Being Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching provides experiences that range from the biggest strategic picture of what the University does, or should be doing, down to the most minute circumstances surrounding individual students. The latter role is probably unknown to the vast majority of people around the university.  Yet it is a role that takes up a good deal of time and requires attention to detail.   It is a Pro-Vice-Chancellor alone that has the authority to sign special regulations to allow students to do something that is against the general regulatory structure of the university.  But it is also the Pro-Vice-Chancellor who is the final port of call within the University for any complaint or grievance that a student wishes to make against us: if the PVC turns the student down they then have the option of taking their case to the 'Office of the Independent Adjudicator' (or ombudsman for higher education).  The PVC for Research and Innovation normally handles all such ad hominem issues surrounding research students and I deal with them for students on taught programmes.  I seem to have dealt with a significant number of 'Case Review' requests (as they are called) in the last couple of weeks.  They include one where the student concerned had involved a solicitor (this is becoming increasingly common) and the paperwork was about 6 cm in height off the desk.  This all has to be read very carefully.

Certain general patterns emerge from a reading of these requests, and one in particular is very common - and very unfortunate.  The generic argument runs like this: "I never did very well in exams and was criticised for not structuring my work properly but I never got any help for it.  Just before my final exams I had a dyslexia test and that showed that I was dyslexic.  But I didn't tell anyone.  I got a 2-2, and I think if allowance was made for my dyslexia I should have got a 2-1."  A variant on this is: "I felt ill throughout my final year but I never sent in any medical notes.  In addition shortly before my second year exams my grandmother (who brought me up) died and I had to go home to be with my family instead of doing my revision.  I didn't do very well in those exams, but I never told anyone about my grandmother.  I think I deserve a 2-2 but when the degree results were announced I got a 3rd.  I've now asked my department to take into account the circumstances that affected my second year performance, and I've given them medical notes for my third year - but they've refused to take them into account and raise my degree class."

We try to make it as clear as possible that students should inform the university and their department of any circumstances that may affect their performance in assessments.  Yet it is remarkable how many students do not do so - until after the assessments have been completed, marked, and the final degree class awarded.    The external examiners have gone home, sometimes the degere ceremony has been held, and then the student claims they have been subject to an injustice.  Unfortunately it is generally them that have done an injustice to themselves by not taking advantage of the help that we can provide, or informing their department of significant mitigating circumstances.  When we know of these issues we can try to level the playing field as much as possible - we can provide support for dyslexic students, extra time in exams for those who suffer panic attacks, we can arrange counselling and many other measures. We can note distressing personal circumstances in confidential records and use them in exam boards to mitigate poor performance in the semester that has been so affected.  But we can only do these things if we know in advance.  And something that is humbling is seeing the lengths to which many colleagues go to assist individual students through personal difficulties - often without any recognition from around them since they are dealing with matters confidentially.

I have great sympathy for many of the students whose cases end on my desk, but ultimately there is little that I can do for a lot of them. Turning the clock back is something that is rarely possible.  But the student who actually wants to set aside the results they have obtained and wants to take their assessments again with support is relatively rare: more of the cases that reach me are asking for us to raise their marks - sometimes well above the levels they ever actually achieved - on the basis that they would have done better but for ...

But each case has to be read and considered in detail.  And some are very difficult and take some agonising over.  Student Services provide expert advice, but never try to lead my decision.  As a university we generally get these 'right'.  In very few cases that go on to the ombudsman are we criticised for being unjust.

I have concerns about the response rate for this year's National Student Survey - and I'm not alone.  The survey runs for several weeks, and every few days we receive a file from the polling organisation showing how we are getting on towards the overall target of 50% response at institutional level and for each individual department.  We achieved around 65% last session, although a couple of substantial departments didn't reach that level and didn't appear in the published results.  This year we are running a little behind the rates of response achieved week by week last year, and we are therefore under greater threat of not reaching the threshold.

