Details of the methodology used in compiling the Guardian postgraduate tables 2011
The methodology focuses on subject-level summaries of the taught postgraduate provision taking place at each institution in the UK. Eight pieces of information are provided for prospective students. Some of these commonly have value judgments associated with them (completion rates, for instance) but others are simply for reference (fees, proportion of overseas students). There is no aggregate teaching score calculated for each department and hence no ranking at subject level. There is no overall institutional table.
Volume of provision
This simply shows the number of full-time and part-time students taking a course, and illustrates the size of the department and the mode of study options it provides. Distance learners are included in the part-time figure and all numbers are headcounts of taught postgraduates from the 2008-09 academic year, the latest for which data is available.
Students from outside UK
This measure shows the proportion of postgraduates studying in 2008-08 who have their permanent domicile outside of the UK. Thus the statistic includes both EU and non-EU students but excludes foreign students who resided in the UK before commencing their studies.
Part-time and full-time students are both included in the figures, but it should be remembered that very few students from outside the EU study part time.
Expenditure per student
The amount of money that an institution spends providing a subject (not including the costs of academic staff, since these are already counted in the student-staff ratio) is divided by the volume of students learning the subject to derive this measure, which applies to all students and not just postgraduates.
Added to this figure is the amount of money the institution has spent on academic services over the last two years, including library and computing facilities, divided by the volume of students enrolled at the university in each of those two years. At least 25 (full-time equivalent) students must be counted in the calculation for it to be accepted and year-on-year inconsistency or extreme values can also cause results to be considered non-credible.
Points are assigned to the expenditure-per-student values according to how that value compares with the average for the subject, given the standard deviation of average expenditures in that subject. The resulting standardised scores are then converted into points using the Standardised Score Boundaries table.
Student-staff ratios
SSRs compare the number of staff teaching a subject with the number of students studying it (at all levels), to get a ratio where a low SSR is regarded positively. At least 25 students and two staff (both FTE) must be present in an SSR calculation. Year-on-year inconsistency and extreme values at either end of the spectrum cause several SSRs to be considered non-credible.
FT completion rate
This statistic refers to the population of full-time postgraduate students (not including those aiming for institutional postgraduate credits or "no formal postgraduate qualification") who either completed their qualification in 2008-09 or who were in the standard registration population and had a leaving date within that year. This will include students who completed after writing up their dissertation in 2008/09 having received the taught element of their course in the previous year. Such students, as well as students who fail to complete after a period of dormancy, are counted in the calculation of completion rates but not in the full-time and part-time "volume of provision" fields.
Once the population is defined, a comparison between qualification aim and any qualification awarded determines the leaving status of the student. Students who are awarded the qualification they sought are treated positively along with students who were awarded a similar or superior qualification to the one they were aiming for. Students leaving with a lesser award or no qualification at all are treated negatively.
PT completion rate
This statistic is identical to the FT completion rate but for part-time students only. The greater flexibility of part-time modes of study often results in lower or slower completion rates, so combining FT and PT rates would be likely to unfairly penalise departments that predominantly offer part-time courses.
Tuition fees for home students
This statistic looks at 2010/2011 data compiled by Mike Reddin who publishes an annual survey and represents it at subject level, showing course or subject-specific variance where this is available. Taught postgraduate home/EU fees are used for all subjects, while the Business & Management Studies table also shows the maximum fees charged for an MBA course.
Tuition fees for overseas students
This data also comes from Mike Reddin's fee compilation. There is some resolution of subject-specific fees, with classroom-based or arts subjects having fees distinct to those of lab-based or science subjects.
For the purposes of this guide, the lab-based fees have been applied to these subjects:
Medicine, biosciences, engineering: materials and mineral, dentistry, chemistry, engineering: civil, veterinary sciences, physics, engineering: electronic and electrical, anatomy and physiology, agriculture and forestry, engineering: mechanical, nursing and paramedical studies, earth and marine sciences, mathematics, psychology, engineering: general, computer sciences and IT, pharmacy and pharmacology, engineering: chemical, architecture
Arts or classroom-based fees have been applied to:
Social work, modern languages, drama and dance, business and management studies (MBA fees shown separately), archaeology, philosophy, law, classics, geography and environmental studies, sociology, religious studies and theology, social policy and administration, politics, anthropology, economics, history and history of art, media studies, communications and librarianship, English, sports science, art and design, building and town and country planning, education, music, and tourism, transport and travel.
Thresholds for inclusion
An institution must meet three criteria to be included in a subject table:
• First, at least 35 postgraduate students (headcount of FT and PT) must have been assigned to the subject. The process for students being assigned to subjects uses a mapping of JACS codes, which institutions have the opportunity to tailor to reflect their own boundaries of provision.
• Second, the cost centre that has been assigned to the institution's department must contain at least 25 FTE students. Again, universities and colleges can control which cost centre is used.
• Third, the department must have at least a full-time or part-time completion rate.
• Intelligent Metrix is an independent consultancy specialising in measures of higher education performance and activity.
By focusing on behaviour management, a select committee report misses a real opportunity to support behavioural change in vulnerable children
Terry (not his real name) is 10. For most of his school life he has been on the edge of trouble, sometimes up to his neck in it. He has found learning hard and is resistant to instruction because he fears failure. At times he is a wild presence and at others is curled up in a sad silence. His father disappeared long ago. His mother rarely manages to collect him from school on time and gives him the attention he craves by yelling at him.
At home, Terry has had little chance to develop confidence or hope. But his experiences at school are making a difference. There have been signs of progress in his behaviour. "He climbed on a cupboard recently," says his teacher. "I told him he had made a bad choice but now he could make a good choice by coming down. He knew he wasn't going to be yelled at." Terry came down without a fuss. "He wouldn't have done so a few years ago."
All agree that a well-ordered classroom is desirable. A sense of purpose, engaged pupils, and a safe learning environment are worthy aims. Buried in the report of the education select committee, published this month, is an acknowledgement that these issues do matter - but the report itself is overwhelmingly focused on behaviour management: what you do when kids muck up, rather than how to promote the positive. Although it is important to have management strategies up your sleeve, these will be less effective if not delivered within the context of a healthy teacher-student relationship. This is not about being soft on pupils – it is about what works. High expectations are part of it.
The paper does not define the behaviour that is wanted. It focuses around "discipline". This has connotations of control, obedience to rules set by someone else, not negotiated. Pro-social behaviour is choosing to be co-operative because it makes sense to you within a community to which you feel you belong. This is the root of self-discipline and supported by rafts of research on what helps children grow into independent, responsible adults.
Concern is expressed in the report about the lack of mental health services for vulnerable young people, but little acknowledgement that a first line of mental health is in the classroom. Teachers can either promote or undermine a positive sense of self and sense of connection in their interactions with students. Maximising participation and emphasising choice rather than control, (though still being clear about boundaries and consequences), modelling wanted behaviour, helping students identify their strengths and encouraging them to set their own goals, showing that they are worthwhile and wanted are just some of the actions effective teachers take. It is not a quick fix, but this approach is in everyone's interests.
This was a real opportunity to support behavioural change for children at risk – it is a shame that doesn't seem to fit with the requirement to get everyone in line.
• Sue Roffey's latest book is Changing Behaviour in School: Promoting Positive Relationships and Wellbeing
A new government programme designed to cut the number of benefit claimants will place the financial burden on further education colleges
Colleges are by now used to getting paid by results. Their funding depends in part on students gaining a qualification at the end of their course, and training schemes for unemployed people can pay as little as 40% of money upfront.
Later this year, though, the stakes for colleges and other training providers will become even higher, as the first learners enrol for a new programme designed to reduce the numbers claiming jobseekers' allowance and other benefits.
