Teachers for Supply

Social science

Photograph: Alamy

A collection of consistent stereotypes and barriers are preventing men from moving into primary teaching, a study by the University of Bedfordshire and Nottingham Trent University finds.

Most foreign national women trafficked into the united kingdom and compelled to commit offences are given custodial sentences without help or support if arrested – despite being victims of often horrifying crime and abuse themselves, says a Cambridge-led report.

Science and technology

Photograph: Public Domain

​Natural chemicals present in green tea and red wine may disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer’s disease pathway, in accordance with research from the University of Leeds.

Injection-free vaccination technique created by scientists at King’s College London could address the worldwide vaccine challenge for diseases similar to HIV and malaria.

Arts and humanities

Photograph: Rex Features/University of Leicester/ Rex Fe

Academics from the University Leicester have suggested the likelihood that Shakespeare was the inventor of the hunch-backed Richard III, after comparing literary accounts of Richard with their osteological findings from his remains.

Comet explosions failed to end the prehistoric human culture, generally known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, in accordance with researchers at Royal Holloway University.

And finally

Photograph: EPA

Holidaymakers’ photos could help scientists track the movements of big endangered sharks living within the waters of the Indian Ocean, finds a researcher from Imperial College London. It’s the first study to point out that these publicly sourced photographs are suitable to be used in conservation work.

Would you prefer your university’s research featured at the network Email claire.shaw@guardian.co.uk along with your latest news

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My mother, Joyce Ferlie, who has died aged 87, was an inspiring teacher of French with a selected interest in promoting foreign languages, Anglo-French twinning and facilities for adolescents.

She was born Joyce Howlett in Upton, Wirral, and went to a neighborhood grammar school, then took a French degree at Liverpool University. Her father was a civil servant and strongly promoted education for girls.

After three years as an education officer within the RAF, she met and married Tom Ferlie, my father. They were happily married for greater than 55 years and lived in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, for an extended period inside the 1960s and 1970s. Joyce was active within the Kenilworth community, as one in every of a brand new generation of female graduates taking up local civic roles in addition to family responsibilities. It was an optimistic time and he or she contributed to the event of the growing town.

As a protracted-standing teacher of French at Abbey highschool (now Kenilworth school and sixth form), she was noted for her inspiring lessons and her copies of Paris Match, which brought an exotic touch, as did her very modern trouser suits.

She always had a world outlook and was an ideal supporter of establishing local links with France. A founding member of Kenilworth Business and Professional Women’s Club, she was also an active member of the committee of Kenilworth Youth Club. She became a volunteer within the Workers’ Educational Association and the local Anglo-French twinning association after moving to Hook Norton in Oxfordshire in 1980.

After a period inside the Cotswolds, Tom and Joyce eventually retired to Exeter to be near my brother, Peter.

Tom died last year. Joyce is survived by me and Peter.

How cheering to determine Michael Gove’s English Baccalaureate Certificate go up in flames – and never simply because the EBC was hopelessly thought out. Put simply, GCSEs are an excellent thing. i used to be mentioned within the era of O-levels, 16-pluses and CSEs – not a two-tier system because it is generally called, but a 3-tier system.

The 16-plus was just like the GCSE in you can get anything from the top O-level pass to the bottom CSE pass within the one exam. Comprehensive schools, reminiscent of the single I attended (the bright Kersal High, which sadly needed to close) opted for the 16-plus whenever it might since it was fairer. However the great divide was between people that took O-levels and people who took CSEs. You didn’t do CSEs, you were consigned to them. And being consigned to CSEs left you a second-class citizen at 14.

With one stroke, the GCSE removed this. A struggling child might work his or her thanks to an A-C, or a sensible but distracted pupil might drift all the way down to a lower grade. The key was that the result was not predetermined before you started the course.

Gove desired to abolish this, seemingly because he believes by the age of 14 our destiny is sorted; we all know who’s boss class and pleb class, rulers and ruled, and it’s daft to pretend otherwise.

But, in fact, for any society that aspires to being a meritocracy here’s nonsense. Children develop at different ages and in several ways. Who’s to assert there’s any longer merit in excelling in history than computer studies (Actually, the market place would suggest the other.)

Which takes us to his bigoted want to narrow the curriculum. The function of any education system is to organize as lots of people as possible for a successful future. Gove seems to need the other.

I have known many academic children through the years, including my older daughter. Never have I heard them say, “Ah, if only the curriculum were narrower would life be more fulfilling” The undeniable fact that there’s a broad curriculum means there’s every opportunity to excel in traditional academic subjects, should they so wish, while allowing others to reach different subjects.

