Education news, comment and analysis | theguardian.com

The self-funding higher education myth has been busted | @guardianletters

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 21:01:00 GMT

Five months after the last election, the coalition government announced its plans to transform higher education which, as Peter Scott points out (Can university courses in celebrity be far off?, 7 January), have corrupted the behaviour of universities. Just like during the build-up to the last election, higher education has been kicked into the long grass by all three main parties. But this time around there is a pressing need for a public debate, which acknowledges the failings of this government's reforms and discusses ways to address them.

The Lib Dems may be nervous discussing anything to do with higher education ever again, particularly close to an election, and Labour's brief forays into higher education have been exposed as policy-lite. However, if neither party is prepared to be brave then the Tories will get away with some of the most dangerous changes to our higher education system going unchallenged. As Scott points out, the self-funding higher-education myth has been busted: taxpayers will carry on shouldering a huge chunk of the cost of higher education, as 40% of students will never pay their loans back. The government's recent decision to offer unlimited public subsidies to private providers, who do not face the same regulatory checks and balances as public institutions, is explosive.

In a stroke, ministers have effectively rigged their quasi-market in favour of those providers with access to the capital markets to fund aggressive expansion. This will place huge pressure on university and college managements to ape private-sector modes of delivery and company forms just to stay alive. The brutal fact is that the closer colleges and universities move to a for-profit model of service delivery, or the more dependent they become on private revenue streams, the greater will be the pressures on quality. Popularity and economy of scale will become the new key criteria for courses to meet. The system is broken and it needs fixing before the next election, not after. Robust regulation of private providers, putting them on a more equal footing with their public counterparts, needs to shoot up the political agenda, before Peter Scott's feared degrees in celebrity become commonplace.
Sally Hunt
General secretary, University and College Union

First world war: an imperial bloodbath that's a warning, not a noble cause | Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 21:01:00 GMT

Tory claims that 1914 was a fight for freedom are absurd – but then history wars are about the future as much as the past

They were never going to be able to contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.

Hostility to the war, the education secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.

Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law" and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at "anti-militarists".

This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.

It's not just that most men and all women in Britain were still denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.

Every single one of the main warring states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials enforced the export of food in British-ruled India, slaughtered resisters in their tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.

Britain was supposed to have gone to war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is now Namibia in the same period.

As to international law, Britain's disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a few years before. London refused to reply. The answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes "slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".

In reality, it wasn't just the seed of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights, laying the ground for future disasters in the process.

Gove and his fellow war apologists worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war itself that was most depraved.

Fortunately, the revisionists lost the argument among the public long ago – just as Gove has largely lost his battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the future as much as the past – and so long as imperial conflict is discredited, future foreign military interventions and occupations will be difficult to sell.

For the rest of us, this year's anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster. It also contains a warning about the threat from the rise and fall of great powers. China is no imperial Germany, but the US – allied with Japan – is a declining global power in a region in which it is tightening its military grip. It's not 1914, but the dangers are clear.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

Seumas Milne

Dogs defecate in accordance with earth's magnetic field, research finds

Mona Chalabi — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 20:29:07 GMT

A scientific study has revealed that dogs adapt their excremental habits to be aligned with the earth’s axis

Mona Chalabi

Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness? | Emma G Keller

Emma G Keller — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 18:40:03 GMT

Lisa Adams is dying of breast cancer. She has tweeted over 100,000 times about her journey. Is this educational or too much?

Lisa Bonchek Adams is dying. She has Stage IV breast cancer and now it's metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver and lungs. She's in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud. On her blog and, especially, on Twitter.

She has tweeted over 100,000 times about her health. Lately, she tweets dozens of times an hour. Her Twitter followers are a mixed bag. Some are also battling cancer or work in the medical field, others seem to follow Adams' life story like a Reality TV show. Here's a taste of what it's like:

Pain today is worst in days. Cannot get on top of it. I have 1)constant drip plus ability to do 2)on-demand drip, 3)emergency. All in use.
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

But it radiates out to side of back ("radicular pain") and has nerve component of pain. Mixes with the lung pain/same side
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

All morning docs and nurses go in and out so you may see answers to questions in spurts. I also sometimes nod off mid tweet...
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

She has been scrupulous about keeping track of her seven year decline. Her journey began with six month routine postpartum checkup after the birth of her third child. You can read all about the details of her disease and treatment on her blog right up until about this morning, which is when she posted her latest entry, only a few hours after the previous one.

She begins each day with the same tweet:

Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can't find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) December 27, 2013

Over the past few years she has tweeted more than 165,000 times (well over 200 tweets in the past 24 hours alone.) Her clear-eyed strategy of living with cancer for as long as she can has caught the attention of many women with breast cancer, several writers and thousands of fans from everyday lives all over the world. I heard about her in the process of organizing a Guardian US Living Hour chat on DNA and cancer tumors in early November. Before you knew it, she was in the chat having her tumor genome and her cancer trial discussed in detail. I never met her, but I swapped tweets and emails with her, and kept track of her health.

Which is why a few weeks ago I noticed she was tweeting a lot more and from a situation she described as agonizing. The clinical drug trial she was on wasn't working. Her disease seemed to be rampaging through her body. She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?

Social media has definitely become a part of Adams' treatment (I wonder what her hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, thinks about that.) Tweeting makes her less lonely, it gives her a purpose, it distracts her from her pain, and the contact it brings clearly comforts her. Adams has managed to keep her dignity and her deft sense of humor intact as she has charted her decline.

As she tweeted a few hours ago:

"Why is she tweeting if it hurts so much?" I am sure people ask. It helps to distract me especially when I am alone (it's 6 AM here)
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

Adams is not alone in doing this. Journalist Xeni Jardin live tweeted her cancer diagnosis two years ago and the long treatment journey. Jardin told the Guardian last year that she wasn't sure if she would be quite as "sharey" if she could go back in time.

It's clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience. She doesn't deny that. She sees herself as an educator, giving voice to what so many people go through. And she is trying to create her own boundaries, flimsy as they might be. She'll tell you all about her pain, for example, but precious little about her children or husband and what they are going through. She describes a fantastic set up at Sloan-Kettering, where she can order what she wants to eat at any time of day or night and get as much pain medication as she needs from a dedicated and compassionate "team", but there is no mention of the cost. She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She's living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life.

In some ways she has invited us all in. She could argue that she is presenting a specific picture – the one she wants us to remember. "I do feel there will be lasting memories about me. That matters," she wrote to me in a direct message on Twitter.

The ethical questions abound. Make your own judgement.

Are those of us who've been drawn into her story going to remember a dying woman's courage, or are we hooked on a narrative where the stakes are the highest?

Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a "no visitors sign" on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?

We've put together a condensed timeline of Lisa Adams' tweets. You can also read her entire feed.

Emma G Keller

Are iPads and tablets bad for young children?

Paula Cocozza — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 17:59:54 GMT

Tablet ownership has more than doubled in the past few years – and as many parents are finding, children are highly proficient at using them. But are these devices harmful to their development? Or do they encourage 'technological intelligence'?

Four small preschool children are sitting in a semi-circle around their teacher, in a large, bright room in a Georgian house in Bath. The nursery belongs to the Snapdragons chain, one of the first in the UK to offer iPads to its children soon after the tablet was launched in April 2010. The shelves are full of books, but the children are not looking at books. They are listening to their teacher, Amy Porter, read aloud an interactive story from an iPad about Zub the monster. The children bend towards the screen as if its glow were pulling them closer. They creep forward, the circle tightens and the iPad disappears from view beneath four heads of supremely shiny hair. Their engagement is absolute. They are kneeling, bobbly undersides of socks poking out from beneath their bottoms, feet as neatly folded and intently composed as adult hands at rest in a lap.

Since their launch, tablets have become increasingly popular in preschool and early-years learning. And, in growing numbers, parents are buying them for home use. John Lewis predicted that it would sell one tablet every 15 seconds in the runup to Christmas. By December, the Tesco Hudl had become so hard to find it was selling on eBay for £180 instead of £119. Then Aldi joined the budget price war with the launch of a rival tablet for £80.

If you are an adult in possession of both a tablet and children, the children are likely to take possession of the tablet. According to Ofcom's latest report on the subject, household ownership of tablet computers has more than doubled from 20% in 2012 to 51%; where there are children in those households, they tend to be users too. When the Common Sense Report on media use by children aged up to eight in the US was published last autumn, it found that as many children (7%) have their own tablets as adults did two years ago (8%). Given the fivefold rise in adult ownership of tablets in the US since 2011, it seems reasonable to expect a similarly large leap in the number of children owning and using tablets by 2015.

But the strength of children's engagement with the devices can sometimes appear sinister, even cultish. There are countless YouTube videos of toddlers sliding thwarted fingers along the pages of magazines, trying to unlock them. One friend claims her child's first word was not "Mum" or "Dad" but "iPad". In March the tabloids reported that a four-year-old girl was receiving treatment as "Britain's youngest iPad addict". The clinical psychologist Linda Blair, who notes an increase in parents asking her about their children's tablet usage, says she would never hand her iPad to a toddler. But many parents happily do just that, while others are so concerned about the impact of technology on their children that they leave the room to use their mobile. Which is right? Do parents who choose to limit or deny access to tablets deprive their children of technological intelligence, or are they keeping them safe from an as yet unknown harm?

It was this question, or one close to it, that led Jordy Kaufman, director of the BabyLab at Swinburne University in Melbourne, to explore the impact of the use of technology on children aged two to five. BabyLab – note the hi-tech intercapital – is Australia's first infant cognitive neuroscience laboratory, and Kaufman got the idea for his research while observing his son, then five, playing with an iPod Touch.

