Guardian Education News
Abolish target of sending 50% to university, report urges
The government's strategy has driven down standards and devalued degrees, say graduate recruiters
Labour's target of getting 50% of young people to go to university has driven down standards and devalued degrees ? and the next government should abolish it, leading graduate recruiters argued today.
The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), which represents 750 employers, many of them blue-chip companies, also called for a phased increase in top-up fees. It said its proposals would force higher education institutions to be more open about the job prospects their courses offered.
The body, whose members recruit around 30,000 graduates a year, said families should be encouraged to save for university through a national savings scheme. It wants the current cap on tuition fees, which restricts them to £3,225 a year, to be gradually removed ? with no limit to remain by 2020.
The AGR's chief executive, Carl Gilleard, said: "Too many young people are left to graduate without vital employability skills. We urge all political parties to consider the practical recommendations in our manifesto ? adopting them would have huge benefits for the economy and help to reaffirm the value of a degree.
"We know that some of these calls to action ? particularly those which relate to funding and finance ? are unlikely to receive a universal welcome. After careful consideration, however, we have concluded that this package of measures is the best way to drive up standards in higher education, provide a better return on investment for students and parents, and ensure the UK remains competitive in a global knowledge economy."
The report called for "employability skills" to be embedded in all degree courses, more high-quality work experience for students before and during university, better careers advice, and the introduction of a "higher education achievement report" alongside degree classifications, to measure and record student development.
A review into the future of fees, headed by Lord Browne, will not report back until after the general election, and both Labour and the Tories have refused to state a position on raising the cap.
The National Union of Students (NUS) branded the AGR's proposals offensive. Its president, Wes Streeting, said: "The AGR does not seem to appreciate how much its own members benefit from our higher education system. It is in the long-term interest of our economy that the number of highly skilled graduates entering our workforce continues to increase.
"At a time when students are leaving university with record levels of debt, and graduate job prospects are at an all time low, it is offensive to argue that the cap on fees should be raised at all, let alone lifted entirely.
"The vast majority of the general public is against higher fees. If the cap on fees were scrapped, a disastrous market in higher education would open up, which would see poorer students priced out of more prestigious universities, and other students and universities consigned to the 'bargain basement'. This would be a disaster for UK higher education and must not be allowed to happen."
The University and College Union (UCU) said the report was out of touch. The union's general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: "The future for the UK is at the forefront of a high-skilled knowledge economy ? and we won't get there with less graduates. The three main beneficiaries of higher education have been identified as the state, the individual and the employer, yet only two of them are picking up the bill.
It is time that business started to make a proper contribution to university funding, instead of parroting its siren calls to increase the debt of students and the burden on hardworking families struggling in tough economic times."
No problem pupils in our backyard, say locals
Are recent disputes between special schools and local residents indicative of a growing trend in people refusing to live alongside pupils with behavioural problems?
The Continuum school, Canvey Island, is an anonymous-looking place, tucked away down a side street on a gently decaying bit of the Essex coast. Inside, pupils and staff are winding up their day with a little awards ceremony ? a bag of sweets for youngsters who managed their best behaviour during the day.
Callum Stimson, 14, has just had a bag of Haribos and is fizzing with energy. "I got six points in one lesson!" he exclaims. "The teachers are nicer here than at my old school and the classes are smaller. So I don't cause any trouble."
A casual visitor might be surprised to learn that when this small special school opened its doors last September it sparked a furore. There were complaints to Ofsted, a poster campaign, a public meeting, even questions in parliament ? all with the clear aim of having the unit closed down. Why? Because its pupils have emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) and, therefore, according to local residents and their MP, they shouldn't be there. These teenagers, the protesters say, are not fit to be educated in a residential area.
Nationally, the number of young people classified as having behavioural problems is rising fast ? there were 150,000 last year; a 25% increase in four years. So this local row raises questions that resonate well beyond the bridges that carry the traffic away from Canvey Island. Is it becoming increasingly common for people to refuse to live alongside these difficult pupils? Are we perhaps even experiencing a wave of nimbyism that extends not just to the sometimes unlovable "EBD" child but to other children and young people in general?
Around the country, similar disputes have been arising, though mostly on a less epic scale. In Somerset, a planning committee objected to the siting of a nursery in a residential area. In Gloucestershire, residents were up in arms when a secondary school applied to put in a new football pitch close to neighbouring homes. Down the road from Continuum, in Benfleet, Essex county council was forced to withdraw plans for a Sure Start centre at a local primary school because of complaints it would be too close to nearby homes.
The problem of where to put difficult teenagers is one that Bob Hall, the managing director of the Continuum group, which runs 12 independent special schools and 70 children's homes, grapples with daily.
"It is a growing issue," he says over a cup of tea in one of the Canvey school's tiny classrooms, where the 16 pupils work in groups of four with two staff. "You can't open a provision like this and not expect people to object ? you never hear from the people who understand, but you always hear from the ones who are against you."
Hall says he was under no illusions when Essex county council asked him to provide a total of 80 places in three new special schools ? he knew it wasn't going to be easy. He initially submitted an application to put the school on an industrial estate in Basildon, but in June last year ? three months before the school was due to open ? the local planning committee rejected the scheme. There'd be problems with access, it said ? but Hall claims the underlying message was clear: teenagers with problems weren't welcome.
So Continuum's workmen moved in to this former doctors' surgery on Canvey Island, which had one major advantage ? it didn't require permission for change of use because it was in the same category as a school for planning purposes.
Hall says he knew that when local residents got wind of the conversion, they were bound to be upset. But what happened next must have surpassed all his expectations ? not least, he admits, because the school's pupils didn't begin by endearing themselves to their neighbours. There were complaints that in the first few days, some of them got on the roof and began throwing tiles; the local pharmacy reported youths barging their way behind its counter.
"Mistakes were made," Hall says. "There was rowdy behaviour. There was bad language. They would go into the shops and they would swear. But when you have young people like these you have a settling-in period whilst peer groups are established and they get to know one another. We haven't had a complaint now for weeks and weeks."
The rumpus might have died down as quickly as it arose had it not been for the involvement of the local Castle Point MP, Bob Spink, a former Conservative who is now independent. He made the issue a personal crusade, leafleting the area, calling a public meeting to protest at the school's presence and questioning ministers in the House of Commons, demanding its closure. Residential areas were not the right places to educate the wayward, he said.
At a public meeting in October, there were angry exchanges. Local education officials and even a community policewoman spoke up for the school, but Spink remained unconvinced.
"The officers who came to the meeting were totally offensive," he says. "They said I shouldn't call these out-of-control youths 'yobs'. They said I should seek to understand these children have had a difficult time. I said, 'No, they're yobs. We should confront bad behaviour and stop it, not tolerate it'."
Unimpressed by the response he got at the meeting, Spink continued his campaign, complaining to Ofsted that the school posed a safety hazard. An inspector duly arrived, unannounced, on a day when the pupils were due to go out. When they were told they couldn't because the inspector was there, they misbehaved and a critical report was posted on Ofsted's website. The school fired off a lengthy complaint; Ofsted withdrew the report and is investigating the incident.
Spink followed through in parliament, questioning education ministers at every opportunity and, finally, in January this year, Gordon Brown. "Teenage tearaways" were terrorising elderly residents, he said. Essex county council should be ashamed of its behaviour.
The prime minister responded, blandly, that no one should be expected to suffer from antisocial behaviour. But Spink's point had hit home.
Essex county council issued a statement saying it viewed the Canvey site as temporary, and that it was looking for alternatives. Spink remains determined to continue his campaign until the school is moved.
"We get difficult children and we must try to put them back on the right tracks, society has a duty, I totally accept that," he says. "But the area already had problems with antisocial behaviour. Fancy sending a group of bad lads to somewhere like that."
The saga of the beleaguered Canvey Island Continuum school does not come as a shock to the wider community of special needs experts. Claire Dorer, chief executive of the National Association of Independent Schools and Non-Maintained Special Schools, says local residents often react with alarm to the opening of new facilities. But, she says, in most cases their fears are allayed once they get used to their new neighbours.
"We do come across these issues in terms of anxiety from local communities about what having a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties might mean for them. If you ask people if they would like 50 difficult 15-year-old boys at the end of their garden, they will say no," she says.
"But our experience is when young people are given the chance to have their needs met, they don't display the same level of behaviour. And, generally, local communities end up being fairly welcoming."
Perhaps a case in point is the Grafham Grange Special Educational Trust at Bramley, Surrey, which met resistance from planners when it applied to put in a new football pitch ? there were concerns that the floodlighting would cause a nuisance and would be inappropriate because the building was Grade 2 listed.
The trust's chief executive, Susan Tresman, decided to meet the issue head-on, and immediately set about wooing the decision-makers.
"We had a very forthright meeting on the site, she says. "I introduced them to some of our students. And it was brilliant. That was the beginning of what's become an extremely productive relationship."
Tresman says the key is to welcome in the local community, and to involve it. Now local football teams come every week to use her school's pitches.
"You do need to be resilient and creative, and to be prepared to challenge in a positive way," she says. "We don't want people to pass by at the end of the drive and say: 'We don't know who's in there'."
