I went to the Union Shop to buy a sandwich today. The whole foyer area was very quiet, but I was thinking about a recent occasion when it was thronged with people.  I don't know how many people reading this blog know about the great 'Lip Dub' event.  A couple of weeks ago almost all the Students Union societies organised their members to lip synch two songs - one by Queen and the other by Take That - while dancing, acting and various other things related to their society.  What is more amazing is that the resultant film lasts just under 7 minutes and was taken as a single shot with the camera tracking right through the Union Building, down into Bar 1, out into the garden, through the Interval, into the Atrium area and back to the front entrance.  Anyone who hasn't seen it is strongly recommended to have a look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL_ju4E1NHQ

or search on Youtube under 'lip dub sheffield'.  Although it's only been posted on the site for around 10 days the video has already had around 11,000 hits.

Students can organise far more innovative means of communications than many around the university (possibly including many academics) realise.  Another student communications exercise that I've been a fan of for some time consists of the video diaries made over the last four years by a Sheffield student who calls herself 'Laurbubble'.  I'm not sure whether I should give her real name, but suffice to say that she is now a final year student in Germanic Studies, having spent her third year abroad.  Laurbubble has been making video diaries since she arrived at Sheffield, and has a very engaging way of putting her point across - as well as excellent video-editing skills.  She has made 74 videos (as of today), some of which have received over 30,000 hits.  I will recommend three here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMoZIUl0BMY

which is her advice to new first year students, 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1o4R1xfHw4&feature=related

which contain her reflections on types of fresher students, and finally

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL_ju4E1NHQ&feature=fvsr

which is a reflection on her first week in Germany on her exchange year.

For the final class in my third year option I said that student groups could choose their own way of putting across the material they had researched.  The topic was the eays in which high status migrant groups are changing the ways of life in major European cities (Japanese in London, British in Paris etc.).   I expected that most would use Powerpoint - in which they had become expert during the semester. Or they would produce a slide pack (as used by the UK Civil Service in briefing ministers).  But amongst the things I got were: a scripted series of dialogues involving a high status Japanese migrant in London ringing his boss in Tokyo; a role play discussion by three British female migrants including one who was about to return to the UK with her two teenage children; a piece of high quality desk-top publishing of a leaflet; and an extended pitch of a business case for the setting up of a web site aimed at British expats in Saint Petersburg.  All of these contributions were full of interest and relevance to the overall topic.

Perhaps I should more often give my students the opportunity to go 'off piste' and determine their own means of communication.  Oh, and 30,000 hits for a video looks pretty good as an impact statement for the forthcoming REF!

That's it for 2011.  I started this blog in January 2010 with the intention that it would last only a year.  Last December I asked for votes on whether it should continue, and you gave it the thumbs up.  I rather enjoy doing it, so I'm going to continue into next year - unless I see that the readership statistics are consistently going down.  Happy Christmas to all readers.

I don't remember hearing the phrase 'away day' until about 15 years ago.  Perhaps they had taken place before then but I was unaware of them.  When we had significant discussions in my department, for example about curriculum change, we set up a small group (what we would now call a 'task and finish' group - although that was another phrase we didn't use at the time) and they reported to a normal staff meeting.

The first away day I remember being involved in took place at Whirlow Conference Centre on Ecclesall Road South.  Since then I've attended a number of others, the most exotic destination being Hassop Hall.  But I remember arriving at Cagliari Airport in Sardinia some years ago to attend a conference at the university and discovering that most of the other passengers on my flight from Gatwick were employees of Richard Branson's Virgin businesses on their way to a 2-day 'away day' in a beach resort.  As far as I know the University has never run to that sort of event, although I have heard of departments (in the past!) going to Scarborough.

Today I was at an awayday at Halifax Conference Centre on Endcliffe Vale Road, and I found that there were other similar events to the one I was attending going on there as well.  In total quite a lot of people from around the university were engaged in 'awaydaying'.  A question that occurs to me is whether the expense of using a day is ultimately worth it.  'Work expands to fill the time available' is sometimes called 'Parkinson's Law'.  If that 'law' is true it would be interesting to evaluate the results of awaydays against the question of whether they could be achieved in a shorter time period - such as a normal meeting. 

Once upon a time I worked out the value of an hour's staff time for various grades of staff, and wrote the list up as a table in the front of my notepad.  I'd then occasionally look round a group of people in a discussion and work out roughly how much the session was costing.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a generally linear relationship whereby the most expensive meetings were dealing with the least important matters - and vice versa.  Although I have certainly been involved in some very productive away days in my time, and today's was of consdierable interest, I remain to be convinced that they are all of value.   Yet they have became a standard part of the university's toolkit of collaborative discussion and decision-making.

This time last year I complained that although I had spent a very long time marking the projects submitted by my final year students, and had written a lot of supportive feedback on them, when I gave them the chance to reflect on my comments many of them only wanted to look at the final mark and then walk away.  As I made clear after various comments had been posted by readers, this was a summative piece of coursework, and formative feedback on a draft had been available prior to the work being submitted.

This time I have done something different.  I offer it up for others to comment on.

It takes me about 30 minutes to read and comment on a 2500 word project.  In producing my comments this year I wrote a lot (as usual) - both as marginal comments throughout the script, and as a final set of comments with recommendations to all stduents on who they might improve. (I think it's important to do that for everyone, even if they have already reached a high standard.)  This year I did not add a final mark to the script.

I then gave all students their essays back, along with a small slip of paper.  They had to collect the essays in class according to their registration number, since I did not have their names.  I gave them 15 minutes during which time they had to read through all my comments.  And I told them that I would only give them the mark for their essay once they had handed in the slip of paper with the mark that they expected to have been awarded in the light of the comments they had received. 

My rationale in doing this was to get them to think further about criteria for assessment, and the relationships between the extnet to which one meets the criteria and the final mark.  If they had not understood what I was getting at with my comments there would be a very low correlation between their expected mark and the actual: if they HAD understood my comments then there would be a clsoe relationship.

One student gave her/himself 41 when the actual mark was 61. I suspect that was because although I had been critical of the standard of presentation the content had been good, and the student concerned misunderstood the overall criteria.   Only two students were brave enough to award themselves firsts (the higher at 72) when in fact there were half a dozen firsts in the group of 36 students, with the highest mark at 84.

But overall there was a very high degree of correlation between their marks and mine.  With the exceptions of the cases I've just mentioned, everyone was within 5 marks of the mark awarded.  And the general feeling was that this was a good way of making students think further about the marking process, and what they can learn by considering the feedback given.

I'd be interested in others comments on this.

I am the co-convenor of the Higher Education Academy's network of Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching.  We meet twice a year, with the normal pattern being an evening dinner with a guest speaker, followed by a day of discussions, talks and other activities after an overnight stay.   Today was that day.  We had around 35 at dinner last night, and 55 at today's sessions.

Last night our speaker at dinner was Lord Kenneth Baker. Older readers will remember him as a Scretary of State for Education in the 1979-1997 conservative government.  He is now a leader of the Baker-Dearing Trust which is seeking to reinvigorate technical education in schools in England.  What it is actually doing is setting up new 'University Technology Colleges' for pupils aged 14-19.  We in Sheffield have recently won a bid to set up one of these, jointly with Sheffield Hallam.

But it is not Ken Baker's speech last night that I want to talk about.  Our discussions today included a round table consideration of the possible effects of the current changes to fees and number controls for the student experience.  As always, I greatly enjoy being in a mixed group of colleagues from across the whole of Higher Education.  In my group were colleagues from a university offering programmes only to adult learners, a London university with a very high proportion of postgraduate students, a small church-founded university, a big post-92, and me from a Ruseel Group institution.  here are some of our conculsions:

1. It is going to be very difficult to retain diversity within individual universities.  We will see some become even more predominantly widening participation focused than at present, while others become more exclusive in entry standards and in social class mix.  The latter will have very few mature students.

