2012 copy dates for CILIP Update magazine
There will be 12 print issues of CILIP Update in 2012. Every issue will also be available in digital format - see CILIP Update Digital.
Email all copy and images to update@cilip.org.uk
Recruitment and display advertising copy dates and further information are available 
here
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Features
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News
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January |
12 December |
4 January |
12 January |
19 January |
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February |
13 January |
26 January |
9 February |
16 February |
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March |
10 February |
23 February |
8 March |
15 March |
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April |
9 March |
22 March |
5 April |
12 April |
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May |
6 April |
19 April |
3 May |
10 May |
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June |
4 May |
17 May |
31 May |
7 June |
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July |
1 June |
14 June |
28 June |
5 July |
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August |
29 June |
12 July |
26 July |
2 August |
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September |
27 July |
23 August |
6 September |
13 September |
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October |
7 September |
20 September |
4 October |
11 October |
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November |
5 October |
18 October |
1 November |
8 November |
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December |
2 November |
15 November |
29 November |
6 December |
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"Trust professional librarians to be innovative and creative"
A lively debate took place this morning in Westminster Hall on the future of public library services in England. MPs contributing to the debate included Glenda Jackson, Gloria De Piero, Ed Vaizey, Justin Tomlinson and Diane Abbott.
Watch the full debate on parliamentlive.tv
CILIP's Director of Policy and Advocacy, Guy Daines, was at the debate. See what he thought on his blog post.
CILIP Update journalist Matthew Mezey live tweeted the debate.
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CPD: Useful resources and references
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development http://www.cipd.co.uk/cpd/aboutcpd/
CILIP Career Development Group (CDG)
CILIP Health Libraries Group (HLG)
www.peterhoney.com – Learning styles
http://www.businessballs.com has a wide range of free resources on topics such as being more assertive, motivation, change management, personal development planning and interviewing techniques
http://www.belbin.com is an online resource which helps you to identify how you operate in a team setting. The following book by Belbin is also a useful resource:
Belbin, R Meredith (1993) Team roles at work. Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann
Honey, Peter & Mumford, Alan (1986) The manual of learning styles. Peter Honey, 2nd ed.
Honey, Peter (2000) Learning Log: a way to enhance learning from experience. Maidenhead,
Peter Honey Publications
Building Your Portfolio, 2nd edn The CILIP guide Margaret Watson , FACET publishing www.facetpublishing.co.uk
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/teachingandlearning/pdp
http://rapidbi.com/created/personaldevelopmentplan.html#howtodevelopyourownpersonalplan
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/pdp
http://www.cilip.org.uk/filedownloadslibrary/qualifications/chartershiphandbook10.pdf
http://jionalibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/why-i-am-a-member-of-cilip/
http://thewikiman.org/blog/?paged=6
Impact Magazine of CDG group ,Winter 2010 Vol 13 No 4 p77-81
http://www.slideshare.net/WoodsieGirl/npc2010-laura-woodstakingchargeofyourcpd
Woodsie girls presentation
http://woodsiegirl.wordpress.com/tag/presentations/#_ftn1
Carol Brookes http://www.slideshare.net/CareerDevelopmentGroup/training-and-developing-on-a-shoestring-web-version
http://www.slideshare.net/CareerDevelopmentGroup/portfolio-building
PLE is more of a concept than a physically defined tool
Thanks to Sara Batts, Reed Smith LLP and Olwen Walker Kirkland and Ellis International LLP
In the academic sector PLEs and Personal Learning Networks (PLN) are interchangeable terms which discuss and conceptualise ways of bringing together many disparate strands of individual for an individual learner.
See the presentation given by Sara Batts and Olwen Walker at 2010 Online conference in the December 2010 section of Saras blog
http://uncookeddata.wordpress.com/
Lots of definitions here http://slidesh.re/OnlinePLE1 (Iona Buchem)
How to construct one – instructions here http://slidesha.re/OnlinePLE2 (Corinne Weisberger)
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Apply now for £3,000 travelling award to the United States!
The Travelling Librarian Award is an opportunity to do a study tour in the United States for two weeks.
The English-Speaking Union (ESU) and CILIP invite applications for the Travelling Librarian Award, from UK library and information professionals who are personal members of CILIP.
The Travelling Librarian Award is intended to encourage US/UK contacts in the library world and the establishment of permanent links through a professional development study tour.
The Award will be about £3000 to cover flights and some accommodation in the US. The successful candidate will be free to put together their own programme of visits (although help and advice will be available). Where possible she or he will be encouraged to take up home hospitality with ESU Members. The successful candidate will be expected to cover further incidental costs.
Normally the visit lasts about 2-3 weeks and takes place during the Autumn.
Applicants must be:
a) UK library and information professionals and;
b) in membership of CILIP at time of application.
Candidates should apply via email with a CV and a supporting letter to:
The deadline for applications is 27 April 2012.
Applications will be considered and a shortlist will be drawn up. All candidates will be contacted shortly after the application deadline. Shortlisted candidates called to interview to discuss their application further in person.
Interviews will take place in London on Thursday 14 May 2012.
A selection panel will judge all applications objectively on how well they further the aims and purposes of the award, and the evidence provided in support of this. Each application will be judged on its individual merits. There is no set application length expected. It is up to each candidate to write as little or as much as they wish. However, what you present in support of your application should be: a) relevant and b) sufficient, to allow the selection panel to make an informed decision.
Typically, each year there are many excellent applications. However, should there be no suitable application, the panel reserves the right not to make an award for that year.
On return, the successful candidate will be expected to give some presentations and produce a short report. Usually a Travelling Librarian reception is held each year when the most recent winner has the opportunity to make a short presentation/talk on their study visit. Past recipients have found the study tour a rewarding personal and professional experience which has often helped advance their career.
The English-Speaking Union aims to strengthen international understanding through a variety of cultural and educational programmes and scholarships. As part of its international policy, CILIP aims to provide opportunities for members to enrich their professional lives by sharing experience and expertise with overseas colleagues.
guy.daines@cilip.org.uk
020 7255 0632
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Universities and colleges need to make online learning a central part of their strategies if they are to stay competitive globally, says a new report.
The report argues that those UK higher education (HE) institutions that are prepared to make online learning a central focus will be able to develop responsive, engaging and interactive education that is both high quality and cost-effective.
They will also need to take advantage of rapidly developing technology and rich sources of content, and invest in high quality learning, if they are to remain globally competitive against the challenge from international and private providers.
The report is published by the online learning taskforce, which includes JISC's chair Professor Tim O'Shea, and showcases 14 innovative approaches to online course delivery in the UK.
Dr Malcolm Read, JISC's executive secretary, said: "Online learning is an increasingly important element of teaching particularly to support learners at a distance in both space and time. We look forward to working with the Higher Education Academy and others to support higher and further education exploit the opportunities to improve the learner experience offer by on line learning."
The report makes six recommendations to institutions and the wider HE sector. They include use of online learning to enhance student choice and meet learners’ expectations; realignment of training and development to support academics to play a leading role in online provision; and the development and sharing of open educational resources to enhance efficiency and quality.
The chair of the task force, British Library chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley, said: "The HE sector has been talking about the potential of online learning for well over 10 years. The moment has come to move online learning more centre stage. Only by doing this will UK higher education remain and grow as a major international force. Our report offers pointers towards achieving this goal."
Sir Alan Langlands, chief executive of Higher Education Funding Council for England, said: "At a time of increasing expectations from students, universities should be using learning technology appropriately and delivering online programmes that are high quality and flexible. Prospective students from the UK and overseas require clear and easily accessible information about online learning."
via Jisc news
Ministers seem to think the traditional academic subjects they studied and the team games they played at school are what everyone's children should do, says Estelle Morris – but what about the alternatives?
Given the opportunity, most people will express a view about what is right and wrong with our education system. Almost everyone has been to school and most people have played their part in educating their own children. You certainly don't need to be a qualified teacher to feel you know what is best.
It's a simplistic view, but I think you can roughly see two groups among parents: those who want their own children to have the same or a similar education to their own and those who want anything but. Some children are signed up at birth for a parent's old school; other parents scrimp and save to move somewhere where they think education is better than theirs.
This is the way it should be. Parents know their children best and will understandably strive to achieve it for them. The problem is that we now seem to have a team of education ministers who want to replicate their own education experiences for everyone else's child.
There's a thread running through ministers' pronouncements on what they consider to be a "good" education for older secondary school students, and I suspect it pretty closely mirrors their own time at school.
If you follow the debates on the future of the school sports partnerships, their views on "soft" A-level subjects, their plans for the future content of league tables, what might happen to assessment, and, most of all, the English baccalaureate, a picture begins to emerge.
Team games are the only sort of sport that matters; traditional subjects are better than new areas of study; assessment should always be at the end of the course; vocational subjects matter less than academic ones.
There is little appreciation of the contribution of the social sciences or religious education, of applied subjects such as engineering, or vocational courses. Perhaps most worrying, the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in a technological world don't seem to get a mention.
The approach to education that ministers seem to value has served many people very well, and the skills, knowledge and attitudes it has given them have in turn benefited our country. I do not argue against that sort of education being available to more children.
Yet valuing that shouldn't blind us to the strengths of alternatives. Wanting all children to be stretched, to be ambitious, to develop a love of learning, not to be held back by poverty or lack of aspiration is not the preserve of those who prefer a more traditional approach.
Any number of people, many of them very successful in life, will bear witness to creative and imaginative teachers and schools that used art, drama or sport, practical subjects or the social sciences to motivate them and entice them into the world of learning. As well as these being important in their own right, drama can lead to a love of poetry, or politics to a fascination with history, or design to a lifelong interest in architecture.
This is, of course, the fault line in Michael Gove's raft of early policy announcements. He starts from the premise that teachers should be trusted to know what is best for their pupils, but gives the strongest of signals that he values one type of education more than any other. Never was this more evident than the way in which the current curriculum review was announced.
Engaging, motivating and teaching children is a complicated business. It is both an art and a science, and our best teachers are geniuses at finding different routes to help children to achieve.
It's strange that a government that puts diversity of school providers at the core of its vision should show such little appreciation of the diversity of ways in which young people can learn and succeed.
• We have changed the headline on this story to better reflect the content of the article.
This is a chance for pupils to tell us what they like about their school, and what they would change, for our new manifesto, which we will present to decision-makers
Do you know what makes a perfect school? Help us to draw up a new Children's Manifesto
Ten years ago this month, Education Guardian asked children to design their perfect school. From over 15,000 entries from pupils aged five to 18, we drew up the Children's Manifesto – a recipe for the school of your dreams.
Now we want to ask pupils again. Is your school just as you'd like it to be? Or are there things you would change? Is the building right? Should you sit exams? Are you allowed to express yourself? Are your lessons interesting? Here's your chance to let us know how schools in Britain can become perfect for pupils.
We're going to listen to all pupils' comments. Just email them to school.i'd.like@guardian.co.uk, giving your full name, age, year and name of school, and a contact phone number. The more pupils who write in, the more powerful our voice. The deadline is 18 February.
