I spent some time this afternoon in a very interesting discussion with the head of a department about the pros and cons of introducing a genuinely inter-disciplinary degree.  Indeed, the possibility we were talking about would in some way not be disciplinary at all, but would seek to encompass a broad range of approaches to knowledge, to the world around us, and to how to explore aspects of it and operate within it.

The catalyst for our discussion was knowledge of the introduction in 2012 by a world-leading London college of what they are now calling a BABSc in Arts and Sciences.  I find the idea very interesting.  The college see this as their top product, that will attract the very brightest students (including a significant number of international students) and that will produce graduates who enter the top-most careers.

It is the last of these expectations that probably causes many people to pause.  If students don't have a secure grounding in a single (or two) disciplines, why will employers be interested in them? This is where the disciplinary thinking that gives strength to many aspects of a university's work comes up against the reality of the post-graduation labour market. For the truth is that the majority of our students go into employment where the actual discipline they have studied is of little significance - it is the skills and competences they have picked up along the way that are more important. (There are, of course, key exceptions in areas such as Medicine and Architecture - but even in subjects such as Engineering significant numbers of students do not enter employment as engineers.)

Colleagues at the London college have stood disciplinary thinking on its head and have said to themselves 'what is it that would enable our students to be successful in competing for places on the Civil Service fast track entry scheme, or in the competitions for places in the European Union civil service, or in the graduate entry schemes for the biggest international corporations?'  The answers they have come up with include the ability to analyse an argument, the competence to handle statistical data, an understanding of the language and methods of science, an appreciation of ethics and of ethical behaviour, competence in a second langauge and the ability to operate in culturally different environments, experience in investigation and in teamwork, self-confidence and accuracy in self-presentation on paper and in person.  It is difficult to see how this range of attributes could be delivered within a Single or even a Dual Honours programme. And that is why the college has decided to create a completely new degree, with a new structure, to deliver this vision.

But exciting though I find this vision to be, my anxiety lies in whether students would be attracted to it - or perhaps I should say UK students.  School and college education in the UK narrows the horizons of young people by forcing them to 'drop' so many areas of study at too early an age. By the age of 16 almost all young adults have been forced by our system to drop languages, or Maths, or science, or the humanities, (or several of these) in order to focus on a tightly-bound set of subjects for their school-leaving examinations.  Growth in interest in the International Baccalaureate is certainly chipping away at such specialisation, and that is a good thing but so far on a relatively small scale.  The London college is requiring all entrants to its new degree to have A levels (or equivalents) involving both a science and an arts subject. Although I am keen on their new degree I would therefore not have been eligible for it on the basis of my own A levels of Geography, History, and Economics with the British Constitution (those were the days before there was a separate Politics A level, but aspects of political study were incorporated as a paper within Economics). I suspect that most of my scientific or engineering colleagues - with the common Maths, Physics, Chemistry combination, or Physics, Chemistry, Biology - would be equally barred from the programme.

So there are questions over the UK candidate market for such degrees - in terms of eligibility.  They go alongside doubts over the willingness to eschew disciplinarity to move to a much broader intellectual training.  But the college is imagining that its new degree will be its premier product, attracting international students.  I can foresee the success of that recruitment - of students from countries (such as Germany, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian states) where much more broadly-based school education maintains the study of up to 10 subjects (including sciences, arts, creative subjects, and languages) up to the age of 18 or 19. It would be ironic if the premier degree programme at one of the UK's leading universities ultimately becomes the springboard for international students to gain the attributes to enable them to out-compete UK graduates for the elite jobs in the UK and the wider labour market.

I will watch developments on this new programme with interest - and will also encourage colleagues in Sheffield to think about how we might respond to the thinking that has been going on at the other end of the East Midlands Trains route.

There will be again be only four blog posts next month as I'm having a few days' leave to attend a niece's wedding in Italy.  Blogging dates selected by random numbers will be: 6th, 23rd, 25th, and 27th.