Why does this matter?  Firstly it matters because we genuinely want to know what our graduating students think of their time here - whether their feelings are positive or not.  How can we work to improve the student experience unless we know the areas where they think we are deficient?  Fortunately there are not many of those across the university, although there is variability between departments.

Secondly, appearing in the various league tables that are derived from the NSS results - and in the Unistats web site that all candidates are invited to interrogate through the UCAS site - is important to keep our visibility high.  Now that UCAS applications are dealt with entirely on-line, the fact that a particular department might not appear in the Unistats database might lead applicants to believe that we do not offer that subject.

So today I had a meeting with the Student Union's Education Officer and with the head of Marketing - as well as the Head of Learning and Teaching Services - to plan how we can collectively campaign to encourage students to complete the survey before the deadline of the end of April.  I sent out a general e-mail to all heads of department near the start of the NSS period.  Now we are moving towards targeting particular departments - completion rates at the moment vary from around 20% to over 75%, and there may be something we can learn from departments producing the high response levels.

Sheffield overall has done well in the survey in recent years, holding a pretty consistent position at around 3rd within the Russell Group (last year exceeded only by Cambridge and Glashow - although Oxford failed to reach the 50% threshold and therefore was not included in the data results).  This is an enviable position to be in: hence my anxiety to ensure that we appear in the tables once again this year.

In my blog post for 22 January I mentioned that I am currently acting as a 'mentor' in the Senior Academic Women's Mentor Scheme currently being run by our department for Human Resources.  It is disappointing that we need such a scheme at all, but I am delighted to be part of it.  It is just over 50 years since the frist female professor was appointed in this university (Aileen Guilding in Biblical Studies in 1959).  A little later Alice Garnett (in my own department, Geography) became the second female professor and went on to become the first female Dean of a Faculty.  There have been relatively few since - among them Ankie Hoogvelt in Social Sciences, Pam Enderby in Medicine, Margaret Llewellyn in Law.   I would like to be corrected, but I don't think there was ever a female Dean in the Faculties of Engineering or of Pure Science: I'm not sure about Arts, but again I think not.

Micheline Beaulieu became the first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor, in 2005, and it was she who became the first woman ever to preside over degree ceremonies and confer degrees - 100 years after the University received its royal charter.  Micheline had been head of department (in Information Studies) and was very keen to help other women to advance to senior positions within the university. Today I believe we have a greater number of female heads of departments than we have ever had before - and across all Faculties (with the exception of Engineering where I don't think there has ever been a female head). Within the professional services, women have held a number of the top positions - as heads of Student Services, Accommodation and Campus Services, as Academic Secretary, as Director of Human Resources, and as Director of CiCS.

But is a matter of regret to me, and I know to many others too, that our current University Executive Board has no women from an academic background as members, and we currently have no female PVCs.  We are unusual in this respect.  When I go to meetings of the Russell Group Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching (as I shall next week) I am within a group that is half male and half female.  Until recently both the PVC for research and the PVC for learning and teaching at Leeds were women - one from French and one from English.  I have close research connections in both Portugal and France, and when I attend senior meetings at the University of Lisbon women are often in the majority - indeed my main contact there is a female Pro-Rector. I have sometimes been the only male in the room at meetings in the Sorbonne.

But the data that Human Resoucres produces after each promotions round demonstrate that when they come forward for promotion women have an equal chance of success to men.  However therein may lie an issue - is it that women are more hesitant about coming forward?   Are women acacdemics less willing to take a risk than men in aiming for top jobs?  I don't know the answers, but it is because I am keen to explore what can be done in this area that I have taken on three senior women as mentees for the whole of 2010 (in fact, three and a half since I am sharing one with another PVC).