We will publish some of your comments and use all of them to inform and guide the manifesto. Some of those who send in the most imaginative and exciting ideas will be asked to join our special Children's Manifesto panel, helping to sift through the submissions to turn them into the final manifesto.
We will then present the manifesto to decision-makers. Who knows, perhaps we can make the dream school come true.
This is what the school children of Britain wanted back in 2001
The school we'd like is:
• A beautiful school with glass dome roofs to let in the light, uncluttered classrooms and brightly coloured walls.
• A comfortable school with sofas and beanbags, cushions on the floors, tables that don't scrape our knees, blinds that keep out the sun, and quiet rooms where we can chill out.
• A safe school with swipe cards for the school gate, anti-bully alarms, first aid classes, and someone to talk to about our problems.
• A listening school with children on the governing body, class representatives and the chance to vote for the teachers.
• A flexible school without rigid timetables or exams, without compulsory homework, without a one-size-fits-all curriculum, so we can follow our own interests and spend more time on what we enjoy.
• A relevant school where we learn through experience, experiments and exploration, with trips to historic sites and teachers who have practical experience of what they teach.
• A respectful school where we are not treated as empty vessels to be filled with information, where teachers treat us as individuals, where children and adults can talk freely to each other, and our opinion matters.
• A school without walls so we can go outside to learn, with animals to look after and wild gardens to explore.
• A school for everybody with boys and girls from all backgrounds and abilities, with no grading, so we don't compete against each other, but just do our best.
At the school we'd like, we'd have:
• Enough pencils and books for each child.
• Laptops so we could continue our work outside and at home.
• Drinking water in every classroom, and fountains of soft drinks in the playground.
• School uniforms of trainers, baseball caps and fleece tracksuits for boys and girls.
• Clean toilets that lock, with paper and soap, and flushes not chains.
• Fast-food school dinners and no dinner ladies.
• Large lockers to store our things.
• A swimming pool.
This is what we'd like. It is not an impossible dream.
These are some suggestions school children have for the perfect school in 2011
'My perfect school would be where we could decide which days we wanted to go to school. So if sometimes we worked for 10 days in a row we would be able to have a four-day weekend. I know it isn't possible because we have to learn the same things and sometimes only one pupil would be in. David Cameron did not consult us about cutting funding to our school, which means that I have to pay for my music lessons, which I worked very hard to get a special place for.'
Louis Bradshaw, 12, year 8, Haberdasher's Aske's Hatcham college, Lewisham
'It's unfair that only the people who are good at writing stories have their stories displayed in the school hall. I think everyone should have their work displayed and the school should, maybe every Friday, display the work so that we can read each others' work, then write comments as well. That way no one feels left out.'
Zarah Yesufu, eight, year 4, St Joseph's RC school, Wembley
'My school gives me the opportunity to voice my opinions through the Pupil Senate, as long as you are serious and sensible about what you would like to change. I was consulted about my intention to start a debating society at the school. First of all, I discussed this issue in the Senate. Thereafter, I met with one of my teachers and arranged for the society to meet one lunchtime a week, much like any other school club. We now meet every Thursday to debate on both serious and fun issues and I am very proud of what I have achieved.'
Michael Middleton, aged 14, year 10, Sawston Village college, Cambridge
'They do ask what we'd like sometimes. When we were getting a new teacher, we had a lesson from three teachers and we were asked which one we liked the best. They did choose her. I'd like more extended projects. When we did the second world war, we had a make-do-and-mend week, using old clothes to make funky new stuff. I made a skirt from an old pair of jeans and I still wear it.'
Hannah Stott, aged 10, year 6, Wolvercote primary, Oxford
'When I was eight, my school put up a board on which pupils could pin up ideas. Hardly any of them got done, not even the eco-friendly ones. My dream school isn't one that has loads of high-tech equipment. It is one that has students that enjoy learning and whose opinion will be considered seriously.'
Olive Bradshaw, aged 10, year 6, Walnut Tree Walk school, Lambeth
'At the start of the week you could fill in a form to choose what lessons you wanted. Kids should get at least an option on where to go on trips. Also, they shouldn't have to wear school uniform if they don't want to. In after-school club there should be crisps and drinks and some fruit to keep you going.'
Roisin Shanks, aged nine, year 5, Bonner primary, Tower Hamlets
Ten years ago, Education Guardian held a competition, The School I'd Like, offering children a chance to start setting the agenda for their own education. Did they get what they wanted? And are we listening to them any more today?
A new national curriculum, academy status, the English baccalaureate. These controversial developments are all arriving shortly at a school near you. And who's proposing such radical shifts in educational provision and assessment? Government, educationalists and the occasional celebrity expert. But there's one group whose opinion we haven't heard on these initiatives, even though they will experience the greatest impact. School children.
Ten years ago this month, Education Guardian ran a competition called The School I'd Like. (The Observer had run a 1967 competition under the same title.) Primary and secondary students were asked to design the school of their dreams. More than 15,000 school children responded; the competition is still one of the largest informal surveys of children's attitudes towards schooling ever conducted in this country. Entries came as photographic collages, papier-mache models, architectural plans, Braille essays, recorded rap songs and illustrated books. Secondary student Tom Copping rewrote the lyrics to Lennon's Imagine: "Imagine there's no Ofsted / Schools all on 'alert'/ No compulsory subjects / You can even garden in the dirt …" Twelve-year-old traveller Rocky sent in a poem, asking for the school to follow him rather than the other way around.
These School I'd Like entrants didn't politely put up their hands and wait to be asked – they pleaded, cried and insisted their voices be heard. Secondary school pupil Aleksi Hastings had his "super skool" entry set as a task by his teacher. '"Hi, this is a homework that will probably just be written, read and returned, with a mark and someone's red pen all over it …Please don't just push this aside as another homework, treat this piece presented before you as an academic breakthrough. Make the dream come true."
Ten years later, have any of the young people's dreams come true? Educational initiatives have multiplied and reports been written about reports, from Building Schools for the Future to the (also now abandoned) Rose Review. But is it still education, education, education without consultation, consultation, consultation? Are adults continuing to develop strategies and schools continuing to implement them without asking the pupils?
Student involvement in real decision-making seems to still be largely at the mercy of committed heads and understanding teaching staff. "Pupil voice depends upon the school," says Tim Brighouse, former Schools Commissioner for London and a judge in the 2001 competition. "Some schools have the appearance of a school council, but it's only symbolic. Then there are a few schools that have really pushed student voice."
David Miliband was schools minister when Building Schools for the Future (BSF) was introduced in 2004. He admits that student input to BSF design plans was inconsistent. "It was more ad hoc engagement in what students, teachers and the community wanted from a school building. But where it has happened, it's been inspiring," he says.
One reason educationalists and government can give for not listening very hard is that young people's demands are often heady and idealistic. In 2001, we asked children to let their imaginations run wild – the very kind of blue-sky thinking governments themselves so often favour. So a swimming pool was high on pupils' list of near-essential items a school should offer. Primary school pupil Hannah Watson even wanted the lessons in her "timbuctoo primary" to take place in the water, "to aid relaxation", with "blow-up chairs and laminated maths books".
Miriam Grossfeld's entry won the upper secondary. Now 25 and a graduate in psychology from Cambridge University, she looks back on her submission with some regret. "I was quite brutal," she says. "I was wrong not to see the other side of it. But that was how I felt at the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. I asked for everything to be individual, so that everyone could create their own little curriculum. I realise now that it has to be standardised. You have to tick boxes. And now people rightly tell me – well, you got your GCSEs and have a job so I shouldn't complain. But I still feel like I'm looking to find what really inspires me. If schools let children find that, could produce a generation that felt inspired in what they did, then education would really work."
Maisie Munroe, the 2001 lower secondary winner, is now 23 and has just completed her master's at Barcelona Institute of International Relations. "I came home from school and was moaning about something and my mum said – 'Have you seen this School I'd Like in the paper?' So I just sat down and wrote it that afternoon," she remembers. "It was idealistic stuff." Her entry was: "In my perfect school there would still be rules, but they would guide us, not confine us. There would be no grading, praise only for working hard and not your mental capability … Exams would be abolished. We would discuss our opinions in every lesson. Teachers and pupils would be equal. In my school, the only thing they would ban would be unhappiness and pain."
Students also put forward small, cheap or cost-free, easily achievable suggestions. Quieter school bells, water jugs in every classroom, desks that leave room for knees, no flickering strip lighting, no holes in the playground tarmac, sharp pencils. I wonder how many schools could tick all these small measures off today? Children also longed for teachers to change. Primary school pupil Will Honey wanted them, "to use less of their cross voice". Others hoped teachers would simply remember their name and let them go to the toilet when they needed to.
In 2001, Jane Allnutt was teaching year 6 at Hilltop junior school in Essex when the class worked on the School I'd Like competition as a project. She believes pupil voice is increasingly taken into account. "Things pupils suggest now get implemented much more," she says. "Ten years ago, the class tried to get a recycling bin and they said no. Now most classrooms in most primary schools have a litterbin and a recycling box. That's the sort of thing that children actually asked for and it actually happened. If the kids come up with good ideas then we'll try and put them into practice – if we can, and if the health and safety rules allow, and if the budget allows." That's a few 'ifs'.
Some argue that, even if these small things have improved due to pupil pressure, the larger issues remain to be tackled, in particular concerning pupil power. "We know from research that young people want to be more involved in the running of their schools," says Maggie Atkinson, the Children's Commissioner. "They particularly want to help select their teachers and give feedback on lessons. Where schools involve pupils well, it leads to better relationships, improved behaviour and higher attainment. For example, at one school we visited, the school council runs training sessions for teachers – giving feedback on their lessons. Teachers say this helps them improve, and they really value the feedback – even if they did find it a bit daunting at first."
Brighouse argues beyond "independent learning" for pupils to "interdependent learning", where staff and pupils learn from each other. "How do you include everyone in the learning process? It's no longer 'I'm going to tell you all that you need to know about Macbeth'," he says. Brighouse gives the example of one school where year 9 pupils lead regular ICT sessions, acknowledging they're often the experts. "Dare we take this step?" he challenges.
The School I'd Like competition, like its 1967 predecessor, has also influenced pupil involvement. Dr Catherine Burke, senior lecturer in history of education at Cambridge University and an instigator of the 2001 competition, compiled a book from the entries with colleague Ian Grosvenor that is regularly used in teacher training. But Burke is not optimistic. "The school I'd like has now become the school I'd like my child to get into. Pupils have fallen out of the picture and parents are now in it. It's all about parental choice, not pupil choice. Pupil voice is being reduced and now seen as something problematic and in the way," she says.