Under the Work Programme, which will replace Flexible New Deal and other welfare-to-work schemes this summer, just 10% of money will be paid upfront. As part of a growing trend requiring training providers to find jobs for learners as well as teach them skills, the rest will be staggered over the next 18 months – and then only if the learners remain in employment. Within three years, all payments will be performance-related.
Given the economic climate and rising unemployment, you might think that colleges would be reluctant to take the risk of receiving only a fraction of what they hoped for because individuals do not find jobs or quit after a few months.
But, instead, there is disappointment in the sector that just one college – Newcastle – made it on to the shortlist of prime contractors. Others, such as Carlisle College, are hoping to work as subcontractors for the mainly private firms selected by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to bid for contracts in each region.
Newcastle's involvement in the Work Programme is based around Intraining, the college's private training arm set up three years ago.
Last year, about 40,000 learners participated in welfare-to-work programmes at Intraining's 60 centres across England. Its managing director, Phil Bonell, is upbeat about the new programme and optimistic it can achieve results by giving learners personal support before and after they find work.
The emphasis on payment by results, says Bonell, may come as a shock to some colleges, but reflects a trend in work-based learning over recent years. "For certain sectors such as FE, being paid in this way will be new if they've not been involved with the DWP in the past."
The Work Programme is being funded from savings the government hopes to make in the overall welfare bill. Claimants who refuse to take part could lose their benefits, with sanctions likely to be stepped up once job seekers' allowance and other income-related benefits are replaced by universal credit after 2013.
Jacq Longrigg, employment services manager at Carlisle College, says finding work for learners will be a challenge even though the jobs picture in Cumbria is better than in other parts of the country. "We have developed relationships with job centres and employers and feel quite confident," she adds.
As a college, Carlisle recognises that it is increasingly being judged on "hard economic outcomes", but sees these programmes as an important source of funds. "We have to generate income to survive," says Longrigg.
Carlisle is lined-up as a "job broker" by G4S, one of 35 prime contractors that will submit bids to the DWP over the coming months. Sean Williams, managing director of G4S's welfare-to-work team, says colleges "are very much part of the picture".
Those working for G4S as job brokers, by offering training and help finding work, will be paid by results in the same way as the prime contractor. But providers that offer specific vocational training and other advice may be paid upfront by G4S.
Funding for the Work Programme is the subject of an inquiry by the House of Commons work and pensions select committee. Strong criticism has come from the Association of Learning Providers, which warns that some trainers will be dissuaded from working as subcontractors.
Graham Hoyle, the ALP's chief executive, says: "There is anxiety that a programme that bears considerable financial risk for the prime contractor may also transfer an inappropriate amount of that risk down the supply chain."
Only organisations with a turnover of £20m were considered as prime contractors. A further eight college-led bids failed to make the DWP shortlist, including a consortium of 27 colleges in south-west England led by Petroc. David Dodd, the college's principal, says it was disappointed by the outcome and noted that "none of the college groups new to this type of scheme were awarded contracts".
Teresa Frith, senior skills policy manager at the Association of Colleges, says there is a "nervousness" in the sector, with many colleges waiting to see how things work out. But colleges generally are in a stronger financial position than other learning providers and could use alternative income to cover short-term costs.
Success will depend on the difficulties colleges and others face in finding jobs for learners. Payment by results, says Frith, is only fair if the goals are realistic and achievable. "The results have to be in the gift of the provider," she says.
Under the Work Programme, providers receive an attachment fee for each learner, plus a lump sum when the individual completes six months' work. Further payments are made every four weeks if the person remains in work.
For 18- to 24-year-olds on job seekers' allowance, providers will initially receive £400, followed by £1,200 when the person has been in work for 26 weeks, and up to13 'sustainment' payments of £170. For over-25s on JSA, 'sustainment' payments are worth £215.
By 2014, the attachment fee will be phased out so that all payments depend on job outcomes. A maximum of £14,000 will be available for people on incapacity benefit but, for those receiving JSA, payments will be about £3,000-£4,000 per learner.
When it comes to the government's new free schools, there is no freedom of information, opponents say
The education secretary, Michael Gove, barely had his feet under the ministerial table when he announced plans to allow parents, teachers, charities and other groups to set up their own schools last June. Eight months on, just how much is known about the free schools programme? According to those who oppose the new-style schools, not nearly enough.
Jane Eades, who is involved in the campaign against a proposed free school in Battersea, south London, says: "The whole free school movement is shrouded in secrecy. By the time many people hear there is going to be a free school in their local area, it has already been approved by the government."
What is known is that there have been 258 applications and 40 of these have been given initial approval (known as the "business case" stage). And at a time when many education organisations are having to make cuts, the government has allocated around £50m to fund them.
What those who oppose free schools would like to know is how that public money is going to be spent. Many believe the first stage of the application process to become a free school – known as the stage two proposal – should be in the public domain. But attempts to access this information have been largely unsuccessful.
Andrew Nadin, who is leading a campaign against a proposed free school in Bedford, says: "Any inquiries I have made to the DfE [Department for Education] have been blocked at every turn. You ask a question and they just go into shutdown."
The Freedom of Information Act gives individuals access to recorded information held by public authorities, subject to certain limitations. Until free schools are open to the public, they are not public bodies, which means they are currently exempt from freedom of information requests (FOIs). The remit of the New Schools Network, headed by Gove's former adviser, Rachel Wolf, is to provide guidance to those thinking of starting a free school. But because it is a charity, it is not obliged to respond to FOI requests either.
FOI requests made directly to the DfE have had limited success. Some have been denied and most have been only partially successful. Reasons given for withholding information include: data protection issues (such as naming individuals involved in projects), the need to "protect commercial interests" (that is, anything that might influence the department's bargaining power when buying goods or services) and, commonly, the information is due to be published at a later date.
Eades put in an FOI request last July requesting the details of the 62 proposals for free schools it had received to date. This was refused on the grounds that the information was "intended for future publication". Nadin has received a series of emails from DfE officials (seen by Education Guardian), dating back to last September, promising the imminent publication of all the stage 2 proposals. These have not yet been published.
A subsequent FOI request was no more successful. The DfE replied over two weeks after the deadline (public bodies are obliged to respond within 20 days of receiving an FOI request), and the information offered was edited, with so many sections blacked out, that it was "little more than useless", says Nadin. When he complained, in one email exchange, that it was a "whitewash", a civil servant replied "Can't win 'em all!" While this was swiftly followed by an apology, and reassurance that the email was not intended for Nadin, the gaffe has left him feeling that the DfE is not taking transparency seriously.
The Other Taxpayers' Alliance, a campaign group, had more success with its FOI request, which revealed that the DfE had failed to invite applications for a £500,000 grant to assist parents setting up free schools before awarding it to Rachel Wolf at the New Schools Network.
But as the Labour MP for Wigan, Lisa Nandy, points out, even this information was not easy to obtain. "It took several months, a freedom of information act request and an intervention from the House of Commons Procedures Committee before I got the most basic of answers to my questions about the process for setting up a free school. It is deeply worrying that there is such a lack of transparency around these schools given the impact they will have on children."
The secrecy around free schools is particularly baffling given the government's apparent obsession with transparency. Since the Coalition government came to power last May, the government has set up a Public Sector Transparency Board and Transparency Vision (whatever that is) and a Short Term Transparency Data Publication Plan (ditto).
As Martin Freedman, head of conditions at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), puts it: "The government is saying it wants transparency and is publishing data sets on local authority spending and chief execs. At the same time, we can't find out a thing about free schools."
