Tuesday, November 21, 2006
University funding and the schools crisis
In the Further Education Bill the Government wants to allow FE colleges to award degrees. It is all part and parcel of getting 50% of school leavers and those up to the age of 30 to become graduates.
Also announced today are moves by the Higher Education Funding Council to switch money to Universities who recruit students from "poor" backgrounds. Academics from the leading universities (represented by an umbrella organisation named "The Russell Group")have voiced concerns that they will be paid for accepting students who do not have the academic vigour to complete a degree course and so they will be penalised for recruiting students who have demonstrated the academic disciplines required of them who are not deemed to have come from a "poor" background.
I worked for one of the "new" universities in london for 4 years as their Facilities Manager. One would be forgiven for thinking that a university should be about research and teaching and maintaining academic standards. In the case of the university which emlpiyed me, you would be wrong. The mission statement had more to say about social engineering and influencing social change beyond any tangible link to its remit, demoigraphic, and catchment was striking. What else was striking was the cynicism with which it tried to encourage students with poor, or even no A Levels onto degree courses by one means or another and to try and keep them from dropping out by doing away with exams, allowing re-sit after re-sit of exams until a pass mark was achieved, and when all else failed allowing mitigating circumstances to be used to disregard failure and award degrees anyway. The single criteria for enrolment at this university is the ability to pay fees. It is a damning indictment of this policy that the drop-out rate of students who cannot cope at this University is exceptionally high. Not surprisingly it refuses each year to publish it's results for the Tmies league tables.
Under the proposed system the likes of UCL (and I will profess now that it my twice alma mater) would be penalised for recruiting the brightest and best students against the likes of the university I used to work for. Parents of teenagers applying to the better universities are rightly worried that their children will strugle to find places whilst lesser qualified, and consequently lesser able, peers are admitted. Universities are worried that they will have to water down course content in order for them to cope.
One result of this policy over the past few years is that schools now push less able students towards easier subjects that Universities are forced to expand in order to obtain funding to subsidise the harder, and thus less popular courses. Only this week Reading University has announced the closure of it's Physics Department because of falling student numbers. To the Universities it does not make viable economic sense to offer courses that are under-subscribed because funding is being targeted on a demographic that is being pushed towards A Levels in Combined Sciences rather than pure Physics because it is deemed to be easier to pass, and an inflated grade plus the "tick in the box" as being from a target social group will see you leap over those students from non-target schools with good A Levels gets the University more (much needed) cash from HEFCE's coffers.
Children from poorer backgrounds are not inherently less intelligent than those from better off backgrounds. What they do lack in comparison however is a decent school system that can nurture their talents so that they achieve their potential. If we are to provide genuine opportunity for all we need to ditch some idiotic fallacies that have driven education policy for the past 9 years:
1. Universities should be about academic excellence. Not as many as half of young people aged between 18-30 would derive any real benefit from a degree as the value of holding one is debased. The net result is that students are graduating thousands of pounds in debt and joining a graduate job market that is offering the asme jobs as they were to non-graduates 10 years before.
2. If the FE sector is to flourish it needs to offer a practical alternative to degrees that are attractive to employers and students alike. Giving them degree awarding powers and then creating another overseeing standards QUANGO as proposed in the FE Bill is not the answer.
3. Schools are the starting place for academic standards and should be given the flexibility to promote and encourage learning as opposed to meeting arbitrary targets. I wrote a few day ago about flexible catchments, and this is one of many changes needed to the way schools operate to give them the means to teach. It is interesting that many independant schools are ditchnig the A Levels as discredited and opting either for the international Baccalaureate or the new Cambridge "Pre-University" diploma.
It is a grave concern to me that school places, then, are at such a stretch in Milton Keynes. We welcome 13 new residents a day on average, and yet in spite of this 450 pupils are being educated in temporary accommodation, and the temporary accommodation at Oakgrove is now set to stay for another five years. Given that the Government are happy to set the expansion plan for Milton Keynes until 2031 but funding for schools only until 2008, I am concerned that our students will not be given anything like the best start in life that they should be getting. The failure of both the Lib Dem Council to get the school building programme in Olney on time and on cost as well as adding too little too late to school provision, and Government's short sightedness and focus on tomorrow's headlines has hampered the city's ability to meet the challenges of providing the first rate education our residents deserve.
Both Mark Lancaster and I believe that the city ought to have a dedicated undergraduate university. We have representation from de Montfort, Crafield, and the Open University, but neither Mark or I feel that they satisfy the demand. I am particularly interested in the approach of the University of Buckingham, the UK's only private undergraduate University. I think the model would translate well into MK. If it is to be successful though the Council ought to go beynod lobbying for it's creation, but pressing Government hard for a joined up schools policy to adress the deficiencies of 9 years of labour's social meddling and "class war" dressed up as policy.
