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.

Thursday 25th October 2012 - The pleasures of an urban geographer

Although most of my days are spent in university administration and other related roles, I am an urban geographer at heart.  This trait comes out most clearly when I find myself in London or some other major city (other than Sheffield - although the way that Sheffield works also interest me).  I yearn to understand how people live their lives in the city: what degrees of choice they have; how they are constrained by, for example, the housing market or the transport system.  And I am interested in how all the different ways of life of ordinary citizens add up to the vibrancy of city life - the daily and weekly rhythms of activity.

Whenever I have meetings or other events to attend in London I try to get a train that will give me a little time to get the feel of the streets - either by walking to my destination or my getting the bus.  Yesterday afternoon I arrived at St Pancras at 1730 for an event in St James's at 1830 and I took the bus as far as the Strand.  It did the journey in 15 minutes.  The traffic was light and there were relatively few passengers.   A 1730 bus journey in Sheffield would be a very different story - London and Sheffield work on different daily diaries, with many of those working in London being at their desks until well after Sheffielders have gone home.  And when I took the tube much later that evening to sleep on my daughter's sofa-bed in her north London flat I was in the midst of others who were just going home from work.  But unlike many in Sheffield who go home first and then go out for the evening, those surrounding me had been out for a drink or a meal on their way home.  London works in a different way from most other UK cities.  Some years ago I found that there were similar differences between the daily rhythms of Paris and of its suburbs.  I was writing a book on Paris and came across an unpublished government report that enabled me to represent diagrammatically the life of the whole metropolitan area throughout a 24 hour cycle.

People sometimes ask me which is my favourite European city.  London is in some ways the one I know best, having been partly brought up there.  But there are vast swathes of London that I hardly know (except from maps - and I prefer to get the feel of a city through the soles of my feet).  I do still get a buzz in observing the changing scene in London - revisiting neighbourhoods after a gap of a year or two and seeing how things have changed.  Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury in the city centre; Richmond and Camden in the outer and inner suburbs - these are areas that I enjoy being in.

But for places that really excite me with their atmosphere, and the challenge of trying to understand urban life in a different cultural context, some of the best for me are the following:
- Sitting in the Hackescher Hof at the centre of the former East Berlin, or in a cafe in Prenzlauer Berg, and reflecting on the changes in ways of life in the city since the fall of the wall;
- Shopping in the so-called 'Turkish Market' along the Landwehrkanal in Berlin on a Tuesday afternoon, and watching the interchange of ethnicities and the breaking down of many potential inter-community barriers;
- Sitting outside the Brasileira cafe in Lisbon or walking up the nearby side streets to the Carmo and looking at the relics of old Lisbon in a neighbourhood that has yet to feel the full force of gentrification;
- Returning from time to time to the estate known as the Quinta do Mocho ('Owl Farm') near the airport in Lisbon and watching the 'normalisation' of life in what was once probably the most ghetto-like ethnic minority neighbourhood in the whole of Europe (I can explain why if asked!);
- Strolling the avenues in le Vesinet in the western outer suburbs of Paris, and seeing how some of the traditions of French rural life permeate the French capital.

These are the experiences that have driven my academic curiosity.  I look forward to my next visit to London - in less than two weeks time.  

Thursday 18th October 2012 - Social mobility and widening participation

The publication of the latest Milburn Report on social mobility led to me being interviewed on Radio Sheffield once again today.  The Report seems to me to have two foci - one around the encouragement of young people from widening participation backgrounds to stay in education beyond the age of 16 and then to aspire to go to university, and the second around the difficulties for students from such backgrounds going on beyond their undergraduate studies to take postgraduate qualifications.  It was the former that the Radio Sheffield interviewer wanted to highlight, although it was the latter that I would have preferred to deal with on air.  I have become a cracked record in various places over a number of years with my view that we are doing few favours to students from impoversiehd backgrounds who arrive here with career goals that will inevitably involve a postgraduate qualification, and who then find that there is no support for them undertaking that - despite a relatively generous support package at undergraduate level.  That is not something that universities can fix: bursaries and other support for postgraduates are not 'countable' as part of our commitment to the Office for Fair Access.  I know that because we have tried it: four years ago when Martin Harris was the Director of OFFA, and again only a couple of weeks ago when the new Director, Les Ebdon, visited us.  The Vice-Chancellor recently was told, at an external event,  about the extent of this glass ceiling problem for widening participation students in one area: any such student wishing to become a barrister after taking a qualifying law degere will find that there are only 6 scholarships available nationally to do so.