Wolf points out that the New Schools Network is an "advisory, and not a decision-making organisation". But the question of why the government has outsourced a key function to an independent organisation also remains unanswered.
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, says: "Everywhere else we hear of draconian cuts to public services, yet there appears to be money available to bankroll this costly and unnecessary programme. This is about state schooling not state secrets, and we have a right to know how much money free schools will take from the education budget. This is money that should be going towards the education of the majority of children, not just a few. Free schools are one of the government's flagship education programmes. It is totally unacceptable for there to be no clear public information available on its cost."
The government has been accused of rushing through policies without thinking things through, and last week Gove was judged to have acted so unfairly by cancelling school building projects that it amounted to an abuse of power. Will this lead to a rethink over new schools policy? The DfE did not respond to questions before Education Guardian went to press.
But Toby Young, who is heading plans to open a free school in west London, has his own issues about transparency. "It strikes me as a bit rich that the NUT [National Union of Teachers], the GMB [union] and the Anti-Academies Alliance [AAA] are demanding more transparency about free schools when they are far from transparent. For instance, the most energetic opponent of the West London Free School is Nick Grant, the local NUT shop steward. In addition to being on the NUT's national executive, he is a member of the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] and co-founder of the Anti-Academies Alliance. The degree of Trotskyist infiltration of the NUT, the GMB and the AAA and the close links between the SWP and the anti-free schools campaign has yet to be brought to light."
• This article was amended on 15 February 2011. The original called the campaign group the Taxpayers' Alliance.
It's 10 years since Tony Blair said comprehensives were finished. But for many the ideal will never die
Ten years ago this week Tony Blair proclaimed the dawn of the "post-comprehensive era". Inspired by his belief in faith schools, the then prime minister urged comprehensives to develop "a distinctive mission, ethos and purpose", saying that diversity would be "not the exception but the hallmark of secondary education". His spokesman, Alastair Campbell, put it more bluntly: the days of the "bog-standard comprehensive" were over.
Campbell, a long-time champion of comprehensives, now dismisses the phrase as an "off-the-cuff accident", but it touched a nerve. It summed up many politicians' ambivalence towards comprehensives – schools unfamiliar to most of them – and it keyed into parents' anxieties. A decade later, have ambivalence and anxiety won the day? Did Blair succeed in wiping out the "bog-standard" comp?
The answer is, superficially, yes. The vast majority of comprehensives did Blair's bidding and diversified. Some 96.6% of secondaries are now specialist schools, which leaves just about 80 that have bucked the trend, according to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The more entrepreneurial heads – 780 at the last count – opted for foundation status, distancing themselves from the local authority. Then there are the 400 academies and soon there will be free schools. Faith schools, backed by the current prime minister just as they were by Blair, also expect to see their numbers increase.
However, the real fate of the "bog-standard comp" is problematic. It doesn't help that Campbell's phrase is seen as an insult. By contrast, in high-performing Finland, the "bog-standardness" or uniformity of its schools is regarded as a virtue.
Bernard Barker was the first comprehensive pupil to become head of a comprehensive school. He is now emeritus professor of educational leadership at Leicester University. He says that unlike Finland "we have a deeply unequal, selfish and less trusting society. People wanted greater equality of opportunity and social mobility in the 1960s and 70s when comprehensives were established. They still want it now ... but only for themselves. The invention of all these new types of school in England has allowed parents to achieve some kind of market-place differentiation so they feel they are protecting their interests."
Peter Mortimore, former director of the Institute of Education in London, is also a comprehensive champion. He is exasperated that Blair chose diversity over uniformity, and that Labour did not dismiss as "nonsense" the talk about comprehensives failing. "If you look at what has been achieved, it's a success story. We should have been proud of bog-standard comprehensives instead of seeing the term as an insult and seeking alternatives."
The "post-comprehensive" era really began with Margaret Thatcher and the unleashing of market forces and consumer choice, says Barker. Open enrolment broke families' links with their local schools. Blair merely followed in her footsteps. Specialisation was a means of offering parents choice, as were league tables, though in reality, says Mortimore, "no one chooses schools on the basis of specialism. All choose on the basis of results".
League tables make parents constantly dissatisfied that they are not getting the best for their children, he says. "We have some of the best schools and teachers I've ever seen in the world, but they operate in a crazy system designed to create the maximum unhappiness. Sticking with the bog-standard comp would have been much better."
And that is what the Welsh did. Wales, says David Reynolds, professor of education at Plymouth University, is 99.5% comprehensive. There are no league tables, no specialist schools, no academies or foundation schools.
However, the Welsh system is currently struggling to produce good results. Welsh 15-year-olds are slipping down the international Pisa rankings of performance in science, maths and reading, and the gap between Wales and the other UK countries is widening. Reynolds blames this on a significant funding gap – a Welsh child gets £604 a year less spent on them than an English child – and a reluctance to innovate.
Improvements will happen, says Reynolds, and not through diversification, but through comprehensives. Are they "bog-standard"? "In Wales we prefer to call them community schools. There is a strong historical bond between communities and schools and children are far more likely to go to the school in their local patch."
Martin Wise, head of Holyhead high on Anglesey, the UK's very first comprehensive, opening in 1949, agrees that community links are vital. "A school has a responsibility to its community and should be the hub of it. Every town wants to see its school succeed and wants to support it. We offer a truly comprehensive education and we are very proud of our history."
Choice and league tables have strained such sentiments in England. Take, for example, Twyford CofE high school in Ealing, London, described last month as a "great comprehensive" by the education secretary, Michael Gove. Twyford specialises in music and languages. It is outstanding and heavily over-subscribed. In 2009, 85% of pupils achieved five A*-C at GCSE.
But Twyford casts its nets far beyond its local area. It takes pupils from seven authorities and 70 feeder schools. Few of its pupils qualify for free meals and the vast majority have had to prove their commitment to their faith with evidence of attendance at a place of worship going back to the age of six.
Alice Hudson, the head, says that Twyford is a comprehensive though she concedes that it has a larger than average proportion of children who, in days gone by, would have gone to grammar schools. "Schools that make it evident they care about academic achievement attract more able students."
For Blair, Twyford, with its faith and its specialisms, would indeed have been a "great comprehensive", but for those who opposed his agenda at the time, it would prove their fears justified. Roy Hattersley, former deputy Labour leader, warned Blair of the dangers of a two-tier system. But such warnings went unheeded. Today, says Barker, "schools reflect the working of the local market economy in education ...just as in the 1950s. Those at the top are doing very nicely. Those at the bottom of the pile are badly bruised and disaffected."
Now Labour is promising to heal the divisions and once more celebrate the comprehensive ideal. Andy Burnham, the party's education spokesman and former comprehensive pupil, blames the current government for setting schools and communities in competition with each other, and for fragmenting and segregating the entire education system. Has he forgotten the "post-comprehensive" era? Ten years is a long time in politics.
The Guardian is opening up its resources website learn.co.uk to give teachers free access to 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive teaching materials
Today the Guardian is embarking on an exciting new project that will give teachers access to 70,000 pages of lesson plans and modern interactive teaching materials, all absolutely free.
While others in the online media firmament are testing out the prospect for putting material behind paywalls, we've decided to go the other way. We're liberating premium content from our resources website learn.co.uk and making it completely free to teachers and schools.
From today any teacher can access our vast repository of resources free at http://teachers.guardian.co.uk. Our new Guardian Teacher Network comprises content covering every objective, age four to 18, in what used to be the national curriculum.
The content is varied and deep, and includes:
• Literacy and numeracy materials for primary children almost exclusively designed as whiteboard interactivities that can be used right in the classroom.
• Science whiteboard activities at secondary level devised to enable complete demonstration of key active concepts, such as calculating velocity, or developing shapes in three dimensions.
