Guardian Education News

The prospect of working at a university with people who pursue knowledge for its intrinsic value is truly liberating

Here are two contrasting experiences. I read a short story I have written to a group of people, and when I've finished I invite questions, stressing that these can be as broad or specific as they wish. The first questioner wants to know how I see meta-fictional conceits in relation to the traditional philosophic novel, and when we've discussed this for a while she asks for further reading recommendations. A second questioner asks me how I view my work in relation to naturalistic fiction. A third makes a comparison between my story and a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (a doyen of Latin American science fiction writing), and it's my turn to note down this suggestion for further reading.

The following day I speak to someone on the phone who's read the film script I've adapted from the same short story. She asks me this question: "Why did you mention the brand name of a lemon squeezer in your script?" This is not a single bathetic instance – she follows it by asking me questions for a further 20 minutes, none of which suggest any familiarity with my work beyond this script and an article I wrote for the Guardian travel section about Trafalgar Square.

The first group was, of course, comprised of university students, whereas the individual phone caller was a journalist on a national newspaper. Surely this disparity alone – on the one hand focused, engaged and intellectually adventurous young people, and on the other a single incurious and prejudiced one – eloquently makes the case for why I would wish to work in a university environment. Of course, I've had plenty of experience of truculent and blinkered students, while I know many engaged and deeply committed journalists. Nonetheless, this juxtaposition did seem to me emblematic of how academic environments are very often ones in which knowledge is pursued for its intrinsic value, while in the wider world the only value seen as accruing to almost anything is frequently financial.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and – it often seems – social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian. While emotionally sympathetic to the protesters against increased tuition fees – and their siblings in the Occupy movement – what's struck me most in the last couple of years is the absence of theoretical rigour in their critique. That, and the sense that with education, as with the NHS and other parts of the public sector, the opposition to cuts/privatisation is essentially a proxy battle, while the real question – how can we move from a divisive, inegalitarian and stultifying neoliberalism towards a more equitable and nurturing society? – seems unasked, let alone answered.

It's the opportunity to engage with these issues and many others that excites me about taking up thismy new position of professor of contemporary thought at Brunel. I have been a vocal critic of the burgeoning of creative writing programmes in British universities, and while teaching some aspects of literary composition under the aegis of the school of arts, I will be formulating and presenting course modules for the school of social sciences. I'm interested in such things as reading and memory in the digital age, the practice of pedestrianism as a form of urban study and political activism, the cultural supremacy of the so called psy professions, and, of course, that perennial sawhorse: whither the novel?

I realise that the above may make it sound as if I'm more concerned with what I will get out of teaching these students, rather than what they may get out of me – but actually I believe the two are pretty much the same thing. The encounter I described at the outset took place at the University of Kent, and the multifarious debate engaged – or so the tutors told me later – their students proportionately. There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour – if I believed in progress I suppose that's what I'd call it.

Lastly: I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology "value for money" in my literary and journalistic work – and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.

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Research shows there are almost 20,000 fewer full-time undergraduate courses available than in 2006

The number of degree courses on offer at British universities has been slashed by more than a quarter in the past six years, new research suggests.

It reveals that there are almost 20,000 fewer full-time undergraduate courses available now than there were in 2006.

The study, by the University and College Union (UCU) found cuts across a range of subjects, from the sciences, to arts and humanities.

England, where tuition fees will rise to a maximum of £9,000 a year this autumn, has been the hardest hit, with almost a third fewer courses on offer, it claims. UCU said that the findings showed that funding cuts were affecting course availability, which could be damaging to students.

The report's authors analysed official course data, and a sample of single-subject degree courses to investigate whether there had been any noticeable change in what was on offer. It found a sharp reduction in the total number of full-time undergraduate degree courses in Britain: a fall of 27% between 2006 and 2012.

In total, there are 51,116 degree courses available this year, compared with 70,052 in 2006. Within the UK, England has seen a 31% fall in courses, while Northern Ireland has seen a drop of 24%, Wales 11% and Scotland 3%.

In England, six out of nine regions have seen a cut of a quarter or more. Among those with the largest reductions are the south-west, with a drop of 47%; the east, which was down 41%; and the north-west, which had a cut of 40%. At the other end of the scale, oOnly 1% of courses have been cut in the East Midlands.

The report found that among the single-subject courses examined in the UK, there has been a fall of 14.6% in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem subjects), while social science courses have dropped by 12.8%, and arts and humanities are down by 14%.

Sally Hunt, UCU general secretary, said: "While successive governments have been dreaming up new ways to increase the cost of going to university, the range of subjects available to students has fallen massively. The UK's global academic reputation is built on the broad range of subjects available and on the freedom of academics to push at the boundaries and create new areas of study.

"This report shows that, while government rhetoric is all about students as consumers, the curriculum has actually narrowed significantly."

She added: "Although students in England are expected to pay up to £9,000 a year to study, there is much less choice for them.

"hifting the burden of funding from the state to the student means nervous universities will look to axe even more courses that they worry won't make a profit. However, we simply cannot have areas of the country where local students do not have access to the courses they want to study."

According to official figures published by the university admissions services Ucas, the numbers of applications to university had been rising up until this year. As of January, 462,507 UK students had applied for courses beginning in the autumn, compared with 506,388 at this point last year – a drop of 8.7%.

Maverick writer will be teaching students at Brunel University's school of the arts and its school of the social sciences

Since graduating from Oxford in the early 1980s, Will Self's career has been nothing if not diverse. He has swept streets, drawn cartoons and made cold calls; he has written as a maverick political journalist, a psycho-geographer, satirist and self-declared flâneur.

Now he is going back to university – this time in a role that marks his most respectable stage to date – as professor of contemporary thought at a London university, with licence to dream up new courses and research projects that reflect his eclectic interests.

Self takes up the new chair at Brunel University, in Uxbridge, west London, next week. He will be teaching undergraduate and post-graduate students at the university's school of the arts and its school of the social sciences.

He may contribute to courses on urban planning and human geography; he has written about the pleasures and hazards of exploring cities on foot. He may also teach a module on "psychoanalysis and contemporary society", echoing a theme of his fiction in which a psychiatrist is a recurring character. Self describes psychiatrists as occupying a "priestly role" between sanity and madness.

The university also expects him to contribute to the teaching of journalism and creative writing.

The author will have a role in increasing the university's engagement with the wider community, which will begin with a lecture on "urban psychosis" at the end of next month.

Self said his teaching would reflect preoccupations such as the relationship between people and geography. "I do think there are interesting things to be said about the relationship between different modes of transport, including pedestrianisation, and perceptions of the way the city has grown up, the way we experience it, and the impact of new technologies on that … I just think that architects should be made to walk."

He added that Brunel attracted him for "psycho-geographical reasons".

"It's very near to Heathrow, and there's a big British Asian community that has grown up around Southall. Take the last few weeks and all of this Dickens brouhaha, the bourgeoisie got themselves into an awful pother – 'why was he so great and we're so crap – where is the contemporary Dickens?' Maybe the contemporary Dickens is going to be a British Asian."

Self said he hoped his own writing would be influenced by his activities at Brunel.

Dany Nobus, Brunel's pro-vice chancellor, said the university is keen for Self to develop new ideas for research activities and teaching programmes that cross disciplinary boundaries.

He said: "We were incredibly impressed, not just by his intellectual background and range of interests but also by his commitment to university life.

"What we want to do is about crossing boundaries and also about taking the university beyond its own boundaries, opening things up towards the wider community."

Self said that he was joining Brunel at a parlous time for universities. He regards higher education as a sector under assault from a reductive view of universities as training for a future workforce.

"Just because the dominant metric seems to be that everything has to be costed in terms of how it contributes to the economic producers of the future doesn't mean that I can't critique that, and make that part of my teaching practice," the author said.

Self, 50, who is married to a Guardian journalist, Deborah Orr, is the author of eight novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating with a third.

In 1997, while covering the then prime minister John Major's campaign for re-election, he was fired by the Observer for allegedly taking heroin on the official aeroplane.

Brunel, founded in 1966 and named after the Victorian engineer, has another novelist on its staff: Fay Weldon was appointed chair of creative writing there in 2006.

Will Self on …

The Olympics

I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils – but this is nonsense. They're a boondoggle for politicians and financiers … The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism – in 10 years' time they'll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.

Drugs

I admire them from afar. I think the heavier hallucinogens are amazing. The problem with our society is there aren't enough positive drug rituals. I said this to the Archbishop of Canterbury the other night – the Church of England should introduce some sort of ecstasy communion.

The internet

The web – like any other emergent medium – is still inchoate. The claims of Mumsnet, Twitter etc to be intrinsically 'democratic' forces for good that have helped to bring down evil empires in Tehran, across the Middle East and now in Wapping are wholly specious.

The honours system

Defenders of the honours lunacy always point out that it isn't only crony capitalists and political placemen and women who are cloaked in ermine and topped-off with balls. But the odd ennobled social worker is no match for those furious oxymorons: the Labour lords – surely paradoxes on a par with fascist humanitarians or vegan hammerhead sharks.

After councils and care units, now schools are being encouraged to imitate the department store's stakeholder structure

Once upon a time, we knew three things about John Lewis. One: it's a very nice, very middle-class department store. Two: it owns Waitrose, that very nice, very middle-class supermarket. Three: it is, or claims to be, never knowingly undersold.

These days, we can add a fourth: never knowingly under-referenced within plans to reform the welfare state. In 2010, London's Lambeth council announced an intention to remould itself according to the "John Lewis model". Last June, David Cameron unveiled plans to turn parts of the public sector into "John Lewis-style" mutuals. This week, a rightwing thinktank suggested turning state schools into John Lewis-like companies. A planned free school in Suffolk will be a John Lewis-style partnership, while an NHS hospital in Cambridgeshire and a care unit in Swindon already claim to operate along those lines. Even Nick Clegg has talked about making other firms in the private sector operate a bit more like John Lewis.

The John Lewis business model gives each employee part-ownership of the company, a share of its annual profits, and a say in how it is run. In theory, it makes employees more invested – literally – in their work, and so heightens both productivity and profits. At least, that's how it works at John Lewis itself. Critics argue that the right's proposals either only pay lip service to the scheme on which they are based – or are simply a way of making privatisation seem fluffier. This week's plans could encourage stakeholders (teachers, pupils) to work harder. On the flipside, they could also lead to the outsourcing of a school's management structures, and thereby make teachers less accountable. Suffolk's Breckland Free School has already outsourced its management to a private firm, and won't be overseen directly by the parents who set it up.

