Thursday 29th November 2012 - Closing down opportunities for the average child

This evening I was at a committee meeting at the sixth form college where I am a governor.  The Principal and Vice-Principal were reporting that this year it is very difficult to motivate students to complete UCAS forms for university entry.  There is a total lack of motivation, particularly amongst working class boys: the students don't know what they want to do, seeing university as too risky and not for the likes of them. 

Yesterday evening I took part in a panel discussion, set up by our Students' Union, about the future of the NUS campaign for higher education.  During the course of the discussion I came to the conclusion that the country is currently in danger of throwing away many of the improvements in opportunity that have occurred across the whole education sector over the last 70 years.  The chronology goes like this:

1944 The Butler Education Act paving the way for secondary education for everyone.  This gave the chance for young people to stay at school longer and to receive genuinely secondary and not just elementary education.

1963 The Robbins Report which led to the expansion of higher education through the creation of a whole raft of new universities - Warwick, Essex, York, Sussex, Kent, Lancaster.  This significantly increased the opportunity to go to higher education.

1970s The move to create an integrated comprehensive school system in many parts of England.  This got rid of the old secondary modern schools and created the opportunity for young people to remain longer in an education system that could eventually lead to university or a variety of other career destinations.  This, of course, was an imperfect change since it was not implemented in many areas, and anyway the independent schools were untouched. Indeed, many former 'direct grant' schools educating bright but less well off pupils moved into the independent sector (as my old school did).

1992 The ending of the 'binary divide' between Polytechnics and Universities so that the vast majority of higher education students could rightly claim they had a university education - and with a degree that was awarded with pride by their new institutions once they gained degree awarding powers.

These minor revolutions all opened up opportunity for young people from backgrounds where, before the Butler Act, the norm would have been to leave elementary school at 14or 15 and go straight into employment with no higher level training.

What is happening today?

• The introduction of the English baccalaureate with a subject mix that many schools will find they are unable to deliver (where are they to get the languages teachers from, for example?) so that their students are disadvantaged in seeking to go further.
• The removal of schools from local authority control through conversions to academies (and the creation of free schools) which will result in parents with the best resources gettng choice for their children and the rest being left behind.
• 'A level' reform which seems likely to restrict  the numbers getting the best grades, therefore again limiting the 'middling' performers to lesser opportunities.
• The elimination of educational maintenance allowance reducing the likelihood of those from the poorest backgrounds staying on at school or college
• The new university fees structure, generally perceived as resulting in a massive 'debt' on graduation and thus reducing the likelihood of the risk averse from engaging at all.
• The entry into the higher education sector of unregulated new private providers who are already cherry-picking the cheapest and most vocational of course offerings and thus reducing the possibility of cross-subsidy between low and high cost provision in existing universities
• A fee repayment regime that can be altered by the stroke of a pen of a minister, without any recourse to parliament, such that the repayment terms could instantly be made less favourable
• An absence of any real plans for funding postgraduate education - so that even if a student from a poor background can get past all the new obstacles I've just listed they are likely to be held back from entering a chosen profession by the lack of a higher level qualification.

It seems as if many of the advances in school and university education over recent decades are today being undone. No wonder the young people at my sixth form college are disillusioned and reluctant to fill in UCAS forms. 

Thursday 22nd November 2012 - Convening an HEA network

Today I have come to the end of three and a half years as the co-convenor of the Higher Education Academy's network of Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching.  Some of these tasks seem to have very long names!  It has not been a very onerous responsibility, but it has been an interesting one.  Members of the network gather twice a year for an overnight meeting, generally in London. On the first evening there is a dinner with a speaker, and on the following day there are a series of discussions, presentations and workshops.  Sometimes special interest groups hold sessions and plan activities.

Because we normally get 50 or so participants we have been able to attract excellent after dinner speakers - Sir Alan Langlands (head of HEFCE), David Eastwood (VC of Birmingham who came to talk to us - along with civil service minders - while he was a member of the Browne Review), yesterday evening Les Ebdon, the new head of OFFA.  We have also organsied very interesting discussions.  My first meeting as co-chair had Phil Willis (chair of the parliamentary select committee that was making accusations about dumbing down), Colin Riordan (chair of a HEFCE sub-group looking into these accusations), and Anthony McLaran (the new head of the Quality Assurance Agency) all sharing a platform.