There are pitfalls to pupil participation. Sometimes young people just don't ask for what we adults want them to. In the Children's Manifesto drawn up from all the School I'd Like entries, one point was, "Fast-food school dinners and no dinner ladies". (This was five years before Jamie [Oliver]'s School Dinners.) School fountains spouting Fanta were a popular request. Maisie Munroe now believes her winning entry was unrealistic, putting the needs of individual pupils before the whole pupil body. "We need to be able to give everyone the same opportunities. So I'm torn between the idea of letting children explore several kinds of education and the necessity to give each and every child opportunities. That realism kicks in as you get as you get older," she says.
Brighouse hopes that, despite the drawbacks, we'll hang on to the ideal of listening to young people. "I'm very optimistic about student involvement. It's in a few schools and not as deeply embedded as it should be – but it will be. Student voice is going to have a very powerful impact."
Can the coalition succeed where Labour failed, to make university admissions follow A-level results?
"Post-qualification university admissions in England. Where have I heard that before?"
So tweeted Professor Steven Schwartz, now vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, but also, significantly, the man who was once Labour's university admissions "tsar".
He was responding to reports this month that suggested fundamental changes to England's higher education application process, also affecting the timing of school exams. They might be introduced after two years.
"Sixth-formers are to be spared the agony of waiting for A-level results before knowing if they have won a place at their chosen university under a plan to overhaul the Ucas [Universities and Colleges Admissions Service] system," one newspaper had reported. "Final school examinations will be taken weeks earlier and the autumn university term pushed back if the changes, to be revealed in a white paper, win support."
Schwartz was right to detect a note of familiarity in the reports. For what they did not mention was that Labour had actually sought for years, without success, to introduce changes with exactly the same aim as those now seemingly being put forward by the coalition.
In fact, back in 2004, an inquiry Schwartz led into university admissions had concluded that such a system would be "fairer and more transparent".
The story of the years since strikes many – including Schwartz himself – as a failure to achieve the goals David Willetts, universities minister, is reported now to be aiming at.
So what has gone wrong? And what are the prospects that such a reform might work this time?
Since the 1990s, a consistent criticism has been made of the university admissions system: it is largely based on pupils' predicted grades at A-level, rather than their actual results.
Because applications have to be submitted to universities by 15 January, they can only include teachers' forecasts of students' likely grades in A-levels that will be completed in the summer, rather than their actual achievements.
But this creates a problem. There is evidence that predictions are inaccurate in as many as 55% of cases. Students, therefore, face injustice if they are predicted lower grades by teachers than they go on to achieve.
It has long been argued that the system risks harming disadvantaged students' chances in particular. John Morgan, a former president of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) who has been involved in discussions over reform for eight years, says many disadvantaged pupils are on a "faster upward trajectory" in the sixth form than their better-off peers, improving sharply towards the end of their courses. Thus, they would benefit from later applications.
The need for change has been acknowledged officially for more than a decade, with Ron Dearing, in his 1997 higher education report, which paved the way for tuition fees, and Mike Tomlinson, in a report on A-levels in 2002, both concluding that university admissions should not be based on predicted grades.
The question has always been: how to achieve this? With A-level results published in mid-August and university terms starting in some cases in early September, there is little time as it stands to process applications.
Labour's attempt at reform began in earnest in 2005, as it responded to the Schwartz review with a consultation paper putting forward a host of recommendations, including two alternative options that would eventually have introduced a version of a post-qualifications admissions (PQA) system.
One would have seen all students submitting applications to university only after A-level results were published. The second would have seen them put in "expressions of interest" to universities well before results were released, universities then making offers of places to some students, but some places being reserved for after results came out.
However, Labour shelved the move in 2006 after both options were rejected by the consultees, two-thirds of whom were from universities.
Instead, it published another paper with less radical recommendations, including setting aside a week after A-levels in the applications process when students achieving better-than-expected grades could apply to more prestigious universities. This proposal, a so-called adjustment period, has happened.
But other recommendations, including a stipulation that exam boards should bring forward A-level results day by a week to free up more time for the applications process, have not ... until now, at least.
The other radical changes suggested – bringing school exams forward or putting back university terms to leave space for admissions – have long been ideas in the background of this debate but have hit firm obstacles, observers say.
Schools would be reluctant to lose more teaching time by scheduling exams earlier, while there has been huge resistance among universities to any delay in term dates, especially given that the foreign students on whom they increasingly rely for income expect to be able to start university in early autumn.
John Dunford, ASCL's former general secretary, who has been involved in discussions on PQA since 1994, stresses universities' role in the failure so far to effect change, but says all parties need to compromise.
Given the history, is there any chance this latest plan will come to fruition? One who believes not is Schwartz himself. Asked if PQA had any chance of working this time, he replies: "None whatsoever."
He says: "Everyone who has looked at the issue ... concurs: PQA is the only sensible way to proceed. Only universities object, usually on the grounds that waiting for A-level results before making admissions decisions would leave insufficient time for them to fully evaluate applications.
"The force of this objection is reduced considerably when these same universities make instant admission decisions during clearing. A few cynical types have suggested that admissions tutors dislike PQA because all the work will take place in the summer."
Universities UK, the lobby group, says in a statement that universities have supported PQA, but then adds that for it to work "it must be compatible with both the university and school year, and the timing of national examinations".
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is itself cautious, saying only that "there's a likelihood that we might look at PQA" in the white paper, due in the spring.
Some remain optimistic that PQA can happen. Edexcel, the exam board, says it is confident it could release A-level results a week early if asked. And, as Education Guardian was going to press, an exams source told this newspaper that A-level and GCSE results are indeed being moved forward by a week from 2012.
Morgan, a headteacher who also sits on the board of Ucas, says that admissions staff in universities have been quietly warming to PQA in recent years, partly for financial reasons: having students apply after they know their grades would cut down on "wasted" applications, thus reducing overheads, he says.
For Dunford, progress on PQA has been painfully slow, but this would make it no less sweet if finally achieved. One suspects he should not hold his breath.
Colin Hindmarch is a college principal who once inspired hate – but now inspires envy
Colin Hindmarch sits at the oversized boardroom table in his office. There are no books on the shelves and nothing on the desk, not even a computer, as if he had just moved in or is about to move out. But he is definitely staying put, he says. The neatness is deliberate, part of his leadership strategy. "I went on this training course once where they said that if someone comes into your office and sees piles of paper everywhere, they will think you haven't got time for them. I'd never want to give that impression," he says.
A recent Ofsted inspection concluded that his college, at Harlow, Essex, was "good with outstanding features". The college can now boast overall success rates – government figures that measure student achievement – of 88% (the national average is around 76%), which puts it second in the country.
It would be enough to make any principal feel satisfied. But here it's especially amazing. Just three years ago, Harlow College came close to being placed in special measures, and Hindmarch's attempts to turn the place around made him, in his own words, "possibly the most hated principal in the country".
He must surely feel like thumbing his nose at those who doubted him: the unions who fought him, the teaching staff who decided to leave, and the minister who disowned him (of which more later).
"To a small degree," he says, with just the trace of a smile. "But only to a small degree. I would have preferred it if I had been able to take everyone along with me."
When he arrived at Harlow, Hindmarch, who had been vice-principal at City of Sunderland College, was "shocked" at what he found. While staff believed everything was going well, data collection was "very poor", meaning some staff ("some, not all") had no idea how their students were doing or what they needed to do to improve. Many had low expectations of their students and took little responsibility for their progress. "'What do you expect? They're from Harlow' – I heard that a lot in those first few months," he says.
In the months following his appointment in September 2006, all the teaching staff were re-interviewed for their jobs, and graded against 39 criteria, including attendance, teamwork, punctuality and relationships with students. More than 100 of the 179 teachers took redundancy or were made redundant.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone shared Hindmarch's vision. His uncompromising approach sparked strikes, a bitter legal dispute with the University and College Union (UCU), an employment tribunal, and – what Hindmarch admits was his "lowest point" – a public withdrawal of support from the then further and higher education minister and Harlow MP, Bill Rammell, who said in February 2008 that "the change strategy the principal initiated was not adequately thought through or effectively implemented".
As well as introducing new systems to track students' progress, Hindmarch introduced a radical new approach to teaching where, instead of having several classes each week, students had subject days. Teachers would set targets at the beginning of the day and students could go home as soon as they were achieved.
"A lot of people were very nervous about the things we wanted to do. And I understand that," he says. "But you will very often hear the public services exalted as creative and innovative. Actually, people get very nervous about change and are happier if you carry on just doing things as you always have done."
Also controversial was the change to holiday entitlement, from 12 to 10 weeks a year, taken across the year and not just in the school holidays. Like many of the innovations, Hindmarch feels they were misinterpreted. "We were actually giving staff more freedom to determine when they would be teaching. But it was portrayed by the union as being the opposite."
At the same time, it was being widely reported that new contracts issued by Harlow College stipulated that staff would be required to work a 56-hour, six-day working week. "I still don't know where it came from," he says. "But there was absolutely no truth in it at all."
At the height of the troubles, he was shouted and sworn at by staff on a regular basis. That, he says, he can understand, but what really hurt was interference from Rammell, who asked the Learning and Skills Council to carry out an inquiry into the college in July 2007, claiming that the college was understaffed and would not be able to cope with the influx of students in the autumn.
"He [Rammell] was very upfront in terms of what he thought of me," says Hindmarch. "But to have the minister of further education believing that you are fundamentally wrong and thinking you were essentially about to sabotage the local college … it was extraordinarily unhelpful. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that the picture that was portrayed by a number of people was that the college was suddenly in the hands of someone who was incompetent and bonkers."
He admits that some days he used to "go home, go upstairs, pull the covers over my head and that was it!" So did he ever doubt himself, start to believe he really was "bonkers"? He shakes his head, vigorously, "I knew I was right".
This unshakeable sense of confidence and determination is what characterises Hindmarch. He initially trained as a primary teacher, but fell into further education after a varied career teaching maths and physics in secondary schools, working in a school for young people with emotional and behavioural difficulties, and running a language school.
One of the most valuable things he learned during his time at City of Sunderland College was the need for staff, even at the most senior level, to focus on learners' needs. "Sunderland is a much more deprived area than Harlow, but you'd never hear the lecturers there saying the students couldn't achieve. If a student is failing I take that personally; all staff should take that personally. But that kind of culture has to come down from the top."
In his early 20s, he tells me, he learned Gujarati from scratch, jacked in his teaching job and sold his car to travel to India to beg for the hand in marriage of a young Hindu girl (now his wife of 34 years) he had spotted across a crowded room.
He says repeatedly that he "understands" why lecturers, the union, and even Rammell were so worried by his radical vision. What got him through the bad days was the unfailing support of his family, the chair of governors, Martin Cole, and his Hindu faith, which he says has informed his leadership style. "Amongst other things, you have to try to see things from others' point of view, work out how people view the world. And if you do work it out, for the majority of people, if you do see where they are coming from, it does ease things a little."
While there are "no tensions" with UCU now, his relationship with Rammell didn't fare so well. While they developed an "acceptable working relationship" for the remainder of Rammell's time as Harlow MP (he was defeated by the Tory, Robert Halfon, in last May's general election and is about to take up an appointment as deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Plymouth), Hindmarch reckons he is not on Rammell's Christmas card list.
