This will be a short entry because it's close to midnight and I've only just got back from London where I attended a meeting of the Universities Parliamentary Group taking place in a House of Lords Committee Room at 6 p.m.  Why I wanted to be there was because the subject was the National Student Survey and one of the speakers was Janet Beer, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes and the person who is currently chairing a review of the Survey and of the Teaching Quality Information dataset that makes strong use of it.  I wanted to hear the thinking of the review group. The other two speakers were Lord Young - the Minister for Students - and the President of the Students' Union at the University of Warwick (which is famous as being very lukewarm in support for the NSS).

In her brief presentation, interrupted by various parliamentarians going off to take part in a division, Janet raised the spectre of additional questions being posed in the survey on the topic of whether students were satisfied with the number of contact hours.  I think she was teasing her audience, because in the later discsussion she, the other principal speakers, and the audience (VCs, PVCs, MPs and peers) all spoke strongly against contact hours as having any validity.  This echoes the findings of a HEFCE sub-committee I served on recently, chaired by Geof Crossick, the Warden of Goldsmiths College London, which was tasked with looking at the costs of sustaining excellence in teaching in English universities.  We similarly came to the conclusion that simple measures such as staff-student ratios or contact hours mean very little on their own.  I was therefore heartened by Janet Beer's views.

The issue that many people in the room felt was the crucial one for students was the responsiveness of staff, rather than contact hours: the question of whether staff are willing to deal with student queries, to provide supportive comments on progress, and to give advice on progression and careers.

Another point of interest was hearing Lord Young indicate that the government pays a great deal of attention to the views of the National Student Forum - possibly moreso than the results of the National Student Survey.  The Forum is something we know about, but honestly have not paid a great deal of attention to in Sheffield.

Gatherings such as this are useful networking opportunities to share with colleageus from other universities how we are all dealing with issues we share. Tonight I therefore chatted with colleagues from Bradford, Derby and the University of East London, as well as having a longer catch up with Eric Thomas, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, who I had last seen when we shared a taxi from a hotel out to Beijing Airport three yearss ago.  Eric used to be on the staff at Sheffield, in Medicine, and was recounting the way everyone stood to attention when the Vice-Chancellor of the day (Geoffrey Sims) visited his department.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay to dinner after the meeting, as I have an 0830 appoitnment tomorrow morning - hence the late train home.

This will actually be my last blog post for this week as I am taking a day's leave tomorrow to travel to Brussles where I will be visiting a close friend who is in hospital.

A lot of discussions I have been involved with today have been around the theme of employability. This came up at a meeting this morning about postgraduate students and postdocs, and again this afternoon at Learning and Teaching Committee.  There was a time when departments simply needed to teach students for their degrees and could leave the Careers Service to find jobs for their graduates.  There was a time when there was a general assumption that students who were doing PhDs would automatically go on to become unviersity lecturers.  I remember some years ago when a senior colleague, on learning that three of my ex-PhD students had secured academic jobs, gave me the advice that I could now stop taking PhD students on since I had produced a sufficient replacement for myself in the lecturing profession.

Those days are gone.  In an era of mass higher education (at undergraduate level) the nature of the graduate labour market has changed hugely, and the attributes that graduates need to develop in order to be successful in that market have also changed - often in ways that are unclear.  The flow of PhD students now is many times larger than the rate of advertisement of new lectureships. I am not sure that we have all caught on to these new realities.

Academics have often not worked outside academia - or have only done so a long time ago - and don't fully understand current labour markets (or understand them only in narrow technical areas and not in the generic graduate recruitment sectors that the majority of graduates enter).  So we are not always in a position to give very clear advice to students on the opportunities they may have on graduation.  But those opportunities depend crucially on the skills, knowledge and aptitudes that students develop whilst registered on our courses.  There is something of a conundrum there over everyone's understanding of what the contemporary (and future) labour market needs are and will be.

Employability is thus a crucial but rather difficult theme for us to grapple with.  I have been mulling over, during the past 24 hours, the view expressed by Lord Young at last night's meeting that he would like to see every university in the UK being required to have an employability strategy.  The idea has some attractions, but I'm not sure what such a strategy would look like - and I'm even less sure of how it might be operationalised.