Back at the Continuum school, Hall remains unrepentant about his more bullish approach.
"These pupils just weren't getting an education," he says. "Our mistake, if it was a mistake, was bringing them quickly into a new facility. I don't apologise for that because the only other option was for them to be on the street ? it was the right thing to do."
Budget cuts hit trainee youth workers
The future looks bleak for would-be youth workers ? and the colleges that teach them.
As local authority budget cuts bite deep, the future looks increasingly uncertain for students training to become youth workers. Not only do they see a shrinking jobs market, but many who study at college for the degree they need to qualify as a full-time professional are struggling to fund themselves.
This is bad news not only for them, but also for colleges that run degree courses. They're seeing significant numbers drop out. In the past, when councils were better off, the youth workers they employed could expect to be sponsored during their studies. But in many places that money has dried up.
Some universities have already stopped offering degrees in youth and community work. Most FE colleges appear to be battling on, though one college, Havering, declined to comment when contacted by Education Guardian about the future of its course and the prospects for students.
Job prospects
Bal Gill, programme co-ordinator for the youth and community work degree course at Ruskin College, Oxford, says he hasn't taken on anyone sponsored by the council for several years. And the students he has are worried about job prospects and security.
"They aren't sure there's a future for youth work. We have people going off on other courses, rather than risking one they aren't sure about. We've had three switch to social work ? you can get bursaries for that, where you can't for youth work degree courses."
A national shortage of social workers means the job prospects in that field are better, making it even harder for youth work courses to compete. With students struggling to pay their way, it's perhaps unsurprising that out of 30 who began a foundation degree at Ruskin, only 15 completed. Part-timers, who take four years to complete their course, have acute financial difficulties, Gill says. "People have had to leave because otherwise they would have lost their houses."
At Bradford College, course tutor Graham Griffiths has also noticed a drastic decline in numbers of youth work students sponsored by their employer. "In 2007 we had 17 who were, but this year only two out of 30 are," he says.
He expects several of the 30 to drop out. "They're struggling to get grants. Some full-time students are also working ? as taxi drivers or in supermarkets. There's a lot of pressure on people."
Trainee youth workers come from myriad backgrounds. Ruskin's intake includes a refugee who fled the atrocities in Rwanda, someone with a 40-year background in industry who, Gill says, "wants to make a difference", and an 18-year-old who has already spent four years as a youth work volunteer.
Graduates will face the prospect of dealing with difficult teenagers. "You want people with life experience so they can draw on this," says Griffiths. Yet those are often the ones too financially stretched to stay the course.
The picture is different at YMCA George Williams College, in Canning Town, east London, a charitable foundation that offers FE and HE courses and is the country's biggest trainer of youth workers. Currently 315 are enrolled, though only 85 are full time. The rest are home-based distance learners.
Mixed economy
"We're a mixed economy," says the principal, Mary Wolfe. "We're funded by Hefce [the Higher Education Funding Council for England] but also get money from other sources, such as the Rank Foundation. We've given bursaries to some full-time students. Around 5% to 7% drop out ? that's lower than most."
Even so, senior tutor Dr Brian Belton expects some fallout as students struggle to fund their studies. "This will hit people training full time, who tend to be younger, and impact on the college," he says.
It's not only local authority youth services under the cosh. Some councils also pay for "detached" youth workers, for instance those attached to a local church. Belton says these posts also risk being squeezed.
No one yet knows the full extent of the cuts or their impact. Unite, the trade union representing youth workers, has made Freedom of Information Act requests to find out; and the National Youth Agency, which aims to improve young people's services through public, private and voluntary sector partnerships, has commissioned its own survey. "We aren't optimistic about what it will reveal," says its chief executive, Fiona Blacke.
Social activities led by youth workers "can be the way young people learn to learn", and will suffer, she says. Youth work's role in stopping some teenagers going off the rails is widely acknowledged. "When you realise it costs £150,000 a year to keep a young person in custody and £30,000 for a youth worker, it's a no-brainer."
One growth area for jobs is, curiously, within FE itself, where there's an increasing market for specialists to work alongside students with troubled backgrounds.
Smart move
Henley College, which serves one of Coventry's most deprived areas, found hiring youth worker Joanne Gaffney a smart move. "Students bring a lot of challenges in trying to complete their studies," says assistant principal Alan Jones. "They can be struggling with drugs, homelessness or forced marriage."
He says Gaffney helps with "curriculum enrichment", encouraging 16- to 18-year-olds to join clubs, go fundraising and take part in community events. She has also sorted out the college social centre, in the past a no-go area for women, the disabled and those with learning difficulties.
In Coventry, a bitter three-month industrial dispute has been fought as Unite tries to stop the city council contracting out its youth service in a cost-cutting exercise. Unite says part-time youth workers who help to run the city centre One Stop Shop, a lifeline for vulnerable teenagers, face a pay cut approaching 40%.
Team manager and branch secretary Jan Lloyd has dealt with many young people in crisis. "Working with Connexions and the PCT [primary care trust], we see about 100 people a day."
Unite's youth work sector national secretary, Doug Nicholls, says 4,000 more youth workers are needed across the country to meet an agreed government ratio of one for every 400 13- to 19-year-olds. But there's little chance of that happening. Amid recessionary times, the outlook for idealistic students and their college courses can only get tougher.
School-leavers: they can't read, write, keep time or be tidy
Lucy Neville-Rolfe attacks the quality of education received by many of the young Britons recruited by the retailer
A main board director of Tesco will today attack the quality of school-leavers and the standards achieved by A-level students and university graduates.
Lucy Neville-Rolfe, the retailer's director of corporate and legal affairs, says school-leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and that many also have "what you might call an attitude problem". She adds: "They don't seem to understand the importance of a tidy appearance and have problems with timekeeping ... Some seem to think that the world owes them a living."
Neville-Rolfe also says: "There are growing questions over various aspects of our exam system." She adds that grade inflation makes it difficult to identify the highest achievers: "There seems to be a fair amount of evidence now that [exams] are getting easier and failing to stretch people. The proportion of firsts and 2:1s has risen enormously so it's much rarer to get a 2:2 than a first. People who are clever today are achieving the grades of the very clever a couple of decades ago."
Tesco is the largest private sector employer in the country, with 280,000 UK employees, and Neville-Rolfe, 56, is one of the most powerful and well paid women in British business. An Oxford graduate and former civil service high-flyer before joining Tesco, her total pay package last year was more than £1.6m.
Her broadside, in a speech to be delivered at a London conference, is the second time in under six months that Tesco has publicly criticised the education system and the quality of school-leavers. Last October, the grocer's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, said: "Despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us ... are often left to pick up the pieces."
His comments were echoed by Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, which represents business leaders and by Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer. Rose said millions of school-leavers were unfit for work because: "They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing." Lambert said the education system was failing poorer children and producing "exam results we ought to be ashamed of".
Neville-Rolfe, says part of the problem is that there are too many agencies and oversight bodies and too much paperwork: "Our education system seems very complicated to me. I would guess that the paperwork mountain with which teachers have to struggle is even worse than the red tape we face in business. There are lots of agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers. It isn't surprising if teachers sometimes get distracted from the most important task at hand: teaching children well in the classroom."
She says Tesco store managers are the "equivalent of a headteacher in a school" and that senior supermarket staff would make good school governors.
Heads should also be given more power and rewarded better. "Why don't we give heads and teachers more freedom to take responsibility and use their professional judgment?"
She also points to wider problems among the young and their attitudes to work, authority and discipline: "The truth is that a certain humility and an ability to work hard are important for success ... More broadly, a society where people don't feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society."
In her speech to the Institute of Grocery Distribution's conference on skills, she says that education "is set to be an important point of debate at the general election" and that the supermarket industry should come up with a "manifesto for education and skills which we can give to whoever wins".
The government and teaching unions have repeatedly dismissed the attacks by business leaders on educational standards, pointing out that they have never been higher.
The lingerie that doubles as a face mask
'The idea of a simple and readily available mask came to me after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine'
Last October, at Harvard University, I was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for public health for inventing the Emergency Bra, an item of lingerie that, in case of an emergency, can be quickly transformed into two protective respiratory face masks.
Don't get too excited, boys: this can be done without removing any clothes.
My Ig Nobel nomination came as a pleasant surprise. And I recognised that this competitive prize for "scientific achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think" is hugely popular and a great opportunity to deliver a message on emergency preparedness to the public.
I admit that disaster preparedness is not the most enthralling discussion topic, but it is obvious why my invention is well suited for the Ig Nobel prize. Almost everyone who hears about it first laughs, then appreciates the underlying idea: an effective personal protective device needs to be simple, economical, and readily available.
The idea of a simple and readily available mask came to me after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine. I was a young doctor at the time treating children relocated from the contaminated zone. I knew that the radioactive Iodine-131 aerosol released from the damaged reactor was a major contributor to the internal radiation dose of the affected population. My experiences led me to question why simple protective face masks were not available. As the mother of a one-year-old son, I was convinced women should have readily available means of protecting their children.
