
One idea floated then – more by outsiders than by Oldhamites – was that the new academies should be multifaith schools, in which Muslims, Catholics and Anglicans would all have a stake. Leaders of the three faith communities, it was suggested, should help to determine the schools' curriculum and ethos. Moreover, the schools could expand into community services, offering sports facilities, adult evening courses, opportunities to learn English, and so on. Muslim children could learn the Qur'an inside school after normal hours instead of going daily to the mosque, it was proposed.
That hasn't happened: the academies (though one is sponsored by Oasis, a Christian group) are non-faith, rather than multifaith. I am not surprised. It was evident to me that most faith leaders were at best suspicious of, and at worst downright hostile to, mixing across religious boundaries. This is not peculiar to Oldham, and certainly not to the imams.
Faith leaders wish to protect and expand their markets. I do not blame them. They have premises to maintain and employees to pay. Education is one of their best promotional vehicles. The Christian churches sponsor schools because they help to fill the pews: parents get their children baptised, attend on Sundays and, if they can afford it, donate to the church roof in order to maximise their chances of a school place. Nearly all costs are met from public funds. It is a win-win for the churches. Why should they jeopardise it? Equally, why should the imams jeopardise the survival of their after-school classes or private Muslim schools? Many of the latter hope eventually to join the state sector and receive taxpayer support as CofE, Catholic and Jewish schools do.
Last month, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, chair of the CofE Board of Education and Bishop of Oxford, proposed that CofE schools should reserve as few as 10% of their places for churchgoing families. The CofE's function, he said, was not about "collecting nice Christians into safe places", by which he meant (I think) that church schools should cease to provide white middle-class parents with havens in which to shield their children from rougher and duskier-skinned peers. It is all very well for him. The CofE has been the established church since the 16th century. It has a lucrative sideline in marrying, baptising and burying the secular masses. If there are redundancies, bishops, like any boss class, will be last to go. As for Catholic, Muslim and other minority faith leaders, fear of losing their customers and of ultimate extinction is in their DNA. One Catholic priest in Oldham summed it up. He would not, he said, support anything that "takes people away from their own worshipping communities".
I wish Oldham luck in reaching across the religious divisions. But faith leaders will not do much to help. They will strive to increase understanding across the boundaries, but they will not work to demolish them. It is not in their interests to do so. That is why it seems so extraordinary that the government not only supports faith schools, but encourages more.
The Nottingham University Samworth academy has a room packed with curiosities and puzzles that stimulate pupils' imaginations, and generate a sense of wonder
The large white 1950s telephone could have been a prop from the set of Mad Men. It shares a shelf with a vinyl-clad Vector Radio that looks as though it should be permanently tuned to Radio Luxembourg. Nearby is a black typewriter so old it might have been used in Billy Wilder's adaptation of The Front Page.
All three items seem to fascinate the young visitors to the Wonder Room at the Nottingham University Samworth academy (Nusa), a shiny new school sponsored by the university in Bilborough, a former council estate. The room is crammed with curiosities – the pre-war typewriter is particularly popular with pupils more used to the sleek and silent computer technology of the 21st century. "It seems so down-to-earth and real," says David Robson, 14. "I find it very satisfying to write on."
Dr Matthew McFall looks on, beaming. "Do you know," says the school's Agent of Wonder, "that the longest word that you can get from the top row of the keyboard is 'typewriter'?" He has dubbed this particular typewriter his "stealth literacy machine". And one of his many epigrams is: "To the digital native, the analogue becomes wondrous." Wonder is his business – stimulating curiosity through any number of apparently randomly assembled objects and organisms.
Some of the items have been contributed by members of the teaching staff, but most have come from the home of this inveterate hoarder. "I'm a lifelong collector of the weird and the wonderful," McFall says. And he is putting his collection to good use. "Research suggests that providing hands-on experiences raises questions, answers some, then raises more among inquiring young minds," he says.
The room contains all sorts of puzzles, including an interlocking metal device exported from Brazil in the 1980s and a wooden solitaire set with a full complement of marbles. "I've only ever done this on a computer," says Simon Ricketts, 12. "Never, you know, physically until now."
On the next table, Steffan Cotton, 13, is peering at a bee's tongue through a microscope. "It's awesome," he says. "Now I know how they lick up all that pollen." Around him are laid out odd-shaped pods and seeds, and on a shelf above is an African voodoo lily, which attracts flies by giving off the smell of rotting meat. "It only does it once a year, but the stench is obscene," McFall says with some relish. "The kids are horrified, but also fascinated. Never underestimate the yuk factor."
What he has created is akin to a museum inside the school. "Making part of the school another world means that you always have somewhere to visit," he says. "A room like this offers the opportunity to light upon things rather than be strictured into studying them." He says he has been obsessed with magic since his parents bought him a conjuring set when he was four. "I want to use that same sense of wonder to empower the children rather than having them feel they are stupid because they don't yet understand everything they encounter in life."
He firmly believes the idea should catch on. "I think every school should have a place where wonder can be celebrated. Being interested in seeds, literally and metaphorically, I'm keen to see this idea germinate and spread."
There seems little reason why it shouldn't at a time when schools are said to be cutting visits to museums and galleries because of the cost of supply teachers to cover staff absences.
Some are already thinking along the same lines. The Langley academy in Berkshire declared itself Britain's first "museum learning school" when it opened recently. It committed itself to 12 educational visits a year, and imported objects from dinosaurs to Edwardian bicycles.
The Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, meanwhile, has been taking its handling collection to schools across the region for the last three years. "They're mainly objects from Papua New Guinea," says marketing assistant Sam Morton. "They're used as ways to get children to think about their own culture and heritage."
John Reeve, chair of the museums education group at the Institute for Education, feels there's scope for other universities and museums to export their expertise in similar ways. "Mentoring in schools by students of archaeology or anthropology is another way of spreading enthusiasm for those subjects," he suggests.
Teachers from Nottingham and elsewhere have been visiting Nusa's Wonder Room in some numbers. And McFall's enthusiasm appears infectious, judging by some of the messages tied to a rack where visitors and pupils are invited to leave comments. "What a wicked way to be enlightened, provoked, puzzled and perplexed," reads one. Another visiting teacher told the Agent of Wonder that there wasn't an available room at her school, but she was determined to convert the toilet roll cupboard into what might be termed a cubicle of wonder.
The school's principal, Dave Harris, rarely misses an opportunity to talk about the Wonder Room. He first met his "agent" at the nearby campus where McFall is doing his second doctorate in "wonder and learning", based at Nottingham's Learning Sciences Research Institute. "I bumped into Matthew in a corridor there and we started talking about ways of engaging children and changing attitudes," Harris says. "We hit it off and the kids loved him. He's been coming into school since September – once a week because that's all I can afford to pay for. But the room is open at other times and children wander in during breaks between lessons."
The academy's teaching staff have been quick to spot its potential. "Some of us come here for inspiration or just to recharge the batteries," says Vanessa Tice, who is part of the behaviour support team. "We also use visits here as a reward for good behaviour or as a place to come and calm down. I sent two girls to the Wonder Room for mediation. They ended up discussing something of mutual interest and left the best of friends."
What appeals to the vice-principal, Alan Dewar, is the "subversive and unquantifiable" nature of the room. "You can't pin down with any precision what its value is, but anybody who's been here knows that it is valuable." A colleague in the English department, Clare Barlow, finds that value in stimulating stories and providing props.She once brought a low-ability group in here and aroused their interest by using the Drake Language Master – a recording device from the 1970s – to capture on magnetic strips the witches' prophesies from the opening scene in Macbeth.
McFall's prize exhibit is the inner ear of a whale. But that is currently on loan to a school in Essex. The wonder message is spreading.
Campaigners say new rules forcing asylum seekers to pay higher student fees with no access to grants or loans are 'deeply regressive'
Daniel was 14 when he arrived alone in the UK from Eritrea with just a few words of English. Ten years on, now a British citizen, he has a 2.1 from South Bank University in sports science, a well-paid job as a business developer for a management consultancy firm and has published a short story. While studying, he represented his university in table tennis and was a sports ambassador doing outreach work in local schools and running summer camps. In time, he wants to study for a master's in something related to occupational psychology, and possibly go on to do a PhD .
"I want to be able to do what a typical person wants to do – which is to make a success of my life," he says.
Had he been considering entering higher education this year, however, things would have been different. When he applied for university his application for asylum had still not been decided, but he was treated as a home student, eligible to pay home fees, for which he received a loan that he is now repaying.
Since a rule change in February, young people in this position, who have not been granted asylum but have been given discretionary leave to remain in the UK because it is not considered safe for them to return to their home countries, will be treated as overseas students, forced to pay higher overseas fees and with no access to grants or loans. As most of these young people came to the UK as lone children, with no money, and have been in local authority care, this locks them out of higher education altogether as they have no way of paying for their education.
Last year, 2,700 decisions were made on asylum applications from children aged 17 or under with no family to care for them in the UK, and of these, 1,935 were given discretionary leave to remain. Once children reach 17 and a half, they are allowed to stay, under their existing legal status, until a final decision is made on whether or not to grant them asylum, but because of a backlog of cases this can take years.
Kamena Dorling, manager of the Migrant Children's Project at the Children's Legal Centre, a charity that provides legal advice and representation to children and their carers, says: "Until these students are granted indefinite leave to remain, which may not be until they have been in the UK for over six years, they are cast into limbo at a crucial time in their lives."
She says the centre has been overwhelmed by calls from social workers concerned about the effects of the rule change.
Alison East, a solicitor working for the Migrant Children's Project, says: "Local authorities would normally be providing some on-going support of the sort that parents provide, but they cannot possibly meet the huge cost abyss that would open up if those young people cannot access student finance. This means they would fall out of education."
She says support from other sources is also getting harder to find as higher tuition fee charges mean many charities that previously supported migrant children through university have started supporting home students instead. Then, while some individual universities may agree to provide funding or charge home fees, "you have to be stellar for universities to go the extra mile, especially this year because of what's going on with the fees".
One charity that does support some of these students is the Helena Kennedy Foundation, which provides bursaries, mentoring and support to disadvantaged students from further and adult education.
Wes Streeting, chief executive of the foundation, calls the changes "deeply regressive".
"Ministers are expected to talk tough on immigration, and removing support for people who have discretionary leave to remain is part of that process," he says. "But they need to look clearly at the sorts of students being affected by this. We want to make sure that people who come to the UK having survived very difficult circumstances are given access to education because that is often how they can do what the British public wants them to do, which is turn their lives around and make a contribution to the country that took them in."
