Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer. 

Trapped in the university

Much of popular anger with politicians comes from a belief that they fail to successfully tackle the major challenges facing our society. Since many members of the public regard political leaders as all-powerful beings, they can only ascribe this failure to weakness or mendacity. This leads to a demand for politicians who exhibit strength of purpose and/or personal morality. Unscrupulous candidates for office (as now in the USA)  respond to these expectations with blustering statements of their ‘toughness’ and tedious personal expressions of piety.

Yet when we read the autobiographies of the most senior politicians, it becomes clear that they struggle hard to achieve anything. Organisations, even in authoritarian societies, are now so complex that there are multiple points of resistence to any amendment in policy or day-to-day practice. Instead, complex organisations carry on doing what they have always done, in the way they have always done it. As a result, our leaders find themselves trapped, often reduced to the role of becoming spokesmen for decisions that seem to have been made by no one person, but which have somehow become inevitable.

I experienced this sense of being trapped in a small way when I was head of the Division of Neuroscience in Birmingham Medical School. I attributed my lack of effectiveness to personal incompetence until one day, together with other senior managers in the School, I attended a management development session. One of the tasks set by the facilitator was for each of us to prepare a montage showing our view of our role in the University. We were provided with a board, various newspaper colour supplements, scissors and glue. We set to work. When we had finished, I looked round at what we had produced. Every board without exception included prominent images of railings, iron bars and other signifiers of imprisonment. In other words, all of us felt trapped in the university.

The management training session taught me that my colleagues also experienced a sense of powerlessness. Perhaps their appearance of competence showed not so much that they were better managers than me but better actors. I tried thereafter to act the role of a competent manager, but I do not enjoy acting and after a while I ceased to bother. After five difficult years as Head of Division, I retreated to thankful obscurity.

The ancient of day's marking

During my career as an academic member of staff at the University of Birmingham, I probably marked thousands of essays, from both undergraduates and postgraduates. The most miserable experience was marking hundreds of medical student examination papers at a time. As with most markers, I became a sort of machine. I would devise a checklist of suitable responses to each question and tick the number of times each student used one. I could thereby mark each mini-essay in two or three minutes. Much more enjoyable were the essays written by undergraduate medical students for their elective project on learning disability and health, which I still teach and mark. Students choose their own topic within this field and always produce long essays that are stimulating and, in some cases, worthy of publication.

A further problem with marking is not just the number of scripts to mark, but also the requirement to assign a numerical score to a long essay. It was different when I worked with my colleague Dr Beryl Smith when we set up our postgraduate masters course in intellectual (‘learning’) disabilities in 1992. Students completed eight assignments (each of which would be answered by long essays of between 1500 and 3000 words) and a dissertation of 15,000 words. Students were encouraged to write about their area of special clinical interest (such as challenging behaviour, epilepsy and so on). We decided that only four grades were required to mark each assignment to an acceptable standard of reliability. We gave a B if the student met the specified requirement for the assignment, a C if they answered the question but did not argue their case well or failed to draw on sufficient evidence. We gave an A where the answer was a high standard and would be publishable in a professional journal. Finally, the failed D grade was given where the student did not meet the requirements of the essay assignment. To make this scheme work, we needed to make sure the requirements of the assignment were stated clearly, and we included details of our marking-scheme. This system was reliable because there were only three grade boundaries (A/B, B/C and C/D) to decide. We double-marked all assignments and usually came to rapid agreement on the grading for each essay.

All this of course would look like mollycoddling to the sort of academic who believes that the only aims of examinations are to catch students out and identify a would-be elite. Beryl and I took a different approach: we believed that the purpose of our course and hence the marking of assignments was to help students learn to become more reflective and effective practitioners. This would, indirectly, be our contribution to improving the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. The purpose of the assignments was not just to decide whether each student’s work was of an acceptable standard, but also to help us measure their progress, and see what areas required some individual attention. As important as the grade, therefore, were the detailed comments we completed on each essay, identifying how the student could improve what they had written, areas of strength they could develop, and areas of weakness they could concentrate on improving.

Beryl eventually retired and the University introduced new regulations that stipulated that all marking should be numerical. Instead of our four grades with clear descriptions and marked to a high degree of reliability, we had to use percentages. What nobody could tell me was what they were a percentage of. If students are set a large number of questions to answer (for instance in a maths exam), then it is possible to calculate the percentage they answered correctly. This only has any meaning of course if each question is deemed to be of equal difficulty and all questions can be marked as either ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. But to give a ‘percentage’ for an essay suggests that this is the degree to which it approximates to some perfect essay. No such perfect essay exists. Indeed, it seems rare in universities for any essay, however good, to be given more than 85 ‘percent’. At the lowest end of the scale, I have once or twice given a mark of 35 ‘percent’, but I think that almost all marks for essays fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Since it is not possible to define what marks are a percentage of, the marks are not actually percentages at all: they are ‘pseudo-percentages’. They are an example of the belief that scores and numbers are preferable to description, even when they are used to supposedly measure things that are inherently non-numerical. Academic psychologists are probably the most prone to this disorder, ‘measuring’ such diverse concepts as intelligence, affection, extroversion and so on with numerical scales calculated by summing answers to sets of questions or assigning weights to responses to various ingenious types of numeric scales. Sooner or later, people come to believe that because it is possible to assign a numerical score, then there must be a thing corresponding to it. So  many believe there is an entity called ‘intelligence’ which you can either have a lot of or a little of. This is despite the common-sense observation that people often have a very uneven pattern of mental skills, being, for instance, brilliant at thinking through maths problems but incompetent at remembering times and dates.

The urge to assign scores to people also says something about the people assigning the scores. No competent clinical psychologist would believe that an individual patient could be summarised by a few numerical test scores. Instead, each patient is seen as unique, perhaps having some familiar categories of problems, but still assessed and treated as an individual. A clinical psychologist and academics like myself and Beryl can afford to treat people as individuals because we are assessing so few of them. Once organisations become involved in processing large numbers of people, they see people as numbers. This has happened to many universities. There may be hundreds of students in a single year of an undergraduate course, knowing little of the academics who teach it and having few chances to exchange ideas with them. Indeed, some universities try hard to prevent any such exchange, placing their academic staff in research centres and laboratory blocks behind locked doors, inaccessible to mere undergraduate students. They have become people-processing institutions which, like business corporations, are judged not by how they improve the lives of ordinary citizens but by how much income they generate. Cash has thus become the supreme number which measures all. It is the Modern of Days, replacing the Ancient of Days in William Blake’s painting.

See also

The end of the university

My local library in Worcester is now housed in a new building called the ‘Hive’. With its irregular shape and exterior of gold-coloured panels, it could be an example of ‘crapitecture’. But this is not the case: the Hive does not blight any neighbouring buildings, has a clearly-marked entrance, and suits its intended purpose. The purpose is revolutionary. The Hive is the only example in the UK of a combined public and university library. The specific needs of students are met by a university-only short loan collection, and the public are only allowed to borrow one copy at a time of books marked with a blue band as ‘high demand university items’. But otherwise, the two libraries have merged, resulting in a massive expansion in the number of book available to the general public, including a wide range of academic texts. The combination of students and the general public in a single building seems to work, although the new library is much noisier than the old Worcester City Library, as groups of students meet at tables, discuss assignments, eat, and socialise.

The Hive is revolutionary because it is a further step in undermining the higher education cartel operated by the traditional universities. Universities began in the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, few people were literate, and very few indeed had read more than one or two books. It made sense to group scholars around a library and give them protected status within the walls of an institution. With the 20th Century expansion of universities into giant research institutions providing mass higher education, there are far more people within the walls: but the walls still stand.

Four key elements have made universities exclusive: access to traditional printed resources such as academic textbooks; the lectures and seminars provided by university staff; access to on-line material, especially academic journals; and the awarding of qualifications. Libraries like the Hive challenge the first of these elements. The next element to be challenged is the university lecture. In the past two years, several universities have begun delivering MOOCs (massive on-line open courses). Each such course comprises a module of academic lectures on a defined topic made available free-of-charge via the Internet. Students (usually in very large numbers) register with the provider and may receive a certificate of completion after passing an on-line test. Providers of MOOCs make money in the same way as Google: by selling their database of subscribers (with associated personal details) to advertisers. They may also charge for completion certificates. Studying on-line is convenient, particularly for those who work and can only study part-time. But on-line lectures do not provide the opportunity to discuss issues in depth with an expert in the small face-to-face groups that take place (although less frequently than in the past) in universities. Nor do MOOCs or the Hive offer free access to the contents of academic journals. And of course, if you want to get a degree, you need to be a registered student at a recognised university.