"It was so intuitive to him, I thought: there is something important going on here and we need to learn what effects this is having on learning and attention, memory and social development." His team's research will be published later this year, but Kaufman strongly believes it is wrong to presume the same evils of tablets as televisions. "When scientists and paediatrician advocacy groups have talked about the danger of screen time for kids, they are lumping together all types of screen use. But most of the research is on TV. It seems misguided to assume that iPad apps are going to have the same effect. It all depends what you are using it for."

Kaufman regulates his son's time on the tablet, but disagrees with some of the criticisms of tablet use. "One is that they inhibit creativity, unlike blocks or Lego," says Kaufman. "But if you look through a Lego set, that tells you exactly how to make it. I think the criticism fits a lot of the physical toys more than a tablet." The next generation of the burgeoning app market for children may exceed the teaching potential of more traditional toys, Kaufman says, because they will be able to measure growth and give feedback to parents.

For very young children, there may be benefits in being able to handle the world of the tablet before they have the motor skills to handle their broader environment. Kaufman cites a study in which babies who were too young to pick up objects were given Velcro mittens so that objects would stick to them. "Being able to manipulate their environment gave these very young children a kickstart to learning. It is possible that tablet exposure might be doing something similar."

It is hard to find an expert who thinks that monitored and considered tablet use is harmful. Even Richard Graham, the doctor who was reported to have treated the four-year-old patient for iPad addiction, does not think tablets are bad for children. Graham, lead consultant for technology addiction at the Capio Nightingale hospital in London, says that that "case", so eagerly taken up by the tabloids, comprised a single informal phone call with a parent, in which he gave advice. There was no followup treatment. He doesn't believe that "addiction" is a suitable word to use of such young children.

The difficulty for parents is that the dangers of tablet use for children – if dangers exist – are as yet unidentified. Research is in its infancy. We know little about what is going on in a child's head while they are using a tablet. "Really not very much at all at this point," says Kaufman (his BabyLab plans to publish research in the spring). This is partly because it is hard to measure brain activity in someone who is moving, and partly because metal cannot be taken into an MRI scanner. Until we know more, parents can only follow their own parenting instincts. "There is a school of thought that tablet use is rewiring children's brains, so to speak, to make it difficult for them to attend to slower-paced information," says Kaufman. Then he adds: "But every thought we have rewires the brain in some way."

Tablets are designed to mirror the world we know. They appear to operate intuitively, mimetically, responding to, reflecting and re-presenting the user's touch. Might the way tablets translate our sense of touch create a particularly intense relationship between user and technology?

Rosie Flewitt, of the Institute of Education at the University of London, has published research on how iPads can support literacy in nursery, early primary and special education. She has just submitted a study, looking at tablet use in the light of recent research into mirror neurons, to an Australian journal for peer approval. As part of her research she observed tablet use in a special school, where the children were writing stories and producing book covers on an iPad. "It was a form of mastery for those individuals that hadn't previously been accessible to them without a lot of help from other people," she says. "But beyond that there was something about the activities that captivated all the children intensely and motivated them to carry on. We have been trying to puzzle out why. That sent us on a journey finding out about mirror neurons … It may be that what you see on the screen is partially powerful because of the way mirror neurons work."

Mirror neurons are themselves a young area of neurological research: neuroscientists do not yet agree on the nature, function or behaviour of mirror neurons in humans (see here for an overview). Essentially, mirror neurons mean that when humans see an action, they think for a fraction of a second that they are performing the action themselves. Separate messages from the skin then tell the brain whether this action or touch is really happening to them or not. Flewitt suggests this may help to explain the particularly deep kind of engagement that children appear to display with tablets – although we are a long way from understanding what the consequences may be for cognitive development. "For a nanosecond," she says, "you see something happening on the screen and your brain empathises with what you see. You think: 'Is it me? Is it someone else?' It's a virtual reality to which we relate deeply as human beings because that's the way we're wired up."

Back at Snapdragons in Bath, the children appear to have no difficulty in letting go of their iPads, fingers curious for other things. Moments after swiping the screen in order to administer Zub's medicine, William, four, is poking the same digit into the holes of a decorative radiator cover, and Joe, also four, is picking at the embossed logo on the tablet's rubber case.

Has a parent ever expressed concern about tablet use at the nursery? "Not a single one," says Lyndsey Tanner, the branch manager. She has the word "Believe" tattooed on her left forearm in large, elegant cursive. "I get really cross when people say that iPads are a sedentary activity. Actually, do you know what, come and spend a day with me and I'll prove to you how wrong you are. It is the future, and it enhances their learning massively. It has never replaced any more traditional teaching methods we use. It is just another toy in the box."

To prove her point, four little hands are sliding down the banister on their way to the garden. William, Joe, Isobel and Rosie put on their anoraks. They are teaming up, an iPad beween each pair, to fill in monster pictures with colours they will photograph in the garden. It is raining, the kind of drizzle that doesn't fall so much as hang in the air, and within minutes the surfaces of the tablets pucker and glisten with beads. Intricate hairnets of raindrops appear on the children's heads, as delicate as a sugarwork lattice. None of them mentions the wet. They are happy charging around the garden collecting colours, each one captured with the exaggerated clunky click of the camera. It is the perfect fusion of hi-tech and outdoors, digital and concrete. As if to prove Lyndsey's point, Joe approaches after about five minutes to ask if he can feed the chickens instead.

This seems idyllic tablet use. And yet some parents persist in worrying when they see their children displaying proficiency on an iPad. Kaufman believes the proficiency is part of the problem. "I say that not necessarily based on scientific evidence but on my own experience. As a parent, I sometimes find this unsettling. But I try to be mindful that it is an open question whether it is unsettling because there is something wrong with it, or because it wasn't a feature of my own childhood. Not that long ago parents were bothered by seeing their children reading all the time. They would complain that they would hurt their eyes. My grandma was always telling me that she was harassed for reading."

Flewitt thinks that to deny children access to tablets is to "risk having one section of society that is growing up with skills and one section that is growing up without. You might think that it doesn't matter because they will develop those skills later. But it's not the same. They won't identify with it. It's not part of who they are … Children have been born into a world where these things exist," she says, "like we were born into a world where there were televisions, cars on the streets and packaging on food."

So what should a parent who fears their child's proficiency on a tablet do? You can choose educational apps or propose other activities. You could consider setting a time limit on tablet use – although Flewitt disagrees with this approach, in case you interrupt your child at the point of the app's maximum benefit. She has another idea. "You need to acquire proficiency," she says. "You can acquire it from them. They can teach you."

I decide to take Flewitt's suggestion. I don't own a tablet. Whereas my children, aged six and three, appear to operate them intuitively, this has not been my own experience. When I tried one, it reoriented itself unexpectedly, as if I had turned a steering wheel I didn't know I was holding. It didn't seem to have browsers and I found it hard to open and close things.

I tell all this to my teacher, who turned six in September. "You can call me Moin," he says.

"I'm in your classroom then," I say.

We sit side by side on the sofa in the lounge of his home in Haringey, north London. First, Moin shows me the on/off button. Then he shows me all the squares that are his games and videos. He slides along the full row of squares and we choose Lego Ninjago. "Tap," says Moin, then shows me how to choose my weapons; he advises "silver sword" and "black scythe". We choose our powers. Moin taps the one that says "Pestilence" and in about four seconds our figure appears to have met a sticky end. Next Moin teaches me Stand O'Food. I fear caution limited my investment in sauces and garnishes because after about 10 minutes we have made only $5.24, but I am tapping quite quickly on burgers and buns (when my teacher gives me a turn) and appear to have some happy customers. Last of all, Moin shows me how to use the camera. On our eighth attempt we manage to get both our faces in the frame for a double-selfie, and the hour is up.

Who is best on the iPad in your house, I ask? "I am," says Moin, closing the red leather case and gathering his crayons. He is drawing people whose hair is too big for the world. His mother, Sule, nods. "I have to figure out the logic, but they seem programmed to understand it," she says. Perhaps the tablet was secretly designed with children in mind as much as – or, who knows, more than – adults. Perhaps that would explain why children enjoy, unintimidated, all its potential – and instinctively understand its limits too.

"So you can basically do whatever you want to do on an iPad?" I ask Moin.

"Ye-es," he says, hesitating.

Then he adds, in a consoling voice, as if it's best I learn the bad news now: "But you can't make it come alive. You can't make the iPad come alive."

Paula Cocozza

Why you shouldn't force a child to kiss a grandparent | Annalisa Barbieri

Annalisa Barbieri — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 17:11:45 GMT

Learning about consent is a vital part of sex education, and forcing a child into affection with a family member only confuses

This is what this article is NOT about: it's not about forbidding a willing child to sit on Granny's knee, or giving Grandpa a kiss, or cuddling Auntie Kate. It's not about being overly politically correct or trying to stop normal family life.

What it is about is this: children have powerful instincts, and sometimes adults override those instincts for social niceties that suit the adult, not the child. Sometimes children don't want to kiss a relative or family friend, for all sorts of reasons, and yet adults want them to because otherwise it doesn't look nice, or seem polite. In being coerced to kiss or cuddle someone they don't want to, that child is being told that how they feel, what they want to do with their own bodies, doesn't really matter. That an adult's wishes and sensibilities matter more.

And it's a more pernicious action than you might think. If a child gets used to being told their bodies aren't their own, or have no right of refusal, even in something as innocent as kissing grandma, when or if there is malintent from another adult they may not feel strong enough to say no. How are children magically supposed to learn that lesson? You cannot expect a child to acquiesce when you want them to, and then magically grow up to "know their own mind". Knowing their own mind starts with allowing them to speak it.