A spokesman for the Department forBusiness, Innovation and Skills says: "This change brings clarity to the system for those awarded leave to remain in the UK. It has been necessary in reviewing eligibility to ensure that limited financial resources are used effectively."
But Streeting says the changes represent just one aspect of the difficulty young people seeking sanctuary in the UK have in going on to university.
While February's rule change has particularly affected those who came to the UK unaccompanied, young people who arrived with their parents, but who apply to university before their parents' immigration status is resolved, have always been treated as overseas students, even if they have been living in the UK for many years. This has long made higher education unaffordable for them. Also struggling are those who receive settled status too late to meet the three years eligibility criteria for home fees.
The foundation is now trying to get every higher education institution in the UK to offer at least one place for students seeking sanctuary, to waive tuition fees until their status is resolved and to offer training and mentoring support.
Its project, named Project Article 26 after an article in the Declaration of Human Rights that states that everyone has the right to education, has just received more than £40,000 funding from The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which it hopes will enable it to work with more universities to offer a package of support for these students.
James Lee, employment and training policy adviser at the Refugee Council, says this kind of help is badly needed.
"A young person will be encouraged to go on to university because they will be doing well at A-levels or the equivalent, and will be considered a home student at school, but when they apply to university they are slotted into an international student category from then on," he says. "We think that's unfair."
He argues that it clashes with the government's encouragement of high-level skills and penalises students who have often had to overcome traumatic experiences in order to achieve.
"These are often people who are particularly dedicated students," he says. "Clearly if you arrive into a new educational system you have to work really hard both with language and academically."
Daniel, who is still too worried about the stigma of having been an asylum seeker to use his real name, says people often do not realise how tough and emotionally taxing the process of seeking asylum is. "The worst thing about it is the uncertainty," he says. "If you are unsure about what's going to happen tomorrow, you are always on edge."
David Willetts says he aims to de-regulate higher education. But though there may be increased market competition, there will still be plenty of regulation and control, says Roger Brown
In his spring speech to the vice-chancellors' conference, the higher education minister, David Willetts, said that the government's ambition was to make the new higher education framework "as de-regulatory as we can". In the continuing absence of a white paper, it is not possible to make a proper judgment. But a close reading of the speech and other official responses to last autumn's Browne report may offer some clues.
There can be little doubt that the overall thrust is to increase competition. Most direct funding for teaching will disappear, so that students will literally be purchasers of courses through a fee that will approximate to the cost of provision. Institutions will compete on the fees charged, as well as on quality and availability. Some institutions may be able to increase their numbers at the expense of others. New providers – FE colleges, private companies, even, in the longer run, schools – will enter the market. There will be much greater information for students at institution, subject and course levels. The implication is that the existing barriers to price competition, recruiting extra students and market entry will be removed or loosened up, with a reduction in regulation, bureaucracy and state control.
But wait a minute. The Office for Fair Access (Offa) is currently assessing the detailed access agreements through which most HE institutions need to satisfy the authorities each year about their performance on access or retention. Current rumours are that about a third have been referred back.
Next, if the Browne recommendations are followed, institutions that still receive direct government support for some of their teaching will experience tighter external control over the curriculum, with the new higher education authority "setting basic programme content requirements, eg the minimum number of laboratory hours for applied science courses".
When we turn to the entry of new providers, we find the minister thinking aloud about a "core plus margin" scheme to reward "those providers that offer students high-quality programmes at a price that represents best value". This sounds like the old Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council funding method, which used vast resources in institutions bidding, HMI judgments, advisory committees, appeals mechanisms etc. The other ideas being mooted here – the recruitment of additional students "off quota", tariff-based systems – could also prove to be very bureaucratic.
Finally, it seems most unlikely that even if they prove to be feasible, the new information requirements will reduce institutions' compliance costs.
All of this is on top of the new institutional quality assurance regime due to come into force this autumn. This extends considerably the scope and intensity of external quality assurance, with institutional review judgments extended from two areas (academic standards and learning opportunities) to four (threshold academic standards, public information, learning opportunities and enhancement). And this is without the UK Border Agency.
In his classic text, The Higher Education System (University of California Press, 1983), the late Burton Clark described the state, the market and the academic oligarchy as alternative means of regulation. It looks as though under the new higher education framework we shall have lots of all three.
The awful irony is that the new framework is most unlikely to lead to improved quality. There are three main reasons for saying this.
First, the main threat to quality is prolonged underfunding. While various figures have been mentioned, there are as yet no official projections for the future unit of teaching funding or the share of GDP devoted to spending on institutions. In any case, the whole framework rests on the assumption that private funding will replace public funding, which is a gamble at best.
Second, variable fees will exacerbate the already considerable resourcing and status differentials between institutions. These increased differentials will put paid to the assumption that underpins the current regulatory regime, that all institutions should be judged by the same criteria. (Willetts alluded to this in his speech, suggesting that institutions with "a good track-record" might have less frequent reviews, something which is bound to lead to more bureaucracy, with consultation on published criteria, appeals panels, further reviews etc.)
Third, and most seriously, market competition is bound to threaten, if not undermine, the main plank on which quality assurance has always been based, academic peer review. Indeed Willetts has already indicated that new applicants for degree-awarding powers will not need to have any experience of teaching. Deregulation, anyone?
• Roger Brown is professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University
New allegations surface about The Manchester College's courses at a second young offender institution
New allegations have been passed to ministers claiming that the country's biggest FE college and major provider of prisoner education has received public money to which it is not entitled.