Can these elements be developed outside universities? There is of course nothing stopping independent academics setting up seminars for students registered for a particular MOOC. They could charge a small fee/attender, and seminars of this kind  already take place in India. Programmes of MOOCs could be assembled into a programme of study equivalent in length and standard to a university degree and then examined by an independent agency (rather like the way independent agencies set papers for GCSE and A-level examinations).

Opening access to research publications, however, is more of a problem. This is because academic research journals are published by a limited number of very profitable corporations. Academics contribute material for free, review each others’ papers for free, and (in most cases) edit journals with minimal remuneration. The corporations then print some copies, but mainly distribute via password-protected sites on the Internet. These sites include archive material from previous editions of each journal. Universities pay very large sums each year for access to the contents of these journals, which have been  produced by university staff in university time, based on research which has often been funded by public institutions. Some research journals (such as the British Medical Journal or Nature) have large circulations, but most are read by a small number of specialists. This bizarre system therefore restricts public access to research, while also providing a massive public subsidy to a select band of private corporations. Governments are aware of this problem, and open access for research publications will eventually take place after much trial and error.

Once these problems have been overcome, there is an opportunity to provide low-cost higher education which would meet the needs of people who work and need to study part-time, who have limited financial resources, or who wish to avoid the massive costs and debts incurred by attendance at a traditional university. This would be a step beyond the ground-breaking Open University (OU) which was set up in the 1970s. But the history of the OU is a warning. Despite being innovative, convenient and low-cost, the OU did not provide the model for university expansion in the 1980s and after. Instead of creating new distance learning institutions, governments in Britain chose to expand the traditional universities with their full-time three-year degree courses designed for school-leavers. The result was to divert resources from training skills to producing degree certificates. Large areas of our cities have been blighted by student accommodation - multi-occupied second homes, used for only six months each year. This has been a major (but little-commented) factor in generating a housing crisis in the last two decades.

Students’ financial security has also been blighted by the decision to expand traditional university courses rather than open learning. Instead of studying while earning, students each now incur debts of £40,000 or so for fees and maintenance loans. Their three-year degrees often fail to provide them with the skills needed in the workplace, while the reduced number of seminars and small-group teaching sessions in many universities limit the intellectual stimulation that is meant to be the defining experience of higher education. So open access may still be impeded by the dead weight of existing institutions. Let us hope that technological change combined with public demand will create a new type of higher education that will be open to all who wish to study and learn.


See alsohttp://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/guide-to-crapitecture.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-teach-skills.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/is-higher-education-rip-off.html

Can't read, won't read

One morning last week I went to the orthopaedic clinic in Worcester. By the door, in large letters, was a sign. It told patients not to go straight to the desk, but to collect a number from a box below the sign, and sit in the waiting room for their number to be called. This message was repeated on another large sign above the reception desk, which also told patients not to stand near the desk in order to maintain the privacy of individual patients speaking to the receptionist. I collected my number (21) and waited. After five minutes, my number was called. Another man (number 22) hovered round the desk and tried to barge in front of me, but I held my ground. I was registered by the receptionist and waited to see the physiotherapist and consultant.

While I did so, I noticed that half the people entering the clinic failed to pick up a number from the box and had to be told to do so by the receptionist. Some could not even find the box, and had to be guided by other patients. Why this manifest failure to follow a simple instruction? The reason did not seem to be age or infirmity. The great majority of patients in the clinic were young or middle-aged, and this group included almost all those who failed to read the signs. I suspect the main reason was simply functional illiteracy.

By ‘functional illiteracy’, I mean not just the inability to read, but also the unwillingness to do so. Many people are able to read, but find that it requires an unwelcome effort of concentration. When faced by a sign with words (even large ones like those in the clinic), they look the other way. There are many other examples of this. When I go to Foregate Street Railway Station in Worcester, I note the screens that indicate for each train the time, destination and platform (there are only two at this station). Around the window where you buy tickets, there are lists of the next trains to the main destinations. Yet sreveral customers do not read any of this written information and ask at the ticket office.

Many people therefore live in a world where they depend entirely on the spoken word, whether face-to-face, on a mobile phone, or on television. There may be few if any books in their homes, and parents do not try and help their children learn to read. People can lead a satisfactory life with functional illiteracy until they encounter the world of formal bureaucracy, whether public or private. In such cases, there is a wall of mutual incomprehension between an organisation dominated by written rules, job descriptions and standardised forms, and an individual whose understanding of the world is based on the spoken word. People with functional illiteracy faced by an official-looking letter must either show it to someone with greater expertise, or just ignore it. The latter course of action can be catastrophic. When I was a social worker in West Lothian in the 1970s, we were routinely told by the Housing Department of impending evictions (usually for non-payment of rent). This information was usually received on the day of the eviction. We would visit the tenant to see if there were implications for childcare, or if a disabled person was involved. I visited the S Family, and found they were utterly unaware of what was due to happen at 11am that day. I found a series of letters from the Housing Department, unopened and unread, behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Later, Mrs S told me in distress of her life with an abusive husband, a son in prison and an estranged daughter. “Mr Cumella”, she said with feeling, “I feel so thingy”. So functional illiteracy was coupled in her case with a lack of vocabulary to express emotions.

Much of the debate in education about how to improve literacy seems to be about teaching techniques. English spelling does make learning to read a bit more difficult than would be the case in a language like Spanish, in which spelling is phonetic. But literacy levels are high in Japan, where the written language uses three different orthographies. I think the main problem is not teaching technique or the quality of primary school teachers, but the lack of commitment among some parents to education itself and the low expectations they have of their children.

It is not easy to see how we can deal with this problem, but in the meantime we need to help people with functional illiteracy cope better with formal organisations. This means using symbols and colour schemes to supplement written signs. At the Orthopaedic Clinic, this would mean using a sign of a large arrow (in a contrasting colour to the wall) pointing to the box, with a picture of a hand picking a card. The use of symbols of this kind is widely-accepted in services for people with a learning (intellectual) disability: we just need to recognise that there are very many more people who have problems in reading and learning than we have previously estimated. 

Student life long ago: the LSE in the 1960s

I became a university student for the first time in September 1965, when I registered for a B.Sc(Econ) at the London School of Economics. I was, as far as I know, the first member of my family to go to university, at a time when very few school-leavers did so. I was not, however, a school-leaver. My secondary school career had ended in failure when I got only two A levels (in chemistry and maths). I switched to social sciences at Handsworth Technical College across the other side of Birmingham. Freed of the obligation to attend sport, school assemblies, cadet training and other ‘character-building’ nonsense, I was able to get three good A levels in a year. Handsworth Technical College also prepared me for the way in which universities organised their teaching, with lectures and seminars spread through the week, with long gaps for self-directed study.

Universities in those days were small institutions, and undergraduates got the chance to listen to lectures by and discuss their ideas with the most elevated of intellectuals. I remember lectures by Michael Oakeshott, Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the Labour Party), William Robson, Geoffrey Sterne and Peter Self. My tutors included Alexander Irvine (later Lord Chancellor), Edward Mishan and William Letwin (father of Oliver). The were many essays to write, but exams only at the end of the first and third years. There was none of the endless grind of modular continuous assessment which students experience these days. The LSE was indeed a wonderful place to learn, and not just about economics and politics.

The LSE was in easy walking distance of everywhere in central London, near an incredible range of cinemas, theatres and galleries. To me, the act of becoming a student in London involved joining the world, and learning about art and culture. I went to the theatre when I could afford it, and the cinema almost every week. I bought a student membership of the British Film Institute, and spent any free afternoons watching classic old films. Saturday evenings were less cultural. These were spent at a dance in one of the colleges of the University in a determined (but usually unsuccessful) attempt to find a woman.

This rich life was possible despite a severe shortage of cash. My grant was £110/term, from which I met all living and travel costs. I visited home every half-term and vacation, and saved money by hitch-hiking. I phoned my parents from a call box every Sunday morning at 11am. My main recreation was walking, and I travelled over large areas of London each Sunday.

