higher education

As many will know, I rarely write about work related issues on here. It's probably generally a good idea not to associate one's employer with my diverse and eclectic other opinions. And, since I am also a governor of the university, I don't want to put myself in the position of making any indiscretions, perhaps where I am in receipt of privileged information.

However tonight's an exception. And be warned, that this post is going to be a real monster - for which I make no apology.

Last week a planning application for a key part of Oxford Brookes University's redevelopment of its campus at Gipsy Lane in Oxford was refused, having been "called in" to full council after it had been approved by the City Council's Strategic Development Control Committee on the recommendation of planning officers. Coincidentally (or not, as one actually suspects) news went round of a meeting of local residents' groups in East Oxford and the Headington area which, in its own publicity was:

"intended to be constructive by bringing together the communities from Headington and East Oxford ,their elected representatives and Brookes University and start a community debate about ways how to restrain the presence of Brookes University in East Oxford."

Well, with such a neutral (not!) intention (I understand that university management were not, in fact, specifically invited, which itself does not bode well for "constructive" debate) this was clearly an event not to be missed, even if I was only going to sit and listen. Now, one would not characterize the meeting as "heated" since most of the people there were of a similar opinion - that Brookes has to be "restrained" in the area, and those of us not of that opinion seemed collectively to decide that discretion was the better part and so on...

But the main impression I got was that, whilst there were some good arguments, quite a lot of the people with the most to say were not, shall we say, in quite the fullest possession of the facts. That is not entirely their fault in many cases (though I suspect some of invincible ignorance because I've heard them previously) - the university cannot always disclose information that might be commercially sensitive to a public audience, and some aspects, such as "what constitutes a student" in counting student numbers, are and have always been, open to some interpretation - a former registrar at the university would always say, if someone asked him "how many students do we have", "well, it depends what you call a student" and indeed, with Brookes in particular with its many modes of delivery through partnerships and so on, it is a tricky question.

But I will try and address the issues I remember from the meeting as best I can, and without disclosing any confidentialities, because this is crucial to countering the campaigners' initial contention - that Brookes needs to be "restrained".

So first, student numbers. One speaker produced figures that purported to show that Oxford University has about 11,000 students and Oxford Brookes around 18,000. He stated that these were taken from publicly available sources. And indeed they are, however it was completely disingenuous of him to make a comparison between those two figures. Brookes does have just over 18,000 students enrolled. But this figure includes everyone - postgraduates, people studying for Brookes qualifications overseas or at partner colleges, part time students, people away in any one year on year out "sandwich" courses, mature students living at home and so on. The equivalent figure for Oxford University is just over 20,000 (pdf).

Brookes has in fact, just over 12,500 full time higher education students enrolled (at all levels, and including "sandwich" courses whose students will be away from Oxford for a year in their course) compared to Oxford's nearly 19,000. Of these 12,500 full time HE students, some 7,000 are based at campuses within the city with the remainder based at other campuses or at partner colleges some way from Oxford. Of these totals, some 3,700 are accommodated in halls of residence or a few (this point was raised, and overplayed I feel) leased houses - 3,500 or so really are in halls, not houses; about the same again, 3,700 and some, live at the family home; leaving a total of 4,700 and change who do not live either at home nor in university accommodation, and 1,300 or so of these live outside Oxford. So just over 3,400 occupy what might otherwise be "family homes" within Oxford of those who "do not pay council tax" (i.e. full-time students): just over 2% of the city's term time population and just under 3% of its non-student population.

Now, it is true, as Green councillor Craig Simmons pointed out that this 3,400 is a higher number than either the university would like, and more importantly than what the university had agreed to get the number down to by this year. However we do have another 400 student rooms in halls of residence coming onstream within the next 18 months, with another 370 or so expected shortly after provided within the city by a private provider. On top of that Brookes themselves are redeveloping both Harcourt and, if planning permission is forthcoming, Wheatley to a higher capacity still. 3,400 is, however, lower than the number in private accommodation when the agreement with the City Council was made in the Local Plan process seven years ago, and, contrary to one claim in the meeting, we have increased halls provision by over 800 bedrooms since that agreement.