2. A much higher proportion of stduents will study at their nearest university - a point that links very closely to that below.  And movement across the national boundaries within the four parts of the UK will diminish.  For instance, the current Welsh policy of paying the difference between the standard Welsh university fee and that charged in the desitination university for Welsh students who go elsewhere in the UK will rapidly prove unsustainable so that Welsh students will increasingly be limited to Wales, Scots to Scotland, and so on.

3. The subjects on offer within individual universities will become more limited.  Cross-subsidisation from one subject area to another will becoem elss acceptable to students in a period of transparency.  Subject areas will close and institutions will focus their efforts in a smaller range of areas.  For less mobile students (see point 3 above) this will hugely restrict choice.  That will be paradoxical in a period when government rhetoric is about increasing choice.

4. Dynamism in university course offerings will diminish.  Students will make cases that what attracted them to institution x was the range of final year courses, and when they get to that level they will find that the courses have changed and they will feel aggrieved.  There will be many challenges to change.

5. Postgraduate taught programmes will bn ecome the preserve of overseas students, with only minimal numbers of home students - except in areas where there is an immediate and direct link into employment.  But in such areas the competition from private providers will be intense - as it already is for postgraduate training in Law.

It's a depressing prospect. 

It has been a 'languages' day for me.  This morning I formally opened a careers fair for jobs involving languages.  And this evening I hosted a round table discussion over dinner with the various co-ordinators for the many languages we teach.

The set of employers at the languages careers fair was very interesting.  There were what might be thought of as the 'usual suspects' - the British Council, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, GCHQ and others.  But there were also engineering firms, an information servcies provider, the big management consultancies.  In total a surprising range of employers were setiing out their stalls to attract both specialists linguists, but also students whose degree subject had been something very different but who also had proved themselves as language learners.  I talked to several of the employers and got similar messages - we have certain specialist needs for which we need linguists, but we also want engineers, scientists, management students, economists, journalists etc who can understand something of the way in which languages and cultures operate outside their own background, and who could be sent on 'foreign' placements or work in mixed teams with those of different nationalities.  On Friday we have the twice-yearly meeting of our Careers Advisory Board, and that is a message they have been giving us for some time.

I go to musing whether in the relatively near future we are going to see a new set of employer differentiations in relation to our students.  At one time they chose between rival candidates for posts on the basis of expertise in using Excel or Powerpoint, or experience of undertaking a significant piece of independent research.  That was at a time when these skills were not universal in our students.  Now almost every degree programme develops some aptitude in those areas, and I wonder whether in the future we will see employers taking the student with some language ability over the monoglot?  It is a plausible scenario with an increasing proportion of jobs lying within companies and organisations that operate internationally.

Perhaps students are realising that.  For my evening event I had asked for a set of data on registrations for level 1 (beginners) classes in the Modern Languages Teaching Centre this session and last.  The data are very interesting.  Last year there were 718 registrations for modules of language. This year there were 906 - or a 26% increase.  Italian grew by 52%, Arabic by 31% and Spanish by 17%.  A new course in Modern Greek was introduced and attracted 29 registrations.  Thirty-seven students are taking a largely on-line module in intercultural awareness with an intensive course in a new language.  These are very significant figures.

Language learning in schools is atrophying rapidly - particularly in the state school sector.  But it does seem that students are realising the benefits of languages befroe it is too late.  Our employers should find this encouraging.

This is the last of the random dates that came up for blogging in November.  Dates in December will be 1st, 9th, 13th and 19th.

I have written before (15 December 2010, 23 February 2011, 27 May 2011) about inaugural and special lectures and the value I think they have in widening the experience of those who attend.  Tonight I was in the audience for another equally special occasion.  A good university makes many contribtuions to society at large - obviously through its educational mission, but also through its research when translated into policies and products for use in the wider world, through its involvement in wider debates on ethical, economic and technical issues, and in many other ways.  But a university with a significant cultural offering contributes to the enrichment of human experience. The recent 'Off The Shelf' festival brought many people from the wider community to book-related events sponsored by the University.  A  couple of weeks ago I was involved in the opening of an art exhibition in the city, partly sponsored by the university and partly by a major law form.  Tonight I attended a recital.

It's confession time about my personal interests - and the confession is that music is my main leisure activity.  In particular I play the piano, I enjoy opera, and I seek out musical experiences when I am travelling (and have introduced many students to their first opera attendance whilst on field classes in Berlin).  I particularly enjoy great singing, and over the years I have been fortunate enough to hear many of the great singers of recent decades - Janet Baker, Ileana Cotrubas, James Bowman, Cecilia Bartoli, Andreas Scholl, Natalie Dessay, Anna Netrebko and many more.  Tonight it was Elizabeth Watts in a recital of numbers by Alessandro Scarlatti and Handel.  And it took place in Firth Hall, to a sell-out audience who applauded until we were finally given an encore.  And Elizabeth Watts is a Sheffield graduate (in Archaeology rather than in Music) who has gone on to win the recital prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition and a host of other prizes. It was a wonderful evening - a homecoming for one of our distinguished alumnae - and another aspect of the multiple contributions that the university makes to the wider community.  For I recognised relatively few people there: most were, I strongly suspect, from outsdie the university.

But as I sat listening to the full-bodied and technically brilliant singing (and one great feature of Elizabeth Watts is that every word is clearly articulated) I also looked around and pondered on the message that Firth Hall gives to the casual visitor.  It's a wonderful space, certainly, but with its portraits of ex-Vice-Chancellors all in acacdemic robes - and not a woman amongst them - it doesn't create a real feeling of inclusivity.  One of the main rooms at Queens University Belfast has similar portraits of males round the walls, but in pride of place on the main surface is a specially-commissioned painting entitled 'Women of the University' which depicts a range from professors to cleaners, students to secretaries, catering assistants to lab workers.  It's a nice and very effective idea.  And we could always have a world-class recitalist and opera singer depicted there to represent our alumnae.

Before I became a PVC I very often came in to work by bus.  But my going-home times are now so irregular, and often stretch beyond the time when the bus service frequency drops, that I generally now drive in.  That brings me through the 'student quarters' of Broomhill and Crookesmoor - and sometimes through Crookes or Walkley if I vary my route.

The urban landscape in these areas has suddenly changed in the last few days.   A forest of signs has suddenly appeared, placed in permanent brackets on the sides of houses, on posts in gardens, or pasted to windows.  The landlords have decreed that now is the time to seek tenants for their propoerties for next academic session .We are in the seventh week of the 2011-12 academic year, with 23 more weeks of undergraduate education to come, plus the Christmas, Easter and summer vacations, yet we are already into the 2012-13 letting cycle.  And it is very difficult for students to resist it.

What it means is that first year students who are in the early stages of making friendships are thrust into deciding who they might want to share a house with next year - with a reasonable chance that by next September, 10 months away, their friendships will have changed and they will regret the groups they made now.  It means that second and third year students living in rented property will be expected to put up with other groups inspecting their accommodation with a view to taking it over next year.  For stduents who will graduate next summer it gives added anxiety to decisions about whether they might want to stay on to do a Masters programme or seek employment in the city, because the feeling grows that if they don't make their minds up now all the best accommodation possibilities will have been snapped up.

For all of these individuals this early housing blitz is a reminder of the transitoriness of the student lifestyle, at a time when everything should be settled for the main part of the current acacdemic year with students feeling secure and stable in their lifestyles and networks - whatever type of accommodation they are in.  We can try everything we can to help students to recognise that dealying the housing search for a few months will not bring disaster.  But everywhere you look around the student neighbourhoods today those little 'to rent' signs build an atmosphere of anxiety and the feeling that 'I must do something now' about next year.

If I were allowed a little piece of legislation I would ban all advertising of housing offers for the following acacdemic session until Easter at the earliest.

I may have been lecturing for a long time, but I am still willing to try to new things - indeed, I am quite keen to do so if I think they will bring benefits.  Tomorrow I am going to try to use the voting system by which students can express their opinions on particular issues by voting in class and seeing the results come up instantly: their collective views can then be used a basis for class discussion.  I've seen the system used - indeed we use it in the University's Risk Review Group to vote on what we think are the biggest risks the university is facing each yera. But I have never set it up and used it myself.