Most students in the 1960s lived in halls of residence (which in those days were more like barracks than flats) or lived in ‘digs’ with families who registered with the university to provide bed, breakfast and evening meal for a small group of students. I spent the first year living with two other male students with a family in Streatham. This involved daily commuting by suburban train from Streatham to Blackfriars, and then a walk either along the Embankment or through the Temple to Fleet Street. For someone raised in the dreary suburbs of Birmingham, this was all immensely exciting.

In the second year of my degree, I moved to shared rooms in a house in Lordship Road in Stoke Newington, and then in the third year to rooms in Finsbury Park Road. I had to learn to cook for myself, which I did most evenings and at weekends. However, there were alternatives. LSE students avoided the appalling canteen in the School, and gatecrashed canteens in local businesses. My specialty was the Indian High Commission - a large building just across the Aldwych from the LSE. I would enter by an unmarked back door, which was always opened just after noon. Past the lift shaft and along a corridor, I would join a queue of Indians shuffling forward. Food was served by friendly canteen staff from huge metal pots. I would pay and find a table - often the only person in the entire canteen who didn’t look Indian.

Finsbury Park Road was a tough area at the time I lived there. Three doors up from my house was a brothel, inhabited by haggard women and filthy, neglected children. A car was abandoned outside, and the brothel children reduced it to a wreck in days. Requests to the local council had no effect, and in the end one of the exasperated local residents fire-bombed the car. It was cleared the next day. This was the start of Finsbury Park’s long climb to respectability. Now my son lives in a quiet and pleasant street in another part of Finsbury Park. There are no abandoned cars there any more: indeed, residents and visitors need to pay a fee to the local council to park outside their own houses.

There was no fire-bombing at the LSE, but much talk of revolution. By 1968, my quiet world of study was disrupted by strikes and protests. I personally saw little wrong with the LSE, but the various groups of student ‘agitators’ in the School saw protests about trivial issues like security gates as a kind of small-scale simulation for the imminent British revolution in which they would become its officer class. This desire for power coupled with a strange admiration for violence in other countries was cloaked in an intense and intolerant form of Marxist mumbo-jumbo.

Marxism has now all but disappeared, but the LSE lives on. When I can, I meet with other ageing alumni in the West Midlands. We talk about politics like we did when we were young, and I remember the time when I walked out of the working-class Birmingham suburbs into the world of learning.

See also: http:Surviving school

Rank bad

The London Olympics were a festival for statisticians. As an example, let’s look at the men’s 100 metres. Usain Bolt won this race with a time of 9.63 seconds (a new Olympic record). But all the entrants had very similar times apart from Asafa Powell, who pulled up with a groin injury and completed the race in 11.99 seconds. Leaving him out of the calculations, the difference between Usain Bolt and the last-but-one runner was only 0.35 seconds. This tiny sliver of time is only 3.6% longer than Bolt’s winning time. So a statistical summary of the race (using nonparametric statistics because of the skewed distribution) would say that the median race time was 9.84 seconds, with an interquartile range of  0.76-0.97 seconds. Or, in everyday language, they all (but one) ran very fast and there was little variation in the times they took.

Of course, this misses the point. The 100 metres final is a race, and what matters in a race is the ranking of the runners - who comes first (and to a less degree second and third). But just as it makes no sense to ignore ranking in races, it is equally pointless to analyse all areas of human activity as if they are races. This does not stop people doing it, and rankings are now common not just for things that are simple to measure (such as the time taken to run a race), but also for institutions and the complex range of activities they perform. This means that such rankings have to be derived from multiples of ‘scores’ based on a range of unreliable data about something that can never be reliably measured.

As an example, let’s take university research and teaching. Recent years have seen a growing collection of international ‘league tables’ of universities. These use a wide range of data, including statistics about numbers of staff and students, numbers of publications in academic journals, income from research grants, and rankings by panels of academics. This data is then scored, weighted and combined to produce a combined score which can be ranked. Individual universities can then congratulate themselves that they have ascended from the 79th best university in the world to the 78th best, while those that have descended a place or two can fret, threaten their academic staff and sack their vice chancellor.

Yet higher education systems differ greatly between countries, and universities themselves are usually a diverse ragbag of big and small research groups, teaching teams, departments, and schools. This makes a single league table a dubious affair, even if it is based on reliable data. But that of course is not the case. The university in which I worked (by most standards a well-managed institution) struggled to find out what its academic staff were doing with their time, or the quality of their achievements. In other universities, the data on which international league tables are based may be little more than a work of mystery and imagination.

But the problem lies not so much in the dubious quality of the data, but the very act of ranking. Even when the results are derived from a single survey in one country, the results are often analysed in a misleading way. As an example, look at the National Student Survey in the UK, which is taken very seriously by the UK higher education sector. In its most recent form, this comprises 22 questions about different aspects of the student’s university and course. All ranked on a five-point Likert scale and given a score from ‘definitely agree’ (scored 5) to ‘definitely disagree’ (scored 1). A conventional way of comparing universities and courses would therefore be to take the mean score on each scale, and this is how they are analysed in papers like the Guardian. So, by institution, the results for the overall satisfaction question vary from the maximum of 4.5 (the Open University) to 3.5 (the University of the Arts, London).

This is all seen as being a bit too technical for prospective students, and so the Unistats website reports only the responses to a single statement in the Survey: “Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course”. It then adds together the number of students with scores of 5 (‘definitely agree’) and 4 (‘mostly agree’) to produce the percentage of ‘satisfied’ students. This is quite a common survey procedure (I admit to having done it myself), but it is flawed. Someone who ‘mostly agrees’ may still have important reservations about their course.

If you actually analyse satisfaction scores, you find that the great majority of universities fall within a narrow range, with some outliers. As an example, ‘satisfaction’ among students with degrees in medicine in English universities range from 99% in Oxford to 69% in Manchester. The median satisfaction is 89%, with the interquartile range between 84% and 94%. So half of all medical schools fall within only ten percentage points around the middle of the range. This makes ranking pointless, because a small change in percentage satisfaction from one year to the next could send an individual medical schools several places up the rankings, but would amount to little more than the usual fluctuations common to surveys of this kind.

A far more useful step is to look at the outliers. What is so special about Oxford (99%) and Leeds (97%)? Alternatively, are there problems at Manchester (69%) and Liverpool (70%)? Before we get too excited about the latter two universities, note that they have levels of satisfactions that most politicians and people in the media would only dream about. However, to see if there are particular problems, we need to look in more depth at the full range of results. We could also see if there is anything distinctive in the way they teach. Actually, we do know that both universities have been very committed to problem-based learning (PBL). This is a way of teaching medicine that involves replacing conventional lecture-based teaching by a system whereby small groups of students are set a series of written case descriptions. Students then work as a group to investigate the scientific basis for the presenting problem and the evidence for the most effective treatment.

Research on PBL in medicine is (in common with a lot of research in education) inconclusive. But medical students are very bright and highly-motivated, and would probably triumph if their education amounted to little more than setting them a weekly question to answer and presenting them with a pile of textbooks to read. Come to think of it, this more or less describes how PBL operates.

The impact of research into intellectual disability

Universities in Britain are currently preoccupied with preparing for the next round of assessment for the allocation of government research funding (called the ‘REF’). A particular feature of this round is that universities are required to submit information about the ‘impact’ of their research, which will then be scored and included in the formula for allocating funds. As I noted in a previous posting, the idea that the whole of research can be scored on a simple scale is a prime example of a crackpot idea. However, institutions and governments cling to crackpot ideas, and respond to their inadequacies by making them more complex and hence even more crackpot. So it is with the REF.

Nevertheless, it is still important to consider which research has had the greatest impact, particularly where this concerns the lives of people who are disadvantaged, ill or disabled. If you look at the impact of research in my own field of public policy for people with intellectual disability, you find startling results. The two pieces of research with the greatest impact in the last five years have without doubt been the secret filming by the BBC in 2011 of staff abusing the residents of Winterbourne View, and the 2007 Mencap report Death by Indifference on the death by neglect of six people with an intellectual disability in general hospitals. Both studies received wide publicity and led to government reports, debates in Parliament, and legislation. Yet neither study was carried out by academics, and neither were published in academic journals. No academic study in this field over the last five years has had a remotely comparable impact. Why is this?