So, first conclusion: even if there has been a small increase in the overall number of students, the number "living out" within the city has still fallen in absolute terms, and will continue to do so as new halls come onstream, whatever the perception amongst the local communities.

Second, the "New Student Centre Building" in context. Whilst it was ostensibly the planning application for a new building on the site of a previous very tatty 1950s building at the Gipsy Lane campus that sparked this more general outcry at "Brookes's expansion" and the need to "restrain" the university, it was markedly absent from much of the discussion at the meeting. One might, from the inside perspective, suggest that this is because the arguments are in fact inconvenient for the "anti-Brookes" campaign.

Yes, it is a big building. But it does not mark an expansion in the overall floor space at Gipsy Lane - which was one of the grounds for Green councillors at least trying to prevent it getting planning consent. The widely consulted upon "Master Plan", approved by the City Council over a year ago now, makes it quite clear that this building is the key to reducing overall the floor space and the number of buildings on the Gipsy Lane site. At the moment, because of the age and history of some of the buildings, they are actually pretty badly utilized - in terms of how much of the time any particular room or building is in use for education. The provision of this new building, designed with much more flexible spaces, and more suitable for contemporary teaching and learning activities means that at the end of the Master Plan process, there will in fact be a net reduction of over 30% of built floor space on the Gipsy Lane campus compared with what is there now (i.e. after the loss of the 50s engineering building).

So, second conclusion: setting aside issues of design and neighbourliness, which, yes, are important, especially if you live immediately adjacent to it, on the issue which concerns the agitated community groups most - the perception of an ever expanding university - the present application represents not an expansion, but in fact phase one of an overall reduction in built space. This does not, I believe, give them an argument for refusal of the planning application on the grounds of not having met targets about the number of students "living out".

Now, third, and to my mind the most important issue here, and one in which I think we are in complete agreement, concerns where in Oxford those "living out" students actually live, and what effect they may have on those particular neighbourhoods and how best to mitigate those effects. Yes, it can be clearly seen that those who live out prefer to live out as close as they can to first, the main campuses and second, the parts of Oxford in which they want to spend the rest of their time - socializing, spending money in the local economy (estimates range up to £100 million on top of what the university itself contributes to the local economy) and so on.

What one can reasonably say is that, notwithstanding that the overall number living out is falling, they are getting, apparently inexorably, more concentrated in certain neighbourhoods - in particular within an overall area bounded by about Howard Street in the south-west, St Clement's in the west, Headley Way and the "New Marston" area in the north and parts of Headington in the east. And along with that concentration of where they live, goes all the changes that local communities are concerned about in regard to the "Inner" Cowley Rd in terms of the mix of businesses, concentration of nightlife that causes disturbances and so on.

Now, on this issue, I think it is worth emphasizing one crucial fact: family homes become HMOs and student lets only when an owner occupier decides to sell to someone who is going to rent the property out. It may be true that students are prepared to pay a premium for proximity to their places of study and socializing, but you cannot actually blame the university for the fact that householders in these areas have apparently been all too willing to surrender family homes, presumably at top whack prices, to landlords who have spotted and want to exploit this trend in the market. Such is the nature of the land and property market, whether the demand is from students, or a particular ethnic community, or proximity to a particular employer.

I also think this is key to achieving some of the concerned neighbours' wishes too. Instead of calling for the heavy hand of government to step in and create some arbitrary rules for avoiding what the community is calling, rather unkindly in my opinion, "student ghettoes", there is a perfectly good, voluntary mechanism for putting a stop to any further "studentification" and eventually clawing back some of the property for family owner-occupier use. And in particular, it is a mechanism that will test the real resolve of those communities to do something about it themselves, and demonstrate whether the campaigners are, in fact, representative of the more general opinion in their areas.

