Teachers for Supply

The Conservative candidate within the Eastleigh byelection has tried to defuse a row about education by claiming she was not talking about Hampshire when she suggested that state schools weren’t adequate for her son.

Maria Hutchings was embroiled in controversy after she apparently claimed that her son’s ambition to become a surgeon will be thwarted if he went to a state school. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said Hutchings had insulted “every pupil and teacher at our state schools”, while a collection of surgeons and GPs who have been state-educated wrote an open letter claiming they were working example she was wrong.

But while out campaigning with the house secretary, Theresa May, on Monday, Hutchings insisted her comments were misinterpreted.

She told the Guardian: “Once I spoke about my son’s education i used to be talking about when he was five years old and I was living in another area.”

Hutchings, who lived in Essex before moving to Hampshire five years ago, said the baby was “gifted” and he or she visited four local schools, none of which had measures in place to cater for such children. She said: “We need to find the suitable education for our kids. The same old of schooling here’s excellent. i think all of us must make the appropriate choice for our youngsters.”

The candidate added that she, her husband and two of her four children had all gone to state schools while her youngest daughter was at the waiting list for 2 state schools in Eastleigh.

It isn’t the first time in the course of the campaign that Hutchings has claimed she was misquoted or misinterpreted. She has already needed to defend herself over alleged remarks made through the 2005 general election campaign about refugees, gay people and foxes. She has also created headlines by saying she would have voted against gay marriage and would vote for leaving the ecu if there has been a referendum now.

Asked in regards to the state education row, May said: “Parents will always should make decisions for themselves over what’s right for his or her children. What we wish to see around the whole state sector is ensuring we’re providing the education it is right for each child.”

When asked whether Hutchings was a “franchise candidate” – campaigning as a Tory but choosing which of the party’s policies she supported – May said: “Maria seriously isn’t a qualified politician, she is somebody who has lived and campaigned for local community for multiple years. She’s going to campaign for area people, she’s going to fight for local community.”

The home secretary added that a vote for Hutchings showed support for David Cameron’s policies comparable to “controlling immigration, reforming welfare and status up for Britain in Europe”. Getting such messages over is very important for the Tories in Eastleigh, where Ukip is campaigning strongly.

Hutchings’ claim that she was misinterpreted came as Labour organised the primary stunt of the campaign, dressing up two activists in surgeons’ green scrubs, and handing out leaflets wherein they claimed: “Cameron’s rightwing candidate has sensationally revealed the Tories’ true colours by attacking Eastleigh’s local state schools.”

The leaflet continued: “Here is an insult to our teenagers and teachers who work so hard and to the folks and community who support them.”

Passersby were encouraged to sign a letter to Hutchings that stated: “You seem saying that our state schools are more than enough for our children but not for yours.”

Her remarks were described by Kevin Brennan, the shadow minister for schools, as “extraordinary”.

The Labour’s candidate, the author and long-term activist John O’Farrell, said he had sent his children to a state school – and were chair of the governors there for eight years.

The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, were turning their attention to the Conservative-controlled Hampshire county council. Their candidate, Mike Thornton, presented the authority with an “invoice for wasteful spending”, claiming it had frittered away millions on advertising, office furniture and consultancy fees.

Leading higher education is hard. That much people can agree on. The Inspiring Leaders category of the Guardian University Awards, sponsored by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, is a recognition of this and a decision to recognize and celebrate people who have brought out the highest in others and achieved exceptional results,despite the turmoil in higher education. Alongside the award, the muse commissioned from me a report on what we all know about leadership in higher education, drawing by itself research and that of others.

The resulting review, What Can we Find out about Leadership in Higher Education, means that we may know lower than we expect we do, not because we’re short of research, but because we are looking at leadership through strong filters. Research generally shows us leadership at second hand, reflected in the perceptions of staff about their leaders, or leaders’ beliefs about their own practice.

What we don’t have is extended observation of what leaders actually do, and as yet, little means of linking leadership activity to impact on teaching, student outcomes and research. Even listening to the views we do have, no tidy findings emerge. Leadership – in higher education as elsewhere – eludes neat formulations.