I have also known many children who struggle academically. My younger daughter is at the autistic spectrum. We were told when she was young that she was unlikely to pass exams. However, she carefully chose her GCSE subjects (including IT, drama, food technology – yes, people who Gove despises), worked extremely hard and passed her GCSEs. a super success. Her overly ambitious comprehensive school weren’t keen for her to head directly to A-levels (they asked for 5 Bs) but we insisted she had the correct to. Again, she carefully chose subjects, worked hard and passed her A-levels. Another brilliant success. She scraped her way into university, where she is now thriving.

Just today I received an email from a chum who said that his son struggled his way into university with hasta hoy and an E in business studies, now works for Apple and jets off to California anytime they do a product launch. My friend concluded: “He wouldn’t get into university now … so would finally end up doing what, i ponder”

The list is endless of these who struggled and went directly to change the arena. Bill Gates, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, all dropped out of faculty and got a second chance (partly because academic achievement wasn’t seen because the be-all).

The system Gove proposed was one who denies second chances. Worse than that, it denied first chances – the plan was that pupils who failed to complete an EBC were to go away school with a “statement of accomplishment” in preference to a real qualification.

Yes, Einstein et al are the freaks. But that is not the purpose. Success is often relative. Whatever my daughter does together with her life now, she has made successful of it. If Gove had had his way she would has been kicked into touch at 14.

Michael Gove might never achieve his wish for a nation where all children acquire the “fundamental building blocks” of information to equip them through life. But when his draft national curriculum is any guide we’d as a nation get much, much, better at University Challenge.

Announced alongside the verdict to maintain GCSEs in fact and to broaden the style secondary schools are judged, comes a 173-page document, plus appendixes on grammar and punctuation, which lays down the Gove-ian vision of what children in England can be taught.

While it is a deliberately slimmed down document – Gove argues it’ll form “only a part of the total curriculum, not its entirety”, allowing teachers to head off piste occasionally – what it lack in pages it makes up for in suggested facts. Plenty of them.

As well as an intensive grounding within the essentials of maths, spelling, grammar and punctuation, from 2014 children can be expected to pinpoint cities and rivers on a globe in geography classes, while history will present, in Gove’s words to parliament, “a transparent narrative of British progress with a suitable emphasis on heroes and heroines from our past”. English will involve “the nice works of the literary canon”.

Gove said: “We’re determined to present every child, in spite of background a broad, balanced, education in order that by the point their compulsory education is complete they’re well-equipped for further study, future employment and adult life.”

This back-to-basics approach is on the centre of the education secretary’s philosophy, one heavily influenced by systems in places including Hong Kong and Singapore, in addition to the u. s. state of Massachusetts, all mentioned in Gove’s address to MPs.

Gove has stated regularly his admiration for the yankee educational thinker Eric Hirsch, whose works heavily influenced a curriculum revamp in Massachusetts, and Daniel Willingham, an American cognitive psychologist.

Both these men argue that before students can begin analysis or criticism in a given subject they should first have a superb enough store of the facts, ones committed deeply to memory instead of culled on demand from reference books or the web.

The education secretary argues that such an approach is key for social progression, saying disadvantaged pupils who won’t absorb such knowledge at home should be supplied with it by teachers.

In a speech on Tuesday night outlining his ideas Gove said that and not using a curriculum like this “students from poorer homes will continue to accomplish less well inside the exercise of each basic skill that one must be employed within the modern world”. He added: “The buildup of cultural capital – the purchase of data – is the important thing to social mobility.”

It is an approach greatly favoured by educational conservatives presently.

The Department for Education was soon circulating an approving quote from the historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, who praised a “proper emphasis at the heroes and heroines who bring history to life”.

Teaching unions were more circumspect, though the NASUWT bemoaned the liberty granted to maintained schools to deviate farther from a group curriculum, as academies, free schools and personal schools can accomplish that already. Wales, Scotland and northerly Ireland follow their very own versions.

Beyond the truth-heavy tone there have been few obvious significant changes. An analogous core subjects remain – English, maths, science, art, citizenship, computing (a reputation change from ICT), design and technology, geography, history, languages, music and PE – though with a foreign language made portion of the compulsory study in late primary school for the 1st time.

Labour officials cited that for each of the talk of the literary greats only 1 , Shakespeare, was actually named, and there has been loss of a particular mention of the NHS in post-war British history.

Regarding history, at the fringes of the talk campaigners hailed the return of Mary Seacole, the pioneering black British figure who tended soldiers within the Crimean war, and who was because of be far from the curriculum. Seacole’s place within the curriculum have been “not only cemented, but enhanced”, Gove told MPs.

Financial groups meanwhile praised the addition of classes on personal budgeting and money management within the citizenship syllabus. The Amateur Swimming Association gave a sigh of relief that its sport had made the cut for PE.

For all of the debate, the anomaly is that laying down what must be taught will almost certainly have less actual impact on schools than another change – that of the way the success of colleges is gauged.