So today I downloaded the relevant programme, 'TurningPoint', and set to work producing the questions I want to put to the students.  I was a little surprised to be confronted with a variant of Powerpoint, since I was expecting something different, but I progressed through my questions and ended up with something close to what I want.  Then I went on to the next step, 'creating a participant list'.  At this point I wondered why such a thing was needed - the participants would be those in the room who had voting boxes.  So I went to the help button and was provided with a manual.  This is where I do start to sound very elderly.  I would much prefer to have a manual in front of me whilst working on a programme, rather than having to switch between screens.  Nevertheless I think I worked out that I don't really need a participant list at all and that there are a number of things in the manual that are really 'bangs and whistles' and  aren't needed for a simple use of the programme.  And that's another feature of systems these days - they are so complex in many cases that it is very difficult to start out on them because the user is provided with too many options at the outset.  It is more useful when one is offered a 'basic use', 'intermediate use' and 'advanced use' option at the outset.  

Anyway, I worked on this stuff until about 8 p.m. this evening and then set off for home.  But to run the whole thing I am going to need support from CiCS colleagues.  Wish me luck.

I can see why many people are nervous about trying new ways of doing things.  Risking something with a first year class of 300 is a very adrenalin-producing experience.  Anyone lacking confidence in handling an audience can easily have their level of self-assurance further dented if things go wrong.  My approach is generally to tell students that I am doing an experiment, and that usually brings them on side and makes them tolerant if things go wrong.  With the voting exercise tomorrow my fall back position will, of course, be to get them to vote by raising their hands.  It might be back to the simplest of technology after all.

Today we had a big careers fair in the Octagon, jointly organised by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam.  Its theme was careers in Engineering, Science and Technology.  As I heard at the end of the day, attendance had been very considerable - certainly up on last year.  This might not be surprising in a year when students have realised that they might have to put a lot of energy into chasing a post-graduation job. 

 

But there is one group of students for whom the goalposts in job hunting have changed significantly since they started their studies.  These are international students who arrived here in 2008 or 2009 expecting to be able to get work experience in the UK for a year or two after graduation and then return to their countries of origin with a further set of skills and experiences under their belts.  Instead they have been subject to a drastic change in the regulations for post-study visas, and many of them will effectively be barred from taking employment in the UK.  The rules are going to change again in April 2012 for anyone who graduates after that date.  A particular problem lies in the complexity of the regulations, such that employers are not aware of what they can or can't do: the result is that many are not taking on international students at all because it seems too difficult to do so.

 

I wonder if the government is Macchiavellian enough to have planned this complexity for just such an outcome?  In other words, making things as difficult as possible in the hope of reducing overseas student numbers in the UK yet further through the negative messages that are going out across the world about the UK government's attitude to immigration and to overseas students.

 

But this morning we had a 30 minute seminar for employers to make them aware of what they have to do to take on an international student.  It was an excellent session, bringing together  advisers from our Careers Service and the Students Union, with colleagues from Hallam also participating.   And judging by the standing room only at the back, employers want this sort of information. 

 

Last week I met a group from the CBI.  They share many of our concerns about policies towards international students. It seems to be only the goverment that sees things differently. Oh, and the Daily Mail. But one panders to the other on this.

By lunchtime I was getting tired. It had been a busy week.  There had been a series of dawn starts, including on Wednesady getting an early train to London for a two hour meeting at UCL: I had been involved in five continuous hours of significant meetings on Tuesday including chairing the University Executive Board in some tricky business around both future admissions targets and the Research Excellence Framework; I had been in discussions with visiting delegations, including one from the Confederation of British Industries and another from Nanjing University of Technology (and meetings where everything has to be translated are particularly tiring); and I had spoken at the evening launch in the city for an art event sponsored jointly by the University and a major law firm. I had spent this morning on an interview panel for a new senior appointment - a task always demanding full concentration.

By 5 o'clock I was totally revived and full of enthusiasm again,  What had brought me so fully back to life?

I spent the whole afternoon teaching my final year class.  Actually, I wasn't really teaching very much at all.  In the three hour class I had perhaps spoken for, in total, around 30 minutes. I wonder how this would count in David Willetts' obsession with contact hours?  Yes: I had been present, but the greatest contact the students had was with each other. Their learning was from what others were saying and doing, not from me.

This was the first session in my module where the students were presenting the results of their research and reflection.  Thirty-six students had been split into eight small groups and each given a particular issue to consider.  The overall theme was the transformation of cities in Central and Eastern Europe since the ending of communism twenty years ago.  I had set the topic up two weeks ago with a one hour lecture, illustrated by images and video clips, of city structures as they had been in the communist period and on the ideals of communist city planning. But today each small group of students had been asked to prepare a 10 minute Powerpoint presentation giving the results of their reflections on their own theme - the fate of the poor in the post-communist city, changes in the use and meaning of public space, and so on.

I have a very nice and motivated group this year (although rather more numerous than I ideally wanted - 24 rather than 36 would have been perfect).  And from the start of the very first presentation I knew this was going to be a great afternoon.  The first slides were clear, with a sensible blend of text and illustration; the two students who presented their group's thoughts spoke fluently without reading directly from a prepared text; they made eye contact with the audience; the academic content was well-structured.  The group as a whole has gelled enough for there to be questions and answers between the students at the end of each presentation.  A later group who approached their task largely through case studies produced an excellent summing up drawing general points from their examples (rather than just leaving it there, as I had started to fear they might).  Eight presentations should have taken around an hour and a half (allowing for some questions) but they overran significantly and I decided to abandon the lecture I had prepared as an introduction to the next seminar topic and instead add extra annotations to the Powerpoint I was intending to use, and put that on the MOLE2 page - which I have done.

At the end of the presentations we had a great discussion about what had worked and what had been less successful.  We also came up with several general points about post-communist urban transition.  I found out that many of the students had hardly any experience of making presentations and welcomed the opportunity to do so.  A number commented on the way out that it had been a fascinating afternoon, that they had learned a lot about a subject they knew little of, and they commented on high quality aspects of individual interventions.

So I felt that I had perhaps achieved more for the core reason behind the university this afternoon - student education - than in most of my other activities during the week.  But I hadn't been teaching: I had been facilitating their learning, largely through the way I had set the whole activity up.  It was a good feeling to end the afternoon on - although not the day, since I then went on to the retirement party for a senior colleague where I made a speech.  And for the third time in the week it was closer to 8 than 7 o'clock when I finally got home.

The dates for blogs in November all fall in the earlier part of the month - 1st, 3rd, 9th, 15th, 16th.

I have written before (most notably on 16 June 2011) about my membership of one of HEFCE's Stratgeic Advisory Committees (SACs).  There are five such SACs - one each on Research, Teaching, Widening Participation, Enterprise and Skills, and Leadership and Governance.  Once each year all five committees come together, along with other members of the HEFCE Board, for a 26 hour meeting (lunch time one day to lunch time the next).  This year's meeting started today and is being held at a rather modern conference centre attached to the University of Loughborough.  This afternoon, apart from a welcome from Shirley Pearce, the Vice-Chancellor of Loughborough, we had a very thought-provoking and broad overview of the current HE landscape in England from the Chief Executive of HEFCE - Sir Alan Langlands - followed by a series of very stimulating workshop sessions in which members of the five Strategic Advisory Committees were deliberately mixed up: my group was tasked with consdiering issues around increasing competition from new providers.

When I wrote on 16 June I said how important I felt it was for all of us involved in universities to have some understanding of the issues as they affect other parts of the overall system.  It is easy to get embroiled in our own particular neck of the woods, yet in many ways higher education in any coutnry stands or falls according to the strnegth of the overall system and not just the individual institutions.  As was said this afetrnoon, the English system is marked by a relative flatness of the quality profile - for example in comparison with some other countries where there is a massive variation between the best and the worst institutions.  The USA is arguably in this latter camp, with recent scandals affecting for-profit providers indicating the weakness of overall quality control to preserve the standards of high education - and the interests of students - across the country as a whole.

