There is no Sunday evening blog to start off this week's set of reports - I was in London for a weekend of lesiure and took Monday off as well, driving back to arrive in Sheffield on Monday evening.

Last week was, of course, the week of A level results, and that took a lot of my time.  But what I want to comment on here is the panic that seems to be brought to the whole admissions scene in August each year by the irresponsibility, mis-reporting and general attitude of ther mass media.  The level of ignorance expressd by even the quality press is astonishing - so much so that I sometimes wonder whether they wilfully mis-represent things in order to suit their own agenda, knowing that what they are saying is actually wrong.  Inevitably it is a time of anxiety for candidates and their schools - as well as their parents - but much of the media seems to approach the period by trying to whip anxiety into hysteria.

It seems that there is litle that a university such as ours can do to please the media during this period.  If we insist on the highest admissions grades we are perceived as 'elitist' and insensitive to the circumstances of candidates from less-privileged backgrounds.  If we take note of widening participation circumstances and act accordingly to bring in some students from difficult family or educational backgrounds who have slightly under-performed in exams then we are labelled as being biased against the middle class.  This year there seems to me to have been a deliberate decision by several news media to hide the truth about the cap on home / EU student numbers.  Despite long explanations to journalists showing that there are two completely separate 'markets' for Home / EU students and for overseas students, we get stories about universities (we have been specifically mentioned in some reports) holding back on home students in favour of overseas students.  So are we supposed to turn away the income that home students bring - in other words both the HEFCE teaching income that comes for every student, and the deferred fee that students themselves pay?  What university would do that - deliberately turning away UK funding?

But it's all something of a storm in a teacup.  By later this week attention will have shifted away from A level results and university places to GCSE results.  But even then we are not immune - a newspaper request was passed on to me earlier today asking why we wanted students in one particular subject to have a certain number of GCSEs at a certain grade.