One reason is the way in that most policy research in intellectual disability is funded by central government. The Department of Health decided by the time it published the white paper Valuing People in 2001 that the healthcare of people with an intellectual disability was no longer a major policy concern. Little effort was therefore expended on commissioning research into general hospital care for this group of people, and there is still hardly any published academic research on this subject. Department of Health policy also favoured the decanting of people with an intellectual disability into small homes managed by the private sector and a reduction in specialist health services for those with mental health and/or behavioural disorders. However, small homes are usually unable to manage people with severe behavioural problems, and appropriate specialist care is costly. The private sector moved in to fill the gap by providing what were essentially long-term mental hospitals stripped of the level of trained staff that would have been provided if the NHS had managed the institution. The Department of Health did not see this as a problem before the Winterbourne View scandal, and so research was not commissioned.

But even if there had been a desire by the Department to commission this kind of research, it could not have been carried out by academics. Academic research involving human participants needs the approval of an ethical committee and (in the case of healthcare) of the NHS research governance system. Neither of these would have approved of secretly filming staff abusing residents or collecting data from families about how hospital staff caused death by neglect. Health and social services have a streak of self-interest which can be used to obstruct research into the poor quality of the care they can provide. But ethical committees block research for different reasons. Ethical committees apply rules developed in medical research, in which trials of new medications or surgical procedures carry a risk of harm to subjects. Medical trials are required to ensure that subjects give their informed consent to participation, and there are comprehensive guidelines for what counts as ‘informed’ and ‘consent’. This of course has the advantage of transferring liability to the subject. People who have problems giving informed consent therefore present particular difficulties for ethical committees, and it is difficult to gain approval for any research involving children, people with dementia, or people with intellectual disabilities. This is even the case when the research is (like most social research) descriptive and therefore involves no risk of harm from medication or surgery. In fact, the emphasis among ethical committees on the issue of consent makes it almost impossible for an academic to get approval to carry out any descriptive research involving people with an intellectual disability.

This leads to a bizarre paradox: research is deemed ‘unethical’ even where it aims to expose the grossly unethical treatment of vulnerable people (and hence protect them from further abuse). We therefore know remarkably little about the real world of residential care as experienced by this group of people or the real extent of the neglect and abuse they may suffer. This leads to a further paradox. Academics carry out little research in this important field of public policy: we rely for what we know on journalists and investigators in charities.

See also:
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/research-without-fear.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/great-crackpot-ideas-of-past.html

How to teach skills

There is a crisis at the heart of British education - not university fees, academy schools, or the declining standards of A levels, but the inability of our education system to produce sufficient people with the right kinds of skills needed by employers. How could this happen after two decades in which there has been a massive increase in university admissions? The answer is that universities are good at teaching knowledge and the skills needed to generate and analyse knowledge, but not very good at teaching the skills needed in other workplaces. Expanding the number of people who go to university therefore diminishes the proportion of new entrants to the labour force who have appropriate skills when they begin work.

What is the best way to teach skills? There is a useful example from history. In the middle of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, the RAF upgraded 1050 of its fighter aircraft by installing new constant-speed props. These added 7000 feet to each plane’s altitude and significantly reduced wear and tear on aircraft engines. The way this was done is a model for how to promote innovation and how to teach skills. The new props were developed by de Havilland, who formed a team of expert fitters to tour each airfield. Each squadron was told to select its best fitters, who were trained by the expert team. Training involved three stages: the expert team would first demonstrate one installation; then supervise the squadron’s fitters as they carried out another installation; and finally assess the squadron’s team when they carried out an installation without supervision. If all went well, the expert team would move to the next squadron.

This three stage model of demonstrate-supervise-assess is the basis for all successful programmes for teaching skills. Of course, the de Havilland team was teaching one skill to people who already had many skills in this field. Most occupations require hundreds, if not thousands, of individual skills, and this means that training people to become skilled doctors, plumbers, or lawyers takes years rather than days. Most skills training also involves starting with newcomers who, unlike the fitters in RAF squadrons, initially lack relevant background skills. Some skills can be assessed quickly, but others (particularly those involving an ability to respond to emergencies or to deal with difficult or distressed people) require observation over a long period of time.

The example from the Battle of Britain also shows another essential feature of skills training: it should be done by the most skilled practitioners. These are the best people to judge what counts as skilled practice, and therefore also the best people to supervise trainees and assess whether they are sufficiently skilled to be counted as a competent practitioner.  This model of training, supervision and assessment by the most skilled practitioners has been a key principle in all trades and professions since they existed. Of course, skilled practitioners also need to be knowledgeable practitioners, and so training in professions and trades has traditionally involved more formal classroom teaching, often on a day-release basis.

And that was how almost all professions and trades were trained until recently. Most lawyers, nurses, professions allied to medicine, and librarians did not go to university, but gained their professional qualifications while working in a junior capacity in their chosen occupation. Most craftsmen became apprentices, and attended colleges of further education on day-release. The exceptions to this model, in Britain at least, were divinity and medicine. These were taught at university, although a university degree was not a pre-requisite for a medical career until well into the 19th Century. Teaching medicine at university had the advantage of making it easier to standardise the curriculum and the way it was taught. There remained an emphasis on acquiring skills because students spent much of their time in practice settings under the supervision of medical professors, who were chosen as being the most eminent practitioners in their specialty.

All this changed during the last 30 or so years. Virtually all professions are now taught either as a university degree or following a university degree. This has enhanced the status of these professions, but it has come at a cost. Universities have become vast institutions competing for funds from the state and research funding bodies. Competition for funds has meant a greater emphasis by the universities on their research output, often at the expense of the quality of teaching. This affects the recruitment of senior academic staff, including those who are responsible for teaching skills. As an example, medical professors are now appointed not primarily for their skills as practitioners, but for their research record, even where this exclusively involves experiments with mice and rats in laboratories.

As universities have sucked up educational funds and ever more students, the teaching of skills for the rest of the population has been allowed to atrophy. In Germany, over half of all young people complete an apprenticeship, taught in companies and vocational colleges. Indeed, as many as 40% of all employees in Germany have completed an apprenticeship. The proportion is similar in Australia. In England, it is 11%. Apprenticeships in most countries take three or more years to complete. In England, the equivalent figure is between one and two years.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Britain has needed to import trained people from the rest of the EU at the same time that it has record numbers of young people out of work. The failure to train all our young people in vocational skills not only harms the British economy, it also demonstrates a cruel neglect of the young people themselves.

Graduating joy

University students invest several years of their lives and thousands of pounds of their money in their education. When their course of study is complete, they feel a great sense of achievement accompanied by a desire to celebrate. How well do universities help them in this task. From my experience in England and Scotland, hardly at all. I have attended three graduations as a student, half a dozen as a member of academic staff, and three as a proud parent. I found that these graduations fell into three types:

1.    Stuffy and self-congratulatory. This was my dominant experience of graduation ceremonies, from when I graduated with my masters degree from the University of Strathclyde, my social work qualification from the University of Stirling, and my PhD from the University of London (I didn’t attend the ceremony for my first degree). Also stuffy and self-congratulatory were the degree award ceremonies I attended as a member of staff at the University of Birmingham. All of these events shared a familiar British obsession with meaningless procedures (usually ‘traditions’ of recent invention), wearing funny hats, and a complete lack of fun. In each case, large numbers of students were processed at high speed, with no recognition of their individual talents, the promise they held for the future, or the fact that all the professors, vice-chancellors, administrators and so on depended for their income on the money these students brought into the university. The most memorable of these events was at the University of London. This took place in the splendid setting of the Albert Hall, and was chaired by Princess Anne, as Chancellor of the University. Graduands were supposed to bow to her when they paraded on the stage to receive their degree. Some churlishly refused, and in each case an amused smile appeared on her face. The dullest graduation ceremonies of all were at the University of Birmingham, but the Medical School did make up for this afterwards by holding a slightly more informal reception for graduands and their parents. One irritating feature of Birmingham’s ceremonies was the refusal to honour students who graduated with diplomas and certificates rather than degrees. The University of Stirling could do this, but Birmingham preferred to exclude this group of students (but take their money of course). 

