Widening participation policies must play a large role in every university's preparations for 2012. We have a very good record on this - one of the very best within the Russell Group.   But in some of the discussions I've been party to in the last few weeks I've got the feeling that some attitudes are based on prejudice rather than real evidence.  Several times I have heard it assumed that the Faculty of Arts and Humanities has relatively fewer students from widening participation backgrounds than other Faculties, that Engineering has particular appeal for those from familes or areas with little experience of higher education, that Medicine (despite our efforts) is still a very middle class discipline to get into.

I recently asked the Admissions team to provide some data on this at departmental level, and they have today provided 5 year entry profiles on issues such as gender, disability, mature students, ethnicity, and widening participation backgrounds.  I would have also liked data on the independent v. state school divide, but those are much harder to extract from the system.  I want to comment here on two particular data sets that I have found interesting.

In some ways the ethnicity data (home students only) are not surprising. We can see at graduation something of the diverse ethnicity of students, although we can't at that point identify who is actually an overseas student and who is from a Black or Ethnic Minority (normally known as BME) group from the UK.  On average over the 5 years of my data, 12.2% of UK students on entry declared themselves to be non-white.  That is higher than for the city of Sheffield as a whole (the last census - admittedly now outdated - recorded 8.8% of Sheffield's population as non-white).  Four of our five faculties had departments that straddled that average.  Only in Arts and Humanities did all departments have student entries that produced below-average proportions. The lowest proportion of non-white UK students on entry was actually in a Social Sciences discipline.  The highest was in a subject area in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health where almost half of all entering students over a five year period were of non-white ethnicity.

But the data on widening participation are more surprising (at least to me).  On the measure used (relating to neighbourhood of origin) 11.8% of entering students were classed as from areas with very low participation in higher education.  The departmental range within the university was from 7.7% to 19.7% on five year data.  This time every faculty had departments both above and below the institutional average.  Some of those stereotypes I have heard in recent weeks are immediately confounded.  Certainly most Engineering departments exceeded the university average, but the largest such department was below.  As many Arts and Humanities departments exceeded the university average as undershot it - and it was an Arts and Humanities department that came fourth in the overall university league table.  Medicine itself actually brought in more widening participation students than the university average - so much for the stereotypes of it as a very middle class area.  It was a department within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health that produced the highest score over five years, whilst one in Social Sciences produced the lowest - and that was actually my greatest surprise.  So much for stereotypes: they need challenging, and the data have challenged mine!

That's it for this week. I'm taking tomorrow as a day's leave.  I'll be back next month.

The exams season is on again. Students on my own final year option class will be taking their 2 hour answer-two-out-of-six-questions exam next week.  As preparation for that I have offered a series of 'tutorials' on key topics for the exam - four students to a tutorial with the offer that each student (25 in the group) can attend two.  Topics are assigned for each tutorial.  That potentially should add up to over 12 hours of tutorials.  In reality I will actually be doing 9.  These are not part of my department's workload allocations (although because of my PVC role I am not part of that system anyway) and the students attending tell me that they have not been offered this sort of advice session before.  This afternoon I have taken three of these 1-hour sessions.

But why are there only 9 hours - representing 36 student attendances out of the possible 50?  The fact is that a small number of students have not signed up for any of these sessions (some have only signed up for 1, which is fine).  Looking through the list of students in the group it quickly becomes apparent that there is a relationship with the marks that students got for their projects - which were handed back well before Christmas (see my blog of 13 December). One might assume that those who got the poorest marks on the projects would be the keenest to sign up for these revision sessions, and that those who got good marks (and there were some very high performances) might feel confident and not sign up.  The reverse is in fact true.  The absentees from the voluntary revision sessions are precisely those students who got the poorest marks in the projects - and who prima facie need advice and guidance most if they are to perform well overall on the module.  They are also those with the poorest attendance record from the taught period of the module.

I could obviously 'chase' these students to try to encourage them to attend - although there have been a number of general e-mails addressed to the whole class, to which they failed to respond.  But I have split views at this point.  I have kept my side of the 'Our Commitment' statement that was agreed at Senate last session and which was distributed to all staff and students at the start of this acacdemic year, but they are not keeping their side of it by taking an active interest in their learning and making the most of the opportunities offered them.   So one part of me says 'leave them be: they will get their just desserts if they perform badly overall.'

