As of today hEaD space has a new home over at Wordpress .... Can I say that here? Oh, I just did.
Hope to see you there.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Sunday, 5 October 2008
Degree classification and grade 'inflation'
This summer has seen an awful lot of ink expended on issues of degree quality and 'grade inflation'. I don't particularly want to wade in on one side or the other, largely because the issue is incredibly complex, in a way that many of the 'commentators' in the media (and in Parliament) over the summer either could not grasp or chose to ignore. Let me just make a few observations:
I instinctively dislike the term grade inflation. It carries a lot of (deliberately disparaging) baggage. Inflation is not a neutral term. Inflation implies a reduction in value. By even engaging in the debate in the language of inflation we are therefore, from the outset, assuming something that needs to be proved; not just that we are awarding more Firsts and Upper Seconds, but that this is wrong and devalues the status of our degrees. This in turn also assumes that our assessment practices twenty or thirty years ago were superior to those in place today, and that assumption should certainly be challenged.
And this is where we have to come back to the problem of complexity. Whether we like it or not, we are not comparing like with like. When Norman Baird at qed law produces a table showing that most law schools are awarding substantially more First and 2:i's in 2007 than in 1997, then we can certainly acknowledge that is interesting (though why 16 law schools were apparently awarding less in 2007 is more counter-intuitive and possibly even more interesting), but as Norman himself acknowledges, it is just a snapshot, based on some very simple percentages. It tells us nothing about which of those changes (if any) are statistically significant; it does not indicate whether either of those years chosen was atypical for that law school, so we have no sense of the outliers, and, obviously, it tells us nothing about the underlying practices that might account for that change. And there are a lot of candidates to explain the changes, mostly well known, including:
In short, I don't think we are facing a crisis of degree standards, but I think we do have some artificial expectations of what a mass system of HE can and should achieve, and a certain amount of political dishonesty about the consequences of massification; and universities have, to some extent, been complicit with goverment in that process.
If we really wanted the 'standards' of an elite system in a mass environment, we would need to resource the environment much better, and more logically (most degrees still operate an illogical system of resource allocation, whereby, as much by default as by design, a larger pro rata share of resources are spent on the later years, rather than on the critical first year of the programme). It would also have to become politically acceptable to have higher initial failure rates. Neither of these things are likely to happen. And I don't actually have a lot of problems with that. But we surely do have to accept that, in a mass system, the purpose, scope, and value of an undergraduate degree is different from what it once was. That is not to say necessarily better or worse, just different. To some degree, the market is already doing this for us, though, of course, fairly arbitrarily, and without much sensible public debate.
As it is we have at best a hybrid (some might just say confused) system, and the teachers - the poor bloody infantry in all this - have to work out how to fix a machine that, ultimately, is constitutionally broken. What are the fixes? Here are a couple of starters for ten for this particular university challenge:
I instinctively dislike the term grade inflation. It carries a lot of (deliberately disparaging) baggage. Inflation is not a neutral term. Inflation implies a reduction in value. By even engaging in the debate in the language of inflation we are therefore, from the outset, assuming something that needs to be proved; not just that we are awarding more Firsts and Upper Seconds, but that this is wrong and devalues the status of our degrees. This in turn also assumes that our assessment practices twenty or thirty years ago were superior to those in place today, and that assumption should certainly be challenged.
And this is where we have to come back to the problem of complexity. Whether we like it or not, we are not comparing like with like. When Norman Baird at qed law produces a table showing that most law schools are awarding substantially more First and 2:i's in 2007 than in 1997, then we can certainly acknowledge that is interesting (though why 16 law schools were apparently awarding less in 2007 is more counter-intuitive and possibly even more interesting), but as Norman himself acknowledges, it is just a snapshot, based on some very simple percentages. It tells us nothing about which of those changes (if any) are statistically significant; it does not indicate whether either of those years chosen was atypical for that law school, so we have no sense of the outliers, and, obviously, it tells us nothing about the underlying practices that might account for that change. And there are a lot of candidates to explain the changes, mostly well known, including:
- changing teaching and assessment methods;
- possible changes to student motivation and prior learning;
- availability of more student support mechanisms in HE;
- possibly greater individual and institutional pressures on teachers to give higher marks (including the growing recognition that marks may need to be defensible if challenged)
- maybe even the recognition in law that the practice of marking across a narrow band of marks, relative to other disciplines, is not defensible when you are dealing with what is usually one of the most able cohorts of students in the university.
In short, I don't think we are facing a crisis of degree standards, but I think we do have some artificial expectations of what a mass system of HE can and should achieve, and a certain amount of political dishonesty about the consequences of massification; and universities have, to some extent, been complicit with goverment in that process.
If we really wanted the 'standards' of an elite system in a mass environment, we would need to resource the environment much better, and more logically (most degrees still operate an illogical system of resource allocation, whereby, as much by default as by design, a larger pro rata share of resources are spent on the later years, rather than on the critical first year of the programme). It would also have to become politically acceptable to have higher initial failure rates. Neither of these things are likely to happen. And I don't actually have a lot of problems with that. But we surely do have to accept that, in a mass system, the purpose, scope, and value of an undergraduate degree is different from what it once was. That is not to say necessarily better or worse, just different. To some degree, the market is already doing this for us, though, of course, fairly arbitrarily, and without much sensible public debate.
As it is we have at best a hybrid (some might just say confused) system, and the teachers - the poor bloody infantry in all this - have to work out how to fix a machine that, ultimately, is constitutionally broken. What are the fixes? Here are a couple of starters for ten for this particular university challenge:
- The classification system as both the Burgess Report and the QAA have pointed is well beyond its sell-by date. It should be replaced, though personally I would favour a more radical solution than Burgess's transcript; possibly a grade point system.
- Perhaps we should also consider an institutionalised move to marking on the 'bell curve' for larger modules. If this is done transparently across the sector (a job for the Committee of Heads of University law Schools perhaps?), it could act as a potential brake on creeping grade inflation, as any move of the median grade would have to be at least reported, possibly agreed, within the sector. Moreover, 'marking to the curve' seems a fairer way of accounting for marker variations (including teacher experience and expectations; year-on-year variations between papers, etc) than our current supposedly 'objective' system.
Monday, 22 September 2008
Widgets
I found this browsing the blogosphere.... particularly like the rather imperial red for countries visited. Delusions of grandeur obviously.
visited 26 states (11.5%)
Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president
visited 26 states (11.5%)
Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Normal service will (finally) be resumed shortly
Finally sent off the last big batch of entries yesterday morning for a new law dictionary I've been editing. It's been a mammoth task. The project's been ongoing for over two and a half years, with a team of nearly twenty contributors. The editing process has taken up virtually all my spare time over the last six months, and then some; it certainly hasn't left much time for blogging! It will be good to have it entirely finished, but there's still a last few entries outstanding, some cross-checking and the proofs to be done. It has reached that stage now when it will just be sooo good to see it finished....
Friday, 11 April 2008
Small world
So here I am sitting with a glass of wine on a hotel veranda in Barbados, musing on the occasional delights of academic life....
Actually one of the biggest oddities must be travelling all the way to somewhere like Barbados and not even making it onto the beach, but that's how it goes sometimes. I'm over here to do job (leading a Faculty Review of the Law Faculty at the University of the West Indies) and competing pressures on my time mean I arrived late last Sunday afternoon, have been working with the review team all week and fly out tomorrow (Friday) pretty much as soon as we have reported back to the Faculty. Still it has been interesting. I find these kinds of quality processes fascinating, and enjoyable - especially when the students are as engaging and articulate as they are at UWI - but challenging too. There's the whole rather forensic thing of asking the right questions of different people and working through papers to triangulate the data we're accumulating, and then there's the developmental processes of trying to articulate good practice and make viable recommendations that will support a department to make improvements where necessary. Plus sitting behind all that activity is the little voice in your own head (not so) quietly interrogating you on your and your own department's own practice!