Interim thoughts from today's meeting reinforce my reflections from June.  There is a significant level of interdependence between all institutions, even in the face of what is now being seen as a more competitive market place.  Decisions made by institutions in very different parts of the sector impact on us all.  The knock on effects of choices to deliver or not deliver particular degree subjects, the impacts of fee setting, the timings that will be made over the release of candidate offers, the impressions created in schoolchildren by the outreach activities of their local universities - all these things have wide ramifications.

In the face of this level of interdependence it was perhaps not surprising that a very diverse set of individuals at my table for dinner this evening prolonged our discussion well beyond the time when our plates had been cleared away - only finally breaking up to go off to see the enws of Gaddafi's death on the 10 o'clock news.  Without naming names, we were a pretty diverse group: the VC of a Million+ university, an ex-president of the National Union of Students, the Principal of an FE college that also delivers HE, a Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) for Learning and Teaching from a 94 Group university, a DVC International from a Russell Group institution, a Russell Group PVC Research, the chair of HEFCE, a permanent staff member from the National Union of Students, a head of Widening Participation from a Russell Group institution, and me.  Actually, on second thoughts there was perhaps an over-representation of Ruseell Group universities on my table!  Perhaps birds of a feather do flock together, whatever I say.

Putting students into groups for teamwork seems to me to be a very significant element in any course.  If the groups work well everyone benefits; if not the ultimate learning from the course can be severaly damaged, and student satisfaction is also low.  Over the years I have tried different ways of doing it -  letting them choose their own groups (which often leaves the problem of the 'last person to be chosen'), dividing them according to where they are sitting in the classroom (which often mirrors the earlier method), splitting them up alphabetically, and so on.  For three years I experimented by constructing groups that were entirely of one gender - with the fascinating outcome that males benefitted from being in single sex groups but females didn't.  (I can provide more detail on that outcome if anyone wants me to.)

This year I have tried a new approach, and today it was put into practice for the first time.  A couple of weeks ago I asked all the students in my third year option to complete a 24 question personality profile - loosely based on the well-known Myers-Briggs or Margerison-Clark systems, but adapted to the skills needed or group work in my module.  The answers have been scored in five categories - loosely around gregariousness, leadership, openness to innovation, organisation, and 'follow-through' or 'completer' status.  The first task that I have given my class (37 students who I have divided for the moment into 8 groups) is concerned with the changes in Central and Eastern European cities since the ending of Communist rule and the inception of marketisation and privatisation (particularly in the housing market).  In addition to using the profiling information I have also used the results of a factual question they were additionally asked about the countries they have visited.

So today the students have found out which of the eight groups they have been assigned to, and they spent 30 minutes in their groups planning how they are going to work to produce a presentation in a seminar in two weeks time (each group has a different but related topic to work on).  I was delighted to see the seriousness of purpose that they showed in starting off - many of them not having met the others in their groups before. Each group has a nominated leader whose responsibility it is to organise their activities - these leaders being those with the highest score in that category in the profiling exercise. Each group also has members who between them have experienced travel in at least three former Communist states; each also has someone with a high score on 'openness to innovation' since I am looking for interesting presentations that perhaps deviate from the run-of-the-mill. 

For later seminars in the class I - at the moment - intend to redesign the groups using slightly different criteria from the profiling.  If readers of this blog are interested in following these experiments, do let me know and I'll blog about them again later in the semester.

We had a governors' meeting at Longley Park Sixth Form College this evening.  Enrolments of new students at the college have remained stable from last year - which is an excellent outturn.  These will potentially be higher education entrants in 2013 or 2014.  So far the chanegs in the support package for students from low income households (the replacement of EMA etc.) do not seem to be having an effect - at least not at Longley Park.

But across the college sector as a whole the pictrue is rather gloomy.  Analysis of the national pictrue of recruitment this year shows significantly lower new enrolments, with a particular drop in the north-east.  Young people from more deprived backgrounds are far more likely, across the country as a whole, to be in sixth form colleges than 11-19 schools than is the case for those from more affluent backgrounds.  That is true in Sheffield, but it is also true nationally.  (There are, of course, certain exceptions, such as the Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge.)  One hypothesised reason for the drop in college enrolments this year is the loss of EMA.  Many colleges have wide catchment areas with students needing to travel some distance, at considerable expense, to attend: the loss of financial support for travel may well be a key factor for many.  Longley Park has a strong local catchment and its pupils are not therefore affected by this issue.

But one other feature reported at our meeting was that students are being much more hesitant about applying for university entrance. There is more interest in apprenticeship schemes and students are looking keenly at cost and distance before committing to a university application. 

A couple of weeks ago the Vice-Chancellor had a series of meetings with head teachers and other senior school and college figures from across our region.  Afterwards three conculsions could be drawn:
1. Schools and colleges have no information or understanding about the changes in admissions numbers that will be handed down this very session - via the competition for AAB students and the competition extra places in institutions with low fee levels.
2. Middle class pupils in traditional 11-19 schools are being more strongly encouraged than ever before to aim high and to seek entry into the best universities.
3. Establishments with pupils from widening participation backgrounds are witnessing a diminution of interest in higher education more generally, and what interest exists is for less prestigious and lower cost alternatives.

As the Vice-Chancellor of a post-92 university said recently in my presence, we are about to see the undoing of 10 years of efforts in widening participation, and the rapid strengthening of an existing class divide between different types of university.

The thought of being a member of a 'Risk Review Group' is possibly one of those things that put people off the thought of going into a management role.  In my early days as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor it was not something that I found the most intersting part of my job.  But I have grown to see the value of it, and to see how the ideas discussed within it can actually be applied in my research area - in other words, this is an example of 'administration-led research.'

I was first asked to undertake a risk analysis in around 2004 when I was acting Head of Economics.  Colleagues seemed totally uninterested in the task, so I dutifully placed a few points on a two-axis graph suggesting things that might adversely affect my department - the likelihood of them happening and the impact if they did.  Most of the things I identified were things we could actually do nothing about - global recession reducing international student flow, and other similar things. 

But as time went by I got more interested in risk analysis as a management tool.  And then I started to think how some of the concepts ould be applied in everyday life - or at least to the analysis of everyday lives.  I am not saying that individuals undertake formal risk analysis, but that we might analyse their behaviour using concepts derived from that.  To me the crucial overall considerations are as follows:
1. The likelihood of something happening.  It might be something we want to happen, or something we don't want to happen.
2. The impact if it does happen.
3. What we can do to change the likelihood of it happening - to increase the chance if we want it, to decrease the chance if we don't want it.
4. What we can do to change the impact of it happening - to increase the impact if we want it, to decrease it if we don't.

At today's meeting of the university's risk review group we were looking at things such as the likelihood of a fall off in student demand as a result of the new regime, or the likelihood of the university being able to achieve significant research collaborations with other institutions.  We were looking at all the four steps I've outline above.

But after reading into the risk review literature I realised that some of the ideas within it could help a project being undertaken by one of my research students. She was working on why migration from East to West Germany after the reunification of Germany in 1990 had been less than one might have predicted on the basis of economic conditions.  Risk analysis provided a useful basis for explaining why many people had adopted strategies that minimsed the likelihood of occurrence of things they wanted to avoid, such as losing family links, moving into what people saw as a potentially hostile social environment in a new region.  I later suggested a similar use of risk analysis to another research student working on the entry of Tamil refugees into the London labour market: her problem was that many refugees took employment within the ethnic economy on low wages and poor conditions when they could have secured much better employment outside it.  Information their might suggest that they didn't know about the outside opportunities - but in fact they did.  What they were doing was to seek to mitigate what they saw as risks in working outside their community even if, for the biggest number, the outcome was actually poorer than it might have been.

Today's Risk Review Group meeting did not set off any new lines of research enquiry - but it seems to me quite rare that experience in one area of what might seem to be our segmented jobs can not lead to applications in another area.

This is being posted several days late, and I apologise for that.  On Monday evening, when I should have written this, I was preparing for a two day meeting of the Russell Group Pro-Vice Chancellors for Learning and Teaching, to be held in Glasgow. What I have tried to recapture is my reactions to the change of atmosphere on Monday.
 