Because most women wear one all the time ? and it can provide two face masks ? I considered using a standard bra as the basis for such a personal protective device and designed my first prototype.
In 2001 I was shocked to see the photographs of victims of the 9/11 tragedy in New York holding pieces of cloth over their faces while running away from the disaster. Evacuation from similar emergencies would be easier if individuals had readily available face masks to protect their airways and free their hands. It was at that poiunt that I decided to proceed with commercialisation of the Emergency Bra.
For a medical scientist with no business experience, this was a challenge. But thanks to media exposure, I have received feedback showing that demand for the Emergency Bra is high. With the support of colleagues, students, family and friends, I re-prioritised my academic life and have started to manufacture the Emergency Bra, which will be available in the very near future at www.ebbra.com. The bra can provide a person with a critical time window to escape from fires, explosions, natural disasters and biological and radiological terrorist attacks (including a "dirty bomb"). As well as protecting against inhalation of harmful airborne particles and freeing victims' hands while they escape, it can decrease the chances of a panic attack in large crowds by providing individuals with a sense of security.
For the Ig Nobel award ceremony, I designed a hot pink Emergency Bra that has now been dubbed the Harvard model. I demonstrated it on Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (Nobel prize for physics, 2001), Orhan Pamuk (literature, 2006) and Paul Krugman (economics, 2008). Although they were not expecting it, they seemed to enjoy the demonstration.
During the forthcoming UK Ig Nobel tour this month, I will also demonstrate that the Emergency Bra is not only an effective, economical and readily available personal protective device but that, first and foremost, it is a beautiful piece of lingerie. Its additional function of personal protection does not interfere with its aesthetics or its main purpose.
I have no doubt my demonstrations will generate some laughs. However, I also look forward to addressing some serious questions from the British public. I hope audiences at Oxford University, Imperial College and elsewhere will leave thinking about the potential risks they face. I will consider my goals to be accomplished if I make people remember the importance of being prepared for the unexpected.
? Dr Elena Bodnar is director of the Trauma Risk Management Research Institute, Chicago
? For more information about the Ig Nobel tour, go to improbable.com/ improbable-research-shows/ig-uk-tour Improbable research, page 8
How to avoid a Climategate scandal
Leaked emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia have caused a furore. Phil Jones on how not to get caught out by freedom of information requests
The "climategate" scandal involving the University of East Anglia has sent shockwaves through universities, but many academics still do not fully appreciate the full implications of freedom of information legislation.
The problems at UEA arose when emails allegedly written by some of the world's leading climate scientists were stolen by hackers and published on websites run by climate change sceptics. The story broke just before the Copenhagen conference on climate change and appeared to call into question the validity of some of the leading scientists' claims.
But as well as this, Graham Smith, deputy information commissioner, said the emails between scientists at the UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) revealed that freedom of information (FoI) requests were "not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation".
For universities and their staff, the situation at UEA is one that fills them with both relief and dread. Relief that it is not their research; not their university. Dread that it could be them next. The phrase "FoI request" is enough now to strike fear into the heart of many an academic.
Where FoI legislation applies ? as it generally does in education ? it is likely that every piece of correspondence, every email written and every document you have produced could be considered as information that may have to be disclosed in response to an FoI request.
Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, admitted when he appeared before the House of Commons science and technology committee last week: "I've obviously written some very awful emails," but insists he had never tried to pervert the scientific process.
There are real risks for organisations that do not have their "house in order" for FoI purposes. I held a seminar recently on these risks. There was real shock and disbelief about the implications and it was clear that university staff and academics still do not fully appreciate that everything they do or write could be subject to FoI requests.
So how do universities and academics ensure that their correspondence does not become the "smoking gun" that turns a simple FoI request into an international scandal?
It is not inconceivable that where a university is working on some research that has a commercial sponsor, pressure could be exerted on researchers to reach a certain conclusion, or to portray the results in a way that would be helpful to the sponsor. Where that is the case, do you really want email correspondence going on record about the way in which the results are portrayed? Careful consideration needs to be given to the tone of any email exchange, so the university's position is clear. The best advice is: think twice before you hit the send button.
Remember, informal email discussions that you have with a close colleague are no longer private and could be disclosed in the future. Will the possibly uninformed reader who asked for the emails be aware of the context in which they were written? Do you really want people to know the nicknames you have given to some of your collaborators?
For sensitive information that you would not want in the public domain, rather than putting it in email or in a document, it may be better to discuss it face-to-face or on the phone.
Careful consideration should also be given to how long emails are saved and when they are deleted. In some fields of work, there will be regulatory reasons for keeping emails (clinical work, for example) but do they all need to be retained and archived? A periodic review should be performed to ensure that, wherever possible and lawful, emails that could be that smoking gun are deleted.
When making handwritten notes or comments on documents, staff need to be aware that those scribbles could enter the public domain in response to a FoI request. Do you really want someone to see your exclamations of "Idiot!!!" or "Rubbish!!!" on a note? Probably not, so take care ? and shred your notes once they have served their useful purpose. Imagine your embarrassment when comments about how doddery your head of department is, or how pompous your vice-chancellor is, or how adorable he or she is, come out in the open.
Another thing to consider is the evolution of a document from first draft to final agreed version. No doubt, along the way there will have been discussions that may mean the final version is very different from the first draft. Is it helpful to retain every draft and set of comments? What message do they give to the uninformed reader with a particular agenda?
Remember, it is both the individual approach of researchers and the overall approach of the institution that need to be addressed. Jones admitted to the Commons committee that he had not dealt with requests for data "in the right way". His detractors accuse him of a reluctance to reveal his data and research, and both Jones and the UEA of a desire to avoid complying with FoI requests.
Jones told the committee: "It was just frustration. I thought the requests were just distractions. It was taking us away from our day jobs ? I am obviously going to be much more careful about my emails in future. I will write every email as if it is for publication."
This is a sound consideration. "Every email I write," says a lawyer colleague of mine, "I write as though next week I could be reading it in the newspaper."
So be careful what you write in email or on paper. And a final note of caution: while it is helpful to amend and delete information periodically, this cannot be done once a related FoI request has been received. Doing so is a criminal offence.
? Alan Nelson is a senior associate at law firm Dundas & Wilson
The Tory comprehensive school scam
Michael Gove's plans for 'socially comprehensive' schools are simply a way to offer public funds to ailing private schools
So Michael Gove wants to encourage the creation of more "socially comprehensive" schools and is hoping to recruit more private schools into the state system in order to do so.
This is not the first time that Gove has bandied the term "comprehensive" about. In fact, he's always doing it. In a major speech last November, A Comprehensive Programme for School Reform, he set out five priorities for school reform, not one of which had anything to do with comprehensives, as generally understood. Instead, Gove was simply using the term in its blandest dictionary definition sense: to mean "of large content or scope".
So why even use the word? Is it perhaps a deliberate attempt to tap into the powerful association, in the public mind, of fairness with comprehensive reform, the movement that first broke down the educational and, in many cases, class divide between secondary moderns and grammars, but has come under sustained attack from the Tories ever since?
In a word, yes. Frequent use of the "c-word" is part of a broader opposition attempt to project themselves as champions of the poor, not just in education. They know that their core weakness is the party's perceived privilege and association with privilege. "Socially comprehensive" is just a new twist on this linguistic rebranding. It's a rather odd usage, however, given that Gove has yet to clarify exactly what he means by it and how he would achieve it. Genuine comprehensives are, by definition, all-ability schools. The social mix of a school is a different matter and depends on the crucial question of admissions.
Fair admissions is one of the key themes shaping the real future of our schools, although you wouldn't know it from listening to the politicians. The Tories are saying very little on this beyond saying there will be an admissions code. Yes, but what kind? Many fear that should they win the election, they will give individual schools greater power over their admissions, leading to consequent chaos and greater, not less, social polarisation.
It seems even odder to suggest that private schools might play a key part in a socially comprehensive system. By definition, fee-paying schools select, first if not always foremost, on the basis of parental income.
It seems pretty obvious that Gove is offering a life-raft of state funds to a few ailing minor private schools; in so doing, it gives a One Nation patina to his wider school plans. There is certainly no suggestion that elite institutions such as Eton or St Paul's become "socially comprehensive academies" ? perish the thought ? nor any suggestion that the narrowness of their class intake, or indeed the predominance of middle-class children in the country's remaining grammars, present any ideological problem whatsoever to the current Tory leadership.
Funding 'a barrier' to good education for Katine children with special needs
Limited funding having an impact on the achievements of Soroti district's 5,000 children with special needs
Inadequate funding is a major barrier to a decent education for children with special needs in rural communities, authorities in Soroti have said.
The number of children with special needs is on the increase every year, but little is being done by local and central government to beef up funding for the sector, said Soroti district education officer Moses Etoyu.
"My sector receives UShs 10m (around $4,880) per year. This money has to be shared amongst four departments: sports, inspection, administration and special needs. This amount is very small," he said.
The government has policies and structures ? from central government's Ministry of Education to district level - regarding the promotion of special needs education and monitoring any issues that arise.
Around 5,000 children in Soroti district, in which Katine is located, have disabilities.
