It's great to end the week on a high - to go home uplifted by something rather than tired and in need of a gin-and-tonic and a restful weekend.

My last engagement of the week was to officiate at the closing session of the 'Global Engineering Challenge' event.  This has involved all first year engineering students working together, across all departments and with students from all over the world, on team projects to create solutions for the difficulties of daily living in the 'global south'.  It has brought together not just undergraduates but also postgraduate students to act as facilitators to the groups, plus acacdemic and support staff, plus recent engineering alumni, plus employers. This afternoon Mike Hounslow, PVC for Engineering, Rebecca Hughes, PVC International, and me have hosted the final sessions of the event in three different lecture theatres simultaneously (given the 900 or so students involved).  Tata Steel sponsored prizes for winning teams and senior figures from the company were there to make the awards, and to get the message across to the students that what employers so often are looking for are not just the disciplinary understanding but also the softer skills of experience of team work, communications skills, project management and the like.  And so many of these can be gained through extra-curricular activities just as much as through study.

We undertook a feedback evaluation of the week in the final session, which provided strong evidence that students had found the whole thing very stimulating.  A team of Journalism Studies students had made a documentary film about it and even the excellent rough cut they showed on screen demonstrated the enthusiasm of the engineering students as they went about their projects in groups of six.

Creating a real inclusive acacdemic community in a university of our size is not easy.  In big departments undergraduates, postgraduate taught students, postgraduate researchers, acacdemic staff, and support staff often don't mix.  I've often been surprised at how little my own final year undergraduate students understand of the wider portfolio of activities within their own department, with staff research activities often being a closed book to them.  And students quickly establish friendship groups and stick to them, rather than welcoming in the newcomers or those from very different backgrounds.  It seems to me that the Global Engineering Challenge activity should go a long way to establish a wide academic community across Engineering.  What I want to se now is whether the idea of mass group projects brining lots of stakeholders together can be reproduced successfully in other faculties.

So, a good end to the week.  Except that I came home in the recognition that I have 34 final year exam papers to mark over the weekend.  I need that Friday evening gin-and-tonic after all before getting down to them tomorow. 

Ever since the Browne Review was published in the autumn of 2010 there has been silence from the government on postgraduate education.  Browne was supposed to say something about it - it was in the brief - but nothing came other than a statement that the benfits of postgraduate taught programmes accrue more to the individuals that have taken them than to wider society.  I have tried to refute that suggestion in graduation speeches to postgraduate social scientists over the last two years - the idea that society does not benefit from having trained postgraduate social workers, town planners, teachers and economists is, to me, preposterous.

HEFCE has received no steer on postgraduate education, and as a result funding is already being progressively withdrawn.  The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has received no vision from the coalition government. 

But with the introduction of the new undergraduate fee regime in the autumn of 2012 the issue of who will take postgraduate professional training programmes from 2015 onwards will start to loom large.  Will students who graduate then be willing to take on an extra debt burden, particularly sicne there will be no maintenance support for them (as well as no fee support)?  My colleague Mary Stuart, Vice-Chancellor of Lincoln University, has pointed out at a HEFCE committee we both sit on that there is a danger that by the late years of this decade postgraduate taught programmes will be populated entirely by overseas students.  Where, then, will come the graduate entrants into key professions where a Masters degree or postgraduate diploma or certificate is essential?  Will we only see the wealthiest able to afford such training?  What of all the widening participation students we are supposed to be encouraging into our undergraduate programmes - will they be able to go on to take the courses that convert their undergraduate studies into a profession (such as the Legal Practice Course without which the Law graduate cannot get into practice as a solicitor)?  Assuming that research councils might still be funding postgraduate research places, where will the supply of students who have done the preliminary research training masters come from?

All these questions are on my mind because tomorrow I will take the train to London to attend a meeting that, at last, BIS has called to discuss the future of postgraduate education.  The attendees are a promising cross-section of major stakeholders in this area (plus me!) - the Chief Executive of HEFCE, the Presidents of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the British Academy, the head of the Council for Industry in Higher Education, the chief executives of each of the university mission groups, and so on.  But I don't hold out great hopes.  Clearly the coalition will not countenance any increased Treasury charge for supporting a different aspect of higher education.  That will mean that any support for postgraduate education would come at the expense of a reduction of support elsewhere - for instance a reduction in undergraduate students in order to reduce the student loan book.  It may be an interesting meeting in terms of the dynamics between different participants, but I will have to keep an open mind as to whether anything that chanegs the policy landscape comes out of it. 

I have spent some time today preparing background materials to have with me during a visit tomorrow from four colleagues from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) - the government ministry that ultimately operationalises English government policy on universities (note, not UK policy, since higher education is the responsibility also of the devolved administrations).  The lead visitor is the Director of Higher Education Policy, someone I have met before through Russell Group activities.  BIS was created only 5 or so years ago, before which university policy lay within the much wider remit of the Department for Education and Skills.  And in preparing for tomorrow's meeting, and having conversations with various colleagues about it, I was set to reflect again on the split that we now have in England between education up to the age of 18 and education beyond that age. 