But another part of me realises that if they do badly, have not developed real graduate skills, and end up finding it difficult to secure graduate level employment, that will then rebound on my department, and the wider university, in the employment statistics that will in future be highlighted for potential candidates to peruse prior to making their decisions on which university to commit to.  I'd be interested in others' views on this dilemma that I know is shared by other teaching staff in other departments and in other universities.

One 'benefit' of the post-2012 fees regime may be that students will be more motivated to achieve their full potential in the light of their furture required graduate contributions.  But then the disengaged students of the future could take the view that they are never going to reach the earnings threshold to start making their graduate contribution and thus remain coasting.

Views please!

I was struck by a point made by a colleague at the meeting this morning of the Doctoral Research and Development Committee (which oversees postgraduate training and postdoctoral career development).  Apparently a survey has shown that over 80% of new postgraduate research students express the aim to become university lecturers.

Something I have always done with my postgraduate students is to try to broaden their horizons. I have sent them on courses on enterprise, even when they were reluctant to do so. I have tried to interest them in applying for posts in the civil service. I have sought to extend their interests and research experience well beyond the actual thesis topic they are working on. Such a high proportion of PhD students aiming for an academic career seems unfortunate to me.  The demographics of the situation suggest that many will not achieve that ambition and will then possibly feel a failure. There are many areas of life where the analytical and other skills of a well-rounded PhD graduate are of great importance.  And there are very substantial research careers to be pursued outside academia.

In addition the Council for Industry in Higher Education recently produced a report in which many employers indicated that they found a lot of PhD graduates to be less immediately employable than those entering with undergraduate or taught postgraduate qualifications. They had become too narrowly focused on their research topic, unwilling to see the bigger picture, too motivated by their own interests and not prepared to prioritise the needs of their employer. I guess many of these PhD employees are those who failed to get into academic careers and are therefroe somewhat de-motivated.

When I was mid career a colleague from another university once asked how many PhD students I had supervised to completion, and how many had lectureships.  When I gave a number greater than one for the second question he said 'you can stop PhD supervision now - you've more than replaced yourself in academia and ensured continuity in your subject'.  I have ignored his advice.

But the point made at the meeting this morning led me to muse on the outcomes of my research students, of whom there have now been around 25. Less than half have gone into university posts (some now at senior levels, including a Professor working in a Japanese university), and some that did so with enthusiasm later decided that such a career was not for them.  But amongst the others there have been some very worthwhile cases of research skills and knowledge being turned into very varied careers - the Company Secretary of the biggest baby goods firm in Germany, a genetic counsellor, an organiser of home education, a consultant to one of the Directorates-General of the European Union, a senior civil servant in the Department of Education, as well as someone who now runs her own catering business.

With the increased emphasis on skills training for research students, and the introduction of employment awareness from the start of their period of registration, I hope future PhDs will see much broader possibilities opening out for them, in more varied fields, than those in the survey reported this morning.

There has been a flurry of activity today involving Radio Sheffield and the Sheffield Telegraph wanting to get hold of a speech I made last Thursday, and to interview me about it.  Unfortunately I have been involved in meetings almost all day, as well as revision sessions for my students, so I've not yet been able to oblige with the interviews.

Degree ceremony speeches are normally fairly anodyne, but I decided that on Thursday I would go in quite hard when I presided at the 0930 ceremony for a group of Social Sciences departments.  Back in October 2010 I wrote in this blog that I abhorred the idea, voiced in the Browne Review, that there is less public than private benefit from the study of the social sciences (and the arts and humanities). I pointed out that it is likely that, in future, there will be no direct public funding for the study of the social sciences at universities in this country.  I used that as the basis for a call to newly graduating social scientists (all from postgraduate taught programmes or from PhDs) to defend the subjects they had been studying and to bear witness that society needs their expertise.  In doing this I was going against some of the traditions of the occasion, but the speech was greeted with prolonged applause and afterwards a large number of colleagues, university officers (including the 'lay officers' from Council) and others told me that they felt that what I had said needed saying and that the forum had been the right one.

Sir Peter Middleton, the University Chancellor, had phoned in early on Thursday morning to say that he was unwell.  So I found myself presiding at the 12 noon ceremony again, unscheduled, and used variants of the same speech once again.