Sources differ somewhat in the identification of the ten most-widely spoken languages in the world.  Definitional issues are important.  Should Hindi and Urdu be regarded as the same language?  Should we use figures for first-language speakers, or should we include those who speak a particular tongue as a second or third language?  The list below comes from a reasonably reliable web site (http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/most_spoken_languages.htm) but holds data that go back to 1999.  Nevertheless it will do for the purposes of my argument.  The top ten list on that site is as follows:
1. Mandarin Chinese and mutually comprehensible variants
2. Hindi
3. Spanish
4. English
5. Arabic
6. Bengali / Bangla
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German

I've recently challenged a number of people around the university to say how many languages we teach at Sheffield. None has yet got it r ight - most under-estimate by around 30%.  My count (including one or two that are offered as intensive courses) comes to 19 at the present time.  It includes every language in that top ten group with the two exceptions of Hindi and Bengali.  In this respect we are one of the very few universities in the UK that can truly claim to offer a near-comprehensive set of languages to our students. Yet this fact is one of the least known of our strengths.

(I suspect that some will be surprised at the absence of French from the list above - and at the fourth place held by English.  Both are important lingua franca, but have fewer native speakers - many fewer in the case of French - than the other languages above them in the table.)

As part of our proposal to students coming under the new fee regime in 2012 we want to offer them the chance to develop the skills needed to enter the global labour market.  Our employers on the Careers Advisory Board have coined the phrase 'cultural agility', by which they mean the flexibility of approach, attitude and cultural understanding to do business and work with people from very different global circumstances. One important way of developing those attributes is through learning a language. Our employers tell us that it doesn't really matter what language it is. But they want to know that a student is capable of developing at least a 'get by' knowledge of a different tongue, and that they have understood the ways in which people in different cultures may act and behave differently in common situations.

We need to have our future 'offer' of languages fully worked through by the middle of June so that when applicants for 2012 entry first come on campus, as they will do at the first open day, on June 18th, we have something exciting, comprehensive and important to tell them about. Today I have been briefing a colleague on the challenges of delivering that vision in the course of the next two months, and then of turning it into reality.  This is something I believe passionately in.  Ideally I would like all our Sheffield graduates to have some level of competence in a language other than their native tongue - but I am enough of a realist to recognise that I would find it very difficult to win a university-wide battle on that.  But I do want to raise the proportions of our students who engage with a foreign language at some point in their time with us - and who we then support in making their claim for competence to work wherever in the world there are jobs and opportunities.  And, to add a little idealism to this, being able to break the ice in a conversation with someone from another country is halfway to making them a friend and colleague rather than an enemey to be looked at with suspicion.  So if Sheffield really pursues its strnegths in languages I believe we will be doing our bit for global peace and understanding as well.

I spend quite a lot of time walking around the campus between meetings. Not having taken up residence in the Rotunda (the octagonal castelated building between Firth Hall and the Park), I meet a lot of people by going to see them rather than having them come to me. I do quite a lot of business in cafés - Coffee Revolution, City View Café and the Jessop West Café in particular. Walking between meetings and appointments gives me the chance to meet a whole variety of people, to pass the time of day, and to try to gauge the general mood around the place.  I've been in the University a long time now, and I know a lot of people to say hello to.  I know a lot of people's names, although there are others who I always speak to but whose departments or names are unknown to me. 

There are, in addition people who say hello to me but who I don't remember meeting before. Shortly after the start of the acacdemic year this happens quite a lot when students, particularly overseas students, say hello to me when they see me.  They recognise me because I have stood at the front of the Octagon Centre, or a lecture theatre, and tried to convey a warm welcome to the university to them. I take it that I have succeeded in conveying that warmth, when they choose to respond to me as I am crossing Tower Court or entering the Management School.

I try to learn the names of my students as quickly as I can - carrying the mug shot photographs of them all as first years to my third year class for the first few sessions until I am confident in bringing them in to discussion with a personal invitation.  It disappoints me when students sometimes claim that  no one other than their personal tutor knows their name.  The use of names and personal greetings is part of the lubrication of society - showing respect to people around us, and recognising that we are part of a shared experience.