Lambeth's John Lewis council promised much – community involvement in exchange for council tax rebates – but has been criticised for playing an active role in privatisation. Only last week the council sold off a community-run arts centre to developers. And what of the Swindon care unit? In the words of cabinet office minister Francis Maude: "It's a mutual where there's no financial incentive. They will own it, but with no profit share or anything, no financial upside. They will have to take out 30% of their cost over the next four years and they are really excited about it." In other words, it's a John Lewis partnership, but without most of the rewards. Unless you count swingeing cuts as a good thing.

Nick Clegg's ideas seem the most appropriate interpretation of the John Lewis model: they're about making capitalist structures fairer. But proposals to turn public services into John Lewis-style firms seems slightly disingenuous. After all, the NHS – which gives citizens both a say in its organisation (at the ballot box) and a piece of its resources (in the surgery) – might already be the biggest John Lewis model going.

Sunderland is best-known in business circles for its Japanese links via Nissan, but it's also renewing its own version of the special relationship

Northern England's links with the United States, which include the gift to the world of Wrigley's chewing gum, have been mightily emphasised today in Sunderland.

The city on the Wear has its own special Friendship Agreement with Washington DC, the only non-capital city in the world to do so. An uneven match? Not at all. Without Sunderland and area, there might never have been George Washington.

Hence the ceremonies at his family's old home, Washington Old Hall, which is very much worth a visit. While the British Embassy in Washington hosted a reception to mark the renewal of of the agreement, local people got together at the Wearside end to do their bit as well.

Encouragingly, for those who expect such things to be the preserve of people my age, the programme was much enlivened by young people. David Crone, chair of Sunderland youth parliament, read the American declaration of independence (the model for northern England's forthcoming breakaway), Lauren Waine of Monkwearmouth school sang the American national anthem and Martyn Foster from Broadway junior school read Martin Luther's eloquent speech, I have a dream.

Pupils from George Washington primary school joined in as well, before the Mayor of Sunderland – let's hope it becomes a Lord Mayoralty soon, now that the place is a city – Coun Norma Wright concluded proceedings.

There is a practical point to all the fun and games (and useful history). Contemporary Sunderland is famous for its links with Japan, through the Nissan plant, but are many American business connections as well.

United States firms account for one of the biggest shares of local inward investment, such as the Lear Corporation which is launching a new production plant at Rainton Bridge, creating 300 jobs. The TRW Automotive company already employs the same number at its steering systems plant, which was opened in 1989.

Looking the other way, the Sunderland firm SaleCycle, which recovers abandoned shopping trolleys online, has a sales office on the edge of Washington DC. At the small business level, Phil Vickery, one of Wearside's glass artists who cluster round the National Glass Centre, has found the Friendship Agreement more than just a twinning symbol.

He told the Old Hall get-together:

We need to keep doing this to form long-term relationships with US buyers. I have made strong contacts and captured opportunities that have led to friendships and being able to sell directly to the US market. Without this help it would be just about impossible for people like me to break into the US market.

Dominic Edmunds, founder and managing director of SaleCycle said:

We have recruited US staff, opened our office and generated sales directly into the US market. The good relationship which Sunderland has established with Washington DC was instrumental in all of this. Without the city council's connections it would have been much more difficult and taken far longer to achieve.

And Paul Willson, plant controller at TRW was happy too, that:

The Friendship Agreement builds the relationship, confidence and the possibility of investments between our two cities.

There's a way to go in the north east so far as jobs are concerned, as no one needs telling. But today has helped.

Latest data shows 25% of 21-year-olds who left university with a degree in 2011 were unemployed compared with 26% of 16-year-olds with GCSEs

Graduates leaving university found it harder to get jobs in 2011 than students finishing A-level courses, as youth unemployment hit its highest level since the 1980s, official data shows.

In 2011, 20% of 18-year-olds who left school with A-levels were unemployed compared with 25% of 21-year-olds who left university with a degree, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Graduate unemployment rates were almost on a par with those for people leaving school with just GCSEs, with 26% of 16-year-olds with these qualifications out of work.

But the ONS figures show it was easier for older graduates to find work: at age 24 only 5% of degree holders were unemployed compared with 7% of those who finished their education after A-levels and 13% of those with only GCSEs.

Charlie Ball, deputy director of research at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, said the figures were "absolutely correct, but give a misleading impression", as the cohort of people leaving with A-levels was smaller than the number graduating.

He said the graduate jobs market had "hardly returned to its state pre-recession", but most of those leaving university were likely to get jobs within six months.

"Although the number of young people out of work is historically high, the graduate unemployment rate in this recession has not reached the levels it did in the 1980s or 1990s," he said.

Research by investment firm Skandia suggests graduates still earn a high premium over the course of their career once they do find work. It says a graduate leaving university today should earn an average of £1.6m over a working career of 45 years compared to £1m for an 18-year-old entering the workforce and retiring 48 years later. A 16-year-old working 49.5 years will typically earn £783,964 over their career.

Although the prospects for graduates may not be as gloomy as they first appear, the ONS figures make grim reading for young job seekers.

The ONS said unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 stood at just over 1m in the last quarter of 2011, the highest number since 1986/87. This represented one in seven (or 14.2%) of this age group and is the highest rate of youth unemployment since 1984/85. Of these, 307,000 were full-time students actively looking for work alongside their studies.

London was the region with the highest youth unemployment rate, with 24% of economically active 16- to 24-year-olds unemployed from July 2010 to June 2011. However, the ONS said this was a result of the number of students in the capital, some of who were looking to work. When students are discounted, the highest proportion of youth unemployment was in the north-east at 15%.

The TUC's general secretary, Brendan Barber, said the figures showed the importance of higher qualifications in helping young people into work. But he added: "With ministers putting up fresh barriers to higher education by hiking tuition fees and scrapping the EMA, the scar of mass joblessness that is hitting today's youngsters could follow some of them into their late 20s or even 30s.

"The government's cut-price work experience scheme is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the scale of our jobs crisis. Young people need tailored support and experience of proper paid jobs to give them the best possible chance of moving into work."

Recently, some large firms have stepped up their recruitment of school leavers to attract bright students put off by the cost of going to university.

All of the UK's "big four" accountancy firms, which between them recruit several thousand graduates each year, have established degree-equivalent school-leaver training programmes, including Ernst & Young which launches its programme in the autumn.

Stephen Isherwood, head of graduate recruitment at Ernst & Young, said the company had already recruited 30 of the 60 school leavers it planned to take on from hundreds of applications.

"There is a sense that the mantra of the last few years that everything is about university is not necessarily right, and that A-level students should really be thinking about what they want to do and whether that means going to university, and making sure they get the best deal for themselves."

Beyond the superficial novelty of a show hosted by an African-American professor, MSNBC is serious about intellectual debate

In Wesley Morris's recent piece about the changing fashion preferences of NBA athletes, he writes:

"In the same way that there are people who never thought they'd see a black American president, there are also people who never thought they'd see a black basketball star dressed like a nerd."

Sports icons like Kevin Durant and LeBron James call attention to widespread changes among a generation of black Americans who embrace a nerdier personal style. But style is not the same as substance, and Dr Melissa Harris-Perry's new politics show on MSNBC now unabashedly brings the content of nerddom to a massive viewing audience.

When Harris-Perry, a political scientist, used the word "nerdland" (now a Twitter hashtag for the show) to describe the show, she was not implying a racially segregated nerdland reserved for black people. In fact, two of Harris-Perry's first three guests were white men, including Edward Cox, chairman of the New York Republican state committee. But because contemporary black nerddom is wrongly understood by many as a recent historical development, black intellectuals like Harris-Perry engaging in and moderating intellectual exchange may seem new and peculiar to many viewers.

Though she speaks to multiple audiences and cultivates broad conversations that do not start and end with race, Harris-Perry is acutely aware of the ways in which racism and sexism mark her as exceptional in the contemporary landscape of political punditry. In her debut last Saturday, she displayed this awareness in a self-effacing manner, beginning the show "with what I was hoping would feel like a counterintuitive thesis for the start of MSNBC's sort of 'liberal African-American girl show,' which is, I actually want a strong Republican party." Harris-Perry's most recent book focuses on public perceptions and stereotypes of black American women, as well as women's responses to the way they are represented. She knows she is not a novelty act, and she joins small but distinguished cohort of professional black female television hosts, which includes Soledad O'Brien and Gwen Ifill. But as Brian Stelter points out, Harris-Perry is the only tenured professor in the United States to host such a show. The program's uniqueness is its mission to bring the academy to the public, and "stuffy professor" is not among the bevy of race-, class- and gender-dependent stereotypes black women routinely deal with.

It is precisely on this front, at the splaying boundary between the academy and the public sphere, that the Melissa Harris-Perry Show matters most, as it speaks to pressing controversies in the debate over ethnic studies and access to higher education more broadly. Activist and author Tim Wise explains the folly and shame of the state of Arizona's recent ban on ethnic studies, a judicial decision that disfigures American history, exacerbates racism, and suffocates intellectual freedom. Like Harris-Perry, scholars in ethnic studies and African-American studies regularly hold appointments in multiple departments, as researchers ask and answer questions that require cross-disciplinary connections and yield bountiful intellectual rewards. Nowhere is this truth more clear than in the career of professor of African-American literature Ruth J Simmons, who served as president of both Smith College and Brown University. Ethnic studies do not just teach about race and ethnicity; they teach how to think and exchange ideas, skills that serve all students quite well, no matter their specific interests.

In addition to the ethnic studies controversy, MSNBC's foray into nerdland comes at a time of heated debate about the purpose and promise of higher education in the United States. Panic hovers over American colleges and universities, as skyrocketing costs of tuition, state budget crunches, and flippant anxieties about the value of the humanities writ large clutter the public sphere. Distorted discussions about educational utility and elitism pollute the most basic questions of access, as Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently accused president Obama of "hubris" and "snobbery" after Obama expressed his hope that every American child attend college.

On the other hand, new advances in online learning and programs like iTunes U and Ted talks are making both the credentials and content of higher education more accessible than they have ever been. The Harris-Perry show will not solve the deeply-rooted inequities that restrict access to higher education for so many Americans. But it does represent MSNBC's recognition that the public thirsts for earnest intellectual discussion, driven by data and evidence and facilitated by trained professionals. All members of the academy, regardless of discipline or political preference, should recognize the value of the Harris-Perry show, as its host explicitly acknowledges the different skill sets and demands of academic research and public intellectualism.

It is doubtful that shouting matches between passionate and opinionated pundits will disappear from politics news shows, and perhaps those spectacles have their place. Harris-Perry herself was recently drawn into in a well-publicized row with fellow professor Cornel West – a conflict that stemmed from the researchers' differing evaluations of President Obama and, as Dr Mark Sawyer carefully explains, regrettably deteriorated into personal attacks. If the first Melissa Harris-Perry show is any indication, its host will not silence or insult those with whom she disagrees, including fellow nerds. The conflict and crescendo of intellectual exchange are intrinsic to academic work, and the hope is that this new space will provide civility and empiricism where discourtesy and conjecture usually reside. If this comes to pass, the Harris-Perry show will succeed in demonstrating that academics are more than elitists who produce indecipherable research only for each other.