Obviously the outcomes are confidential, but fortunately the incidental things that fall out of the process are always really interesting too. I know more about the Caribbean Single Market than I did before I started, have discussed with a Jamaican Professor of International Law whether Caribbean human rights law allows a margin of appreciation in the way of the ECHR (answer: it doesn't, or certainly not in those terms) and experienced lots of the ways in which globalization is shrinking our world. For example, meeting the head of the law school at the College of the Bahamas, who just happens to be a Warwick graduate; sitting at lunch up at the Cave Hill Campus discussing Obama's prospects for the Democrat US Presidential nomination, almost as if it were a matter of local politics; hearing law students and law teachers expressing concerns that almost exactly mirror those I hear in the UK: increasing numbers, worries about appropriate levels of skills (of the students, not the staff... mostly), worries about job prospects (students again)and the increasing work pressures on the academics too. Plus ca change....
Actually one of the biggest oddities must be travelling all the way to somewhere like Barbados and not even making it onto the beach, but that's how it goes sometimes. I'm over here to do job (leading a Faculty Review of the Law Faculty at the University of the West Indies) and competing pressures on my time mean I arrived late last Sunday afternoon, have been working with the review team all week and fly out tomorrow (Friday) pretty much as soon as we have reported back to the Faculty. Still it has been interesting. I find these kinds of quality processes fascinating, and enjoyable - especially when the students are as engaging and articulate as they are at UWI - but challenging too. There's the whole rather forensic thing of asking the right questions of different people and working through papers to triangulate the data we're accumulating, and then there's the developmental processes of trying to articulate good practice and make viable recommendations that will support a department to make improvements where necessary. Plus sitting behind all that activity is the little voice in your own head (not so) quietly interrogating you on your and your own department's own practice!
Obviously the outcomes are confidential, but fortunately the incidental things that fall out of the process are always really interesting too. I know more about the Caribbean Single Market than I did before I started, have discussed with a Jamaican Professor of International Law whether Caribbean human rights law allows a margin of appreciation in the way of the ECHR (answer: it doesn't, or certainly not in those terms) and experienced lots of the ways in which globalization is shrinking our world. For example, meeting the head of the law school at the College of the Bahamas, who just happens to be a Warwick graduate; sitting at lunch up at the Cave Hill Campus discussing Obama's prospects for the Democrat US Presidential nomination, almost as if it were a matter of local politics; hearing law students and law teachers expressing concerns that almost exactly mirror those I hear in the UK: increasing numbers, worries about appropriate levels of skills (of the students, not the staff... mostly), worries about job prospects (students again)and the increasing work pressures on the academics too. Plus ca change....
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
Legal Ethics
My former colleague John Flood is a visiting professor at the University of Miami this semester, where they have got him teaching the compulsory Professional Responsibility course. In a recent blog entry John has rightly described professional responsibility and ethics as the lost territory of English law. "Why is it", John asks, "that the business schools have been able to grasp the importance of teaching ethics, but law schools haven't?" A good question - and one I've commented on in response to John's entry, but I hope its worth expanding on that response here too.
John tends to point the finger at professional disinterest, and I'm sure that plays a part. The glib answer to the English denial of legal ethics has tended to be "no Watergate" - ie there has been no major crisis of professionalism that has forced the profession (and the academy) to seriously confront the problem. But I doubt that's the whole story.
Without trying to be exhaustive about it I think there is a range of factors. The English began codifying their professional conduct standards only about 70 years after the US - so the law of lawyering itself is still not as established a part of the culture. The greater separation of academic and vocational education I'm sure is also pretty key, and with it the tendency both of apparently vocational subjects, like ethics, to be marginalised in the academic curriculum, and of the vocational courses to lack the critical, engaging approach that we see in the best professional responsibility courses in US law schools. Consequently we also still lack any kind of critical mass of scholars. There are few discrete courses on legal ethics at the undergraduate stage in the UK, and it is notable that in the 10 years since Kim Economides and I started editing our journal Legal Ethics, the numbers of British scholars regularly contributing to the field has not significantly increased - indeed the gravitational pull on the journal has been southwards, with Australia now providing the greatest number of contributions. This is hardly surprising given that ethics is now far more established as a standard part of the Australian LLB.
Is this likely to change? In some respects its quite difficult to be optimistic. The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee pushed for a greater emphasis on ethics in its First Report published in 1996. This created a definite flurry of activity in the mid to late 1990s (of which we were part), but as I've just observed, it has not really been sustained. The Law Society subsequently set up an Ethics Education Forum to advise it specifically on ethics education in its work on the Training Framework Review, though quite what effect that body had is now hard to ascertain. Its regulatory successor, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, has recently commissioned Economides to review the terrain and make further recommendations. The outcome of that process remains to be seen, but whatever Kim Economides recommends is likely to meet opposition. There is no desire among academics to re-open negotiations on the Joint Statement that govern the professional requirements for the LLB, and some, perhaps understandable, reluctance to see these foundation subjects extended. A deepening of ethical training at the vocational and work-based learning stages of training might prove easier to implement, though that might still seem to be too little, too late. And to introduce more ethics at any stage will mean that teaching ad training institutions will have to address a significant knowledge gap.
At the same time these arguments are surely all wearing a little thin. Our approach is now significantly out of line with most of the major Common Law jurisdictions. We have confronted knowledge gaps before, and survived, and there is already a solid foundation of academic literature on which to build. Moreover there are numerous ways in which a more intellectually satisfying legal ethics (which could be informed by moral philosophy, axiology, the history and sociology of the professions, etc) could enrich both the academic curriculum and vocational training, and help us take the study of the legal profession itself more seriously. There is probably more pedagogic literature on teaching legal ethics than on most substantive parts of the curriculum. In short, the tools are all there. in this context, for legal educators to continue to deny ethics a serious place in the law curriculum starts to look like not just a failure of our ethical imagination, but an abnegation of our own professional responsibilities.
John tends to point the finger at professional disinterest, and I'm sure that plays a part. The glib answer to the English denial of legal ethics has tended to be "no Watergate" - ie there has been no major crisis of professionalism that has forced the profession (and the academy) to seriously confront the problem. But I doubt that's the whole story.
Without trying to be exhaustive about it I think there is a range of factors. The English began codifying their professional conduct standards only about 70 years after the US - so the law of lawyering itself is still not as established a part of the culture. The greater separation of academic and vocational education I'm sure is also pretty key, and with it the tendency both of apparently vocational subjects, like ethics, to be marginalised in the academic curriculum, and of the vocational courses to lack the critical, engaging approach that we see in the best professional responsibility courses in US law schools. Consequently we also still lack any kind of critical mass of scholars. There are few discrete courses on legal ethics at the undergraduate stage in the UK, and it is notable that in the 10 years since Kim Economides and I started editing our journal Legal Ethics, the numbers of British scholars regularly contributing to the field has not significantly increased - indeed the gravitational pull on the journal has been southwards, with Australia now providing the greatest number of contributions. This is hardly surprising given that ethics is now far more established as a standard part of the Australian LLB.
Is this likely to change? In some respects its quite difficult to be optimistic. The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee pushed for a greater emphasis on ethics in its First Report published in 1996. This created a definite flurry of activity in the mid to late 1990s (of which we were part), but as I've just observed, it has not really been sustained. The Law Society subsequently set up an Ethics Education Forum to advise it specifically on ethics education in its work on the Training Framework Review, though quite what effect that body had is now hard to ascertain. Its regulatory successor, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, has recently commissioned Economides to review the terrain and make further recommendations. The outcome of that process remains to be seen, but whatever Kim Economides recommends is likely to meet opposition. There is no desire among academics to re-open negotiations on the Joint Statement that govern the professional requirements for the LLB, and some, perhaps understandable, reluctance to see these foundation subjects extended. A deepening of ethical training at the vocational and work-based learning stages of training might prove easier to implement, though that might still seem to be too little, too late. And to introduce more ethics at any stage will mean that teaching ad training institutions will have to address a significant knowledge gap.