That split at 18 is getting wider in many ways.  The divide in ministerial responsibility is symptomatic, in my view, of something much wider than civil service convenience.  At one time universities were primarily taken as contributing to education - which was seen as a good thing in its own right.  They belonged with other aspects of education starting at pre-school age.  Now universities are seen as contributing to economic drive and growth - and are therefroe placed alongside considerations of business development and workforce planning.  Where once the discussion in universities was dominated by questions of 'what should a graduate in .. (fill in a disciplinary name) ... know', discussions today take the form of 'what are employers looking for.' 

I don't deny that this more instrumental view of what a university education is about has great benefits - not least for graduates who should be more prepared to enter the labour market. 

But in looking forward to what our graduates will do in the future, we have in many cases stopped looking backwards to the education they have undergone before they arrive at university.  Just as BIS sometimes appears not to talk to the DfE (Department for Education), universities have lost many of their talking points with schools. Yes: we do outreach activity and seek to encourage more aspiration for a university education from those with deprived backgrounds.  But university staff are no longer centrally (or even peripherally) involved in the setting of school curricula; they no longer act as examiners for A level or other exams; careers whereby many university staff have at some period in their lives taught in schools are now long since gone. (Some of my older colleagues when I first started lecturing had had that experience.)

It has been suggested to me that a future meeting of the Russell Group Pro-Vice-Chancellors should invite a DfE official along in the effort to reconnect with government policy-making on schools: I think I shall put that idea to my PVC colleagues when we next get together in Birmingham in a copuple of months' time.

Ths morning, befroe going to attend degree ceremonies at 1200 and 1530, I conducted two 'revision tutorials' for my final year class.  I have had 36 students taking my module this semester but I last saw them on Friday 8 December, and all the teaching to that point had been in a small number of lectures and a large number of very diverse group exercises.  The 2 hour exam for the module (to add to the project for which one-third of the module marks are already in the bag) is not until 24 January - that means almost 7 weeks between the end of formal teaching and the exam.

A couple of years ago I decided to offer optional one hour tutorial slots during the early part of January, with no more than 4 students to sign up for each slot.  They would be in my room, and each would be built round the considreation of some past questions on aspects of the course.  Last year I offered students the chance to attend 2 such tutorials, but I had fewer students then.  This year I have had to limit it to a potential one tutorial each - and even then it has proved hard to squeeze nine tutorials into my schedule over a two week period.  So far I have held three.

I'm not sure who has been the greatest beneficiary.  The students who have been involved have all commented at the end that they feel more confident about how to approach the exam - in particular in terms of the balance between structrue and detail in exam essays, the necessity for supportive evidence, the desirablitity of considering alternative scenarios in answers asking for thinking on likely future developments, and a number of other points.

But I have been hugely stimulated by the discussions as well.  And I regret not doing more small group teaching - ideally tutorials.  My experience is that the questions and issues raised by undergraduate students often force me to rethink my own explanations for particular phenomena.  The students won't accept half-articulated assumptions and challenge my own ideas.  So today I have been rethinking with them various aspects of policies to combat social exclusion in European cities, 'ethnic cleansing' at the level of urban neighbourhoods and former Yugoslavia, and  Angela Merkel's views on the failure of multiculturalism in Germany.  In each case I think I have learned as much as the students.

A Happy New Year to regular readers.

When I first sat in exam boards at the university the commonest degree class outcome was a Lower Second.  Thirds were more common than firsts, and I remember years when my department awarded no firsts at all.  Of course, at that time there were no real specified criteria for exam marking.  This meant that students didn't really know what we were looking for - but I suspect that as also true of a number of the staff.  Over the years I came to have the strong suspicion that those staff who I knew did not themselves have first class degrees were extremely loath to award first class marks to any student - perhaps because to do so would be to accept that the student had out-perofmed the staff member concerned.

Today I looked at the recent figures for degree classification from this university.  In 2010 18% of students received a First, and 57% a 2-1 or Upper Second.  Only 23% got a Lower Second, and 2% a Third. I have excluded from this analysis those degree schools (such as Medicine) where degrees are not classified.  The majority of stduents now get an Upper Second.

Colleagues in Student services have recently alerted me to trhe growing numbers of past students who are contacting them asking to be given mroe detail of their position within the Upper Second - either a percentage or a class position.  There is a paradox in as much as many students strive for an Upper Second as the be-all-and-end-all of their existence, yet an Upper Second is such a coarse label that employers and others (including us as universities when we are considering candidates for postgradute work) regrad it as a very weak discriminator.

For a year or so a small group of universities, of which Sheffield is one, has been discsusing the merits of moving to an alternative means of recognising students' academic performance. We looked at the European Credit Transfer System, but we have alighted upon Grade Point Averages as the way to go.  These are standard practice in the USA, Canada and a number of other coutnries, and have recently been adopted by China.  I have actually taken over as the chair of the group from a colleague in another university who has just changed roles.  Although our original group involved seven institutions, many others want to join us.  The tide is starting to flow in a particular direction.

The only real problem that I can foresee here in Sheffield is that the standard means of implementing a GPA is via letter grades (A+, A, A- etc) or via their exact equivalent in a short numerical scale.  A number of other universities are rapidly moving that way.  Those with longer memories will recall that Sheffield did so in the 1990s - well befroe anyone else - and then retreated from our 16 point scale a few years later.  Opposition was led by certain disciplines whose colleageus in other universities now seem to be among the leading protagonists for such short marking scales. 

The debates here will, I am sure, be very interesting ones.  I'd welcome comments from those who remember the battles over the relative merits of the 16 and 100 point scales.