Nerdland is home to rugged terrain and occasionally stormy weather, but its air is sweet, its sky is vast, and its borders are open to all.

My good friend Ian King, who has died of cancer aged 57, made significant contributions to the national student union movement. Over the past 35 years there has rarely been a strategic move that has not benefited from his wise counsel and assistance. He was one of those responsible for creating one of the first effective central purchasing organisations for unions, which eventually became NUS Services Ltd (NUSSL). He was among the first managers to promote those unions offering activities that would supplement students' work on their degrees – known as student development activities. He was a prime mover in the increased professionalism of union staff.

Ian started his involvement in unions while he was an undergraduate at Stirling University. He went on to serve as general manager of the unions of York St John University, the Polytechnic of Wales (now the University of Glamorgan) and Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). In 1987 he was appointed general manager at Birmingham University Guild of Students, where he enjoyed 10 happy, satisfying and innovative years.

He was often consulted on important NUS issues by union officers who respected his opinion and could be sure of his integrity, confidentiality and availability. In 1997 he was appointed chief executive at NUSSL, responsible for a £60m annual purchasing budget. As with all his other posts, he introduced rapid change, increasing NUSSL's effectiveness and making it more accessible to its members.

Eleven years ago, Ian was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He faced this with courage, fortitude and humour. He was determined that his activities would not be restricted and carried on working until 2010, despite ill-health. He continued with his many interests, mainly travel, sport and the arts. He was a keen cricket fan and a supporter of the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Ian gained most joy in the development of people, whether students and staff.

He is survived by his wife, Becky, whom he married in 1975, and his daughter, Amy.

My friend and colleague Brian Shefton, who has died aged 92, was a distinguished scholar of Greek and Etruscan archaeology. One of his most significant achievements was a collection of Greek and Etruscan artefacts which he established in 1956 when he was given a grant of £25 to purchase three Greek pots. The collection expanded to include nearly 1,000 objects, many of which can now be seen at the Great North Museum: Hancock, in Newcastle upon Tyne. Brian also built up an important collection of books on Greek and Etruscan archaeology, which make up the Shefton collection in the library at Newcastle University.

Brian was born in Cologne, the son of Isidor Scheftelowitz, professor of Sanskrit at Cologne University, and his wife, Frieda. In 1933 the family moved to Britain to escape Nazi oppression. Brian thrived in Britain and, after military service during which he changed his name to Shefton, he graduated from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1947. He then spent three years travelling in Greece before taking up a lectureship at Exeter University.

In 1955 he arrived at King's College in Durham (now Newcastle University) as a lecturer in Greek archaeology and ancient history. He remained there for the rest of his career, becoming professor of Greek art and archaeology in 1979. To Brian, the archaeology collection and library holdings at Newcastle were his greatest achievements.

His scholarship was truly international. He was an enthusiastic traveller with an extensive network of colleagues and friends. He attended international conferences frequently, and also received prestigious fellowships and honours, including an honorary doctorate from Cologne University and the British Academy's Kenyon medal.

His enthusiasm for his discipline stayed with him until the end. He spoke at a conference in Basle, Switzerland, on Etruscan archaeology in October 2011 and continued to work on research projects. He was an incredibly generous scholar who always had time for others. His irrepressible energy and curiosity were an inspiration to all those who knew him.

Brian is survived by his wife, Jutta, whom he married in 1960, and his daughter, Penny.

A new all-party Parliamentary group for the region has been formed. Andrew Percy, its co-chair and Conservative MP for Brigg and Goole, explains why and sets out its priorities

With the emergence of City Regions, Local Enterprise Partnerships, and the clear commitment by all major political parties to "localism", is now the right time to establish a new, regionally-based, cross-party group of Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire MPs?

The clear consensus is "Yes".

The question of whether to join political forces in the greater interests of Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire has been something that we and a number of our fellow MPs have been asking ourselves of late.

The answer has come, loud and clear, that now – perhaps more than ever – is the time to put party politics aside and work together as MPs to help unlock the growth that our local constituents need, however they may choose to vote.

The fact is that the region of Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire does not get the attention or credit it deserves, in terms of the critical role it plays for the UK economy – e.g. it provides almost 20% of the UK's electricity needs and almost 30% of the country's petrochemical products, so vital to industry. It also has unparalleled potential for future, sustainable growth.

The year ahead promises to be fundamental to the future economic success of the region, with an array of key investment and economic policy decisions anticipated. These relate to a wide range of organisations - from global industry giants to Whitehall departments - covering sectors from potash mining and offshore wind, to the location of the Green Investment Bank.

So now feels exactly the right time to establish a new, cross-Party commitment for the region as a whole, to fight for the greater good of Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire, in what is undoubtedly an extremely challenging economic climate.

This is why we have set up our new All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), to focus attention on the ways that industry and Government at all levels must work together to unlock the huge growth potential that exists across the region. For a number of years MPs may have met together regionally, within their party structures - but this is the first time that MPs will come together, across party lines, to focus on areas of common ground, which need coordinated action.

To be known as the APPG for Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire, the Group has now met for the first time, to agree its membership and identify its early priorities.

To emphasise our cross-Party commitment, the APPG is jointly chaired – by myself and Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield. We've also drawn the Group's vice-chairs from all three major Political Parties.

At our first meeting we identified three key themes, where we will focus out attention during 2012 - all linked to the overarching priority of driving greater economic growth.

Firstly renewable energy – how can we unlocking its enormous growth potential and harness the benefits for the entire region (and beyond), in terms of its supply chain, jobs growth that could number in the tens of thousands, skills improvements and wider community benefits?

Secondly, transport infrastructure – in particular to examine the extension of High Speed Rail to the region and the establishment of the "Northern Hub" for rail services, as well as the wider infrastructure needed to unlock growth in the short term.

Finally, tourism, culture and the regional brand – what more needs to be done to build on increasing visitor numbers and ensure the region is at the forefront in the minds of potential visitors and investors?

It's worth noting that the APPG has also been strongly welcomed by our partners in local government, with the secretariat support for the APPG being provided through Local Government Yorkshire and Humber (LGYH), the cross-party alliance of all local authorities in the region.

A formal launch event is now being planned for 14 March, where we are looking to secure the involvement of a number of high profile figures from across the region. The launch will set the scene for all three focus areas; but also, critically, act as a showcase for all the things that are great about Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire, showing off the unmatched offer and potential that it has.

More news on this from the Guardian Northerner as we go along.

Blighted by abysmal teaching standards and glaring inequalities, India's schools are failing to prepare the way for future prosperity

If you want a glimpse of the challenges facing India's education system, there is no better vantage point than Rajpur primary school. Located in the tribal belt of the Shahabad hills of Rajasthan, the school serves some of India's most disadvantaged children. Poverty and illiteracy are endemic. Most of the kids crammed into the school's two classrooms are first generation learners; the majority have yet to master basic literacy and numeracy.

To understand why, you just have to witness a grade 1 lesson. Three groups of children sit in neat rows. The teacher reads to the youngest in monotone English, apparently oblivious to the uncomprehending faces before him. Another group is reciting multiplication tables. The older children are silently copying sums from a blackboard.

Welcome to the rote learning raj that governs India's primary schools. Teachers in Rajpur see their pupils not as active learners, but as empty vessels to be filled with facts. No provision is made to ensure the children gain basic literacy skills in the early grades. Only one of the five teachers is trained – and none speaks the home language of tribal children.

Teacher absenteeism is another problem. The headteacher complains he seldom has more than two of his five teachers present, while parents complain the head himself is an infrequent visitor.

The school is a microcosm of the education challenges facing India. On the one hand, the country is posting encouraging growth rates and is home to some of the world's finest technology institutes. On the other, it has a lower league school system delivering an abysmal quality of education, failing the country's poorest children, reinforcing social inequalities, and undermining the skill-base needed to create jobs, sustain high growth and eradicate poverty.

If education was measured solely by enrolment, India would be the success story of the past decade. In the space of a single primary school generation, out-of-school numbers have fallen from 25 million to 8 million. The primary school enrolment rate now stands at 95%, a level unthinkable 10 years ago. Even though many girls drop out after the age of 11, gender gaps have narrowed. So encouraging are the gains, an ambitious plan to achieve universal secondary education has been adopted.

Surging enrolment bears testimony to the impact of some impressive policies. There has been a massive expansion of school construction in disadvantaged rural areas, school fees have been removed, midday meal schemes have given parents added incentive to send children to school, and highly marginalised districts have been targeted for special support. The right to education act, adopted in 2010, made the provision of free education a basic human right enshrined in law.

But while impressive enrolment figures tell one story, only two in three children of primary school age attend regularly, and one in five drops out. Moreover, millions are receiving a poor-quality education. Just how poor was made evident by January's annual status of education report, which covers a representative sample of rural schools. The report found that fewer than half of grade 5 children could read a text designed for grade 2 pupils. Basic arithmetic results were equally poor: only 60% of grade 5 pupils could do a grade 2 addition sum.

To an extent, the problems go beyond the education sector. Despite two decades of high growth, India has registered limited success in combating child malnutrition. Around four in 10 children experience chronic malnutrition before reaching school age, with devastating – and largely irreversible – consequences for brain development and future learning outcome.

Yet the education system is equally problematic. Infrastructure improvements over the past decade have brought previously excluded populations into the country's schools, but poor teaching is commonplace. Many teachers are themselves badly educated. Multi-grade teaching in overcrowded classrooms creates a difficult learning environment, while teacher absenteeism – around one quarter of the workforce misses school daily – is another blight. Consequently, pupils receive fewer hours of instruction than they need, and what they do receive is often unfit for purpose.

Symptomatic of the malaise is the relentless rise of private schools, which are now attended by more than a quarter of children in rural areas. Most provide mediocre teaching at considerable cost to the poor, but at least the teachers turn up. It is difficult to think of a starker example of state failure.

Inequalities in education are at the heart of a wider malaise – a failure to translate high growth into human development. Poverty is falling slowly, inequality is rising, and India's dismal performance in areas such as nutrition, child survival and health continues. These are symptoms of a glaring divide in opportunities for education.

Looking ahead, the shortcomings in India's education system threaten to convert a potential demographic dividend into a disaster. The country has one of the world's youngest population profiles, and is getting younger: by 2020, the median age will be 28. India needs to create around 12m new jobs a year for young people entering the labour market. Harnessed to the skills provided through education, India's youthfulness is a potential asset that could fuel growth, employment creation and shared prosperity. Without education, the asset will become a social and political liability.