Hindmarch may no longer be the most hated principal in the country, but he just might be the most ambitious. He is currently learning Hindi and would love to write a Gujarati grammar book. His ultimate goal for his college would be a "100% success rate, with all students achieving a grade A or distinction". "Our long-term goal is probably an impossible one, because we don't know how to achieve it yet," he says. "But it doesn't mean that we couldn't, one day. If I'd shared some of my goals for Harlow College with people right from the outset, they'd have really thought I was mad. I don't think they would think that now. Staff know that if we aren't already, we soon will be the most successful college in the country."
• Keep students at the heart of everything you do
• Create a clear strategy for teaching and learning that is understood by everyone
• Be bold and brave and don't be afraid to take risks
• Create a culture where everyone accepts responsibility for students' successes and failures
• Always be truthful about what is going on at the college. Never deceive anyone else or yourself
Scientists from the Space Research Centre are working with an art historian to reveal secrets of the Tudor Reformation
Cutting-edge space science technology of the sort used to analyse moon rock is being applied to fragments of 16th-century tombs. Scientists from the Space Research Centre in Leicester are working with an art historian from the nearby university as well as academics from Oxford and Yale in a three-year project that hopes to shed new light on our understanding of the Tudor Reformation.
The tombs, at the parish church in Framlingham, are close to the family seat of the Howards, the extremely wealthy and powerful Dukes of Norfolk. But they were originally sited 40 miles away at Thetford Priory, traditional resting place of the Howards until Henry VIII had it dissolved in 1539. They were moved and reassembled some time in the 1540s while the third duke languished in the Tower of London. (Henry was becoming increasingly paranoid about the threat that he posed to his infant heir.) The reassembly process was flawed, however. Some different materials were used.
What appear to be fragments of the original tombs were unearthed at Thetford by archaeologists as long ago as 1934. But they languished in a warehouse for decades and came to light only recently, when Dr Simon Thurley took over as chief executive of English Heritage and asked all curators to find out what they had in store.
Leicester University art historian Dr Phillip Lindley was called in to investigate the fragments and was immediately fascinated – not just by the quality of the artwork by French sculptors, but also by the possibilities that arose of re-thinking parts of Tudor history. "We're trying to relate what happened to the monuments to what happened to the number one power family of the day," he says.
Lindley would like to be able to take the tombs apart and investigate how they were reassembled. "Obviously I can't do that," he says. "But I was talking about it to scientists at the Space Research Centre who proposed that we scan them, take them apart virtually and then put them back together again to look as the Howards originally intended. It's like doing a jig-saw puzzle on screen with all the pieces mixed up."
The two main tombs were commissioned for the third duke himself and for his son-in-law, Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond, who died in 1536, aged just 17, and happened to be the illegitimate son of the king himself. (The fortunes of the Tudors and the Howards were intertwined; hence historians' ongoing fascination.) Fitzroy had become firm friends during his short life with his brother-in-law, the Earl of Surrey. Yet another Howard, Surrey was the third duke's son and the man who introduced the sonnet to England with Thomas Wyatt. That didn't cut any ice with the king. He had Surrey executed for treason shortly before his own death in 1547.
Surrey's tomb is at Framlingham as well and is currently being investigated by Dr Lisa Ford of the Yale Center for British Art. "I was talking to Lisa over a coffee when I was at Yale," Lindley recounts. "By an astonishing coincidence, we discovered that we were both absorbed by tombs in the same small corner of England."
Another key member of the research team is historian Dr Steven Gunn, of Merton College, Oxford, charged with providing historical context for the findings. "The Howards are central to our understanding of the artistic development of 16th-century England," he says. "We know that their tombs were moved from Thetford during the third duke's imprisonment, and we now have what seem to be the missing pieces. But was it a case of taking them to Framlingham because they'd already been destroyed, or did they have an Ikea-type tomb kit ready to be put together at Framlingham when Thetford was dissolved?"
Lindley has other questions: "Why were parts of the monuments left at Thetford? Had the third duke's and Fitzroy's tombs been dismantled and taken to Framlingham while the duke was in prison? Or are the excavated fragments the remains of the third tomb [Surrey's]?" He is hoping that the virtual technology will help the research team to provide some answers.
Gunn also hopes that what he calls "this Time Team approach to archaeological reconstruction" will appeal to the general public and to school children. And the "audience advocate" will be striving to ensure that it does. The project has attracted funding of £497,000 from two research councils – Arts and Humanities and Engineering and Physical Sciences – and, for what is thought to be the first time in the field of research, the team has appointed someone to ensure value for money. "My role," says freelance interdisciplinary scientist Dr Adair Richards, "is to ensure that a project funded by public money serves the public. One way we're going to do this is to work with English Heritage to create a learning toolkit to allow teachers to present Tudor history in a new way, with a focus on the research process rather than just the results."
The hope is that up-to-the-minute space technology will provide children of the future with a new way of looking at clues that illuminate the past.
A scheme that links schools has significantly improved GCSE results: could it spread across the country?
Knowledge has always abounded in Manchester and its surrounding towns, birthplace of the British cotton industry, modern computers and chemical engineering. How come, then, that in the first years of this century too many schools in Greater Manchester's 10 local councils were underachieving, and badly?
More than 90 were rated outstanding, but, overall, results were below the national average and non-attendance was above it. Something had jammed, and in his offices overlooking Oxford Road, where thousands of students swarm between Manchester's four universities, Professor Mel Ainscow had an idea what it was.
"The knowledge and skills were here in local schools in abundance," he says. "But they weren't sufficiently moving around. The challenge was especially with 'hard-to-reach' urban pupils. That's where the difference had to be made."
This was the germ of an inter-school programme that is now being credited with the sort of improvement in GCSE results that the coalition's education white paper dearly wants to continue. This month's national data on 2010's GCSEs shows an increase of 6% on average scores in 2009, and 11% since the Manchester City Challenge began in 2007.
The challenge is the reason, says Ainscow, who is optimistic about Michael Gove taking up the ball and passing it to other councils across the country. Four years is a short time on which to build a theory, but the concepts behind this are older and more thoroughly tested than that. Ainscow has been researching them for more than 10 years at the Centre for Equity in Education, which he co-directs at the University of Manchester. The charismatic Tim Brighouse practised the preaching in London's City Challenge from 2003, and also achieved good results. A third challenge, involving the four councils of the Black Country, is doing the same.
The practicalities are summarised by three words from Ainscow's diagnosis – "moving knowledge around" – and there have been three main pathways. The familiar term "families of schools" describes one of them, but these are not families in the traditional, feeder/pyramid sense.
Dropping old sensitivities about boundaries, Greater Manchester's 10 councils bonded together schools from Oldham to Wigan in comparable groups, 11 for secondaries and 58 for primaries. Laid out in this format, data revealed anomalies and similarities clearly.
Ainscow, who took on the Manchester equivalent of Brighouse's London role, says: "We were looking at schools whose intake, size and other features had much in common, and seeing how one was doing well and another not. We were looking for the good things, naturally, and through this system, they were clear. It was a game-changer."
The next step was what Ainscow calls "carefully brokered" school partnerships, with challenge staff such as Andrew Morley earning the nickname "matchmakers". One of Morley's marriages shows strikingly how assets and talents are now shared by schools that previously might have been on different planets: he linked the strictly Orthodox Jewish primary Yesoiday Hatorah in Bury with Birchfields primary, a stone's throw from Ainscow's office in Manchester, most of whose pupils are Muslim.
Both schools are very large. Yesoiday's head for 20 years, Jonathan Yodaiken, has 650 pupils; Birchfields' Sam Offord, appointed four years ago, has 720. Both have language and cultural issues and – at the launch of the challenge – they also had a difference: Yesoiday had Ofsted's second-highest rating of "good", while Birchfields needed a boost.
Three years later, that has happened. Yodaiken, taking orange juice and biscuits with Offord at one of hundreds of inter-school meetings, recalls: "There was cheering here when we heard last year that Ofsted had also rated Birchfields as 'good'." This wasn't a lopsided relationship, however. Both heads acknowledge the way their schools have learned from one another.
Birchfields' exuberant artwork excited Yodaiken and his colleagues; they were also interested to hear how Birchfields parents, while sometimes hesitant about parent evenings because of language difficulties, queued to be helpers on school trips. Yodaiken says: "We can all get a bit blinkered and set in our ways. Working with Sam and her colleagues has sharpened us up, helped with thinking about staff career development, management and working in teams."
Offord is equally quick to acknowledge the benefits of Yodaiken's experience; an author of educational books, his leadership was rated by Ofsted in December as "charismatic", and he also has that valuable extra for successful veterans: a continuing willingness to learn. An Ofsted inspector himself, he spies out good practice on every visit.
Offord especially rates Yesoiday's openness, highly detailed pupil tracking system, and the culture of leadership. Both agree: "Our schools may not look the same superficially, but Andrew [Morley] picked up the same vibe."
The next step, co-ordinated by 18 heads including Yodaiken, will be "triads". Yesoiday and Birchfields will embrace a third partner, and best practice should spread. The final main pathway is less precise, more of an attitude, says Ainscow. The challenge encourages the spread of good ideas from the ground, or classroom, rather than their imposition from above. Ainscow says: "There is no doubting the great benefits of central government spending in the last decade. But there has been a downside in the dulling of potential creativity. People get used to instructions from above."
Crossing the 10 councils' borders is crucial to countering this; a school in Thameside, for example, is more relaxed swapping skills with one in Stockport because local competition ceases to be an issue. The approach chimes with the experience of Offord and Yodaiken. Both describe their partnership as "organic, watering the flowers"; a gentle process and, crucially these days, a thrifty one. As Ainscow says: "The assets were already there. Challenge is spreading them around."
From gurus to history lessons, uniforms and English as a second language
Huw Kyffin
Canterbury
• I take issue with Dylan Wiliam on his assessment of the current government "not tying things down so tightly". The evidence – phonics and a new test for five- and six-year-olds, and the English bac – suggests otherwise despite the protestations of more freedom for schools from ministers.
Youcannotbeserious via EducationGuardian.co.uk
Before the election Michael Gove laid out his vision for history teaching: "Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England."
Among those Gove has recruited to review the curriculum is that apologist for the British empire, Niall Ferguson. So welcome to the great white, male, ruling-class view of history. Doubtless, schools will be receiving a map with all the former colonies coloured in pink. So why not go the whole hog and resurrect Empire Day? The girls can sew Union Jack flags and the boys can do some square-bashing with wooden rifles whilst singing a hearty version of the national anthem. Remember, you read it here first.
Richard Knights
Liverpool
• Mike Baker and the Better History Group have a point, up to a point. Yes, it is important that pupils are aware of history as a chronological thing. Without a sense of historical time and who did what roughly when, not much grasp of the subject is likely. But I really don't think that an emphasis on UK history alone works at all in 2011. There are clearly limits to what can be taught, but knowing when the French revolution, American civil war and Russian revolution were is more important than understanding that Henry VIII had a beard.