The Guardian has learned that in most cases it is the children with special needs who miss out and achieve poor results because of the limited funding. Out of the UShs 10m the education sector receives, only UShs 1.5m is allocated to special needs. This means that, on average, each child with disabilities receives UShs 300 ($0.15) from the state to fund their education, less than a cost of a 500ml bottle of soda.
Children with special needs are usually assessed to determine who will attend a mixed school, under the country's inclusive education policy to avoid stigma, and who will study at a special school, such as St Francis school for the blind in Madera, which, along with Katine primary school, is taking part in the British Council's Connecting Classrooms school link programme.
Development partners like the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref), which is implementing the four-year Katine project, Sightsavers International and Uganda Society for the Disabled are supplementing government funding.
According to Etoyu, Amref has provided training for Katine teachers to improve the way they teach children with special needs. It has also worked with the district to ensure inspections of special needs education are carried out.
Amref's education officer, Lillian Viko, says one of the objectives of the Katine project is to improve access to quality primary education, and that includes promoting the inclusive education of girls, children with disabilities, orphans and other vulnerable children. These children tend to have the highest school drop-out rates.
"There are 1,613 (766 female, 847 male) orphans and vulnerable children documented in Katine. Among these 38 are children with disabilities, four blind, 10 deaf, five lame and deaf, and 17 with physically disabilities, and two epileptic. The rest are orphans," said Viko.
The project has held community awareness seminars that attracted 3,600 people on how to care and support orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs). The aim was to raise awareness of the importance of enrolling and supporting marginalised children in school and outside.
Parents and guardians have been reminded how to play an active role in the education of their children so they know their own responsibilities of those of the government. "The communities have now provided information on OVCs in the whole sub-county so that they can be included in sub-county plans," said Viko.
According to Viko, the project has reproduced and distributed to all schools materials for children with hearing impairments. These are expected to help teachers and children work and perform better.
Why university standards have fallen | Geoffrey Alderman
The disempowerment of academics and a corporate model of governance have driven down standards, not Blair's 50% target
The new "manifesto" ? Talent, Opportunity, Prosperity ? published by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) deals with a number of core issues in the current debate about the future shape and direction of higher education in the UK. Here I want to concentrate on just one of them, namely academic standards.
What the AGR says is that the nebulous commitment made by Tony Blair in 1999 ? in which (to quote him) he "set a target of 50% of young adults going into higher education in the next century" ? has actually devalued the currency of a degree and driven down standards by forcing thousands of students to enrol onto programmes that lack academic rigour and which are delivered by "below-average institutions".
More specifically, the AGR manifesto declares that government-imposed targets designed to increase the number of students from deprived backgrounds risk being met only by lowering the academic standards of the institutions that meet them.
I believe that there has been a decline in academic standards overall in British higher education over the past two decades, but not for the reasons advanced by the AGR. The evidence for this decline is contained in the 2009 report, Students and Universities, of the then select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills. In my written and oral evidence to this inquiry, I identified the following factors as fundamental to this decline:
First, the league table culture that has permeated the senior leaderships of many British universities, resulting in intolerable pressures on academic staff to pass students who should rightfully fail and to award higher classes of degrees to the undeserving.
Second, pressures to maximise non-governmental sources of income, primarily from "full fee-paying" non-European students, to whom it is deemed prudent by these same senior leaderships to award qualifications to which they are often not entitled, so as to ensure future "market share".
Third, the increasing and increasingly stupid use of students' course evaluations as pivotal factors in the academic promotion process. To put it bluntly, a conscientious academic with poor student evaluations may find it difficult or even impossible to obtain promotion because her/his students do not like getting the low grades they may well richly deserve.
Fourth, the breakdown of the external examiner system, due partly to the near-universal modularisation of degree programmes and partly to the abysmal remuneration for work of this sort. The evidence given to the select committee of improper pressure on external examiners makes exceedingly grim reading.
Fifth, the relative leniency shown towards academic dishonesty, coupled with the tendency of university administrators to insist that plagiarism be viewed through the prism of what I believe is termed "cultural relativism".
So, let me be quite clear: I do not believe that "more" necessarily means "worse". But I do believe that more has come to mean worse because of the toxic combination of factors I have listed above, and which are obviously interrelated.
At bottom, more has come to mean worse because of poor quality university leadership, aided and abetted (it is true) by even poorer quality government oversight. David Lammy's call to university vice-chancellors last September to "get better at telling your story" betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem, which is not about perception (or PR) but about a reality that Lammy and his department seem unwilling or perhaps unable to confront.
If there is, perchance, any spare cash for education, it should go into the primary and secondary sectors, where it is needed most. The current cap on university tuition fees should be removed, but the removal should be accompanied by a comprehensive system of financial aid, so that admission to university is "needs blind".
At the same time, academics must be re-empowered, and the pseudo-corporate model of university governance imposed by Conservative and Labour governments since 1979 must be replaced by the collegiate model, which alone has the capacity to restore national and international confidence in the high standard of the British university degree.
Social work needs an independent college
Forget a government-funded college - we need our own profession to create a institution led by, and accountable to, social workers, says Hilton Dawson
The 12,500 members of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) are being urged to give a resounding "yes" vote in a referendum next month on the organisation's proposal to create a UK College of Social Work.
We want to transform our profession by creating an independent college to which all 105,000 social workers in the UK will be offered free registration. The college would set its own high standards for entry to the profession, accredit continuing professional development, license all employers of social workers, and set standards for a social work career structure.
This is in stark contrast to the rather puny suggestions of the Social Work Taskforce, which recommended a government-funded college that would give a stronger voice to social work, exercise influence over policy-making, and help improve public understanding of social work.
What we need from the government is not interference or money, but the legislation and the amendments to statutory guidance that would embed the college in critical decision-making about entry to the profession, training, professional development, the fitness of employers, and a career structure that retains the best qualified, most experienced social workers in social work practice.
We need devolved governments that will recognise the critical importance of social work to people's lives ? that they are just as good as doctors, nurses, teachers and police officers. But, above all, we need our own profession to create a college led by, and accountable to, social workers.
This is not a case of the BASW taking over anything. It is a bold and historic move, but it is also a moment of considerable humility. It is the BASW putting our democracy, our organisation, our resources, our 40 years of experience, our skills and our international standing at the disposal of all social workers. Now is the time to take our profession into our own hands in order to take it forward.
If we do that together, we will transform the profession, ensuring that people can have great careers doing the best work in the world, and ensuring that social work serves people very well.
All we are doing is what every other successful and highly regarded profession would do. There is no other profession that would accept the government creating a college for it.
We reject criticism of "going it alone" because we want all organisations with social work members to join, in association with the BASW and, hopefully, with the college. We will ensure a UK college works with all governments and organisations in the best interests of social work.
To those who whisper that the BASW isn't up to it, we point to a growing membership and, as a consequence, independence, financial sustainability and coherent investment plans. We have access to world-class resources, and knowledge about the highest international standards of practice.
And as for those who say this is too bold, it remains to be seen whether the BASW members will support their own council and whether social workers will join their own college. My view is that support for a college is a compelling matter of professional and personal pride. This is such an important time for social work that we can hardly be too bold.
California's Living New Deal project
The Living New Deal project was first conceived to mark the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. The driving force behind it, California academic Gray Brechin, likens it to a society-wide "archeological dig".
Iranian suitors offered online marriage course
Prenuptial training for young people aims to tackle country's rising divorce rates
There was a time when Iranian women seeking husbands prioritised job status and financial security ? not to mention love ? at the top of their list of needs.
Now potential suitors face the prospect of having to fulfil a daunting new requirement before asking for a bride's hand ? having the right government certificate.
Acquiring the appropriate official qualifications before popping the question is part of a plan for prenuptial training courses approved by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the aim of reversing declining Iranian marriage rates and rising divorce statistics.
From next week, online courses will be offered to young people to prepare them for the pitfalls of married life. The three-month courses, involving weekly tests, will be run by the state-governed national youth organisation, and those who successfully complete them will receive a certificate as proof of their readiness for matrimony. Mohsen Zanganeh, the head of the national youth organisation for Tehran province, said the courses would provide young people with an understanding of the "alphabet of life" and were intended as an essential gateway to marriage.
"We intend that within the next two years, if a boy attempts to woo a girl, she will answer only if he has finished his course," he told the Fars news agency. "We are trying to increase the level of information among young people concerning marriage."
Zangeneh said the course would run along similar lines to a universityand have a panel of 40 experts serving as its scientific board. The idea has been partly prompted by the rising divorce rate.
Iranian decision-makers are also alarmed at a rise in the average marrying age, which scientists say is leading to an increase in premarital sex and abortions arising from unwanted pregnancies.
How Neil Baldwin became Keele University's mascot
As a boy, he walked into Keele University ? and never left. And he counts bishops, sportsmen and politicians among his friends. So just who is Neil Baldwin?
Last weekend, Keele University celebrated Neil Baldwin's 50th anniversary there. It was a splendid two-day affair, with speeches from distinguished alumni, a dinner, a testimonial football match, and a service of thanksgiving for his work conducted by the Bishop of Lichfield, a Keele graduate.