Having turned the corner on school enrolment, India now faces the hard part of education reform: recruiting, training and supporting a workforce equipped to deliver decent quality education and strengthening the accountability of schools, teachers and state governments.

Raising learning achievement levels while overcoming the country's deep-rooted inequalities will not be easy. But is it really beyond the capacity of India, a fully signed-up member of the space race, to provide kids with a proper education?

Private companies should be allowed to set up and run schools under a social enterprise model, say the conservative Policy Exchange thinktank

Teachers should be encouraged to take a stake in John Lewis-style partnerships to run state schools as profit-making enterprises, according to proposals outlined by the conservative Policy Exchange thinktank.

Private companies would be allowed to set up and run schools under a social enterprise model that would give employees a share of ownership and re-invest a portion of any profit back into the school.

The Policy Exchange report enters politically risky terrain. The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, ruled out profit-making in state schools in a speech last year. However, the education secretary, Michael Gove, a former chairman of Policy Exchange, has approved a free school in Suffolk that will out-source management to a commercial company.

The report urges ministers to pilot social enterprise schools in some of the most deprived parts of the country. Schools would be allowed to distribute 50% of any surplus as a dividend to shareholders. The remaining 50% would have to be reinvested in the school.

Teachers and other school employees should be given the option of holding shares in the parent company or in the school itself, the report says.

The thinktank argues that allowing "for-profit" provision would provide extra capital to create more school places at a time when there is a severe shortage in parts of the country. Successful private providers able to keep a share of their surplus might also have a stronger incentive than charitable trusts to set up new schools. At present, local authorities are required to take back surpluses, but academies are permitted to carry over 12% of their budgets annually.

Policy Exchange suggests the proposed schools would operate under a "social mobility test" requiring at least 20% of pupils are eligible for free school meals.

They would also be prevented from selling off government-procured buildings or facilities, and payment of dividends would be tied to the school's performance. For-profit firms are allowed to run publicly funded schools in Sweden and the US.

James Groves, the head of education at Policy Exchange, said: "Given the huge challenges which our education system faces in the coming years, the government should continue to push the boundaries of the status quo. This report challenges the idea that there is simply a choice between for-profit and not-for profit schools. A John Lewis model of school where private companies, including teachers and school staff are encouraged to personally invest offers one such innovative alternative."

Earlier this month, the former top civil servant in the Department for Education told the Guardian he sees "no principled objection" to profit-making companies taking over state schools and believes they will "probably" be allowed to do so eventually.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "There are no plans to allow organisations to run schools for profit. The success of many academies in raising standards is built on philanthropic organisations using their expertise to turn around underperforming schools.

"We're more than doubling targeted investment at areas facing the greatest pressure on school places, to over £4billion in the next four years. Parents want to send their child to a good local school - that's we are building free schools, letting the most popular schools expand to meet demand from parents and driving up standards right across the system."

My mother, Joan Foster, who has died aged 70, was a gifted and versatile teacher and local historian. Energetic and creative, she brought history to life for countless adults in Newcastle and shone a light on the lives of children in the north-east in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Born in India, where her father was a lieutenant colonel, Mum spent her childhood in Yorkshire before reading history at Bristol University and moving to Newcastle to live with our father, David, who had begun his career as a lawyer there. They married in 1963.

Mum's belief that education should be accessible to everyone meant that she started her career teaching miners' children and boys who had been excluded from school before being drawn to teach adults of all ages and backgrounds. She ran outreach courses, summer schools and local study groups.

Mum held Newcastle and Northumberland in deep affection. The city was the focus for her two books, Newcastle upon Tyne – A Pictorial History (1995) and Our Bairns – Glimpses of Tyneside's Children 1850-1950 (published in 1997). In the latter, she wrote about the migration of children from Britain to colonies overseas. She visited Canada, where she met former child migrants who had been forced to leave their homes in Newcastle in the 1920s.

Mum's interest in the lives of local children stuck and in 2004 she wrote a thesis, Northumbrian Rural Working Children from 1800-1914. She also discovered the diaries of the Northumbrian farmer William Brewis, which gave a rare firsthand account of rural life in the first half of the 19th century. These diaries were later published.

Mum was modest and unassuming – about her talent and her beautiful looks. With her warmth, sunny optimism and sense of humour she created a happy, lively home for her three children – Sarah, Daniel and me – and a collection of animals. Despite the onset of Alzheimer's, Mum kept active for as long as she could. Dad cared devotedly for her at home until the last few weeks of her life. We survive her.

Riot police clashed with protesters on Monday in the Spanish city of Valencia.

Fifth day of rallies against education cuts and heavy-handed policing threatens to spark further protest across Spain

A tense standoff between demonstrators and police in Valencia, eastern Spain, threatens to spark protest across the country as schoolchildren and students start a fifth day of rallies against education cuts and heavy-handed policing. Baton-wielding police pursued demonstrators around the city on Monday as protests grew following the arrest of a 17-year-old protester from a local secondary school.

Police claimed they were attacked by demonstrators hurling bottles and that 11 officers had been injured.

Schoolchildren and university students are at the forefront of daily protests in Valencia against a regional government gripped by corruption scandals as it imposes austerity measures to control debt and balance its budget.

Police have arrested 43 students and schoolchildren, including eight minors, in the city over the past four days.

Demonstrations in support of the Valencia students were being organised in half a dozen cities around the country on Tuesday evening. Valencia's students, meanwhile, said they would continue to protest "with our books and hands in the air".

The Valencia region, which is run by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative People's party (PP), is seen as a test of how his new government will set about imposing further austerity measures on a country already tumbling back into recession and gripped by 23% unemployment.

Rajoy's government has vowed to crack down on spontaneous protest, with interior ministry officials saying they will not tolerate the kind of camp-outs in town squares organised by the Indignado movement last year.

Local police chief Antonio Moreno has called the demonstrators "the enemy", adding fuel to complaints that his officers are using heavy-handed tactics against protesters as young as 16.

Trade unions and opposition politicians have criticised police, while the local journalists' association says several of its members have been treated roughly.

"My daughter was with me and her two grandmothers … We weren't demonstrating, but they didn't seem to care," said Ana Navarrete, mother of 17-year-old arrestee Alumdena, told El País newspaper. "They tore her out of my arms, grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the ground and, between three of them, took her away."

Interior minister Jorge Fernández said he would inform parliament about the incidents, adding that demonstrators had disobeyed police instructions.

Valencia's government is at the centre of a number of PP corruption scandals, including one involving the King Juan Carlos's son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarín – who is due in court on Saturday.

The regional government's credit rating was recently reduced to junk status by ratings agencies.

Exam boards consider new curbs on examiners after claims that teachers were being tipped off about questions

Exam boards are considering imposing strict new curbs on examiners in the wake of allegations that some are divulging to teachers the questions pupils will be asked.

Mark Dawe, the chief executive of one of the country's leading exam boards, OCR, told MPs that in future examiners could be banned from attending seminars with teachers.

Each year thousands of teachers go to seminars organised by exam boards to pick up tips on what examiners are looking for when they mark pupils' exam scripts.

But an undercover investigation by the Telegraph last year claimed examiners were tipping off teachers about the questions their pupils should expect.

The exams regulator, Ofqual, withdrew a GCSE exam paper as a result of the investigation and three examiners were suspended.

One was recorded telling teachers: "We're cheating. We're telling you the cycle [of the compulsory question]. Probably the regulator will tell us off."

The sting sparked alarm among ministers, who ordered Ofqual to conduct an inquiry into whether there was sufficient "unpredictability" in exams. The inquiry is expected to report by the summer.

MPs on the cross-party Commons education select committee, who had already started their own inquiry into the exam boards at the time of the investigation, described the revelations as shocking and suggested that there may be a need for radical changes.

Facing questions from the MPs as part of their inquiry, Dawe admitted that two of his examiners had been sacked for divulging information to teachers in the past 18 months. The cases were unrelated to the newspaper's sting, he said.

One of the examiners had revealed inappropriate information in a textbook, while another had given hints of what might be in an exam during a seminar, Dawe said. The hints turned out to be incorrect.

Dawe told the MPs he was considering banning examiners from seminars if it turned out that the public was concerned they were giving away too much information.

However, he said attending seminars was very helpful for examiners because they were given an opportunity to hear feedback from teachers on the questions they had set in previous years.

"It would be with some reluctance that we stopped examiners going to the seminars," Dawe said. "But if we are continually facing accusations … we are going to have to do this."

The process of banning examiners from seminars would take about a year and would not be painless, he said.

Qualifying as a legal executive means you can become a lawyer without paying university tuition fees. But it probably isn't for those chasing a big salary

"Train to be a Lawyer in just 1 yr," began an advert for The London College of Law in the Evening Standard a couple of weeks ago. "Amazingly Low Course Fees available!! No need to go to Uni," it continued. Too good to be true?

While you can complete legal training in a year, qualifying to practise as a lawyer takes longer. Fellowships from the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) require candidates to complete not one, but six years of law-related work and study – though the tutored element of the qualification need only take one year. This involves 14 hours a week of intensive study, plus another ten of homework, which together meet CILEx's requirement for the Professional and Higher Professional Diplomas. You also need five years of qualifying employment to become a fellow of the Institute. Some other course providers require the diplomas to be studied over at least two years, but LCoL offers a fast-track option. The advertisement was quite correct to assert that you don't need a degree to become a lawyer.

Traditionally, alumni of the non-graduate CILEx route, which culminates in the title of 'chartered legal executive', have been regarded as the poor relation to solicitors and barristers. But the combined effect of three major recent developments in the worlds of law and education means diplomas earned at the likes of The London College of Law, which operates from a business centre in Tottenham (and is completely separate from the College of Law, which has eight centres around England including two in London) could soon be put on an equivalent footing with the qualifications awarded by the mighty Inns of Court.

The first of these developments is the Legal Services Act, which in 2009 removed the barriers preventing legal executives from becoming partners in law firms. In a related move, the judiciary opened its doors for the first time to members of this long-overlooked branch of the profession. Almost overnight, one of the major advantages solicitors and barristers held over legal executives disappeared. "There are no longer any meaningful distinctions between the job titles," says the first ever CILEx judge, Ian Ashley-Smith, who reckons that the changes will see fewer legal executives will find cause to re-qualify as solicitors - a fairly common move up until now.

Also proving disruptive is the government's decision to treble university fees. Concerned about the effects of the increases on the socio-economic diversity of their employees, while also keen to foster a reputation for innovation and unstuffiness to fit the mood of the LSA era, a number of big corporate law firms have launched apprenticeship schemes to train up school-leavers via the CILEx route.