Evrything is back to 'normal'.  Not only are the new students here, but the continuing undergraduates are back as well.  Students are waiting to get into lecture theatres in the Alfred Denny Building, there are throngs making their way up from the Richard Roberts Building on the hour.  I had to queue in the Students' Union shop for several minutes to pay for my lunchtime sandwich.  The start-of-the-year plant sales are taking place on the concourse. (I wonder how many of the plants being sold will last more than a month or two in the hands of first year students who may never have cared for a houseplant in their lives before.)  When I drive home in the evening there are groups of students making their way through Broomhill to and from the residences.  The buzz is back.

Universities were created to teach.  Research took place through teaching - through the discussion of philosophical and moral questions.  It was not until the nineteenth century that a research function came into the core structures of some universities.  Today Sheffield, and many other universities around the world like it, has a dual mission of research and teaching.  But during the summer months when undergraduate students are not around (and postgraduate students are not in great evidence as they get on with their research and their projects), and when the lecture theatres and seminar rooms undergo maintenance and refurbishment or are occupied by conferences, the university is only half an institution. 

Now we are back to normal, with the whole of the institution's complex portfolio of activities in full swing.   

My randomly chosen blogging days for October will be 5th, 12th, 14th, 20th and 28th.    

This blog is being posted a little late.  It was not written on the date to which it refers, because I spent that evening hosting the dinner for our new international students - and didn't get home until after midnight.  I blogged about that event last year (Monday 20 September 2010), and it remains one of the absolute high spots of my year - the bringing together of people of very different backgrounds from all around the world for the purpose of education.  Instead I will write about something else from Friday.

This morning I had a phone conversation with my opposite number at another Russell Group university, located in London.  She is not able to make it to our regular all-Russell Group meeting in Glasgow in two weeks time. (Three of the four London Russell Group members have female PVCs or equivalent for Learning and Teaching, so I've not given watertight identification here.)  Our discussion was around the possibility of changing the degree classification system and moving to a grade point average.  This is omething that I have talked about before, with a group of seven universities taking the lead and then going public with the idea to the Times Higher a couple of months ago.

What has happened since is the recognition that a lot of other universities are actively considering going in the same direction, and would welcome the chance to join our group.  My view is that we should broaden our discussions, since having a larger number of universities on board will give the project greater purchase with students, employers and other stakeholders.  But the danger of enlarging the discussions is that we might get fissiparous tendencies.  We might end up discussing a number of variants of a simple scheme and ultimately slow everything down.  There is something to be said for a small group to make its stand and then see who follows.

One aspect of the discussion that I welcome is the possibility of moving back to something akin to the 16 point marking scale that we operated as a university for some time.  It is interesting to reflect that when we abolished the system and went back to the 0-100 scale, a number of other universities continued to move towards a more limited mark scheme based on 16 or 20 points.  It will be very easy for them to convert to a system based around A+, A, A-, B+, B, B- and so on.  The 16 point scale was very appropriate for large areas of the university, and I have difficulties in understanding why those parts of the university that didn't like it are mirrored by similar departments elsewhere who have no problems with it.  It may be that we will have to look into such issues in some detail in the next year or two if we are to move away from our current undifferenitatied system in which the vast bulk of stduents gets an Upper Second or a First towards something that produces a more nuanced eflection of individual overall performance.

This afternoon a group of 12 us met to start thinking about the Undergraduate Prospectus for admission in 2013.  We were drawn from the Admissions Office, from Marketing, and with me as the acacdemic and UEB representative.

Why so early?  The 2011 intake hasn't yet arrived, and we haven't yet received any UCAS forms for 2012 entry (although we soon will). I remember being at a small meeting with a high ranking official from the Department of Busines, Innovation and Skills 12 months ago who ws telling us (in relation to 2012 admission) that we would have full guidance from his department on government thinking by September 2011 (i.e. now).  We told him that that was at least 8 months too late, and he visibly paled before us.  Why so soon?

Let's work backwards.  In order to be admitted in September 2013, candidates have to submit their UCAS forms by January of that year.  Such forms will need to be completed by candidates and schools / colleges during the autumn of 2012.  University Open Days, all round the country, will take place during the period June to September 2012, with various recruitment fairs and events preceding them from Easter 2012 onwards to get information across to Y12 (or first year sixth form) young people.  Prospectuses therefore need to be ready by March 2012, and with a print run of 100,000 (which is how many we print) it is big operation to get to that stage.  Copy for the presses has to be ready by the end of January, and with around 70 different areas of the university inputting to the document, we  need to start during the autumn of 2011.  Hence our meeting this afternoon to plan the 2013 prospectus.

Doing so this year seems even more before times than usual. With the significant change in the fees regime next year, we don't yet have any idea how students will react, what sort of information they or their parents or advisers will be looking for, or the questions they will be asking us.  We have certainly done the market research, but the robustness of the findings is yet to be tested.

This very long lead time to admissions, and the BIS official's lack of recognition of it, make what is currently happening for 2012 entry even more difficult.  The first UCAS forms will be with us within a couple of weeks, yet there are still very significant national consultations going on about target numbers, the funding of places, and a whole set of parameters that need to influence our strategy in making offers. Universities have this week been given the chance to rewrite their painstakingly produced OFFA (Office of Fair Access) agreements on widening participation, lower their fee levels, and enter a competition for places.  The outcomes of the competition will not be known for months - well after the bulk of their offers need to be made.  Universities are in a seemingly impossible situation in deciding how to operate in the admissions cycle leading to 2012 entry.

We are expecting, within days, an announcement about a move to post-qualifications admission - with the whole process operated over a four month period from June to September after the early declaration of candidates' level 3 (usually A level) grades. This year it almost seems as if we are being set up to agree to anything that gets us away from the current system.  But it remains to be seen whether any proposed change will have been thoroughly thought through: spotting potential unintended consequences of new proposals in higher education is something we are all getting quite skilled at. 

I had meetings today with the Activities Officer of the Union of Students and with the Director of the Careers Service. A central aspect of both meetings concerned what I will call 'degree+' ideas.  I think these ideas need to be uppermost in our minds as we move towards the induction and welcome of new students later this month. So what is the degree+ idea?

Employers are increasingly telling universities like us that they take it for granted that whatever actual degree school a stduent has been studying in they are likely to be analytical, articulate, skilled in project work and project management, and able to work in teams.  These attributes (enshrined in the 'Sheffield Graduate' concept) can apply to students in English, Sociology, Chemistry, Computer Science or whatever.  We know that between 60 and 70% of graduate jobs do not specify any particular discipline.  And some work I asked our Careers Service to undertake a few years ago showed that even in our degree programmes that carry professional accreditations a significant proportion of graduates do not enter the expected vocation related to their degree (80% not doing so in one extreme case).  Among recent ex-students of my acquaintance I can think of an electrical engineer who is a merchant banker, a historian who is a project manager, a geographer who is now a craft brewer, and a politics graduate who works on broadband installation in housing projects.

When employers are looking to take on graduate staff from among the thousands who present themselves with good degrees (or good degree prospects) from good universities, how do they choose?  I do know employers who use a simple metric such as eliminating all those who cannot spell or punctuate their applications correctly.  Others (rightly) reject those who have scissored and pasted a previous application into a new form without changing the name of the organisation they are applying to.

But many choose on the basis of degree+ - the things that a student has done and achieved alongside their degree.  It is the work experience (even at a relatively low level); the volunteering activities; the positions of responsibility taken with a sports team; the overseas travel; the experience of business plan competitions and other enterprise activities; the representational roles within departmental, student union or university governance that really count to many potential employers.  They say that our students are sometimes a little complacent and believe that they will walk into a 'good job' as a result of having a good degree from a good university.  We need to disturb that complacency and get the degree+ message across to our new students, particularly our first year undergraduates. Our graduates need to differentiate themselves and degree+ can help.  