Also announced today are moves by the Higher Education Funding Council to switch money to Universities who recruit students from "poor" backgrounds. Academics from the leading universities (represented by an umbrella organisation named "The Russell Group")have voiced concerns that they will be paid for accepting students who do not have the academic vigour to complete a degree course and so they will be penalised for recruiting students who have demonstrated the academic disciplines required of them who are not deemed to have come from a "poor" background.
I worked for one of the "new" universities in london for 4 years as their Facilities Manager. One would be forgiven for thinking that a university should be about research and teaching and maintaining academic standards. In the case of the university which emlpiyed me, you would be wrong. The mission statement had more to say about social engineering and influencing social change beyond any tangible link to its remit, demoigraphic, and catchment was striking. What else was striking was the cynicism with which it tried to encourage students with poor, or even no A Levels onto degree courses by one means or another and to try and keep them from dropping out by doing away with exams, allowing re-sit after re-sit of exams until a pass mark was achieved, and when all else failed allowing mitigating circumstances to be used to disregard failure and award degrees anyway. The single criteria for enrolment at this university is the ability to pay fees. It is a damning indictment of this policy that the drop-out rate of students who cannot cope at this University is exceptionally high. Not surprisingly it refuses each year to publish it's results for the Tmies league tables.
Under the proposed system the likes of UCL (and I will profess now that it my twice alma mater) would be penalised for recruiting the brightest and best students against the likes of the university I used to work for. Parents of teenagers applying to the better universities are rightly worried that their children will strugle to find places whilst lesser qualified, and consequently lesser able, peers are admitted. Universities are worried that they will have to water down course content in order for them to cope.
One result of this policy over the past few years is that schools now push less able students towards easier subjects that Universities are forced to expand in order to obtain funding to subsidise the harder, and thus less popular courses. Only this week Reading University has announced the closure of it's Physics Department because of falling student numbers. To the Universities it does not make viable economic sense to offer courses that are under-subscribed because funding is being targeted on a demographic that is being pushed towards A Levels in Combined Sciences rather than pure Physics because it is deemed to be easier to pass, and an inflated grade plus the "tick in the box" as being from a target social group will see you leap over those students from non-target schools with good A Levels gets the University more (much needed) cash from HEFCE's coffers.
Children from poorer backgrounds are not inherently less intelligent than those from better off backgrounds. What they do lack in comparison however is a decent school system that can nurture their talents so that they achieve their potential. If we are to provide genuine opportunity for all we need to ditch some idiotic fallacies that have driven education policy for the past 9 years:
1. Universities should be about academic excellence. Not as many as half of young people aged between 18-30 would derive any real benefit from a degree as the value of holding one is debased. The net result is that students are graduating thousands of pounds in debt and joining a graduate job market that is offering the asme jobs as they were to non-graduates 10 years before.
2. If the FE sector is to flourish it needs to offer a practical alternative to degrees that are attractive to employers and students alike. Giving them degree awarding powers and then creating another overseeing standards QUANGO as proposed in the FE Bill is not the answer.
3. Schools are the starting place for academic standards and should be given the flexibility to promote and encourage learning as opposed to meeting arbitrary targets. I wrote a few day ago about flexible catchments, and this is one of many changes needed to the way schools operate to give them the means to teach. It is interesting that many independant schools are ditchnig the A Levels as discredited and opting either for the international Baccalaureate or the new Cambridge "Pre-University" diploma.
It is a grave concern to me that school places, then, are at such a stretch in Milton Keynes. We welcome 13 new residents a day on average, and yet in spite of this 450 pupils are being educated in temporary accommodation, and the temporary accommodation at Oakgrove is now set to stay for another five years. Given that the Government are happy to set the expansion plan for Milton Keynes until 2031 but funding for schools only until 2008, I am concerned that our students will not be given anything like the best start in life that they should be getting. The failure of both the Lib Dem Council to get the school building programme in Olney on time and on cost as well as adding too little too late to school provision, and Government's short sightedness and focus on tomorrow's headlines has hampered the city's ability to meet the challenges of providing the first rate education our residents deserve.
Both Mark Lancaster and I believe that the city ought to have a dedicated undergraduate university. We have representation from de Montfort, Crafield, and the Open University, but neither Mark or I feel that they satisfy the demand. I am particularly interested in the approach of the University of Buckingham, the UK's only private undergraduate University. I think the model would translate well into MK. If it is to be successful though the Council ought to go beynod lobbying for it's creation, but pressing Government hard for a joined up schools policy to adress the deficiencies of 9 years of labour's social meddling and "class war" dressed up as policy.
# posted by Sherington Tory @ 12:18 PM 