But Baldwin has never worked at Keele in any capacity, or been a student there, or had any formal connection with the place. He walked into the students' union in 1960, an engaging schoolboy with learning difficulties from the local town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and became a fixture. "I liked the campus and the chapel and the people," he tells me on the phone.
When, four years later, Malcolm Clarke walked nervously into the students' union on his first day at university, this stout, jovial young man ambled towards him and said: "Welcome to Keele. I'm Neil Baldwin." Clarke says today: "I appreciated his warm welcome, but who exactly was he? As always with Neil, his exact status was unclear."
Most Anglican bishops have met Baldwin at least once. A keen churchgoer, he turns up at their homes for tea like an old friend, and, though a little puzzled, that's how they treat him. At a thanksgiving in the Keele chapel a few years ago for Baldwin's work there, the visiting vicar recounted how he had first met Baldwin 20 years before, while at theological college in London. "He seemed to know all the bishops," he said.
Clarke became the student union president in the turbulent year of 1968, when Keele students occupied the registry. Clarke opposed the action and resigned as president over it, but not before proposing Baldwin for honorary life membership of the student union. For that, at least, he got unanimous support. I too was there in the late 60s and remember Baldwin as a solid if enigmatic figure. I'm pretty sure we first met in the union bar, late at night. In 1974, Clarke became mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and on the day of his inauguration, Baldwin sat beside him in the back of the mayoral Daimler, waving regally at puzzled bystanders.
As the 70s closed, Keele appointed a new vice-chancellor and Baldwin phoned Clarke, by then living in Manchester, to give him the news. "It's Professor David Harrison of Cambridge," he said, "and 'e's a very nice man." "A very nice man" is one of Baldwin's most frequently imitated phrases; he says it emphatically, and as though there's a D in the middle of "very".
"Do you know him then?" asked Clarke. "I've just had tea with him and his wife in Cambridge," replied Baldwin. Clarke now says, rather carefully: "I think Professor Harrison may have been under the impression Neil was the Anglican chaplain."
Baldwin's Keele student friends thought he was fantasising when he talked about his friendships with Kevin Keegan, Gordon Banks, Graham Taylor and other famous footballers, until one day a well-known member of the Stoke City squad dropped him off at the student union, having given him a lift home from an away game. When Clarke met the players, they told him they knew Baldwin well ? but had doubted his stories of his friendship with the mayor of Newcastle.
Eventually, Baldwin became a regular fixture on the Stoke City team coach for away matches. He makes it sound terribly simple. "I met Lou Macari [Stoke manager in the 1990s and a former Scottish international] outside the ground and we got talking. He made me the team's kit man." It sounds as though it can't be true, but it's confirmed in Macari's autobiography, Football, My Life, which has seven pages about Baldwin. Macari treated him as a kind of mascot, getting him to dress up and sit on the touchline for the amusement and morale of his squad ? once in a chicken suit, another time in full white tie and tails.
Macari, like Clarke, grew to love him. He and Baldwin were often seen together in Stoke, walking Macari's dog. And one day in 1993, during a friendly against Aston Villa at Villa Park, Baldwin's old friends among the Stoke supporters saw him, in full Stoke kit, warming up on the touchline. With five minutes to go in the match, Macari actually sent this rather overweight man of nearly 50 on to the pitch. The players on both sides and the referee must have been in on the plan, because Macari then had 12 players on the pitch ? and the players passed the ball to Baldwin, who almost got a shot at goal.
In his autobiography Macari calls him "my best-ever signing". Baldwin's unselfconscious remarks were a constant source of amusement for the players, and did wonders for morale. They never paid him properly as kit man, but have now given him free entrance to Stoke games for life. Baldwin says Macari is "a very nice man".
The late John Golding MP used to tell a story about how he walked into the House of Commons restaurant one night and saw Tony Benn, then energy secretary, at a table with Baldwin. Golding was a Keele graduate and MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, so he knew him well. Golding was also the Labour right wing's chief fixer, and he loathed Benn with a passion, so he left swiftly before either of them saw him. He never worked out how Baldwin had got the energy secretary to invite him to dinner.
It was quite simple. Baldwin had come to the House of Commons and put in a card for Benn saying, "Neil Baldwin from Keele ? friend of Steve's." "Steve" was Tony Benn's son Stephen, and Baldwin was not making it up. Like many Keele graduates, Stephen Benn keeps in touch with Baldwin to this day.
Stories about Baldwin abound, and they are almost always true. He once sold a Keele rag magazine to then prime minister Harold Wilson and buttonholed the Duke of Edinburgh for a chat about world problems. He wrote on spec to an American oarsman who was in the Cambridge boat race crew one year, and got himself on board the official launch that followed the race and into the boat-race ball afterwards.
"Neil's complete lack of self- consciousness has made him many genuine friendships with the famous," says Clarke. "People say he's a fantasist, but he isn't ? he turns his fantasies into reality."
As a young man he had an unskilled job in the pottery industry in Stoke, and in the 80s he travelled as Nello the Clown in Sir Robert Fossett's circus. His other travels were aided by his habit of putting on a clerical collar before hitching lifts. His mother, Mary, used to worry about how he would cope after her death and sensibly made him move into his own flat; she died a few years ago, and Baldwin is managing.
People are always willing to help him, because, says Clarke "there's not an ounce of malice in him". Every generation of Keele students for 50 years has looked after Baldwin, and he in turn has enriched their lives with his extraordinary adventures. Generations of Keele students, including Stephen Benn, have played in the Neil Baldwin Football Club, of which he is the manager and captain, and in which he wins Player of the Year every year. Clarke calls it "a motley collection of students of the day, managed, coached, captained and kit-managed by Neil".
Now his footballing days are probably over. He is 64 this month and will go into hospital this year to have two new hips. He may continue to train his team, though. "I've always been grateful to the people at Keele," Baldwin says in his calm, gravelly voice with its strong Potteries accent. "The students have always been wonderful, they are still good friends to me."
Baldwin's old friend Malcolm Clarke now chairs the Football Supporters Federation and is the supporters' representative on the Football Association council. The two meet regularly at Stoke City matches.
Clarke and Keele alumni officer John Easom want the university to give Baldwin an honorary degree, as do many Keele graduates, including me. "He has contributed a lot more to the university than most people who get honorary degrees," says Clarke. For the moment the university establishment is resisting. Clarke has even bigger ambitions: he wants Baldwin to have an honour. He plans to petition Gordon Brown. It might just work. There could be votes in it. And it can only be a matter of time before I hear Baldwin say that "he's a very nice man".
Mum and Dad get a D- for homework | Open thread
As parents struggle to answer GCSE-level questions, are you confident helping with your children's schoolwork?
Despite claims that exams are getting easier, a survey has shown that parents struggle to answer GCSE-level questions. Faced with 10 questions based on the curriculum in science, maths, history and geography, they managed to get an average of just two correct answers. The results of the quiz, taken by 500 people with children under 16, suggest that helping teenagers with their homework could be beyond the capabilities of many parents.
The parents were asked about subjects including the name of the bars on a synoptic chart (isobars), the total number of degrees in the exterior angles of an octagon (360) and the number of chromosomes in a human cell (46).
If you're a parent with school-age children, how has the curriculum changed since you were at school? Do you feel confident helping with homework, or does it leave you scratching your head?
? This article was amended at 16:10 on 9 March 2010. The original made reference to the angles of an octagon ? it should have specified "exterior angles". This is now been corrected. D- for us
Video: The Ig Nobel prize-winning gas mask bra
The winner of the Ig Nobel prize demonstrates how her gas mask bra could save lives
The Hurt Locker's high road to the Oscars podium | Jeremy Kay
The idea of making history with Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy over in the end ? that along with the authenticity of The Hurt Locker and a clever awards campaign
Avatar and The Hurt Locker entered Sunday's Oscar ceremony like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and a dinghy bound for the same chunk of promised land. The seemingly mismatched opponents were the lead contenders for the major prizes outside the acting categories (Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner was a deserving nominee but it was always going to be Jeff Bridges's night) and, of course, there was the added spice factor of marital history.
James Cameron glided into the 82nd annual Academy Awards at the helm of Avatar, Golden Globulised six weeks earlier in the best director and picture categories and, lest we forget, the biggest movie of all time. Here was a man whose films are so vast they dispense with definite articles and need only trade on one-word titles; the cinematic equivalent of Oprah, Madonna or Beckham. Here was a movie whose $2.5bn(£1.67bn)-and-counting box office is two-thirds the size of what Fiji's purchasing power was in 2009. Many believed the major Oscars were Cameron's to lose. But they hadn't reckoned on his former missus.
Kathryn Bigelow, a gifted storyteller and action director who had previously served up guilty pleasures such as Point Break, Blue Steel and the truly sensational, much misunderstood Strange Days, proved to be a force. Her latest, The Hurt Locker, refused to capsize in Avatar's monstrous wake and gamely stayed the course throughout the awards season. Despite only grossing $14.7m at the north American box office (the lowest grossing best picture winner ever ? Summit Entertainment is considering a re-release), the thriller had become a critical darling, hailed as the best Iraq war film to come out of the US, and indeed the best visceral slice of war on screen in many a year.
