Sailing to Switzerland

On the 23rd August this year, my son Andrew and I sailed to Switzerland. We had not intended to do so. Our original plan for our holiday was to fly to Milan Malpensa, hire a car and drive to Stresa on Lake Maggiore. The next day, we had intended to drive to Locarno or points North, and then spend the next few days in Austria. But on the day before we were due to leave, I realised that I had lost my driving license. Andrew has not yet passed his driving test, and so car hire became impossible. The flights were already booked, and so we decided to backpack. Two trains from Malpensa got us to Stresa, where we stayed two nights. Then we took a steamer up the Lake to arrive at Locarno quayside in the early afternoon. Three nights in Locarno included a trip to the extraordinary castles of Bellinzona, and a train journey along the valley West of the city to the hilltop village of  Intragna. Another train journey took us back to Italy and the town of Como, where we spent one night before returning home.

Travelling by boat and train meant that I had more time to look at the scenery, and note the sharp change crossing the border. Stresa is a beautifully-preserved resort town, with great hotels lining the lake front. The town centre is full of narrow pedestrian streets leading to a town square full of restaurants. Italian restaurants seem incapable of cooking bad meals, and we ate better in Stresa and later in Como than anywhere in Locarno. The enjoyment of food in Switzerland is of course lessened by the price you have to pay for it. When we arrived in Intragna, we found it almost deserted - the only place open was the small Hotel Stazione. We went through to the back and found we were the only customers in a splendid restaurant with a view down the valley to Locarno. Andrew ate Gnocchi and I ate Risotto ai Funghi. Both were the finest we had ever eaten, and we were not put off our food by the constant sound of gunfire. The waiter explained that this was from the firing range used by the Swiss Army on its summer training.

On reflection, it is not so unusual to arrive in Switzerland by steamer. Many years earlier, our family had travelled across Lake Geneva by ferry from Evian-les-Bains in France to Lausanne. That was a happy time too.

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

Living the cliché: I remember the sixties

Yes, I remember the 1960s, even though I was there. I had of course spent the late 1950s as a teenage soldier fighting with Fidel in the Sierra Madre. But now I was back in London smoking dope with Mick and Keith, going to mass protests in Grosvenor Square, and raving at the Isle of Wight Festival. I rode the hippie trail to Katmandu, and went to the summer of love in San Francisco, but most of the time I lived in a squat in Chelsea. I naturally had long hair and a beard and wore a flowery shirt and kaftan (bought in Carnaby Street). I had free love with so many girls, who wore (successively) miniskirts, hotpants, and maxi-skirts. I remember that they all had long straight blond hair and lots of black eye shadow (although it was hard to tell because of all the Pink Floyd strobe lights in the discos we went to).

What happy days they were - for someone else. Actually, I was only 13 at the start of the sixties. After a miserable time at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, I spent a year in Handsworth Technical College doing a new set of social science A-levels (which were not taught in King Edward’s School), and went to the London School of Economics. I left in 1968 and started a master’s degree at the University of Strathclyde. I lived in Streatham, Finsbury Park and Glasgow, and never in a squat. Nor did I ever take drugs, though I drank a fair quantity of beer. I did go out with one blonde, but she had shortish hair and was careful with the eye makeup. I am ashamed to admit that I had a flowery shirt and for a time did have a beard.

My experiences of living in the 1960s were probably quite similar to those of many other people of my age. But when I think back, my personal history has become infested with another set of memories: the tired collection of recycled clips and clichés that appear on television programmes about that decade. This raises an important question: at what point do people reject their own memories and start inserting fictional ones in their place? The only corrective to this tendency may be some kind of home-made reminiscence therapy: watch contemporary films made in Britain, which show what the streets looked like, how people dressed, and how they spoke to each other. I recommend you start with A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life, The Ipcress File, and Alfie.

The lost insight

1976 did not begin well for me. I was living alone in a town where I knew no-one, still legally married and waiting for divorce, working unhappily as a social worker in West Lothian. I could have regarded my new single status as an opportunity and travelled. But I was wounded and needed to return home. So, quite by chance, I learnt of a job with the new Employment Rehabilitation Research Centre (ERRC) in Birmingham. I was interviewed in London by the Head of the Centre, Dr Paul Cornes, and became a ‘Higher Social Work Researcher’ with the Manpower Services Commission. The ERRC was an unusual creation. Part of a civil service agency, it was intended to help solve the problem of employment rehabilitation centres. These provided courses a few weeks long for disabled people, with the aim of helping them return to ‘open’ employment (ie jobs in the ordinary labour market, rather than sheltered work). Being part of the civil service was a problem - publications were seen as breaches of the Official Secrets Act. The senior civil servants who had seen the Centre as a solution were soon replaced by newcomers who saw it as a problem. This was not helped by the almost total ignorance among the same senior  senior civil servants of disability or employment rehabilitation. Paul Cornes navigated his role with great skill and increasing frustration, and proved one of the best bosses I ever had.

