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.