There is even disagreement about who the sector’s leaders are. In the foundation’s research many believe that what the most senior leaders do is in fact institutional management and that leadership is unnecessary. Staff see themselves as passionately committed to their work and, though management of an enabling environment is indispensable, the motivation and direction of leadership is not.

Others believe leadership is vital and see it as widely dispersed amongst colleagues or researchers in the same field, as well as those in formally designated leadership roles. True to the untidy nature of leadership research, the foundation’s research reflects a persistent belief in, and desire for, inspirational leadership and an equally persistent deep vein of resistance to being led.

Take the creation of vision, for example. I found both a yearning for vision, alongside a good deal of scepticism and little evidence of how it works in practice. I wonder if the yearning is just a reflection of current leadership rhetoric: “That’s what leaders do: they create vision.” The evidence suggests it is more than this.

Setting aside happy clappy mission statements which tend to draw widespread scorn, academics seem to want a deeper validation of their work; to be convinced that it matters, that higher education matters. At the same time there is an apparent unshakeable confidence and intense focus on each academic’s goals that need no other external drive from inspirational leadership. Staff want vision and don’t need it.

The uniqueness of the higher education context makes a difference. Other industries face the challenge of getting the best from highly creative, knowledge-producing staff but, arguably, none have staff with the same sense of personal mission and entrenched independence that academics possess. While some recent studies of leadership treat higher education institutions as if they were commercial businesses, the acid rain of HE staff autonomy dissolves corporate command and control approaches to a lesser or greater extent.

Given the near universal stress on the importance of leadership in education and politicians’ propensity to conclude that when things go wrong it’s leadership that is at fault, knowing what a good leader looks like might be considered important. But I could find no agreement. One person’s heroic leader is another’s leadership villain.

Where there is achievement, the efforts of a skilled leader may not be visible to all. When asked what makes effective leadership, staff tend to produce an idealised list of excellent characteristics unlikely to be matched by fallible human beings. Academics asked about the leadership of others are likely to reflect primarily from the perspective of their own individual needs. They will also judge depending on what they see as leadership’s main goal.

There are stark divides in beliefs about the purpose of leadership in universities. For example, the widening participation championed by some is perceived as dilution or even pollution by others. Excellence is pitted against social mobility, as if the two were incompatible.

Trying to make sense of this, and especially to communicate an overview to others is not easy. Clear findings, implied policy change and practice recommendations appeal. Fuzzy disagreements and multiple viewpoints do not. It is tempting to provide the kind of certainties that are reassuring. The foundation’s research resists and avoids painting a simple picture, either of the sector or its leadership.

There is a rich ecology of leadership that we know something of and still need to learn more about. In particular, we need to know more about what leaders actually do both within the public face and within the underbelly of politics, and what the impact is on outcomes for students and research.

Higher education is caught up in a perfect storm of hiked student fees, exposed international recruitment, widening participation pressures, and intensifying threats from international competitors. Neither leader bashing nor public relations-driven praise will help the sector. Nor will banal over-simplistic recommendations for practice.

What is needed is to build on this research to understand better what leaders do and to what effect. Let’s take a more sustained look at leadership in action and use that to help individual leaders make the complex choices about practice that the environment demands. If leadership has star billing in UK Plc’s higher education show (as many people think) then surely this would be a fair move.

Jacky Lumby is Professor in Education on the University of Southhampton – you’ll be able to download the review, What Will we Find out about Leadership in Higher Education, here

The Inspiring Leader award, sponsored by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, may be announced on the Guardian University Awards on 27 February at Senate House, London – tickets can be found here

This content is delivered to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct for your inbox, join the better Education Network.

Confident that nobody would notice what he was doing, Michael Nicod spent months inside the homes of families he didn’t know, making detailed notes about everything they ate. Nicod was performing research for Britain’s Department of Health and Social Security in 1974. He and his colleague, University College London professor Mary Douglas, wrote a report called Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals.

Nicod and Douglas desired to identify what typical British persons see because the essential parts in their typical meals. The pair drew on their training as anthropologists: “We imagined a dietician in an unknown Papuan or African tribe wondering the best way to introduce a brand new, reinforcing element into tribal diet. We assumed that the dietician’s first task can be to find how the tribe ‘structured’ their food.”