What has been my role?  Along with my co-convenor and colleageus from the Higher Education Academy, I have been involved in planning our meetings, identiofying speakers and themes, and then in chairing the actual events.  Convenor pairs have eben deliberately chosen from different parts of the sector.  Hence I have worked with PVC colleageus from Salford, Aston (a brief pairing because she went on to another job) and Sunderland.  At today's meeting my successor, from Bath, took over fully from me.  Notably, all these pairings have involved me and a female colleague. As I have noted before, among senior university posts it is the PVC L/T one that seems nationwide to be most gender-blind in appointment. 

Some  senior people here may wonder why I find it useful to attend meetings with colleagues from a wide diversity of universities - what do they share with the concerns of the Russell Group?  Aren't we very different, and isn't it enough just to talk to universities like us?  No.  And that's not just a 'no' from me: at today's meeting were colleagues from a number of Ruseell Group universities - UCL, Cardiff, Durham, Manchetser, Glasgow, Edinburgh.  In the past Bristol, Warwick and Kings College London have often been there.  Innovation and good practice in delivering excellent education to our students can come from many different sources.  I came away from today's meeting with good ideas and food for thought gleaned from Winchester, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield - as well as from Glasgow.  However divided into mission groups we may be (and that will, I am sure, be problematic for us all in the next comprehensive spending review), we have much more in common in teaching than some care to admit.

I have enjoyed my stint as co-convenor of the HEA network, and I will continue to try to go to its meetings even now that my term of office is over.

(Oh, and I should add that one of the provileges of office has been the chance to determine the invitees.  One of the stars of today's meeting was Tom Arnold - last year's Student Union President at Sheffield - talking about the role of the Students Union in strategic leadership of change in learning and teaching.)

Friday 16th November 2012 - Students' general knowledge

It is some years now since I had a set of personal tutees or took some of the general first or second year tutorials in my department (Geography).  In the days when I did so I used to find one of the most salutary things to do at the start of the year was to ask students what their earliest memory of a political or world event was.  The first observation from their answers was that I had generally forgotten when they were born, and assumed they were older than was in the fact the case,  The second observation was that it was surprising how recent many of their first political memories were - a remarkable number of students had no recollection of anything outside their own immediate experience until they were teenagers.  This always amazed me.  Perhaps I was brought up in a politicised household, but I have remember world events from before I was 10 (in a slightly garbled fashion, in some cases).  But the students I deal with are social scientists, and I would have expected them to have taken an early interest in the wider world.

For 13 years I took final year students to Berlin on a field class, starting in 1996.  At the start of that period almost all the students could remember the events of November 1989, but steadily that personal connection to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism diminished.  Today probably all my final year students were born in 1990 or 1991 - in other words when Germany was on the way to, or had already achieved, reunification.

Teaching 'contemporary' issues in Europe - which is what I do - it is tricky to identify what is 'contemporary' to my students.  I have been marking projects they have submitted which have required them, in the case of one of the questions they can choose, to compare two ex-communist countries in terms of the ways in which national identity has been (re)affirmed since democratisation.  Students can choose their own pairs of countries, and I have read some excellent discussions of the new geopolitical alignment of Estonia as opposed to Ukraine, or the fate of minority groups in the assertion of national identity in Romania as opposed to Bulgaria.  But I am often surprised at the mis-conceptions students hold about recent history.  A remarkable number seem to believe that all of Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and so on) was actually part of the Soviet Union.  Some seem to believe that the Czech Republic and Slovakia have always been separate states.  

In another one of the possible topics (on citizenship and racism) there is a different problem.  Despite my encouragement to get into internet sources, and a class exercise on major newspapers across the continent, many students stick with the academic literature. The result is that they neglect major recent speeches and events - such as Chancellor Angela Merkel's comments less than two years ago that in Germany multiculturalism has totally failed, or the deportation of gypsies from France to Romania.  These things are not yet reflected in journal articles.

So I have two related problems.  One is that many students are not aware of major past events within their own lifetimes.  The second is that they don't read the news media to keep up to date with issues - or if they do they don't see them as relevant to academic tasks.   Perhaps I need to do three things before I can successfully deliver my course on 'The Social Geography of Europe.'  Firstly I need to remind myself of the age of the students and what they might remember and know.   Secondly I need to find ways of filling in the gaps - which might lead to me teaching them contemporary history rather than contemporary geography.  And thirdly I need to get them to follow political and social events, and to take them on board in their understanding.  Context is everything in the social sciences, and without an appreciation of context we are lost.