The icing on the cake has been the decision to award CILEx chartered status (hence the 'C' that now appears at the front of the old ILEX acronym). In the past, legal executives often found themselves lumped in with paralegals and other support staff as second tier legal professionals. As of last month, though, when the body officially received its royal charter, the title of 'legal executive' has enjoyed the same protection as other chartered professionals like surveyors and accountants. Put all this together, and it's no wonder that many believe legal executives' time to have finally come. "This is a terrifically exciting time in the history of our Institute," said CILEx president Susan Silver after taking receipt of the charter.

Amid all the excitement, though, there are concerns about how those who have entered the law through this route will find themselves treated further down the line. "I hope a generation of bright young minds don't fall for this ruse," wrote one commenter on a legal website recently in the response to the news that yet another big firm has launched a CILEx apprenticeship scheme. "Kennedys' [the firm in question] are just capitalising on the tuition fee fear amongst the young (and remember, we are talking about impressionable 17-18 year olds here) to get students who have the grades to be a 'proper lawyer' to settle to a lifetime of mediocrity, and a salary ceiling of about £30k. Ideas like this one are breeding a future of discontent. Any young people reading this, if you have the grades to get onto this scheme, and you want to be a lawyer, take the hit on the student loan and fulfil your potential. Be a lawyer, not a scared wannabe." Many lawyers privately share this view.

However, Nick Hanning, one of around 200 legal executives to have become partners in law firms over the last two years, strongly disagrees. He dismisses the £30,000 salary ceiling claim, and emphasises that graduates' fears about racking up debt are well-founded. "I don't think the university and solicitor route is a safer bet. You are committing great expense to getting your degree, more expense getting your Legal Practice Course (LPC) qualification, and then you still can't qualify unless you complete a two year training contract. That's four years of risk."

But for an 18-year old with the financial backing, grades and inclination to go to university, who has a decent shot at securing a training contract with a top firm in advance of the completion of their studies, is taking the CILEx apprenticeship route really a good idea?

"To get into a megafirm like, say, Slaughter and May, you still need a degree, but the reality is very few of the thousands of law graduates end up at such firms," responds Ashley-Smith. "Put it this way," he continues. "You can have a very good career as a legal executive."

Bourdieu's ideas are making a comeback in education and can be found across the social sciences and the arts

Ten years after the death of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we seem a long way from the days when he severely criticised the world of politics and the media. Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Bourdieu is also the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault, but ahead of Jacques Derrida, according to the ranking produced by Thomson Reuters (previously the Institute of Scientific Information), which counts citations. "Bourdieu has become the name of a collective research undertaking which disregards borders between disciplines and countries," says Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley.

A dream come true, for Bourdieu wanted to set up a "collective intellectual" based on scientific work done as a team sport. "The work of a researcher remains, when it is disseminated and becomes a sort of reflex response," says historian Gérard Noiriel. This is indeed the case for Bourdieu. But "references should not be confused with reverence", Noiriel cautions. "If a line of reasoning is debated, it must be open to question," says fellow historian Christophe Charle.

The sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron, co-author of his first major publications, still considers Bourdieu as a friend, despite their divergence at the beginning of the 1970s. He emphasises the essential contribution of his thinking "Ultimately 'with Bourdieu, against Pierre Bourdieu' does seem to define quite well the influence he had on me, much as on any reader or student who came into contact with his sociological imagination, [which was] an extraordinarily fertile source of hypotheses, concepts and schemas, almost all of which could be reused in the service of empirically relevant theories". But Passeron adds: "They were also likely, particularly due to the force of his most ambitious concepts, to encourage novices to indulge in sterile, mechanical imitation."

Luc Boltanski, a disciple who has distanced himself from his master, was determined not to blindly reproduce the same theory. Much the same is true of Bernard Lahire, who has focused in particular on "the invention of illiteracy". But what is left of his sociology of education, which influenced generations of teachers? After dropping off the radar in the 1980-90s, his ideas are making a comeback, according to Bertrand Geay. "In the past five or six years a new generation of PhD students has started looking at policies to open up the intake of [hothouse] classes préparatoires, at handicaps and over-achievers, and the making of syllabuses," he explains.

But Bourdieu's legacy reaches far beyond education. For one thing his scientific contribution still irrigates many branches of social science. Bourdieusian categories exert increasing influence in the sociology of intellectuals and writers, witness the work of Charle or the sociologist Gisèle Sapiro. His mark is apparent in the application of sociological analysis to justice, to working-class neighbourhoods and youth (Stéphane Beaud, Gérard Mauger), to elites (Michel and Monique Pinçon-Charlot), the family (Rémi Lenoir), and of course the media, the focus of his last publications.

Indeed it is here that Bourdieu's followers have displayed the greatest political commitment and bite. Satirical papers (PLPL or Plan B), non-profits (Acrimed) and films, in particular those directed by Pierre Carle, have broadcast his criticism, bringing it to a larger audience. The recent general release [in France] of Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde, a film by Gilles Balbastre and Yannick Kergoat, based on the eponymous book by Serge Halimi, is a further instance of this legacy.

At the same time Bourdieu's work has put down roots in other fields including political science and history, thanks to exchanges with historians such as Roger Chartier and the Enlightenment specialist Daniel Roche, with whom he worked at the Collège de France. Many of his expressions have entered everyday language – champ (field), reproduction, domination – making commonplace concepts once the subject of theoretical debate and giving an opus more often celebrated than really read the rigidity of dogma. "I sometimes have the impression that criticism has targeted a Bourdieu who never actually existed," says historian and political scientist Frédérique Matonti. "Often criticism seems to correspond to the way that Bourdieu has been taught, rather than to ideas in his work itself, which are remarkably malleable, never set firm, but constantly reworked."

Among the reasons cited to explain Bourdieu's "return" or "topicality", some highlight his influence on philosophy. While emphasising the importance of his empirical observations, Marie-Anne Lescourret, who published a biography in 2008, points out that some of the notions he used originated in philosophy. This is true of the concept of habitus (dispositions acquired in the course of our education) and the "symbolic forms" – violence, power, capital – which he borrowed from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who was driven into exile by the Nazis. Bourdieu had his work translated into French and published.

"It's as if there was something wrong with being a sociologist!" Matonti says. "On account of his initial training there certainly is an essential discussion with German philosophy, witness his book The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, a text that could only have been written, or read, by someone with a firm grasp of philosophy. It was also a question of generation: at that time people reasoned for or against phenomenology, for or against Sartre."

Although one of his last books was called Pascalian Meditations, it seems plausible that the key thinker for Bourdieu was not so much Pascal as Spinoza, who has since become a global icon for the radical intellectual left. What impressed the sociologist was the apparently contradictory notion that liberty does not mean casting off our deterministic chains, but rather understanding them.

But according to Passeron the neutral stance specific to scholars was totally foreign to Bourdieu, even if he did on occasion lay claim to that prerogative: "People who were even vaguely familiar with Bourdieu know he was capable of suffering intensely because of the hardness of the human condition, the arrogance or hypocrisy of social domination. "

The unresolved contradiction between commitment and scientific detachment still weighs on anyone reading or interpreting his work.

Could another Bourdieu appear now? Certainly not, says Noiriel: "No single thinker could exert so much influence. Sociological research has gone global, whereas it was only just taking shape in France when Bourdieu established his position."

But does the same apply to the position of a critical intellectual which he embodied, we ask? "Many more people now adopt that stance, but I am still attached to the position he defended as a specialist intellectual, following on from Foucault [...] primarily concerned with mobilising his learning, gained in a particular field of research, without becoming involved in all sorts of other topics."

"Bourdieu rarely spoke out on issues with which he was not familiar," says the sociologist Franck Poupeau, who edited his Political Interventions. From social deprivation to industrial action, his commitment was linked to "a profound understanding of these issues". So, he believes, "another Bourdieu would be possible now, but he would take a different form, that's all."

Bourdieu himself defined sociology as orchestration without a conductor. That orchestra is still playing.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde.

Peter Rabbit would have eaten them and been sick. His creator painted delicate watercolours of them, and was a match for her Victorian scientific contemporaries

Her rabbits are famous – Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy and company – but the world at large knows less about Beatrix Potter's toadstools.

That's now to be put right by an analysis of this expert side of the writer and farmer's life at the prestgious Linnaean Society – the one which has an enticing nameplate in gold script as you go through the entrance arch, with all the Hockney devotees, into the Royal Academy courtyard in London.

Prestigious, but in the old days, stuffy. Miss Helen B. Potter, as she was known at the time, was not allowed to follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin et many al by reading her paper on fungi in 1897. Trouble was, she was a woman and that wasn't on.

The paper, On the germination of spores of agaricineae, which is considered a significant contribution to fungal research, had to be read by a male friend instead. She had illustrated it and other work with delicate and accurate watercolours of the relevant toadstools – forerunners of the likes of Mrs Tiggywinkle and Pigling Bland.

A good selection of these fungal pictures is on show at the excellent Armitt Museum in Ambleside, in the Lake District, where Potter made another reputation as Mrs Heelis, breeder of the local Herdwick sheep and extremely generous donor of land to the National Trust. The original Linnaean paper, alas, has not survived; discrimination was one of the reasons why Potter gave up scientific research and went for the bunnies instead.

But its essence has been tracked down and pieced together by Prof Roy Watling of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh and the resulting 'restoration' will be read to the Linnaean by a young fungal expert Ali Murfitt. Sitting alongside the Beatrix Potter Society's patron Patricia Routledge, she will be part of a women's quintet that should compensate the writer's spirit for the Victorian snub. The event was organised by Prof Eileen Jones of Huddersfield university and the Linnaean's executive secretary is Dr Elizabeth Rollinson, who says:

We hope that this event will stimulate interest in the fascinating and accessible arena of mycology, which extends well beyond mushrooms and toadstools. The Linnean Society is delighted to host this meeting as part of its ongoing remit to encompass the whole spread of natural history.

Murfitt says:

I've been reading more about Beatrix and realise what an honour it is to 'be Beatrix' for a day. I share a lot of her interests from fairytales to farming, and mycology of course.

And the fifth woman, the Armitt's curator Deborah Walsh, says:

This is a very exciting prospect which will highlight the immensely important and influential nature of the work which Beatrix Potter achieved, and will bring to national attention the wonderful collection of her work which our museum holds…

The lecture is on 20 April and tickets, costing £10, can be booked by calling the Linnean Society on 020 7434 4479, or via their website.

Stephen Twigg says education needs its own Office for Budget Responsibility

The Commons debate on the appointment of Les Ebdon, the new director of the Office for Fair Access, was notable for its failure to engage with the facts.

The full transcript is now on Hansard, but here - in paraphrase - are a few of the more absurd exchanges:

A Tory MP: Ebdon is threatening universities with fines if they don't meet centrally decreed targets.

Vince Cable: Quotas... are not government policy.