Critics are so far removed from commercial sensibilities they might as well be living on Avatar's planet Pandora. This worked to the advantage of The Hurt Locker. Their steadfast belief in the anti-blockbuster allowed it to gain momentum so that, despite the Golden Globes shut-out, it had already reached the status of serious Oscar hopeful. As the season wore on, and more and more critics' groups across the US ? Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, to name a few ? rewarded Bigelow and The Hurt Locker, its star continued to rise.
As the awards season entered February, voters agreed privately they had had enough of the blue-skinned giants. My own decidedly unscientific poll of a small number of Academy members who spoke on condition of anonymity was revealing. Avatar had reaped sufficient rewards, they said, and it was time to honour a movie that made them think, moved them, and embodied a sense of timeliness and timelessness.
Academy voters are a sentimental lot and the idea of making history is alluring. Enter awards specialist Cynthia Swartz of PR agency 42West. Hired by Summit Entertainment, Swartz devised a campaign that rightly cast Bigelow as a brilliant director who could hold her own in a man's world while raising the prospect of the first female director to win an Oscar. The idea was intoxicating and I can attest to the speed with which it coursed through Hollywood's bloodstream. Within a day of the nominations on 2 February, there was barely talk of anything else.
For the record, Swartz also got people talking about the man who started it all. Screenwriter Mark Boal was inspired by his time as a journalist embedded with US troops to write about his experiences. He would also win an Oscar on Sunday and introduced a valuable element of authenticity to the story, one that was potent enough to ensure that the usual 11th-hour sprinkling of ill-founded lawsuits and threats of plagiarism that besmirch almost every Oscar race largely fell on deaf ears. Besides, the members had already voted by the time most of the crackpots came out of the woodwork.
Swartz ensured that Academy voters received swanky DVD screeners. The critics awards kept on coming. Then on 31 January Bigelow became the first woman to clinch the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) award. By now the sense of history in the making was irresistible. The winner of the DGA has gone on to win the best directing Oscar on all but six occasions since the Guild launched its annual prize in 1948. The Bafta ceremony was a confidence booster, a dress rehearsal for what was to come, and by the time Barbra Streisand took to the stage at the Kodak theatre on Sunday to present the Academy award for best director, Cameron must have been shrinking in his seat. To be fair, the two remain on good terms, and he looked genuinely pleased for Bigelow when his ex-wife's name was read out. Cameron is probably pleased for everybody these days ? so would you be if you'd just made the biggest movie of all time and earned a personal fortune in the region of $225m.
The Academy loves an epic, and on Sunday that epic was the story of David v Goliath. The best picture Oscar, The Hurt Locker's sixth on the night following other senior honours such as Boal's screenplay award and the editing prize, was a fitting finale for a plucky movie that deserved to be seen by a wider public audience. Thanks to a smart awards campaign it was seen by a wide audience of critics and awards voters, and in the end, that was all that counted.
Crib sheet 09.03.10
Haikus, socks, robots, smoking guns and emergency lingerie
Conference season kicked off at the weekend with John Dunford's swansong appearance at the Association of School and College Leaders. It's been a particularly gloomy time for heads ? 75% more of them were sacked this year than last. There were any number of downbeat stories to dismay ASCL delegates, including the news that Ofsted's new regime has resulted in the number of inadequate schools doubling, and the proportion of outstanding ones being cut in half. What chance the teachers can strike a more spring-like note when they gather later this month?
Report card
Emotional issue When residents of Canvey Island discovered a school for pupils with behaviour problems was to open in their midst, they were alarmed. Then the local MP turned up the heat?
Haikus of the modern age Teacher Phil Beadle, to his astonishment, falls for Twitter
On the margins
At last, joy and light ? and a smattering of downright madness ? in the higher education fog. The Ig Nobel award winners go on tour in the UK this month, displaying their weird and wonderful achievements. Triumph of the night has got to be Elena Bodnar's Emergency Bra, which can be removed quickly by the wearer and transformed into two protective face masks. Dr Bodnar was inspired, she says, by Chernobyl.
Quote of the week
Courtesy of the Times Higher, Malcolm Gillies, London Met's VC, decodes the signs of our times:
The sign at London's Green Park Underground station commands "keep right". At King's Cross it says "keep left". Neither has any apparent effect upon the seething mass of peak-hour commuters. They're utterly pragmatic, scrambling for the quickest route, with the words "sorry" - or "idiot" - ready when the inevitable collisions occur.
We're like that in universities at the moment. We know approximately where we need to go. But traditional order is breaking down and even the signage is confusing. Our courtesy is also tested. If you are not careful, you can be pinged by the funding police for over-recruiting and undercompleting at the same moment - like simultaneously receiving tickets for speeding and driving too slowly.
What you said
Agw31 commented on the news that 50% more men were applying for teacher training:
The real problem as I see it is that many more men end up as heads in primary schools. If the consensus really is that there should be more men in primary schools because boys need male role models (an argument of which I haven't been convinced yet) then why usher the few male primary teachers there are into senior management positions and eventually into headships, where they spend less time with children and more time managing. I hate the fact that any primary male teacher I have ever come across has been in a senior management position, never an ordinary class teacher.
Take our advice
Go hide that smoking gun As Climategate rumbles on, we offer legal tips for academics on the perils of emails and freedom of information requests
Socks over shoes, not shoes over socks It may sound plain silly, but according to researchers in the hilly New Zealand city of Dunedin, wearing socks over shoes is an "effective and inexpensive method to reduce the likelihood of slipping on icy footpaths". Why didn't they tell us that a couple of months ago?
Stories of the day
The house of robots Work is going on in a Hatfield house to teach robots to become companiable creatures, able to assist older people and engage with autistic children
Ditch the 50% target Graduate recruiters say Labour strategy is driving down standards and devaluing degrees
Live chat
How do you improve children's writing skills? Whether you're a teacher or a parent, join today's forum to find out. Between 12.30pm and 2.30pm, two experts from the National Strategies will be live online to answer your questions, share stories of effective practice, and support discussion.
As a teacher, I've realised Twitter has real potential
If Twitter can cause the casually wept lonely tear to reach the ears of a concerned peer, then it is a useful resource
I signed up to bury Twitter. Not to praise it. The idea was to complete a trilogy of columns I had entitled the "wind up a spod" series, and deliberately elicit spluttering outrage about Twitter from educators who have been blogging about its noodle-boggling goodness.
My first "tweets" (and I still feel slightly bilious using this word as it makes me feel like an uncle dancing at a wedding to the happy teenage couple's favourite grime track) were brief exercises designed to satirise the somewhat ridiculous narcissism I perceived in the Twitter user. Who on earth could be so assured of their own importance that they would think their 140 character dribbles would be of any interest to anyone with anything corresponding to a life?
My first utterances included, on 25 June, "Realising I can't spell pheasant"; to be followed four days later by "Worrying about kidneys (mine)."
But then one day I got a response to one of my tweets that started to make me rethink. "Failing to be amusing on the subject of boys' achievement on a Saturday night," I had written. "Work/life balance. I've heard of it."
The current UK Secondary Teacher of the Year, David Miller, on recognising a soul in partial torment working too hard on a Saturday night and missing Match of the Day, used Twitter to reach all the way across from lower Dumbarton and, with it, dispensed a bit of much-needed virtual empathy. And at that very moment, my feelings about Twitter changed.
If this is a site that can cause the casually wept lonely tear to reach the ears of a concerned peer then, in an education system that seems less and less to recognise or care about teachers' humanity, it is a useful resource. It allows one to access the kind word, the piece of professional advice, perhaps even the readily located resource.
Twitter devotee Laura Doggett, director of e-learning at Westfield Community Technology College, has written an article available at www.lauradoggett.com that is held to be seminal by those inclined to witter about Twitter. In her "Nine Reasons Teachers Should Use Twitter", she lists, erm, nine reasons why it is a useful tool for professional development. Not the least of these is that, as a medium, it is instantaneous. You can ask a question from your network of newly minted professional allies and receive a reply almost instantly. The question could be about where to find a resource on a specific subject, or whether anyone has advice about how to deal with a difficult work situation, and it is likely it will receive a series of pithy yet considered answers within the hour from various sources.
Doggett also refers to the fact that Twitter gives access to experts both local and global. You have the option of following people you might see face-to-face, day-to-day or otherwise, or to follow globally recognised experts, who, given that it only costs them a minute to reply and there is no implication they will get into an onerous, protracted correspondence, will actually reply if you ask them a question.
As an example, following American educationist and former teacher Alfie Kohn has given me access to a series of articles that I would not otherwise have encountered; specifically, one about the results of the so-called marshmallow test that calls into question one of the central tenets of the burgeoning emotional intelligence industry.
Furthermore, having access to a ready network of peers means you have the ability to run ideas by people, get them peer-reviewed, so to speak. And if producing, for instance, a scheme of work, or an observed lesson, you can ask for and get immediate feedback as to where the best research has been done on this subject. All it takes is a cry for help, and such is the all-pervasive sense of fraternity on Twitter that you get a guiding hand on your shoulder within seconds of asking for it.