At the same time these arguments are surely all wearing a little thin. Our approach is now significantly out of line with most of the major Common Law jurisdictions. We have confronted knowledge gaps before, and survived, and there is already a solid foundation of academic literature on which to build. Moreover there are numerous ways in which a more intellectually satisfying legal ethics (which could be informed by moral philosophy, axiology, the history and sociology of the professions, etc) could enrich both the academic curriculum and vocational training, and help us take the study of the legal profession itself more seriously. There is probably more pedagogic literature on teaching legal ethics than on most substantive parts of the curriculum. In short, the tools are all there. in this context, for legal educators to continue to deny ethics a serious place in the law curriculum starts to look like not just a failure of our ethical imagination, but an abnegation of our own professional responsibilities.
Monday, 25 February 2008
Shoot the REF?
A hotel in Dundee on a cold rainy night... the perfect opportunity to get the blog going again after too long a gap. I've been meaning to write for a while on a topic that has occupied a lot of my attention over the last 18 months, namely research assessment. With the submission of data for RAE 2008 at the end of last November, the UK academic community has finally consigned seven years of research activity into the hands of peer review panels. Even though the results of this latest exercise will not be known before December, the funding councils are already moving to establish the parameters for a replacement for the RAE - the proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Universities were recently given the opportunity to respond to a consultation paper on the new REF. While most of the paper related to outline proposals to shift the balance of assessment in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) subjects from peer review to 'metrics' (ie quantitative measures of performance, including citation counting), the paper also raised a number of questions about how the methodology for the arts, social sciences and humanities should be changed. Widespread concerns over the inappropriateness of bibliometrics for these disciplines appear, to a degree, to have been accepted and the thrust of the paper focuses on the questions of the kind of 'light touch' peer review that would be appropriate for these subjects, in conjunction with a possibly greater range of metric indicators than are used at present.
There must be relatively few academics and policy-makers who would not consider that the RAE has had its day. It has, I think, had some beneficial effects, but it has also distorted certain aspects of research activity, and been a massively resource intensive process. At Warwick alone the RAE 2008 has produced a university submission comprising, so our RAE team tell us, of 2296 pages. The hours put into the exercise by university and departmental research coordinators and administrators, by internal and external peer reviewers and various committee meetings must be staggering, creating I suspect a huge (lost) opportunity cost out of the whole exercise - and that's before we factor in the centralised costs to the funding councils of the assessment process itself.
So, what about the options for 2013?
The consultation has very much focused on metrics and especially bibliometrics as the primary methodology for the STEM disciplines. Even in this context, I think there are significant problems that need to be considered and it is hard to resist the view that bibliometrics are potentially a pretty bad idea, at least not without some considerable refinement. Let me give you just a couple of quite obvious concerns. First, there is already some debate about what bibliometrics actually measure. HEPI has argued quite forcefully that metrics actually assess research impact not research quality. If funding continues to be distributed on a quality basis, this must of itself beg the question whether metrics are the appropriate primary measure. Secondly, any kind of research assessment will effect what it seeks to measure - a good methodology will maximise 'beneficial' effects (however we define them) and hopefully minimise undesirable and inefficient distortions. Bibliometrics inevitably threaten to bring in a whole new range of distortions, for example, citation counting could simply encourage departments to use co-authoring strategically to coat-tail less highly-rated researchers on the work of research stars. Similarly, will bibliometrics actually reinforce the value of star researchers and transfer market in such stars? It could work more against new and early career researchers then the existing, qualitative approach of the RAE. Work takes time to have an impact, particularly with long publication lags in many journals. How will this be taken into account? This could be of considerable longer term significance in the context of the demographic “time bomb” most universities are facing, given aging staff profiles.
The proposals for a 'light touch' peer review for the social sciences and humanities are only broadly sketched out at this stage. Even so , there are some grounds for concern, not least given the likely speed with which changes will implemented. It is hard to see how the funding councils will reconcile the ‘light touch’ ideal with their stated commitment to continue with the process of quality profiling that was introduced for RAE 2008. (That is, where each publication is rated and the department is given a research profile, showing the percentage of work at 4*, 3*, 2*, and so on). The light touch might also do more to embed or reinforce the status quo and concentrate research funding in a way that has negative consequences for the sector as a whole and for the student learning experience. The combination of detailed peer review with a range of both quantitative and qualitative inputs has facilitated recognition and reward of smaller, emergent, research cultures within institutions - essentially post-92 universities and colleges - that have not had the cultural capital or resources in the past to develop a breadth and institutional depth of research excellence. It would be unfortunate if this capacity were to be lost. Moreover, the impact of a new methodology seems very hard to assess in diversity terms at this stage. Initially at least the new methodologies are also likely to create new, or at least different, demands on institutions, both in response to the proposed greater reliance on metrics and other quantitative measures, and in the need to manage two different REF processes.
I wonder if it really is about time we all agreed enough is enough, but that's not going to happen, is it? That's the problem with the audit juggernaut, once you set it going, its very hard to stop.
Universities were recently given the opportunity to respond to a consultation paper on the new REF. While most of the paper related to outline proposals to shift the balance of assessment in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) subjects from peer review to 'metrics' (ie quantitative measures of performance, including citation counting), the paper also raised a number of questions about how the methodology for the arts, social sciences and humanities should be changed. Widespread concerns over the inappropriateness of bibliometrics for these disciplines appear, to a degree, to have been accepted and the thrust of the paper focuses on the questions of the kind of 'light touch' peer review that would be appropriate for these subjects, in conjunction with a possibly greater range of metric indicators than are used at present.
There must be relatively few academics and policy-makers who would not consider that the RAE has had its day. It has, I think, had some beneficial effects, but it has also distorted certain aspects of research activity, and been a massively resource intensive process. At Warwick alone the RAE 2008 has produced a university submission comprising, so our RAE team tell us, of 2296 pages. The hours put into the exercise by university and departmental research coordinators and administrators, by internal and external peer reviewers and various committee meetings must be staggering, creating I suspect a huge (lost) opportunity cost out of the whole exercise - and that's before we factor in the centralised costs to the funding councils of the assessment process itself.
So, what about the options for 2013?
The consultation has very much focused on metrics and especially bibliometrics as the primary methodology for the STEM disciplines. Even in this context, I think there are significant problems that need to be considered and it is hard to resist the view that bibliometrics are potentially a pretty bad idea, at least not without some considerable refinement. Let me give you just a couple of quite obvious concerns. First, there is already some debate about what bibliometrics actually measure. HEPI has argued quite forcefully that metrics actually assess research impact not research quality. If funding continues to be distributed on a quality basis, this must of itself beg the question whether metrics are the appropriate primary measure. Secondly, any kind of research assessment will effect what it seeks to measure - a good methodology will maximise 'beneficial' effects (however we define them) and hopefully minimise undesirable and inefficient distortions. Bibliometrics inevitably threaten to bring in a whole new range of distortions, for example, citation counting could simply encourage departments to use co-authoring strategically to coat-tail less highly-rated researchers on the work of research stars. Similarly, will bibliometrics actually reinforce the value of star researchers and transfer market in such stars? It could work more against new and early career researchers then the existing, qualitative approach of the RAE. Work takes time to have an impact, particularly with long publication lags in many journals. How will this be taken into account? This could be of considerable longer term significance in the context of the demographic “time bomb” most universities are facing, given aging staff profiles.
The proposals for a 'light touch' peer review for the social sciences and humanities are only broadly sketched out at this stage. Even so , there are some grounds for concern, not least given the likely speed with which changes will implemented. It is hard to see how the funding councils will reconcile the ‘light touch’ ideal with their stated commitment to continue with the process of quality profiling that was introduced for RAE 2008. (That is, where each publication is rated and the department is given a research profile, showing the percentage of work at 4*, 3*, 2*, and so on). The light touch might also do more to embed or reinforce the status quo and concentrate research funding in a way that has negative consequences for the sector as a whole and for the student learning experience. The combination of detailed peer review with a range of both quantitative and qualitative inputs has facilitated recognition and reward of smaller, emergent, research cultures within institutions - essentially post-92 universities and colleges - that have not had the cultural capital or resources in the past to develop a breadth and institutional depth of research excellence. It would be unfortunate if this capacity were to be lost. Moreover, the impact of a new methodology seems very hard to assess in diversity terms at this stage. Initially at least the new methodologies are also likely to create new, or at least different, demands on institutions, both in response to the proposed greater reliance on metrics and other quantitative measures, and in the need to manage two different REF processes.
