We are drawing to the end of what has been a very busy confirmation and clearing period (even though the university didn't go into clearing at all) leading to the registering on the student database of our new intake.  The transfer of their records from their UCAS files to our student records started this afternoon.  And thus in three weeks time we shall see the arrival of over 4200 new home / EU undergraduates as well as (probably) in excess of 700 new overseas undergraduate students.  On top of that there will be 2000 or more new postgraduate students (taught or research) plus several hundred exchange stduents from various countries around the world.

Friends from outside the university world often assume that we close down almost completely over the summer.  Yet the number of people involved in the huge volume of activity that the timeatble for new arrivals entails results in constant pressure throughout this period.  Academic selectors, administrators, and heads of department in all academic departments have pored over UCAS forms and over the aggregate statistics of how their departments are getting on in meeting their planning totals.  And that isn't just for A level results.  This week we have had the confirmation of resaults for August finishers from Sheffield International College to handle as well, with decisions to be made on borderline candidates.  The Student Services Admissions team has been working at full blast, accompanied by colleagues from Planning and Governance Services considering the financial implications of the distributions of admissions numbers around the university.  By next Tuesday I will have chaired three meetings of the University Executive Board at which the admissions position has been the dominant agenda item.  Staff in Accommodation and Campus Services have already sent out around 4000 accommodation contracts since A level results were declared (only 8 days ago) and have received a majority of signed contracts and direct debits back as well.  Student Services is preparing the registration process.  And in every academic department module handbooks are being updated and welcome packs collated.

The pressures on admissions this year brought about by the HEFCE cap on recruitment have led to some of these processes being handled under stronger tensions than is usual.  The bare period of 4 weeks between the declaration of A level results and the start of Intro Week is narrow in the best of years.  The question of whether we as a country should move to a post-qualifications admissions system is something that, in my view, should be aired once again.

Refereeing proposed journal articles is a crucial aspect of an academic's task.  Yet to my mind it is undervalued and is becoming more difficult as time goes on.

At one time I would have received a brief letter from the editorial staff of a journal enquiring whether I would be willing to provide comments on a manuscript.  I would phone or write back and would then receive through the post a full copy of the manuscript, along with any general guidelines the journal had for referees' comments.  I would be asked to respond within 1 - 2 months.

Yesterday the editorial team of a journal contacted me by e-mail, asking me to referee a paper within less than a month. I e-mailed back to ask for a few extra days (given future travel commitments: the 4 hour round trip to London by train provides an excellent opportunity to give serious first-stage consideration to a manuscript).  They allowed that, but I was then faced with the task of registering and logging on to the publisher's archive of manuscripts and then printing out a 47 page article already formatted in a style that might be very useful to those making up the final pages of the journal but which render it very difficult to read.  I would argue that, given the cross referencing between different sections of a paper that one has to do when one reads an article, it is impossible to do this satisfactorily on screen: a paper copy is needed.  But the effort and cost of producing this has been shifted from the publisher to the reviewer.

I then downloaded the form that I am asked to use to provide my referees' comments.  Many of the questions that I must answer areg irrelevant to the nature of the paper itself, whilst other issues that need to be addressed have no place on the form.  I'm also asked to tick boxes with very black and white possibilities, and not given room to add nuances to my answers.  The editors don't want me to send back an annotated version of the paper - yet I know from past experience that many detailed comments are best made against the actual words in the manuscript.

So the editors are going to get a poorer set of comments from me than would have been the case a few years ago. They have shifted quite a lot of the administrative burdens on to me.  And I also know that because of the pressures to publish and the demands of the RAE / REF (and because publishers can see the possibility of pushing up their income) the journal has moved from 4 issues per year to 12.  FInally, I also suspect that for many articles today that are read by three referees, they will constitute at least half of the total readership of the article.

And if this particular article is eventually published, I will not be sent an offprint of the article or even a message to tell me which edition of the journal it is appearing in.

Yet the whole peer refereeing system depends on the significant input of time involved in this whole process.  I have actually stopped accepting refereeing tasks for one research council since their demands for a speedy turn around (gerenally 7 days for a proposal of up to 100 pages) are completely unreasonable.

At least one side benefit of the RAE and the citations fixation is the fact that of the 47 page manuscript I received yesterday, half of the pages are the references - I suspect largely to the works of friends of the anonymous authors (which reduces their anonymity) on a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' basis.

At a recent meeting of our Careers Advisory Board one of our employer representatives related how his international firm had taken a Sheffield graduate into a temporary placement and was so satisfied with him that they offered him a permanent position on a very good starting salary: he turned it down because he wouldn't move to London where the job was to be located.

I remember a couple of years ago asking a final year tutee about his search for jobs.  He said he was prepared to spread the net quite widely - but then added "as long as it's still within an hour's drive of Darlington" (his home town).

A recent Student Union officer observed to me how many students didn't want to leave Sheffield on graduation because they had had such a great time being a student in the city.  He coined the phrase "the Sheffield bubble" and argued that the university nees to do as much as possible to prick that bubble so that students see the possibilities of going elsewhere.

I have tried to persuade students to take languages modules here to broaden their career propsects.  I remember one saying that she'd never been any good at foreign languages, anyway she didn't want to work abroad, and everyone anywhere these days speaks English anyway.  Yet when she was shortlisted for a good job (in London as it happens) she lost out to a Swede who was seen by the employer (and it was a civil service department and not an international company) as having more to offer because of her ability to work in different cultural contexts.