My proposal: these campaigners should approach every owner-occupier in their areas and ask them voluntarily to sign up to a restrictive covenant on their home such that they will not sell up to someone intending to rent the property out as a multi-occupancy or student let. If everyone does so, then it is a sure demonstration that the campaigners are representative, and that their own neighbours are willing to help, effectively financially (by foregoing any possible premium they may get from a prospective landlord over another owner-occupier), stop any further encroachment. If they are not willing to accept such a restriction, one can only conclude that, when it comes down to it, that local community favours that price premium over maintaining their community. In such a situation, why on earth should an unrepresentative minority then be able to call upon the heavy hand of government coercion to do the same thing by force or planning regulation? If new halls do release family-homes back into the owner-occupancy market, they to should be encouraged to adopt the covenant and so help those neighbourhoods claw back some of the lost ground.

But this also goes hand in hand with assisting the university itself to help them, by providing purpose built accommodation in areas where students will find it more attractive to choose halls than to choose private lets. There is much debate about this issue - will students ever be tempted into halls rather than the perceived "benefits" of living out? Here we do have a problem of image in Oxford. Because of the history of Brookes all its current halls of residence were built in order first and foremost to accommodate the first year students. We cannot actually demonstrate that halls can be more attractive than private housing for continuing year students because we do not, effectively, have any halls that offer the equivalent type of accommodation.

"First year halls" are geared around people who arrive for the first time, not knowing the city probably, and almost certainly not knowing enough others to decide on their own groups with whom to share accommodation. Rooms are licensed to individuals bundled together in "cluster flats" that preserve enough privacy for individuals who do not know each other, and more rules to make such ad hoc groups function in as civilized a way as possible.

Further halls developed with the aim of enticing continuing year students out of family housing therefore need to be geared to that market: they need to be in the right location so that they are at least as convenient as the private lets with which they are competing; they need to offer a better standard of accommodation; they need to be more directed at groups who have formed a circle of friends and who want to club together and share a flat or house as a quasi-household; and they need to be in sufficient quantity to enable them to compete on price with private lets, allowing for any difference in quality.

And, for those who remain skeptical I can tell you now that I have yet to visit a private let student house that offers as good a standard of accommodation as properly maintained halls of residence. Family homes were not built that way - someone will get a pokey little room, others the en-suite bathroom, some will share a tiny little communal space because a landlord has decided to fit as many bedrooms in as possible, and so on.

Our newest halls of residence are being built at densities in excess of 300 bedspaces per hectare, and yet each bed-sitting room is around 15 sq m (the minimum acceptable for letting purposes in a private house is just 6 sq m) with its own en-suite facilities, and all the little things like sufficient power sockets, TV, phone and internet points in every room, well maintained, if "institutional", furniture, enough communal space such that everyone in the flat can have a place at the same dining table, cupboards and fridge space to keep their own things in and so on. Many halls providers in the private sector now provide facilities such as gyms and even swimming pools to make them more attractive. And in those university towns and cities where they do have a higher number of hall spaces available, whether university provided or by the recently burgeoning commercial providers, they do not seem to have a problem filling them - else it would not be such a lucrative business to be in.

By contrast, I have seen some truly shocking private lets, they are at a density usually way below half of what we can fit in halls - basically landlords can get away with treating their student tenants like something out of the Young Ones - especially perhaps those in truly "family sized" homes which are unlikely to fall under any of the registration and inspection schemes any time soon.

But the real upshot is that if we can build sufficient halls, close into the main campuses and socializing areas of town, for every hectare's worth of halls, we can reduce the land used by student private lets by two or three times that amount. So it's no use everyone moaning about "studentification" of family housing neighbourhoods whilst at the same time selling to those very landlords they don't want to see, and most importantly, whilst trying to prevent, as far as possible, planning for the halls of residence that could and should replace the need for the use of those family homes.

I've gone on far too long here. But I want to address a couple of specific points that were raised at the meeting:

First, several times someone (with whom I have had a most unpleasant brush previously over a Brookes development in which she quite wrongly assumed I was merely a Brookes shill when on the Planning Committee) said that Brookes wanted to get rid of some of its halls - specifically mentioning Crescent Hall and Paul Kent Hall. The only reference to this the university has made is in its submission to the Core Strategy examination in public. And it is quite clear - impossible to misinterpret other than willfully. These halls are, de facto, further away from the campuses and socializing facilities than most students would, everything else being equal, prefer to live. They are therefore not contributing to any possible effect of getting students out of family homes more conveniently located. All the university has said is that if it can be allocated sufficient land in more attractive locations such that it could build as many bedspaces as in these two other halls, as well as its overall aim to have net more halls spaces, then it would be better to build in those better locations and release those sites into the market for mainstream housing land.