I wonder if it really is about time we all agreed enough is enough, but that's not going to happen, is it? That's the problem with the audit juggernaut, once you set it going, its very hard to stop.
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
We're back!
Moira and I got back from Kenya on Sunday after an incredible challenge. This was the first visit to Africa for both of us, and the first time we had ever attempted a long distance cycle ride. It was tough. Believe me, we have earned every penny of your sponsorship money! On the last day of the ride we visited the project at Mumia that the International Childcare Trust is sponsoring with a local action group. The aim of the project is to build a drop-in centre and night shelter for street children . The centre will also provide adult education and other facilities to work with local women, including widows who are being supported to take on fostering projects with AIDS orphans and others, and families in crisis. The greeting we received (pictured) was extraordinary and it was an intensely moving experience. The first floor of the centre is virtually complete, funded by some of the money raised out of last year's Cycle Cambodia challenge, and the building was opened by ICT's chairman during our visit. The Cycle Kenya team were a great group of individuals, and even though it was tough, we had a real ball. The memories from this trip - and the visit to the Mumia project in particular - will stay with us for a very long time indeed.
A big THANK YOU again to everyone who has supported us so far. Our Just Giving site is still operational, so please, if you haven't sponsored us already and would like to, there is still time to do so. We are also in the process of putting a day-by-day account of the challenge up on Moira's blog, linked here
Friday, 9 November 2007
Ere we go...!
Its reached the fateful day. We leave Warwick this afternoon for an overnight flight to Nairobi and 411kms of cycling. Feeling more than a little apprehensive about a couple of the days - days two and four - which involve over 100 kms, which looks to be mostly upwards, and then 88kms with a big 25 km ascent in the afternoon. We've done some good mileage in training, but not enough hills I fear.....
But there's no turning back - that's why they call it a challenge! Thanks again to all out fantastic supporters who have helped us raise nearly £5000 already, and our major fund-raising events still have to take place. The photo here relates to one of those - a children's charity cycle ride in Victoria Park, Leamington which is happening on the Sunday after we get back - 25th November from 10.30 am. Big thanks to Roger and hirecentres.com for sponsoring this event on our behalf and to Stephen, our Police community support officer (pictured here with some of our first participants) who has been a tremendous help with all the detailed arrangements. Come and support us if you're in the area!
Until our return.......
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
The numbers' game
I got copied in yesterday to an interesting puzzle that Shakeel - our Information Manager at UKCLE - had uncovered for Gary Slapper at the Open University. Recent UCAS statistics apparently indicate that just under 90% of those applying for law are getting in. So what, Gary asked, has happened, and what about that still widely held belief that law is a massively oversubscribed subject?
I don't actually know the answer, but I have no particular reason to doubt the data. The following I think is a reasonable supposition based on what I do know about the admissions system over the last 10-15 years (the older stats quoted below pretty much all come from UCAS, courtesy of the study on "Access to and Participation in Undergraduate Legal Education" (Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2, UWE Bristol, 1996) that Vera Bermingham and I undertook for the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee in 1995.
1) The extent to which law was oversubscribed was probably always a bit mythical, reflecting the way students applied to the old UCCA/PCAS system pre-1993-4. Under that system students could apply through UCCA to six universities (I think) and then separately to about the same number of polytechnics (now post-92 universities) via PCAS. There were a lot of insurance applications across the two schemes as students tried to protect their position - especially in case they did worse than they expected. This would have inflated the admissions figures. In the last year of the old scheme UCCA and PCAS together handled 31,760 applications. In the first year of the combined UCAS scheme (for 1994 entry) UCAS handled 20,988 - that doesn't mean almost 11,000 less students applied to read law, it just means that the number of applications became a truer reflection of the real number of applicants across the system as a whole.
2) Since then we know that institutions have recruited significantly more students to LLB coursess, and that the number and range of courses has also expanded. In 1994 about 8,000 students were admitted to qualifying law degrees. It appears that, subsequently, that number has more than doubled.
3) In 1994 the overall ratio of UCAS applicants to admitted students was about 2.5:1 - itself way below the old UCAS/PCAS average which I believe was nearer to 12 or even 15:1. Interestingly, the number of applicants in 1994 and in the latest figures are strikingly similar. I suspect the figure may be relatively constant in the intervening period. If that is correct, then, logically, if the number of applicants remains constant, and the number of places continues to grow, we would reach the position we seem to have now: near parity between applicants and places.
That of course represents an interesting challenge, particularly as yet more law degrees are due to come on stream in the next year or so, eg, at York and Winchester, and British universities seem to be doing less well in the highly competitive market for international students. While the elite law schools may be protected by their status and popularity from the worst effects of these trends, and will, I am sure, continue to be oversubscribed, the lives of admissions tutors in some law schools may be about to become even more interesting. How long can you keep fishing at a nearly empty pool?
I don't actually know the answer, but I have no particular reason to doubt the data. The following I think is a reasonable supposition based on what I do know about the admissions system over the last 10-15 years (the older stats quoted below pretty much all come from UCAS, courtesy of the study on "Access to and Participation in Undergraduate Legal Education" (Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2, UWE Bristol, 1996) that Vera Bermingham and I undertook for the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee in 1995.
1) The extent to which law was oversubscribed was probably always a bit mythical, reflecting the way students applied to the old UCCA/PCAS system pre-1993-4. Under that system students could apply through UCCA to six universities (I think) and then separately to about the same number of polytechnics (now post-92 universities) via PCAS. There were a lot of insurance applications across the two schemes as students tried to protect their position - especially in case they did worse than they expected. This would have inflated the admissions figures. In the last year of the old scheme UCCA and PCAS together handled 31,760 applications. In the first year of the combined UCAS scheme (for 1994 entry) UCAS handled 20,988 - that doesn't mean almost 11,000 less students applied to read law, it just means that the number of applications became a truer reflection of the real number of applicants across the system as a whole.
2) Since then we know that institutions have recruited significantly more students to LLB coursess, and that the number and range of courses has also expanded. In 1994 about 8,000 students were admitted to qualifying law degrees. It appears that, subsequently, that number has more than doubled.
3) In 1994 the overall ratio of UCAS applicants to admitted students was about 2.5:1 - itself way below the old UCAS/PCAS average which I believe was nearer to 12 or even 15:1. Interestingly, the number of applicants in 1994 and in the latest figures are strikingly similar. I suspect the figure may be relatively constant in the intervening period. If that is correct, then, logically, if the number of applicants remains constant, and the number of places continues to grow, we would reach the position we seem to have now: near parity between applicants and places.
That of course represents an interesting challenge, particularly as yet more law degrees are due to come on stream in the next year or so, eg, at York and Winchester, and British universities seem to be doing less well in the highly competitive market for international students. While the elite law schools may be protected by their status and popularity from the worst effects of these trends, and will, I am sure, continue to be oversubscribed, the lives of admissions tutors in some law schools may be about to become even more interesting. How long can you keep fishing at a nearly empty pool?
Thursday, 18 October 2007
"Transforming legal education"
This modest little title belongs to an excellent book just published (Ashgate, 2007) by Prof Paul Maharg of Glasgow Graduate School of Law. Paul is one of the most innovative thinkers around on legal education and his work at Strathclyde on creating transactional learning environments (teaching through simulated legal transactions) is really world class. This book reflects on a lot of that experience, but does much more in terms of developing an alternative theory of legal education pedagogy - which incidently involves linking the construction of the legal realist curriculum at Columbia in the 1920s, ethics education at Edinburgh University in the eighteenth century; and the practices of the mediaeval "Glossators" of Roman Law!Perhaps even more interesting is the experiment that goes with the book. Paul and a number of colleagues have just launched a wiki which will form the basis of a community of practice for what Paul calls the "Transforming Initiative". I've just signed up to it, though blowed if I know quite what I'm going to do with it - yet! If you're interested in the project, go to Paul's Transforming Legal Education website - linked here
Monday, 1 October 2007
Disabling education?