Finally I was talking to a recruitment manager recently who said that her firm, which used to have separate recruitment operations for the UK and for mainland Europe, is now running one integrated operation - and that UK graduates don't stand up very well in that competition because of their narrow horizons.

I have today been starting to draft some consultation papers for the university's next 5-year Learning and Teaching strategy.  I am absolutely convinced that we will be letting our students down if we don't do everything in our power to give them the ambition and the skills (including what our Careers Advisory Board calls the 'cultural agility')  to seek employment anywhere within the global labour market.  And that includes working in the UK because, as one of my earlier examples shows, even if our UK students don't want to work abroad they are competing with foreigners who do - in the UK.

But I recognise that the strongest dose of apathy towards such an agenda for the university will almost certainly come from our UK students who don't want to move out from the blanket of a familiar environment and who don't want to be challenged to think of themselves in wider international ways.  There is a paradox here: we seek to entice students to come to Sheffield because it offers what they have come to expect.  But we need to shift their expectations to new things - to widen their horizons for things they initially are reluctant to consider - and to do it because we have their long-term interests at heart. This will be an ongoing issue over the coming year as we work towards our new teaching strategy.

The publication of the NSS results is causing some annoyance this year.  The survey team is not making them available on the schedule origianlly published, and data on inter-institution comparisons has been running particularly late. In addition certain findings have been released to the press prior to universities themselves having access to the data - which puts us all in a difficult position if we are asked to provide comments.

However, we do now know that Sheffield contineus to perform well overall within the Russell Group.  Last year our overall satisfaction score put us third in the group after Cambridge and Glasgow.  In 2009 Oxford students did not apparently know how to fill in the survey, so Oxford did not appear in the institutional tables because its response rate was too low.  This year Oxford students have done better and that university now appears in the tables - where it takes top place for overall satisfaction within the Russell Group.  That pushes us into 4th place, with Cambridge and Glasgow still in front of us: but Warwick has now moved into a joint position with us. Our overall satisfaction score stays at 89%: I have suggested a target to Unviersity Council of 90% for the future.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about assessment and feedback scores, and we (along with other Russell Group universities) still lie in the lower half of the table on that particular set of indicators.  Sheffield's overall score on assessment and feedback has risen by only 1%.  To some that may mean that the debate during session 2009-10 (most notably in Senate) has not been accompanied by any improvement.

But if we compare scores for 2009 with those for 2010 there are some very interesting changes.  In the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health, where there has been a concerted attempt to improve feedback to students, every department has seen an improvement in their score - by 14% in the case of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science.  In Physical Geography (in the Faculty of Social Sciences) the level of satisfaction with assessment and feedback rose by 16% in one year following the introduction of new procedures to allow students to see their marked examination scripts - procedures which have brought little extra burden to acacdemic staff but which have clearly been strongly welcomed by students. Law, with one of the highest staff-student ratios in the university, has similarly seen a 6% rise in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback.  In the Faculty of Engineering four of the six departments for which we have comparative data recorded an increase in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback - in one case (Mechanical Engineering) by 10%.

So, there are these good news stories around the university - and yet our institutional score for assessment and feedback has scarcely shifted.  I will spare departmental names where there have been steep falls in results, but at Faculty level the improvement in half the departments in Social Sciences is matched by declines in the other half.  Whilst some Arts and Humanities departments have seen significant improvements (for instance, Germanic Studies with a 17% rise) others have seen a decline.  But it is in the Faculty of Science where there has been almost universal decline in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback.

University results are dependent on performance in individual departments.  We have seen this is previous years: in 2008 Sheffield would have been 4 places higher in the national (not the Russell Group) league table were it not for the performance of two large departments that brought us down.  A task for me and the Faculties over the next year will be to try to spread the improvement in assessment and feedback practices that is now apparent in some areas of the university so that it covers the whole institution.

There is no Sunday evening blog to start off this week's set of reports - I was in London for a weekend of lesiure and took Monday off as well, driving back to arrive in Sheffield on Monday evening.

Last week was, of course, the week of A level results, and that took a lot of my time.  But what I want to comment on here is the panic that seems to be brought to the whole admissions scene in August each year by the irresponsibility, mis-reporting and general attitude of ther mass media.  The level of ignorance expressd by even the quality press is astonishing - so much so that I sometimes wonder whether they wilfully mis-represent things in order to suit their own agenda, knowing that what they are saying is actually wrong.  Inevitably it is a time of anxiety for candidates and their schools - as well as their parents - but much of the media seems to approach the period by trying to whip anxiety into hysteria.

It seems that there is litle that a university such as ours can do to please the media during this period.  If we insist on the highest admissions grades we are perceived as 'elitist' and insensitive to the circumstances of candidates from less-privileged backgrounds.  If we take note of widening participation circumstances and act accordingly to bring in some students from difficult family or educational backgrounds who have slightly under-performed in exams then we are labelled as being biased against the middle class.  This year there seems to me to have been a deliberate decision by several news media to hide the truth about the cap on home / EU student numbers.  Despite long explanations to journalists showing that there are two completely separate 'markets' for Home / EU students and for overseas students, we get stories about universities (we have been specifically mentioned in some reports) holding back on home students in favour of overseas students.  So are we supposed to turn away the income that home students bring - in other words both the HEFCE teaching income that comes for every student, and the deferred fee that students themselves pay?  What university would do that - deliberately turning away UK funding?

But it's all something of a storm in a teacup.  By later this week attention will have shifted away from A level results and university places to GCSE results.  But even then we are not immune - a newspaper request was passed on to me earlier today asking why we wanted students in one particular subject to have a certain number of GCSEs at a certain grade.