There has been a flurry of activity today involving Radio Sheffield and the Sheffield Telegraph wanting to get hold of a speech I made last Thursday, and to interview me about it.  Unfortunately I have been involved in meetings almost all day, as well as revision sessions for my students, so I've not yet been able to oblige with the interviews.

Degree ceremony speeches are normally fairly anodyne, but I decided that on Thursday I would go in quite hard when I presided at the 0930 ceremony for a group of Social Sciences departments.  Back in October 2010 I wrote in this blog that I abhorred the idea, voiced in the Browne Review, that there is less public than private benefit from the study of the social sciences (and the arts and humanities). I pointed out that it is likely that, in future, there will be no direct public funding for the study of the social sciences at universities in this country.  I used that as the basis for a call to newly graduating social scientists (all from postgraduate taught programmes or from PhDs) to defend the subjects they had been studying and to bear witness that society needs their expertise.  In doing this I was going against some of the traditions of the occasion, but the speech was greeted with prolonged applause and afterwards a large number of colleagues, university officers (including the 'lay officers' from Council) and others told me that they felt that what I had said needed saying and that the forum had been the right one.

Sir Peter Middleton, the University Chancellor, had phoned in early on Thursday morning to say that he was unwell.  So I found myself presiding at the 12 noon ceremony again, unscheduled, and used variants of the same speech once again.

It was, perhaps, a 'risk' to use a public occasion in this way.  But I firmly believe that as educators we have a duty to put a number of important issues in front of the public at the moment.  It isn't just the elimination of direct public funding for the social sciences and the arts and humanities that needs to be publicly understood. It's also the elimination (from this summer) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance for 16-19 year olds from poorer backgrounds in schools and colleges.  It's the ending of AimHigher funding which has been crucial in creating integrated programmes of awareness and aspiration raising amongst young people, using universities collaboratively with education providers for all younger ages. It's the proposals on the tightening of border controls to the UK that threaten to reduce the numbers of overseas students we can recruit and thus weaken the international diversity of our campus.  It's the introduction of a completely new student support system at a time when government has cancelled all public information budgets such that the levels of misunderstanding among many crucial groups (schools, parents, futrue students) are frightening.

There are huge changes afoot in education, at all levels, across England.  (Note: I exclude Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland here.  They will witness their own changes, but in varied ways.  'Education UK' is not a brand that could have any coherence.)  We in the sector need to take whatever opportunities we have to get that understood and talked about.