• Extensive video and game-style content. Other areas of the site, notably at GCSE and AS-level, are presented as a mixture of text and animation, which is particularly powerful for revision or students working in pairs.
• Testing made simple. We're making our immensely powerful test centre for secondary schools available free. It's a flexible bank of more than 20,000 questions that lets you build bespoke tests and deliver them online or on printed handouts.
• Animated Guardian material. We have digitised a huge archive of resources pages from back copies of Education Guardian for teachers to browse on the Teacher Network. And they're even better online because we've animated most of the diagrams.
All the content is developed by classroom teachers to address specific curriculum or examination objectives, and all has been designed by skilled web developers to run easily and work simply. There are roughly 33,000 individual lesson assets that teachers can pick out and do what they want with: incorporate in PowerPoint, "mash" into other lesson content, whatever you like.
And that's the point. The reason we've decided to make this material free is that it's now clear that the future for digital learning will lie, not in "solid state" material, but in content that individual teachers and students can manipulate and order to suit their own needs, in their own time. We have therefore loaded all our materials on to a straightforward-to-use learning platform that enables teachers to download content, timetable it, adapt it, add to it, upload it, review it, recommend it, pass it on … all the things a tweeting, networking, user-generating generation expects to be able to do.
If you're a teacher, it will now be your content, not ours. We're aiming for you to take it over and build and adapt it yourselves. We all know that the real value in online resource lies in collaborating our way to greater creativity and best practice. So we've made it easy to upload your own resources and access lessons developed by other teachers. It will also be your network – a place where we hope you will engage with each other on your own terms, talking about what matters to you.
To sign up, go to http://teachers.guardian.co.uk. Registration is quick and easy. If you're already registered at guardian.co.uk, you can simply sign in as usual. Enjoy what we are giving you. And please don't keep it a secret from your colleagues.
• Colin Hughes is director, Guardian Professional
Special needs children 'thrown to the wolves' and Chinese excellence
Last week Fran Abrams reported on fears that the government could reduce the number of children eligible for help with special needs
The powers that be want us to differentiate between students and find a way to teach them all, irrespective of differences. We identify how they learn best. We identify which subjects they're weaker in; whether support at home is lacking. We identify what needs to be done for each child. In many cases, if we can secure extra support for a child, whether this is in the form of an additional body in the classroom who can keep them focused, or someone to sit and encourage them to work, or more structured higher-level support for those with more complex needs, we do it. We do it because we have been told every child matters, and we try and meet that.
However, the SEN support is already woeful in many schools. As a supply teacher for a number of months I visited some schools with outstanding levels of support, and others that were quite proud to say that they offered nothing, and on parents' evening told parents "this is what we have. If you don't like it, apply somewhere down the road". There are already children slipping through the net. Yet it will most likely get worse. Not to mention that many schools are contemplating applying for academy status, and once they move out of LEA control, they no longer have any responsibility to protect the needs of their SEN pupils.
But what did we expect? They are the weak students who bring non-selective school results down. They are the drain on funding and resources, not to mention staff time. They are vulnerable, and we are throwing them to the wolves.
Calexandria via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Warwick Mansell looked at the success of children of Chinese (including Hong Kong) origin, regardless of social advantage, and wondered why more research was not done on the subject
I'm Chinese, I was born and brought up in the UK. My parents worked my sister and I very hard – idleness would not be tolerated. To give you an idea, my parents were appalled at the education I received at my state junior school. So they gave us two to three hours' homework a day in English grammar, writing and comprehension, maths, logic and basic science. This was in addition to one hour's music practice a day. TV and non-educational entertainment were strictly rationed. School grades had to be an A, otherwise serious disciplinary consequences would be incurred.
I remember my mother being told by white parents that she was a bad mother for making us work so hard. And yet we had varied interests, read widely, performed very well at school and university and we both now have professional jobs that we enjoy.
Chinese culture and identity is very homogenous regardless of financial standing, the same values are found whether you are rich or poor.
TianRiu via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Me: "What's that on your arm?"
Student: "My father/mother beat me because I didn't get an A."
I've heard this far too many times in the schools I've taught in in Asia.
MSGlendinning via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• This study reveals that being poor is not a barrier to educational achievement if you have parental support and encouragement. Sort of blows away the prevailing leftwing ideas that "deprived" kids are severely disadvantaged at school.
Connacht via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Has your BlackBerry taken over your life, or your iPhone? Academics are trying to find ways to help
You're in the middle of reading a long, important document, but suddenly find you can't concentrate. It's not because the topic is snore-inducing or because it's chocolate o'clock, but due to a tiny, red light, flashing insistently in the corner of your eye. A BlackBerry silently screaming for attention forces you to stop reading to see what the messagesays. Two minutes later, you do the same again.
Whether it's an iPhone or a trilling landline or a pinging email, the latest technology interrupts us all the time. But if you've ever wondered exactly what effect the myriad interruptions have on your working day, research by academics at the University of Kent is a worthy interruption.
The faculty of psychology at Kent set up a "reading laboratory" with an eyeball-tracking camera to monitor eye movements. It then linked up just over 100 testers and asked them to read a passage of text on a computer screen, before interrupting the participants with one-minute messages – like phone calls. They were then told to return to the original reading, while the eye-tracking camera analysed how they did so. The researchers, led by Ulrich Weger, a senior lecturer in psychology at Kent, found that participants re-read a substantial portion of text before reaching the point where they left the original task – so much so, that each interruption caused an average 17% increase in the total time it took to read the whole passage.
Weger was inspired to carry out the research by his own procrastination. "I noticed how easily I was distracted when working on my computer," he explains. "I wasted time by reading emails whenever they came into my inbox. I noticed that once I had started reading the name of the sender, I read the first line of the text. Once I mastered that, I continued reading the entire message, and once I got to that point, I felt compelled to respond because there was no point in leaving an already half-finished task. Then sometimes I needed extra information to answer the message, so had to add other tasks."
Weger says his many disruptions meant he "often wasn't making any progress with what I was originally working on – and in the end felt quite breathless and exhausted. I thought I couldn't be the only person struggling with this." Talking to colleagues confirmed the scale of the problem, and Weger secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to start investigating.
He believes the Kent research is important because our modern working environment is "full of tempting – and sometimes not so tempting – sources of interruptions", but admits it's tough to find ways to deal with them. "The best thing to do is to try and avoid interruptions in the first place – often people don't really need to respond to an interruption, but do so because it's tempting," he says.
Weger's research showed that simply leaving a mark on the page before responding to an interruption can allow you to resume reading much more efficiently afterwards, cutting 10% from the time it takes to return to the same point in the text. The academics also looked at the impact of background speech and music, and found that when participants were exposed to simultaneous background speech while reading a text, it took them significantly longer to get through it. Some workers might seize upon those findings as a reason to kill off open-plan offices.
But Weger says there will always be other distractions. He advises turning off attention-sappers such as automatic email notifications, and arranging desks so they don't point towards anything interesting – like people walking around outside, but admits: "Sometimes these strategies come with their own costs – turning off your iPod or mobile, for example, can trigger a yearning or even pressure that can get quite distracting in itself.
"The best way to overcome our addiction to new information is to learn to control yourself: you can do exercises to help ... using thought-control exercises like concentrating on a simple imagined object for a few minutes every day," he explains.
Weger says a concentration exercise he found in a book written by Rudolf Steiner 100 years ago is still useful. "As soon as you notice that you have diverted to another thought, pull yourself away from the intrusive thought and turn back to the image straight away. After practice, you get more competent at shielding yourself against the countless tempting stimuli in our world of information overload." It sounds very virtuous, but Weger admits he still gets lured into the trap of time-wasting procrastination – even while writing up his research into it. "I still struggle with distractions all the time," he says.