2.    Utterly commercial. All of these graduations, however, were infinitely preferable to Nottingham Trent University (NTU), where my daughter graduated with a BA in Textile Design. The University imposed charges above her fees for all the materials she used in her degree, and then charged parents for attending the graduation ceremony. In other respects, the ceremony was exactly like the others, with a large hall, boring speeches, and an endless parade of graduands. There was a meagre reception afterwards. I suggest NTU’s administration have a chat with its academic staff teaching the degree in management and marketing to learn the concept of customer care.

3.    Small and respectful. The best ceremony I attended was at Leeds University, where my son graduated with a BA in Politics. This was a small affair, limited to students in the same subject, and followed by a very friendly reception afterwards where staff, graduands and parents could meet over a buffet meal. I was pleased to find that the academic staff in the Department of Politics knew their undergraduate students well. The academic speeches were witty, and the several of the students cheered each other when they received their degree. My son went on later to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, from where he graduated with an MSc in International Public Administration in 2011. I did not attend this ceremony, but I did see a video. This took place in the oldest building in the University, and, after the ceremony, graduands signed their name on its walls, next to centuries of previous graduates and honorary graduates. It must be nice to write your signature next to that of Albert Einstein. But what was particularly good about this ceremony was that each student’s academic supervisor made a speech outlining the subject of their dissertation and its contribution to knowledge.

I have seen pictures of graduations in other countries, which include parades of students through the local town, concerts, gigs, dances and general fun. This could happen here too, but it would need universities to recognise that their primary purpose is the dissemination of knowledge, and that they collaborate with students to achieve this, and that success in this task is grounds for real celebration. Of course, it also requires that the British middle class lose some of its dreary stuffiness and learn how to have fun.

Is higher education a rip-off?

Students in most English universities will next year pay £9000/year for their three-year degree course. Is this £27,000 value for money? One way of determining this (popular with governments) is to promote higher education as a personal investment, with a financial return to the student in the form of increased future earnings. However, there is little reliable data on which to base such a calculation. Information about earnings after university comes from data collected before the current recession and at a time when a much smaller proportion of school-leavers attained a degree. The investment model is in any case of dubious value because higher education should be much more than just a means to the end of accumulating ever more possessions.

A more appropriate way of assessing value for money is to calculate how much a good  university education should cost to deliver, and whether this corresponds to what students will be charged in fees. Anybody who has worked in a university will suspect that they operate at less than optimal efficiency. Expensive lecture theatres and teaching laboratories are used for 26 or so weeks/year. There is an expectation in many universities that all academic staff will do research as well as teaching, thereby avoiding the gains that accrue through specialisation. Courses may take years to set up, and universities commonly offer many degree programmes with small numbers of students.

So let’s imagine a university that operates more efficiently but still delivers a high quality of education. In the first place, it will aim to make better use of its capital and human resources by teaching three 15-week semesters/year, instead of the usual two. To calculate how much this will cost, we can simplify things by omitting STEM (science , technology, engineering and medicine) courses because they incur high equipment costs for which universities are compensated by a central government grant. How much teaching should students receive? Over the last few years, universities have reduced teaching hours and increased the number of students in small group teaching (some have 20 or so per ‘small group’). There is also a trend to offload undergraduate teaching to postgraduate students. These trends have their apologists, who say that the quality of the teaching is more important than contact hours. But this is rather like parents who pursue their own careers rather than spend time with their children, and then rationalise this by saying the hour or so they do spend is ‘quality time’.

My imaginary university will do none of those things: all students will receive 20 hours face-to-face lectures/week, plus one hour/week of small group tutorials in groups of ten students, all led by academic staff. How many academic man-hours would this involve? I estimate that each one-hour lecture needs four hours to prepare, but only one hour to revise for the next time it is given, and that each lecture needs a thorough revision once every five years. This gives a mean of 1.6 man-hours of preparation for each hour of lecturing. Small groups require less preparatory work - about one hour for a new tutorial and half an hour to revise. This gives a mean of 0.6 man-hours preparation for each set of tutorials. My imaginary university operates on the Melbourne model, with a small number of large degree programmes - let’s say each has an annual intake of 100 students. The 15th week of each semester will be allocated for exams. No course work will be marked (except as a formative assessment) because of the large and growing problem of agencies which write essays, dissertations and even theses for a fee. Student examinations will each take one hour to mark for each semester, requiring 300 hours for the programme each year.

Based on this data, we can calculate the academic man-hours to deliver each programme as 3156/year. If we assume that each academic works 30h/week on teaching (including preparation time) for 45 weeks/year, this indicates a requirement for 2.3 academics for each year’s intake of 100 students. This would mean a teaching team of 4.6 academic staff for the course as a whole. Let’s assume that the mean staff costs/academic are £50,000/year, resulting in £116,888 cost/year. Academic staff costs are about 36% of total university costs, which would produce a cost of £324,689/100 students, equivalent to fees of £3,247/year and £6,494 for the full degree course.

It would be possible to reduce these fees even lower if some efficiencies could be attained in university administration, which has expanded in recent years because of the spread of quality assurance paperwork and the increasing complexity of the admission process. Universities also have a tendency to build expensive monumental buildings, sports centres, art galleries, conference centres, performance venues and so on. My imaginary university would concentrate on academic matters rather than entertainment (which is available in plenty in the areas in which most students live). Finally, many universities subsidise research from teaching income. The strategy here has been to enhance the prestige of the university (and of course its senior academics), thereby attracting students who wish to attend a prestigious university however limited its commitment to teaching. In my imaginary university, the emphasis would be on scholarship rather than the more circumscribed activity of research. Research would take place, but in defined research centres, which would be expected to be financially self-supporting.

These figures are of course speculative. It could be argued that there should be a balance more in favour of small group teaching rather than lectures, or that some non-STEM courses incur higher costs such as those in the arts (which require specialised equipment and incur high material costs). People who propose such arguments are welcome to make their own revised calculations. A further criticism is that academic staff would be unwilling to spend so much time on teaching. This is probably true of many academics at present, but the solution lies in recruiting people who enjoy teaching for its own sake, combined with a strong desire to keep abreast of current knowledge in their field.

Is this imaginary university ever likely to happen? I would prefer it to be a co-operative, run by its staff on John Lewis lines. But it is rather more likely that private organisations will spot the commercial advantages, charge rather more than £6,494/course but a lot less than the market rate of £27,000. Perhaps then students in the more expensive universities will realise how much they are being ripped off.

The curse of the hero scientist

I have recently read David Edgerton’s book Britain’s War Machine (with thanks to Worcester Public Library). This looks at weapons production in the UK during the Second World War, and along the way shoots down several common myths. For instance, Edgerton notes that Britain was well-prepared for war in 1939, had an army that was more mechanised than Germany, was supported by a vast empire and did not therefore ‘stand alone’ after the fall of France. The most intriguing part of the book for me, however, is the discussion of innovation in weaponry. The British Government, from Churchill downwards, was fascinated by innovative weapons, and sought to make the best possible use of scientists. Yet although the most effective scientific and technological developments were achieved by teams working in industry, the military and the civil service, governments had a concept of the hero scientist, inspired and working alone. The figure of the hero scientist was encouraged after the War in films and books which incorrectly portrayed people like Frank Whittle and Barnes Wallace as lone visionaries struggling without official support against bureaucratic obstruction. Documentaries have subsequently given undue emphasis to innovations such as the Mulberry Harbour and the ‘bouncing bomb’, which had only a marginal impact on the outcome of the War.

Edgerton argues that this idea of hero scientist not only diverted resources from more effective forms of weapon production, but also led to an emphasis on equipment rather than effective strategy and tactics as the means of winning battles. The results could be seen in 1941, when British forces were defeated in Singapore by a smaller and poorly-equipped Japanese Army.

The idea of the hero scientist has been something of a curse in Britain ever since. Grand innovation imposed from above has often been prized above step-by-step technical improvements or enhancing the creativity and skill of the workforce. This can be seen in the British motor industry, which in the generation following the Second World War, produced many innovative designs, from the sports car, the Mini, front-wheel drive cars, cars with tailgates, to the luxury 4x4. Yet the industry paid much less attention to improving the reliability of its products by improving the organisation and skills of the men and women who built the cars. As a result, British cars lost market share, and British-owned companies became bankrupt. Most of the British motor vehicle industry in now owned by the Japanese, who focussed on redesigning the technology by which cars are produced, in co-operation with a skilled and motivated workforce.