Another Tory MP: The quota policy espoused by Professor Ebdon puts the cart before the horse...

Cable: Professor Ebdon has never advocated the use of quotas.

A Labour MP: Will the government endorse the use of contextual data?

Cable: Contextual data are already used by universities...

There were some honourable exceptions. Elizabeth Truss, a Conservative backbencher, asked a thoughtful question about the shortage of further maths provision in comprehensive schools. But for the most part, the debate was blindly partisan.

That's why Stephen Twigg's announcement today that a future Labour government would create an Office for Educational Improvement - along the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility - should be welcomed.

The new body will be independent of ministers, effectively tasked with keeping government honest about what the evidence says - rather than cherry-picking to fit ministers' prejudices.

It would also help drive up standards by translating research into programmes that could be used in the classroom.

In a speech to the Labour pressure group Progress, Twigg will say: "I do not see this as being just another quango. Rather I want to involve people who have experience of the front line. A head teacher who has experience of getting poorer kids into university, for example."

Twigg's speech - trailed in a comment piece in The Times [£] and an appearance on the Today programme - is notable for two things:

First, he positions himself between Gove and the "far left" on education, labelling both sides dogmatic.

Twigg says: "Michael Gove thinks only freeing schools from council bureaucrats will raise performance. And the far left think all reform amounts to a wholesale privatisation of schools. Neither view stands up to scrutiny."

Second, he reaches out to both Labour and Tory voters by appreciating their common ground on education.

Twigg says: "There are lots of Labour voters who believe in rigorous examinations and proper discipline, just as there are lots of Conservative voters who believe in vocational subjects and helping the poorest pupils."

Rather than traditional party lines, he talks about "conservative and progressive" approaches to education.

"While conservatives are happy for schools to simply identify talent – for the best to rise to the top; progressives want our schools to be talent factories – creating and incubating the skills and ability in our children."

That is a smart way to challenge a Conservative education secretary who poses as the heir to Blair.

The latest figures show that the number of NEETs in England are at a record high. Download the data for yourself
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Neets are in the news. Not in Employment, Education or Training figures were highlighted by deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg who has unveiled a work programme for what he describes as "disengaged" 16 and 17-year-olds.

Meanwhile, NEETs are at a record high.

The number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, work or training in England reached 1,163,000 – quarterly statistics from the Department for Education show. They just go up to the third quarter of last year - figures out later this week will cover the whole year.

This is 137,000 more than the same point the year before and a year-on-year high since records began in 2000. It means 21.1% of all 16- to 24-year-olds in England were NEETs. This compares to just 17.3% in the third quarter of 2007.

The latest statistics show the number of neets had fallen between the summer of last year and the end of the year. Between July and September, 1.03m 16- to 24-year-olds were NEETs – 17.1% of the age group.

However, the figures, published by the Department for Education (DfE), tend to follow a seasonal pattern of lower rates in autumn after a peak in late summer, reflecting the academic year. So if you just look at Q4s, the number has never been this high before:

At the same time, the the latest data, for end 2010, showed the lowest rate for 16-18 year olds since consistent records began in 1994, and the eighth successive annual fall since 2002.

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Lauren, a 2011 Google Science Fair winner from USA, explains why her experiment about carcinogens was inspired by her evening meal

Lauren, a 2011 Google Science Fair winner from USA, explains why her experiment about carcinogens was inspired by her evening meal:

Visit GoogleScienceFair's YouTube channel [video link].

If you're 13 to 18 years old, you can enter by submitting your entry by 1 April 2012 for your chance to win fantastic prizes. This video tells you a little more:

Visit GoogleScienceFair's YouTube channel [video link].

Everyone has a question. What's yours?

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Learn more about the Google Science Fair.

Here's some information from last year's Google Science Fair competition, and a story where I interviewed one of last year's semi-finalists, a young British scientist, Georgia Bondy, about her Google Science Fair project.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

twitter: @GrrlScientist
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email: grrlscientist@gmail.com

Training new journalists has provided muscle for a lively setup which is lighting 15 candles on its birthday cake today. And going online.

OVER the last 15 years, the ground-breaking Old Trafford News has trained hundreds of people in photography, writing and publishing skills, while providing a trusted independent source of information for 12,000 homes in one of the most diverse communities in Greater Manchester.

It has gone from being a photocopied freesheet to a glossy, full-colour magazine; and this week will see the launch of OT News Online, a website created by and for a community that is amongst the ten per cent most deprived in the country.

So what is different about the OT News that has seen it thrive as other more traditional media struggle?

Editor and regular Guardian contributor Ally Fogg says that he sees the magazine's training role as key to its survival.

The OT News has two distinct purposes. While the first is to produce a magazine that will inform, entertain, and inspire people to get involved, the second is to provide volunteer opportunities and training to those who may otherwise be excluded.

The two feed into each other; that is what makes us successful.

In July 2007, the magazine received £125,000 from the Big Lottery Reaching Communities fund, enabling staff to offer free training in journalism, photography and design, as well as one-to-one support and placement opportunities.

By placing production in the hands of a team of trained local volunteers, connections with the community were strengthened.

Lottery objectives included a five per cent increase in participation; the actual increase was more than 15 per cent. One article about a cooking class saw attendance leap by 77 per cent. Fogg says:

Although funding bodies are understandably reluctant to pay for the publication of a magazine, they will fund the training of those who contribute to it's pages.

And with just 16 people from Salford given jobs at the BBC's northern Media City headquarters, Fogg says there is more need than ever for an "alternative stepping stone."

Illustrator Imaan Williams, 23, has finally made it to the hallowed ground of Media City after using her OT News experience to apply successfully for a master's degree in animation at Salford University. Williams graduated from Liverpool John Moores University in May 2010 with a BA in graphic arts and animation, but found herself unable to progress.

Last year she started volunteering at OT News, creating the the magazine's comic strip. Soon other organisations started noticing her work; she was commissioned to design a flyer for Trafford Volunteer Week.

When I finished university I didn't have any professional experience. I set up a blog, and put all my voluntary work on there. They were were really impressed at the Salford interview because I had a professional portfolio. It's also given me the confidence to work with others.

The OT News is based at the local St John's Community Centre, which they currently use for free. Each edition costs £3,000 to produce and deliver, and is paid for by the sale of advertising space, which costs around £400 per page.

Community organisations and the council also pay for 'sponsored features', where a subject is guaranteed coverage. But, Fogg insists, this does not compromise the magazine's ability to scrutinise and criticise.

We can say what we want. The worst that can happen is that we lose an advert. Because we are not dependent on one single funder, we are not in the pocket of any particular organisation.

The 15th anniversary is seeing the magazine focus on a new mixed model of funding. They have set up a charitable social enterprise, OT Media Plus, to help support other fledgling community media groups. Fogg says:

We are passionate about our model of community journalism as an agent for change. We honestly believe we are setting a new standard in hyperlocal media here in Old Trafford that could be seen as a model to communities across the country.

Helen Clifton (www.helenclifton.com) is a freelance journalist and director of OT Media Plus

£126m scheme seeks to encourage employers to take on young people not in education, employment or training

Nick Clegg will vow to deal with the "ticking time bomb" of teenagers who are not in work, school or training.

The deputy prime minister is due to announce on Tuesday a £126m scheme to get 16- and 17-year-olds back into employment or education.

The initiative, which is part of the government's youth contract scheme, announced last November in a bid to tackle youth unemployment, charities and businesses will be invited to bid for contracts worth up to £2,200 to take young people on.

They will receive an initial payment up front, and more money when the youngsters show progress.

At least 55,000 "neets" – those not in education, employment or training and who have no GCSEs at grades C or above – are expected to benefit.

Clegg said: "Sitting at home with nothing to do when you're so young can knock the stuffing out of you for years. It is a tragedy for the young people involved – a ticking time bomb for the economy and our society as a whole.

"This problem isn't new, but in the current economic climate we urgently need to step up efforts to ensure some of our most troubled teenagers have the skills, confidence and opportunities to succeed."

This group of teenagers has been singled out because evidence suggests that unemployment early on can have a permanent effect on earning potential.

By 42, someone who has been frequently unemployed as a teenager is likely to earn up to 15% less than their peers, the Department for Education said.

The announcement comes less than a week after the latest unemployment figures showed that the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds not in work increased by 22,000 to 1.04 million in the three months to December.

Figures for the third quarter of last year, showed that more than a million 16- to 24-year-olds (1,163,000 – almost one in five) were considered neets.

Ofsted head Michael Wilshaw's comment that 5,000 headteachers lack leadership comes at a time when it is already proving difficult to recruit heads due to a 'football manager mentality'

"I wanted to be a headteacher because I knew it would be a fantastic job. As a teacher, you've got control over the 30 children in front of you in the classroom ... but as a head, you can shape the future for more than 1,000 children." That's the view of Francois Van Rensburg, now in his second year as headteacher of the Warren school in Romford, Essex.

But not enough teachers are so enthusiastic. Increasingly, deputy heads and other senior teachers seem to feel it is not worth stepping up to the plate to be a head. As schools come under more scrutiny, the stakes seem simply too high, the expectations – encapsulated last week by the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, who accused 5,000 heads of failing to do their jobs properly – too onerous.

According to the latest annual survey of senior staff appointments in schools across England and Wales, published by Education Data Surveys, headship vacancies are challenging to fill in many areas. The research shows that London schools, especially those in suburbs, experienced more difficulties recruiting a new headteacher during 2010‑11 than during the previous year. In secondary schools, the re-advertisement rate for headteacher posts rose slightly on the previous year, to 28%.

Interestingly, it is often fast-trackers from outside the profession who are prepared to buck the trend and take up the challenge. Van Rensburg, for example, was an athletics champion in his native South Africa. Andrew Day, principal of Haberdashers' Aske's Knights Academy in Lewisham in south-east London, was, until six years ago, a travel executive. They're both graduates of Future Leaders, a programme set up to fast-track new joiners and other junior teachers into headships.

But no one believes fast-tracking on its own can solve the problems of headteacher recruitment – and, in the light of Wilshaw's comments on mediocre leadership in schools, headteachers' leaders believe the appetite for headships among senior teachers is likely to decline further.

According to Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, "negativity and over-accountability have combined to mean that, especially in schools where there are extra pressures, it's much more difficult to attract candidates for job vacancies at the top".

"What you want are high-quality leaders," he says. "Bringing people in from outside is great if it works – but it can only be part of a programme, and the other part of the programme should be enabling good senior teachers to take on headship roles in schools – and that's what's missing at the moment.

"Right now, good people are being turned off becoming headteachers because the element of risk involved in the job has increased significantly. We're in a situation where the knee-jerk reaction is that if a school has problems, the answer is to get rid of the head. It's the football manager mentality, whereas what schools need is stability, and what heads need is constructive support, not the adversarial system we're in now where school inspections are hit-jobs."