And as for BlackBerrys and their smartphone cousins, Weger says they're not all bad, and have a "mixed effect". He explains: "The upside of these devices is that you don't have to go home to get the information you need. But the downside is that if you allow yourself to become dependent, they will haunt you. As with all things: if you can make use of something that makes your life easier while maintaining enough inner strength and freedom to avoid dependence, you are the master. If you do not cultivate this inner strength and freedom, you become the slave."
If you take a proper look at the university application figures, it's clear that many 18-year-olds are already shunning degrees and applying for apprenticeships
Are young people being turned off university? This may seem an odd question when the latest figures showed a record number of applicants. But closer analysis suggests that UK school-leavers are behaving differently from other groups over university admissions.
Indeed there is mounting evidence that apprenticeships are becoming a more attractive proposition for many 18-year-olds. And if that happens, then some universities could be in for a serious financial squeeze in the years ahead as the government forces them to rely on fee income instead of central grant to fund undergraduate courses.
On the face of it, the UK university application figures look healthy, showing an overall rise of 5.1% at the notional January deadline. This prompted the usual headlines about "record numbers" seeking university places. As this is the last year before the tuition fee cap is raised threefold, a surge in applications was expected.
Indeed it's precisely because commentators expected a rise in applications that they did not interrogate the figures. But if they did, they would find a different picture. For a start, the rise in applications is much smaller than at the same point in each of the last two admissions cycles. It is also much lower than as recently as last November, when applications were rising by 11.7%. Since then applications have nose-dived. By the summer there could even turn out to be no rise at all in UK-based applicants.
So what has happened? On 9 December parliament backed the government's plans to raise the tuition fee cap to a maximum of £9,000. The subsequent student protests ensured that everyone now knows about the fees rise. Add in widespread media coverage of graduate unemployment and perhaps some of those school-leavers decided not to fill out their Ucas applications after all.
Even though the fees rise does not affect this year's applicants, it has affected the debate about the value of a degree. This explains why applications from England were up by only 3.7% compared with applications from outside the EU (17%) and from non-UK countries within the EU (up 7.7%). Scotland, where the fees changes do not apply, had a rise of 6.5%.
When broken down by age, the differences are even starker. Indeed, the number of applicants aged 18 or under from England actually fell marginally, from 202,104 to 202,045. There were also falls from 18-year-olds in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
It's true that there are 3% fewer 18-year-olds in this year's cohort. But when there was a similar demographic decline in 2010, applications from 18-year-olds still shot up by almost 16,000. And with higher fees looming, it might have been expected that more school-leavers would delay their "gap year" and go for immediate entry.
One possible explanation for the slowing of applications might be that UK school-leavers are applying to universities on the European mainland, where fees are much lower and where several institutions are targeting UK applicants by offering courses taught in English.
But it's more likely that 18-year-olds are hearing what employers are saying. At a conference on employability skills, Jane Scott Paul, the head of the Association of Accounting Technicians, reported that "more and more of our employers are changing their recruitment policies, switching from graduates to training up their own school-leavers … could this be the tipping point for apprenticeships?"
Karen Liddle, who oversees financial recruitment at Procter & Gamble, says that, unlike many graduates, school-leaver recruits "genuinely want to be there, do not have unreasonable ambitions, and have no preconceptions". Applications to the company's finance apprenticeship for school-leavers doubled last year. Liddle says the pass rate for the apprentices is "much higher than for our graduates".
School-leavers are certainly applying in droves for apprenticeships. Last year 24,000 applied for the 220 places at BT and 65,000 applied for 600 apprenticeships at British Gas.
Of course, job scarcity partly explains these high figures. But there are other signs that employers are shifting to school-leaver recruitment. A survey of 500 companies by City & Guilds showed 52% of those already recruiting apprentices believed they offered greater value than graduates.
The government has promised to create 100,000 new apprenticeships. Not all will lure those who would otherwise apply for university, but the application figures for both apprenticeships and universities suggest we could indeed be at a tipping point.
Falafels are safe after all – in small doses, research on rats shows
A study called Effect of a popular Middle Eastern food (Falafel) on rat liver is now available to the public. Focusing strictly on the medical consequences (for rats) of eating "chickpeas paste seasoned with garlic, parsley, and special spices, then deep fried in vegetable oil", it's a 10-page journey from delight to despair, and finally to indifference.
Sana Janakat and Mohammad Al-Khateeb of the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, Jordan, wrote the report. It somewhat enlivens the February 2011 issue of the journal Toxicological & Environmental Chemistry.
Janakat and Al-Khateeb start with some cheery praise: "Falafel is considered the most popular fried food by all socio-economic classes in most Middle Eastern countries. It is consumed for breakfast, dinner, or as a snack. Among low-income families and labourers it is consumed on a daily basis, due to its availability, relatively low price, and good taste."
Then come several pages of unhappy news that lead to a depressing and technical conclusion: "Long-term consumption of falafel patties caused a significant increase in ALP [alkaline phosphatase], ALT [alanine transaminase], bilirubin level and increased liver weight/body weight ratio ... This indicates that consumption of large amounts of falafel on daily basis might lead to hepatotoxicity."
But wait! That's not the end of the story.
Here's what Janakat and Al-Khateeb say they did.
First they gathered falafel: "Frying oil samples and falafel patties were collected from 20 restaurants located in different socio-economic neighbourhoods from the city of Irbid."
They homogenized the falafel, soaked it for 24 hours, filtered it through cheesecloth and centrifuged it. This produced the experimental material – concentrated falafel – with which they performed two experiments.
The first experiment assessed the short-term effect of eating falafel, short term in this case meaning five days. Janakat and Al-Khateeb extracted the oil from some falafel patties, and force-fed it to some rats for the whole five days. Then they killed those rats, and did post mortems to get at the livers. The livers (happily, in a sense) looked in pretty good shape. Thus, the report says, the short-term effects of eating falafel are pretty benign.
The second experiment aimed to clarify the long-term effect of falafel consumption. A fresh batch of rats got to eat lots of falafel – as much as they pleased, whenever they wanted it – for a month. That was their entire diet: falafel, falafel, falafel. Then they were killed. Here, the post mortem results were ugly. The study intones that "long-term consumption of falafel patties (30 days) caused yellowish discoloration of the liver distinctive of liver necrosis", suggesting that "the consumption of falafel as the sole source of nutrition for a long period of time ... can generate a hepatotoxic effect leading to liver necrosis".
That may sound like bad news, but apparently it's not. The very next sentence – nearly the last thing said in the report – is this: "Falafel consumption in moderation and in conjunction with other food items or beverages containing high antioxidant levels can be considered as safe."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
So (everyone seems to start sentences with So these days)… I was wondering if anyone is involved in any serious thinking about the potential of creating E-books locally to replace the familiar photocopied ‘study packs’ or the sometimes more haphazard distribution of PDFs and web links? There’s certainly something quite attractive about the idea of […]
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In prison, enthusiasm can make a morning fly by, especially when it involves animal impersonations
God knows what we looked like standing there in the middle of the Grosvenor Centre, shaking hands and patting each other on the back. I was in my middleclass trendy kit: nice cashmere overcoat, a gaudy, devil-may-care scarf. He was a bit grubby in a shiny, dirt-seamed anorak, manky jeans and fraying trainers. But we were so pleased to see each other. All the people staring at us could see that quite clearly.
