The publication of the NSS results is causing some annoyance this year.  The survey team is not making them available on the schedule origianlly published, and data on inter-institution comparisons has been running particularly late. In addition certain findings have been released to the press prior to universities themselves having access to the data - which puts us all in a difficult position if we are asked to provide comments.

However, we do now know that Sheffield contineus to perform well overall within the Russell Group.  Last year our overall satisfaction score put us third in the group after Cambridge and Glasgow.  In 2009 Oxford students did not apparently know how to fill in the survey, so Oxford did not appear in the institutional tables because its response rate was too low.  This year Oxford students have done better and that university now appears in the tables - where it takes top place for overall satisfaction within the Russell Group.  That pushes us into 4th place, with Cambridge and Glasgow still in front of us: but Warwick has now moved into a joint position with us. Our overall satisfaction score stays at 89%: I have suggested a target to Unviersity Council of 90% for the future.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about assessment and feedback scores, and we (along with other Russell Group universities) still lie in the lower half of the table on that particular set of indicators.  Sheffield's overall score on assessment and feedback has risen by only 1%.  To some that may mean that the debate during session 2009-10 (most notably in Senate) has not been accompanied by any improvement.

But if we compare scores for 2009 with those for 2010 there are some very interesting changes.  In the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health, where there has been a concerted attempt to improve feedback to students, every department has seen an improvement in their score - by 14% in the case of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science.  In Physical Geography (in the Faculty of Social Sciences) the level of satisfaction with assessment and feedback rose by 16% in one year following the introduction of new procedures to allow students to see their marked examination scripts - procedures which have brought little extra burden to acacdemic staff but which have clearly been strongly welcomed by students. Law, with one of the highest staff-student ratios in the university, has similarly seen a 6% rise in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback.  In the Faculty of Engineering four of the six departments for which we have comparative data recorded an increase in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback - in one case (Mechanical Engineering) by 10%.

So, there are these good news stories around the university - and yet our institutional score for assessment and feedback has scarcely shifted.  I will spare departmental names where there have been steep falls in results, but at Faculty level the improvement in half the departments in Social Sciences is matched by declines in the other half.  Whilst some Arts and Humanities departments have seen significant improvements (for instance, Germanic Studies with a 17% rise) others have seen a decline.  But it is in the Faculty of Science where there has been almost universal decline in student satisfaction with assessment and feedback.

University results are dependent on performance in individual departments.  We have seen this is previous years: in 2008 Sheffield would have been 4 places higher in the national (not the Russell Group) league table were it not for the performance of two large departments that brought us down.  A task for me and the Faculties over the next year will be to try to spread the improvement in assessment and feedback practices that is now apparent in some areas of the university so that it covers the whole institution.

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.

I am cheating slightly here. Instead of writing this on Friday I am doing so two days late.  On Friday evening I had a function to go to, associated with the end of graduation week, and I spent Saturday on a family visit to London.  I thought the slight delay might be useful in letting my enthusiasm go down, but in reality it hasn't done so.  I know what follows may seem rather pious and sentimental - but I make no apology for it: I mean what I say.

The end of graduation week leads me to reflect each year on how incredibly lucky I have been to spend my working life in a good university with outstanding students.  In what other job does one spend one's time amongst young people who are keen to learn, who are idealistic about improving the world around them, who are keen to stretch themselves, who have ambition, and who are ready to respond to opportunities?  Yes, I know that as tutors we often have to spend too long on the few troublesome and difficult cases.  But the majority of students fit the description I have just given.

Often we know little of their 'back stories' - of how they got here. And often even the best tutors don't know all that their students do within our unviersity community or in the city of Sheffield.   During the week I have attended 11 degree ceremonies and among those I presided at three as well as reading the names out at one.  When I preside at a ceremony I always ask the Events Team to mark up my script with those who have obtained first class degrees. If the time permits, I always have an extra word with them, and I also always stop and talk to those who have won prizes.  Very often there are students who come across the stage to shake my hand who I have also previously met in other contexts - at widening participation events where they have been acting as student ambassadors providing role models to school children; at Sheffield Volunteering showcase evenings where they have talked about their work with brain-damaged or mentally ill people in the community; at events for international students; or at business competitions in the Enterprise Zone.  Heads of Department and others sometimes indicate students who merit an extra word or two.

I think some of these students that I stop are surprised to find that I am thanking them for their contribution to the life of the university or the city of Sheffield.  But I genuinely feel that while the students are grateful to us, there is often a lot of gratitude owing to them for the ways in which they have entered so fully into the wider non-academic aspects of life as a student.

I have now attended 10 degree ceremonies this week, two as president, one as presenter (on behalf of City College, Thessaloniki) and the others as a spectator on the front row.  The student composition varies hugely between ceremonies - some with larghe numbers of overseas students present, others with none; some with a majority of women, others with a majority of men.

This morning I presided at the ceremony at which, among other groups, the modern linguists graduated.  Something I observed is that we are starting to see a number of UK students from ethnic minority background studying modern European languages.  I find this very interesting, because it contrasts with certain other Arts and Humanities or Social Sciences disciplines.  The very first ceremony this week involved History students, and I don't believe there was a single graduand from a visible ethnic minority.  Similarly on Tuesday I presided at the ceremony for students from East Asian Studies, Sociological Studies and Geography. There was a tiny smattering of non-white faces in Sociology but, I think, only two in Geography.

Why do certain subjects which have a global reach (for example History and Geography) not attract students from ethnic minority backgrounds?  I would be interested to know what the position is at other universities.  I know there is a strong tradition of research and teaching in Black History - is it that students from ethnic minority backgrounds choose to go only to departments with this as a strength?  Is that something that we should be concerned about?  Is geography still seen as an imperialist subject by black and other ethnic minority students?  I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think they are worth posing.  I would welcome comments added to this post.