As a time commitment, getting something out of Twitter comes with negligible cost, and its potential benefits in terms of intellectual grazing away from the normal specific fenced enclave are manifold. Among the education bodies and professionals I follow, I also tune into the wisdoms of the two greatest songwriters of the late 20th and early 21st century: Cathal Coughlan and Mark Eitzel. Sadly, being wise, they have better things to do than sit in front of a screen three-quarters of their waking life recording every banal detail of their existence. But, y'know ? as an idea, briefly engaging with the philosophical musings of the great on a day-to-day basis has value. As one twitterer puts it: "Following smart people on Twitter is like a mental shot of espresso." And if you have sufficient imagination to locate your heroes, then there is every possibility that just logging on would lead to a rewarding, transient engagement with a great mind.
I used to think it was foolish to be promoting ? in school ? a means of social networking that limits the number of characters one can use. It was, I thought, teaching children that communication must, by definition, lack depth. I have revised my opinion. The brevity of Twitter makes it potentially useful in the classroom. Were it not one of the sites banned by the network manager, we might be able to use it to teach children how to write with elegance and simplicity. We might even, if we were imaginative, get students to write a series of haikus in a lesson that they can then publish immediately. We might. But, generally speaking, we don't have the equipment for the 21st-century classroom, and where we do, it is usually broken.
http://twitter.com/philbeadle
Education letters
Michael Gove fails to answer the questions, and homework puts everyone under pressure
Damage limitation
In his responses to readers' questions, Michael Gove demonstrates why no teacher of sound mind would ever vote Tory (2 March).
He fails to answer the majority of the questions, responding with party dogma, most of which could be contested by anyone with a knowledge of education and a sense of history. Second, he demonstrates an inability to engage with the research that he quotes. He ignores the Rose and Cambridge reviews. Praise is heaped on the Clackmannanshire project although its findings have been widely challenged.
The Tories are responsible for Ofsted, the national curriculum, Sats and the creeping privatisation of state education. Labour has maintained the status quo. When we have to make a choice it will be about which party will do least damage to state education. On the evidence from Gove's responses, it won't be the Tories.
John Wadsworth
Goldsmiths, London SE14
? Michael Gove partially reassures those campaigning against the Early Years Foundation Stage and its compulsory learning targets, but he erroneously assumes that it is appropriate for children under five to begin quasi-formal literacy learning. Research from Otago University in New Zealand shows conclusively that children gain no long-term advantage from early reading, and those who start later avoid the negative side-effects of early literacy (undue anxiety and reduced self-esteem due to early failure, a compromised love of learning, etc). New Zealand primary teachers are now instructed to forget reading and writing, and merely focus on good-quality conversation with a rich vocabulary. The fact that young children can be made to achieve something does not mean it is developmentally appropriate for them to do so.
Dr Richard House
Roehampton University
Careful what you wish for
You report that the Tories are keen on the US charter schools, which allow groups of parents to get state funding for a new school (Free for all, 2 March). In a previous era, Rhodes Boyson said that this very same idea could mean schools for Trotskyists, and indeed there are enough of us in north London to do it. Then as now, though, we prefer universal liberal secondary education.
Keith Flett
London N17
Homework headaches
Having recently retired from primary headship, I am seeing school practice through the experiences of my grandchildren and I am alarmed at the pressure put on families through homework (If the child does the homework, the teacher must mark it, 2 March). Fine, where parents have the time and ability to support their children, but what of those families whose opportunity is restricted either through work patterns or parents' genuine inability? Let's find other ways to ensure that the early years are creative rather than destructive.
Chris McDonnell
Little Haywood, Staffordshire
? As a secondary English teacher I was expected to mark both homework and classwork by careful assessment. I had six classes averaging over 25 pupils, who were given an essay and a comprehension homework most weeks. Occasionally, parents would complain that I had "ignored" a spelling mistake. When asked how much time should be spent checking each homework, they usually said 10 or 15 minutes. My reply was to multiply 10 by 25, by 6, and to point out that marking entailed 24 hours of work, in addition to teaching, supervision, administration, and much else.
David Ashton,
Sheringham, Norfolk
Beware private empire building parading as parent power
Whoever starts a new school, it needs democratic governance. Big strategic decisions can't be taken by one person alone, or by a company answerable only to itself
When my children were small, I used to go to extraordinary lengths to arrange my work around the holidays so that I could be free when they were off school. Now I find myself in the opposite situation, praying for the holidays so I can get on with some work.
Why? Some may think I am a glutton for punishment but, as chair of two school governing bodies, at least a third of my week in term time is taken up with meetings, paperwork, discussions with the heads or simply chatting to parents about their observations, concerns and wishes.
I also spend quite a lot of time thinking about what "good governance" means, as, I am sure, do many of the other 350,000 unpaid parents, staff and community representatives who sustain our education system. I wish the same could be said for our politicians.
The role of governors is almost always overlooked when new initiatives or policies are announced. At the moment, we hear a lot about who might start schools, but precious little about who will govern them. But if schools are to become even more detached from their elected local authorities, we need much more detail about how they will remain democratically accountable and responsive to their local communities.
The omens aren't good. In spite of measures to bring academies in line with maintained schools, Labour is still promoting fully independent state schools. These give sole control of the governing body to sponsors, who often oversee chains of schools from remote corporate headquarters with minimal parental or staff representation.
The co-operative trust model may sound more inclusive, but also has a convoluted chain of command ? a "council" made up of interested parties, which then appoints a trust, which then appoints a governing body. Note the word appoint ? not much elected representation there.
The governance arrangements for the new Conservative "free" schools are even more opaque. The website of the New Schools Network, the organisation which will deliver the new academies, suggests that although parents and teachers can campaign to start schools, they probably won't actually be running them. That potentially lucrative role will go to one of a number of recommended private providers, whose representatives coincidentally dominate both the NSN's trustee and advisory boards.
Far from being a vehicle for empowering parents and teachers, this charity, which won't even say where its own funding comes from, is more likely to be a Tory Trojan horse, subtly manoeuvring private providers into a promising share of the nation's education market.
Critics of the current system of "stakeholder" governance will argue, wrongly, that it fails too often. When schools are judged inadequate, a dysfunctional, complacent or unstrategic governing body is often to be found lurking in the background. However, most schools aren't failing, the current system works in many schools, sponsor-led governing bodies haven't saved some academies from brutal Ofsted judgments, and even when everything else has failed, and involvement from an outside body might help, that can easily be incorporated into a democratic model of governance.
Good governance isn't easy; it needs to be effective and representative. Governors need to know when to challenge and when to support, they need to balance the needs of their schools with accountability to the local community. But good governance matters because state schools spend vast amounts of public money, headteachers need to be answerable to someone, and big strategic decisions about schools can't be taken by one person alone, or by a company responsible only to itself.
So when you hear a politician talking about transparency, about ending the democratic deficit, decentralising power or giving people control over their local services, remember to ask about the governance arrangements of those services. Do they include local people in equal measure and give them genuine clout? Or do they pay lip service to real representation? If the latter is the case, take the promises of "power to the people" with a huge pinch of salt. What they really mean is that power will be transferred away from local parents and staff to ever more unaccountable bodies at a time when the opposite should be the case.
www.thetruthaboutourschools.com
At home with the android family
Work going on in Hatfield could create robot home helps ? or even one day robot girlfriends and boyfriends
On a weekday morning in a Hertfordshire street, people are knocking on the door of an ordinary-looking house. Inside, a living room hosts a sofa, bookshelves, coffee tables and a TV. Through an archway, the kitchen kettle is boiling up, ready for the first of many cups of tea.
So far, so normal ? but there's something different about this Hatfield home: it's stuffed full of more technology than your average branch of PC World. Sprawled around its ground floor rooms are a family of robots belonging to the University of Hertfordshire's school of computer science. This is probably the UK's only robot home.
Companions
It's part of a project that began in 2005, when Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at Hertfordshire, was working on a European-wide piece of research called Cogniron. The aim was to create a "cognitive robot companion" for humans, and the team began building and modifying the machines. When they were ready for testing, the team invited people to their lab, where they were monitored while they interacted with the robots.
"It didn't work well, because the participants didn't feel very comfortable in such an artificial context," Dautenhahn explains. She decided to take the project out of a campus setting and into the home, so the academics could investigate how robots work as personal companions in one of mankind's most natural environments. The robotics faculty first decamped from their laboratory into a local flat, but that soon became too small.
"So, in 2008, the university bought a two-storey house with a large ground floor area, so our robots and participants have a lot of space to move around," Dautenhahn says. "All the furniture makes the house look comfortable, giving research participants the feeling of visiting a friend ? it's not their home, but they could imagine living there."
With the testers relaxed, the robotics team could carry out a range of experiments to develop their robots' ability to work with ? and for ? humans. The projects differ depending on the particular issue the researchers are working on. In one, a person sits at a writing table, triggering a robot to fetch a pen. In another, robots try to negotiate rooms without crashing into moving humans. A further trial programmed a robot to persistently interrupt TV-watching participants to ask if they wanted a diet Coke. If the tester said no, the robot repeatedly returned to offer alternative drinks, checking what kind of robotic interruptions participants would bear.