Earlier today I was reading through a paper by Jenkins, Healey and Zetter on the HEA website entitled “Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments” (published in April 2007). I was struck and somewhat depressed by the fact that none of the examples they cited were of developments in UK law schools. Of course I can’t say for sure why that was (I haven’t asked them for one thing), but when I also tried to track down examples of research-based teaching on the UKCLE website, I found remarkably little there either. Of course, the good news might be that everyone in law schools has sussed out the teaching-research nexus, and its so second nature now that nobody bothers to talk about it. But somehow I don’t think so.
Before going any further with this potential rant, I ought to clarify an earlier distinction that Alan Jenkins and Mick Healey made between research-led and research-based teaching, because I think it is fairly crucial. Research-led teaching, putting it crudely, reflects the student-as-audience paradigm of teaching, where they sit back and admire our erudition as we introduce them to our latest piece of cutting-edge research. Research-based teaching, on the other hand is a form of inquiry-based learning which treats the student as a (joint) participant in the research (and hence the learning) process. My betting is that, beyond the still fairly ubiquitous and highly variable experience of writing a final year dissertation, most law undergraduates experience at least some research-led teaching but very little genuinely research-based learning.
If that’s so, then I suggest we are missing a real opportunity and perpetuating a form of what (adapting Ivan Illych’s notion of disabling professions) I am inclined to call disabling education – an education that actively disempowers our students. It manifests itself in the attitude that we can’t or shouldn’t expect too much originality or creativity of poor little undergraduates. A variation of the same attitude seems to emerge with monotonous regularity in discussions about clinical legal education, when non-participants express doubts/shock/total horror at the idea of undergraduates actually being allowed to give legal advice to real people.
For us as academics to keep students at arms length from the experience of research seems to involve
(a) an impressive example of discrepant reasoning – speaking personally it was precisely the experience of doing a research project and being encouraged to write as an undergraduate that led me to start thinking about academia as a career, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, or
(b) pure humbug – do we really think that the skills we have developed as researchers are so advanced and so specialised that they are wholly beyond the ken of our students?
and, from the point of view of the future of the academic profession, it is surely about as smart a survival strategy as being in the front row of the charge of the Light Brigade.
I do know that there are some examples of research-based learning happening in our law schools, and I’d love to hear from other colleagues who are doing this sort of work. I know that the people leading these courses find them engaging, motivating and exciting for themselves and their students, and that developing the research-teaching nexus has direct benefits for their own research, as well as for their students’ learning. In a recent e-mail exchange, Ben Pontin, who has been doing some very interesting research-based work with his Environmental Law module at UWE Bristol, observed “Students are brilliant at gathering 'raw material' - trawling historical archives (newpapers, official records, family histories) for snippets of information; detective work. Also, there was a geography dimension to the research, and students enjoyed designing field trips to the sites of leading nuisance actions, to identify whether any trace of what claimants were seeking to protect remains today. However, where students needed input from an academic was in interpreting the significance of empirical findings. Great at treating law as a material object (a field or stately home protected against a polluting factory or sewage works), students struggled with law's ideas!” I think that last observation makes for a particularly interesting insight and suggests a useful point around which we could reconstruct the role of the teacher in a more research-based legal education process.
Before going any further with this potential rant, I ought to clarify an earlier distinction that Alan Jenkins and Mick Healey made between research-led and research-based teaching, because I think it is fairly crucial. Research-led teaching, putting it crudely, reflects the student-as-audience paradigm of teaching, where they sit back and admire our erudition as we introduce them to our latest piece of cutting-edge research. Research-based teaching, on the other hand is a form of inquiry-based learning which treats the student as a (joint) participant in the research (and hence the learning) process. My betting is that, beyond the still fairly ubiquitous and highly variable experience of writing a final year dissertation, most law undergraduates experience at least some research-led teaching but very little genuinely research-based learning.
If that’s so, then I suggest we are missing a real opportunity and perpetuating a form of what (adapting Ivan Illych’s notion of disabling professions) I am inclined to call disabling education – an education that actively disempowers our students. It manifests itself in the attitude that we can’t or shouldn’t expect too much originality or creativity of poor little undergraduates. A variation of the same attitude seems to emerge with monotonous regularity in discussions about clinical legal education, when non-participants express doubts/shock/total horror at the idea of undergraduates actually being allowed to give legal advice to real people.
For us as academics to keep students at arms length from the experience of research seems to involve
(a) an impressive example of discrepant reasoning – speaking personally it was precisely the experience of doing a research project and being encouraged to write as an undergraduate that led me to start thinking about academia as a career, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, or
(b) pure humbug – do we really think that the skills we have developed as researchers are so advanced and so specialised that they are wholly beyond the ken of our students?
and, from the point of view of the future of the academic profession, it is surely about as smart a survival strategy as being in the front row of the charge of the Light Brigade.
I do know that there are some examples of research-based learning happening in our law schools, and I’d love to hear from other colleagues who are doing this sort of work. I know that the people leading these courses find them engaging, motivating and exciting for themselves and their students, and that developing the research-teaching nexus has direct benefits for their own research, as well as for their students’ learning. In a recent e-mail exchange, Ben Pontin, who has been doing some very interesting research-based work with his Environmental Law module at UWE Bristol, observed “Students are brilliant at gathering 'raw material' - trawling historical archives (newpapers, official records, family histories) for snippets of information; detective work. Also, there was a geography dimension to the research, and students enjoyed designing field trips to the sites of leading nuisance actions, to identify whether any trace of what claimants were seeking to protect remains today. However, where students needed input from an academic was in interpreting the significance of empirical findings. Great at treating law as a material object (a field or stately home protected against a polluting factory or sewage works), students struggled with law's ideas!” I think that last observation makes for a particularly interesting insight and suggests a useful point around which we could reconstruct the role of the teacher in a more research-based legal education process.
Friday, 21 September 2007
TGI Friday
Just back from a day in London at a one day conference organised by three enterprising PhD students at Queen Mary. The theme was "Legal academics: Spectators or Players?" and the organisers had got a really interesting group of people together to discuss the role of legal academics and their relationship with legal practice. It could all have been a bit of a non-event, but as it was it was one of those days where the synergies worked and it sparked all sorts of interesting research and policy questions, much of it around the role of legal education in this relationship. I hope it leads on to some real outputs; it would be a shame to waste all that energy!
Its just as well it was an energising day as the batteries here are running pretty low. Its been a busy summer at the end of a long year. I've been working hard on about three different writing projects, as well as trying to keep on top of my work for the Centre and the RAE, so its been pretty much six day weeks since May, with just a week off for hols in August. Not what most people think us academics do with our time, I suspect. Even so there have been good bits. the Warwick RAE is taking shape, I am getting through the writing - if slowly - and UKCLE has just had its annual Advisory Board, and got some great feedback and support from the Board, which is so valuable to the team. Now its all about gearing up for the new academic year which starts in a week's time; I'm teaching a first year undergraduate module this term, for the first time in a long time, and have also taken over the leadership of the LLM Legal Education, and there's still a fair amount to do on both those fronts. But tomorrow, no work!
Its just as well it was an energising day as the batteries here are running pretty low. Its been a busy summer at the end of a long year. I've been working hard on about three different writing projects, as well as trying to keep on top of my work for the Centre and the RAE, so its been pretty much six day weeks since May, with just a week off for hols in August. Not what most people think us academics do with our time, I suspect. Even so there have been good bits. the Warwick RAE is taking shape, I am getting through the writing - if slowly - and UKCLE has just had its annual Advisory Board, and got some great feedback and support from the Board, which is so valuable to the team. Now its all about gearing up for the new academic year which starts in a week's time; I'm teaching a first year undergraduate module this term, for the first time in a long time, and have also taken over the leadership of the LLM Legal Education, and there's still a fair amount to do on both those fronts. But tomorrow, no work!
Friday, 31 August 2007
Cycle Kenya
Just a short post to let anyone out there know that I'm still alive and this blog is still active!