But a couple of days ago I surprised a student by saying hello to him as I passed him. I was certain I knew him - had met him before - could probably even think of his name if I tried hard enough.  He looked at me as if to say 'I've never seen you before in my life' (although in relaity he must have sat through one of those welcome sessions at the start of the year a few sessions ago). I realised a little later who he was - and no, I had never met him before. It was just that his face was so familiar to me - as the captain of Sheffield's University Challenge team.

I was the first in my whole extended family, on both my father's and mother's sides, to go to university.  Although an only child, I had eight cousins.  None of the six older than me went to university - although one did meet a student who had come to study in her home town university and later married him. One of my two younger cousins did eventually go to university ten years after I did.  No one in my family could give me any advice about university or what I might do afterwards. I was most interested at school in History, but my father said that I should do Geography because if I did History the only possible career I could pursue was as a schoolteacher, whilst if I did Geography I could be a cartographer or a teacher.  My father was, at the time, working as a printer; my mother was a secretary.

How many young people today from my sort of background would have aimed for the university that I went to - Oxford?  When I arrived there I found others like myself - my best friend was a Tynesider from a council house whose father worked in a council office and whose mother had long-term helath problems. And we were not the only ones.  Oxford (and Cambridge) were arguably more socially inclusive then than now.

The key to my achieving a university place at all lies with a type of school that no longer exists.  We are used, now, to focusing on a simple binary divide between those who have attended state schools and those who have attended independent schools.  As any form of indicator of social background this is hugely misleading.  The Vice-Chancellor of one our two ancient English universities was telling me the other day how at his university there are students from low income backgrounds who attended independent schools with the support of bursaries offered by those schools - and who tended to be among the most gifted at such schools because they had succeeded in rigorous selection.

I attended a 'direct grant' school - as did my Tyneside friend and many others I met at university.  These were schools where a high proportion of pupils were funded by the local authority, with a minority of fee-payers. My school in innerl-west London had a 5-form entry, with all the scholarship boys in the top four streams and the fee-payers in the fifth and lowest.   One of the crucial characteristics of these schools was their wide geographical catchment.  Thus instead of recruiting entirely from a very limited range of local neighbourhoods, they draw from a very wide area - with many pupils making significant journeys to reach them.  Pupils at my school must have come from every borough of West London - and beyond into Surrey and possibly Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.  This gave them a wide social mix of pupils who had passed the 11-plus and the entrance test. Among my friends at school were the son of a police constable and the Chinese son of a small shopkeeper whose parents had arrived as refugees from Mao's China and whose mother still didn't speak English.  But there were also the son of the head-teacher of the secondary school that I would probably have gone to if I had not passed the exam for the direct grant school, and the son of a notable family of London estate agents.

The direct grant schools were a very significant agent of educational and social mobility (I choose the phrase deliberately in the wake of last week's government policy on this topic), providing a possible route into a very different world for those who attended them.  They were far from being educationally comprehensive - but they were socially comprehensive.  And they gave those from less privileged backgrounds the chance to be challenged to become something different.  They had ambition for us, even when our families didn't.

The direct grant system was abolished in the later 1970s, and I now find it strange that when I mention the name of my school most people assume that I was part of a fee-paying elite - since the school went independent and still retains that status. 

It seems to me that in current debates over the 'most able, least likely' groups and the attempts to widen participation in England's leading universities we are in some ways trying to put the clock back to the situation of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s when the direct grant schols provided a mechanism for doing exactly what we are trying to do today.  But now we're not quite sure how to achieve the same ends, with the means currently at our disposal.  I have today signed the University's submission to the Office of Fair Access (OFFA) of our Access Commitment - without agreement on which we will not be allowed to charge fees above £6000.  There's a circularity there, since I benefited from widening participation measures, of a rather different sort, when I was a schoolboy.