There is not now, never has been, and will not be any intention to reduce the overall number of hall spaces available to Brookes students by disposing of those two halls. It is simply a recognition of the facts of the property market and the desire of students to live closer to where they want to be,

Second, on disciplinary issues and taking some responsibility for inculcating a more communitarian spirit in our students, especially those who live out. Someone said that the university does not do anything to help turn what I think they called eighteen year old tear-aways, newly independent, away from home, wanting only to please themselves, into potentially good neighbours. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst I am sure there is more the university could do to make it easier, for example, for concerned neighbours to see that something is done about egregious cases of un-neighbourliness, the whole pastoral and disciplinary effort in halls in their first year is directed at trying to get our students to have consideration for others' needs.

We are assisted also in this by the police - my three local beat officers were in fact onsite when I returned from the meeting last night getting ready to go on rounds with the wardens to start that very process with this year's new intake to halls. This is the second year now of an initiative begun by our local neighbourhood officers and now spreading as good practice to university communities throughout the Thames Valley Police area.

The city council also assists - for example by helping us tailor our recycling system in halls so that it matches as much as possible what students living out will be expected to do. Again, this has only really been fully online for two years now, so should only really now be feeding through to those now living out. Hopefully neighbours will see some improvement.

And lastly - bravo if you have read this far - cars. Cars are big lumps of metal. They take up a lot of space, whether they are owned by students or other residents. With students in halls we can police the city's conditions that students do not bring or use a car in Oxford.

Now I know that neighbourhoods perceive this to be a big problem - that a student house could have four or more cars for example. That they notice when students are back because parking becomes impossible. But it is a simple fact: it is only a minority of students who can actually afford to keep a car. You only need one car per house in much of east Oxford to overload the available on-street parking. If so many of these student houses, as is implied, actually had a car per resident, the problem would be far, far greater than it is.

Many people want the university to make it a condition of study that students do not have a car in Oxford, whether or not they are in halls. I cannot concur with that. They are adults; if they have a car, they are paying for the roads. If it is a controlled parking zone they will have to pay for permits. Nowadays students almost inevitably have to work to support themselves, and for plenty that means work sufficiently far away from their place of residence to need a car - possibly even more so than people living in inner east Oxford and working in town or at the hospitals. If you are going to try and base the right to a permit on whether someone pays council tax, then you had better be prepared to ban anyone in receipt of council tax benefit from having a car as well.

The same woman as was misinformed about Crescent and Paul Kent Hall questioned why students can be given car permits at Wheatley and Harcourt. Well there are sound practical reasons - the only people at Harcourt for example who are eligible to apply for a parking permit are those education students who have to travel to school based teaching placements.

Phew - as I said, bravo if you have managed to get this far. I have to say that the whole tenor of that meeting was far too antagonistic toward Brookes, and many of the reasons for that seem to originate in misunderstandings, or, as in the case of owner-occupiers selling up to landlords, of the communities' own making. Brookes is committed to helping address these issues, whatever the origins of them. But the communities need to work with Brookes to achieve it. Taking the line, as in the advertisements for the meeting, that they wish to "restrain" Brookes, does not seem to me to be conducive to a "constructive debate".

And, since "dark threats" were being issued about the prospects for politicians who are not seen to back these neighbourhoods, I will also say that I for one will be taking a dim view of those politicians who take positions that work to the detriment of students as part of a wider agenda against the university amongst some of their more vocal constituents. Some last week voted, in my opinion, against the best interests of nearly a third of their electorate. It is, indeed, usually a silent third, but I for one will do what I can to get our students to have their say in this city. Whatever problems communities may have with particular examples of student neighbours, there is far too great a tendency in this city to lump them all together as the sole cause for all your distress. Any who go around trying to claim to be "student friendly" when it suits them, but most of the time siding against them on all manner of local issues, deserve to be exposed as cynical and somewhat unsophisticatedly so hypocrites.