For Sion Humphreys of the National Association of Head Teachers, the crucial thing for outsiders coming into headships is the need to prove themselves. "There have always been career shifters coming into education, and there's often a suspicion that hard economic times is part of what's fuelling that. It's not always the case, but these people do have to prove themselves in the classroom – they have to get professional credibility."

Van Rensburg started teaching "to fill a gap" after he moved to the UK because his wife had landed a job here. "My athletics career was over, and teaching was something I could do because I'd qualified as a design and technology teacher in the past," he says.

"I didn't expect to love it so much, but I did – and I realised that many of the skills I'd honed as an athlete would stand me in good stead as a teacher," he says. He joined the Future Leaders scheme in 2007, and became head at the Warren school in September 2010. "Being resilient is something I learned as an athlete, and I can put it into practice now as a head," he says. "This is a school with a lot of challenges – around a third of our pupils are on free school meals." Ofsted last year described the school as improving; the number of pupils getting five A-Cs at GCSE, including English and maths, is up by 20% over the last four years.

"Like all heads, I know how tough this job can be – but, as far as I'm concerned, it's my job to get it right. I think in many ways Wilshaw is right: you can't hide behind the data. I say to my staff, we've got to get this right, and if it goes wrong it's my job on the line. That's a driving force – that and knowing that the children in this school, like all children, deserve the best."

Andrew Day also believes his past career – running a travel business – was a good grounding for running a school. "There are many similarities," he says. "Just as when I was running a company, a great deal of running a school is about interpreting data, identifying trends, and marketing yourself." Like Van Rensburg's school, his 1,600-pupil academy has many challenges: the proportion of pupils eligible for school meals is twice the national average, and about 75% of pupils are from ethnic minority groups.

Few in the teaching profession would denigrate or undermine individuals such as Day and Van Rensburg; most agree that schools need all the dedicated professionals they can muster. But some have their doubts about projects that leapfrog people from other professions into top jobs, particularly at a time when those with lots of experience do not seem keen on applying for them.

"With the greatest of respect, how can someone [who has only been a teacher for a handful of years] go into a classroom and talk about learning pedagogy?" asks Phil Allman, head of Olney middle school in Buckinghamshire. "When I sit down and observe lessons, teachers know I can do it because I've been a teacher for 20 years. I don't object to Future Leaders or fast-tracking, but in terms of credibility there's no substitute for teaching experience."

According to Allman, more and more of his senior teaching colleagues think twice now before applying for a headship. "Who in their right mind is going to place themselves in the firing line to head up a school that needs improvement?" he says. "I certainly wouldn't want to – and I've been in the job for 20 years, and I absolutely love what I do.

"I can understand why you'd be averse to it when your livelihood is going to be determined by a two-day inspection. Many good senior teachers don't put themselves forward for the final step because they are smart enough to know that if they take that step and things go wrong, they could be out of a job."

The problem, Allman says, is that the current system is "so adversarial that it puts the best people off". "You don't go into a classroom and pick all the bad things you see going on there to use as a basis for improvement," he says, "you go in and look for the positive, and then you try to build on it to make things even better. That's the approach we need to take with schools and with headships because, while things are bad at the moment in terms of headteacher recruitment, I think they're going to get a lot worse."

In Allman's area, between a third and a half of all heads will retire in the next five years. "We don't have enough people willing to put themselves forward to take their places," he says. "And that's being played out in authorities across the country."

Future Leaders' chief executive, Heath Monk, explains that the project wasn't conceived as a way of enticing those from other backgrounds into becoming heads, but over the five years it has been in existence, that has been one of the outcomes.

"The idea of Future Leaders was to identify people who were able and prepared to take on headships in the country's toughest schools – the ones that find it hardest to recruit leaders – and what we always expected was that a proportion of those who applied to the scheme wouldn't come from traditional backgrounds.

"We give our recruits a huge amount of intensive training and support. And we recognise that to have credibility as heads, they need experience of teaching. But our point is, you don't have to have been a teacher for 20 years to be able to step up to these top jobs in tough schools.

"The people we bring on board often have experience that turns out to be highly relevant to their work as heads, and, far from being stale and not interested in reflection or change, they're brimming with enthusiasm and keen to bring in change."

Attempts to block the appointment of the new head of Offa, and changes to the tuition-fee regime, make higher education policy resemble an Alice-in-Wonderland world, says Mike Baker

The twists and turns of higher education policy increasingly resemble the fantasy Alice embarked on when she followed the White Rabbit down the hole for her Adventures in Wonderland. Nothing is quite as it should be.

How else to explain the bizarre attempt by four Conservative MPs to block the appointment of Professor Les Ebdon as head of the Office for Fair Access on the grounds that they were not convinced by his description of "the root causes of the obstacles to accessing universities"?

Did they think their role was to be the Queen of Hearts, rushing around yelling "off with his head!"? It gets curiouser and curiouser when you learn that just four members from a committee of 11, none with professional experience of universities, felt they could reject a professor with 44 years' experience in higher education, nine of them running a university and five leading the Million+ group, who had been approved by both a selection committee and ministers.

From their questioning of Professor Ebdon, it seems they feared he might penalise universities for failing to promote wider participation when the root problem lies in the school system. While no one, and certainly not Professor Ebdon, would deny that students' school performance is a major, perhaps even the key, barrier to admissions success, they seemed to forget that Offa is not Ofsted. Offa has no powers over schools; it can only work with universities to ensure as many young people as possible reach their potential at university, whatever their starting point.

Meanwhile, there is something Wonderland-ish about the way Offa allowed 25 universities to adjust their fees to just below £7,500 so they could bid for extra student numbers. They did this largely by offering fee waivers, subsidised by reducing the amounts previously earmarked to fund bursaries, scholarships and outreach activities. In short, Offa let these universities cut the very areas that would most help to attract students from poorer backgrounds.

Fee waivers may look tempting to university marketing departments, but they merely reduce the debt that graduates might have to pay back. By contrast, bursaries offer students cash now, when they most need it. The Queen of Hearts should have been calling for their heads, not that of Professor Ebdon, whose own university has stuck to a policy of high fees to fund generous bursaries.

Meanwhile, only in an Alice-in-Wonderland world can we make sense of some of the peculiarities of the new fee arrangements. Here's a riddle the Mad Hatter would enjoy: when is it cheaper to buy something with a £9,000 price tag rather than something priced at £6,000? Answer: when it is a university degree. This is because a graduate who has a £9,000-a-year degree may pay back nothing if they never earn enough, whereas a graduate who pays £6,000 a year for a three-year course could easily end up paying back all of the original £18,000 loan, plus plenty more in interest, if they earn over £21,000 a year throughout their career.

Equally counter-intuitive is the fact, highlighted by the consumer champion Martin Lewis, that a graduate earning £30,000 a year will pay back exactly the same amount each month whether they had chosen a £9,000 degree or a £6,000 one. That is because payments are limited to 9% of salary above £21,000 a year. Admittedly the former may be paying for longer, but since it is estimated that up to 40% of graduates will never pay off all their loan, this remains a "through the looking-glass" world where price tag and cost are quite different things.

Meanwhile, some parts of the media (not the Guardian) managed to suggest that this year's tripling of fees had frightened off droves of school-leavers from applying to university. Not so. Applications from 18-year-olds in England to English universities were down by just 1% after taking account of demographic change. And that is compared with 2011, which saw record applications as students rushed to get in ahead of fee rises. Where there has been a big decline is among mature applicants. Curiously, it is these older students who are least likely to have to pay back all their fee loans, as they may well retire before they have done so.

Few things, it seems, are quite as you might expect in the Alice in Wonderland world of university policy.

www.mikebakereducation.co.uk

The future of higher education at the Olympic site in London will centre on the need for institutions to work together not compete

By the time the last athlete breasts the line at this summer's Olympics, another set of competitors will already be at the starting blocks. These are the businesses and organisations keen to take over parts of the site at Stratford, east London, and their focus is on intellectual rather than sporting muscle.

All three of the bids shortlisted for a chance to occupy the Olympic press and broadcast centres involve a higher or further education element – from a fashion college, to a link-up between a French sports retailer and Loughborough University, to research and technology centres.

University College London (UCL) is also developing plans for a new campus east of the Olympic Park, with possible research and teaching space and accommodation for staff and students.

"The scale of the site we are looking at – over 20 acres – in central London terms is incredible," says Andrew Grainger, UCL's director of estates. "And the fact that it will be adjacent to the Olympic Park is a significant attraction. The government has invested hugely in the area, and the Olympic Park will be fabulous."

There have nevertheless been mutterings, online and person-to-person, among some UCL staff about the wisdom of opening a campus away from its main Bloomsbury site in central London. "Having everything concentrated close together has a whole number of advantages, such as encouraging communication between people in different disciplines," says Simon Renton, the University and College Union's (UCU) vice-president, higher education, and a UCL history lecturer.

"Geography means students and staff are more in touch with each other, so in that respect moves away from Bloomsbury are generally not something people are very keen on."

But Grainger says that while the project is still in its early stages, with no decision expected until June on whether or not it will happen, good transport links and the opportunity to be part of the Olympic legacy and to "bookend" the growing technology corridor in east London, stretching from Shoreditch to Stratford, were too good to ignore. Operating on multiple sites is hardly new in higher education – at one stage De Montfort University had campuses in four different towns, and three different locations in Leicester alone – and the trend has been growing, particularly through moves to open campuses overseas.

Figures just released by the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that the number of students studying in overseas branch campuses rose from just over 11,400 in 2009-10 to just over 12,300 in 2010-11. At the same time, universities based in the UK regions are expressing increasing interest in setting up campuses in the capital. Coventry, Glasgow Caledonian, East Anglia, Bangor and Northumbria already have bases in London, while others, including Newcastle and Loughborough, are considering the possibility.

Malcolm Gillies, chair of London Higher, which represents higher education in the capital, says: "London has a more vibrant demographic than many other parts of Britain, so it is not unusual that people would look to come there – particularly if they have a good-quality educational product – to secure student numbers." He suggests that east London is a particular draw because it is the biggest area of population growth.

But he warns there are downsides, from fierce competition for students to the cost of recruiting staff, and that a high-quality brand and good lines of recruiting both undergraduates and postgraduates is therefore essential.

"London is just very expensive – some estimate up to 15-25% more than other parts of the country," he says. "That has to be factored into salaries."

Certainly, having satellite bases, particularly in pricey London, does not work for everybody, and while some in the sector have responded to uncertain times by exploring new locations, others have retrenched. By last year, De Montfort had consolidated to one campus. Gloucestershire University was forced to close its London campus two years ago after money problems, and the University of West London (the former Thames Valley University) shrank to just two campuses to pull itself out of financial disaster.