I have been delighted in the last few days to find that the Students' Union officers share my views on this. In less than two weeks time they and me, with the Head of Student Services, will be addressing all the 5500 new undergraduates with a similar message - that degree+ is vital for their future success. 

Sheffield University adopted modularisation and semesterisation in 1994.  We may now be on the brink of turning the clock back in some ways.  Today I met with the colleague from Learning and Teaching Services who has been given the task of administrator to what is likely to become a significant project.  We are responding to repeated calls from some parts of the university to introduce change.  But we are aware that there are some supporters of the status quo - in particular, students who have come through very strongly modularised structures in schools and colleges and who fear change.

There are really three elements to the issue - the modularisation of degree programmes; the size, shape and timing of the modules; and the types and timing of assessment associated with the overall structure.  But in order to respond to the demands for change to one, two or all three of these structural elements, we need to understand what the current structures don't allow us to do, and we will also need to come up with a new structrue that is coherent across the institution as a whole.  We do currently have certain unmodularised and unsemesterised degere programmes (Medicine and Dentistry) but they exist with virtually no teaching connections with programmes in other departments.  One of the things that modularisation has enabled us to do is to introduce many innovative cross-departmental or cross-faculty programmes, making use of the common currency of the 10 or 20 credit module taught within a 12 week block. 

My own view is that we should retain modularisation. Systems for the recording of higher education perfomance throughout the world are based around a concept of units of learning and assessment - often of varying sizes.  The calculations that result in an American Grade Point Average invoilve weightings according to the credit values of individual units: similarly the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) reflects unit 'size' in its recording of achievement.

But I would like the university to be open to many different ways of delivering units other than the standard 10 or 20 credit undergraduate unit, or the stanard 15 credit postgraduate module, taught throughout a whole semester. There are many units that need delivery across a whole academic year; there are others that would benefit from being delivered on an intensive one-week basis.  Revising our expectations on module timing might enable us to bring accredited summer schools, work placements and field classes into students' profiles, even though they are vacation 'add-ons'. 

Finally, the issue of assessment will no doubt cause much debate - characterised as 'learn and be examined in discrete units' or 'learn and be examined in the round.'  Modularisation in 1994 ushered in the former (although in reality that had already effectively been the structure for many earlier years in many parts of the university).  At the moment I would favour a combination of the two assessment philosophies - each being appropriate for certain types of learning.

But this is the start of a debate.  What we planned today was an exercise to ascertain the views of faculties. When we then try to reconicle them the fun will begin.

Over the years that I have been a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, the University has been incredibly well served by a succession of outstanding officers of the Students' Union.   Almost all those that I have worked with have been genuinely concerned with the interests of the broad constituency of students rather than pushing sectional interests, and they have been altruistic in working for the future of the university as a whole rather than seeking short-term payoffs for long-term issues.  In most years I set up regular meetings with several of the Union Officers, and today I saw two of them for an hour each to talk through a variety of issues relating to their particular portfolios.

I feel a little sorry for the officers in one key respect.  They have been elected on a particular platform and over the summer (they take office at the start of July) they develop agendas and set objectives for their term of office.  But implementation of many of the changes they want to bring in is dependent on the annual university calendar.  Consequently even the most successful officers rarely see the outcomes of the things they work on during their year of office.  They start the ball rolling, and take ideas through work groups, to committees, to Union Council and so on - but it will be the following year's officers who witness the fulfillment of the ambitions of their predecessors.  Indeed, many good ideas that are brought forward in the first semester take longer to get agreed - particularly if there is further research needed, or if significant resources will be required - so that it may be the officers two years down the line who are at the launch events.

The term of office of our Union Officers is an unusually short one.  Many Students' Unions elect their sabbatical officers for two year terms, rather than for our one year. It could be made to work in Sheffield, and would provide for some continuity between years as well as providing the opportunity for Offciers to see their projects to fruition.  With 8 sabbatical officers, half the positions could be up for election each year.  All students would have the opportunity to run for all the posts - because the electorate has been prepared to elect second year as well as third year students to the various roles - and even, last year, a postgraduate research student as President.

But one argument against this would be that many of our Student Union officers are exhausted by the end of their single term of office, and the thought of going on for a second year is something that many of them wouldn't want to contemplate.  But again, perhaps that is a function of the fact that they only serve for a year and thus put an incredible amount of energy into achieving as much as they can during that limited period.   And perhaps it is that high level of concentrated energy that makes our officers as successful as they are as student leaders. I genuinely don't know whether the Union could improve the system or not.  But clearly it is not for me to say - the Students' Union is self-governing and needs no interference from a member of the University Executive.  Except that I have a feeling that I may be a life member of the Sheffield Students' Union as a result of being a life member of the union where I was at university ...

The next set of blogs will be on 1st, 6th, 8th, 16th and 26th September.

Well, I did restrain myself for almost all my holiday - and only looked at e-mails in the last couple of days when my thoughts turned to any briefings I might need to pick up the reins on my return.  And in the meantime my stand-in PA, Zara Smith, had done an excellent job of filtering messages so that there were not too many absolutely urgent tasks awaiting me on my return today.

As a geographer with particular interests in the ways people live their lives in specific environments, I always find holidays stimulating to academic thinking.  Indeed any travel to a different place has the same effect.  This year my holiday was in central Italy, in many cases revisiting places I had first visited 20, 30 or even more years ago. I first visited the area when I was an undergraduate student, hitch-hiking from place to place and staying in youth hostels (or occasionally in fields or on the floors of hotel outhouses).  I wish now that I had been more observant then.  Had I rigourously collected data then on commercial outlets, the times of day when people did things, the numbers and types of people around, I would have the possibility now of some fascinating longitudinal comparisons. 

In the early 1970s I chose a southern Italian region as one of two case studies for my doctorate thesis - on how small rural communities adapt to the arrival of tourism. I have never actually returned to area (the Cilento region of southern Campania, 140km beyond Naples) since I completed my fieldwork.  But I was minded to do so sometime as a result of what I saw on my holiday this year. Last week I visited a village in Tuscany that I first went to nearly 40 years ago.  Then I slept in a tiny tent in a rudimentary campsite in an olive grove.  There was only one hotel in the village, and a couple of restaurants, and at some times of the day it was possible to be alone in the main street, even in August.

Today I stayed in a hotel converted from a priory on the edge of the village, having chosen from the 20 or so hotels now available.  It was very difficult to secure a table for an evening meal at one of the 25 restaurants, but that was nothing compared with the difficulty in securing a car parking space - 8 Euros for 4 hours in the evening, although on the day we left the village to drive to our next destination all the car parks were full and there were backlog queues of up to a kilometre on the entry roads.  A long conversation with the waiter in our hotel turned on the subject of the unsustainability of ordinary life in the place now - 3 months of tourist-induced hell in the summer followed by 9 months of dormancy when the place effectively shuts up and goes back to how it was when I first went all those years ago.

I turned away from researching tourism because at the time I could find little of theoretical interest to sustain me.  Sometimes, as over the last week or two, I see that there were and are interesting questions to be answered about the growth of the activity.  Perhaps I'll come back to some of them when I retire!

I'm still at my desk but will shortly be going home to complete my packing befroe setting off on holiday tomorrow.  When I first became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor the then Vice-Chancellor, Bob Boucher, told me that he wanted me to take three weeks' leave as a block each year.  He argued that he wanetd his senior team to have a 'proper' holiday.  And his argument was that if you take only a week off no one will cover any work for you, two weeks and some will get done but not all.  But with three weeks off other people have to take over significant elements of the day-to-day business - and that colleagues may appreciate more what it is that you do when you really are there.

Actually, many people now find it difficult to switch off when on holiday - in part because we all carry smart phones that can be used to read our e-mails wherever we are in the world (although often at a price).  At one time we were almost completely out of contact whilst on holiday - now many people find it difficult to restrain themselves from staying in contact. I will confess that, befroe I had a smart phone, I could occasionally be found in internet cafes abroad, just checking on the NSS results, or the post A level recruitment position or some other piece of information.  And it's that last word that is the problem: we don't like being without information - even if there's not much we can actually do with it. 