That's it for this month: more towards the end of March.

University Executive Board today agreed to a proposal that has come from the Admissions and Outreach Sub-Committee, that we should review the university's position with regard to the use of contextual data in admissions.  This is a controversial issue in which whatever universities do they can't win.  Either they are damned by government ministers and others for not admitting 'enough' students from non-traditional backgrounds (because 'normal' admissions criteria are adhered to with no recognition of the backgrounds of applicants).  Or they are damned by the Daily Mail contingent for apparently turning down middle class (and middle England) applicants in support of a social engineering model to allow applicants who don't 'deserve' a place to get in by a back door route.

We all talk about the wish to admit to university those who have the ability and potential to benefit from higher education.  The problem is that we have highly visible measures of ability in the shape of the results for the public examinations that candidates have taken; but we do not have any similar measures of potential.  It is clearly untenable to assume that ability as shown in past achievements is a perfect indicator for future potential.

Some have proposed that universities should use contextual information (on applicants' home background, school characteristics, neighbourhood surroundings and so on) to inform decisions on candidate offers.  But what this does is to lower the achievement, or proven ability, threshold without evaluating potential in any way.  As a geographer I am also very wary of what we call the 'ecological fallacy' - the belief that the characteristics of an area or wider population apply to all the individual elements within it.  Thus we might erroneously assume that all applicants from a particular school in a poor and deprived neighbourhood with high unemployment rates and low levels of higher education experience among parents would all share the characteristics of the neighbourhood: but the local vicar's son and daughter almost certainly don't share those characteristics, but come from a household with a very different set of life course attributes.

My own preference at this point would be for us to use certain types of contextual information to identify applicants who should then be considered in greater depth - for example through an interview - to seek to identify their potential.  But I look forward to the outcome of the review that has today been sanctioned.  And I will also be interested to see what other universities decide to do in this minefield of decision-making on applications for heavily over-subscribed places at good universities.  Others may want to add comments on this issue from their own perspectives.

One of the biggest issues around at the moment is the review being chaired by Lord Browne on the future funding of universities, concentrating on the student contribution to such funding.  I am chairing a small group to consider both the response that this university should make to the review, and the possible implications of what it might recommend.

One thing I am sure of is that whatever the outcome of the review there will be no injection of extra cash into universities.  If the recommendation is for students to pay a higher share of costs, then that will be used to reduce the share borne by the government and thus transfer the responsibility for university funding from the taxpayer to the student or graduate.  This will take universities further along the line from offering a public good (having a population with a high level of education is for the benefit of the whole of society) to higher education being seen as primarily a private good (education benefits those who receive it, but does not have a wider impact).  This would be a remarkably Thatcherite perspective that even the former Prime Minister herself never espoused - even in the early 1980s when some universities found their funding cut by up to 30% by the newly-elected conservative government.

I also doubt that universities would be allowed to raise their fees without some quid pro quo being demanded by government.  I have met David Willetts twice in the last year, and Phil Willis once, and a constant refrain from both of them is that universities have not justified what they did with the first round of fees (from 2006 onwards) in terms of improving the student experience.  Willetts has noted that the current fees plus the grant from HEFCE actually covers the cost of teaching in some (primarly Humanities) disciplines, and therefore argues that there would be no justification for increasing fees in these areas.  But at the same time some of these disciplines are the ones where student demand is highest and admissions grades at their maximum, and where the operation of supply and demand could plausibly lead to higher fees.

If we were allowed to raise fees in such subjects, would we then be obliged to spend that fee income on the students who brought it in? Or would universities be able to transfer the extra income to support higher cost subjects where the current fees plus grant do not match the costs of delivery?  What would students (and parents) say if it were transparent that a student entering to read, say, History, and paying high fees to do so, was to some extent subsidizing a student studying Materials Science where the university's income for teaching does not match the costs of delivery?  There are some interesting conundrums in any outcome from the Browne Review.  One very likely outcome will be differential fee payment for different subjects, which will have profound effects on student expectations.  My group had an interesting meeting about this today, and we will continue to meet regularly over the coming months.