Lucy Emmerson, co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum, recently echoed this, to much criticism. In the January of The Sex Education Supplement: the Consent Issue, Emmerson said that she was disappointed to learn that three out of 10 young people did not learn about consent at school; not about the age of consent being 16 – most knew that – but "about real-life situations and what you would do if 'something happens'".

Emmerson believes that learning about consent starts from age zero. "Much is learned by young children from everyday experiences about whether or not their opinion is valued, and if they have any control over physical contact with others."

Further along in the online magazine, which is aimed at teachers and professionals, there are lesson ideas. In those for key stage 1, ideas are given to prompt thoughts in children "about consent and physical touch … for example whether or not we want to kiss a friend or relative or hug someone". And it gives tips on how to answer questions such as "when is it OK to let someone touch me?" and "how can I say no if I don't want someone to touch me?" For those interested, it recommends a book called A Kiss Like This by Laurence and Catherine Anholt.

How anyone can disagree with this puzzles me. The criticism levied at Emmerson is that it's "political correctness gone mad". How? How is teaching a child that they have control over their bodies and who they have close physical contact with, a bad thing? Another criticism is that it erodes family life. Isn't a child a member of that family? Its most vulnerable member? No one is stopping a child jumping on anyone's knee and giving them a kiss if they want to. But if they don't? Isn't that OK too?

"Children," says Peter Saunders, chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, "should never be forced to do anything which makes them uncomfortable around these issues. Children are instinctive and intuitive around people they are not comfortable with. And we need to respect that."

"There are certain things we make children do which is quite different," says Saunders. "We make them brush their teeth, for example. That is quite different to forcing them to kiss an uncle they don't want to. It's about boundaries. And this blurring of boundaries [by forcing them to kiss someone they don't want to] can indeed blur their understanding of what is right and wrong, about their body belonging to them."

Your child may not want to kiss Grandma/pa for no other reason than they don't feel like it that day. But one day, they may have a very real instinct about someone. You can't have it both ways. If an adult gets offended because a child doesn't kiss them or want to be near them, then really it's up to the adult to address these feelings of abandonment, not the child to make it better.

Annalisa Barbieri

William shouldn't be discriminated against, says professor

Abby Young-Powell, Libby Page — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 14:06:11 GMT

Prince William is a student again and lecturers use red cards to discipline their students, in this week's student news

Don't discriminate against Prince William

Prince William shouldn't be discriminated against at Cambridge University because of the circumstances of his birth, a professor has said.

William travelled to Cambridge to study a tailored 10-week agricultural course this week and has already been criticised by some students.

Speaking to the Cambridge News, Prof Ross Anderson, of Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, defended William's acceptance onto the course and warned against discriminating against the Prince.

He said: "Colleagues and I sometimes organise special courses for people from industry who want to learn about the latest research in our field. For this we charge them money. Whether they have any A-levels at all is no more relevant than the price of tea in China."

Anderson warned that Prince William "should not be discriminated against on account of the circumstances of [his] birth".

The university's decision to accept William as a student has caused controversy over the past few weeks, with some students criticising his acceptance onto the course.

One Cambridge student said in the Tab that: "Normally students need A*AA at A-level to gain entry to Cambridge University, whilst the Prince only achieved a mediocre ABC."

Red cards for laddish behaviour

University professors have used red cards to discipline disruptive male students, according to a professor who has researched laddishness at university.

Research carried out by Prof Carolyn Jackson, of Lancaster University, focused on sports students. It found that some lecturers had resorted to using yellow and red cards, a technique used in primary schools, to combat laddishness.

Students would first be threatened with a yellow card and would then be removed from the lecture if their behaviour didn't improve.

According to researchers, symptoms of laddishness included being loud, being a joker, throwing stuff, arriving late and being rude and disrespectful to lecturers.

Win for international students at Southampton uni

The student union at Southampton University has won a fight for international students to have fixed fees.

Up until now, fees were set by year rather than for the whole degree. This meant international students were paying higher fees every year of their studies.

David Gilani, president of the student union, says: "All students arriving from the 2015/16 year onwards will have fixed fees. This means that each student has certainty over what their degree will cost them."

Student halls hit by storms at Aberystwyth

On Monday around 150 students at Aberystwyth were evacuated from student halls after storms threatened their seafront digs. The students were put up by the uni in alternative accommodation at another campus, but have been allowed to return home after final safety checks.

Will Ray, an Msc student in remote sensing geography, lives in student accommodation on the seafront and was evacuated on Friday.

He says:

"On Friday morning I was jolted awake by the building shaking. I live in the second floor flat and the waves were breaking over our window. At about 11am we lost power.
"In the four years that I've been studying here I've never experienced anything like this."

Ray says that the sea threw gravel up to the accommodation, and that the ground floor flats suffered from flooding.

Rebecca Davies, pro vice-chancellor for student and staff services, says: "The past few days have been difficult for those living in sea front halls and we are very pleased to finally be in a position to let everyone return to their accommodation."

Ceredigion hall of residence at Aberystwyth University before the storm

Ceredigion hall of residence at Aberystwyth University after the storm

Have you been affected by the bad weather? Tweet us pictures @gdnstudents (but of course, don't put yourself in danger), or share your experiences in the comments section below.

Abby Young-Powell

Libby Page

New year, new career: 10 questions academics should ask themselves

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 13:43:49 GMT

Apply a spot of healthy self-reflection to find out whether your current career plan is still the right one for 2014 and beyond

Tradition dictates that the start of a new year is a fitting time to make plans and promises for the 12 months to come. Eat and drink less, exercise more, keep in touch with friends and family regularly – these are the stock fixtures on many a list of new year's resolutions, whether solemnly written out or only half-intended.

This seasonal tendency towards a spot of healthy self-reflection could just as usefully be applied to your career and, specifically, whether your current career plan is still the right one for 2014 and beyond. Below I offer a list of 10 questions which you might find handy to prompt your reflection.

The intent is not to lead you sententiously in one direction or another, nor is this one of those magazine-style quizzes where you add up your answers and find out at the end whether you and your career plan are a perfect match. These are prompts – what you want to do; what you can do; what, perhaps, you ought to do. The questions aren't necessarily presented in order of priority, and there is no expectation that you'll find all of them relevant, but some at least may resonate with you.

1) How did you get to where you are now?

Let's be honest: very few careers follow an absolutely linear path, where each step is meticulously pre-arranged and executed as part of a master plan. Happenstance is a crucial determinant in almost all professional stories, just as most of us are, at times, constrained in our options. But each career step entails a positive choice (apply or don't apply; stay or go; keep trying or move on) and it's important to remember why we made those choices.

Why did you opt to study your subject? Why did you stay on in academia? Why did you choose job X? Why did you move to university Y? Implicit in these questions is, of course, the path not travelled: why did you do X, but not Y or Z? It's almost never true that there was "nothing else"; it's more likely the other options were unpalatable and/or unfeasible.

2) How much do you know about other options?

When it comes to careers, I've heard one phrase from researchers more than any other: "I don't know what else I could do." Don't stay in academia just because it's the only thing you know; make an informed decision that it's the best career for you. Of all your friends and family members, how many do jobs you don't fully understand? Here's a resolution for 2014: find out how they actually spend their time. Your go-to question could be: what does a typical working day for you involve?

3) What do you find fulfilling in your current work?

When do you feel that you're both energised and doing good work? Which days do you leap out of bed, or at least crawl out of it less slowly? Don't be content with sweeping answers – "when I'm doing my research" – because any activity is made up of myriad tasks and responsibilities. Deconstruct what you really mean. Doing bibliographic searches? Reading papers? Being at your desk/bench? Doing experiments? Searching the archive? Writing up?

4) What do you find unfulfilling or frustrating?

There's nothing wrong with admitting that you dislike parts of your job, even in such a powerfully vocational career as academia. Apply the same principle as you did to what fulfils you by deconstructing your answers in order to get to the specifics.

5) Do you have talents you're not currently using, but would like to?

This question is fairly self-explanatory, with the caveat that we are talking here about demonstrable talents rather than mere desires. For example, my passion for tennis is not, sadly, indicative of any ability whatsoever, which is why it would be a preposterous career step. But if you have a proven capacity for, say, successfully leading teams and a job that primarily involves working on your own, then it's worth considering whether you are making the most of what you have to offer.

6) What, realistically, will you need to do in order to maximise your chances of succeeding in your current career?

If you know what you want to achieve, do you know what is required for you to get there? If publications or funding are high on your list, as they are for most early career researchers, then how – in the spirit of resolutions – are you going to commit to getting them done? If you're not sure what's required, then start by making a list of who will be able to advise you.

7) Are you good enough?

Perhaps this question is better expressed as: can you convince others that you're good enough? Either way, the point is a tough yet vital one. Knowing the career you want is one thing, but do you have what it takes? The harsh reality is that there are more PhD students than there are postdoc jobs , just as there are far more postdocs than there are permanent academic positions, more lecturers than endowed chairs, and so on. What's your evidence that you're good enough to last the course?

8) What practical considerations must you keep in mind?

This question is another self-explanatory one. It's a truism, for instance, that to make it in academia, you have to move around (preferably internationally). But this is not a workable scenario for everyone, and it pays to be realistic about such things. Are you being honest with yourself about whether you can, or are willing to, do what's practically required?

9) Whose career advice are you seeking?

What I really mean here is: how many opinions have you sought? Career pathways in academia are various and often complex, and they have undergone significant changes in the last 20 years. In other words, it's unwise to assume that what worked for the preceding generations of academics will work now.