There have been a growing chorus of complaint from teachers, governors and others that the fundamental ranking measure for secondary schools – how many of a school’s 16-year-olds get five GCSEs at C or above, including maths and English – is simply too narrow and distorts teaching, encouraging tricks equivalent to schools entering students for 2 English GCSEs and picking the simpler grade.

Gove agreed, telling the Commons the measure had resulted in excessive talk about the crucial C/D borderline, taking attention from students either struggling or thriving.

The ranking measure is to be abolished, said Gove. Instead there could be an easy percentage for pupils reaching the decreed level in English and maths, and a more complex points score in keeping with eight GCSEs. To the delight of critics of the narrow scope of the EBC this would include as much as three “other” GCSEs, taking inside the likes of art and a few vocational subjects.

This was largely welcomed by teaching unions and Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner for England, who said it might encourage a broader technique to learning.

English universities could be on the point of an experiment that no person alive today has experienced: a vital and sustained decline in student numbers. Except a downward blip between the wars, higher education have been on an inexorably upward trajectory for the reason that birth of the trendy age.

There is lots of talk today a few triple-dip recession. In universities there’s a parallel fear. There has already been a double-dip – 13% fewer students accepted this year. Applications for next autumn, initially well down, have struggled to recover to simply above last year’s disappointing total. Despite this (sort of) recovery, student numbers will continue to fall because the big cohorts of 2010 and 2011 work their way during the system. So a 3rd year of decline can’t be discounted.

Two questions immediately arise. Will it happen, and could it matter

The government’s official line is that it still expects expansion. Nevertheless it is tough to suppress the suspicion that the Treasury is betting on decline, if only since the half-baked reforms on student fees and funding will cost a fortune otherwise.

Those people who argued that tripling fees would scale back demand were dismissed as Cassandras. Dubious data from other countries, and the experience when Charles Clarke raised fees to £3,000 and insist bounced back, were cited as evidence. But things are different now. First, when Labour increased fees the variety of teens was rising. Today the demographic tide is flowing in reverse. Second, the united kingdom Border Agency, because it blunders to implement the government’s anti-immigration policies, is discouraging international student recruitment in important markets.

Third, Michael Gove is popping the clock back in schools. GCSEs are being replaced by English Baccalaureate Certificates, with unpredictable consequences. A-levels are being restricted in two ways – by cutting the links with broader AS-levels and dividing them into “U” and “non-U” subjects. An integrated system of state schools is rapidly being superseded by a chaos of academies and “free” schools. It was the introduction of comprehensives and GCSEs that increased the pool of potential university applicants. Also, AS-levels and modular courses unfolded student choice.

The main drag factor on student expansion is more fundamental, though. It’s now clear that Britain will experience a decade of lost growth. If we’re lucky, by 2018 we shall be back where we were in 2008. That have is already being etched at the mood of the nation. Attitudes to raised education, and everything else, can be deeply marked.

Although the foremost deprived had been hardest hit by the recession (and the government’s ill-chosen remedies), the aspirational classes haven’t escaped. Free, or subsidised, public services are dwindling while secure professional careers have become scarcer. Costs are rising, putting pressure on family budgets, just when some great benefits of investing at some point are harder to spot.

Transformative

Finally, there are some ugly attitudes some of the powerful and influential. The misguided at the left are losing faith within the transformative impact of upper education and mutter irrelevantly about reviving apprenticeships. The proper slavers for a shrunken system reduced to its elite core – floreat Bullingdon Club.

So the reply to the 1st question is that a semi-permanent decline in student numbers is becoming much more likely. Does it matter For universities it matters rather a lot. Put simply, higher education, just like the economy, is hooked on “more”. Its intellectual creativity and scientific productivity depend upon growth – of student numbers (whether “additional student numbers” awarded by Hefce inside the bad old Labour days or relaxed “student number controls” in Brave New Willetts world) and of study income (by improving research excellence framework performances and more aggressive grant seeking). The entire values of upper education – both widening participation and boosting reputation – assume growth. So too do its management systems, incentives and daily habits. There’s a risk, with out a or reverse growth, that the system could come with reference to collapse morally and managerially.

For our nation – and world – it matters much more. No other country is so complacently contemplating decline. Most are pushing hard for growth. The reason being simple. The collection of what the political economist Robert Reich called “knowledge workers”, most of whom should be graduates, is increasing exponentially; high-tech and “knowledge services” drive the economy.

But it isn’t just the economy. To confront the challenges we are facing we have to cultivate a critical humanity, open minds in open societies. After all, you do not need to be a graduate to try this. Nevertheless it is becoming progressively more difficult actively to have interaction without at the very least, in Lord Robbins’s famous phrase half a century ago, “the smell of a better education”.

• Peter Scott is professor of better education studies on the Institute of Education