It was, perhaps, a 'risk' to use a public occasion in this way.  But I firmly believe that as educators we have a duty to put a number of important issues in front of the public at the moment.  It isn't just the elimination of direct public funding for the social sciences and the arts and humanities that needs to be publicly understood. It's also the elimination (from this summer) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance for 16-19 year olds from poorer backgrounds in schools and colleges.  It's the ending of AimHigher funding which has been crucial in creating integrated programmes of awareness and aspiration raising amongst young people, using universities collaboratively with education providers for all younger ages. It's the proposals on the tightening of border controls to the UK that threaten to reduce the numbers of overseas students we can recruit and thus weaken the international diversity of our campus.  It's the introduction of a completely new student support system at a time when government has cancelled all public information budgets such that the levels of misunderstanding among many crucial groups (schools, parents, futrue students) are frightening.

There are huge changes afoot in education, at all levels, across England.  (Note: I exclude Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland here.  They will witness their own changes, but in varied ways.  'Education UK' is not a brand that could have any coherence.)  We in the sector need to take whatever opportunities we have to get that understood and talked about.

In my last post, which should have been the last of all, I asked for feedback.  To date 35 readers have provided that (the line is still open so if anyone wants to add some views they still can).   I was seeking opinions as to whether I should call it a day, as planned, at the end of 2010, or whether people thought I should continue blogging through 2011 - and if so, what advice readers could give me as to what they found interesting.

I was a little disappointed, but not entirely surprised, that of the 35 survey respondents, 25 were in the professional services.  All the other 10 were in academic departments - with the most being in the International Faculty in Thessaloniki.  There were no respondents from the Faculties of Arts and Humanities, or Science.  Of course, this may or may not reflect the actual readership of the blogs.

There was unanimity on the question of whether I should call it a day - 34 of the 35 respondents wanted me to continue (and the 35th didn't answer the question at all).  I'm delighted, and humbled, that respondents have found my thoughts of interest.  Seventeen respondents added material to the free text section for overall comments, and those are very gratifying. An analysis shows the following (some people touched on several issues in their comments):
8 respondents valued the insight into the work of a PVC or someone from senior management (sometimes adding calls for others amongst my colleagues to take up blogging as well)
5 respondents have specifically valued the discussion of a very wide variety of topics
4 respondents particularly mentioned how they feel they have gained some insight into wider aspects of higher education beyond their own experience
5 of you liked the tone and style in which the blog was written
There were comments valuing the occasional debates that the blog has set off, but others who said they had not yet been brave enough to post anything as a discussion point themselves.
9 people explicitly asked me to carry on.
One comment I liked, because it encapsulated what I hoped I was achieving, ran as follows: "Informing, occasionally infuriating, all in all a very good read."
And as for the respondent who kindly suggested that an edited collection could be published - well, Mary Beard (Professor of Classics at Cambridge) has already done that.

So it looks as if I should continue to blog into 2011.  The issue now is what should be the timeframe and the subject matter.  You have given me advice on those issues.  Ten respondents felt that the 2010 pattern of a week's blogging per month should continue; 7 of you felt I should choose six days randomly through the month; 6 felt I should blog only when I have something of particular importance to say; but 10 made other suggestions - these actually generally saying it's up to me.  But one respondent hit on a crucial point in writing "I imagine that having a target helps you to be disciplined about it."  That was very true throughout 2010 - my end-of-the-day routine in blogging weeks was distinctive and that made it easy to keep it up. Reflecting on the process of producing a blog, I realise that 'having to do it' on particular days was what may have made the blog more interesting, since it encouraged me to write about a wider variety of issues. If I had only been writing about 'important' things I would not have covered the breadth of my role so fully.

So I have decided to be disciplined, but in a slightly different way from last year.  In 2011 I will endeavour to blog on 5 days each month.  But rather than these being consecutive I will, at the start of each month, identify five blogging days randomly and will mark my diary accordingly.  That should provide the discipline. (Because January is now half gone, I will actually blog for the next few days to polish off this month.)

And finally, what should I write about if, as often happens, I have a choice of things to mention on any one day?  Well, you seemed to like the variety last year, since 32 of the 34 of you who responded asked for variety once again.  Of the specific themes you called for, the rank order was as follows:
PVC life outside the university (Russell Group, HEFCE etc.)           11 mentions
My teaching                                                                                  7 mentions
Governance, committee work etc.                                                   6 mentions
My research                                                                                 5 mentions
Connections with the City of Sheffield                                              5 mentions
I will try to bear these preferences in mind.

Finally, two further points -
1. If you haven't already completed the survey in the last posting there's still time to do so.  Any further thoughts there would be welcomed.
2. Be brave in adding comments to the blog.  The more discussion we can get going the better.