So, I will try to restrain myself over the next two and a bit weeks (I'm not taking as long away as I was told - A level results week beckons).  But I suspect that at some point I will yield to temptation, when no one else can see me, and will switch on international roaming and download e-mail. 

There will only be two blogging days in August beacsue of my holiday - 15th and 22nd. 

It's graduation week.  There are 15 ceremonies at the rate of 3 per day, and this year I am attending 10 - 4 where I am Presiding Officer and 6 where I am attending but taking no formal role.  Apart from the ceremonies at which I preside, I also attend all those where there is a Senate Award winner, plus one or two others for reasons such as an honorary graduate who is known to me.

It's not actually the ceremonies I want to comment on today, but the lunches.  I know these will be a closed world to most readers of this blog.  Each day during graduation week there is a special lunch served at which the university hosts each day's honorary graduates and their families, as well as a number of civic dignitaries who come to take part in the ceremonies - the Lord Mayor, both of our local Bishops, the Lord Lieutenant, the Master Cutler and so on. The University contingent is made up of those who are reading the names and those who are presiding at that day's ceremonies, with other members of the Unviersity Executive Board attending when they can.

One of the most delightful aspects of these lunches is the conversation - a group of interesting people thrown together for 90 minutes while the Octagon is re-set for the afternoon ceremony. This week I have listened as a colleague from Journalism has given an expert's view of the crisis at News International, discussed opera with a local dignitary, been part of a conversation about the energy conversion for various types of meat, received an explanation of environmental controls on oil rigs off the coast of Africa, and been involved as conversation has flowed over many other topics.

When I first arrived in the university, staff from a variety of departments used to meet together for lunch.  Those around the table varied through time, but among my lunch companions have been an applied mathematician, a sociologist, a scholar of linguistics, colleagues from the Management School, and many others.  The varied conversations that such a mixture engendered seem to me now to be things of the past.  Colleagues today collect a sandwich to eat in their own rooms, or generally eat lunch with others from the same department.  Is it that we have less time, or that we are no longer as interested in wider concerns as we once were (perhaps made narrower by the focus on the RAE)?

But there is little to compare with gentle conversation with those from very diferent backgrounds to set the mind on to new tracks and create new lines of thought.  That's why I particularly enjoy the graduation lunches that I am privileged to attend as a member of the University Executive Board: they are very stimulating events.  I am very lucky to have the chance to be there - and I recognise and acknowledge that good fortune.

In the USA many corporations have links with universities and provide particular support for scholarships, internships and other initiatives.  The practice is less common in the UK, but is growing.  Today we have had a celebration of one particular corporate partnership that really seems to hjave got off to a good start and can deliver some new things for the university.

The Spanish bank Santander has over the years created a university network in its main market areas - Spain, Portugal and the whole of Spanish- and Partuguese-speaking Latin America.  In the last few years it has extended that network to the UK, and Sheffield recently became the latest British university to develop a formal relationship with the bank.  Latin America is a very significance global region, but one in which we have been weakly represented.  Funding from the bank has enabled us to develop a scholasrhip programme to attract students from the region, and also to create a set of mobility funds to support short visits to Spain, Portugal and Latin America by staff and research students here who might be able to forge new links.  Today the President of the Santander Universities network came to hear how we are getting on, to meet the supported incoming stduents and those from Sheffield who have benefited from travel monies, and to discuss next steps.  The enthusiasm shown by all the recipients of financial support was considerable, and it was clear that without the sponsorship of the bank we could not have supported what has in fact happened.

But we have also used the support of Santander to create a series of prizes for the best portfolios and activities reported by students undertaking the Sheffield Graduate Award.  This is close to my heart, as it was me that pushed for the creation of the Award back in my early years as Pro-Vice-Chancellor.  This year over 400 students will be receiving the Award at the graduation ceremonies later in the month, and that is a notable achievement.  We have set up a scheme for this volume of activity using only shoestring funding to do so.  The support of Santander in awarding prizes for the best award winners is special, and I was delighted to meet all but one of the winner today - and they are an outstanding group who will bring credit on themselves and the university.  (And as is the way with corporate sponsorship, no doubt on Santander Bank as well!  Hence everyone wins.)

(Apologies that this posting is several days late, although it does refer to the appointed day. I have no excuse for late delivery other than pressure of work and a series of evening engagements over the past week.)

I was lucky enough to secure a lectureship direct from being a doctoral student.  The early 1970s were the last years of the Robbins expansion of higher education and the number of posts was still growing to match the growth in student numbers - both in the new universities that had recently been created (York, Sussex, Essex, Lancaster etc.) and through the expansion of older foundations.  Most of my fellow doctoral students who wanted academic posts similarly moved straight into them - at Keele, Kent, Queen Mary, Newcastle, Loughborough and elsewhere.  But then expansion came to an end, and after 1979 and the election of Mrs Thatcher's government there was retrenchment: I was the youngest lecturer in my department until I was in my early 30s.

The situation today is very different.  The newly completing PhD student rarely gets offered a lectureship.  Much more common is the route that involves a research assistant position - generally on a project devised by someone else - possibly then followed by a postdoctoral fellowship of some kind (which may have the advantage of being on a project designed by the individual concerned).  The lectureship comes up only at the end of some years of this hand-to-mouth existence - if it comes up at all.

This morning I was at a meeting of our Doctoral and Researcher Development Committee - a group charged with enhancing the skills development of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers, and with their training so that they improve their chances of real career development and the fulfilment of their employment goals.  It is a difficult task.  For many bright young academics the role model they aspire to is that followed by their supervisors - into a full academic job.  Yet in many areas this involves at best waiting to fill 'dead mens' shoes' as there is no expansion taking place.  We have researchers who have been in the same career position for over 10 years, often on a sequence of projects and contracts that does not really lead anywhere.  As someone today said, it is very tough to tell an aspiring young academic that they might be much better off looking for a research career outside academia - or even a career outside research altogether - but we need to be honest enough to do so. The problem is really that we who have made our careers in universities are not best placed to point such individuals in alternative directions - we lack the experience of what other sectors are like.

I have supervised over 20 research students to successful completion, and a number are now employed in a variety of universities: among them Sheffield itself, Kwansei Gakuin in Japan, Greenwich, Southampton, Oxford Brookes, City and elsewhere.  But a number of them have not actually made great use of their research training and high level analytical skills and expertise. I am left wondering whether during their PhD studies more could have been done for them to develop alternative career options.  Many of those students graduated some time ago.  I hope that through the work of today's Committee we can provide a more positive outlook for those of today's research students who will not (or do not want to) enter the academic profession.

As an academic, I have always found June a sad month.  Yes: it marks the end of the teaching and examining year and the chance to catch up on research tasks and to deal with overdue administrative paperwork.  It normally heralds a summer holiday at some point within the next three months, and the chance to visit new places and recharge the batteries.

But it also marks the end of a close relationship with another group of students.  During my career I have taught second year classes from time to time, but much more of my undergraduate teaching has been at either first year or third year level.  For many years I taught first year practical classes - both general practicals and those relating to statistical methods and their applications in geography.  I also lectured to the big first year classes (often of over 250 students), introducing audience participation and discussion formats even within groups of that size.   I remember an institutional auditor, in the days when subject reviewers visited classes, attending one of my lectures and expressing a fear of anarchy when I launched one of these discussion sessions inviting students to come up with their own definition of age classes within a population, illustrating the way in which ideas of age banding are subjective and socially constructed..

But it's not easy to get close to a first year class of 250.

Third year groups are a different matter.  Although my third year option class once reached 84 students (and a senior colleague accused me of running a 'Mickey Mouse' course that clearly only attracted students because it was so easy - I inevitably saw things differently), I have generally taught final year groups of between 20 and 35.  Although I have taught such classes in collaboration with colleagues, I have often taught them on my own.  During my career I have also led 29 residential field classes at Easter - 1 in Oxford, 3 in Normandy, 12 in Paris, and 13 in Berlin.  In all these third year classes, of one sort or another, I have endeavoured to get to know my students, to see them as individuals, to try to find out what motivates them, and to encourage them to surprise themselves with what they can do, and what they know at the end of a course that they didn't know at the beginning.