Although British industry has now generally adopted Japanese production methods, the concept of the hero scientist is still dominant in many areas of British life, and particularly in the funding of higher education. This has two main streams of public funding for research: the research excellence framework (‘REF’ and formerly ‘RAE’), which allocates cash to departments on the basis of past performance; and the research councils, which allocate most of their funds as research grants to named individuals (called ‘principal investigators’) on the basis of future performance. Both methods are phenomenally expensive and capricious. I have looked at some of the problems with the RAE and the REF in previous postings. What about the allocation of research grants to named individuals by the research councils?

The cost incurred here is not just in the transaction costs involved in adjudicating applications for research grants (large panels of academic experts plus the research council overheads they incur), but in the time spent by university staff throughout the country in preparing the 80 or 90% of applications which are not approved for funding. Most of these failed applications are of high scientific quality, which means that the allocation process becomes determined in the end by politics, horse-trading and reputation rather than by quality. Those who get the money are not necessarily the best scientists, but the scientists who are best at getting the money.

Research council funding also destabilises University research. Grants go to named individuals (or groups of individuals), which means that they take the grant with them if they move to another university. Since grants are mainly used to pay the salaries of the researchers and postgraduate studentships associated with the project, these staff are usually required to move with their principal investigator, rather like a clutch of medieval peasants following their lord and master. This all creates a transfer market, in which hero scientists are bribed to move from one university to another. The effect on the department that loses in this bribery race can be dramatic: in a short time, it can lose not just its senior academic staff, but also a large chunk of its funding, several researchers and even some postgraduate research students.

This whole business is often justified in the same way as the free market in senior executive salaries is justified - that the best prizes go to the best people. But good research is not the product just of few hero scientists, but of teams with different skills that can work effectively together on a sustained basis. These skills should include, for instance, the abilities to conduct thorough field and laboratory work, to critically analyse data, to present results effectively, to apply results for clinical or commercial benefits, and so on. These skills will not all be present in one person, yet many of the members of a research team, however capable they are, will never be able to get major research grants in their own name. Universities have little commitment to developing long-term multi-disciplinary teams because funding is unstable, and because it is much cheaper to bribe a grant-holder to move in with their entire team from another university, rather than to spend years developing the skills of their own staff.

Indeed, the whole research enterprise in the UK is staggeringly wasteful of human talent. Scientists proceed through their three years of doctoral research (usually funded by research grants and other public money). This involves some training in research, in return for which the university gains a very cheap source of labour. After doctoral training, only a minority of the new graduates succeed in gaining university employment, usually as a postdoctoral research fellow funded from a time-limited research grant. This may be followed by other time-limited research fellowships, until the great majority drop out of academic life altogether. Years of research training and experience are thus lost - not because the staff who leave are substandard, but because they have the drive to find a job with an employer who, unlike the university sector, rewards talent and hard work with good pay and decent contracts of employment.

There is an alternative funding model. The research councils do grant some funds on a long-term basis to designated centres, and this model is also used with great success by charities such as Cancer Research UK. By providing stable funding, such centres can maintain multi-skill research teams and sustain the social capital needed for effective research.

We should therefore expand this model into by concentrating public funding for research on developing a limited number of specialised research centres which would be responsible not just for research, but also for training scientists to a high level of skills, retaining them in science, and applying scientific knowledge to the wider world. This long-term funding should replace grants to named individuals and the whole wasteful farce of the REF. Academics working within and outside these research centres would of course be able to continue to seek funding for research from charities and other bodies. Some, however, might realise that there is more to scholarship than the rather narrow concept of ‘research’, and may even come to understand that the main function of universities is to pass on knowledge, values and skills to the next generation. This task is not as heroic as being a lone scientist, but plays a greater part in maintaining our civilisation.



See also:http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/10/great-crackpot-ideas-of-past.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2010/06/status-wars-in-universities.html

The curse of the course

Beware of your metaphors, for they shall make you their slaves. We use metaphors so often in our everyday speech that we fail to recognise how they smuggle implications into our thinking. One example (discussed in a previous blog) is ‘stress’. Another, much used in education, is ‘course’. This word, presumably taken from horse-racing, has multiple smuggled implications. On a racecourse, all the horses start at the same line at the same time. They all jump over a pre-determined sequence of fences in the same order. They all complete the course at the same finishing line, being ranked according to the order in which they finish.

Applied to education in universities, the metaphor implies that groups of students on a course all start and finish their studies at the same time, progressing through their experience of learning in the same order and jumping over the same set of assessments. Students are ranked at the end of the course, with a mark taking the place of speed of completion. However, students who do not complete the course in the same time as others, are regarded as non-completers and fail. Lets challenge each of these smuggled implications.

In the first place, there is no need for students to start and finish a programme of study at the same time. Many people wish to study part-time, and combine university education with work. This usually means that their studies take at least twice as long as a full-time student. Many part-time students are mature and have families. They are therefore more likely to need a break of studies because of childbirth, change of employment , and so on. This is administratively inconvenient for universities, but part-time study may soon be the only way in which many people are able to pay for their studies. Part-time study has another advantage: academic education can be dovetailed with vocational training, also enabling students to apply their increased skills to the workplace and increase their productivity. Universities began, and largely continue to be, places where people are educated into the knowledge, skill and values required for particular occupations. But the domination of full-time study in British universities has split vocational education from vocations. As a result, employers complain that graduates lack the basic skills needed to perform their work, while many graduates fail to find employment appropriate to subjects they have studied for three or more years.

Secondly, not all students need to follow the same sequence of learning materials. In many areas of knowledge, some subjects do indeed have to be understood in sequence (the ‘building block approach’). But this is not always true. In many of the programmes and modules I have taught, much of the material could be studied in any order. Other approaches to learning require students first attain an overall (if rather simplified) perspective of the subject before studying a series of individual areas in more detail, leading to their developing a greater understanding of its complexity. In such cases, students need a shared introduction to the subject and in some cases a shared conclusion, but can explore the remainder of the curriculum in any order at their own pace.

Thirdly, ability should not be confused with speed of completion. Some people just take longer to learn, but are as capable at the end of their studies as the fast finishers. Why should they be penalised or categorised as failures because they take six months longer to acquire the necessary skills, knowledge and values than the average student? One reason is that universities do not have a defined threshold of skills etc which students should attain. Instead, they rank students at completion of their course by ‘first honours’, ‘upper second’ and so on. Yet this ranking system has become increasingly meaningless because of grade inflation. In the last 10 years in England, the proportion of students awarded a first honours has doubled, while another 60% now receive an upper second. This has happened at a time when the proportion of school-leavers entering universities has increased substantially and teaching hours per university student have decreased.

Why is the metaphor of the course still so dominant in British higher education? One reason is that it is convenient for universities and for the government agencies that fund them. Full-time students can all be processed efficiently on a three-year conveyor belt, exams can all be set at the same time for all, and universities can be freed from the difficult business of co-ordinating academic and vocational education with employers. Governments can fund universities using a simple block grant based on the assumption that the great majority of students are full-time. Indeed, the current funding system in England disadvantages part-time students.

Yet there are types of university education which does not correspond to the course metaphor. Professional training degrees (such as in medicine, nursing, social work and the professions allied to medicine) require students to complete part of their training in hospitals and other workplaces, where they acquire skills under the supervision of senior professionals in health and social services who have been co-opted into university education. Degrees of this kind also aim to produce students who meet a defined standard of professional competence, rather than rank them by the marks they achieve on their assignments.

This model could be expanded to other degree programmes. Then, instead of students being given a general education with limited vocational training followed by employment in a lowly administrative post, they could get a job and study for a vocational qualification part-time. This would probably require more distance learning, but we have excellent institutions in this country which can provide this. It would also free up large areas of our cities which have been given over for student rentals and are occupied for only 30 weeks each year. This would have the very useful side-effect of doing something practical to reduce homelessness.