If you're looking at other career options, then the need to hear a mix of viewpoints – what a job is really like – is even more critical. All you can do is to be ecumenical in the range of people from whom you seek advice. If you're not already seeking multiple and varied opinions, then add that to your list of new year's resolutions.

10) How do you tend to make decisions?

Here's a final reflection on the nature of reflection itself. Some people like to gather facts and details which they can weigh up carefully before acting; some are inclined to be more instinctive and spontaneous in their decision-making; and some oscillate between the two depending on the stakes.

Put more directly, some readers of this piece will like the kind of reflective thinking these questions intend to prompt; others simply won't. Either reaction is fine, because, at the end of the day, nobody cares about your career as much as you do, and you are responsible for it. So, don't try to operate against your preferences, try to work with them.

I wish you every success in your career during 2014.

Steve Joy is careers adviser for research staff in the arts, humanities, and social sciences at the University of Cambridge – follow him on Twitter @EarlyCareerBlog

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Drop these ugly Anglicisms ASAP, urge French language police

Kim Willsher — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 10:30:37 GMT

Académie Française condemns use of abbreviation of as soon as possible, and adoption of score as a verb

Ask a French person to get back to you and they are unlikely to do so ASAP. The abbreviation is the latest term to fall foul of the Gallic word police, the Académie Française, which says it is 21st-century rubbish.

The Immortals, as academy members are known, have published a damning condemnation of ASAP in their ongoing campaign to protect what is known as "the language of Molière".

"This abbreviation of as soon as possible, which is far from transparent, seems to accumulate most of the defects of a language that hides its contempt and threatening character under the guise of modern junk," the Académie writes.

"The use of French forms developed would be more appropriate and would not have this unpleasant character injunction. And there is a safe bet that the urgency of an application may be marked with more urbanity and the response would not be any slower."

It goes on to suggest dès que possible as the appropriate response.

Another Anglicism to be kicked into touch by the venerated guard dogs of French is score, used as "a strange verb … scorer", as in j'ai scoré, il a scoré etc.

It says the noun, as in a result, has existed in French sport "since the end of the 19th century", but laments its transfer to verb "that we unfortunately hear too often in place of marquer".

"This is an abusive borrowing of the English 'to score' and [is] perfectly useless because marquer already fulfils this role."

The academy was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, King Louis XIII's chief minister, but was shut during the French Revolution and then restored by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Its 40 members, each elected by fellow members, hold office for life and are committed to preventing the pernicious spread of English terms. It has even campaigned against official recognition of French regional languages.

In February last year the academy elected its first British Immortal, Michael Edwards, 75, a poet, critic and literature professor from Barnes, in south-west London.

Past Académie injunctions

Flyer (the academy prefers feuille volante, or flying paper). Look and touch (as in allure or aspect), dismissed as "important in the eyes of certain people who wish to give themselves an air of modernity by borrowing fashionable English words". Digital, which "in French signifies belonging to the fingers, related to fingers – it comes from the Latin digitalis" (the Immortals prefer numerique). And cash, another Anglicism the academy says is "unfortunately spreading" (customers should not payer cash but payer comptant).

Kim Willsher

Five secrets to revising that can boost your grades

Tom Stafford — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 10:12:00 GMT

A huge new study of how people learn reveals the best techniques for exam success

How do you get the most out of your revision time, and end up with the best grades you can? Or, if you're a different sort of student, how can you get the same grades you're getting now, but spend less time revising?

Either way, you need to know how to learn better. And fortunately, decades of research carried out by psychologists about learning and memory has produced some clear advice on doing just that.

As an experimental psychologist, I am especially interested in learning. Most research on learning is done in a lab, with volunteers who come in once or twice to learn simple skills or lists of words.

Wouldn't it be better, I thought, if we could study learning by looking at a skill people are practising anyway? And could we draw links between how people practise and how good they eventually get?

Computer games provide a great way to study learning: they are something people spend many hours practising, and they automatically record every action people take as they practise. Players even finish the game with a score that tells them how good they are.

Using data from a simple online game, my colleague Mike Dewar and I could analyse how more than 850,000 people learned to play. The resulting scientific paper, which has just been published, shows in unprecedented detail the shape of the learning curve, allowing us to test existing theories of learning, as well as suggesting some new ideas on the best ways to learn.

So here are my five evidence-based tips on how to learn:

1. Space your practice

Our analysis showed that people who leave longer gaps between practice attempts go on to score higher. In fact, the longer the gaps, the higher the scores.

The difference is huge: people who leave more than 24 hours between their first five attempts at the game and their second five attempts score as highly, on average, as people who have practiced 50% more than them.

Our finding confirms lots of other research: if you want to study effectively, you should spread out your revision rather than cramming. This is easier said than done, but if you are organised enough, you can spend less time revising and remember more.

2. Make sure you fail occasionally

A new result from our analysis shows that people who are most inconsistent when they first start have better scores later on.

Our theory is that these people are exploring how the game works, rather than trying to get the very highest score they can every time.

The moral is clear: invest some time in trying things out, which may mean failing occasionally, if you want to maximise learning in the long run.

3. Practise the thing you'll be tested on

The big mistake many students make is not practising the thing they will be tested on. If your exam involves writing an essay, you need to practise essay-writing. Merely memorising the material is not enough.

Writing exam answers is a skill, just like playing an online game is a skill. You wouldn't try and improve at a game by trying to memorise moves, you'd practise making them.

Other research confirms that practising retrieving information is one of the best ways to ensure you remember it.

4. Structure information, don't try to remember it

Trying to remember something has been shown to have almost no effect on whether you do remember it. The implication for revision is clear: just looking at your notes won't help you learn them.

Instead, you need to reorganise the information in some way – whether by making notes of your notes, thinking about how what you're reading relates to other material, or practising writing answers. This approach, called "depth of processing, is the way to ensure material gets lodged in your memory.

5. Rest and sleep

New research shows that a brief rest after learning something can help you remember it a week later. Other experiments have shown that a full night's sleep helps you learn new skills or retain information.

Even napping can help consolidate your memories, and maybe even make you more creative. This is great news for those of us who like to nap during the day, and is a signal to all of us that staying up all night to revise probably isn't a good idea.

Tom Stafford

Now there are handouts for massage parlour madams | Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 08:21:00 GMT

Even in the sex industry, employers are treated as 'wealth creators' but young people as burdens

If this were a normal world, when the Department of Work and Pensions released its list of acceptable jobs for the wage incentive scheme we would be asking questions about the scheme itself. Is it right for the employer to get a £2,275 incentive for taking on any employee between 18 and 24 who stays six months? Even when, for an 18-year-old on the minimum wage, that amounts to nearly half the salary? Why should all the incentive go to the employer, when that employee is probably struggling to find bus fares? If this were a normal world, I would compare this to summer 2011, when Lord Freud was extolling the generosity of the Work Programme, whereby an employer could claim up to £14,000 for taking on someone "hard-to-reach". "Weird," I thought, "that is an entire minimum wage, in reward for employing someone on the minimum wage. It's almost as if this is some kind of stitch-up."

However, when you see that DWP list, you will realise we are not in a normal world.

There's an "adult entertainment" section, stipulating which jobs are ineligible for the incentive (lap, pole and table dancers, dominatrices, escorts and masseurs), and which jobs are eligible (cameramen and techies in porn films, and auxiliary workers in massage parlours, saunas, lap and pole dancing clubs). "What about fluffers?" is everybody's first question. "You don't get much more auxiliary than a fluffer." Not so fast, would-be purveyors of entry-level jobs in the arena of the entertainment hard-on. Acceptable jobs in porn include "sound engineers, producers and directors" – it doesn't look as though that extends to anybody who has to physically touch anybody else. After all, employers offering positions to cat-fighters and mud-wrestlers are not eligible. I thought those jobs were mainly freelance, but what do I know? My (professional) mud-wrestling days are long gone.

I don't want it both ways – I believe sex workers choose the work they do in exactly the same balance of pragmatic need and personal fulfilment as asexual workers. If this were a list of eligibility for maternity leave, or flat-rate VAT bands, I would have no problem with it, except to say that it was too exclusive, there being no reason why a receptionist at a lapdancing club should have better workplace protection than a lapdancer.

The wage incentive scheme is different – this is a pretty good deal for the employer. If you're interested, there's a colourful leaflet about it showing some middle-aged dudes in a sweetshop, social-mindedly recruiting a smiling young woman. It's one of a number of pictures of gainfully employed youths, but none of them are behind a counter selling a strap-on or some strawberry lube. Why not? Because the DWP is embarrassed, though it insists it is not.

"Being a delivery man at Amazon is no different to being a delivery man for Ann Summers," the press officer at the department told me. "I know, sweetie," I said, sweetly, "but Ann Summers isn't a pornographer. She makes rubber nurses' uniforms for people who want to get drunk dressed as a nurse. The point is, to perform in a porn film could exploit a vulnerable job-seeker. Because that job is to be a performer. Whereas the job of a cameraman is the job of a cameraman." It wasn't really a point, so much as a mantra: a performer is a performer, whereas a cameraman … well, a cameraman is a cameraman.

If you think the work of fucking for money, on camera, is exploitative, then the process is exploitative; if you think it debases a young person to give another person a blowjob, then it also debases the person who has to operate the boom and minimise the stertorous nose-breathing. If you don't think any of it is exploitative, a different point holds – even the staunchest pro-porn advocates, with fair trade work practices and strongly, carefully drawn emphasis on the respect for and boundaries of their performers, would not, I don't think, dress up the sex industry as great employment for a school-leaver.

You don't have boundaries when you're 18. You have a load of people asking you to do things which, 15 years later, you realise breached your boundaries. And if you think everybody, whatever their age and financial situation, operates in a state of perfect freedom, forging self-determined choices in an equal world, you still have to ask why government intervention is necessary to make the sex industry employ young people. Surely if it needed a handout, it would be to prevent ageism?

