This will be a short entry because it's close to midnight and I've only just got back from London where I attended a meeting of the Universities Parliamentary Group taking place in a House of Lords Committee Room at 6 p.m.  Why I wanted to be there was because the subject was the National Student Survey and one of the speakers was Janet Beer, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes and the person who is currently chairing a review of the Survey and of the Teaching Quality Information dataset that makes strong use of it.  I wanted to hear the thinking of the review group. The other two speakers were Lord Young - the Minister for Students - and the President of the Students' Union at the University of Warwick (which is famous as being very lukewarm in support for the NSS).

In her brief presentation, interrupted by various parliamentarians going off to take part in a division, Janet raised the spectre of additional questions being posed in the survey on the topic of whether students were satisfied with the number of contact hours.  I think she was teasing her audience, because in the later discsussion she, the other principal speakers, and the audience (VCs, PVCs, MPs and peers) all spoke strongly against contact hours as having any validity.  This echoes the findings of a HEFCE sub-committee I served on recently, chaired by Geof Crossick, the Warden of Goldsmiths College London, which was tasked with looking at the costs of sustaining excellence in teaching in English universities.  We similarly came to the conclusion that simple measures such as staff-student ratios or contact hours mean very little on their own.  I was therefore heartened by Janet Beer's views.

The issue that many people in the room felt was the crucial one for students was the responsiveness of staff, rather than contact hours: the question of whether staff are willing to deal with student queries, to provide supportive comments on progress, and to give advice on progression and careers.

Another point of interest was hearing Lord Young indicate that the government pays a great deal of attention to the views of the National Student Forum - possibly moreso than the results of the National Student Survey.  The Forum is something we know about, but honestly have not paid a great deal of attention to in Sheffield.

Gatherings such as this are useful networking opportunities to share with colleageus from other universities how we are all dealing with issues we share. Tonight I therefore chatted with colleagues from Bradford, Derby and the University of East London, as well as having a longer catch up with Eric Thomas, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, who I had last seen when we shared a taxi from a hotel out to Beijing Airport three yearss ago.  Eric used to be on the staff at Sheffield, in Medicine, and was recounting the way everyone stood to attention when the Vice-Chancellor of the day (Geoffrey Sims) visited his department.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay to dinner after the meeting, as I have an 0830 appoitnment tomorrow morning - hence the late train home.