John Bald Ofsted and New Labour

Universities, the OU and A levels. Updated.

The OU is enjoying a boom, according to the Telegraph. At the same time the Vice Chancellor of Manchester University is on radio 4 saying that teaching standards in traditional universities can't keep up with the rise in student numbers that has been forced on them, and 12000 straight A candidates have been rejected from Oxbridge. A vice-chancellor telling the truth rather than fighting his corner. There is a novelty - or perhaps a coincidence.

Update - Jack Grimston of the Sunday Times has this on the increasing use of postgraduates instead of academic staff to teach undergraduates. This has been an American practice for years, and not a good one. The issue is the intangible one of depth of knowledge and understanding, and the need for the brightest minds to come into contact with mature top talent - even if, as David Attenborough pointed out in a recent broadcast, the top talent can be wrong (a Professor of Geology had described the idea of continental drift to him as "pure moonshine"). 

Times change. I took A level in 1968 and an A was hard to get. Thanks to excellent teaching, and working as hard as an eighteen year old knew how, I managed 2. In the third subject, where the teaching was not so good and I didn't really know what I was trying to do, I got a D.  Getting 3 As was a rarity, and the one person I knew at my university who did, received a phone call from an Oxbridge college asking if she wouldn't rather go there instead. If they wanted someone at interview, colleges in those days would usually offer 2 Es, in order to take the pressure off. Long afterwards, I discovered the iniquity of the system - the marks were fiddled in those days too, so that the top grades were awarded on a percentage basis. If everybody did very well, the grade was moved up, so that the difference between an A and a C could be two or three per cent. The harder everyone worked, the more people were pushed in to the funnel. That wasn't fair either.

"We might as well do an OU degree..."

More on the callous neglect of undergraduates and poor teaching at New Labour's universities from the Sunday Times' Jack Grimston. It includes this

Sarah Wakefield, 21, a former pupil of Durham Johnston comprehensive, who is studying politics, philosophy and economics at Manchester, said: “It is getting to the stage where people are saying, ‘We might as well do an Open University degree.’

“We are only just getting clues about some of the cuts. . . Students see an increase in fees, but the quality of what we are getting is falling. It is something a lot of people are identifying with now.”

This is a bit of an insult to the OU, which has various helplines and support systems. Students under the new regime elsewhere are left to sink or swim, without the teaching that characterises genuine university education and develops the highest levels of intellectual capacity.

I will admit to personal interest - at UEA in the seventies, I fell out with an "adviser" and was allocated to a newly appointed lecturer who did not have any other students. This lady gave me every conceivable support and encouragement, as did other lecturers at the School of European Studies, and my degree was at least one class higher as a result. It was what university should be about, and still is at Oxbridge. One result has been a very clear insight into French grammar and linguistic structures that have allowed me to develop new approaches to teaching French, that build on those developed by my late friend Michel Thomas, and to see and explain the links between French and English in a way that has made a significant contribution to solving literacy problems.

It's not rocket science or jet engines, but it has changed lives for the better, and would not have happened with out Ann Spencer.  The University has closed the school of European Studies, abandoned the seminar system and sacked the lecturers. I suppose it still counts as a university under New Labour's system, but I and most former EUR students will have nothing to do with it. Jack Grimston's revelations over the past two weeks, though, suggest that I was being unfair in my particular resentment of what happened at UES - motto, "Do different".  It's just the same as everywhere else.

Lower standards at Bristol

Sunday Times' Jack Grimston on complaints by Bristol undergraduates that they are not receiving proper teaching and marking of their work. This is typical of the pressures New Labour has put on universities, and of its ignorance of their purpose. University education is either designed to develop intellectual capacity to the highest level, or it is not higher education at all, but further education. American universities have for years fobbed undergraduate students off with second rate teaching by "instructors" in a way that denies the young student access to, and interaction with, the minds of top experts in their field - only post-graduates have access to the best in most of their universities. We are now doing the same, in the name of increasing numbers. Outside Imperial College and Oxbridge we will soon have no universities at all - and there have been complaints about Oxford's teaching too, on the same grounds as Bristol's, though chiefly from American postgraduates.