Now Dautenhahn is working on a "proxemics system", controlling how close robots should get to people when approaching them. Earlier research found that humans felt alarmed when robots approached head-on, so the robots now approach from the side. Trials suggest that people are often happy for robots to get nearer than humans.
Humanoid
Like people, the robots vary: Dautenhahn's arsenal includes human-sized mobile machines and a humanoid, toddler-like robot called Kaspar, whose rubber face and realistic features are reminiscent of the characters of the animation film Up. Dautenhahn is using Kaspar for the Aurora project, which looks at how robots can become therapeutic toys for children with autism.
"The children generally respond very well to the robots, playing with them, and exploring their abilities and physical characteristics, for example, looking at our humanoid robots' eyes," says Dautenhahn. "Our goal is to help the children to interact and communicate with other people, so we've focused on using robots as social mediators: using a robot that encourages an autistic child to engage in interaction." That, Dautenhahn says, is the ultimate target of all her social work on robots: she aims to develop machines that help people.
"It's not about replacing people, it is about allowing robots to provide help in their homes. That's especially important for elderly people ? our work could allow them to stay in their own homes for longer. Robots can also help people to recover from injury, helping in their daily lives to allow them more independence and freedom."
To that end, the research team busily records all the robot-human interaction in the Hatfield house, with the academics watching participants from a small control room on the ground floor. The tapes, plus the surveys the participants complete about their experience with the robots and their personal background, help the team work out how best to improve the robots and make them more like social animals.
Although other researchers, mainly in Japan, focus on robotic engineering, the Hertfordshire work is distinctive in its focus on how robots can adapt for social behaviour. Dautenhahn now has a team of 20 working with her, including PhD students, research assistants and post-doctoral students, with backgrounds ranging from robotics and engineering to psychology and computer science.
She thinks companion robots, with realistic human-like features and intelligent functions that allow them to speak and understand speech will be available within 100 years. She also expects robot girlfriends and boyfriends to be creatable, but worries of "a danger that people will then find it too hard to have real relationships, when it's so much easier to have a robot that can be switched off when making annoying comments, and replaced so easily without arguments".
In her own home, however, Dautenhahn gets a break from her metallic friends. "My house isn't suitable for useful robots like robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners," she admits. "They can't cope well with rooms cluttered with children's toys and unusually shaped and uneven gardens, like mine."
And as for the worry that robots will take over the world, Dautenhahn thinks we can relax. "The more you learn about robots, the more you appreciate what biological creatures, we and our fellow animals and other living organisms, achieve so easily. Basic issues of finding food, surviving, developing from a baby into an adult, or walking, talking, collaborating and negotiating with others are easy for us, but not for machines."
Put a sock on it
Walking on icy streets need not be a downhill experience if you put your socks over your shoes
Socks over shoes surpass shoes over socks for strolling on slippery city slopes, says a study done in New Zealand. In other words ? in the words of the study itself ? "wearing socks over shoes appears to be an effective and inexpensive method to reduce the likelihood of slipping on icy footpaths".
Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest did an experiment to test the wisdom of a local winter tradition. The trio, based at the University of Otago in Dunedin, published a report in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
They explain: "There are anecdotal reports that pedestrians who wear socks over the top of their footwear are less likely to slip and fall in icy conditions. Advocates of this practice include our local council (in Dunedin), which advises residents who prefer to walk (rather than drive) in icy conditions to 'put a pair of old socks over your shoes to increase grip'."
Their city has some famously hilly sections that grow treacherous come wintertime: "Damp weather followed by freezing conditions can transform a quick journey to work into a lengthy and perilous expedition."
They "initially considered recruiting volunteers to walk down a short suburban street (Baldwin Street) which, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the steepest street in the world". But legal and other considerations led them to instead send people down two other streets, with merely San Francisco-grade inclinations.
Parkin, Williams and Priest found it simple to recruit volunteers: "To be eligible for inclusion in the trial, passing pedestrians simply needed to be travelling downhill. It was decided a priori that persons already wearing socks over shoes w ould not be eligible."
The research team documented every fall, and wrote comments (such as "walked confidently", "clung to fences or parked cars", "crawled") about the demeanor of each volunteer during their descent.
Not all experiments give clear results. This one did. "Wearing socks over footwear significantly reduced the self-reported slipperiness of icy footpaths and a higher proportion of sock-wearers displayed confidence in descending the study slopes. The only falls occurred in people who were not wearing (external) socks."
But despite the safety advantage, wearing one's socks over one's shoes can create or exacerbate a problem. The problem is of a social nature.
In 1989, two researchers extracted gossip from a group of young (aged 7-11) American schoolchildren, asking each child to discuss the reputations of each of their classmates. The kids prattled on about behaviours that, to them, were warning signs of weirdness: "Eats like a pig, bangs head on desk, sounds like a car, fidgety, acts like a monster, wears socks over shoes."
The what-other-people-will-think problem crops up in the Dunedin study. Parkin, Williams and Priest note: "Although participants in the intervention group were told that they could keep their socks, many (who appeared to have image issues) opted to return them to the outcome assessors ? including one young man who promptly fell on leaving the assessment area."
? Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Preventing Winter Falls: a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention
Children's Perceptions of Peer Reputations and Their Social Reputations Among Peers
Universities need the government to show some commitment in the budget
We will be calling on the government to stand by universities ? expecting us to take no more than a proportional share of the cuts to public services, says Steve Smith
In the last decade we have achieved a widespread recognition of the importance of higher education to the UK, unprecedented political backing ? the introduction of fees was nearly a resigning issue for Blair ? steady growth in investment for teaching, and an even more dramatic (doubling) growth of funding for research.
Although we now face serious cuts, when university leaders and politicians meet for the Guardian HE summit this week, my contribution will focus less on bewailing the loss of public funding and more on how we can brace ourselves not only to survive, but also to thrive in these new circumstances.
We have a fantastic story to tell ? but how many people beyond a small circle in Westminster and Whitehall know what universities do in terms of transforming individual life chances, contributing to the health of the nation, and being integral to local and regional economies? This is why Universities UK is launching an initiative to explain the value of the HE sector to the wider public.
All of this is important because we are going to have to work harder than ever to gain public support. The government has been saying for many months that we should look to alternative sources of income, but we have to acknowledge that although only about 60% of funding to HE comes from government sources, this is not income we could easily replace, especially in the short term.
That's why we will be calling on the government to announce in the forthcoming budget that it will stand by universities ? expecting us to take no more than a proportional share of the cuts to public services. In fact, we believe we have already taken that share in the more than £1bn cuts announced last year, including nearly half a billion from this year's Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) budget, and a further £600m to come from teaching, research and student support budgets by 2013.
We also call on the government to do more to meet the rising student demand for places in HE. We want the government to commit to providing 10,000 fully funded additional student places in 2010-11. But promises must be matched by actions. Last year's promise that the additional 10,000 students would have their student support costs fully funded was not kept: the costs came from the Hefce budget, and thus from universities.
We know there are difficult decisions to make about how to fund increasing participation. We have been clear that additional places must not be provided at the expense of quality, but we are willing to work with the Browne review to establish a more sustainable model for growth in the sector.
And let us not lose sight of our international standing. We're proud that the UK remains a world-leader in teaching, research and knowledge exchange, but we face increasing competition from other countries. We're also asking the government, therefore, to recognise the importance of our universities to the UK's "soft power". When UK representatives visit Chinese political and business leaders, not only do these leaders speak English, a large proportion of them have been educated in the UK. They tend to have fond associations based on their time studying here. That creates a valuable bond.
So when I look around Exeter's campus, or many other universities, and see people from all around the world, I wonder how many future leaders we have the privilege of educating. And in this "Asian century" our strong partnerships with India and China are a huge asset. Having just returned from visiting India and the Emirates, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this aspect of UK higher education.
Closer to home, we will see the launch this Thursday of the European Higher Education Area. We can be proud of our role as one of the original Bologna process partners ? enhancing student and staff mobility across Europe, enabling the comprehension and comparison of degrees, and promoting the attractiveness of European HE worldwide.
So, the government has to think of HE not only as a major public service, a major sector of the UK economy, but also as a major export earner, and a major contributor to our diplomatic and business advantage around the world.
For universities, the next decade can't be about business as usual. We will have to adjust to the new economic circumstances and work out how the sector can take control of its destiny. But we must do all we can to promote the role of our excellent university system in building the bridge to a successful future for our students, and, ultimately, for the population and future world standing of the UK.
At a crunch time for universities ? with an imminent general election and headlines about cuts and another "applications crisis" ? the timing of this week's Guardian HE summit could not be better.
? Professor Steve Smith, president of Universities UK and vice-chancellor, University of Exeter, will give the closing keynote speech at the Guardian higher education summit on Friday. Details at guardian.co.uk/higher-education
Video: Inside the house of robots
Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn explains the possibility of robots as companions or as a therapeutic tool for children with autism
Mysteries of literacy
Ros Asquith on why boys choose simpler books