On my self-determined schedule, it's time to produce a chronicle of some of the more thought-provoking things of the coming week.  It's worth briefly reporting first on some of the more interesting things in my diary since my last posting.

1. I spent quite a bit more time taking revision tutorials for my final year students - and then marking their exam scripts.  A reflection after using inquiry-based learning as the basis for my teaching for the last 4 years is that the collaborative activities students undertake seem to have raised the lower levels of performance, so that there are fewer students who just don't engage at all and who then perform very badly: but at the top end of the range there seems less individual brilliance coming through.  Maybe that is a reflection of group work, and the fact that many students effectively end up with the same set of learning experiences in which the real innovators have some of their flair knocked back a little.  I'd be interested in others' views on this.

2. I participated in a London conference on excellence in learning and teaching, where Anthony McClaran (the new Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency) and I started the day off.  Something that I don't think the vast majority of academic and professional services staff around the university realise is the very high esteem in which Sheffield is held by colleagues elsewhere in higher education.  That certainly came out in comments during the day, and in a later visit that Anthony McClaran paid to Sheffield when he spent two hours with the VC, the Registrar and me.

3. Something else many people probably don't realise is the significance of two specific articulation routes in bringing overseas students to Sheffield.  Between them the Northern Consortium (which oversees preparation programmes in a variety of countries around the world, but principally in China) and Sheffield International College accounted for 39% of new overseas undergraduate entrants to the university this session.  Whilst attending a trustees' meeting for the Northern Consortium in the Council Chamber of what used to be UMIST I had the strange experience of glancing up to find a portrait of our former VC, Bob Boucher, staring down at me.  (Not a good portrait, I'm afraid, but no worse than that which now hangs in Firth Hall here in Sheffield.)  A week or so ago we also had a major event to celebrate the opening of an extension to SIC's premises at North Campus.  I will now endeavour to alert all colleagues to the 39% figure I produced above.

4. One of my most interesting annual tasks in recent years has been lecturing at the Royal College of Defence Studies in Belgrave Square, London.  The audience is a group of around 70 high-ranking service personnel from around the world, undertaking a course on global strategic issues.  I lecture to them on global demographic change and international migration.  The question session is always fascinating, and this year I had to parry points raised by (among others) participants from China, Australia, Morocco, Nigeria, the USA and India as well as the UK. It is one of the pleasures of the dual role of a PVC that from time to time one can step back into one's disciplinary life in this way.  But the lecture preparation takes a long time each year - to update the whole thing to take account of the latest UN demographic data. During the 7 years I've been doing the lecture China has crosseed the line from having a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban population, and Turkey has seen its population fertility reduce to below-replacement level, for example.

5. Finally another 'different' event was an alumni do at the Reform Club in Pall Mall in London, where Sir Peter Middleton (the University's Chancellor) introduced current MBA students to alumni who have made significant careers in finance and management.  It was a particular privilege to be able to hear Sir Peter's personal reflections on being in charge at the Treasury during the 1976 IMF crisis - this in response to a question from an MBA student who I suspect was far too young to know what Peter was talking about.  I also cast my mind back to my teenage years when, as a Londoner from a modest background, I never imagined that I would ever cross the threshold of the grand clubs in St James's (and 'grand' is certainly the word for the Reform Club!

There is a bigger picture to the last month too - the growing recognition, as a result of ministerial pronouncements and press comments, and the publication of a letter from HEFCE, that universities will face some challenging times in the next couple of years.   Everyone is becoming aware of issues developing in a number of institutions, and I detect an attitude that is not so much 'fatalistic' as 'realistic' about the decisions we will all have to make or be part of.  The national admissions position for this summer seems to represent a particular example of dislocated thinking, with a cut of 6000 places across the country at precisely the time when applications have risen by around 22%.  We are in for a very unstable period.  No doubt aspects of that will be reflected in what happens, and what I will feel moved to talk about, not just in the coming week but in succeeding months.