Dr Keith Flett
London Socialist Historians Group, London N17
Schools in many countries all over Europe do without uniform and many of those countries have better educational outcomes than the UK. Uniform is something governments and the educational establishment like to hide behind when they should really be looking at standards of teaching, the enormous differences between the haves and the have-nots in this country, and the pervasive remnants of the class system.
pointythings via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• Schools without uniform are more likely to be those where disorder rules and where ideology ensures poor outcomes. The Derbyshire and Totnes schools featured are likely to be successful because they serve communities that are still socially integrated – ie a low degree of deprivation and little middle-class flight to private education.
EGriff via EducationGuardian.co.uk
English with pastoral help
I had the pleasure of working closely with Elizabeth Knight and her Esol team at another college (Unable to talk the talk, 18 January). What your excellent article does not mention is the value, as opposed to the cost, of Esol classes. I have hardly ever met such a committed group of staff. Teaching was only the half of it – the pastoral support, help filling in forms and support with family issues are just a few areas where Esol staff help to change lives. Saving money on Esol will increase costs in health and social services.
Paul Craven London E5
At universities around the UK, Muslim and Jewish students are finding common ground, with the help of the Coexistence Trust charity
Sara Amin-Nejad, an Iranian-born Muslim studying pharmacy at Manchester University, has never experienced any hostility from a Jewish student. But she has never met one either.
That was why she signed up to be part of a new team, being launched tomorrow at the House of Lords, of 18 Muslim and Jewish students working as "campus ambassadors" at 10 universities around the UK to bring people from the two faiths together.
"I thought it would be a really good opportunity to meet new people," she says. "I've never had the chance to speak to a Jewish student before."
The idea is that the team of students will act as role models for good inter-faith relations. They will receive monthly training sessions in leadership, strategy and conflict resolution and be expected to organise activities on their campuses, such as art and drama projects, and volunteering in the community, that involve Muslims and Jews working together.
The scheme is being run by the Coexistence Trust, a London-based charity dedicated to improving relationships between Muslim and Jewish students. Set up in 2005 as a parliamentary network to combat Islamophobia and anti-semitism, its focus changed three years ago to concentrate on universities.
"We thought that while the parliamentary side was important, we should focus on the next generation, and universities were where we could find the new generation of leaders," says Shahnaz Ahsan, manager of the trust.
The charity also runs Campus FaithHub, which encourages Muslim and Jewish students to leave their university bubble and volunteer together in the local community, as well as a scheme in which they get together to discuss religious texts.
Universities have recently come under the spotlight as potential hotbeds of extremist activity. Three years ago, they were issued with government guidance advising them to address Islamic extremism. Last year, after the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former student at University College London who was accused of attempting to blow up a plane destined for the US, a working group was set up to look at how universities can prevent violent extremism while protecting academic freedom.
But the Coexistence Trust stresses that this is not its focus. Instead, it is about promoting constructive dialogue between students who are open to learning more about each other, but do not have the opportunity.
"We have found there are pockets of students who want to be working together and are quite excited when they see there is an external organisation supportive of what they are doing," says Ahsan. She hopes it will "set a new tone of respectful debate on campus and avoid the polarisation we have seen in recent years".
That is not to say that the students involved in the scheme wear their faiths – or cultures – lightly. The ambassadors include Abid Khan, a part-time Imam, and Yuval Jacob, who last year completed a 10-month pre-army leadership course living in a kibbutz in southern Israel.
Jacob, who is now in his first year of a chemical engineering degree at Imperial College, says the leadership course gave him a chance to find out more about his roots. He has spent most of his life in Germany, but his grandfather had left Germany for Israel in order to escape the Nazis shortly before the second world war.
As part of an Israeli family, he says he always feels connected to the news, but it was not until he spent time in Israel, and saw the sites of conflicts, the crater left by a suicide bomber, that he understood fully what it means for two communities to be at war with one another.
"What makes me interested in the ambassador programme is that I also know the other side," he says. "The side of friendship."
While in Israel, coming across someone who is Muslim would present a point of conflict, he says, having been brought up in Europe, he takes it for granted that he will have Muslim friends – and he does. Here, he argues, the two communities can be easier in each other's company because they are more detached from the political issues that have historically divided them.
Ibrahim Khan, a first-year politics, philosophy and economics student at Oxford – and standup comedian – also makes the distinction between political and social divisions.
While he argues that it is important for Jewish and Muslim students not to shy away from discussions about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, he says it is important for them not to conflate it with their own relationships.
Khan, who was part of a young Muslim advisory group set up under the last government to help guard against extremism, is one of two campus ambassadors who are hafiz, a term used for people who have memorised the Qur'an.
He took the view that if you have a set of values you want to live your life by then the best way to do that is to know those principles by heart. In the process, he says, he learned how far the scriptures supported interfaith co-operation.
Now he wants to have a chance to study the Jewish scriptures. "It would be nice to have more knowledge of Judaism as a religion and separate that from the political situation," he says.
Underlying this, and the other projects run by Coexistence, is an understanding that Muslim and Jewish cultures have much in common.
Rebecca Usden, another ambassador who is studying politics at Cambridge, says: "If you look at the two religions, they look quite similar in many ways and have a lot of common ground. There are definitely ways to counter conflict by looking at these similarities."
She became involved in interfaith work as a student because having been to a school where Jewish and Muslim students mixed easily, university was a bit of a culture shock. "There was so little dialogue between the two communities," she says. "It isn't that there is hostility, it's just that they are not that good at communication."
Amin-Nejad agrees. "The Muslim students I know tend to mostly hang out with groups of other Muslim students," she says. "Most don't know anything about Jewish religion or culture and what they do know is from their parents. A lot of it isn't even true and they don't make the effort to change that."
Yet she argues that the best place to start changing attitudes is at university, when people can be brought together and prejudices challenged, and that can have a knock-on effect for wider change.
"At the moment there is a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication and a lot of prejudice, and often it is between people who have never met," she says. "Once you show people you can be friends – not just co-exist but be friends – then others will follow."
Research shows that Russell Brain admired Henry Head in Brain, the journal
Nowadays, not many people read Brain on Head in Brain. That could change, because this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Russell Brain's mostly admiring six-page essay called Henry Head: A Man and His Ideas, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Dr Head's birth. Which means that this year we are, all of us, entitled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that blessed event.
Dr Brain – who was also Lord Brain, Baron Brain of Eynsham – was editor of the journal Brain.
It would have been surprising had he not written that essay about Dr Head. That's because Head preceded Brain (the man) as head (which is to say, editor) of the journal (the name of which, I repeat for clarity, is Brain).
Head headed Brain from 1905-1923. Brain became head in 1954, dying in office in 1967. No other editors in the journal's long history (it was founded in 1879) could or did boast surnames that so stunningly announced their obsession, profession and place of employ. One of Dr Brain's final articles, in 1963, is called Some reflections on brain and mind.
Dr Head wrote many monographs, some quite lengthy, for Brain. The first, a 135-page behemoth, appeared in 1893, long before he became editor. In it, Dr Head gives special thanks to a Dr Buzzard, citing Dr Buzzard's generosity, the nature of which is not specified.
Reading Dr Brain's Brain tribute and other material about Dr Head, one gets the strong impression that Head had a big head, and that it was stuffed full of knowledge, which Dr Head was not shy about sharing. Brain writes that "Some men ... feel impelled to impart information to others. Head was one of those."
Brain then quotes Professor HM Turnbull as saying: "I had the good fortune when first going to the hospital to meet daily in the mornings on the steam engine underground railway Dr Henry Head. He ... kindly taught me throughout our journeys about physical signs, much to the annoyance of our fellow travellers; indeed, in his characteristic keenness, he spoke so loudly that as we walked to the hospital from St Mary's station people on the other side of the wide Whitechapel Road would turn to look at us."
Brain says that Head "would illustrate his lectures by himself reproducing the involuntary movements or postures produced by nervous disease, and 'Henry Head doing gaits' was a perennial attraction."
In 1904, at the age of 42, Head married a headmistress – Ruth Mayhew of Brighton high school for girls. Brain assures us that she was "a fit companion for him in intelligence".
Brain, though respectful of Head, suggests that his predecessor was over-brainy: "He had many ideas: he bubbled over with them, and perhaps he was sometimes too ready to convince himself of their truth."
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Licensing is complex and the more open you make content under an end user licence the greater the risk if you haven’t sought the necessary permissions. In partnership with the Higher Education Academy, JISC is funding a support project on IPR and licensing issues for Open Educational Resources. The latest addition to their suite of support resources is a new tool - the Risk Management Calculator – designed to help understand levels of risk associated with publishing open educational materials. Typical examples of this might include materials which are still in copyright, but for which the rights holders cannot be traced or are unknown (so called “Orphan Works”). The calculator helps those relatively new to licensing to make the right decisions when creating open content.
JISC programme manager Amber Thomas says: “I’m very excited by the development and launch of this tool because it provides a means for projects and organisations to understand the criteria associated with the types of materials they wish to release – material with copyright but for which permission has not been sought. This tool helps projects to select the most suitable licences for their specific materials and in accordance with the delivery and usability of their Open Educational Resources.”
Project director Naomi Korn comments: “The Risk Management Calculator is a good example of the way the OER IPR support project team works: a marriage of copyright and licensing expertise with a group of immensely talented staff from the technology enhanced learning team at Plymouth University creating tools that users can use to help them understand and do copyright and licensing better.”
More and more organisations are realising the benefits of releasing their content under Creative Commons Licences, or similar open content licences such as the Open Government Licence, which explicitly grant the end-user permission to use materials, modify or redistribute them. Institutions like the British Library are releasing their bibliographic records to be reused without attribution and Creative Commons Licences are increasingly used by developing countries to open up content.
The Risk Management Calculator
The team will be demonstrating the calculator at the JISC Conference in March
Listen to an interview with Naomi Korn (Duration 7:18)
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
#jisc11
via Jisc news
Dylan Wiliam is known as a teaching guru with some 'gimmicky' methods. So how does he rate this government's chances of improving educational standards, asks Peter Wilby
Dylan Wiliam once had only one ambition: to become a famous and successful jazz musician. He turned to teaching only so he could raise enough money to buy amplification equipment. He could hardly have imagined then that fame would eventually come his way in the form of two one-hour, peak-time BBC2 documentaries on teaching techniques. Called The Classroom Experiment, they were broadcast last September and featured Wiliam, black-browed, bald and slightly menacing (he looks a bit like one of those Doctor Who characters who's about to dynamite the universe), chivvying Hertfordshire teachers into using lollipop sticks, coloured cups and mini-whiteboards, and the pupils into doing 15 minutes of exercise in the gym each day before lessons.