But besides any of that, this is a moment so sharp and crystallised in the narrative of the employer as "wealth creator" that it feels as though it must be satire. We have become accustomed, since 2010, to the presentation of employers as modern gods, and employees as so much interchangeable meat.

Young people are no longer assets for a firm, they are burdens, who have to stump up the cost of their own training by working for free, and still be grateful for the "opportunity". Coffee shops offer 20 hour-a-week positions for which the prospective candidate must be on call for 15 hours of every day. The idea of wages that reflect the value an employee brings, rather than the lowest they can be screwed down to – never mind wages that a person can live on – is rejected as fanciful, despite the fact that no economy can function without them, nor any society call itself humane.

And finally, inevitably, we've arrived at a place where we can afford to front massage parlour owners and escort services a third of their wage bill (sorry, for auxiliary staff, of course), but we can't afford the Future Jobs Fund. Because they're not sleazy, they're wealth creators. And you, young person, are not the future of the nation. You're just another sponger, waiting for a go-getting pimp to spin you into wealth.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

Zoe Williams

Education in 2014: the year of the teaching assistant?

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 06:30:00 GMT

We need to take serious action to improve the role and function of school support staff, argues Rob Webster

Last year there were not one, but two days celebrating the contribution teaching assistants (TAs) make to classrooms. Even greetings card manufacturers got in on the act.

These 330,000 individuals – overwhelmingly women – help keep teachers' stress and workload levels in check, maintain classroom discipline and provide learning, emotional and physical support to children with special educational needs (Sen) enabling them to enjoy a mainstream education.

Recognising the value of TAs – a group who make up 25% of the school workforce – is overdue, not least because of the rough ride they've endured recently. Austerity saw funding for training scrapped, then the coalition's "bonfire of the quangos" ruined the creation of a national body for pay and conditions for school support staff. The public sector pay freeze has also kept TAs' already low wages depressed as living costs rise.

The most recent storm TAs weathered followed reports suggesting the Department for Education was considering reducing the number of teaching TAs. This suggestion was originally made in a report from the Reform thinktank on potential savings to the education budget.

As the authors of the research on which this recommendation was based, my colleagues at the Institute of Education and I have argued that such action is not only based on a partial reading of the evidence about impact, but that is likely to do more harm than good for students, teachers and schools.

So for 2014, rather than a couple days of celebration, I'd like to see a year of action to seriously improve the role and function of TAs. The timing couldn't be better. In September, new reforms will change how schools address the needs of Sen students, including a new code of practice. At the same time, schools will receive more money to spend on struggling disadvantaged students via an increased pupil premium settlement.

Historically, the work of TAs has been inextricably linked with support for these students. It seems inconceivable that schools will put these new reforms and changes into practice without considering the role of TAs. Evidence shows what schools can do to improve how they deploy and prepare TAs and to ensure they make a meaningful contribution to learning, plus a process for putting it into action.

There are three main actions that school leaders, teachers and TAs need to take.

1. Professionalise

School leaders need to set out a vision for the role and purpose of TAs in their school, defining the contribution they will make to learning. This means addressing some fundamental questions about what TAs can and should be expected to do, given that they tend not to have the same levels of teaching and subject knowledge as teachers. For school leaders who want to seriously engage with rethinking the TA role, help is at hand.

2. Prepare

Research shows that teacher-TA liaison time before lessons is rare, so TAs often go into classes without knowing what will be taught, what tasks will be done or what the teacher expects from the students. As teachers, have you ever had to teach an unfamiliar lesson or subject at short notice? Did you perform at your very best? Probably not, because you didn't have full knowledge of the topic or much notice to prepare. For TAs, this situation is par for the course.

TAs can only be as effective as teachers enable them to be and they shouldn't have to mind-read. Think carefully about TAs' contribution to learning and communicate your intentions to them. Inform them of the skills or knowledge the students they support should be developing, and what learning you want them to achieve by the end of the lesson.

3. Perform

TAs can have a potentially transformative impact on learning by making small adjustments to their practice. A growing number of schools are reaping the benefits of changing the nature of TAs' interactions with students. You can read my tips for sharpening TAs' practice here.

There is more we can do to maximise the impact of TAs, but these three areas are a good start. What's more, there can be no better demonstration of a whole-school commitment to giving TAs the attention they really deserve.

Rob Webster is a research associate at the Institute of Education and freelance consultant/trainer.

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How to treat a medical intern | Ranjana Srivastava

Ranjana Srivastava — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 01:02:06 GMT

Ranjana Srivastava: We may teach 'patient-centred care', but interns would also benefit from a more considered and considerate engagement with the patients they treat

Ranjana Srivastava

Ministry of Defence funding research into online habits

Ben Quinn — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 22:53:34 GMT

PhD papers sponsored by military include studies of hacker culture, crowd behaviour and social networking sites

A branch of the Ministry of Defence is funding postgraduate research into the culture of computer hackers, crowd behaviour at music festivals and football matches, and the impact of Twitter, Facebook and online conspiracy theories in times of crisis.

The MoD's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) pays six-figure sums to support individual PhD students to help understand the rapidly evolving world of cyberspace and the way in which social media have become an integral part of daily life.

While some of the PhD projects in the £10m programme have conventional military applications – such as researching technology to support underwater drones, and the development of clothing with fully embedded electronics – £97,487 of funding for research at King's College London into "the rise of the digital insurgency" is typical of the new direction.

Background papers for the digital insurgency doctorate at King's College say that the research will target the so-called "hacktivist" group Anonymous. The project will involve the researcher aiming to interact with members of Anonymous, addressing "known unknowns" relating to the group, and understand its grievances and goals, why people are attracted to it and its internal politics.

Rather than just focusing on hacktivism, however, the DTSL appears to be taking an increasing interest in broader issues of social media and online behaviour too. In February, it will host an invitation-only conference focused on "social influence in the information age".

Other PhD projects funded include one at the University of Exeter, which receives £82,630 from the DSTL, entitled Collective Action in the Digital Age: Social identities and the influence of online and offline behaviour.

Picking out the role of Twitter, Facebook, Skype and mobile messaging, a contract for the project states: "The events of the Arab spring, the London student protests or the summer 2011 riots in English towns and cities show the importance of understanding synchronised collective actions driven by online interactions."

The project aims to "deliver new and innovative ways to understand and influence online behaviour".

Mark Levine, a professor of social psychology who is supervising the Exeter PhD, told the Guardian: "I think [the MoD] are interested in online influence. That is why they have put money into this kind of stuff. They want to know what influences people, when and how.

"They are interested in influences which might promote what, from their point of view, might be antisocial stuff that they might want to stop, but they are also interested in the kinds of things they can do to promote situations where groups themselves prevent things they are worried about online."

Levine, who has been a working with others to demonstrate how groups can reduce violence or promote pro-social behaviour, added that the idea behind the project was to test, in an online environment, the psychological theories about why people behave collectively in the way they do offline, such as in football crowds.

The MoD initiated a national PhD sponsorship scheme in 2011, with the intention that successful bidders for the support would also spend time at the DSTL, "subject to certain caveats", according to the agency. Researchers in a wide range of disciplines have been provided with hundreds of thousands of pounds of funding across a range of applications.

How technology can be used to wield influence is also the focus of a £137,433 PhD programme at Queen Mary, University of London, called "Analysing and influencing crowd behaviours through arrays of ad-hoc mobile sensors". Mobile sensors typically include the digital compasses that are used in modern mobile phones for mapping, but which can also be used to identify the location and activities of their owner.

The contract states: "The PhD student will gather large-scale datasets from a variety of different mass crowd events, such as music festivals, sporting events, etc."

It adds that the research will aim to "provide essential tools for event planners and event monitors for wide ranges of events, planned (festivals, football matches, political rallies) or ad hoc (riots, protests)."

Techniques to be explored will include "targeting influential individuals" and crowdsourcing.

Elsewhere, £139,649 is being channelled to another Queen Mary PhD called "Cross-cultural attitudes and the shaping of online behaviour in crisis situations". It aims to examine trends and patterns relating to the flow of information on social media during events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Course organisers say it will "look at how news production is mediated by first-hand accounts through social media platforms such as Twitter and, secondly, how crisis situations foster the setting-up of dedicated platforms for communion and their function in mediating trauma as well as in endorsing or rejecting dominant commentaries (including conspiracy theories and propaganda) in mainstream media".

A Queen Mary spokesperson said that as part of the research, small pilot studies had been conducted at a music festival and at internal gatherings, but seeking ethical approval and participant recruitment would begin for large-scale events in 2014. The spokesperson said that the research would examine the impact of incorrect information in transport and disaster situations as well as music festivals. "All research on human subjects at Queen Mary is subject to ethical review. Furthermore all data was gathered and will be gathered with the informed consent of the participants."

The spokesperson added: "For festivals, we are looking at gathering information in order to provide participants with interesting topographical information such as 'fun' or crowdedness. This research will collect data that will provide essential information on crowd dynamics of such events."

Other PhDs benefiting from military financial aid include: "Exploring identity within modern technology – the influence of social and ethnical concerns on models of distributed identity" (£107,012, the University of Southampton); "Achieving legitimacy in a new media ecology" (£85,588, University of Glasgow); "Data mining to understand international dimensions to online identity – a classification of 2+billion names and their linkage to virtual identities and social network traffic" (University College London £106,160); and "Social movement 2.0: collective identity in the era of online participatory media" (Kings College London, £97,486).Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said: "Clearly there is a range of things which the security services already do.

