The University of Leicester turns its back on adult education

I am proud to be a graduate of the University of Leicester (a part-time Masters in Victorian Studies many years ago, since you ask), but I think it has made a profoundly wrong move.

As the Leicester Mercury reported a few days ago:

Education bosses at the University of Leicester are proposing to close the Vaughan Centre for Lifelong Learning. 

It's believed the closure will result in the loss of several teaching and administration jobs.

Around 30 staff were issued with redundancy notices on Monday and a 90 day consultation period is now underway. Some 348 students currently study there.

There is a perception that universities are now keener on making money than discharging wider social responsibilities.

The University of Leicester spokesman quoted by the Mercury does nothing to dispel this. He said

the proposal came at a time when it was "committed to focusing on its world-class strengths, and to being financially sustainable." He added that the courses offered by the Vaughan Centre had operated at a loss for many years.

Admittedly, part-time degrees now seem hugely expensive next to MOOCs (massive online open courses) and the like, but there is still a social need for them.

Adult education is a great engine of social mobility and personal liberation. As Professor Sue Wheeler told the Mercury:

"The higher education and degree courses provided give those people who might not have succeeded at education the first time around, the chance to gain qualifications. They can study part-time for a fraction of the cost. It provides a real community service and that's what Vaughan College was originally set up to do back in 1862 when it first opened."

Another lecturer, who (tellingly) didn't wish to be named, told the paper she had seen first hand the: "wonderful ways in which it enriched the lives of local people through access to Higher Education".

Offering adult education to the local community should be a condition of an institution being allowed to confer degrees, At present they are too focused on serving dull middle-class children, not just from Britain, but from around the world.

However much money we pour into schools, there are those who will be too poor, too unhappy or too antagonistic to benefit from it. We need to make it possible for such people to come to further and higher education later in life.

There is a petition to Save the Vaughan Centre for Lifelong Learning. I have signed it and hope you will too.

Vaughan College was originally housed in a building on Holy Bones. Until 2013 it was housed in the building on the right of the photograph above. (The one directly opposite, seen across the Roman remains, is the Jewry Wall Museum.)

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Francis Pryor takes the long view on Britain and Europe: "Despite what some would have us believe, Brexit wouldn’t mark a return to a glorious past, so much as a dismal future, where our principal legacy would be the destruction of a truly innovative system of multi-national government."

"The British state, under Margaret Thatcher, committed one of its most violent acts against its own citizens, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when a group of travellers — men, women and children — who were driving to Stonehenge from Savernake Forest to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival were set upon by tooled-up police from six counties, and the Ministry of Defence." Thirty-one years on, Andy Worthington asks where the spirit of dissent is in Britain today.

Matthew Jenkin on how getting children out of doors can pay dividends in academic performance and also improves their concentration and confidence.

Ely Place is a street in central London that used to be part of Cambridgeshire, explains Flickering Lamps.

Caroline's Miscellany explores abandoned passages at Euston station that are a perfect time capsule from 1962.

J.K. Rowling just can't let Harry Potter go, says Sarah Lyall.

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The missing apostrophes of Leicester

On the way to Filbert Street I photographed some lovely vintage signs.

One the thing they have in common is that none bothers with an apostrophe. Today there would be complaints that it was missing.

Since you ask, the boys had to make do with this.

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Why #PanamaLeaks may damage David Cameron and the Tories

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"I thought I was running for the leadership of the Conservative party, not some demented Marxist sect," fumed Douglas Hurd in 1990.

That was when he found his Etonian background being held against him in the Conservative leadership election that followed the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher.

Sure enough, he lost out to the Brixton boy John Major.

Fast forward to 2008 when, in admonishing Nick Clegg for an insensitive remark on pensions, I wrote:

Just because Tony Blair and David Cameron have made it look easy to be a public school type in modern Britain and not rub people up the wrong way does not mean that it is easy. Be yourself, Nick, but do be aware of the effect your attitude can have on other people.

Maybe things were changing by then, because in 2010 I observed:

Being "posh" was, until a year or two ago, just about the worst sin imaginable in British society. In as far as "posh" was used as a synonym for "educated" this was a pernicious development. 

It represented a foolish attempt to keep Labour's working-class roots, despite that fact that many of the people using this style of arguing were pretty posh themselves.

All this is a prologue to saying you should read John Rentoul on the Independent site:

The biggest setback of their first government, the cut in the top rate of income tax, damaged them because it trashed the rhetoric of being “all in it together” and reinforced the image of the Conservatives as the party of the rich. At the time, I wrote that, if Cameron lost the 2015 election, the 2012 Budget would have been when it happened. 