A massive thank you from us and the kids we're supporting to the many generous people who have sponsored us so far on our Cycle Kenya charity ride. We have reached the £3000 target we needed to raise by 31 August to make the cut for this trip. In recognition of this tremendous achievement Moira has raised our total fundraising target from £8000 to £20,000. Its the kind of thing she does when she comes back all inspired from a course, bless. So, watch this space, or alternatively don't watch this space, but go to our Just Giving site and add some coppers to the collection :-)
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
Goodbye to Berlin
As I mentioned in my last blog, I've not long been back from a few days in Berlin, combining the Law & Society Association/Research Committee for Sociology of Law conference with a weekend away with the divine Ms B.
The conference itself was massive, held at the Humboldt University (pictured). Running over five days there were easily over 2000 delegates and (someone told me) nearly 40 parallel streams. I managed to attend about eight: a mixture of legal ethics, legal profession and social theory streams. One of the reasons I went was that there was a lot of systems theory happening, with a number of well-established names performing - Gunther Teubner, Michael King, Jean Clam, and my former colleague and continuing friend John Paterson to name but a few, and systems theory is relevant to my slowly progressing book project on Law, Complexity and Globalization. There was relatively little legal education, or at least not in a coordinated fashion. It was mostly odd papers scattered across streams, which made it more difficult to follow it as a theme. Unfortunately one legal education session that had been coordinated by my Brit colleagues Fiona Cownie and Tony Bradney clashed with my own paper ('Socio-Legal Studies, Transdisciplinarity and the Challenge of Complexity') which partly rehashed and partly developed ideas I'd previous published in Michael Freeman's Current Legal Issues volume on Law and Sociology (Oxford UP, 2006).
Still, legal education wasn't the primary purpose of my going this time, and it was an interesting event. One of the things that I found interesting was the very clear sense I got of the growing split between European and US approaches to socio-legal scholarship. This may not have been everyone's experience of the conference of course; I did attend a number of sessions that focussed on quite distinctively European theories or themes, at which US attendance - and certainly participation - was significantly less, and that may have skewed my view. But I was certainly struck by the degree to which in a couple of theory sessions the Europeans (including the Brits) were operating in a very different theoretical space from the US Americans. A lot of the US law and society project still seems very much caught up with a strongly positivist social science or liberal political philosophy.
The conference itself was massive, held at the Humboldt University (pictured). Running over five days there were easily over 2000 delegates and (someone told me) nearly 40 parallel streams. I managed to attend about eight: a mixture of legal ethics, legal profession and social theory streams. One of the reasons I went was that there was a lot of systems theory happening, with a number of well-established names performing - Gunther Teubner, Michael King, Jean Clam, and my former colleague and continuing friend John Paterson to name but a few, and systems theory is relevant to my slowly progressing book project on Law, Complexity and Globalization. There was relatively little legal education, or at least not in a coordinated fashion. It was mostly odd papers scattered across streams, which made it more difficult to follow it as a theme. Unfortunately one legal education session that had been coordinated by my Brit colleagues Fiona Cownie and Tony Bradney clashed with my own paper ('Socio-Legal Studies, Transdisciplinarity and the Challenge of Complexity') which partly rehashed and partly developed ideas I'd previous published in Michael Freeman's Current Legal Issues volume on Law and Sociology (Oxford UP, 2006).
Still, legal education wasn't the primary purpose of my going this time, and it was an interesting event. One of the things that I found interesting was the very clear sense I got of the growing split between European and US approaches to socio-legal scholarship. This may not have been everyone's experience of the conference of course; I did attend a number of sessions that focussed on quite distinctively European theories or themes, at which US attendance - and certainly participation - was significantly less, and that may have skewed my view. But I was certainly struck by the degree to which in a couple of theory sessions the Europeans (including the Brits) were operating in a very different theoretical space from the US Americans. A lot of the US law and society project still seems very much caught up with a strongly positivist social science or liberal political philosophy.
Monday, 30 July 2007
And more skills
Apologies for leaving you on tenterhooks (not!) for the next exciting instalment, but the realities of various deadlines intervened before I rushed off around dawn last Wednesday to fly to Berlin for the Law & Society Association/Research Committee for Sociology of Law mega-bash aka conference.
I had planned to post a blog or two from Berlin, just to display my international credentials, but after watching a couple of the Americans feverishly blogging away (and hearing of another who had been barking instructions at some poor research assistant in the States who was clearly providing research back-up for his/her master's blog). I rather went off the idea. Anyway this was my first trip to Berlin, and what makes you think I'd stay in and blog when there's a whole city famed for its bars - erm, I mean culture - to be explored!
But now I'm back, and its back to thinking about a post-Leitch world of higher education.
What probably interests me most about Leitch and World Class Skills is the way in which it signals another step in the potential shift in focus and in the power-relations that shape the world of higher education. For the present government a general nod, or even a larger commitment, to knowledge transfer will no longer be enough:
“all HE institutions need to grow their capacity to engage on a large scale with employers, in ways adapted to their different profiles and missions. Those activities should share equal status with research and academic activities. ‘Business facing’ should be a description with which any higher education institution feels comfortable”
- World Class Skills, para 3.56
Whether this shift will in fact deliver the skills outcomes the economy needs may prove to be a moot point. World Class Skills potentially puts a lot of faith in the rationality of markets, and the ability of a demand-led approach to deliver. We are not operating in a planned economy; the fact that employers might want an extra 100,000 science and engineering graduates does not mean universities will provide them, not least because that demand may not have translated well to the traditional (18-20 year old) supply-side of the equation. World Class Skills recognises that, if this gap is to be closed, it will be increasingly by “upskilling” and retraining those already in the workplace. Fortuitously, in a sense, this coincides with demographic changes that will see a substantial decline in the 18-20 population by 2020 (though the actual effects of these changes are still debatable). Universities therefore are aware of the need to develop new markets. The delivery of higher level skills and more work-based learning is clearly one avenue, and one worth an estimated £5 billion at that. But for this change to be effective will require both high quality manpower forecasting and planning by industry, and a greater degree of market ‘savvy’ and responsiveness from the higher education sector.
In the move to a demand-led model, the government makes much of its intention to increase the “purchasing power” of employers. It also makes it abundantly clear that most of the growth in training will be funded by those same employers: they may be able to get more of what they want, but they will have to pay for it. This may not be a problem for the top end of the market (whether that be the major multi-national business or the global law firm), who are already using opportunities created by the liberalisation of the education market to build increasingly tailored academic and vocational provision. But the bespoke approach will not work for much of the market, whether in law or anything else. In this context the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are likely to drive much of the agenda. Essentially employer-led organisations, they act as brokers between employers and training providers, and have been empowered to create and control the National Occupational Standards which contain the knowledge and skills outcomes prescribed, at various levels of achievement, for a growing range of occupations. They have money and market information, can claim to speak on behalf of the world of work, and, while they cannot directly impinge on the autonomy of universities to develop and validate their own awards, they do have the power to ‘endorse’ higher education programmes which satisfy their professional and occupational standards.
However, despite some obvious advantages, the sectoral approach adopted by the SSC model overall could also prove to be a rather blunt instrument. Concerns, for example, have been expressed in some areas (not the “justice sector” so far as I am aware) that the SSCs may be open to capture by particular sub-sectors or certain key employers. This may well put to the test the assumption that what is in the (perceived) interests of employers will be in the interests of the economy as a whole. Furthermore, for both the SSCs and educational providers, matching needs and provision, particularly in respect of less obviously vocational courses and disciplines is also likely to be difficult. For example, Skills for Justice is the SSC for the “justice sector”, and yet much of its work, particularly in respect of the criminal justice system is not particularly served by the law schools. Similarly, for the law schools, the fact that a potentially significant number of their graduates will not work in the “justice sector” begs the question as to which other SSCs they should also be talking to. At the least it seems that there are genuine coordination and information gaps to be addressed.
This in fact is but one branch of a much bigger issue implicitly posed by World Class Skills: the extent to which the employment agenda represents a potentially fundamental structural challenge to traditional university disciplines and the construction of higher education as a distinct and distinctive branch of learning.
I had planned to post a blog or two from Berlin, just to display my international credentials, but after watching a couple of the Americans feverishly blogging away (and hearing of another who had been barking instructions at some poor research assistant in the States who was clearly providing research back-up for his/her master's blog). I rather went off the idea. Anyway this was my first trip to Berlin, and what makes you think I'd stay in and blog when there's a whole city famed for its bars - erm, I mean culture - to be explored!