"Alan, Alan." This big voice had boomed out across the shoppers, and I turned, a bit confused, and there was this old guy leaping down the up escalator two or three steps at a time. He got to the bottom a bit unsteady, a bit breathless. "Alan." Arms outstretched. He saw that I was a bit startled. "Prison," he shouted. "Yes of course," I shouted back, thinking who the hell are you? Then the penny dropped. "You're the guy who taught me how to rob the supermarket." He was delighted to be so remembered and we went over the clever, delightful, guaranteed successful bit of larcenous methodology that had stunned one of my classes into an awestruck silence during break one Thursday afternoon. "I don't do that any more," he said. "Course you don't." "I'm afraid I did do another sentence, though, after I left you." "Oh well." "It was just a misunderstanding with an undercover policeman. Three years I got."
Then, out of that bit of gloominess, his face lit up; "I remember that Aristotle." "Good bloke, Aristotle." "Yeah. He was taught by Plato and Plato was taught by Socrates. That's right isn't it?" "Absolutely." "They think I'm brilliant in my house. It was on the telly the other night about the Greeks and I just told them all about it. I used to like philosophy." We rambled on a bit about the other guys in the class, shook hands again and off he went back up the escalator.
There's nothing like enthusiasm; it always cheers me up and just when I'm thinking of finishing with prison, feeling sick of the whole damn business, some enthusiast comes along and sets me going again.
Casey drives me nuts. I really want to retire. It's time. Then he bursts in with something he's been reading about and the morning is gone in a flash and he's made me promise to do something new. (Trotsky, he wants to know about Trotsky. My own fault for showing off, and now I've got all that reading to do.) "There's a guy on the wing, he's doing a maths degree. He's not here, he's not in the prison. You talk to him and he's OK, he's a good guy but he's somewhere else." Someone had lent Casey a book about anatomy and he, of course, had got into it in that obsessive way that real enthusiasts do. It came with a CD and so we took a look. It was absolutely brilliant. We all thought so, caught up in that lovely time-collapsing fascination that concentrating on something brings. Some of it was quite difficult to watch. There was a dissection of a cadaver: bones, red meat, sinew. "Does this," I wondered, "affect our belief in God?" "Not a bit," said Ian, "Science is entirely neutral. Only the moral arguments count." There was some mention of evolution and Casey made a strange point about lemurs and the way they move and, as no one understood him, he jumped up and did a lemur imitation. We made him do it again, pretending not to get his point. "Very balletic that," I told him. "Just, run it past us again." And he did: doing the lemur. "It's a proper dance," said Ade, "go on, do it again."
As parents and teachers nervously await a green paper on special needs, Fran Abrams visits a school that has one of the highest proportions of SEN students in the country
In the playground at the Northumberland Church of England Academy, 12-year-old Rachael Winch is running towards her mother, clutching a little silver scooter. She fixes her with a hard, close stare, nose to nose: "What are you doing here?"
It was clear before Rachael started school that she was going to need a lot of support. She has autism, and she's one of 50 statemented pupils with severe learning difficulties who attend a special unit within the school. "This facility is superb," says her mother, Ann. "Special needs children are all individual, and they need to have specialist teaching. But they've also got to be allowed to integrate."
In some cases, though, there's more doubt. Last autumn, Ofsted published a report that said too many schools were labelling pupils as having special needs when in fact they just needed to be taught better. There were even accusations from other quarters that schools were playing the system, putting pupils on their special needs registers to get extra funding or to boost their "contextual" scores in exam league tables.
The controversy might not have been all bad news for a government with plans to cut spending. A green paper is expected to set out the future of special needs education this month – and there have been suggestions that ministers could use Ofsted's findings to justify cutting the numbers classified as needing extra help. The proportion of pupils classified as "school action plus" – just short of a formal statement of special needs, but needing extra support from outside their schools – has risen since 2003, from 14% to 18%.
Phil Hearne, the executive director of the Northumberland Church of England Academy, which opened in 2009 sprawling across 10 sites and taking in 2,500 pupils aged three to 19, might be expected to be worried. According to the latest league tables, no fewer than 64% of his 2010 GCSE cohort were on the "school action plus" level – the highest figure for any school in the country. With another substantial slice of the year group on the lower "school action" level, in total nearly eight out of 10 were classified as having special needs.
But Hearne is unperturbed. Last year was an unusual year, he says – the academy had just opened, and it inherited big problems from its predecessor secondary school. The figure will be much lower for this year's GCSE year – about seven out of 10 are now classified as having special needs, he says, most in the lowest category and requiring only school-level support. In any case, he adds, the £200 per head extra funding which the "school action plus" label attracts is a drop in the ocean of the £18m annual budget he runs.
"Playing the system isn't how I would see it. What you are trying to do is to identify the needs of the child and then to look for ways in which you can fund them," he says. "If by happenstance it falls into a particular category and attracts funding, then so be it."
The fact remains, though, that even without the 50 statemented pupils in its special unit, the school classifies a high number as having special needs – the national average for secondary-aged students is just under a quarter.
And there's no denying there's a high level of need here – the school is in a deprived area, and many of its pupils have both parents and grandparents who have rarely, if ever, worked. Its special needs staff give a striking range of reasons why children are placed in the higher-level "school action plus" category. For instance, some receive support from mental health services, while others have been referred to the school nurse because of persistent absence. Some are undergoing a formal assessment process for problems that might include being at risk of child abuse, and some are seeing an education psychologist because of behavioural problems. Others spend part of the week with an alternative education provider doing extra literacy and numeracy classes, while yet another group are supported by a team that helps teenagers at risk of dropping out.
According to Philippa Stobbs, principal officer of the Council for Disabled Children, the current special needs regime can sometimes encourage schools to play the system.
"At a school level, there are incentives," she says. "Take a school where perhaps overnight an additional 20 children are put on to the special needs register – it isn't unheard of. They immediately improve the performance of both their special needs and non-special needs groups, without any child learning anything. Because they move kids out of the bottom of the non-special needs group, into the top of the special needs group, and that's likely to close the gap."
She thinks there are problems with schools having very high numbers on their special needs registers: "It doesn't make any sense for a school to be defining so many children as having special educational needs. What does the special needs operation of the school do if it's got 80% of the kids on its books? No special needs department can do a sensible job with such a high percentage."
Along with other experts in the field, she suspects the forthcoming green paper may simply remove those children who receive in-school help from special needs registers – cutting the proportion of secondary students classified in this way at a stroke, from one in four to one in nine.
This will not stop the numbers from rising, according to Lorraine Petersen, chief executive of the national special needs association, Nasen. "Ofsted probably was right in terms of there being over-diagnosis, or over-identification," she says. "But some of that will come from parents. There's a tendency to say: 'You've got to offer this child x, y and z because he's dyslexic. Once a child has a label, there's extra pressure on the school to try to meet that particular label's requirements."
She believes there are also genuine reasons why there are more children with particular kinds of need these days: "We have more children than ever with mental health issues. We also have an increasing number with complex needs, overlapping needs. They may be on the autistic spectrum but may also have a behavioural difficulty, and because their teachers aren't trained to identify their particular needs, they're frustrated, so they're disruptive. And then you get into a downward spiral of bad behaviour and exclusion."
But Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, says schools are bound to do whatever they have to do to ensure their pupils' needs are met: "I wouldn't call it gaming or cheating. I would say there are perverse incentives here. If the key way to get resources for young people about whom there's significant concern is to make sure they are on the special needs register, schools will obviously do that," she says.
She believes resources are a central issue, and that the forthcoming green paper will add to the woes of schools already facing the effects of local authority cuts: "I'm not looking forward to the green paper with anything like the enthusiasm that I might, because I feel that it will simply be a cost-cutting exercise and it will be about showing that if teachers just get on with teaching the national curriculum all will be well.