That is what makes Cameron’s victory last year all the more remarkable: that he won the grudging votes of people on low incomes who thought he had no idea what their lives were like and yet who still trusted him more than the leader of the people’s party. It is a tribute to Cameron’s skill that he could win with the handbrake of poshness on.

I have seen nothing that suggests anything illegal on the part of the Cameron family. And I suspect that the sort of people who might conceivably vote Conservative at the next election will tend to approve of doing all you can to pass your wealth on to your children.

But the Panama leaks affair may damage the Cameron and the Conservatives in two ways.

First, it reminds us just how damned rich he is. The WebCameron was and his talk of his "Dad" is an attempt to make him sound just like one more father of a middle-class family. The truth is different.

Second, it is a reminder that the idea you will be secure if you "work hard and do the right thing"is not true. You need to come from a family where two or three generations have worked hard and done the right thing - and enjoyed reasonable luck - to be secure. The Conservatives' emphasis on family breakdown in their definition of poverty recognised this truth.

I hope Cameron will ride out this storm: he represents our best chance of winning the referendum campaign and keeping Britain in the European Union.

But I suspect the Conservatives would be wise to choose a successor to him who has not been to Eton.

However, that decision is in the hands of Conservative members. They are not wise and they love Boris Johnson.

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Nat Jester believes we need to talk about men.

"If we’re not careful, we will soon find ourselves operating trials in Kafka-esque fashion ... where a Defendant will be arrested on charges of which he is unaware, and plunged into a court system where everything is secret, from the charges to the rules of the court, and the guilt of the Defendant is assumed." CrimBarrister stands up for old-fashioned values in the law.

Clinical psychologist Jay Watts on the Archers, domestic abuse and gaslighting.

Chris Havergal reports on a study exploring the role of the Jack Wills brand in student life: "In choosing Jack Wills as their uniform, students from less privileged backgrounds were taking their lead from role models around them, Dr Smith argued, and his research details the role that the company has played in this process."

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The Old School, Billesdon

George Villiers, later the Duke of Buckingham and a favourite of James I, was educated in Billesdon between 1602 and 1605. (He was born in 1592.)

Most authorities dismiss the tradition that George Fox, a found of the Quakers, was educated there some years later. (He was born in 1624.)

The Old School in the village does not date back quite that far. It was put up by William Sharpe of Rolleston in 1650.

Nineteenth-century antiquarians feared its loss, but - no doubt much restored over the centuries - it still stands today.

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Mark Pack blogs on the polling industry's inquiry into what went wrong with the polls conducted during the 2015 British general election campaign.

"Gould had long carved out an alternative viewpoint to that of Kinnock and Smith, putting forward arguments that were to look much wiser in retrospect than many were prepared to credit at the time." Alwyn Turner on Bryan Gould, who contested the Labour leadership with  John Smith in 1992.

Niall Meehan on Morris Fraser, child abuse, corruption and collusion in Britain and Northern Ireland.

Toni Airaksinen says you shouldn't report your professors' microaggressions.

The Hwicce of Rutland? Caitlin Green speculates on a possible Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

"Every paradise is lost. That’s kind of the point. Loss is the diagnostic feature of every paradise ever lived or imagined. But for five miraculous years and 120,000 miraculous words Gerald Durrell sustained a vision of paradise with joy in every day and every page." Simon Barnes praises My Family and Other Animals.

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Satnav and the death of our navigation skills

England is a palimpsest of Medieval churches, abandoned mineral railways, ruinous Gothic institutions and follies built by mad aristocrats. But you won’t find them on your satnav.

So I wrote for the New Statesman website in the days when I wrote for the New Statesman website.

Today comes news (via the Telegraph) that a paper in Nature has backed up my anti-satnav prejudice:

Satellite communication consultant Roger McKinlay, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, believes the world is losing its way due to over-reliance on navigation aids. 

Writing in the journal Nature, he argues navigation and map reading should be on the school curriculum. 

Describing navigation as a "use-it-or-lose-it" skill, he warned: "If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation skills will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices."

The school curriculum? I won a Map Reader badge in the Cubs and I think it meant more to me than my degrees did later in life. It was a hint that I might one day succeed in being the sort of outdoors child that I felt I ought to be but feared I never would.

Long before satnav came along, I was surprised by how little idea even educated people had of the geography of their own country.

Organise a work meeting anywhere but central London and you would be deluged with requests for directions. Can't you just look at a road atlas?

And this attitude persists in quiz programmes where questions about British geography or treated as something no one can be expected to know.

What can people who know so little about the subject make of the news?

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Tesco's marketing strategy involves making us feel warm towards farms that do not exist, explains Tom Levitt.

Charlotte Gill is not impressed by a Leeds primary school's decision to ban the game of tag: " I find all of this safeguarding a great shame. It shows how childhood, which should be a free and exploratory time, is now being over-policed."