"Education, education, education" the mantra went all those years ago. Nearly a generation of school-children have flown by. Billions and billions have been poured in to state education and supporting services to raise aspirations. And look what they've got...lower so called social mobility, a higher proportion of posh-schoolers taking up more and more of the professional and higher status and paid jobs and the university places to prepare them for it.

The trots are outraged. We must do more they say! More redistribution! Punish the wealthy more to pay for our failings they mean. Even so called liberals have been at it (he doesn't even want merit to play a part through selection in a free service it would appear). Even six-jobs Millburn's report "blames" those top professions for wanting only to take the best. Well I tell you what, when it comes time for my open heart surgery, I will want to be hacked up by the best, not someone who is there because they were put into some class-busting quota scheme.

Look, the state has had decades to get this right. Now it appears that despite the most sustained period of growth in "investment" in education it's all been proven a farce. You know, "investment" usually demands a return. Not this sort of let down.

It's time to privatize the school system. Completely. Clearly the state is utterly incompetent where it matters and only marginally better where they are "good" at it.

I've done the sums. One thing you may not know about me is that I am a closet educationalist. Having been through a private system that failed me academically but which gave me the best years of my life (and as a scholarship boy at that - my parents weren't wealthy) I've always wanted for everyone who could make use of such an experience to be able to do so.

I've done the sums. I could create a private school from scratch, building only the best in facilities, educational, recreational and residential, with tiny pupil teacher ratios (and paying teachers better too), charging top end public school fees for the most wealthy and taking only state level funding for the least well off and still have fully one third of the school effectively paying nothing and everyone else on a sliding scale. In fact, I could pay for half of it out of the annual budget for providing full time care places for difficult kids in the county.

I'm sure there are lots of people who have plotted their own ideas of alternatives to the child-farms we call state schools too. The problem is statists want to fail everyone at once or not at all. Your policies of no competition, no choice, centralized planning, all go into producing a one-size fits all system that is as reactive as the Exxon Valdez as it approaches the rocks when the course needs changing and now the leaks are showing.

Why do "we" ("the people") believe these schmucks when, like Tony Blair in 1997, they claim they can do something about all this to get our votes? Where is he today? Oh, that's right, the failure of his government has given him millions of pounds a year in consultancy and speech fees and possibly even the title and office of "President of the United States of Europe". The rewards of sin eh? Don't even pretend you care, Blair. This is what you politicians do - pretend you are uniquely qualified to bring happiness to everyone and from there you can only spectacularly fail. Morons. Don't pretend Brown gives a shit either - his policy of loose stool money in the early noughties has doubled the number of kids in temporary housing, priced out of your bubble boom and big bust economy.

Screw the lot of you. Leave. Now. Don't come back from your obscene fucking (some of you no doubt literally) vacations. Leave real people to create real wealth; allow real people to work for whatever they can get and with their dignity intact seek to better themselves in one of the many innovative different choices that will spring up in a revitalized education market. Don't patronize them with quotas to plaster over your screw-ups.

God, I'm angry. And sad. Sad for all the poor sods whose lives have been fucked over by trust in politicians. Red, Blue, Yellow or Green - you can offer no better. Just promises and aspirations. Well I'm sick to death of paying fifty per cent of our national income for your failed promises and tawdry aspirations. Leave. Us. Alone.

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement." Herbert Spencer, over 150 years ago, and we still have not learned.

It seems slightly odd to me that I have only ever written once about Higher Education policy, given that I am a governor of my university, and hear about it all the time in meetings. But it has become a big issue at the moment in the Lib Dems, and seems to have been one of the major discussion areas at the Liberal Youth conference over the weekend, so I thought it might be time for me to jot down a few thoughts.

One thing that seems clear, and I believe this is common currency in university board-rooms across the country, is that the current muddled system cannot go on. 98% I believe it is of courses are charging the full top-up fees, and even they do not make up for the real terms fall of over 60% in funding per student over the past decade and a half or so.