"The fact is that resources are being cut as we speak. We know local authorities are cutting swathes of jobs – lots and lots of services for children with special needs, and the most vulnerable kids. Once the jobs go, so does the money – schools don't have the money to buy in these services."
The Northumberland academy's staff say their job is simply to ensure that all their pupils' diverse needs are met – and in recent years, resources have usually been available to support that. But recently, they say, they have begun to see that changing – even though the academy controls its own budget, a local authority reorganisation and further cuts to children's services are affecting some of the local services they buy into. "Already, support that might have been there a few years ago isn't there any more," says Peter Blackburn, principal director of the academy's secondary department. "Our challenge, if funding is cut, is to find out how we can continue these services."
Northumberland council says it is still making decisions about the future of particular services. But parents are worried about the future. April Orr, whose daughter Josie attends the school's special unit, benefited from a "portage" service – home-based support – and says she was guided and helped by local authority staff at every step when Josie was diagnosed with autism. But she fears that won't be there in future for other parents. "They're always saying early intervention is a big thing – and it's true. We get a lot of support – the staff we work with at the moment are great," she says. "But we know it's going to be cut."
• This article has been changed to say that Northumberland Church of England Academy has one of the highest proportions of SEN students in the country, rather than the highest
Scientists prove that your five a day make you more attractive – by subtly altering your skin colour
Most of us know that eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day will do us far more good than 20 minutes on a sun bed or two hours basted with factor 10 and sprawled on a Mediterranean beach in high summer. But new research suggests that it will also make us more attractive to the opposite sex. Consequently, it seems far more likely to affect the dietary habits of the young than any amount of hectoring from the Department of Health.
"Currently we tell them to 'eat well or in 50 years you will have a heart attack'," says Ian Stephen, 29, assistant professor of psychology at Nottingham University's Malaysian campus. "Now we can say: 'eat fruit and veg and you will look better in six to eight weeks'." But he is adamant that he never set out to find a novel way of reinforcing medical advice. "I don't really care what people do," he insists. "I'm an experimental psychologist, not a public health PR man. However, our results suggest that eating well and staying out of the sun would make you look healthier."
How come? Well, the key component is the carotenoid, an antioxidant responsible for the red colouring found in, for instance, tomatoes, peppers, plums and carrots. That redness eventually imbues the human skin with yellowness, or rather a healthy-looking golden glow. "Carotenoids are stored in fat under the skin," Stephen explains. "They are also secreted through the skin in serum, and are then reabsorbed into the top layer of the skin, bestowing that golden colour."
Alert Guardian readers may have deduced by now that he is talking about Caucasian skins. "Yes, it has been pointed out to me, usually by social scientists, that there is something culturally imperialist about the research," he says. "Ironically, there's almost something racist in that suggestion because the implication is that you can't see the same colour changes in black faces. Of course you can. In West Africa, for instance, skin pigmentation is affected by consumption of red palm oil with high levels of carotenoids. We're hoping to do further cross-cultural studies in the UK, Africa and Malaysia."
The original study was carried out in Scotland, where the sun's rays are not over-intrusive. It just happens that Stephen did the first part of his PhD at St Andrews University. There he worked at The Perception Laboratory, dedicated to investigating "the many facets of face perception" – what makes one person appear more trustworthy than another, for instance, or more attractive.
In that regard, there has been plenty of work on shape, but very little on skin colour, he says. "There are two main pigments that affect the yellowness of skin. One comes from carotenoids, the other from melanin, which is yellow and dark, giving the brown colour that we associate with a sun tan. Using a scientific instrument called a spectrophotometer, I measured the colour change associated with changes in carotenoid levels and melanin levels in the skin. Then, using a computer programme, I allowed participants to adjust the levels of carotenoid and melanin colour in photographs of faces to make them look as attractive as possible. Participants chose to increase melanin colour slightly, but increased carotenoid colour lots.
In another part of the experiment, he used a questionnaire to estimate the amount of fruit and vegetables in the daily diet of another group of participants and then analysed skin tones to confirm that what might be called the golden glow was explained by changes in carotenoid levels and not other pigments such as melanin.
Just over 80 people took part in the dietary study, and 30 in transforming 51 faces on the computer. They were aged from 18 to 26, but Stephen maintains: "There's no reason to suggest that we wouldn't get similar results from older participants." Any gender differences? "The preference for light skin is stronger in women's faces than in men's. Which might indicate that the tanned and leathery look is not quite so off-putting to women as it is to men.
Overwhelmingly, though, the results suggested that a healthy golden glow was equated with attractiveness. "They didn't all give the same answer to three decimal points," says Stephen. "But there was enough common ground to indicate that there wouldn't be much value in extending the experiment to another 300 participants."
The wider implications, he suggests, are that some things haven't changed since Darwin pointed to skin colour as an element in sexual attraction. "The whole purpose of attractiveness from an evolutionary point of view is that the person doing the viewing is looking for a viable, healthy, high-quality mate," he says.
Professor David Perrett, who heads The Perception Lab at St Andrews, points out: "This is something we share with other species. For example, the bright yellow beaks and feathers of many birds can be thought of as adverts showing how healthy a male bird is. What's more, females of those species prefer to mate with brighter, more colourful males. But this is the first study in which this has been demonstrated in humans."
The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Unilever Research. But the ultimate beneficiaries may yet include the Department of Health and, indeed, the many under-30s who might suddenly see the benefits of tucking away their "five a day".
• This article has been amended to correct the spelling of St Andrews University
Tuition fee increases are bound to reduce social mobility, says Jonathan Black, as employers recruit school-leavers afraid of debt
In 1918, the Foreign Office Diplomatic and Consular Services wrote to the University of Oxford Appointments Committee (forerunner of today's careers service) to tell them: "It should be noted that it is no longer essential that candidates should possess a private income or allowance." Ninety-three years later, will the introduction of fees to attend university, at a level that resembles fees for independent schools, roll back the clock to the Edwardian era in terms of restricted social mobility and access?
The current government, and indeed members of the opposition front bench, have emphasised the need to increase access to higher education for those from underprivileged backgrounds. Universities, including Oxford, spend significant time and money encouraging school students from such backgrounds to consider applying, yet there have been hints about possible sanctions in restricting fee-raising power if universities do not achieve as-yet unspecified target proportions of students "representing all society". Universities, we infer, are to be the engine of social change. This is similar to a manufacturing organisation trying to inject quality into a product at the end of the production line.
The introduction of fees between £6,000 and £9,000 per year from 2012 is ushering in recognised changes in higher education generally, among them raised and different student expectations on "service" level, on their relationship with faculty, and an increased pressure to secure a well-paid job on graduation. I believe that there are likely to be equally significant secondary effects, probably on a longer time scale, that will have the effect of reducing social mobility.
Taking the supply side first: our experience at Oxford is that around one third of undergraduates and postgraduates don't know where to start in their career search; from our work in schools, we know the proportion is even higher in 16- and 17-year-olds. There is generally little high-quality careers advice and support in schools to help these children; although the "learn to earn" belief is strong, there will now be increasing worry by parents and children alike over how to justify a £20,000+ debt from a potential university education.
On the demand side, we observe employers driven to minimise their own employment and training costs to maximise short-term profits; there is little ethos of training for the national good, the recognition that while one employer may lose a worker they have trained, they will gain one that someone else has trained. We are beginning to see companies exploring ways to exploit (what others have called) the fear, uncertainty and doubt of studying a non-vocational course at university. For example, the accountancy firm KPMG recently announced it would sponsor 75 students through an accounting degree at Durham University; how long before employers recruit graduate-quality school-leavers direct from the sixth form, training them on the job, perhaps with day-release or modular courses at local further and higher education institutions?