See: My life as a steam engine

                           

Research without fear

A week ago, my computer connection to the Internet ceased. This was puzzling because my son was still able to log on from his laptop, via the home wireless network based on my computer. Eventually, I traced the problem to the Norton Security software I had installed. With remarkable success, this had prevented any viruses infecting my computer by blocking access to all websites. Computers of course mimic the humans that create them. The Norton approach is found among experts on ‘security’ who argue that the only way to protect our liberties is to lock up without trial people who might possibly be terrorists, give the police free rein to assault and kill peaceful demonstrators, and subject all citizens to permanent CCTV surveillance. A similar destructive enthusiasm is found in the system used in the National Health Service for assessing the ethics of proposals for research.

Just as there are real computer viruses and real terrorists, so there is a true history of unethical research on patients. The most outstanding, described in every book on medical ethics, was the Tuskegee Experiment carried out by the US Department of Public Health, in which 400 poor black people infected with syphilis were monitored from 1932 onwards. Although penicillin was identified as an effective treatment by 1940, none of the subjects of the research were informed or treated, leading to the infection of their spouses and other sexual partners, and their children. The whole ghastly racist experiment only came to an end when a whistleblower informed the New York Times.

This case is a warning that medical scientists are no more ethical than other people, particularly when the subjects of their research are poor and from racial minorities. Bad ethical practice in research still exists, although usually in a less extreme manner than the Tuskegee Experiment. There have been cases of people included in clinical trials without their knowledge, people being denied effective treatments, pointless research inflicted on people, and so on. To prevent these kinds of problems, the National Health Service has set up a complex network of ethical committees to thoroughly assess all applications for research. This is backed by a parallel system of ‘research governance’, which ensures that the recommendations of ethical committees are followed by researchers, that research in insured by its ‘sponsor’, and that the cost implications of the research for the NHS are taken into account.

As governments have attempted to extend the protection of human rights (the 2005 Mental Capacity Act, the 2004 Human Tissue Act, and others), so the work of the ethical committees has become more demanding. Nevertheless, the system has improved greatly in efficiency in the last few years, and the various local ethical committees strenuously seek to protect the public from unethical research. However, there is a problem - the same sort of problem encountered by all who seek to avoid risk and create a world free of fear.

All autonomous or creative human action, whether individual or collective, involves risk and therefore danger. The risk may be very small, but the resulting fear may lead to disproportionate and even harmful precautions. In my village, both the primary and secondary schools are in easy walking distance for most children. But many parents drive their children to school because they perceive the quiet roads of a peaceful village to be dangerous and the pavements crowded with paedophiles. As a result, the roads through the village at the times the schools open and close become crowded with large 4x4 vehicles. This has the effect of making travel more dangerous at these times, even for those children and parents who do walk to school. Disproportionate precautions of this kind are particularly common among those with a professional responsibility to protect the rest of us. After all, it seems common sense to believe that one can not be too safe or too ethical.

In the case of ethical committees, this can result in extreme precautions being evoked for the simplest and least offensive of research projects. One of my masters students (a qualified and very experienced child mental health nurse) proposed to interview a small number of experienced and qualified paediatric nurses about their experiences of managing children who are admitted to accident and emergency following overdoses. The ethical committee expressed concern at the impact of these interviews on the state of mind of the nurses, and eventually insisted that an independent counsellor be made available to alleviate distress. Another student wished to send a questionnaire to fellow therapists about the impact on their career of changes in NHS employment practices. This has required six months of applications, and permission from dozens of separate NHS trusts. I know of many similar cases.

Why do ethical committees need to be involved when members of staff pose a few questions to other members of staff? After all, if we applied the same procedures to any other walk of life, all collective human activity would cease. One reason may be that all these research projects concerned the care of either children or people with an intellectual disability. Both are included in the ever-expanding group deemed ‘vulnerable’, a term that flashes warning lights to some ethical committees.

I raised these problems with a team sent to carry out a routine quality assurance review of our masters programme. I was advised that the solution is to discourage students from carrying out research of the kind that requires ethical committee approval. This is of course the Norton Security solution and ultimate triumph of risk avoidance - the danger of unethical research in healthcare will be completely eliminated by preventing any research from taking place. The cost of doing this is that we continue to treat children and people with an intellectual disability with medications for which have limited evidence of effectiveness, and that we fail to investigate the reality of care they receive behind the bland brochures and policy statements. As a result, their real vulnerability to poor quality health and social care is increased.

The wisdom of economics

Economics rarely gets a good press. This is probably because of the regrettable tendency among economists to pose as modern soothsayers: predicting (usually wrongly) the long-term direction of the stock markets, which countries will go bankrupt, and which economies will prosper. But there is great wisdom in economics, which should be known more widely. Here are three concepts from economics, which, if applied, would make British universities far more effective.

The first concept is marginal cost. This means the additional cost incurred in producing one extra item on a product line. A related concept is marginal income, or the additional income received from selling this one extra item. As a general rule, therefore, firms should expand production as long as the marginal income they receive for doing so exceeds the marginal cost. This seems obvious, but it is not how many organisations (let alone universities) operate. I have had very frustrating discussions in which decisions on whether to expand student numbers on a course have been based on average cost/student rather than the (usually very low) marginal cost of adding one extra student to a course that is already in operation. To make matters worse, the government penalises financially those universities which do expand student numbers beyond the ‘planned’ targets that have been set centrally.

The second concept is comparative advantage. This was originally developed to explain how trade can produce additional wealth if each trading partner specialises in producing those goods which it can produce at the lowest cost compared with the cost of producing the same type of goods elsewhere. Comparative advantage can be adapted to analyse the kind of ‘trading’ of activities within an organisation. Suppose an academic department has two members of staff: Cain is an excellent researcher and a mediocre teacher; Abel is a mediocre researcher and a mediocre teacher. What usually happens is that both are required to do their share of research and teaching. As a result, all the teaching in the department is mediocre, while half the research is excellent. If, however, the university applies the wisdom of economics, then they will specialise their staff. In that case, all the teaching will remain mediocre, but all the research will now be excellent. Of course, it would be even better if Abel had been an excellent teacher. But who knows - the more he specialises, the better he might get.

The third economic concept is satisficing. This involves seeking a solution to a problem that is adequate and costs the least. Satisficing is therefore an alternative to seeking a ‘rational’ solution (which would involve comparing all possible alternatives whatever the cost), and to plumping for the ‘excellent’ solution (which involves selecting the best possible  outcome irrespective of cost). Satisficing is what most people probably do most of the time when they come to make decisions about where to live, who to marry, which university to attend and so on. But universities are temples to rationality and excellence: the greatest contributions to knowledge have often come about because academics have taken infinite pains to collect data and have considered radically new ways in which the world and the cosmos can be explained. Such commitment, essential as it may be in scholarship, can have a damaging effect on how academic committees function. Every committee-member thinks up ways in which the outcome of a decision could be even more excellent, and deliberates whether there might be options no-one has yet thought of. It is hardly surprising that university leadership becomes exasperated and takes decisions without discussion or just hands things over to the administrators.

The status wars in universities

Henry Kissinger (quoting several earlier writers) once remarked that disputes in universities are bitter because the stakes are so small. This is true if, perhaps like Kissinger, you regard money and power as the only stakes worth playing for. But academics are not usually greedy or power-hungry - what they seek is status. More specifically, they seek to have status attributed to them by those who already have status in their area of study. There are three signals of academic status: research publications, research grants,  and membership of esteemed academic societies. Status in all three is graduated in an extended hierarchy of infinitely small steps. In each academic field, there is an array of learned journals, ranked mathematically according to how many times the papers they publish are cited by other papers in similar learned journals. This makes it possible to rank the status of individual academics (and the academic departments they work in) according to which journals they publish in, and the ‘citation score’ for their papers. Research grants are of course ranked by size, but also by source. One million pounds from a prestigious peer-reviewed research fund (such as the Medical Research Council or the Wellcome Trust) counts for more in terms of academic status than the same sum from central government or the Lottery. Academic societies are also deliverers of status, in a hierarchy of esteem all the way up to the Royal Society, each with their own rankings of fellows, prizes and other awards.

At the very bottom of this academic hierarchy is teaching. This confers no status in any of these three measures, and, because it involves committing time and energy to meet the needs of other people, also fails to satisfy the essential egoism of many academics. In the past, when universities operated on a more collegiate basis, teaching was seen as a burden to be shared among academic staff in each department. This may still be the case in universities which have maintained a sense of collegiate self-government. But most universities have adopted a corporate model, in which individual academics are set targets for research grants and publications, thereby driving ambitious academics to avoid teaching at all costs. This is not, however, possible for all staff. Competition for research funds is severe (with some only funding 10% of grant applications) and many academics reach a point in their career when the money no longer arrives. In this case, they sink down the hierarchy of academic status and take on more and more teaching and managerial tasks. Some rationalise their diminished status by saying they have so much teaching that they have no time for research.