It was entertaining enough, and the Times TV reviewer called it "utterly gripping", but it all seemed a bit gimmicky. As another reviewer observed, Wiliam came over as a man with a box of unrelated tricks. Wiliam agrees that the programme failed to convey a coherent message, but says that, embedded within it, you will find the main elements of his educational thinking, the product of 25 years' research. That thinking challenges almost every attempt, by governments of any political party, to raise educational standards.
To the fury of the teachers' unions, Wiliam, until recently deputy director at the London University Institute of Education, argues that cutting class sizes and putting up new buildings don't deliver value for money. "The evidence from research," he says, "is that adequate lighting and decent acoustics are very important in schools. But for new buildings in themselves, very few studies show any effect at all. Yes, they improve attendance, but there are cheaper ways of doing that. Building Schools for the Future was quite extraordinary: £40bn investment without any cost-benefit analysis at all."
As for class sizes, if they were cut from 30 to 20, the average pupil would gain four months' learning a year. But classes of 20 would mean recruiting an extra 150,000 teachers to English schools and, assuming they were all weaker than those we now have, pupil progress would fall by five months a year. Wiliam regularly trots out statements like that, and you wonder how he can possibly be so sure, but he's a mathematician with a PhD in psychometrics and he's looked through hundreds of pieces of research, so I suppose we have to take his word for it.
Instead of relying on grandiose policy initiatives, Wiliam argues, we should be raising teachers' skill levels. By that, he doesn't mean recruiting better-qualified teachers, since the correlation between qualifications and effectiveness is close to zero. Nor does he mean weeding out a small minority of "incompetent teachers", which wouldn't affect most children's education. The trick is to raise everybody's game. So the most cost-effective improvements, he argues, are cheap, low-tech changes that will improve teachers' lessons – and this was the main message of the TV programme, which reported that, after a term of Wiliam's interventions, results were up in English and maths.
Take that most common of all classroom scenes: the teacher asks a question and children put their hands up. The answers, Wiliam points out, always come from the same pupils, and the teacher has no idea whether the others understand anything. "Hands up" should be banned. Instead, advises Wiliam, use lollipop sticks; write a child's name on each and pick at random the one to answer the question. Or tell all pupils to hold up answers on mini-whiteboards, which will give you a snapshot of how the whole class is doing. Or hand out green, amber and red paper cups, which children can hold up to show that they understand what you're telling them, find it difficult or haven't a clue what you're on about. As for the morning exercise, US research shows it improves attention and learning throughout the day.
Above all, teachers should stop awarding grades each time children hand in work. Instead, they should make constructive comments and ensure children read and act on them. "We're addicted to grades," Wiliam says. "I've nothing against grades at the end of the school year. But telling students, after every piece of work, that they're at levels 5, 6 or whatever is bizarre, perverse. The national curriculum levels were meant to be descriptions of the totality of achievement over an entire key stage, not judgments on individual pieces of work." Assessment, he explains, should be part of a conversation with pupils that helps teachers to decide where lessons should go next. It should be "assessment for learning" (AFL), not "assessment of learning".
This view was first set out in 1998 in Inside the Black Box, co-authored by Wiliam with Professor Paul Black of King's College, London. (The black box is the classroom, into which policymakers feed inputs in the vague hope that a desirable output will emerge.) It declared that "formative assessment" (a term Wiliam prefers to the more commonly used AFL) would, at the minimum, raise pupils' GCSE scores by between one and two grades. Acclaimed in some quarters as the most important educational research report of the last 20 years, the self-published volume was an extraordinary bestseller, shifting 100,000 copies. It was really, as Wiliam puts it, "a polemic with footnotes" written, by the standards of educational research, in lucid and accessible language, almost like a political manifesto. After publication, Wiliam and Black addressed, between them, an estimated 50,000 teachers.
They later produced a pack of AFL materials bought by a third of English secondary schools. But given the report's initial impact, the results were disappointing. What the authors envisaged was a transformation of teacher-pupil relations, in which the two would move towards being partners in learning. "We were naive about how hard it is to change things in classrooms," admits Wiliam. "The Labour government couldn't get their heads round it. We tried to get them to build these ideas into the numeracy and literacy strategies, but they just weren't interested. When they eventually picked it up, their take was simply that teachers should keep more records and track children's progress more carefully. So grading became part of everyday classroom life. It was nothing like what we intended." So Inside the Black Box led to something worse than before? "Yes, yes."
Wiliam, now 55, was born in north Wales and brought up as a monoglot Welsh-speaker. His father was a University of Wales lexicographer who coined new Welsh words for modern developments such as nuclear power stations, and also a BBC Wales newsreader. Only when Wiliam went to grammar school in Cardiff and later Manchester did he speak much English. His conversations with his father, who died two years ago, were always in Welsh, but today the accent is hardly noticeable.
For most of his schooling, "I was very average, badly behaved, a stammerer, incapable of writing legibly, and physically unco-ordinated, the sort who was always last when other boys chose teams". Only in his later teens did a talent for maths emerge – he won the school maths prize for the best A-level results – and, after two years of weight-training, sufficient co-ordination to play rugby so well that he became house captain and carried on with the game until he was 42. His academic performance, however, did not greatly improve at Durham University, where he just scraped a pass degree. He spent far too much of his time, he admits, on his bass guitar.
Like many graduates with mediocre degrees and few ambitions, he fell (his word) into teaching, first at a private school in Worcestershire and then in inner-London comprehensives. Meanwhile, his band, playing what it called "jazz-folk", gave occasional gigs in pubs. "I hadn't realised how hard it is to make any kind of a living as a musician. If you get enough money to cover your petrol, you're lucky."
So he gave up semi-professional music, dedicated himself to teaching ("I was enjoying it more") and, partly because he taught a "shortage subject", enjoyed a rapid rise. At his second London school, he became deputy head of maths and, when the head refused him a further promotion, he walked off to work on a research project at Chelsea College (later merged with King's) in London. It involved a scheme called Graded Assessment in Mathematics, an early version of formative assessment. A lectureship in mathematics education at King's followed, and Wiliam eventually became dean of the school of education and the college's assistant principal.
In 2003, he moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to join the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the main producer of the multiple-choice tests which, Americans like to believe, eliminate the effects of social privilege and private coaching and guarantee purely meritocratic entry to higher education and many sought-after careers. ETS is an enormous, unimaginably rich corporation with a 376-acre campus and a staff of 2,700, administering 20 million exams a year worldwide.
For an assessment specialist, it seemed a natural home. But the appointment, as senior research director, was not an unqualified success. He describes ETS as "dysfunctional and bureaucratic" and his work on developing a formative assessment package for American teachers ended "somewhere in the bowels of the organisation". He told his bosses that, if he was to make more impact, they would have to appoint him a vice-president. They demurred, and in 2006 Wiliam moved back to London and the Institute of Education. He stepped down from the deputy directorship last summer and now inhabits a small, cold, untidy office, full of unsorted files. He saw me between trips to Sweden and Norway and says cheerfully "I've been far too busy to sort it out". A colleague observed that he didn't care much for the minutiae of administration and "he's probably happiest with his numbers and structures and figures".
Wiliam envisages a future as a freelance, self-financing academic. "I can match my present salary on just 40 days' consultancy a year. Then I'll buy video equipment to shoot things in classrooms. I want to train students to do videos from the learner's point of view. I envisage students and teachers working collaboratively on school improvement, rather than treating it as something teachers do to students." He also hopes to do more work on "teacher-based learning communities", meeting monthly to discuss the development of formative assessment and related ideas.
"We're beginning to put together the right combinations of ideas and support for teachers. You can't do this kind of thing in initial teacher training; it involves high-level pedagogical skills, which you can develop only if you're controlling a classroom. I was talking to a teacher recently who, instead of putting comments on students' essays, wrote them on strips of paper, got the students in groups and then asked them to match the comments to the essays. A delightful twist, which re-engages students in their learning. I'm constantly surprised by teachers' ingenuity."
I ask Wiliam if the advent of a Conservative-led government makes him more hopeful. After some hesitation, he replies: "Yes. I've almost given up on policy because, for the past 20 years, policy has been relatively ineffective. But the difference between Labour and Conservatives is beautifully encapsulated in the 1988 Education Reform Act, where there is a self-denying ordinance: a statement that nothing in the Act should be construed as telling teachers how to teach. As soon as Labour got into power, you had Excellence in Schools saying setting should be the norm in secondary, and the literacy and numeracy strategies telling primary teachers how many bits their lessons should be divided into. It cost half a billion pounds for just one extra student to reach level 4 per primary school per year.
"I don't think this government will tie things down so tightly. There will be potential for better things to happen below the radar. That's why I'm optimistic."
As work begins on a new national curriculum, Mike Baker argues that although analytical skills are valuable, some knowledge of the chronology of our history is essential first
Should children leave school with a memory bank of historical facts – names, dates, battles and treaties –or is it more valuable to develop skills of historical analysis and interpretation?
This is one of the key questions that the new national curriculum panel must decide as it gets to work on Michael Gove's promise to produce a slimmer, more flexible compulsory curriculum. We know the education secretary thinks history should be part of that slimmed-down core and that it should consist of the key chronological facts of "our island story".
Although I start out more in the skills than drills camp, I have been persuaded that the foundation of historical studies has to be a firm grasp of facts and chronology. Although skills of historical analysis are immensely valuable, we need to walk before we can run.
My own experience of school history was so patchy that there are still great swathes of the history of my own country that remain a haze, including the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War and the Restoration. Even now, after a postgraduate history degree, I am ashamed to say I lack a good grasp of the narrative history of the British Isles.
Of course, my schooling occurred before the national curriculum, which was supposed to deal with the very lack of coherence and breadth I experienced. But my children fared no better under the national curriculum, having studied a number of narrow and unrelated periods and topics, with a lot of Hitler and Henry VIII, but no overview of British history.
The historian Simon Schama, now advising the government on the history curriculum, has argued that "a return to coherent, gripping history is not a step backwards to dry-as-dust instruction". But others argue that if pupils develop skills such as source analysis, they will have gained something valuable that will last long after they have forgotten the dates of kings and queens. This is the Albert Einstein school of thought, which believes that "education is what remains after you've forgotten everything learned in school".
But it is not that simple. The history curriculum should teach both facts and skills. The real question is where to put the balance. And, in an invaluable contribution to the debate, the Better History Group has argued that we need a radical shift away from skills and back to knowledge. The group, which represents teachers and historians, has produced a cogent set of recommendations that would improve that balance.
In a persuasive submission to the curriculum review, the Better History Group argues that while some of the alarming decline in school history is attributable to external factors, such as league tables, the growth of skills-based teaching is also to blame. They argue that "the current orthodoxy" is based on a "fundamental misconception" that the aim is to develop skills at the expense of historical knowledge. Indeed, they say "students cannot exercise skills such as analysis of source material in any meaningful sense without much more extensive knowledge than is currently the norm in our classrooms".
The group says the solution is to make history compulsory from primary school to age 16, with an "outline history of Britain" as the heart of the curriculum. They say analysis of sources should no longer be required for examination purposes and that exam marking should reward, rather than penalise, wider reading and original thinking.