But now I'm back, and its back to thinking about a post-Leitch world of higher education.
What probably interests me most about Leitch and World Class Skills is the way in which it signals another step in the potential shift in focus and in the power-relations that shape the world of higher education. For the present government a general nod, or even a larger commitment, to knowledge transfer will no longer be enough:
“all HE institutions need to grow their capacity to engage on a large scale with employers, in ways adapted to their different profiles and missions. Those activities should share equal status with research and academic activities. ‘Business facing’ should be a description with which any higher education institution feels comfortable”
- World Class Skills, para 3.56
Whether this shift will in fact deliver the skills outcomes the economy needs may prove to be a moot point. World Class Skills potentially puts a lot of faith in the rationality of markets, and the ability of a demand-led approach to deliver. We are not operating in a planned economy; the fact that employers might want an extra 100,000 science and engineering graduates does not mean universities will provide them, not least because that demand may not have translated well to the traditional (18-20 year old) supply-side of the equation. World Class Skills recognises that, if this gap is to be closed, it will be increasingly by “upskilling” and retraining those already in the workplace. Fortuitously, in a sense, this coincides with demographic changes that will see a substantial decline in the 18-20 population by 2020 (though the actual effects of these changes are still debatable). Universities therefore are aware of the need to develop new markets. The delivery of higher level skills and more work-based learning is clearly one avenue, and one worth an estimated £5 billion at that. But for this change to be effective will require both high quality manpower forecasting and planning by industry, and a greater degree of market ‘savvy’ and responsiveness from the higher education sector.
In the move to a demand-led model, the government makes much of its intention to increase the “purchasing power” of employers. It also makes it abundantly clear that most of the growth in training will be funded by those same employers: they may be able to get more of what they want, but they will have to pay for it. This may not be a problem for the top end of the market (whether that be the major multi-national business or the global law firm), who are already using opportunities created by the liberalisation of the education market to build increasingly tailored academic and vocational provision. But the bespoke approach will not work for much of the market, whether in law or anything else. In this context the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are likely to drive much of the agenda. Essentially employer-led organisations, they act as brokers between employers and training providers, and have been empowered to create and control the National Occupational Standards which contain the knowledge and skills outcomes prescribed, at various levels of achievement, for a growing range of occupations. They have money and market information, can claim to speak on behalf of the world of work, and, while they cannot directly impinge on the autonomy of universities to develop and validate their own awards, they do have the power to ‘endorse’ higher education programmes which satisfy their professional and occupational standards.
However, despite some obvious advantages, the sectoral approach adopted by the SSC model overall could also prove to be a rather blunt instrument. Concerns, for example, have been expressed in some areas (not the “justice sector” so far as I am aware) that the SSCs may be open to capture by particular sub-sectors or certain key employers. This may well put to the test the assumption that what is in the (perceived) interests of employers will be in the interests of the economy as a whole. Furthermore, for both the SSCs and educational providers, matching needs and provision, particularly in respect of less obviously vocational courses and disciplines is also likely to be difficult. For example, Skills for Justice is the SSC for the “justice sector”, and yet much of its work, particularly in respect of the criminal justice system is not particularly served by the law schools. Similarly, for the law schools, the fact that a potentially significant number of their graduates will not work in the “justice sector” begs the question as to which other SSCs they should also be talking to. At the least it seems that there are genuine coordination and information gaps to be addressed.
This in fact is but one branch of a much bigger issue implicitly posed by World Class Skills: the extent to which the employment agenda represents a potentially fundamental structural challenge to traditional university disciplines and the construction of higher education as a distinct and distinctive branch of learning.
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Skills, skills, skills!
On 18 July the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) published its response to the Leitch Review. In World Class Skills (Cm 7181), it undertakes to deliver an extensive programme of innovations designed to bring the UK into the ‘premier league’ of skilled workforces by 2020.
‘Skills’, not ‘education’, is thus, once again, the word of the moment. Doubtless conspiracy theorists will have seen it coming: the fact that education is now the responsibility of two government departments, neither of which carries ‘education’ in its title was surely an omen of something.
Of course, in a national context where around five million adults still lack functional literacy, a bit of skills focus may not be a bad thing at all. And I for one am quite happy to agree that reading, writing and ‘rithmatic need to be a continuing priority. But what about my patch, higher education? In the course of this and the next couple of blogs I'll try to offer a basic summary and some reflections on what World Class Skills might have in store for HE. Today I'll start with the basics.
‘Skills’, not ‘education’, is thus, once again, the word of the moment. Doubtless conspiracy theorists will have seen it coming: the fact that education is now the responsibility of two government departments, neither of which carries ‘education’ in its title was surely an omen of something.
Of course, in a national context where around five million adults still lack functional literacy, a bit of skills focus may not be a bad thing at all. And I for one am quite happy to agree that reading, writing and ‘rithmatic need to be a continuing priority. But what about my patch, higher education? In the course of this and the next couple of blogs I'll try to offer a basic summary and some reflections on what World Class Skills might have in store for HE. Today I'll start with the basics.
World Class Skills I suggest should be read and taken seriously by anyone interested in or concerned by UK education policy. It represents the latest confluence of various streams of regional, national and international HE policy which together stress the importance of moving to a model which provides (in theory) a more integrated, more flexible, and demand- (for which read employer-) led approach to secondary, tertiary and higher education. The amount of activity in this area has already been significant. In case you've been sojourning on Mars or otherwise taking a break from all this policy stuff, some key examples are:
- the development of 14-19 diplomas, intended to bridge the gap between existing academic and vocational qualifications;
- the new national Qualifications and Credit Framework which intends, building on demand- and market-led principles, to further rationalise and standardise delivery of post-secondary and adult education (separate frameworks for Wales and Scotland are in place);
- the work of the Burgess Group on a common credit framework for HE, one aim of which is to facilitate progression from FE to HE;
- the proposal, now encapsulated in the Further Education Bill, that appropriate colleges will be given the power to award their own foundation degrees;
- recognition, following Leitch, that employer engagement is a strategic priority for HEFCE in 2006-11 (there is already a significant range of funding council activity in this area in respect of the ‘Higher Level Skills’ pathfinder projects, e-skills and workforce development projects, as well as the creation of an Action Group on employer engagement);
- agreement at the London Ministerial Summit in May 2007 that employability and employer engagement were among the ‘Bologna’ priorities for the European Higher Education Area in the lead-up to the next summit in 2009.
As widely anticipated the DIUS proposals adopt pretty much all of the key recommendations in Lord Leitch’s report. Among the important aspirations and objectives for higher education identified are:
- a target of 36% of adults educated to level four (foundation degree) and above by 2014
- HEFCE to develop a new funding model that is “co-financed with employers, achieves sustained growth in employer-based student places and introduces the principle of employer demand-led funding.”
- Five thousand additional university places announced for 2008-09 to be jointly-funded by HEFCE and industry, with a strong focus on collaborative, work-based programmes. Further growth of at least 5,000 additional entrants in each year up to 2010-11 is expected.
- A new Commission for Employment and Skills to be created and Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) to be re-licensed and given an enhanced role in co-ordinating demand-led vocational education. SSCs and higher education institutions to be encouraged to extend their collaborative work.
- A key role is also identified for DIUS itself, working with the Higher Education Regulation Review Group and the Gateways to Professions Collaborative Forum, in brokering partnerships between the professional bodies, SSCs and higher education institutions.
OK that's enough for now. I'm going to lie down in a darkened room and try and figure out what this might actually mean in policy and practice terms....
Friday, 13 July 2007
Pardon?
OK so its not got anything to do with legal education as such but I couldn't resist. The Lawyer (again) had a wonderful piece today on the fact that the Institute of Barristers' Clerks has prepared a glossary of clerking slang. As its not 1st April I am assuming it is the real thing! For those of you who thought most legal language was a bit obscure, trust me, this is in a league of its own.