Crispin Blunt, the prisons minister, has asked the Young People's Learning Agency (YPLA) to examine accusations that The Manchester College (TMC) may have been paid for non-existent courses at Wetherby Young Offender Institution (YOI), near Leeds.
The new allegations have surfaced before the ink is even dry on another investigation into The Manchester College's affairs – at Reading Young Offender Institution. This was ordered in January by the further education minister, John Hayes.
Hayes has received the Skills Funding Agency's report on Reading, but says he will not release its findings until the outcome of any possible investigation into Wetherby. The new matter has been raised by Rob Wilson, MP for Reading East, who is calling for a comprehensive audit of TMC's activities across youth offender learning.
Wilson received a letter of complaint and other documents from a whistleblower at Wetherby YOI, which houses 15- to 17-year-olds. Officials at YPLA say they are considering the material they've received before deciding whether or not to launch a Reading-style investigation. "I would be astounded if they don't," says Wilson.
The future of TMC as the country's major provider of prison education could in any case be in doubt following Hayes's review, Making Prisons Work: Skills For Rehabilitation, published earlier this month, which, among other things, calls for a far wider range of providers. Local prison governors should have much more say on skills and education provision, and in holding providers accountable, it says. The review was highly critical of overall standards within offender learning.
The current system of prison education, the Offenders' Learning and Skills Service (Olass), which awards contracts, was set up in 2006 with a remit to improve basic numeracy and literacy.
Hayes's office has played down suggestions that his review, originally due to be published last December, was shaped by complaints about The Manchester College. But one MP told Education Guardian: "The minister's approach is to create a system that avoids the possibility of a TMC problem occurring. The minister has said that this can't happen again."
Wilson has written to both Hayes and Blunt. In his letter about Wetherby, Wilson writes: "I am extremely concerned about the apparent widespread misuse of public funds by TMC. I'm convinced that this matter needs to be taken extremely seriously.
"There is, I would suggest, a pattern to the events taking place at YOIs where TMC is the main training provider. I believe a thorough audit of TMC's involvement at all YOIs is highly desirable."
Wilson has also contacted the Public Accounts Committee, one of whose members, Richard Bacon, Conservative MP for Norfolk South, has reported the allegations to Amyas Morse, comptroller and auditor general of the National Audit Office.
In a letter seen by Education Guardian, the whistleblower at Wetherby refers to "courses that are on the books but as yet do not exist" and queries the payments for hours worked on a motor mechanics course "whose tutor, although being employed for the past 11 months, has had no groups, but been made to fill in for … courses he is not qualified to teach."
Timesheets sent to Wilson were passed to Hayes and Blunt. They show hours claimed for delivering maths and English to young inmates on the motor mechanics course. The whistleblower says that payments were made for hours not worked on eight separate dates in February.
The whistleblower has alleged that TMC is holding "three-hour lessons forced on young men between the ages of 15-18 who have no wish to be in education". Morale and standards at Wetherby are said to have slumped from January 2010 after a new management team from TMC took charge.
A TMC spokesman said he was unable to discuss details of the matters raised. "The college has not been informed by the Young People's Learning Agency of an inquiry set up to investigate any allegations in relation to HMYOI Wetherby," he told Education Guardian.
"As such, the college is seeking to clarify the issues that have been raised and consequently as this stage we are not in a position to comment."
The Skills Funding Agency spent four months investigating the claims of irregularities at Reading YOI. There, a whistleblower alleged that the college regularly claimed payments for teaching a wide range of basic "diagnostic topics" to inmates such as punctuation and spelling, when often only a few topics had been attempted.
TMC has denied any wrongdoing. Earlier this year, it told Education Guardian nothing was amiss at Reading, and that diagnostic testing had been funded on "an actual delivery hours basis".
In a letter to Wilson about Wetherby, Hayes says he takes the new allegations "extremely seriously". Intelligence from Reading will be made available for any subsequent investigation, he adds.
In his review of offender learning, Hayes said that little progress in standards had been made since 2008, when the National Audit Office found "no evidence that resources devoted to learning in individual prisons correlated to the levels of learning and skills needs there".
"The system is not performing well, as confirmed in many reports from the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) and the Prison Inspectorate," said Hayes.
The contracts of providers that were due to run until 2014 will be re-tendered in August 2012 "to enable greater local influence on provision". "We will encourage the engagement of charities, the private and voluntary sectors and social enterprises to make sure their capacity and expertise is utilised," said Hayes.
TMC said it "welcomed" the review. However, it declined to comment on why several IMB reports, including at HMP Downview in Sutton, Surrey, and at HMP High Down, had been critical of its provision, or to say whether the college would bid for all its existing prison contracts next year.
"Working with offenders is a key contributor to the college's mission of 'raising aspirations, expectations and achievements to enable economic success and social inclusion'," the spokesman said. "We have an excellent track record of working with local prison governors prior to the introduction of Olass."
Paid internships, student debt, university funding
Last week Rachel Williams reported on student and graduate internships that are bought for large sums of money.
If we ban my solicitor next-door-neighbour taking my other neighbour's son to work during the summer holidays to spend three months in a law firm, that's way too authoritarian (assuming such a law is not flouted or circumvented) and it's not an area into which the state should be intruding. The internship inequality problem is like the nice house with a view inequality problem. Anyone who aspires to live in a free society must surely regard political interference in these areas as a step too far.
