Crib sheet
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Life at the sharp end of researchWith scientific accuracy Dan Meyer warms up the audience: “First I have to deal with my gag reflex, then flip my epiglottis, put my pharynx and gullet in one line and nudge my heart a little to the left.” Then he slowly lowers a 50cm steel sword down his [...]
Staff are being patronised and put through hoops
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Ty Goddard is startlingly outspoken for a man who regularly enters the lairs of protocol-driven Whitehall mandarins. Maybe years of pushing through radical change in a series of public and voluntary sector jobs has made him too impatient to bother tiptoeing around fragile civil-service egos. Maybe he’s always called a badly made spade a botched [...]
Higher education at a price
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Your student years are supposed to be the best years of your life, yet more graduates are leaving university not just with a degree but with a high degree of debt. Recent findings from Lloyds TSB show that students who started at university in 2006 can expect to owe nearly %26pound;17,500 by the time they [...]
David Dabydeen The loosetongued ambassador
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Professor David Dabydeen writes fiction and poetry between midnight and four in the morning, sustained by cigarettes and occasional slurps of red wine. Teaching is for the afternoon and early evening. “Going to his lair in the Warwick humanities building is not unlike visiting a rum shop, but without the rum,” says his friend John [...]
Hundreds of qualifications for teenagers likely to go in vocational diploma reforms
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Ministers have unveiled plans for a largescale cull of qualifications taken by thousands of teenagers every year, to make way for the new vocational diploma.The “spaghetti soup” of 6,500 qualifications currently on offer to teenagers will be streamlined by a new vetting body with powers to assess qualifications and decide whether they should be funded [...]
College voices
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I found it difficult to concentrate at school. Most of the teachers were boring. I misbehaved a lot. Outside, I hung around with the wrong crowd, the kind of guys who’d been dealing drugs since the age of 11.I was 16 when I discovered slam poetry - competitive poetry, which is all about good writing, [...]
Just the job for learning
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“Employer engagement” - or getting employers to foot more of the bill for higher education - is the policy catchphrase of the moment, and one the government is pushing.Professor David Eastwood, chief executive of the England funding council, Hefce, announced %26pound;105m to back it up in February, telling the Conference of Northern Universities it was [...]
Clash of cultures
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When Keele lecturers demonstrate outside their council meeting on Thursday for the second time this year - this time swelled by lecturers from other universities - it will be about much more than saving the jobs of their colleagues.University proposals mean that 38 of the 67 academic staff at the School of Economic and Management [...]
Army offers bursaries to boost recruitment
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The British army is to introduce a bursary scheme for thousands of school leavers in an effort to boost recruitment and raise the calibre of candidates, the Guardian has learned. The scheme, which mirrors the American model where many join up to acquire qualifications, will offer %26pound;1,000 to those who sign up but first wish [...]
Arts education described as vital: State work force needs creativity
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Wisconsin needs to cultivate an innovative, entrepreneurial work force, and arts education is the key, Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton said Friday.
A new task force on arts and creativity, co-chaired by Lawton and state schools Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster, plans to survey arts offerings in Wisconsin schools, hold public hearings around the state, and issue a list [...]