Field class interactions have particular rewards. I am not thinking here about the night when, staying in East Berlin shortly after the wall came down, I was awakened at 4 in the morning (as was the whole neighbourhood) by some our students singing 'Barbie Girl' at full volume in the street.  I am instead thinking of the occasions when, at the end of a day of field observation in strange city a student has said 'Now I feel like a real geographer for the first time': these have been really rewarding moments.

It is the rapport that one builds up with a third year group, and with the individuals within it, that leads to my feeling of sadness at this time of the year.  One has just got to know a group really well - and then it's all over and they graduate and go.  The academic calendar turns another page and we start preparing for another year, and another fresh group to start working with.

I admit I feel this a little less since I stopped taking Easter field classes (my last one was in 2008 when I was already three-and-a-half-years into my PVC role), but it is still there - a regret at time passing. Today I feel it particularly in relation to the group of elected Students' Union officers with whom I work very closely during their year of office - and who then come to the end of their tenure leaving me to start building a new relationship with next year's group.

Last Friday the degree results were declared for my department, and I have already sent congratulatory e-mails to a number in my class (and received warm messages back). And at the end of this week there will be the changeover in the Students Union officers.  Another year is over, and a new one starts.

I will be starting my annual leave towards the end of July, so there will only be four blogging days in that month - 7th, 11th, 21st, and 26th.

Most academics go through the whole of their working lives without ever having to deal with the death of a student.  But in an institution of around 24000 students, although most of them are young adults it is inevitable that there will be occasional deaths - from cancer, car accidents or other causes.  Since I became PVC I have been involved in trying to co-ordinate our response to such events in a way that is most appropriate to the wishes of the families concerned. For parents to witness the death of their offspring is a singularly untimely experience, and I am keen that as a caring institution we should play a constructive role in remembering the loss of one of our community as well as their family.

Parents and partners sometimes think that the most appropriate action on our part would be to allow themto cross the stage at a graduation ceremony to receive some sort of public recognition of the achievements of their loved one. My experience of this is almost entirely negative.  As an example, the last time this happened in my presence the partner of the student (who had been murdered in a random street killing by a schizophrenic who was not taking his medication) was in a state of considerable distress by the time she came onto the stage, nearly broke down in the arms of the presiding officer, and was helped back to her seat where her sobs disturbed those around her. The whole atmosphere of the ceremony had been altered for all those present.  This is not an isolated example.  Because of these examples we have now put a stop to parents or others collecting certificates at general degere ceremonies - both for their own good and for the inteersts of the other 1000 or so people in the hall.

What we now offer bereaved parents and others is a small personal event, generally held in one of the University's nicer rooms such as the Tapestry Room or the Chancellors Room, where what is said and done can be very much more tailored to the wishes of those present than in a big degree ceremony.  The family can bring more people along. Those who have taught the student and who knew him or her well can be present and can talk to the family. We can make the event more or less formal, as the family wishes.  Refreshments can be served if desired.  The feedback we have received after these events has been uniformally extremely positive.  I remember one event for a student who had collapsed and died in May of his final year from an undiagnosed heart condition.  A small event in the Chancellors Room that I felt would last at most 20 minutes turned into an extended celebration of the life of the student, with the father speaking about his son's enthusiasm for his final project work (which he had handed in shortly before collapsing) and with academic and administrative staff from his department sharing reminiscences with the family.  We were there for over an hour, and afterwards received a letter, via a family friend, to say that what we had done had really brought comfort to the grieving parents.

These can inevitably be rather tear-jerking events. Those of us who play a particular role in them have to try to blend professionalism with natural sympathy. But the most emotional occasions are those where we are celebrating, prematurely, the achievements of a student who is terminally ill.  On occasion we allow this to happen via attendance at a degree ceremony if the timing is appropriate. I don't know how many people at one of last year's degree ceremonies noticed that the last student to cross the stage, and to have quite a long conversation with the presiding officer, was actually a second year student with complex cancers who was not expected to be able to complete her full degree programme.

But the most remarkable event I have ever been involved in, and one where the tears flowed amongst almost all of the 50 or so people present, was for a terminally ill medical student.  We held the event in the Tapestry Room and she had invited a large number of old school friends and fellow students.  At her request we gowned up and formed a procession of staff who had taught her.  It had been agreed that in presenting the student with a record of her achievements I would make a short speech - which I found very difficult to do but somehow got through it.  When I had finished the student herself, to my amazement, asked if she could say a few words.  And she then gave us a very polished speech with advice to the medics on how to provide dignity to a young woman, like herself, with terminal cancer, and with thanks to the university for her life here in Sheffield.  It was an astonishing performance.  What her family now have to remember the occasion by is a wonderful album of photographs, taken by the university photographer, including pictures of all those who were present.

I am rather proud of what we do to mark the deaths of students.  We do it quietly, but appropriately.  It's not something that will ever be celebrated in key performance indicators or other metrics, but it is an example of the unviersity community at work.  Readers will have guessed that these reflections have been occasioned by a recent death.

On and off during the day I have been writing some notes on the HEFCE meeting I attended in London yesterday.  Since September 2009 I have been a member of the Strategic Advisory Committee on Taching Quality and the Student Experience, which advises the main Board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England on key issues around students.  I cannot, obviously, go into details here about some of the issues discussed yesterday, since they are subject to further consultation and may yet change in relation to government policy (or may even, just possibly, influence policy itself). 

But the HEFCE meeting has its own intrinsic interest because it is one of the few occasions when the breadth of the higher education landscape really comes home to me.  Most academics exist within a very particular corner of higher eduation.  We have our disciplinary links that stretch across institutions, but in many cases those links are to other universities that are roughly similar to our own.  As a geographer working in a British university my research links over the years have been with colleagues in Oxford, Liverpool, Sussex, Dundee, Glasgow, Queen Mary, UCL and similar places  - almost all of them pre-1992 universities.  Outside the UK my connections have been similar - Paris I, Paris IV, Lisbon, the Humboldt in Berlin, Amsterdam, Utrecht.  A research partnership with a colleague at the Portuguese Open University (Universidade Aberta) has been an exception.  As PVC for Learning and Teaching my connections have been primarily with other Russell Group universities (although having taken on a more recent role as co-chair of the Higher Education Academy's PVC network I have increasing numbers of contacts in other parts of the sector - although almost entirely with universities that are structrued rather like us).

In 2005 I was sent by our then VC to attend my first HEFCE annual conference, and found myself in conversation with someone from an institution I had never heard of.  The wider world of UK higher education started to open up for me.

The HEFCE committee reflects that breadth.  The person I know best on the committee is, perhaps inevitably, a DVC from another Russell Group university.  Other committee members include PVCs DVCs and VCs from a number of post-92 institutions, and colleagues from the 94 group,  But there is also representation from the specialist or 'monotechnic' sector of conservatoires, art schools and similar institutions, as well as a representative of a further education college that delivers higher education programmes.  In addition we have attendees from the National Union of Students, the Higher Education Academy, JISC, and the Quality Assurance Agency.  To look round the room, on the 12th floor of the Centrepoint Building in London where our meetings are held, is to recognise the diversity of higher education and the broad numbers of stakeholder groups involved.

However, without this recognition of breadth there is a danger that individual mission groups and other interests seek to pursue their own agendas to the disadvantage of other parts of the sector.  I think there is a growing recognition that these fragmenting pressures meant that higher education did not speak clearly enough with one voice over recent months in the fees debate.  And there is now a clear danger that we will not provide a broad view on the forthcoming White Paper. As a sector we need to present robust and coherent arguments on the value of the future of all higher level educational activity: we need to celebrate the broad portfolio of opportunities presented to potential students, and to do so without appearing to disparage parts of the sector other than our own.  Leadership in these endeavours needs to come from HEFCE itself, but more especially from Universities UK - but with individual vice-chancellors and the spokesmen for different sectional interests buying into the big general message as well. Otherwise 'divide and rule' could be the fate of UK higher education..