MrBendy via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• I find it ironic, if not disturbing, that one of the paid-for internships was for a "fair trade" company. If they're promoting paying the producers of their products fair prices, they should pay a living wage to their workers.
oooh via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• There is nothing new in having to pay for work training. In the 1860s, my 14-year-old great-grandfather had to find £20 to be apprenticed to a coach-painter in Canterbury. Because his father was dead, the money was paid by a charity.
Andrew Belsey Whitstable, Kent
Jonathan Black, head of careers at Oxford University, argued that the government has no long-term strategy for higher education, as dons prepare for a no-confidence vote in the minister, David Willetts
By shifting the burden of debt on to the individual student, the message the government is sending to the youth of today is "you are not worth this country's investment". They should be careful. In 30-40 years' time it will be the youth of today running the country. At that point, the youth may return the favour and decide that pensioners are "not worth this country's investment".
InebriatEd via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Willetts is joining illustrious company. In 1985, Margaret Thatcher's cuts in higher education spending and abolition of tenure resulted in her being the first Oxford-educated postwar prime minister not to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford, after a vote of the governing assembly. Hopefully sooner rather than later we will get a viable policy for higher education based on an accurate appraisal of the nation's needs, and the aspiration of building a fairer society for all, rather than on an outdated neoliberal dogma.
MikaelBlomkvist via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Harriet Swain notes Durham's plans to increase our numbers of non-EU students, implying that the plans are a way to boost funds (Any currency? 24 May). Our strategy, developed well before the current changes to university funding, will have only a small effect on the overall size (around 800 additional students), but it will significantly enhance our diversity. We are well on target to achieving this.
Increasing the number of international students is not at the expense of UK/EU enrolments. Regrettably, the number of UK/EU students is capped by government and we are compelled to turn away many students we would like to accept. Furthermore, international students do not bring any significant financial benefit: the fees for UK/EU undergraduates will not be dissimilar to those for our international undergraduates.
Anthony Forster
Pro-vice-chancellor Education, Durham University
Nearly every family in the UK is descended from migrants. Find out more on the Guardian Teacher Network this week
The history of migration to and from the UK is as old as British history. As Barbara Roche, former Labour immigration minister and leader of the Migration Museum Project, puts it, "We are all migrants. If you want to celebrate Britain you have to celebrate migration."
Even children who see themselves as 100% English, Welsh, Scottish or British are likely to have ancestors who were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Flemish, Plantagenets from Anjou, or from Germany in the 17th century or Italians, Armenians and Black Africans in the 19th century. Today around 11.5% of the UK population was born overseas.
On the Guardian Teacher Network, our new resources website, you can find a series of primary lesson ideas to stimulate ideas on migration. The resources were produced by the Migration Museum Project, which is seeking to create Britain's first Migration Museum.
In a series of activities that fit with the citizenship, history and English curriculum, children are encouraged to explore why people migrate and given the tools to make a class migration map and local history project. What would children take and leave if they were migrating to another country?
The teaching ideas include poignant case studies, from the story of a young man who left Scotland in the 1860s for Canada to the moving story of Sado, who was just eight when she fled from Somalia to London in the early 1990s.
You can find the primary resources and also a lesson on migration for 14- to 16-year-olds here
Children who explore the resources will discover that every family in the UK has their own migration story. The Migration Museum Project is asking schools and families to enter the 100 Images of Migration competition, which they are running in connection with the Guardian. The competition asks people to turn these migration stories into pictures. Entries can be paintings, collages, photographs of objects or people or anything else. Winning pictures will be printed in the Guardian's Weekend Magazine.
The Migration Museum Project website is full of moving stories and images as well more as information about the competition and the proposal to create this new museum.
• The Guardian Teacher Network offers free access to more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This content is being added to every day by teachers and specialists. More than 30,000 teachers have already signed up. To see (and share) for yourself, go to teachers.guardian.co.uk
What is the risk of picking up bacteria when shaking hands? The answer is tiny, researchers find
How many pathogens per handshake? Is it dangerous to shake hands at a school graduation?
Dr David Bishai and a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in the US, did a small experiment. They wanted to gauge whether the people most at peril should worry about it.
Their report, Quantifying School Officials' Exposure to Bacterial Pathogens at Graduation Ceremonies Using Repeated Observational Measures, has been published in the Journal of School Nursing.
"This study was designed to measure the degree to which principals and deans are potentially exposed to the risk of pathogen acquisition as part of their occupational duties to shake hands."
The write-up has some small human touches.
The team recruited officials who had leading roles in graduation ceremonies at elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools in the state of Maryland.
Fourteen authority figures agreed to be the subjects of the experiment. Beforehand, each of the 14 washed with an alcohol-based sanitiser. Then, and afterwards when all the handshaking was done, "each of the participant's hands was set on a clean drape and swabbed from the base of the thumb to the side of index finger and then around the edges of the other fingers to account for all possible areas for hand contamination during a handshake".
The risk is pretty small, the results imply. Only two of the 14 school officials had pathogenic bacteria on hand post-graduation – and only one of those was on the right, shaking hand. Twirling the numbers for perspective, the study explains there is a "0.019% probability of acquiring a pathogen per handshake".
The researchers point out many reasons why their study is just a preliminary, quick sketch of the story. They examined only a few school officials, and tested for only two kinds of pathogens. Medical science is not clear yet on the prevalence of those pathogens on people's hands in general. Nor is it clear that the microbes' mere presence on the outside (rather than inside) of the body is indicative of danger.