They propose a chronological structure starting with Roman Britain, the Angles and Saxons, and the Vikings in year 7, and moving steadily through to the Civil Wars, the Restoration and Victorian Britain in year 9. In years 10 and 11 students could opt for either a full or half GCSE, in which they would choose from a selection of key themes in British history as well as topics from modern world history.
Some criticise the focus on national history as a "little England" approach. But a recent survey of the history curricula across a range of European countries by the Eurydice network shows it is common for countries to focus heavily on their national history, setting out key events that shaped the national story as compulsory knowledge. For example, France, Finland, Greece and Sweden all regard studying their own country's history as a way of fostering an awareness of national cultural identity.
Providing it is not jingoistic or uncritical, a school history curriculum that provides a firm chronology of the development of the British Isles should be a cornerstone of the national curriculum.
Now that lectures are being published on the web, could lecturing styles change – for the worse – asks Jonathan Wolff
You might remember the first time you heard a recording of your own voice. You probably thought someone was playing a trick; it didn't sound like you at all. In your head, you sound like a BBC newsreader. On the tape, it was just like the way your friends spoke, but with more ums, ahs and y'knows. Quite possibly a rather nasty shock.
Well, the next stage is to read a transcript of your own, impromptu, speech. I once gave evidence to a parliamentary scrutiny committee, on behalf of a charity of which I was a trustee. I accompanied the chair of the charity, who had been a very senior public official. We faced a barrage of questions, and the chair replied in what seemed to me a very flat, tedious and pedantic style. I tried to liven things up a bit.
When the transcript arrived, the chair's contribution was measured, acute, direct and, above all, grammatical. Mine read like the random gibberings of a partially trained chimp. That day, I learned that spoken language has inflection, use of body language, and a visual context. Written language has none of these things, and there is a special skill in speaking to look good on the page; not one I have mastered.
But beyond the transcript, there is a further level of agonising self-scrutiny. The era of video-recording live lectures has arrived, and a couple of my lectures are now up on the web. I managed to watch about 30 seconds before having to stop and take a stiff drink.
The problem is that I just didn't like the lecturer very much. My lectures seem to go down well enough with a live audience, but on video I am insufferably smug and irritating. I grin at my own jokes. I grin when there isn't even a joke. I seem to get excited about even the most mundane point. And I jerk my head around like a frightened little bird watching out for the neighbour's cat.
But, I'm hoping, in real life it isn't as bad as it looks. Preparing yourself for the small screen and for the lecture hall are quite different disciplines. I had a session of media training once. It was mostly about head movement. Next time you watch a special correspondent, check to see if he or she had the same lesson as me. Head movement is good, so I was told, as long as it is up and down. On the small screen, nodding your head up and down makes you look sincere and encourages people to agree with you. Moving your head from side to side looks shifty.
By contrast, in a lecture theatre, moving your head up and down makes you look like you keep forgetting where you are in your notes and have to keep taking a sneaky glance. Moving your head from side to side is a way of connecting with the audience, by making eye contact with as many people as possible (thereby also warning them that you might notice if they drop off).
But then there is hand movement, too. In the one class I ever had on lecturing technique, I was told that I didn't move my hands around enough. On a video screen, my instructor claimed, unless your name is Andrew Marr, hand movement is a really bad idea.
Using new and cheap forms of information technology to enhance the '"learning experience" sounds an excellent idea. "Web-casting" lectures provides students who failed to get out of bed with another chance. But there might be hidden costs. Video and live performances differ, not unlike spoken and written language. The video is on your permanent record, the lecture is here only for today. Might we see lecturing styles change to look better on the video, possibly to the detriment of the live performance? Or should I find something else to worry about?
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly
School uniform does not make pupils learn more, statistics show – so why is it still so popular?
There's an unusual school hidden away in rural Derbyshire. It's a small comprehensive with a talent for supporting its students and involving the community. According to Ofsted, it's already good, recording its best-ever GCSE results last summer, and it's getting better.
All of which is excellent news for any prospective parent, but is not what makes Anthony Gell school in Wirksworth stand out. No, what makes it distinctive is the fact that students do not wear uniform.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, is a firm believer in the power of clothes that match. The recently published white paper urged all schools to introduce not just uniform, but blazers and ties.
The Conservatives have been linking high standards, strict discipline and what children wear for years now. "The best-performing schools tend to have similar, if not the same, best practices," said a 2007 policy paper. "Strict school uniform policies, with blazer, shirt and tie, and with a zero-tolerance of incorrect or untidy dress."
Sartorial strictness appealed to Labour as well. Charles Clarke insisted that "uniforms are good for discipline and school ethos, giving pupils a real sense of identity with their school". And Ed Balls suggested that local authorities encourage schools to adopt "smart" uniforms and strengthen ties with "uniformed" organisations such as scouts and guides.
Headteachers and governors have found it hard to resist such pressure. More than 90% of all secondary schools in England are now thought to insist on uniform, while the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust reckons all 347 academies enforce a strict dress code. Many local authorities say they have no non-uniform schools at all.
The few remaining secondary schools without uniform are elusive – and some are wary of even discussing the issue. One Oxford headteacher of a school with no uniform, despite leading an outstanding and oversubscribed school, would only say that the matter was "very complex and highly political".
David Baker, head of Anthony Gell, is more confident. When he took over five years ago, the school was already non-uniform. He surveyed parents, staff, governors and pupils on the subject, aware of how contentious it can be. "It's an issue that divides people. There are very strong views on both sides."
However, he decided Anthony Gell should remain non-uniform. "As long as students come appropriately dressed, clothing isn't a major factor in their learning. I believe in treating children as individuals with rights and responsibilities."
A similar ethos holds sway at King Edward VI community college in Totnes, Devon, where seven years ago the governors "did a brave thing", says the principal, Kate Mason, and abolished uniform.
"It was unusual even then to be a state school without a uniform, but we felt we were spending far too much time addressing issues of non-compliance," says Mason. "Too many conversations with students were about tucking shirts in. We were desperate to focus on the important issues of teaching and learning."
In an age when politicians preach diversity and choice, she finds the insistence on uniform contradictory. "We believe all students are different and we believe in celebrating that. Our school is oversubscribed, our results are better than ever, our students are confident and comfortable. Even if there was something I wanted to fix, I wouldn't do it with uniform."
Supporters of uniform insist that it improves behaviour and builds community spirit. Pupils "enjoy the sense of pride they get from wearing a smart uniform, and the smarter the better," according to research by Oxford Brookes University. The findings were well publicised; the fact that the research was sponsored by the Schoolwear Association was less so.
Yet neither Mason nor Baker appear to have problems in these areas. Ofsted commented on the Derbyshire pupils' generally good and responsible behaviour as well as their pride in and "tremendous loyalty" to their school.
Paradoxically, proof of Anthony Gell's good relations with its pupils is revealed by their willingness to buy its optional branded clothing. Baker frequently sees his pupils wearing hoodies and sweatshirts adorned with the school logo around town at the weekend.
Another claim often made for uniform is that it papers over divides between rich and poor children, making bullying less likely. But in the five years Baker has been head, he has never dealt with a bullying issue sparked by clothing. "I know children want branded trainers and so on, but that spreads across their whole lives. It isn't specific to school. Also, it's obvious even with a uniform which children come from poorer homes. It's difficult to hide the fact that you only have one shirt and have to wear it all the time."
And what of the alleged connection between results and uniform? Back in 2007, the Conservatives pointed out that only one of the top-performing 100 state schools was non-uniform. Yet such statistics work the other way round, too. Despite dressing their pupils in blazers and ties, more than 40 academies last year failed to reach the government's "floor target" of 30% of pupils with five A*-C GCSEs including maths and English.
One man who has spent years studying such statistics is American academic David Brunsma. A sociology professor at Missouri-Colombia University, he became entangled with uniform following Bill Clinton's 1996 suggestion that schools consider uniforms as a way of controlling youth gang culture. Brunsma, who says he was "utterly flabbergasted" at such "superficial glossing over of complex social, democratic, cultural, material and political issues", embarked on some serious research.
After eight years, Brunsma concluded that: "The results, although surprising to many, simply cannot be ignored. Uniforms do not make our schools better."
So why the seemingly unstoppable rise of the blazer and tie? "My conclusions over the years are that this is an issue of children's rights, of social control, and one related to increasing racial, class and gender inequalities in our schools," says Brunsma.
Such ideas are rarely debated in the UK. In the US, where uniform is spreading, its introduction is often fought on freedom of expression grounds.
In Europe, uniform is relatively rare. Yet here in the UK, it goes largely unremarked that the increasing popularity of blazer and tie uniforms over the last 30 years has coincided with increasing social inequality. The most serious recent investigation into what children wear to school was by the Office of Fair Trading – and that was into price. State-school children can now dress smartly and cheaply for learning (Tesco uniforms were £3.75 in the summer), but the divide between them and the pupils of Eton (three-piece tailsuit, £170) or Harrow (monitor's black top hat, £158) is wider than ever.
For Mason and Baker the absence of uniform brings a daily benefit, liberating them from having to nit-pick about pupils' clothing. "It's just a non-issue here," says Mason. "There are other things we want to concentrate on in our conversations with students," says Baker.
As if to prove his point, another secondary head – also called Dave Baker – has been drawn into some unfortunate conversations about uniform recently, specifically about Miss Sexy trousers. The tight-fitting trousers had become popular with girls at Bradley Stoke community school, Bristol.
Baker is reported to have spent £400 on 80 pairs of tailored trousers. Girls who turned up in the Miss Sexy brand were told to change into them, a policy which some objected to as unhygienic. He is also reported as saying that the Miss Sexy trousers revealed "too much flesh" and that it is "hideously embarrassing" to see "flesh and thong hanging out".
To spare his blushes in future, Bradley Stoke governors might consider adopting the dress code of Mason's college. It is simply "3Cs – clean, comfortable and covered up".
Coalition rules on English courses for speakers of other languages will cut eligibility, harming the life chances of poor women and refugees
Lumnije Bajrami was stunned when told she may have to abandon her dreams of a better job and of a university place because of new coalition government funding rules for adult education.
The single mother of an autistic child arrived in the UK from Kosovo in 2005, speaking no English, but determined to make a new life. After three years' struggle, she joined City and Islington College, north London, for the most basic course in English for speakers of other languages (Esol).
She excelled: "It was the turning point in my life and I soon saw real possibilities." The course offered much more than English; it was a focal point for the community and offered work training. By this year, Bajrami was at pre-GCSE level and, while still struggling with English, had become a British citizen with eyes on a pre-access course for her distant goal of university.
But new regulations for Esol courses threaten all that. Under the government strategy on skills, the only people eligible for full funding are those on "active benefits" – jobseeker's allowance (JSA) or employment support allowance (ESA). Those on support described as "non-active benefits" such as income support or on low incomes, including spouses, will not be eligible, nor will asylum seekers, migrant workers and refugees. Even where there is other support, individuals must pay at least half the full cost of the course under a system of co-funding to share the costs between government, employers and individuals.