The funding system for higher education in the UK exactly matches and thus confirms this hierarchy. Research grants are allocated to designated ‘principal investigators’, who can take their grants with them if they transfer to another university. Since their grants usually fund a team of researchers and research students, these too usually transfer, like medieval peasants following their liege lord. This places the most successful principal investigators in a strong position with their university. If they object to policy changes or resent being asked to accept part of the ‘burden’ of teaching, they can move to another institution and take staff, money and prestige with them.

A major source of research grants are the various research councils, which are publicly-funded. But a second stream of public funding is allocated to universities rather than individuals, in accordance with the type and quality of research they undertake. ‘Quality’ is assessed in an infrequent series of assessments previously called the ‘RAE’ but now renamed the ‘REF’. This process involves a series of panels of senior researchers from each academic discipline, who allocate a score on a five-point rating scale for the research carried out in their discipline by each university over the period since the preceding assessment. The scores are awarded, needless to say, on a combination of citation scores for research papers, research grants awarded, and measures of esteem received by staff from their learned societies. The whole process requires a great many panels (67 in the last RAE), and is a massive diversion of funds and precious staff time from research itself. But it is eagerly supported by most research academics because, in a society obsessed by status, the results of the research assessments play the same role that Burke’s peerage or the Almanach de Gotha occupied in aristocratic societies. 

Funding for teaching, by contrast, is awarded neither to named individuals or even for specific courses. Instead, each university is given a block grant for a designated number of students, with this sum topped up by student fees. The block grant is higher if the student attends a clinical or a laboratory-based course (because these are more expensive to deliver), but the same sum arrives if the course is excellent or poor, or whether it is taught intensively or neglectfully. As a result, no status or corporate power attaches to staff who specialise in teaching, and few academics could name the leading teachers in their field of study.

There is, however, one real problem with this hierarchy. Just as status-obsessed aristocrats could bankrupt their countries, so research can undermine the finances of their universities. This is because much research does not cover its costs. Funding from research councils meets only 80% of the its full cost, while many charitable bodies cover little more than the direct costs of the research projects they support. Income from the RAE covers some of this deficit, but many universities subsidise research from funds allocated for teaching. This size of this subsidy is likely to increase because funding from charities and payments for research from central government is likely to decline in response to the economic recession and the consequent poor state of public finances in the UK. Faced by this problem, universities have proposed that student fees be raised while the cost of teaching be reduced. This latter can be achieved by accelerating the existing trends of reducing the number of staff specialising in education, transferring teaching tasks to research students, and cutting back teaching hours.

If this strategy is successful, it will have catastrophic effects for this country. Virtually all professional training now takes place at universities. A poorer quality of higher education would therefore mean less skilled lawyers, doctors, engineers, economists, librarians and so on. Whether or not students are in professional training, they would be less likely to have their ideas challenged, to learn to assess and analyse evidence, or develop skills in the laboratory. The strategy of subsidising research at the expense of teaching would thus have the paradoxical outcome of depriving us of the researchers of the future.

See also: http://stuartcumella.blogspot.com/2009/10/great-crackpot-ideas-of-past.html

Challenging the one-hour university lecture

We do many things in life because we have always done them that way. This applies even when we know that what we do does not work and is unrewarding. An example is the one-hour lecture at universities, which we go on delivering despite all the evidence that it exceeds the attention span of most students, and is usually less effective in delivering information and stimulating learning than almost any other method.

I became an academic in a rather unexpected change of career in 1990. My first teaching experience was on a new masters’ programme in intellectual disability, which was set up by a colleague Dr Beryl Smith. Our students were experienced professionals working in health and social care, and studied part-time. It was difficult for them to get time for studying, and the course was therefore taught for one three-hour session each week. This presented the problem of how on earth we could maintain student learning over such an extended session.

Fortunately, Beryl has great expertise in teaching, and we used her idea of cutting each session into a learning sequence of different elements. This would usually start with an introduction to assess how much the students already knew about the subject, and their experiences of it. This was essential because the students came from different professions, which meant that their knowledge of different subjects was varied and unpredictable. This also gave students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. We would follow this by an introductory lecture of about half and hour, to set out the field of study. Students were then allocated into groups of four or five each, and set a problem to solve. The ‘problem’ might be an analysis of a research paper, discussion of a case study, or the preparation of a draft policy. Each group would then present their response in a plenary session, and this would be followed by a discussion. There could be three or more cycles of this kind in each three-hour session.

On a masters programme, students rightly expect to be taught by topic experts. Beryl and I did not count ourselves experts across the entire field of intellectual disability, and so we invited outside speakers for several sessions. This had the advantage of exposing students to different outlooks, and so stimulated awareness of the difficult policy and ethical dilemmas that frequently arise in working with people with intellectual disabilities.

Looking back on this experience, I realise that we used so many different teaching methods (orienting lecture, reflection, case studies, group problem-solving etc) because Beryl understood that people learn in different ways. Traditional lectures, by contrast, are based on the assumption that there is only one way to learn: by remembering what the teacher says.

A few years later, our masters programme in intellectual disability was converted to distance teaching on the Open University model. By that time, Beryl Smith had retired. Another colleague and I developed distance texts corresponding to each session on the programme. Individual texts still followed the concept of a learning sequence, but self-completion activities replaced group discussions. We ended up with rather more texts than is usual for distance programmes, but students on the programme tell us that they find our texts stimulating and easy to follow.

Moving to distance education had a disadvantage for me. I enjoyed face-to-face teaching, and now I was doing a lot less of it. I eventually moved more into undergraduate medical education. This was a very different world. Teaching was organised into one-hour lectures to 300+ students, plus one-hour tutorials for small groups. As the number of medical students in the University expanded, the ‘small groups’ did too, and eventually we had 22 ‘small groups’, each with about 17 students. Small group tutorials at that time were usually chaired by a staff member and seemed to follow a defined procedure with a clearly-specified set of correct answers which each ‘small group’ was led to discover. However, it has become difficult in some subject areas to find sufficient academic staff to chair all the ‘small groups’, and this has led to greater creativity, with some staff developing self-directed ‘small groups’ in which students are set a problem, and produce a written response which is loaded on WebCT.

For the last three years, I have helped run a module on health services and disability for second-year undergraduate medical students. This comprises ten four-hour sessions, each on a Monday morning. Working with my colleagues Andy Shanks and Dr Qulsom Fazil, we gave each four-hour session a common theme (‘learning disability’, ‘care and carers’, ‘international health’ etc), and divided responsibility for individual sessions between us. Most of these sessions were scheduled to begin with two hours of lectures, followed by two hours of small group teaching. Weighed down by tradition, I initially planned the first two hours as two one-hour lectures. These evoked the usual polite but uninspiring response from students. So I cursed myself for conforming, returned to my experience in masters education, and renewed the idea of teaching using a learning sequence.

I therefore used the first two hours in each session for a sequence of short (half-hour) lectures from a range of presenters, interspersed with short films and question and answer sessions. I have tried to begin these with a film or a personal account which introduces the students to the reality of disability or being a carer, as the case may be. This is followed by a short orienting lecture to clarify terminology and numbers, and present key issues. Further films and short lectures build on this. I have used outside expert speakers to cover more specialist issues. This ‘blended sequence’ approach has been successful, and I will try and improve it further.

I also changed small group teaching on the module, by introducing tutorials led by individual people with an intellectual disability. These were recruited from groups that train and support disabled people in teaching and public presentations. These sessions were much appreciated by students, and helped them develop empathy for living with a disability. However, they were cancelled for this academic year because no budget had been identified to meet the cost of transport and sessional payment. Yet it is surely probable that the University will reinstate this form of teaching, given increasing national concern about the standard of healthcare received by people with an intellectual disability.

I am now quite close to retirement, and so other people will soon become responsible for teaching intellectual disability to medical students in my university. I am encouraged that my colleagues responsible for the medical degree have a firm commitment to innovative and effective education. I hope that in some way I have provided stimulating company for them.