And school graduations are just a sliver of the human experience: "Graduates may have a different level of infectiousness from other members of the community with whom one might shake hands, making our results less useful to politicians, business executives and clergy."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
The government should outlaw branded cigarette packs to discourage smoking, research finds, as smokers train themselves not to see health warnings
No one would drink a glass of poison if it was emblazoned with large letters warning that it would kill them. But millions of people every day ignore similar warnings on cigarette packets. Do seasoned smokers ignore the stark health warnings that declare "smoking kills", "smoking seriously harms you and others around you" and "smokers die younger", or are their eyes trained not to see them? That's what academics at the UK Centre for Tobacco Studies – based at Bath and Bristol universities – decided to investigate using eye-tracking technology. Their aim was to find out whether the government's introduction of health labels – which began in the 1970s with the message, "Warning by HM Government. Smoking can damage your health" – was effective at preventing the habit or encouraging addicts to stop.
What they discovered won't please the tobacco giants. The academics' findings suggest that the best way to stop non-smokers from picking up the habit is to force cigarette-makers to box up their fags in plain packets devoid of any branding whatsoever. The work was carried out by Marcus Munafò, professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, and Linda Bauld, professor of socio-management at the University of Stirling, who noticed that tobacco firms had enjoyed significant surges in sales after jazzing up their packet designs.
The academics point out that, as governments around the world bought in increasingly strict restrictions on cigarette adverts on billboards, TV, cinema and more, tobacco firms began spending more time and money investigating new ways to attract customers. And, slowly but surely, their cigarette packaging became increasingly imaginative.
Munafò points to an example of when Sterling introduced price-marked packs to emphasise their value in 2008. "Its market share increased from 5% to 6.1% in four months," he says, before going on to flag up a limited edition "Celebration" pack of Lambert & Butler in 2004, which included pictures marking the brand's 25th anniversary. That, say the academics, helped to increase Lambert & Butler's market share by 0.4% – or some £60m – during four months on sale. Munafò points out that a couple of years later, Benson & Hedges Silver introduced a new "slide pack", which opened via a side panel rather than flip-top, and saw sales rocket 25% over six months, then a further 32.5% (or more than £74m) after a year. "In the latter two cases, spokespeople for the producers, Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher, explicitly attributed sales success to the packs," Munafò adds. "And an industry paper, Tobacco Journal International, pointed out that 'tobacco packaging is no longer the silent salesman it once was – it now shouts.' The tobacco industry clearly acknowledges that the pack is a marketing tool."
So Munafò and Bauld called in 43 non-smokers, light smokers and daily smokers to look at both plain and branded cigarette packets to help them to work out the different effects. All of their research packs featured health warnings, but while the branded packets were samples from 10 of the UK's most popular cigarette-makers, the others were simple, unadorned white packets, with their brand name and number of cigarettes displayed only nominally in a standard font. The academics then fitted their volunteers with eye-tracking technology to see how they responded to the packets.
"We measured the number of times each person viewed the top half of the pack, which contained the brand information, and the bottom half of the pack, containing the health warning information," explains Munafò, who as an experimental psychologist specialises in investigating the cognitive and biological basis of addictive behaviours. After analysing their findings, the researchers found that non-smokers and light smokers paid more attention to the stark health warnings on plain packs than on those adorned with names like Marlborough. By contrast, the frequent smokers did not – Bauld and Munafò believe they might have conditioned themselves to ignore them.
It might not sound surprising that stark health warning stood out more, and had a more significant impact, on plain packets, but the researchers say their evidence adds support to the idea that the government should force the tobacco industry to dump decorative packaging. Munafò reckons if the likes of British American Tobacco, maker of Dunhill, Kent, Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, amongst others, were forced to standardise the colour and design of cigarette packaging – with all branding removed apart from a standard typeface including the name, relevant legal markings, and health warnings – it would boost the effectiveness of warnings. He adds that previous research suggests that the deterrent of plain packaging would be most powerful among children and young people, or those who believe they are smoking "healthier" cigarettes.
"Studies with teenagers – those not yet smoking or not smoking regularly – have found that they are brand-aware, including awareness by cigarette pack colour and design alone," says Munafò. "And smokers can believe that some brands of cigarettes are less harmful than others due to packaging, for example substantial false beliefs about the relative risks as a result of terms such as 'light' or 'mild', brand descriptors of 'taste' or lighter colours being used on packaging. Plain packaging reduces levels of these false beliefs."
The government has committed to consulting on the idea of introducing plain packaging. Bauld and Munafò have sent their findings to the Department of Health for discussion with its tobacco policy team. But other countries are ahead of us: in January next year, Australia will be the first to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
In the meantime, Bauld and Munafò are furthering their research, including using brain imaging to look at how the brain responds to plain and branded packs. But Munafò is clear about what he thinks the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, should do. "The government should introduce plain packaging of tobacco products and maintain text and visual health labels on packs," he says. "There is good independent evidence on the impact of visual warnings on attitudes to smoking and smoking behaviour."
Switching to academy status may seem daunting to some, especially small, schools. Those who were first in the queue offer some advice on how to make it as painless as possible
It's about a year since New Labour's academies programme abruptly turned into the Conservative academies programme. What started as a plan to help struggling schools became more about autonomy for more successful ones, including primaries.