Nicod lived as a lodger with “four working-class families where the top was engaged in unskilled manual labour”, in East Finchley, Durham, Birmingham and Coventry. He stayed in each place not less than a month, “watching every mouthful and sharing whenever possible”.

Nicod and Douglas express confidence within the obliviousness of the natives. “We reckon”, they write, “that once 10 days of this kind of discreet and incurious presence, the foremost sensitive housewife, busy together with her children, settles all the way down to her routine menus.”

Many others have imagined new tips on how to examine and alter the eating habits of persons aside from themselves.

In 2006, Mariana Simons-Nikolova and Maarten Bodlaender of the Netherlands applied for a patent for an electro-mechanical process they call Modifying a person’s eating and activity habits. Their video/computer system would monitor an individual’s head and hands to detect once they were eating. It will then announce to them via the television or computer, “You might be Now Eating”.

Simons-Nikolova and Bodlaender explain: “By providing the feedback when the topic remains eating or drinking, the topic is helped to forestall the eating or drinking ahead of if no feedback were given.”

A 2008 patent by three Israeli inventors describes “a sensor which detects: (a) the patient swallowing, (b) the filling of the patient’s stomach, and/or (c) the onset of contractions within the stomach attributable to eating”. Electric current can then, for dietary reasons, be “driven into muscle tissues of the subject’s stomach”. This “induces within the subject a sensation of satiation, discomfort, nausea, or vertigo”.

Three Indian inventors filed a patent application in 2010 for a “refrigerator for obese persons”. The fridge monitors “all eating and drinking”, and dispenses diet advice. Also, “a reflecting mirror film at the door makes the man to govern overeating once he stands before the fridge”.

With these and related plans does society become more equipped for “watching every mouthful” of a few of its members.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobel tour of the united kingdom starts on 13 March. For additional info, visit www.improbable.com

Workers on the Department for Education have voted to head on strike in a row over spending cuts and job losses.

Members of the general public and Commercial Services union backed walkouts by a majority of virtually two to 1, and other kinds of commercial action by nearly nine to at least one. The union said turnout inside the ballot was 37.5%.

The PCS said it believed the education secretary, Michael Gove, was using the dep. as an ideological testbed for wider civil service cuts. It said about 1,000 jobs were under threat as a result of the cuts.

The union’s general secretary, Mark Serwotka, said: “These cuts are purely political and wouldn’t only mean misery for 1,000 of Mr Gove’s own staff but additionally put in peril some vital public services, reminiscent of ensuring children are safe at college and supporting special educational needs.”

The PCS accused the dep. of using a management consultant to aid draft plans to axe greater than 1 / 4 of its workforce. Serwotka said the involvement of a management consultancy at a senior level inside the department should ring alarm bells.

“There are serious inquiries to answer a couple of conflict of interest, given [the consultancy] can be allowed to bid for future contracts after receiving such privileged access,” he said.

The Department for Education said: “We’re disappointed that the PCS has voted in favour of strike action. Now we have held extensive discussions with the PCS and we’re consulting with staff at the proposed changes. Now we have made it clear that we wish to avoid compulsory redundancies wherever possible.

“We’d like this country to have the correct education system and the correct children’s services. To gain this we must create a department that delivers a good service to the general public, while ensuring value for money for the taxpayer.

“It’s entirely wrong of the PCS to indicate that the DfE review will in anyway have an effect on the security of kids or the support available for people with special educational needs.”

Scientists have moved toward allowing paralysed people to manage artificial limbs with their thoughts following a breakthrough in technology that gave rats an additional sense.

A brain implant that enables the animals to “feel” the presence of invisible infrared light could someday be used to give paralysed individuals with feedback as they move artificial limbs with their thoughts, or it can even extend a person’s normal range of senses.

Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University in North Carolina who led the work, is a pioneer within the development of brain implants which might be used to regulate computers or prosthetic arms by thought alone.

His aim is to develop how you can help paralysed people regain mobility and ultimately to construct an “exoskeleton” that may move a paralysed person’s legs and arms in line with their thoughts.

Nicolelis was speaking about his latest work, which was published in Nature Communications, on the annual meeting of the yankee Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.

His results were presented as section of a sequence of sessions on advances in brain-machine interfaces, at which other scientists presented a bionic hand which could connect on to the nerves in a person’s arm and supply sensory feedback of what they were holding.