JohnBoy pays tribute to Barry Hines. Among the facts he is uncovers is that Hines once played in a Loughborough Colleges team alongside Dario Gradi and Bob Wilson.

"Though the origin of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies can be traced back to ancient times, the Victorians did not begin to celebrate Easter in the way that we know now until the late 19th century. It was then that Easter bunnies became fashionable." Some fascinating social history from Mimi Matthews.

Eric Grunhauser on the stave churches of Norway, which combine Christian architecture with Nordic designs and the motifs of a Viking great hall.

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The impossibility of holding academies to account

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David Higgerson writes on his blog about the Liverpool Echo's attempts to investigate the actions of a local academy that has announced it will no longer offer A levels:

The school, Halewood Academy, appears to consider itself above scrutiny and refused to talk to the Echo, instead referring to a statement online. The local council, Knowsley, shrugged its shoulders as well it might – it has no say on what goes on at Halewood, despite the fact its borough will have no A-level provision. 

Tom was pointed towards regional schools commissioners who are apparently responsible for making decisions about academies in their areas. There is next to no information on this role, and what there is is tucked away on the utterly useless .gov.uk website. The fact there are precisely zero FOI releases from the regional schools commissioners tells you how accountable they are. There’s no information on the decisions they make either. 

North West commissioner Vicky Beer seemed surprised to be asked what her role was by Tom, and referred him to central government, as it was their decision. Which doesn’t sound very devolved, does it? 

The final irony – if irony is the right word – is contained in a screen grab in Tom’s report – a petition against the A-level closure plans filed on the government’s petition website was rejected because "the government and parliament aren’t responsible."

Higgerson says this glimpse into the future of education will horrify any journalists, but it should horrify every parent and citizen too.

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Schools are being nationalised so they can be privatised

As Stephen Tall rightly says, the announcement in the Budget that all schools will be obliged to become academies amounts to the nationalisation of education.

And as John Elledge shows, that nationalisation includes the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation.

What is going on?

I think I put my finger on it back in 2007 when I reviewed Reinventing the State - the social liberal riposte to the Orange Book - for the Guardian.

I suggested that Liberal Democrat activists would:

appreciate the way Huhne's vision of a rich diversity of local provision contrasts with the Tory idea of popular schools taking over the rest: "It's been a good half for the school: the match with Harrow was won, and St Custard's was purchased through a leveraged buy out."

That sounds like me attributing my own eccentric enthusiasms to the party as a whole, and I have forgotten what became of the idea of popular schools taking over the rest.

But it was clear back in 2007 that the Conservatives believes schools should be run as much like private companies as possible.

Hence the recent emphasis on chains of academies. Hence the Budget's removal of parent governors as part of its nationalisation of schools.

What I fear will come next is the gradual privatisation of what the Treasury has nationalised.

As John Elledge says,

Which schools have held out against academisation? They're disproportionately small (larger ones are more likely to be able to afford in house IT teams and so forth). They're disproportionately likely to be primaries (secondaries are larger). And they're disproportionately likely to be rated outstanding (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). 

And what type of schools are disproportionately likely to be small but outstanding primaries? Faith schools.

Taking on the churches my look a bridge to far even for George Osborne, but it is easy to imagine a campaign against small schools.

We will be told that they cannot offer the facilities and breadth of curriculum that our children deserve. Expect to hear the 'global race' invoked.

And what will become of these closed small schools? Just think of the prime building land they occupy in the centre of sought-after villages.

The forced application of a business ethos to education will result in narrowed educational provision and a diminished life in many communities, even if the schools stay in the public sector.

But is hard to resist the prediction that, at some point in the process, the Treasury will take the opportunity of cashing in and selling off schools to the private sector.

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George Osborne's budget announced the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation, as John Elledge demonstrates.

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Michael Gerson says the Republicans are staining themselves by sticking with Donald Trump. 

Exposure to nature makes people happy and could cut mental health inequalities between the rich and poor, argues Natasha Gilbert.

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The first time I saw George Osborne

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In the days when I wrote a weekly column for Liberal Democrat News - in the days when there was a Liberal Democrat News - I had a Press Gallery pass at the Palace of Westminster.

Everyone said the place resembled nothing so much as a public school. Not having attended such an establishment myself, I was not really qualified to judge.

But the it certainly resembled what I imagined a public school to be like, albeit largely without the roasting over fires or flagellation.

One day in 2001 I saw an improbably  youthful figure on the opposition front bench. He really did look like a cheeky fourth-former sitting in the prefects' seats. I expected him to be booted out as soon as they turned up.

I asked a Press Gallery attendant (they know everyone by sight) who he was.

"That's George Osborne,"he explained.