Lord Adonis, it emerges, the architect of the original scheme, is now writing a book entitled: Academies and the Transformation of English Education. Meanwhile Michael Gove, the education secretary, is forging ahead, trying to persuade ever more schools to convert.
In the last year, 384 schools have changed their status. Some 650-odd are currently approved for academy status and are now busily sorting out the admin required to make the switch; more are awaiting the nod from the Department for Education before embarking on the task.
But there is still angst expressed around the country about the amount of red tape involved in the conversion process, and concern that schools lacking the capacity or confidence to cut through it will be picked off by private companies delighted to take the burden off their hands – for a price.
What do the first schools to convert have to say about their experience since opening their doors as academies in September 2010? What is their advice about how to do it?
The pioneers – those headteachers who applied the minute they could – say they appointed specialists as soon as they heard they had been approved, simply because of the amount of detail in the process. At Hardenhuish school in Wiltshire, for example, the headteacher, Jan Hatherall, appointed lawyers the very next day, and at Durand academy in Lambeth, the headteacher, Greg Martin, says his team was supported through the conversion process by "a communications agency and property and TUPE [specialist employment] lawyers".
Mythologies, however, have built up around the costs involved, say heads who have made the switch. Stephen Davis, deputy head of Lampton academy in Hounslow, points out that schools are given £25,000 to effect the conversion, and though Lampton was fortunate to have a vice-chair of governors whose hard work cut down their legal fees, even a colleague in Brent without any expertise received a bill from the same firm of solicitors that Lampton used for less than £10,000.
Though solicitors might ease the workload, too much of a meal can be made of the difficulty of the paperwork involved, insists Jim McAtear, head of Hartismere school in Suffolk. He scrutinised the legal requirements carefully beforehand and decided a DIY approach was perfectly viable. "The way the DfE has set up the process actually strengthens the infrastructure of those schools," he says. "The difficulties entailed are largely illusory."
Lots of queries arise during the process of conversion relating to each school's individual circumstances, and Hatherall says the support she received from her school's DfE adviser was "outstanding". However, she says she is "hearing now that as more people are queuing up, it's less good". Schools wanting to convert might do well to look to those who have already made the leap for the benefit of their experience.
The impetus for these first heads to cut and run as fast as they could seems to have come from disappointment and anger with services provided by local authorities. The money the schools have pulled back – between 8% and 14% of their total budget – and what it would allow them to do is the central reason all these heads cite for choosing academy status.
That money, they say, means that they have the buying power to get expert professionals into school fast. Vulnerable and distressed pupils are no longer falling behind in their education for want of appropriate and timely support.
The sums these new academies have gained are considerable. At the first school in the country to convert, the Premier academy in Milton Keynes, Warren Harrison, headteacher, now has £330,000 more to work with – 13% of his school budget – that he feels he got virtually no value out of before.
As a foundation school prior to conversion, Harrison acknowledges that he already had considerable freedoms, and he outsourced certain administrative services to private providers, but the extra money means he has been able to increase staffing, extend payscales – so that good teachers can choose to remain in the classroom rather than move into management to increase their salaries, and employ a dedicated social worker on site who ensures that children with social and educational needs get complete continuity of care, which wasn't available via the local authority's social work team.
"We probably don't get things cheaper, but we can move faster," he says.
"The enhanced funding allows us to purchase services that give best value for money, including those provided by the local authority, but we will not be constrained by having one provider who has a monopoly on a service irrespective of quality or cost."
It's this type of freedom, he says emphatically, that has made the conversion to academy status "incredibly worthwhile".
There has been just one downside, he says. The new academies were initially unable to retain VAT – the DfE says this wasn't the policy intention, and they will get a refund backdated to 1 April. But Harrison's finances may still be badly hit because his school converted in the middle of a big capital build programme, and he has had to pay VAT on all construction costs invoiced between September and March.
The transfer of the local government pension scheme has also required heads to accept potentially huge, if unlikely, financial risks. "We carry a notional liability for our non-teaching staff pensions on our balance sheet, and it's a big figure," says Lorraine Heath, headteacher at Uffculme school in Devon.
There's a steep learning curve involved in conversion no matter how capable your management team, it seems. Having complete financial responsibility – and an extra £700,000 to account for – has entailed Stephen Davis learning how to present the school finances in a manner acceptable to auditors; to ease the process, the school purposely awarded the contract to a company that was willing to be involved in guiding staff along the way.
What about the worries that private companies will raise prices once they realise that schools will be purchasing services in far smaller quantities than local authorities were able to buy?
Higher costs haven't yet been a problem, says Davis. Private companies, he believes, are starting to offer more competitive and flexible services in response to schools' ability to shop around: Lampton's human resources and legal costs, he confirms, are already cheaper than they were last year.
Competitive pressure resulting from the new academies' independence is now having an effect at council level, too, says Hatherall. "Under the old regime, nothing had ever been done about some things that weren't good enough, whereas now, there's an awful lot of activity at our local authority to make sure services are good enough so that we will buy them in," she says.
Converting to an academy, however, won't be an automatic choice for all schools, says Davis. Local context and capacity should be the deciding factors. "We have special staff to do the admin – two bursars and a finance adviser – and most big schools will have that," he says. "For a small rural primary or secondary, it might be harder."
"And if you're stretched in other ways, challenged in terms of quality of teaching and it's all hands on deck, say, then taking on academy status might be a stretch too far. And some local authorities are fantastic and provide brilliant services, so why would you?"