I mention all this today because one of my mentees (I prefer to think of them as colleagues - partly because the original Mentor, to Telemachus in the Odyssey, was in my perception a very old and grizzled man) has been 'shadowing' me today to learn more of what I do; of how various University committees run; of what the corporate-level discussion points currently are - and to start the process of deciding what her longer-term ambitions might be.  Mentoring is actually a two way process, because I have learned a lot from her (as I also have from my other female colleagues in the scheme) through the questions she has asked and the observations she has made.  

A number of policy pronouncements from Whitehall and other areas of government over the last few months have exhorted the sector to develop more 'flexible' degree programme provision.  Among the means of programme delivery that have been mentioned are more Foundation Degrees; more part-time degree programmes - both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels; 2 year accelerated degrees (with a third semester of teaching during the summer); distance learning provision (at undergraduate and postgraduate levels); and more cumulation of CPD experiences to build to a degree award of some kind.

One further area that has seen a lot of rhetoric in the last couple of years has been around 'employer engagement' with what to me are often naive statements about how employers are queuing up to work with universities on new degree programmes tailored to their needs - and with the employers paying a significant proportion of the costs of provision.  I shall dismiss these straightaway.  As a university we already work very closely with employers in a whole variety of areas - principally (but not exclusively) in the NHS.  But I have not seen a shred of evidence that there are hordes of employers out there wanting to push money our way to create degree programmes for them.

Today we had a discussion at UEB around the other possible types of flexible provision, based around a paper that was provided by colleagues from Planning and Governance Services and Learning and Teaching Services. We already offer a number of alternatives to the standard 3 / 4 year full-time undergraduate degree; but the question is whether we should take a strategic decision to create more.  One problem is cost.  The start up costs for a distance learning programme can be very high: one organisation with which I am associated has just budgeted over a quarter of a million pounds to develop an online Masters programme - with no certainty that it will attract students.  It is widely acknowledged that the costs of teaching two part-time students amount to more than teachjing one full-timer.   Foundation Degrees have recently seen the withdrawal of the special support from the Higher Education Funding Council that they have hitherto enjoyed.

I have argued in a number of arenas (for example in radio interviews) that teaching accelerated two-year degrees would be inappropriate for us.  The concept behind them is very much of the classroom and didactic teaching.  That is not in the ethos of Sheffield as a research-led university seeking to equip our students as lifelong learners who are able to learn for themselves in a critical manner through their engagement with inquiry-based learning and their participation in research projects and other self-motivated and self-defined learning tasks. In addition there is the crucial reputational issue that two year degrees would not receive recognition under the Bologna Process.  As we aspire to be seen as an international university, I do not believe we should be offering a qualification that is not portable into wider labour markets than that of the UK alone.

There are areas where we could bring in new means of acquiring an award - particularly through the accumulation of CPD activities, and through part-time routes within Masters programmes.  But I doubt that there is much scope for us in pursuing any of the other avenues.

Yet I am conscious that this leaves us open to adverse comments about all those lecture rooms, laboratories and design studios that stand empty for nearly half the year. Isn't this a gross waste of expensive resources?  One project I will watch with interest is aiming to bring Japanese students to Sheffield to undertake 'summer schools'.  If those are successful maybe we can expand such activities in the future, extending the reach of the university and generating new busibess.

Today I have had the unusual pleasure of taking part in a 'management' meeting that relates very closely to one of my own areas of research expertise.  Over the years I have written extensively on international migration, and indeed my first book was on that topic.  I have also acted as an adviser to the Home Office and to the Department of Health.  Today I saw a different facet to the topic when I was one of a small group of PVCs from the Russell Group who met the current Conservative party spokesman on immigration, Damian Green M.P., to discsus how current government policies are affecting the recruitment of international students, and to sound Green out on whether his party would bring in major changes to regulations if they are elected to office on 6 May.  We met in Portcullis House on the Victoria Embankment in London.