"There is often a strong case for moves in this direction to be tempered by some very hard thinking about the ethics of these questions and the risk of legitimate policing slipping, potentially, into being attempts to control and influence.

"Obviously, the nature and type of the mass surveillance which we now know that the NSA and GCHQ engaged in was simply not legitimate.

"But the fact is that digital information will increase. What has to also increase alongside it is transparency and oversight. We have not really had that debate and the fact that we should be taking note and looking at the potential use of research such as this is entirely appropriate."

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said: "People will rightly want to know why the Ministry of Defence is investing in research that clearly carries significant privacy implications. These areas of research also highlight how badly in need of reform the wider legal framework governing surveillance activities is, particularly given the apparent interest in using social networks and internet-connected sensors to track and analyse people.

"The department needs to be much more transparent about why it is funding so much of this research if the public are to have confidence that it does not threaten our civil liberties and that the military's surveillance capabilities are not to be turned on British citizens."

An MoD spokesperson said: "Cyber-security is an issue of growing importance. As routine cyber-security measures (patching, anti-virus) become ubiquitous, socially engineered attacks are a growing threat.

"DSTL seeks to understand these threats and the vulnerabilities they exploit in order to provide effective advice and support to the MoD and wider government on defending against these threats."

The spokesperson added that the MoD was also "trying to understand the world in which we live and anticipate the world in which we will live" and that to do so "it now needs to incorporate an understanding of events in cyberspace and how they might unfold".

Ben Quinn

Written off | @guardianletters

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 21:00:02 GMT

The "clever illusion" of memory offered by the camera is a point well made by David Shariatmadari (Comment, 2 January). It brings to mind the cautionary parable of Socrates in the Phaedrus (274), where he makes the same point about the invention of writing. The Egyptian god of the liberal arts, Theuth, presents his new technique to the king/god, Thamus, with the words: "This invention … will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom I have discovered." The king berates him for his misplaced enthusiasm, and replies that, on the contrary, "this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, for they will not practise their memory … You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Like snapshots of times past, I wonder how many written words, cut as aides-memoire from newspapers such as your own, lie, lost and irretrievable, in fathomless desk drawers, their relevance and wisdom long since unremembered and forgotten.
Roger Tarr
Edinburgh

Rae Woodland obituary

Barry Millington — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:58:17 GMT

Opera singer with close links to Sadler's Wells and Glyndebourne

Rae Woodland, who has died at the age of 91, was a much-loved opera and concert singer with a radiant tone and warm personality. At the age of 16 she had undergone an operation to treat a cleft lip, performed by pioneers in reconstructive surgery, and she went on to develop a career notably with Sadler's Wells theatre, north London, Glyndebourne and the English Opera Group. After her retirement from the opera stage in 1984 she taught singing at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies and the Royal Academy of Music.

It was in part because of her congenital condition that she was sent away to a convent primary school in Southam, Warwickshire, for children with disabilities – though her parents, who were in the hotel business, were always on the move. The surgeons to whose clinic her mother took her for treatment were Sir Harold Gillies and Sir Archibald McIndoe, who asked her what sort of mouth she would like. She replied that she wanted to be a singer: by the time the scars had healed, it was evident that a transformation had been achieved.

Her first vocal successes were in local festivals and in a hotel in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, run by her parents. Sent to study in London with Roy Henderson, whose pupils had included Kathleen Ferrier, she was dismayed to be advised to visit Bond Street to observe how ladies walked, dressed and did their hair; "I think you're a little bit provincial," Henderson told her.

It was not until the mid-1950s, by which time Woodland was in her early 30s, that her career began to take off. First she understudied at Glyndebourne in 1956 and then sang for Lotte Lehmann in a masterclass at the Wigmore Hall. She then joined the National Opera School, and it was while there that she was invited to sing the Queen of Night in Mozart's Magic Flute at Sadler's Wells (1957). She had in fact gone to Henderson as a mezzo, but he extended her range, and indeed the Queen of Night, with its taxingly high tessitura, became one of her signature roles. A recording of her performance at the BBC Proms in 1966, which she once described as "the highlight of my career", demonstrates that she had the ideal voice for the part, using it, moreover, not simply as a vehicle for virtuosity but in a thrilling invocation of the powers of hell to wreak vengeance.

In an archive interview as part of the Oral History of Glyndebourne, made in 1994, she spoke of her happy years with two leading British opera companies: "Sadler's Wells made me; Glyndebourne was the icing on the cake." The family atmosphere, ample rehearsals and high artistic standards at the latter were particularly valued. The roles in which she excelled included Electra in Idomeneo, the Gentlewoman in Verdi's Macbeth and Mistress Ford in Falstaff, but she also essayed such roles as Venus in Tannhäuser and Mimi in La Bohème, and presented a formidable Lady Billows in Albert Herring.

The creation of the role of Lady Eugenie Jowler in Nicholas Maw's comic opera The Rising of the Moon (1970) was another landmark in her Glyndebourne career, but she also maintained a close relationship with the English Opera Group, touring Russia with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and singing frequently at the Aldeburgh Festival. A memorable performance of Idomeneo, in which she was again Electra, took place at the latter festival in 1969, a few days after the catastrophic fire in the Maltings – the performance was relocated to Blythburgh church.

Woodland was also known at home and abroad on the concert platform, appearing in Mahler's Second Symphony (1963), Bach's St John Passion (1967) and a Gilbert and Sullivan programme (1968) at the BBC Proms. In the latter part of her career she developed this lighter side of the repertoire and appeared regularly on BBC Radio 2's Friday Night is Music Night.

She married Denis Stanley, a mechanical engineer, in 1950; he died in 2011. She is survived by her sister.

• Rae Woodland, singer, born 9 April 1922; died 12 December 2013

Barry Millington

Alex Salmond unveils plans for free primary school meals in Scotland

Severin Carrell — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 17:53:30 GMT

All children in primary classes one to three will have right to receive free lunches from next January, first minister says

Alex Salmond has confirmed that all primary school children in Scotland aged up to eight will be offered free school meals as he resuscitated a stalled programme first promised seven years ago.

The first minister said that from next January all children in primary classes one to three would have the right to receive free lunches each school day, covering 165,000 children and saving families around £330 a year per child.

Salmond's announcement in the Scottish parliament follows a similar move, unveiled in September by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, that children aged up to seven in all primary schools in England would be given free meals from September 2014, at a cost of nearly £600m.

The Scottish government's measure, which will cost £42m in its first full year of implementation, was first promised by Salmond's administration when it won the 2007 Holyrood election.

Pilot programmes in five local authorities boosted uptake of free school meals to 75% but the project then stalled. After Clegg's statement, Salmond's government came under intense pressure from 11 Scottish charities, churches and trade unions to honour that "long overdue" 2007 manifesto pledge.

The Scottish government said on Tuesday it was now able to fund the full programme using extra money from the Treasury following the autumn statement last month, as well as extending free childcare to 15,400 two-year-olds whose parents were in workless households and on benefits such as jobseeker's allowance.

Salmond said that overall package, worth a total of £114m, would help deal with the threat that 100,000 children in Scotland would be plunged back into poverty by UK government cuts in welfare spending and public funding.

Insisting tackling child poverty was a central mission of his government, Salmond said he could not see that statistic without "a profound sense of shock. It's certainly a figure which is impossible to forget."

The announcement was welcomed by the campaigners but was met by immediate accusations of cynicism from Scottish Labour and the Tories, who said it compared very poorly with Salmond's refusal to use his existing powers and funding to introduce free childcare for all preschool children.

Salmond has made free childcare central to his independence proposals, but a poll by the anti-independence campaign Better Together published on Sunday found that 64% of voters wanted it delivered now, not after 2016.

Speaking after Salmond's statement to Holyrood, Johann Lamont, the Scottish Labour leader, said: "Rather than help families [now], he chooses to make it a false offer for the referendum, when he has the power to do so now. He makes them wait so he can engineer a false argument to change the constitution."

Severin Carrell

Sally Le Sage obituary

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 16:47:07 GMT

My sister, Sally Le Sage, who has died aged 76, was a highly acclaimed soprano.

She had a beautiful bell-like voice and was also a talented actor, which came to light when she was studying opera at the Royal College of Music in her 20s. There she won an exhibition and many major prizes. She toured the US and Canada with the famous Deller Consort until 1967, after which she won second prize in the prestigious International Singing Competition in s'Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. The critic of the Dutch newspaper De Tijd said of her: "She was kissed by the muses who gave her a very lovely voice." The following year she was awarded a scholarship to study lieder and French song with Pierre Bernac.

Sally soon became known for her recital and oratorio work. She sang the Mozart Mass in C Minor in the Festival Hall, London, and performed at many continental festivals. Her repertoire included works such as A Child of Our Time by Michael Tippett (Stockholm), Ravel's L'Enfant et Les Sortilèges with Simon Rattle (Leeds), Beethoven's 9th Symphony (Amsterdam), the Woodbird in Wagner's Siegfried (Covent Garden and Glyndebourne), and Anne Trulove in The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky (Cambridge Arts Theatre). She made recordings on the Vanguard, Nonsuch, Harmonia Mundi, Oryx and RCA Victor labels.

Born in Farnborough, Kent, she was the youngest of three daughters of Joan (nee Baker) and Jack Dowdall, an advertising executive who coined the phrase: "If you want to get ahead, get a hat." Our parents met singing in an amateur show; I also became a singer, under the name Ann Dowdall, and our sister Susan Dowdall (who died in 1999) was an actor.

Our mother died when Sally was a year old. Between the ages of two to six, she lived in hospital with TB in the hip. At eight she was able to have an operation to stabilise the hip and then went to Badminton school in Bristol.