I joined the ERRC a few months after it began work, and replaced a kindly, committed but rather intense social worker called John Hannigan. The two of us overlapped in post for a week, to enable me to learn from him. We visited one or more (I forget how many) employment rehabilitation centres, and spent a lot of time talking. On the Friday, just after lunch, John gave me his considered verdict about myself, which went something like this:
“You’re a strange contradiction Stuart. On the face of it, you’re a brash loudmouth, but...”
At that point, someone came in the office and I never learnt the rest of the sentence. John’s great insight about me was lost forever. So I carried on being a brash loudmouth, albeit with a newly-acquired doubt that I might be a different sort of person underneath.

I stayed at the ERRC for some years, and, as usual, failed to take advantage of my employment. I did not publish, did not make the kind of contacts that would have developed a career in disability research, and failed to get a transfer to the permanent civil service. However, the research I carried out at the ERRC did form the basis for my PhD, and I spotted a rather special woman on the staff of the employment rehabilitation centre next door. The ERRC has long gone, but our marriage has remained the most important thing in my life.

The land of make-believe

You are watching the television programme Who do you think you are?, in which a famous person traces their family background. They start by visiting an aged relative. You see the famous person in their car talking about what they expect to learn from this visit and why this is important to them. You next see the car pulling up to the house of the aged relative and the famous person getting out and going to the front door. Inside the house, you see the aged relative go the front door, open it, and say “What a surprise”.

It is not a surprise, of course. There is a cameraman in the house, probably supported by a producer, a lighting engineer and a sound engineer. The scene will have been carefully set up. The scenes outside the house and in the car (perhaps filmed on a different day) will also have been rehearsed and then edited. The whole scene, in other words, is a skilful fraud. But it is fraud we are used to in factual programmes just as much as in film and television drama. This is the ‘naturalistic’ model, or the pretence that we watch people behaving spontaneously in the complete absence of all the cameras and the teams of people that make the pictures and sound happen. We are so used to this fraud that we no longer see it as such. When we see a lone presenter walking across the moors or up a mountain, we believe she is alone on the hills. Yet we see pictures of her taken from a helicopter, or pictures of her struggling up to some peak taken by a cameraman waiting for her on that peak. We are led to believe the commentator has walked the whole distance by themselves and found their own accommodation or pitched their own tent. The true surprise occurs when a commentator on television does mention his cameraman or production crew.

The frauds can go further. Wildlife programmes intersperse shots of animals in the wild (usually taken by highly-skilled camera team after weeks of careful work) with pictures of similar animals in zoos. This is all to give the impression that when we see an animal such as a polar bear go into its lair in the wild, we are then seeing the same polar bear in its lair feeding its cubs even though these later shots are actually of a different polar bear filmed in a zoo. ‘Reality’ television programmes involve set piece arguments provoked by a presenter, all to give the impression that the performers before us present a shocking insight into the raw side of life. More shamefully, contests on children’s television programmes have been fixed to produce the most entertaining outcome. 

This does not occur because the people who produce television are any more dishonest than the rest of us. Rather, they would probably justify these deceptions on the grounds that they help viewers comprehend an underlying truth (what family history tells us of the past, what a particular long walk is like, how polar bears feed their young, and so on). But they also do so to conform with the public’s expectations of television, derived in turn from films and other drama which, with very few exceptions, obey the ‘naturalistic’ model. This is so well-established that a whole genre of comic television programmes exists in which a presenter points out examples where the mechanics of film-making have accidentally been made evident (a visible sound boom or a shot of a camera crew in a mirror). These programmes are supposed to be funny because they show a breach of a sacrosanct social convention.

This is very different from drama on stage, in which it is more evident that we are watching actors portraying characters and following a script written for them. A good actor can make the audience forget this, provided the audience are engaged. Television, by contrast, requires less engagement by its audience and less suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the naturalistic model and the lack of apparent difference between factual and fictional programmes is a cause of morbid confusion for some television viewers, who send flowers when a character (not an actor) in a soap opera dies. Others have interpreted science fiction films and television programmes as the truth and truly believe that a race of intelligent reptiles have taken on the appearance of world leaders, or that the moon landings were an elaborate fake. For them, television (whatever they are watching) is the true reality, while their daily lives are but flickering images on the walls of the cave.