On top of that, it fails to create any kind of price mechanism where people might be able to see what value a university or rather its applicants put on a particular course at a particular institution. It is a nonsense to think that three grand at The New University of Bloggshire is as good value as three grand at one of our world leading institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Instead we rely on very subjective analyses of the National Student Satisfaction Survey and even that is difficult as the organizers may put a good course in a subject area in which an institution is not so excellent and devalue that one course.

What also seems clear is that the value of a first degree is, shall we say, not as high as perhaps it was when all those who say "I got university free, so I'm damned if I'm going to see the next generation up to their necks in debt" went to university. It is a very generous sentiment, and, whilst I didn't in fact go to university I do recognize the hypocrisy - had I taken my school teachers' advice I would have had free higher education and a living grant too. That may not of course be the fault of the Higher Education Institutions so much as primary and secondary education - I don't suppose many students in my day would have had to be taught remedial English and maths at university as we are told some are today in order to get the most out of the Higher Education experience. Additionally, many more students than previously feel the pressure to do second and subsequent degrees in order to stand out in the job market as perhaps a first degree would have done for them in previous generations.

I think the majority feeling in those university board-rooms is that they would prefer to see the fees cap lifted completely when the opportunity arises sometime after 2010, even though by that time many may not want to charge too much so as to be in competition for a smaller number of students when the 18 year old cohort dips significantly in around 2012. We are also on tenter-hooks waiting to see how economic troubles in the wider world will affect student numbers - in previous recessions there has been a boost to Higher Education as people out of work re-train, but faced with fees and debts and an even more uncertain economic outlook, we wonder whether this will be the same this time round.

So, regardless of how our policy affects students themselves, the universities are in an ever more uncertain position. Whatever option we choose, we must see to it also that universities get sufficient funding. There will be no merit in having free Higher Education if the universities themselves cannot deliver that within the budgets allowed.

Anyway, I wanted to suggest an idea with this post. It's somewhat half formulated, and I certainly have not tried to run any figures on it yet, but I hope you might get the idea and maybe be willing to help develop it in the comments.

I have always regarded universities as social enterprises, mutual institutions of a sort. Indeed I once tried to persuade Brookes to adopt a more overt mutualism in its management structure. During the Great Depression in North America, when students were still having to pay fees but had very little money left for anything else, many embraced mutualism as a way to get through. This was the era in which the co-op meal plan, the co-op houses and halls of residence, and the university credit unions burgeoned. Partly as a result of this they have a much stronger alumni culture than we have here.

A credit union type system could be used to enable universities to charge a full market rate for their courses whilst financing all students "needs blind" so that they do not have to pay anything until they are earning. These credit unions would enable alumni (and possibly applicants before they are at university) to save, with interest, in less toxic investments than they have been in the banking system of late while funding current students through university and who would then be expected, as part of their "pay back", to join and save, investing in the next cohort of students, when they graduate.

On top of this we need a package of measures perhaps to encourage the development of low cost co-operative halls of residence and mutual housing societies to prevent the basic accommodation needs of students becoming the £5-7,000 per year drain that the big corporate halls providers expect to charge and the private rented sector delivering second class housing for students.

I had an early meeting yesterday of a governors' committee where someone mentioned this Guardian article from Monday about how Oxford and Cambridge Universities have proven lukewarm or downright icy towards the idea that they should sponsor New Labour academies.

Oxbridge snub to government on academies

Polly Curtis and Patrick Wintour
Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian

Oxford and Cambridge universities have turned down ministerial attempts to persuade them to adopt a city academy, the Guardian has learned. Their decisions deliver a fresh blow to the government, which is trying to raise the academic profile of the schools by wooing top universities to sponsor one. Confidential documents, seen by the Guardian, reveal that Cambridge has vetoed the idea to avoid any negative fallout should the school fail or receive bad press. Sponsoring a school could also present a "conflict of interest" over admissions for pupils at the school, it says.