The focus of today's interview was, as I have indicated, on support for 16 year olds.  Milburn has suggested that universities should pay bursaries to young people from low-participation neighbourhoods to enable them to stay in education until 18, and should work with them to improve attainment and aspiration.  I will leave on one side the fact that we do the latter already.  The former suggestion is nothing new.  Until this year the government paid Educational Maintenance Allowance to relevant young people: it has now withdrawn that and replaced it by a much less generous bursary scheme, distributed to schools to administer (at great cost to themselves), and in such a way that many schools have allocations that are greater than they can spend whilst schools in real areas of hardship have seen a massive cut in the funds available to their students.

We had a governors meeting last night at the sixth form college where I am a governor.  The principal of the college reported that she had been at meetings with other sixth form college heads where they had indicated that because they didn't have enough call on their bursary allocation they were using it to give merit awards to students with full attendance records, whilst in our college - with one of the most deprived catchment areas in England - potential claims from eligible students add up to over three times the available funds.

The withdrawal of EMA is a disastrous policy, but for the Milburn Report to suggest that the cost of replacing it should be borne by universities would be to try to paper over a crack in education policy that is widening by the month.  Actually, to speak about 'education policy' in relation to widening participation is probably a misnomer.  The withdrawal of EMA, the ending of the AimHigher project where universities, schools and colleges worked together to seek to raise aspiration and attainment, the ending of support for the 'Excellence Hubs' for gifted and talented children from widening participation backgrounds - all of these things suggest that there is now no real political drive to raise higher education participation for those who might, by some in power, be possibly labelled as 'plebs.'

Friday 12th October 2012 - Respect comes from more than titles

Last week one of the students on my final year option addressed me as 'sir'.  It was not in front of the class.  But I gently told him that I much prefer to be known as 'Paul'.  I've said that to many people around the University. It's now generally only the porters who call me something else - usually 'Prof' (which I confess I'm not keen on).  When I asked one of them why they wouldn't call me Paul he said that his supervisor had told him not to, as a mark of respect.

Some people feel that they can gain respect through the use of their title. My own feeling is that one should earn respect via what one does and how one does it rather than assuming it through the use of particular forms of address. I suppose it goes back to a protestant ethic of justification through works rather than through formulae.

Today I was reminded of that student last week because I had an e-mail exchange with a long-standing research colleague in Portugal.  I have known her for over 12 years, since she was a PhD student.  She is now a full lecturer.  We have worked on research projects together, attended conferences, edited materials for publication. Yet she wrote to me today as Dear Professor White.  I responded instantly by replying Dear Dra ..., using her formal title - and told her that she really ought to be addressing me as Paul.  Her response was 'It seems cheeky', but she did at least address the email Dear Paul.

A few years ago I was involved in a joint research project with a German professor.  We both had relatively junior colleagues working with us and supporting us.  Mine always referred to me as Paul: the junior German colleague gave her professor his full title. (Well, not quite: I've known German colleagues who have insisted on being introduced as Herr Doktor Professor ...)  When the two German colleagues visited Sheffield the German assistant confessed to my junior colleague that her professor had told her that she could address him by his first name here in the UK (because my assistant was on those terms with me) but she must never do so when they were back in Germany.

But perhaps in asking my Portuguese colleague to call me by my first name I am being culturally imperialist.  Perhaps I should accept how things are done in Portugal, and not expect her to adopt the 'English way'.  But when I go to visit my colleagues in Portugal I know that I could easily get the cultural niceties wrong.  Every meeting starts with a handshake for all the male participants and kisses on both cheeks for all the females.  Not to participate would seem stand-offish.  Perhaps we in England are more comfortable with establishing relationships via naming rather than by actual physical contact.