A dispassionate assessment of the situation your school faces is vital to make the right decision, agrees McAtear. "We looked at the improvement we had made as a school, and we then looked at what part the local authority had contributed to it, and we could not identify one thing," he says.
"So we then looked at the value for children of the local authority's input and we decided that they did us very little harm, but no real good. If local authorities are honest, they will admit they were already running down services. In a sense, we didn't leave the local authority, the local authority left us. There wasn't that much to lose."
Given their experiences over the academic year, what would this first cohort of academy heads say to others feeling trepidation about converting?
"I don't think it will worry leaders; I think it would worry managers," says Harrison. "If the relationship between this school and the local authority had been better, we wouldn't have done it so fast. But if you're contemplating it, get on with it – there are huge gains financially to be made now, which might not be available in the future."
• Additional reporting by Jessica Shepherd
• This article was amended on 1 June 2011. It originally said that Hardenhuish school was in Devon. This has been corrected.
A national day to celebrate libraries has been launched today. National Libraries Day will take place in early February 2012. It will be the finale to a week of events that will celebrate libraries and librarians, and highlight the importance of reading.
Children’s author and libraries campaigner Alan Gibbons announced the launch:
"We are delighted to launch National Libraries Day, a week of events in early February leading to a day of celebration of reading, libraries and librarians around the United Kingdom. A reading child is a successful child. A child who goes to the library is twice as likely to be a good reader and that child becomes a literate adult, a lifelong reader. There are 320 million visits a year to our libraries but we can make them even more popular.”
“We see National Libraries as a positive day of celebration to promote the whole culture of reading for pleasure, information and engagement whether you read your traditional books or on your laptop or e-reader. It is time to make reading a universal culture. We want people to go to their local school or public library and use their School Library Service. Use it. Join it. Love it."
A group of leading literacy, reading, library and education organisations met today at the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals and agreed to support the day. Planning is at an early stage but National Libraries Day activities will include encouraging people to join and use their library, and providing promotional materials and support so local communities can run events such as read-ins, poetry sessions and parties across the country. It is hoped that all sorts of libraries across the country will get involved including public libraries, in schools, colleges and Universities.
“National Libraries Day follows the tremendously successful Save Our Libraries Day, which took place on the 5th February.” said Annie Mauger, CILIP’s Chief Executive, “Save Our Libraries Day was successful because individuals and communities that deeply care about their libraries got out there and made a noise. People love libraries; National Libraries Day will be an amazing opportunity to show how deeply they care.”
-ends-
Press contact:
Mark Taylor, Head of Corporate Marketing and Media Relations, CILIP
Tel: 020 7255 0654
Email: mark.taylor@cilip.org.uk
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Leading developers from across the UK have been awarded funding to explore technologies to make learning more productive for students, including those with visual, auditory and other impairments.
The first competition is focusing on enhancing communication which is often a challenge for people with sensory impairment. The three successful bids will create software to help translate sign language into text, and sensors which will make it easier for learners to communicate using gestures.
The second competition will develop technology to help learners produce and navigate digital information independently, anytime, anywhere and in a user-friendly way. The projects will design solutions to make it easier for learners to access specially designed textbooks from any device, transfer documents in an accessible format and pull out the key facts from a document.
The funding has come from two competitions sponsored by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and managed by JISC TechDis, a leading UK advisory service on technology and inclusion. Both competitions represent phase one of a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) programme, which encourages technology solutions for specific public sector needs.
Business and Enterprise Minister Mark Prisk said: “It is fantastic to see funding given to innovative small businesses that can now develop life-changing technologies. These organisations are absolutely vital to driving growth in our economy, and I warmly congratulate all the successful bids.”
The competition attracted the attention of European and international organisations and a rigorous assessment process took place, involving a panel of over 45 experts who work in the field of assistive technology.
David Whyley, Head teacher Consultant – Learning Technologies and one of the competition judges said: “The standard of the entries showed an amazing depth of appreciation of the importance that accessing new technologies can play in the lives everyone. The applicants really impressed me with their wide range of innovative, high quality solutions. The response to this competition has shown that there is a tremendous number of talented people out there who desire to have an impact on the living, learning and work of the targeted groups.”
Both competitions represent phase one of a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) programme, which encourages technology solutions to help with specific public sector needs.
The companies involved range from small private sector start-ups, to more established technology developers through to much larger consortia, as well as a university.
Sal Cooke, JISC Techdis Director said: “We are delighted that we have been able to attract interest from such a broad range of organisations, with substantial expertise, who are clearly committed to providing innovative assistive technology solutions. The potential impact is huge, as all the proposals have one thing in common; they are designed to be of benefit to the end user by improving communication and access to information. All the projects will be working with end users to ensure the results of phase one clearly identify and address their needs.”
A total of £250,000 for each competition was made available and successful companies will be expected to complete their contracts by the end of October 2011. A decision will then be made with regard to a second phase of the project. This will clearly depend on the availability of funds and the successful outcomes from the phase one projects.
Mark Glover, Head of SBRI at the Technology Strategy Board, said: “SBRI has enabled organisations that would not normally engage with the public sector to propose exciting new ideas and get the support necessary to move them towards commercial reality. These two competitions have created an excellent opportunity for businesses and academia, to develop technology which promises to make a significant difference to the learning, working and social environment for people with disabilities.”
Find out more about the competitions
Read the original press release on the JISC Techdis website
via Jisc news