Overseas campuses can be even more problematic. Renton says quality assurance can be more difficult, as can relations with academic staff. UCU is now gathering data on potential problems in this area.

Renton argues that many of these campuses may also be less lucrative than they appear because many of the students they recruit are students that would otherwise have travelled to the UK to study.

Peter Scott, professor of higher education at the Institute of Education, says that while setting up branch campuses can be fine for universities that are global brands, the ineffable essence of the institution may not translate so easily: "All universities have their own habitats; they are 'places'. That atmosphere and ethos are not always easy to reproduce."

But how far does place matter in a globalised sector, where communication is increasingly carried out online rather than in a college quad?

Gillies, who is vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University, says: "Increasingly we are becoming less dependent on place in higher education." But he says students still want physical contact, as well as online learning.

Renton agrees that "there is no electronic substitute for students talking together and exchanging thoughts and ideas in order to dissect them in the presence of a senior leader".

But he says there is no reason why these staff and students should all be from the same institution. His department already welcomes students from colleges affiliated to the University of London, such as Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway, to study specialist courses. "There would be no good reason why, with goodwill on all sides, we couldn't be exchanging students with a wider group of institutions, and why other institutions couldn't do the same kind of thing," he says.

Back to the Olympic Park, where Grainger says UCL would be keen to work with whatever other higher education providers end up there. UCL also hopes to build on its existing links with the University of East London. "We see them as very good neighbours, with whom we work closely," he says.

UCL will find other familiar neighbours, too. Also opening in Stratford is Birkbeck College, which is based just a few streets away from UCL's Bloomsbury home. From Autumn 2013, its new campus in Stratford centre – to be called University Square – will offer flexible day and evening courses, in a joint venture with the University of East London.

Far from ending up a race between rivals, the future of higher education at the Olympic site – and quite possibly elsewhere – could be more about collaboration than competition.

Teachers and parents tell us who they would like to see in charge of education – and why

Geoff Barton, headteacher, King Edward VI School, Bury St Edmunds

What we really need is an education secretary who recognises that successful schools are all about developing talent. Simon Cowell certainly knows that, but I don't think there would be room in the education sector for an ego like his.

Sir Alex Ferguson is a different proposition; he's no pushover and wouldn't be afraid to ask difficult questions about performance and goals, but he wouldn't allow egos to take over.

If I could choose a political sort – from any party – I'd go for David Miliband. I always thought he had great promise as a junior education minister. He seemed to understand that educational success could only be achieved by creating the right conditions for teachers. In many ways, he was the best education minister we never had.

Kim Thomas, parent

My fantasy education secretary would be Charles Dickens. Having been removed from school and sent out to work at the age of 12, he never underestimated the importance of education. Despite not attending university, he was a true lifelong learner, teaching himself French from scratch as an adult.

Dickens understood that even the poorest deserved an education, giving financial support to the Ragged Schools, which took in destitute children. Most importantly, in Hard Times, he satirised the dreary rote-learning approach of contemporary schoolmasters in the character of Professor Gradgrind – a Victorian Michael Gove – who says: "Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."

Jeremy Rowe, headteacher, Leman Park high school, John Leman high school, Suffolk

There's no one in the current government I think is up to the job of education minister. If only the former London schools commissioner, Tim Brighouse, was in politics. He is a real visionary who has delivered incredible change in both London and Birmingham schools. As someone who puts people at the heart of everything he does, he is everything Michael Gove is not and would make a fabulous education secretary.

Michael Gosling, principal, Trinity academy, Halifax

No school should ever fail its students, and we need an education minister who can tackle any poor performance head-on. Businesswoman Karren Brady managed to turn around the fortunes of Birmingham City Football Club and, despite the media glare on her personal and business activities, has never lost sight of what is important.

A good education minister understands that education doesn't have political colour, and puts their money where their mouth is when it comes to getting the system right for students. The minister for children and families, Sarah Teather, has shown fantastic potential and commitment so far and would be a good bet as education secretary.

Anna Elliott, primary school teacher, Cumbria

At the moment I feel fairly despairing of most politicians. The current government seems more interested in showing how it's different from the last one than coming up with strong policies.

But I have got time for my local MP and shadow transport secretary, John Woodcock, who manages to combine being very visible in the media and the Commons with playing the part of constituency MP very well. While he was taking the government to task on Network Rail bonuses in Westminster, he still made time to meet teaching assistants from schools around here about pay and conditions.

If he was in a ministerial role in education, and brought that dedication to being connected to real people outside of the Westminster bubble, we might just have a fighting chance.

Genevieve Smith-Nunes, ICT teacher, Dorothy Stringer high school, Brighton

I think the business secretary, Vince Cable, would be a safe pair of hands for education. He's knowledgeable, has a really calm, personable manner and I'm sure he would be able to persuade people round to his way of thinking.

The minister for culture, Ed Vaizey, could be another frontrunner. His work on the Next Gen. report, which made the case for teaching computing in schools, showed that he has an understanding of the skills children need for the future – unlike Gove, who seems to want to take us back to the 1950s.

This week the Guardian Teacher Network has lots of resources to help you get pupils involved in Sport Relief fundraising

Inspired by the build-up to Sport Relief – one of the UK's biggest fundraising events – and the London 2012 Olympics, the Guardian Teacher Network this week brings you a wealth of resources aimed at getting young people moving.

This year, Sport Relief takes place from 23-25 March. For primary pupils, What is Sport Relief? is a great place to start. It contains an assembly script , presentation and film that looks at Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton's record-breaking effort for Sport Relief 2010. Skelton kayaked 2010 miles down the Amazon River, paddling 14 hours a day for six weeks. The assembly covers what Sport Relief is, why fundraising is important and how pupils can join in.

A similar resource is available for secondary pupils, with an assembly script , presentation and film that focuses on comedian Eddie Izzard's fundraising efforts for Sport Relief 2010. He ran 43 marathons in 51 days and raised over £1.8m. The assembly covers global citizenship themes including the need for clean water, the problem of water-related diseases and what pupils can do to help.

Use Sport Relief 2012 Sweatbands for Schools as a possible enterprise activity for pupils to buy and sell sweatbands in their school. Other fundraising ideas suggested by Sport Relief include holding a fancy dress sports day or pitting staff against students in a series of sports activities. You can access a Sport Relief sponsorship form and paying-in slip on the Guardian Teacher Network.

There are activities for early years, too. Sport Relief 2012 has teamed up with the popular television series Waybuloo to encourage even the youngest children to get involved. Make Waybuloo face masks or put on a sponsored Waybuloo puppet show (http://teachers.guardian.co.uk/teacher-resources/6558/Waybuloo-Puppet-Show----- Fundraising-Activity). For more details about Sport Relief for schools, check out the website here (www.sportrelief.com/schools)..

For activities inspired by the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, check out the Wellcome Trust's new In the Zone resource. It uses science activities to discover how our bodies work during sport, movement and rest.

Brilliant Bodies is a set of three early years lessons that help children to learn about different parts of the body and how we use balance. On your marks, get set, breathe is an activity for 11- to 14-year-olds that looks at questions such as: How do athletes move so fast or jump so high? How do they get "in the zone", and what happens inside our bodies and minds when we take part in sport, performance or dance?

As part of In the Zone , free experiment kits are available for all UK schools. Four- to 11-year-olds can access online games, and 11- to 19-year-olds can upload the results of their science experiments to compare with other students across the country. Teachers can download presentations, editable teacher and student notes and additional resources.

The Guardian Teacher Network has more than 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to www.teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are also hundreds of jobs on the site; for a free trial of your first advert, go to schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk.

Business secretary Vince Cable summoned to Commons to answer urgent question as Ebdon's appointment is confirmed

A vice chancellor who sparked a political storm over his views on the social mix of degree students has been appointed England's new university access tsar.

Professor Les Ebdon told MPs this month that he might trigger the "nuclear option" if given the role, and forbid universities from charging the maximum tuition fees of £9,000 a year if they were not taking enough disadvantaged students.

The row over Ebdon's appointment as director of the university admissions watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa), reached the highest levels of government, with David Cameron claiming he was powerless to prevent the professor getting the £130,000-a-year, three-day-a-week role.

On Monday Vince Cable, the business secretary, who has responsibility for universities, was summoned to the Commons to answer an urgent question about the appointment. Cable had originally endorsed Ebdon for the role and stood by him when the Commons cross-party business committee refused to back it.

The Conservative backbencher James Clappison forced Cable to appear before MPs by tabling an urgent question, which was granted by the Speaker, John Bercow.

Cable defended his choice, listing Ebdon's "vast experience, gained through a working lifetime in higher education". He would be equipped to deal even-handedly with all parts of the sector, Cable said.

"We undertook two long, thorough searches to ensure we found the right candidate for the post, and I have no doubt that Professor Ebdon has the qualities and determination to help those students from low-income or other under-represented groups to secure the places in higher education that their attainments and potential show they deserve," Cable said.

Ebdon, the vice chancellor of Bedfordshire University, has been accused of defending "Mickey Mouse degrees". Michael Gove, the education secretary, is reported to have been against the appointment. Tory MPs, such as David Nuttall, have accused Offa of being an "expensive and unnecessary quango encouraging social engineering".

Others demanded reassurances from Cable that well-off pupils in their constituencies would not be turned down by top universities because of their backgrounds.

Ebdon will take the helm of a watchdog that can fine universities £500,000 for missing targets, and can refuse to sanction an access agreement – in effect banning institutions from charging more than £6,000 a year in tuition fees.

It aims to encourage more people from low-income families and other under-represented groups, such as some ethnic minorities, to apply for higher education. It is seen by some ministers as a central vehicle to improve working-class access to universities.

A group of Conservative MPs, called the Fair Access to University Group, and including Graham Stuart, the chairman of the influential 1922 committee and the cross-party education select committee, argues that Offa has made attempts to "enforce social rather than academic admissions criteria" upon universities.

"This is not only a distraction, but counterproductive to the overall wellbeing of the sector," the MPs wrote in a report entitled Achieving Fair Access: Removing Barriers, Realising Potential.

They said the main reason disadvantaged students did not go to the top universities is that they were not encouraged enough at school and sometimes were not given the chance to study rigorous subjects at A-level.

Private schools should be given public money to recruit bright pupils on free school meals and schools should be ranked according to the proportion of pupils who go on to top universities, the MPs argued. They also called for face-to-face careers advice for students, something the government has reduced.

The Russell Group, which represents the 20 most academically selective universities in the UK, warned that universities should not be subjected to government targets.

These could "disincentivise universities from continuing with some activities in deprived areas which target the students who are the hardest to reach", said Wendy Piatt, director-general of the group.