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The sugar tax and the infantilisation of coffee

"Osborne’s new sugar tax is a tax on the poor" announces an article in the Spectator - a magazine not hitherto noted for its concern for the poor.

In the short term it may operate like that, but the long-term effect of the tax is likely to be that manufacturers reformulate their products to avoid having to charge the tax.

Good news for the poor, though not for the school sports schemes that will benefit from the money it raises.

Children like sweet things and there are good evolutionary reasons why this should be so. Sweet things tend to be safe to eat. If children loved bitter green things the race would never have survived.

But in the last few years something terrible has happened to coffee. Queue in one of the chains today and the odds are you will find yourself queuing behind an adult buying a drink that looks like an ice cream sundae. It may well contain a similar amount of sugar.

We are, of course, free to eat as much sugar as we like, but there is a political dimension to this remaking of public taste.

Maybe it is the coffee shops that should be reformulating their products to avoid a sugar tax?

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Banning tackling in school rugby

I want to play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the stream
Cut myself and see my blood
I want to come home all covered in mud

The Who, I'm a Boy


Schoolboy rugby appeals to this blog's prejudices, but the open letter from doctors and other health experts should not be dismissed:

The majority of all injuries occur during contact or collision, such as the tackle and the scrum. 

These injuries which include fractures, ligamentous tears, dislocated shoulders, spinal injuries and head injuries can have short-term, life-long, and life-ending consequences for children."

My impression is that rugby clubs are good at introducing children to the game gradually, whereas one often sees a pack of small boys chasing the ball across a muddy soccer field that is far to big for them.

But an article by Anna Maxted in yesterday's telegraph skilfully brought out the dilemma for rugby parents:

My 13-year-old staggers home pink-cheeked and mud-splattered after rugby practice. I order him up for a bath, and stuff his sodden kit into the wash. 

This ritual gives me a similar feeling to singing 'Lavender’s Blue' to him as a baby. I’m part of a great tradition, upholding the basic tenets of parental duty and care, giving him a textbook happy, healthy childhood. 

But later that night he complains he can’t sleep: he hurt his neck during the game.

At the heart of this debate, I suspect, lies just not a dilemma for parents but one for rugby union itself. What is the game meant to be like?

Robert Kitson wrote a very good article on the subject earlier this year:

What sort of attacking spectacle are we encouraging if up-and-coming young fly-halves and centres keep getting man and ball simultaneously and barely have time to catch the ball, never mind pass or run? When youth teams are kicking penalties as a first resort rather than being encouraged to move the ball?

Boxing used to be taught in state schools, but disappeared in the 1960s after a campaign led by Dr Edith Summerskill.

If rugby union as we know it today does not want to go the same way, it needs to decide what kind of game it aspires to be.

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Vince Cable looks back on the tuition fees debacle

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Vince Cable spoke to Times Higher Education this week after taking up an honorary professorship at the University of Nottingham.

Asked about the Coalition decision to increase tuition fees, he said:

"It was politically very traumatic, but it was actually good policy. One of my colleagues, I think, came up with the phrase that we got 8 out of 10 for the policy but 2 out of 10 for the politics.

"The problem was that we made this pledge about not increasing student tuition fees – it was disastrous, it was not deliverable. ... 

"We got hammered for it – loss of trust, all those things. But it wasn’t deliverable in the financial climate of the coalition. 

"My job was to try to make the best of a bad job and produce a system which was genuinely progressive. It is. Nobody pays fees; they pay a form of graduate tax when they leave, depending on their income. 

"The universities as a consequence are now quite well funded, unlike most other bits of what you could broadly call the public sector."

You can see the heart of the Liberal Democrats' problem in the photo above - and I don't mean Nick Clegg.

We pledged to vote against any increase in tuition fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative,

As was pointed out (I think by Polly McKenzie) in the debate I posted the other day, this took it for granted that we would not be in government after the 2010 general election.

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The Boxmoor Playhouse and letters about custard

I once wrote of Boxmoor County Primary School:

I was very happy at Boxmoor, though in one way adversity there helped make me a Liberal. The dinners were cooked elsewhere and brought to the school, and they were indescribably awful. (My mother let me come home for dinner after a while.) And if you didn't want custard with your pudding, you had to have a letter from home.

I now regard this as an early introduction to the absurdities of socialism.

That was the old Boxmoor County Primary in St John's Road, which was demolished long ago.

We had our dinners in the church hall next door. That building still stands, though it is now called The Boxmoor Playhouse. (There appears to be a new hall built recently next to the church.)

We also held fetes in the hall and I once gave a well-received Innkeeper in the school nativity play.

It's not quite the Saville Theatre, but I am glad to see that somewhere I trod the boards is still thriving.

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