Tuesday 6th November 2012 - Planning student seminars

This year I have 38 students taking my third year option module (entitled 'The Social Geography of Europe').  Earlier on in the semester there were a series of enquiry-based learning activities around a number of European data sets (the European Values Survey and some of the Eurostat databases), as well as analysis of newspaper coverage of various issues (we picked racism this year) from around the continent as whole. I also gave various short introductions to topics that students would work up for their projects (which are due in tomorrow), and to the seminars.

There are six seminars in the course and these take place in the second half of the semester.  At one time I would have baulked at running a seminar-based programme with 38 students, but I have found ways of doing so which enable all students to be fully engaged - principally by dividing the total student body into between 6 and 8 groups for each seminar, each with a separate task.  The groups are differently composed week by week, so that students get used to working with people they may not know well.  And at the start of the whole course I asked the students to undertake a brief psychological profile questionnaire so that I have some basis on which to identify who are the ideas people, who have technical expertise, who are likely to be the glue in a group, and who are the finishers.

I am ovbiously keen for the students to develop an understanding of major social issues across Europe today.  But I am also very keen for them to develop graduate skills.  Hence my desire to operate each of the six seminars in a different way. It is seminar 4 that is giving me pause for thought at the moment.

Seminar 1 was on the changes that have occurred in Central and Eastern European cities since the ending of communism.  This was a conventional session in which each of the 8 groups I had divided the students into made a 5 minute powerpoint presentation of their response to a particular question.  In class they then undertook a morphological analysis of the built environment in a selection of cities, using maps and photographs as well as new-found knowledge of the operation of processes such as privatisation of the housing market.  All the material they created has been 'sewn' together into one document that is now on the MOLE2 page for the module.

Seminar 2, this Friday, will be on the indigenous minority languages of Europe and their possible viability into the future.  Student groups each have a minority language situation to cover, acting as the 'inspectors' that periodically prepare reports for the Council of Europe on countries that have signed the Convention on the Protection of Indigenous Minorities.  (I was once involved in such an inspection myself, when I went to Russia as co-raporteur for an evaluation of Russia's policies to such minorities. It was at the time of the Chechen uprising, and my co-raporteur was the Hungarian deputy minister for gypsies. I can dine out on some of the stories of that meeting, if people ask me!)  The students have to use powerpoint, but as 'slide packs' rather than as slides which will ever be shown on screen.  Slide packs are now the commonest way for civil servants to prepare briefings for ministers (at least in the UK): they consist of a mixture of text and diagrams and do not need reading as continuous narrative.  The students will discuss their reports in groups in class and then suggest possible alterations to the European Convention, as well as action points for governments and for minority groups themselves.

Seminar 3 will be next week and is on the break-up of former Yugoslavia and the remaining unsettled issues.  The students are divided up into groups to role play the various factions involved - all the constituent groups of former Yugoslavia, plus some crucial external countries such as Greece and Bulgaria.  All the reading suggested before the seminar is of polemical and nationalistic web sites, and the seminar requires each national group to explain their viewpoint to an outside figure - this year the scenario is a presentation to newly-elected President Romney (although I do hope I'm wr...!).  Each group will be given 'their' flag and encouraged to play their role fully, down to heckling other speakers.  A colleague stands in as the President while I make notes on what they are saying and then comment on their performance and the key points at the end, using a presentation that I write as they speak.  Only after the session are they given an academic reading list on the topic.

That's all planned and in the bag.  But seminar 4 is giving me pause for thought. It's on the various national policies seeking social cohesion in European countries. Two years ago I got an alumna who worked for an urban planning consultancy to come along and told the students that they had to make a policy pitch to her. I also told them they had to act professionally and come dressed suitably for such an occasion.  It was the dress code and presenting to a real official that worried them - so much so that one poor student started her pitch and then rushed out to throw up.  I've not tried that approach since.  I've got until this Friday to decide how I want this year's seminar to run. I'd better go and get on with thinking about it. At least I've got seminars 5 and 6 already pretty well sorted out in my mind.