As a university we are very proud of our diversity.  But in reality at departmental level it sometimes does not show itself.  This year we did see the graduation of some male speech therapists, but I remember years in which that has been an all-female department.  The number of male nurses is small.  Males are still in a significant majority in all the Engineering departments, although the numbers of females seem to me to be rising.  If you want to find a British Asian student look at Dentistry where there are particular concentrations.

Widening participation is generally viewed in terms of the attempt to draw more students from socio-economic groups and neighbourhoods that do not normally send students to university (and I have blogged earlier this week about looked after children).  But perhaps in some departments there are other dimensions relating to the diversity of students that ought to move up the agenda.

When the Bologna process started there were considerable fears in the UK that many features of our university system would not survive the harmonisation process.  The last 3-4 years have been interesting in showing that it has been countries on the European mainland that have taken steps to move towards the UK structures, rather than the other way round.  I have been called on in the past to give advice to two German universities to give advice on how to introduce bachelors degrees in my own subject.  (One of those universities actually decided that it was too difficult to do so and closed down the department instead!)  Today I spent an hour on the phone answering questions posed to me by a colleague in a French university, about how governance structures work here.

My whole acacdemic career has been based on the undertaking of comparative studies.  I know how difficult they can be.  The funding of French universities is very different from ours - there is no intermediate agency like the Higher Education Funding Council between the ministry and institutions.  There is therefore no role for a body like the University Council here.  That is very different in other coutnries: in the Netherlands, for example, the University Chair is as important as the Rector Magnificus (the equivalent of our Vice-Chancellor).

The French system is interesting beacuse it is very difficult for a university like ouirs to strike up alliances with individual institutions there.  A result of the 1968 unrest was the breaking up of many universities into separate fragments - often consisting of a single faculty.  I have recently examined PhDs in both the Paris universities with significant Geography departments (Paris I and Paris VII). Other Paris universities exist for Law, or for Medicine, with no other subject represented. Were Sheffield to want to strike up a strategic partnership with a Parisian institution we would be limited to a very small part of our own wide portfolio.  Therefore it was interesting today to hear from my French colleague that in the city where his university is situated there is now a vision to re-merge the three universities that were split from one after 1968.  That would make an institution that would look much more like ours, or like universities in Germany, the Netherlands or Portugal (other countries that I have had close connections with). 

I am convinced that we need to create much stronger international connections for our university.  Changes throughout Europe are making that much easier for us by adapting structures.  Where the gap now lies is in many embedded cultural attitides within our own coutnry.  Theyt might be harder to tackle.

Sometimes it's the small steps that are the most significant.  One of the things I am most proud of that we have achieved over the last few years has affected only a tiny number of students, but I think we really have changed people's lives.

Young people in care have been the group with probably the second lowest rate of progression to higher education in the UK, after gypsies.  When we first looked into the numbers here in Sheffield we were able to identify only two students from such a background. The frequent moving between foster carers, disruption of schooling, a lack of role models and many other factors lay behind this statistic.

Today, as a result of a campaign that has brought many different people together, we know of 17 such students from care backgrounds in the university.  I know that today one of them crossed the stage and became a graduate - well on the way to a future life in a significant profession.  I take immense pleasure in that.

I will confess that I became interested in the issues affecting care leavers for a very personal reason.  My younger daughter, who at the time worked for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, was asked to play a leading role in producing the green paper 'Care Matters'  that led to awakened awareness of the plight of young people in care.  Her discussion of going round Britain listening to the stories of children in care affected me greatly, and I recognised from her researches how higher education was effectively a closed-off world to such young people.  I then supported colleagues in Student Services and in the Admissions and Outreach team (now relocated within Student Services as well) to develop a programme of support, and we did so in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam.  Academic colleagues in certain departments have enthusiastically joined in.

The organisation that evaluates university measures to help care leavers is called the Frank Buttle Trust.  When they visited us a couple of months ago to look at our programme they described our efforts and structures as 'exemplary.'  That's another source of pleasure for us.  But the real payback is to watch a young person from a care background cross the stage as a graduate, thanks to this university's efforts: that's really 'making a difference.'

The new main entrance to the Union of Students was opened over the weekend ready for this week's degree ceremonies.  I found myself trying to direct certain parents and supporters around it today, despite the fact that I didn't fully recognise where I was myself.  Some of the Union Officers, past and present, were around and they are clearly wowed by the building.  It is an absolutely splendid entrance to what we know is the best Union of Students in a UK university.

I hope, however, that it won't be seen as 'sour grapes' to say that there are few acacdemic buildings that have such an impressive atrium and entrance.  Of course, I know that the footfall of students in the Union is many times greater than in any academic building - even in Jessop West or in the Mappin Complex -  but sometimes we perhaps put a little too much emphasis on the quality of the Union.  Our prospectuses sometimes appear to be selling the Union as much as the selling the acacdemic experience of the university.  That is something that has changed in the last couple of years, but there is a danger that we make the sort of claim that was once made for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London - "nice café with a reasonable museum attached." In our case it could be "fantastic Union with some quite good academic departments to go to as well".

The trick in getting this right lies in our marketing as an institution.  And part of that will depend on each academic department putting forward clear statements, addressed to candidates and students, about the excitement and value of studying their discipline.  What I would really like to see is acacdemic departments all providing the sort of 'wow' factor introduction to the studying side of university life that the new Union entrance gives to the social, cultural, entertainment, campaigning and support side of the student experience.  In my view not all do at present, although some do it very well.