Until now, neurological prosthetics have largely been demonstrated so that it will restore a lack of function. Last year, a 58-year-old woman who had become paralysed after a stroke demonstrated that she could use a robotic arm to bring a cup of coffee to her mouth and take a sip, simply by desirous about it.

The work was portion of a US clinical trial of a brain implant called BrainGate, developed by neuroscientists at Brown University.

In his latest work, Nicolelis has created the 1st device to increase a healthy animal’s natural ability. “What we did here was to illustrate that shall we create a brand new sense in rats by letting them ‘touch’ infrared light that mammals cannot detect.”

He inserted an electrode into the portion of a rat’s brain that processes touch and fed into it electrical signals that corresponded to a native source of infrared light. After a month of teaching, Nicolelis found that rats’ touch-processing brain cells were responding to both touch and infrared light simultaneously.

“This shows that the adult brain can acquire new capabilities which have never been experienced by the animal before,” he said.

In the long run, Nicolelis said it’d be possible to apply prosthetic devices to revive vision – as an instance, if a person’s visual cortex were damaged – by training an extra a part of the brain to process the ideas.

“Otherwise you could even augment normal brain function using the rules we’re describing here in non-invasive how you can deliver the data,” he said.

“Shall we learn how to detect other varieties of signals that we normally don’t see or experience; the perceptual range could increase.”

Also on the AAAS, Silvestro Micera of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne presented the most recent version of a prosthetic hand that could provide real-time sensory feedback, enabling its user to scrupulously control grasp.

The prototype version of this bionic hand had only two broad areas that provided sensory feedback. The newest version gives feedback to the user from individual fingertips in addition to the palm and wrists, giving people a more lifelike experience.

“The assumption could be that it would deliver two or more sensations,” Micera said. “You’ve a pinch and receive information from three fingers, or feel movement within the hand and wrist.”

Nicolelis said his work on infrared light in rats may be used to deliver feedback for paralysed people given prosthetic limbs. He suggested: “Imagine you’re wearing an exoskeleton and also you’re walking and you bend your knees – that flexing could generate a pulse of infrafred light it really is proportional to the perspective of deflection and that signal can be transmitted to a sensor that delivers that signal to a patient’s brain.”

Because light travels so fast, the feedback from the unreal limbs will be even quicker than normal nerve impulses and the individual using the prosthetic would simply “feel” the movement of the bionic limb as a special variety of touch.

Micera plans to trial the bionic hand in a patient in Rome later this year, who he said was of their 20s.

He said that the final word aim of his prosthetic hand project was to make users feel that’s as natural as possible. “We are hoping that at some point it will become embedded within the arm and the user will just forget it’s there,” he said. “It’s intended to be as lifelike as possible.”

Three more findings

From the yearly meeting of the yankee Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston

1 Chimpanzees get depressed too

Martin Bruene, a psychiatrist on the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany presented a session on how great apes in captivity often show behaviours that might be psychiatrically interesting in people, inclusive of self-mutilation, aggression, fear or social withdrawal. The excellent news is that anti-depressants can be utilized to assist – Dutch behavioural biologist Godelieve Kranendonk found they worked to assist former lab chimps combat depression and trauma.

2. Mars Curiosity update

John Grotzinger, the executive scientist for everyone’s favourite Mars rover, Curiosity, updated the sector at the adventuring robot’s latest movements at the Gale Crater at the red planet. Last week it drilled a hole into the skin of the planet and the extracted dust is now making its way through a sequence of sieves before the best dust – grains not up to 150 microns across – are analysed inside the rover’s onboard laboratories to search for interesting chemistry.

3. Dark matter

Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was billed to discuss the primary results from his dark-matter-hunting experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which was launched to the International Space Station in 2011. Almost twenty years within the making, the AMS results were hotly anticipated because the first glimpse at what the mysterious dark matter, which makes up around 1 / 4 of the mass of the universe, should be fabricated from. Unfortunately for the assembled crowds, Ting kept his powder dry, despite much prodding and questioning, revealing nothing concerning the year’s worth of knowledge from AMS except to assert that they might be “important” results and could be made public when he submitted them to a systematic journal within a couple of weeks.