In later life, Sally taught for a period at the Royal College of Music and also at Clare College, Cambridge. She retired to Malvern in the early 2000s but still taught singing. Sally will be remembered for her engaging and loving personality, her warmth of spirit and unending sense of fun.

She is survived by me, and by her nieces and nephews.

On course for global success with the Institute of Education

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 15:25:55 GMT

The Institute of Education at the University of London is a leader in international development postgraduate studies, helping its graduates land jobs in government, NGOs and the UN

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Few master's courses count a former child soldier among their students, as well as development workers in the world's major charities and non-governmental organisations.

But the cluster of international development and education postgraduate courses offered by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of London attracts a dedicated and diverse student body thanks to its worldwide reputation for teaching and research.

"We're completely left standing by the dynamics of our students," says Elaine Unterhalter, professor of education and international development. "They are very diverse, but everyone has experience in a developing country. Some are British families with historic links to perhaps Pakistan or Nigeria, they'll go back and feel quite connected and may be thinking about a new career based on this expertise.

"One student, who was a child soldier during the Biafran civil war, came to England as a refugee and works in the health sector. He's absolutely committed to education in Nigeria and his degree is giving him some of the skills and insights to take this forward."

Most students join one of the four linked courses to further their career in international development and many are sponsored by governments or employers. The courses are:

• education and international development

• education, gender and international development

• education, health promotion and international development

• educational planning, economics and international development.

Shared aspects include a core module on education and international development, which combines professional learning in different aspects of international education with research skills and knowledge. All combine professional learning for specialists with research skills and knowledge about the fast-changing field of education and international development.

Up to a third of students already work in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and the courses, says Unterhalter, are a professional qualification for organisations such as the UN. Graduates include policymakers and education programme managers in NGOs and the UK government's Department of International Development.

Former student Emily Henderson says: "It's a very global cohort. Everybody had worked or volunteered in an organisation. Whenever we looked at an issue, more often than not, a student had worked in a very similar context, so we could discuss aspects that were not covered in the set readings."

Teaching covers both academic and practical elements, says Henderson, who joined the education, gender and international development master's course to further her career. "We could be discussing policies or presenting our own professional experience as well as having more academic discussions. It's been brilliant."

Courses are flexible, allowing full-time study over a year or part-time study for up to three. Most modules are available online, but Unterhalter stresses the "incredible advantage" of learning in London at an institution ranked seventh worldwide for education studies, and which has been developing these courses for more than 60 years.

Students explore debates in education and international development, focusing on key questions and major issues, particularly around social and economic divisions, sustainable development and the impact of globalisation. They develop critical reflection, skills around their particular interests, and undertake research. "We think about practice but also how to improve policymaking. We see research as a very important component," says Unterhalter. Students' interests can also lead to new modules, such as an upcoming one on education in emergency and conflict situations.

Benefits are many and varied, says Unterhalter. "There's the buzz of the student mix, the dynamism of diverse colleagues and exposure to a very wide range of ideas. Teaching aims to ensure students' ideas will be shaken up. This can sometimes be confusing, but one of our intentions is to make students think about things they take for granted. In the process they get skills for jobs and skills for evaluation. You'll get a critical perspective, which means you won't see the world in the same eyes ... and that's valuable because anything around development issues always unsettles you. It also gives you a community of people going through the same process to talk to and create new perspectives."

Students agree. "I would absolutely recommend it," says Henderson. "The benefits of the course community are long-lasting. These days, to work in the development field you need qualifications, and this cluster of courses gives an excellent grounding. It would also appeal to anyone who is already working in international development and wants to critically engage with the work they're doing."

Sébastien Hine hoped the course would help him get a job in his chosen field. It worked: he is now combining part-time study with a research assistant job at the thinktank Overseas Development Institute: "The course gives you a real range of skills, and a lot of what I've got out of it is because of the range of students, most of whom have some experience operationally."

Kenyan student Awuor Ponge was delighted with his experience. "The interactive nature of the online modules and the one-to-one touch with the lecturers helped develop us academically and professionally. This was further enhanced with the face-to-face sessions when we attended the residential session in London. I have come to realise that IOE graduates are in high demand in Kenya … since April, I have conducted three high-profile assignments for international development organisations operating in Kenya, the latest being for UN Women."

To find out more about international development and education postgraduate courses, visit the IOE

Trevor Kletz obituary

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 14:52:56 GMT

My colleague and friend Trevor Kletz, who has died aged 91, was responsible for saving thousands of lives in his role as a safety adviser and renowned academic in high-risk industries such as petrochemicals, energy production and pharmaceuticals. His writings on human error and accident investigation refocused industry's emphasis away from individual lapses to systems failures and safer design. These concepts fostered a revolution in modern safety management thinking.

Trevor was born in Darlington to Jewish parents from a Russian immigrant background. When Trevor was 11 years old, an uncle gave him a chemistry set as a present, which influenced his decision to study chemistry at Liverpool University. He graduated in 1944 and joined Imperial Chemical Industries.

In 1978 he was appointed an industrial professor in the chemical engineering department at Loughborough University. In 1986 he became a visiting fellow and he was latterly a visiting professor at Loughborough and in 2003 an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University in the US.

He was appointed an OBE in 1997 and was a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Chemical Engineers, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He was also an honorary fellow of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and the Safety and Reliability Society.

His published work includes 11 books and more than 100 reviewed papers on loss prevention and "process safety". His research was hugely influential in the way that industries build, operate and maintain their facilities to prevent major fires, explosions and accidents.

Trevor was a masterful communicator. He could reduce seemingly complicated issues to the simple fundamentals. He knew that he could save lives by spreading his insights and he had the perseverance, patience and generosity to repeat his messages until they were heard and understood.

A theme that runs through Trevor's work is drawing lessons from accidents. His mantra was "organisations have no memory" and he often observed: "There's an old saying that if you think safety is expensive, try an accident." He was a remarkable man, much admired by many generations of chemical engineers across the world.

In 1959, Trevor married Denise. They had two sons, Tony and Nigel, who survive him. Denise died in 1980.

Myths about how the brain works have no place in the classroom | Dr Hilary Leevers

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 14:48:03 GMT

There is a shortage of rigorous research into teaching methods, and results are poorly disseminated among teachers

Are you left-brained or right-brained? Are you more creative or rational? You can find out easily enough – there are myriad online tests that will help you find your dominant hemisphere.

Or so they claim. In fact, a study in PLOS One last year showed fairly conclusively that the idea one side of our brain is more dominant than the other – and by extension, that this dictates what kind of person you are – is little more than a myth.

It's a shame: this seemed such an attractive idea. After all, there are two distinct (though connected) hemispheres of the brain and some of us are clearly more arty, others more sciencey. Excuse the pun, but it seemed something of a no-brainer. That's the trouble with myths about the brain – just because they sound credible and have the veneer or neuroscience doesn't make them true.

"Neuromyths" can merely perpetuate misconceptions about the brain. Of greater concern is when they influence how we are raised or educated. You may be familiar with the idea of different types of learner. For example, if you are a "visual learner" you need content delivered primarily visually. But there is very little scientific evidence to support this idea, and labelling pupils by type of learner and delivering content accordingly limits the richness of their learning experiences and may reduce what is learned.

Neuroscience is a blossoming field of research and its potential impact on education is wide-ranging. We are already beginning to see examples of it being applied. For example, many American schools now start their classes later in the morning after research suggesting that teenagers do not like early starts – not because they are inherently lazy, but because they have a natural sleep pattern that leads to a late-to-bed, late-to-rise cycle. When systematically tested in US schools, later start times were found to be beneficial. Whether this would be the case in the UK is as yet unknown.

In fact, classroom interventions based on rigorous scientific evidence are surprisingly scarce. Together with the Educational Endowment Fund (EEF), the Wellcome Trust has spent time surveying teachers to find out what approaches and interventions are currently in use. Many teachers say they are influenced by the idea of "learning styles", as mentioned above. Others use Brain Gym which, according to its website, "is based on more than 80 years of research by educational therapists, developmental optometrists and other specialists in the fields of movement, education and child development". Yet there is scant evidence that Brain Gym is doing anything to boost the brain.

Teachers have told us that they want their teaching approaches and tools to be based on evidence. Much of teacher training is shaped by research evidence and many teachers investigate the impact of different practice in their own classes, often disseminating their findings informally through peers. However, teachers rarely have the scientific training to appreciate the difference between informal experimentation in their own classrooms, and the robust evidence base upon which larger-scale change should be based.

The truth is that there is a real shortage of scientific studies and there has not been a good system for sharing the findings of those that exist with teaching practitioners. The government hardly leads by example: a report earlier last year from Nesta noted that out of 70 programmes implemented by the Department for Education, only two or three had been robustly evaluated.

This is why the Wellcome Trust and the EEF are launching a £6m fund for research projects to develop and test evidence-based interventions grounded in neuroscience research in a robust and rigorous manner.

The trouble with education is that we have all experienced it and many of us also have children going through the system, and so we all have a view on how it should be done. But our views tend to be based solely on our own experiences, our own prejudices and our own anecdotal evidence, rather than hard evidence of what is best for children. We need to do better. An education system based on misguided ideas at best misses out on real opportunities to improve, and at worst may be detrimental to our children's learning. But an education system based on policies, initiatives and interventions that have been tried, tested and shown to work has the prospect of offering our children the best possible start to their lives.