If you wander across to my old friend John Flood's blawg you will find various snippets about this extraordinarily idiosyncratic part of the English legal system, as John pretty much cut his teeth as a researcher on the subject of barristers clerks rather longer ago than he might care to admit. I do know we've shared one or two "frighteners" over the years. but I wonder if he knows what a "Dionne Warwick" is? Watch this space.... My personal favourite is the definition of a "fox hole": "area beneath desk where telephone calls can take place peacefully". Now that really is what I call a bad day at the office.
If you wander across to my old friend John Flood's blawg you will find various snippets about this extraordinarily idiosyncratic part of the English legal system, as John pretty much cut his teeth as a researcher on the subject of barristers clerks rather longer ago than he might care to admit. I do know we've shared one or two "frighteners" over the years. but I wonder if he knows what a "Dionne Warwick" is? Watch this space.... My personal favourite is the definition of a "fox hole": "area beneath desk where telephone calls can take place peacefully". Now that really is what I call a bad day at the office.
Sunday, 8 July 2007
On my bike (or not)...
The observant amongst you may have noticed (if you haven't already heard more directly) that I'm doing a charity cycle ride in Kenya in November. The last two weeks of almost incessant rain haven't done much for the training regime, so the re-appearance of the sun this weekend provided an opportunity to hit the road again, so we (self and intrepid partner) set off yesterday morning to one of our favourite training areas, Draycote Water, near Dunchurch. It's a reservoir with a five mile tarmac perimeter 'road' (mostly about the width of a single track), so its generally a good place to train without getting mown down by traffic. Generally.
Anyhow, yesterday was not that great; there was a strong head/side wind most of the way round and after 10 miles and forty minutes, though we could have done more, we'd actually had enough, so we gave it up on the basis we would do a longer ride today. Arriving at Draycote (again) at about 9.30 this morning, we found there were quite a lot of walkers and cyclists already milling around - a bit of a shock, its usually pretty quiet when we go, but I guess the good weather had a lot to do with it. But the conditions were better, so off we set, occasionally weaving through groups of walkers and families on bikes who happily milled across the full width of the path. About four and a half miles round, I found myself on one of the narrow access roads facing an approaching small car and elderly driver. I mentally paused for a bit, thinking am I going to get through or should I stop? But I figured there was room if the car pulled over a bit and I stuck fairly close to the kerb. Well I certainly got close to the kerb. The car did not pull over, the wrong instinct kicked in and, instead of breaking whilst unclipping my left foot from the pedal to come to a safe halt, I caught the kerbstone and flew off the bike onto the grass (fortunately) verge! As I picked myself up I looked back to see the driver pause long enough to see that I was on my feet before moving off again - nearly mowing down a couple of walkers in the process! Thanks, mate.
So, what's this got to do with education? Probably not a lot really, I just wanted to tell you what a crappy day I've had! But that's not really true either. Getting back on a bike after thirty odd years has been a slightly humbling LEARNING experience. Its kind of funny being a bit of a novice at something again (I think I've reached a stage in life where I usually avoid things I know I'm not going to be much good at!) True, you never quite forget how to ride a bike, but anything beyond the basics still requires quite a (re-)learning curve - in some ways almost more so because you still have the sense of what you could do then. So its actually a bit of a shock to discover what you can't do now (yet) - like getting your water bottle on the move without falling off or veering into the nearest hedge/car/other cyclist. Without getting too Rumsfeldian about it, there's definitely a process of discovering what you don't know you don't know about your own abilities - both positive and negative! And that's surely what a lot of learning has to be about. I think I'm going to be nicer to my first years come September; after all there's an awful lot they don't know they don't know - yet.
Anyhow, yesterday was not that great; there was a strong head/side wind most of the way round and after 10 miles and forty minutes, though we could have done more, we'd actually had enough, so we gave it up on the basis we would do a longer ride today. Arriving at Draycote (again) at about 9.30 this morning, we found there were quite a lot of walkers and cyclists already milling around - a bit of a shock, its usually pretty quiet when we go, but I guess the good weather had a lot to do with it. But the conditions were better, so off we set, occasionally weaving through groups of walkers and families on bikes who happily milled across the full width of the path. About four and a half miles round, I found myself on one of the narrow access roads facing an approaching small car and elderly driver. I mentally paused for a bit, thinking am I going to get through or should I stop? But I figured there was room if the car pulled over a bit and I stuck fairly close to the kerb. Well I certainly got close to the kerb. The car did not pull over, the wrong instinct kicked in and, instead of breaking whilst unclipping my left foot from the pedal to come to a safe halt, I caught the kerbstone and flew off the bike onto the grass (fortunately) verge! As I picked myself up I looked back to see the driver pause long enough to see that I was on my feet before moving off again - nearly mowing down a couple of walkers in the process! Thanks, mate.
So, what's this got to do with education? Probably not a lot really, I just wanted to tell you what a crappy day I've had! But that's not really true either. Getting back on a bike after thirty odd years has been a slightly humbling LEARNING experience. Its kind of funny being a bit of a novice at something again (I think I've reached a stage in life where I usually avoid things I know I'm not going to be much good at!) True, you never quite forget how to ride a bike, but anything beyond the basics still requires quite a (re-)learning curve - in some ways almost more so because you still have the sense of what you could do then. So its actually a bit of a shock to discover what you can't do now (yet) - like getting your water bottle on the move without falling off or veering into the nearest hedge/car/other cyclist. Without getting too Rumsfeldian about it, there's definitely a process of discovering what you don't know you don't know about your own abilities - both positive and negative! And that's surely what a lot of learning has to be about. I think I'm going to be nicer to my first years come September; after all there's an awful lot they don't know they don't know - yet.
Wednesday, 4 July 2007
All tomorrow's parties - postscript
By coincidence, the Lawyer has just reported in its latest survey of the profession that 24% of lawyers would like a change of career. More than 50% of Associates in what the article described as "lower mid-market" firms (with a turnover between £25M and £50M) wanted to leave the profession. The survey indicates also the extent to which high salaries act as 'golden handcufffs' - the liklihood of a cut in pay is cited by 70% of those who want to leave legal practice as the major barrier to doing so.
Is this a reliable finding? Hard to say from where I'm sitting, but its not obviously hugely flawed. The survey was conducted by YouGov for the Lawyer. It obtained over 2,500 responses. This is certainly enough to form the basis of a good representative sample, though this article says nothing more about the demographics. The sample would have been self-selecting, so some skewing can't be ruled out, and we don't know if any tests of statistical significance were used to check the data. (In social science research these are useful because they indicate the reliability of data by computing the probability that a particular finding was not the product of chance).
Turned around, of course, this finding also suggests that around 75% of lawyers overall don't want to leave the law. Does that still sound like a major cause for concern? (By contrast a poll of 1000 people for the Work Foundation last year came up with 78% claiming they were "very" or "quite satisfied" with their jobs, with about 5% saying they were very dissatisfied with work.) It would be interesting to know how that compares with other professions like medicine and accountancy. That said, whatever way you cut it, the sectoral data does suggest that some parts of the profession are facing potentially significant retention problems.
By the way, nine per cent of those who wanted out would like to teach.
Is this a reliable finding? Hard to say from where I'm sitting, but its not obviously hugely flawed. The survey was conducted by YouGov for the Lawyer. It obtained over 2,500 responses. This is certainly enough to form the basis of a good representative sample, though this article says nothing more about the demographics. The sample would have been self-selecting, so some skewing can't be ruled out, and we don't know if any tests of statistical significance were used to check the data. (In social science research these are useful because they indicate the reliability of data by computing the probability that a particular finding was not the product of chance).
Turned around, of course, this finding also suggests that around 75% of lawyers overall don't want to leave the law. Does that still sound like a major cause for concern? (By contrast a poll of 1000 people for the Work Foundation last year came up with 78% claiming they were "very" or "quite satisfied" with their jobs, with about 5% saying they were very dissatisfied with work.) It would be interesting to know how that compares with other professions like medicine and accountancy. That said, whatever way you cut it, the sectoral data does suggest that some parts of the profession are facing potentially significant retention problems.
By the way, nine per cent of those who wanted out would like to teach.
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