The secondary effect of this apparently happy marriage of school-leavers and employers might be to generate a workforce that is narrowly trained in disciplines and techniques that are useful only for today's challenges. School-leavers, particularly from underprivileged backgrounds, will understandably be attracted to the apparently expedient option of employment with some training and qualification. It would be understandable if school-leavers from underprivileged backgrounds were overrepresented in such a group; this choice avoids university debts, secures employment and provides some training and qualification.
Government statistics and newspaper league tables measure student employment status soon after graduation, almost as if such a measure were the final word on the issue. Academics, students and colleagues I talk to are concerned about lifetime careers, not just the first six months. We know from our alumni that as people grow and develop they seek to expand their horizons and build a career applying their transferable skills to new challenges. I would worry that those who have taken a short-term route into a narrow discipline will find such mid-career development more difficult than if they had studied a full university degree and learned how to apply those transferable skills to their career for themselves.
I believe it is just those students from less privileged backgrounds, whom the government believes might be excluded from education and careers, who are more likely to end up in this form of indentured training – with limited options for the future. Other students from more privileged backgrounds who have been able to follow a more broad-based education are likely to be better equipped for a wider variety of roles. It is an attractive aspect of the British education system that career choice can be so wide from apparently non-vocational degree subjects.
It is said that half the jobs that exist today will have changed in form and content by the time today's 15-year-olds enter the world of work. Among many other things, we in universities teach and train core transferable skills useful in future employment. We may not all call them that, teach them directly, or issue formal certificates asserting that our students have gained these skills. However, we observe sophisticated employers continuing to recruit at all leading universities because they recognise the long-term transferable skills of our students – the result of a higher education system where school-leavers have chosen to study what interests them and thereby acquire skills for the future, unencumbered by the pressure of taking on large debts.
I believe there is a good chance that the introduction of higher fees will create deeper and longer-lasting splits in the working population that reinforce, rather than break down, social divisions. The privileged will continue to gain a broad education, which will give them choice and control over their careers; the less privileged will focus on expedient, short-term options that will give them narrow training, equipping them for fewer roles, offering ever declining choice in a fast-changing world.
• Jonathan Black is director of careers at Oxford University
Proposed changes would mean even less choice of school for parents – unless the Liberal Democrats stand up for their policies
It is almost exactly five years since the last Labour government introduced its controversial Education and Inspections Bill. It followed a highly contested white paper, which promised to create a system of independent non-fee-paying schools. Companies, faith groups, charities and parents were going to set up and run these new institutions with a much reduced role for local authorities. Sound familiar?
Before the bill was even published, more than 100 Labour MPs had threatened to rebel; they drew up their own "alternative white paper" and eventually ground a number of concessions out of a reluctant prime minister who once described the process as "hell".
As a small bit-part player in the process, I am still proud of the pamphlet I co-authored at the time with fellow campaigner Melissa Benn about the future of comprehensive education. We helped to focus attention on what thousands of schools with responsibility for controlling their own admissions might mean for parents and pupils, especially the least well-off.
By the time the bill appeared, local authorities had rightly regained some rights to propose new schools, the role of the schools adjudicator and local admissions forums had been strengthened and schools were required to act "in accordance" with the admissions code, rather than simply to "have regard" to it. Even then, it only passed into law with the support of Conservative MPs.
It now seems we are destined to celebrate the fifth anniversary of that piece of legislation rehearsing many of the same arguments. The latest education bill receives its second reading today and will in effect repeal many of the concessions wrung out of the Blair government.
If a new school is needed, academy/free school bids must be prioritised before any other school can be considered, the secretary of state will decide who runs it, local authorities are frozen out and new maintained schools will be almost impossible to achieve.
The government is also to give itself powers to transfer land directly to free schools, the requirement for locally established admissions forums is to be ditched, at a time when there may be an explosion of autonomous schools, the schools adjudicator will no longer be able to require schools to change illegal entry criteria and parents will no longer be able to complain to the local government ombudsman.
Translated into everyday life, these changes mean that, far from having choice, parents will have a very limited menu: an academy, or an academy called a free school; no say in who runs it; no local scrutiny of how it manipulates its admissions and no meaningful role for the local authority in planning places to meet local needs.
In a sense it is encouraging that the take-up of academies and free schools has been so sluggish that the financial carrot has now been replaced by a big stick. But these clauses, alongside the changes to the teaching workforce, and the curriculum, represent a massive power and land grab away from local communities and to central government, for which there is no mandate.
Tony Blair did at least win the 2005 general election, even if he didn't mention his plans for schools in his manifesto. The Tories haven't won an election since 1992; they are being propped up by a party that wooed thousands of floating teachers, governors and parents with promises about fairness, devolution of power and local accountability, but which has gone curiously silent in an area where its policies once commanded respect.
The bill will give Andy Burnham, shadow education secretary, the chance to define himself on some key issues, not least the role of local authorities in a modern education system and how we ensure fairness in resourcing, planning and admissions.
The big question is whether the Liberal Democrats will now step up to the plate, to try to regain credibility on policies they once called their own. We keep hearing about their new plan to define themselves in opposition to the Conservatives within the coalition. I can't think of a better opportunity than this education bill to put that New Year resolution into practice.
• www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk
From preferred A-levels and the English bac to colleges and academic redundancy
Last week Lucy Tobin reported on confusion over universities' "preferred" A-level subjects. A few days later, the Russell Group published a guide
I've helped out at Cambridge open days and it's a real shame to talk to potential applicants who want to do, for example, biological natural sciences and are doing biology and chemistry A-level without maths. Realistically, they don't have a chance, competing with private school applicants who have the "ideal" combination: maths, further maths and two sciences. Where does the problem start? Crap advice from teachers. Cambridge's website is good, but it takes a 15-year-old with a lot of foresight to be making A-level choices with the best university courses in mind.
umboose
• I've just found out that thanks to Gove and his "English bac", my son, a scientist through and through who will probably take maths, further maths, applied maths and physics for his As, will have some universities closed to him because he won't have a language GCSE. He's facing the prospect of losing a place to someone who may not have his aptitude for science but who has Latin.
chattykathy14
• If you are applying to a sixth-form college you have to apply in year 10 with a good, if not definite, idea of the subjects you wish to study. To expect anyone to make this choice at the age of 14/15 seems hard.
sunshinecandy
• We (universities) could help solve many problems by providing a Universities UK exams board for A-levels, with syllabi that are approved as rigorous.
Bobber1
From your article on Harlow College, it seems the adage about lies, damn lies and statistics eludes you (Bonkers? Maybe. Successful? Definitely, 25 January).
There are four measures of colleges' performance: achievement rates, which measure high grades; pass rates; value added; and success rates. Despite the name, success rates are no more than glorified retention rates. They measure how many students who began a course went on to pass it. Success rates make no distinction between grades A and E.
The fear of collapsing success rates means that students have been deterred by colleges from trying different courses, and teachers often compete to retain students when they should be objectively advising them. Then there are "exit strategies". If a student has no prospect of succeeding in their first choice of course, college managers can transfer them to a very short course which is nearly impossible to fail.
Anthony Carlyon
Ingatestone, Essex
• I am saddened by your infommercial for Colin Hindmarch. If you speak to just one man, you get one point of view: man comes in and saves college. Yet the 100 lecturers who left may have different stories to tell. Many felt so aggrieved that they took the meagrest of severance packages and left a college that they had dedicated years of their lives to.
Adam Amor
Harlow, Essex
Your advice to academics faced with redundancy (My old job? Ancient history, 1 February) covers a range of options, but fails to mention the one word that will really help: "strike".
Keith Flett, London N17