Dr Hilary Leevers is head of education and learning at the Wellcome Trust

Basketball offers escape from deprivation in Montreal

Anne Pélouas — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 14:00:00 GMT

Hard-to-reach students learn to use positive experiences on the courts to boost their academic performance

The headline of the magazine posted at the entrance to Jeanne-Mance secondary school in Montreal reads "Dream on". Sure enough, students at this school taking part in the "Bien dans Mes Baskets" [happy in my trainers] scheme have no shortage of dreams. With more than half the 970 pupils coming from underprivileged backgrounds, the scheme helps about 100 teenagers a year, who are often struggling with learning or behavioural problems. It offers a way out of the downward spiral, opening the door to new sporting or academic ambitions.

Martin Dusseault, a school social worker, started the ball rolling. "Before 2001 we had great difficulty getting through to challenged adolescents in the neighbourhood ... mainly of Haitian or African origin," he recalls. "The school would shut at 3pm and the kids would hang around in the yard. Some played basketball, which has links with hip-hop culture. One day I went out with my ball to join in." His move had a positive impact on relations with pupils at the school and he soon started acting as their trainer. Players began to confide in him, talking about their problems in one-to-one chats in his office. "They saw me as someone they could trust, no longer as a social worker," he explains. "I understood that basketball was a way of establishing meaningful links with struggling teenagers and turning school into a place where they could flourish."

The Bien dans Mes Baskets programme gradually developed at the school, outside classes. "We managed to get the gym to open at lunch, weekends and even during school holidays," Dusseault explains. He now leads a small team of social workers and volunteers (including former pupils) tasked with supervision and training.

Ball games are "a tool for social intervention" among the Dragons, as the eight basketball teams – six men's and two women's – are collectively known. The aim is to acquire social skills through a project centred on young people's own interests, while encouraging certain forms of social interaction and boosting academic motivation. Among other things, the Dragons have repainted the gym and helped set up rooms for parent-teacher meetings.

Andrée Marquis, the school head, sees a real difference in the young people. "They are much more committed, have a huge sense of belonging to their school and environment, with solid ethical and partnership values," she says. The Bien dans Mes Baskets programme has been extended to include even the youngest pupils, with nine mini-Dragon programmes for middle schools in the neighbourhood. Their goal is to ease the passage from middle to secondary school through basketball, using older pupils as volunteer trainers.

Two years ago, Bien dans Mes Baskets linked up with the Centre for Family, a nonprofit organisation in Brooklyn, New York, which organises youth activities, including basketball. In partnership with the International Association for Social Work with Groups, the two bodies staged a women's basketball event. A team from Jeanne-Mance travelled to New York City for the occasion in February. "Some of them came back completely transformed, with much greater self-esteem," Dusseault says.

Alonie Le Gresley, 17, took part. "It didn't matter whether we won or lost the matches. What mattered was meeting up with other girls like ourselves. There was conflict in the team at the time, but being in New York put an end to all that," she says. The winner of last year's Athlete of the Year award at her school, Le Gresley is indeed transformed. She was expelled from several schools previously, but is now beaming: "I like school. I've found motivation in sport and everything I do with my friends from Bien dans Mes Baskets."

Dusseault is also proud of what Eloho Omalosanga, 26, has achieved. When he landed in Canada from the Democratic Republic of the Congo aged nine, he spoke neither French nor English, as well as struggling with learning disabilities. A football player, he "forgot [his] feet and started playing with [his] hands" in what he now sees as his "second family". In 2012 he won the Quebec province Volunteer of the Year award for his work as a trainer.

Mambi Diawara, 19, is still very attached to his old school. Born in Canada, of Malian parents, his education has seen "ups and downs". Thanks to Bien dans Mes Baskets he found an outlet in sport. But he emphasises the valuable help he received from the social workers, improving his performance in class. In 2011 he won a prize for perseverance at school and in sport, followed by the Quebec Student Sport Federation's Recruit of the Year award. "I still dream of professional basketball," he admits and has just been contacted by an American university team.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

Anne Pélouas

Prince William begins agricultural course at Cambridge University - video

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:44:40 GMT

Prince William is given a tour of St John's College, Cambridge as he starts his course in agricultural management

Nida Ul-Naseer: missing teenager wanted to attend university

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:15:51 GMT

Asylum-seeker status preventing 18-year-old from going to university is behind her upset and disappearance, says sister

A teenager who disappeared after taking out the rubbish was upset because her family's asylum-seeker status barred her from attending university.

Nida Ul-Naseer, 18, of Newport, South Wales, has not been seen since leaving her home in Linton Street on 28 December.

Her family revealed on Tuesday that their attempt to seek asylum in the UK from Pakistan was turned down a year ago.

It resulted in Nida opting to retake a business studies course she had already passed.

Her sister, Shamyla, 23, told a press conference that she believed Nida's disappearance stemmed from being upset because she could not attend university.

"I think that not being able to go to university is the reason for her leaving," she said, speaking alongside other family members at Newport Central police station.

She said her sister had been upset and angry about the situation before she vanished.

Nida might also have been barefoot when she disappeared three days after Christmas, it has emerged. Police said it was not known if she had taken anything to put on her feet, although if she had planned to leave it was likely.

The teenager suffers from a medical condition and needs medication without which she is likely to become anaemic.

Her sister revealed on Tuesday that Nida had been taking iron supplements and also suffered from heartburn.

The teenager had been unhappy for some time about not being able to attend university. Her sister said she had seen friends who did less well in their exams go on to university. She went to college instead but remained unhappy.

Before she left she had argued with her family about her inability to go to university and was said to be shouting and crying.

Her father, Naseer Tahir, who was also at the press conference, said in broken English that he was happy for his daughter to attend university.

He added that he was sad he was not able to provide her with what she wanted.

The conference heard that Nida did not have a boyfriend and was described by her family as very religious.

The family has been seeking asylum in the UK for five years. Their passports are held by the Home Office.

Shamyla began the interview with a direct appeal to her missing sister, saying: "Nida, please come back home. Nida, please come back home. We are desperately worried about you. Nida, we need you. Nida, please come back home, we cannot live without you."

The academies model: fragmentation, favouritism and failure

Ron Glatter — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 13:00:00 GMT

Our peculiar education system that allows for academies and free schools should be phased out. All publicly-funded schools need to be placed in a common framework as soon as possible

The start of a new year is a time for reflection. We might ask ourselves what the future historians of education will make of the extraordinary times we have been experiencing since 2010. I suspect the quick-fire contracting out of a large and growing chunk of our school system will be a key focus of their attention.

This has been achieved through funding agreements, mainly for academies and free schools, made directly with the secretary of state. The term "funding agreements" has a kind of homeliness about it that masks the radical nature of the change. Although it may seem a boring legal technicality, it's actually of great significance.

There were attempts in the 1990s by the Conservative government to create independent state schools – the so-called grant-maintained schools and City Technology Colleges – which were free of local authority control. The new system is often seen as simply a reincarnation of those failed projects.

But as law professor Mike Feintuck and his co-author Roz Stevens explain in their recent book School Admissions and Accountability, those previous attempts were based on detailed statutory provisions. They quote the barrister David Wolfe who says that, compared with the rest of the school system, which has strong legislative underpinning: "The academies model is very open… only a single provision in an act of parliament, and everything else done through contract."

The arrival of academies was a landmark in the running of state education in England, as Feintuck and Stevens point out. Contracting out represented a completely different and untried way of operating a school system. It was started by the Labour government and initially focused on struggling schools in deprived areas. Policymakers may have expected the arrangement to apply to just a small proportion of state-funded schools, and may never have considered the full implications. But when the coalition came to power, they wanted it to become the norm and it now covers more than half of all secondary schools and a growing minority of primaries.

There has been no public debate about whether we want our schools to be run this way, even though this set-up raises enormous issues. An obvious issue of principle is the great power that this process places in the hands of central politicians. As Richard Pring, from the Oxford University, said in his recent book about secondary education: "What is being created is the most personally centralised education system in western Europe since Germany in the 1930s – each school contracted directly to the secretary of state…".

Further, if a few academy chains secure control of large numbers of schools – as some aspire to do – the legitimacy of their power could come into question. After all, who controls schools is far more than a technical matter of performance – moral, cultural and social issues lie at the heart of schooling.

On the other hand, if there is a wide diversity of contractors, many of them small and including numerous stand-alone schools, the risk of great variability in quality is increased. The system becomes highly fragmented, and international evidence shows that this is not an effective strategy for whole-system improvement.

Above all, there is a monumental challenge in managing such a large number of contracts from the centre, or anywhere else. Several high-profile failures, such as that at Al-Madinah free school in Derby, have vividly illustrated the risks. The government seems at last to have recognised this with its plan to regionalise the process based on eight commissioners and headteacher boards.

But such a system will scarcely make the task any easier; it will create a raft of new bureaucracies and continue to block local input. The plan to manage more than 20,000 schools by contract is unsustainable, and the sooner that is accepted the better – not doing so will leave the system in a complete mess, rife with division and artificial distinctions.

This peculiar system should be phased out as existing agreements come to the end of their seven-year life. All publicly-funded schools should be placed within a common framework as soon as possible. Various models could be considered for such a framework but an obvious contender is that of the maintained trust school. This allows schools a high degree of autonomy, enables outside bodies to take part in governance, facilitates school-to-school collaboration and promotes wide stakeholder involvement including a proper role for local authorities. A weakness is that it fragments admission decisions, placing them at school level, so stronger regulation or reform of admissions would be required.

We need an inclusive, integrated and coherent set of arrangements which avoids political favouritism and unjustified status hierarchies. The most successful educational systems, combining high quality with equity, have such arrangements at their heart. If we could develop this, future generations would at least be able to look back at us with less bemusement.

Ron Glatter is emeritus professor of educational administration and management at The Open University and a visiting professor at the Institute of Education, University of London.

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Ron Glatter