Which is interesting, and something itself of a turn-around on several hundred years' history. Some of the existing "Oxbridge Academies" may only take pupils to 13 years old - St John's or King's in Cambridge, New College or Christ Church in Oxford. Another, Magdalen in Oxford, is a leading feeder school to the universities' colleges. Others not necessarily located in the same place have direct, often founding, links with colleges - such as Winchester and New College or Eton and King's College. Then there are innumerable local schools the colleges of the two universities have effectively founded through their ecclesiastical benefices.

The formal recruiting links may have been broken with the demise of closed scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge but there can be no doubting that "conflicts of interest" were built into the Oxbridge system from the start. Now, that's not to say that it would be a good move to set up a new possible conflict of interest. As noted in that article the decision of my own university, Oxford Brookes University, to participate in the new Oxford academy that will replace The Peers School next year, was not without controversy. And some of my own qualms were similar to those of the head of the PGCE course at Oxford - that our school of education has links with many local schools, that our widening participation and outreach programs work with all local schools, and how would all this be affected if we had a founding stake in just one local school.

Another issue I'd have with the country's two leading universities starting academies is precisely that academies cannot select on ability. It seems to me that this is one case where selection could be justified, and probably boarding too - two national schools run by the two leading universities, able to pull in the brightest and the best who would benefit most from being taken up a level in their studies to equip them for the academic rigours of the world's best universities. And why not? Public money funds things like national sporting academies which are selective on a different sort of ability.

Neither of us are large cities where our universities' local connections could provide a base for such an academy - unlike perhaps Imperial or UCL who have the huge and still growing "market" of London schools to mix in. Though I suppose there is an argument that more people in our respective counties should be helped to get into Oxbridge because we should benefit more from the presence of those universities in our midst. Could you ever find a fair way of sticking a pin in the map somewhere and saying that only kids in this catchment area/city/county have the chance of an Oxbridge partnered school?

But how about another idea altogether - that they set up a virtual academy. Just as Oxford and Cambridge are, along with Imperial, in a different league of universities worldwide, so their prospective students need to be brought into that different league as early as possible. I know that in my case, my hopes of an Oxbridge education were probably dashed by the time I was about thirteen or fourteen, when my interest at school "peaked", for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I was not driven or permitted to go as fast as I could go academically and as a result became the disinterested teenager in many lessons - coasting on previously acquired knowledge and skills.

One of the great advantages of private school was that I had lots of teachers who were academics and not just educationalists. This made it easier to place me with a mentor for S level subjects for example which were much less related to the curriculum of the day and more to "added-value" academic skills and disciplines like historiography instead of just history, the study of literary criticism instead of just literature and so on. I just don't think that state sector teachers have the time, after all the paperwork and so on, to indulge their academic fancies in the same way somehow - it's not to do with their skills and abilities but the sausage machine system of state schools. So an Oxford University "Virtual Academy" could work like the Open University for bright kids, to add value to the knowledge and skills they gain from their existing state school. To run summer camps and crammer camps for the brightest and the best to keep them that little bit more stimulated and their learning skills on top form.

Every state school has to have a program now for dealing with "gifted children" in their Special Educational Needs strategy. Many I know from school governors discussions struggled to define "gifted" fairly to all sorts of gifts. But here would be one way of targeting a particular sort of academic giftedness - you could tie up an academically bright child whose talents were not being fully realized because of being thrown in with the mix of average pupils with a real life academic, or even an undergraduate student who could mentor them through extra tuition. They could create online courses, like the Open University, that schools around the country could be encouraged to send their brightest pupils on to add to their in house education.

And in return, those schools that use the services of the Oxbridge Virtual Academy would have the benefit of retaining their brightest and best locally, keeping them as an example to younger kids and perhaps even filtering down their enthusiasm and additional skills to others in their "home" school. It seems like a win-win idea to me. No doubt both universities would say that their existing widening participation activities already do much of this. But I think actually harnessing it as an identifiable "virtual institution", part of the Oxford or Cambridge "brand", would take it that one step further, make it, and them, more visible and perhaps even widen the opportunities beyond the schools they already choose to co-operate with in their W-P programs.

The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

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