The introduction of the new points-based system by the UK Borders Agency has been beset by significant misunderstandings of universities' activities by the Agency.  It was always likely that this would happen.  I was having breakfast on an early-morning train to London about 18 months ago when the woman sitting next to me revealed that she worked for the Home Office and was one of the team bringing in the new system, and needed advice from universities about it.  I'm not sure that enough advice was received - or if it was it wasn't listened to.  There have certainly been some recent improvements, but what concerned our small group of PVCs today was the reputation that the UK is quickly acquiring abroad of not offering a welcome to overseas stduents. Instead of being regarded as important business and educational opportunities for us, and for the internationalisation of life in our universities, the operation of the regulations on visas has created the impression that the UK regards all applicants as suspicious.  Green listened carefully to our arguments, and was obviously well briefed on key aspects of the topic.  Whether he actually takes on the immigration portfolio in May, if the Conservatives form the next administration, remains to be seen.  He has held the shadow brief for several years now.  Possibly he understands it too well to be asked to take it on in government - or is that a too cynical notion of the fit of expertise to portfolios in the chpice of ministers?

Another blog week is coming up so here is a quick round up of things since the week in February.

Inevitably quite a lot of nervous energy over the last month has been expended waiting for HEFCE's funding letter for 2010-11 - the details of which we received ten days ago but which could only be released more widely on Thursday 18th.  The outcome for Sheffield is actually a little better than we had forecast - effectively a  level cash settlement (which in reality means a reduction in income because of inflation).  The trouble is that there will almost certainly be other bad news to come - in the forthcoming budget, and in a probable further emergency budget in July after the general election (which will probably add further cuts to the other £600 million across the sector that has already been announced but not yet allocated).  This is a very difficult period to plan through, especially when the Browne report on student funding looks now as if it could well come out in July of this year and hearld further changes to the funding regime.

I will add one other reflection on the last few weeks - relating to the University's connections to schools and colleges.  Since my last blog entry I have:
- had two meetings with a new colleague we have appointed to link this university more strategically with Sheffield City Council over raising the educational performance of young people in the city and increase participation in higher education
- had a meeting with two senior colleagues from the umbrella bodies that represent independent schools
- attended an 'awards evening' at the local college where I am a governor - a college that according to certain indicators has the third most deprived catchment area in England
- had a number of discussions about what we should be aiming for in terms of the composition of our student body.

There are very complex issues here.  Amongst English Russell Group universities it is only Sheffield and Liverpool that substantially exceed the benchmark for state school entries handed down to us by HEFCE.  We can take pride in the very successful widening participation actions we have taken, which have contributed to a significant increase in young people from local areas coming to university who would never previously have thought about it.  At the local awards evening it was reported that 500 young people from the college have now progressed to either Sheffield Hallam or the University of Sheffield in the 6 years since the college opened.

But the fact that we exceed our benchmark for state schools could be looked at another way - that we under-recruit from the independent sector.  I would actually like to see better recruitment from such schools for three reasons:
1. We want to educate the most able students with the greatest potential - wherever they are from and whatever their background.
2. There are certain disciplinary areas where a high proportion of those taking the relevant A levels are in independent schools - for example in parts of the sciences and in languages.  A couple of years ago it was reported that over half of all young people studying for A levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry were in the independent sector.
3. A more complex reason is that I believe that we can benefit all our students by taking them out of their 'comfort zones' and exposing them to interactions with people who come from backgrounds they have not previously encountered.  One of the most significant here is to encourage contact between UK and international students - and it distresses me how often I see UK students holding back from making such connections.  A few more students from independent school backgrounds would, I think, reduce the perception of differences that some of our students hold. One of my students recently went to an assessment centre and was clearly fazed by meeting, for the first time in his life, people from independent schools: it seems he immediately felt to be at a disadvantage - no doubt because of his own deep-seated prejudices (but possibly also through theirs).  A few more independent school students here might help to change that - and add yet greater diversity to our student population, for the benefit of all.

I recognise that these views may be controversial: I await comments!