Bajrami is one of 1,400 students at City and Islington in the same boat, which has left Elizabeth Knight, deputy director of the centre for lifelong learning at the college, fuming. "In terms of Esol, 60-70% of our 2,000 learners will become ineligible," she says. "These people are still on low pay and are here trying to benefit the country, and improve their education and employment skills."
Border Agency
The irony, says Knight, is that the college was chosen, as were many, as the route to British citizenship by the UK Border Agency, which gave it the mandate through Esol for low-level English tests. "That will have gone unless students are on jobseeker's allowance or pay themselves."
Of the 195,000 people on college and community group Esol courses in England, an estimated 100,000 will lose out, initial findings of an Association of Colleges survey suggests. Most are women in domestic isolation, caring for children, or in low-paid jobs and seeking to improve themselves. The government insists that a required impact assessment was completed before the skills strategy was published. But Joy Mercer, director of education at the AoC, doubts this: "If they had done a detailed assessment, these policies would never have got through, given the impact on women."
Roushon Choudhury, a mother of three from Bangladesh who is now at Tower Hamlets College, summed up the feelings of desperation of many on the breadline. "I went for a job interview last year. But they said my English wasn't good enough. They advised me to improve it. My husband gets very little money. How can I study if I have to pay for it? And if I can't improve my English, how can I get a job?"
Mercer sees a deeper issue here that could cost the country far more than it saves: a fragmented approach to benefits reform and support for Esol and wider post-19 adult education funding. "There is a lack of joined-up thinking and funding here that won't help the 'big society'. There is strong evidence that people doing Esol want to volunteer, to join governing bodies, participate in their children's education – a lack of language is a big barrier to all these. But the loss of opportunities can be seen in every college we turn to."
Contradictory policies
So, too, are contradictory policies, says Selina Stewart, assistant principal at Joseph Chamberlain sixth-form college in in Birmingham, where only 10 to 20 out of 700 students qualify under new regulations. She points to "a failure of policies to connect up". "A learner on JSA told me she was called up for the three months' mandatory training and couldn't attend Esol. When I appealed, they refused to listen. So she is going on a course she cannot understand instead of staying with Esol, which is preparing her for work."
Several courses, such as the Workers' Education Association community health education project in the West Midlands, which were praised by John Hayes, minister for FE and skills, for their Esol provision, are in doubt as local businesses and charities are forced to make cuts. Peter Caldwell, WEA regional director, says: "It will take some quick thinking to stop provision just withering on the vine."
A campaign for the restoration of key areas of publicly funded Esol was launched last week, led by the National Association for Teaching English and Community Languages to Adults and drawing in the Refugee Council, University and College Union and other professional associations.
The new government measures are based on two closely related notions: that those who benefit must pay (unless need under new criteria is proven) and that employers should not expect state handouts for workers they choose to recruit. The latter point stems in part from abuse by gangmasters who recruited eastern Europeans as cheap farm labour with the promise of free English lessons on the state.
At one level, organisations such as Niace, the national organisation for adult learning, do not argue with this. Alan Tuckett, director of Niace, says: "It is difficult to argue for employer subsidies when low-paid people in local communities are being refused free or subsidised language classes at their local college."
It is an issue argued by John Hayes, who has tackled gangmasters in his Lincolnshire constituency: "The employer subsidy does not seem to be ethical and we aren't going to fund it any longer." Initially, he recommended directing funds at "settled communities" and narrowing eligibility. But the word "settled" proved too vague. It appears nowhere in the government's final technical guidance report, where the stress is on "eligibility".
But Nick Linford, author of the Hands-on Guide to Post-16 Funding, who has monitored Esol developments closely, says: "They have done it the lazy way and not thought through the consequences, so targeting those courses that attract some of the most vulnerable adult learners."
A £4.3m Learner Support Fund that gave colleges discretion to help pay fees has been scrapped, as has the funding "uplift" that gave Esol courses 20% extra compared with other subjects. The cuts being introduced through co-funding will erode things further from around £3,000 to £1,300 per student, which, they argue, will not cover the costs of courses, room hire and teaching.
A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said the government was prioritising funding where it is "most needed". "FE colleges and training organisations are responsible for identifying and meeting the learning needs of their local communities and retain the flexibility to set their fees policies accordingly."
Researchers hope that a 'smart' prosthesis could transform the lives of amputees – and help soldiers get back to active duty
The seaside setting of Bournemouth University might seem a world away from Afghanistan and the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that the Taliban are using there to injure British troops. But a group of Bournemouth academics hope that the work they are carrying out at the university's Design Simulation Research Centre might one day transform the lives of the rising number of amputee soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and potentially return them to active service.
It's not war theory that Professor Siamak Noroozi, 54, and his team are working on, but practical design and engineering work. Using artificial intelligence and new technology, they are developing a "smart" prosthetic socket that is able to measure the individual interactions between the socket and the stump of a limb and, they hope, will transform the lives of amputees.
"We came across this project because we know that a lot of people are very dissatisfied with current prosthetic sockets," Noroozi, a mechanical engineer, explains. "Currently, prosthetic limbs are made of two components: the leg – the mechanical part, which connects the person to the ground – and the socket, which connects the mechanical part to the body. But that interface can be very comfortable or very painful and can definitely generate pain if not designed properly.
"You cannot create the perfect prosthetic socket that has the same feeling as your normal leg, but you should be able to get a socket with a profile that can be modified to create an optimum comfort level, and then maintain that whether the person is walking, sitting and so on." At the moment, since sockets are not "intelligent", they can't account for changes in the residual limb due to sweat or fluid build-up, for example, and can become uncomfortable or painful.
Noroozi learned that prosthetists rely on their own experience to fit a patient with a prosthetic limb, but "there was no tool available to quantify that fit by giving data or feedback to ensure that the wearer does not experience pain or discomfort from the artificial limb." As a result, he and his team decided to try to create one.
"For many years, research has been carried out to try to improve the fitting process for prosthetic limbs, but from what we know, none of this research resulted in a clinical tool that can inform processes about the quality of the fit, or the changes made during the fitting process, or what happens as a result of those changes," Noroozi explains. "So, if you modify the socket – making it better or worse – there's no qualitative tool that can tell you the variation of the resultant pressure after the changes you make to it."
In a bid to create that tool, Noroozi and his team at the Design Simulation Research Centre are using their knowledge of engineering and artificial intelligence to create a "virtual" socket, which can record data to see how it reacts to different loads, and react to the incoming information to ensure the socket maintains a state of comfort for the user at all times.
"The socket can be used to monitor the progress of the person, telling us what is happening when they are static, or walking, or running, or going up stairs, to create a load profile and then judge whether those load profiles result in a comfortable or painful socket," says Noroozi. "That would mean we could transform every individual socket so it suits the person specifically and any required adjustments can be done very quickly. This should reduce the time it takes to fit each individual socket and possibly extend the life of sockets from six to nine months, as at the moment, to several years." As a result, the academics expect the socket to save the NHS significant amounts of money. "One of the reasons that the cost of fitting is so high at the moment is that you are paying for the experience of the prosthetist," says Noroozi. "With our new tool, that experience can be encapsulated, which means we'll be able to better visualise the effect of any corrections to the socket and, we hope, get things right the first time."
The engineers on the project, which has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the medical charity Remedi, are now working with Blatchford, a private company that works with the Ministry of Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, Surrey, where soldiers are sent following injury in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
"When we started work on this project, we had all of the population in mind," says Noroozi. "But more recently there are, sadly, larger numbers of younger people with amputations who want to be more active once they've had their limb amputated. Many of these are soldiers returning from conflicts like Afghanistan whom Blatchford are working with to improve the quality of their lives."
Noroozi and his team hope that better-fitting limbs could help thousands of amputees around the world to enjoy a fuller life. "It is our hope that we will be able to help many people – including soldiers – with our smart socket to give them as much of a return to normal life as possible," he says.
"Comfortable sockets allow amputees to return to an active life, and, in the case of soldiers, to return to active duties. One of our colleagues is specifically working on research related to prosthetic limbs for people who wish to be more engaged in Paralympic activities." For now, the academics are focusing on "miniaturising" their work, as well as making it wireless and optimising the number of points for collecting data. Blatchford is currently manufacturing a socket that integrates the smart technology, which will then be tested by amputees. That hope – that the new socket could make a difference to the lives of soldiers and other amputees – inspires his work, says Noroozi. He adds: "If I can improve the quality of life for one person with an outcome that is beneficial and sustainable, that is where the passion for my job comes from."
The English baccalaureate, claim your free school meals and youth smoking
The so-called English baccalaureate (Bacc pain, 11 January) is no more an "integrated" qualification than a basket of flour, butter, eggs and sugar constitutes a sponge cake. At best, Gove has re-introduced a version of the old national curriculum. At worst, he has lumped together a bunch of his favoured subjects, arbitrarily changed the qualifications system and destroyed parity of subjects at GCSE level without a coherent plan for vocational subjects outside of the "EBacc". Sorting out the ensuing mess will take years.
Derrick Cameron, Stoke-on-Trent
• Our school is a high performing school that is being actively touted by Mr Gove to become an academy. One of the attractions of becoming an academy is the freedom to develop curriculum models at variance with standard national curriculum models. This measure seems to be cutting that very freedom from academies. Are we to be trusted to manage our own school but not to be trusted to set up a Key Stage 4 options structure to suit the needs of pupils and to allow them to succeed?
What is the rationale for geography over economics? Why, at a time when religious tolerance needs promoting, would RE be deemed unfit for inclusion when Latin and Ancient Greek are accepted? The future engineers will often come from studying some form of D+T at school – but this is not included.
JonBandit via EducationGuardian.co.uk
• This is a brilliant innovation. Schools which previously played the system by replacing rigorous subjects with vacuous vocational qualifications simply to climb the league tables now have nowhere to hide.
cunningfox via EducationGuardian.co.uk
I wholly commend this strategy. Claiming free school meals has become the new passport – not just to the "pupil premium" con but, much more significantly, to winning free university tuition for your first (and possibly third) year's study. While the new free school meal proposals are yet to be detailed, we wait to see if one term's claim at age 5, or 11, will validate FSM for life, a pupil premium for each year of primary schooling and fee-free entry for part of one's university life. I think we should be told. Meanwhile, claim instantly ... and often.
MikeReddin via EducationGuardian.co.uk
John McClurey, Gateshead
• The National Federation of Retail Newsagents has demonstrated that tobacco display bans do not work and have failed to reduce smoking in every country that has introduced them. Your report concedes that smoking rates among young people have increased in Ireland since the ban. In the UK, more than 70 Lib Dem and Tory MPs have called on the government to abandon the ban. The government should delay implementation, as businesses cannot linger in uncertainty.
Parminder Singh
National Federation of Retail Newsagents, London EC1
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