London barrister hopes to educate people about the law with bitesize Youtube videos
Christian Weaver likes to keep it concise. His video series ‘TheLawin60Seconds’ is pioneering legal advice for an age of supposedly limited attention spans.
The 24-year-old lawyer has begun teaching people about their rights in online talks to camera that aim to simplify the complexity of legislation into a few basic principles.
Continue reading...Like summer heat, it was here and now it’s gone. The colourful, inexplicable Christo installation floating on London’s Serpentine will begin to be dismantled today; all done, suddenly, with its strange business of delighting and baffling visitors to Hyde Park.
Last week, the 7,506 oil barrels of Mastaba, the artist’s 20-metre high pink, blue and red fortress, were still glinting in the evening sun when I took a trip on the Solar Boat that crosses the lake during the summer months. As we took photographs, on one side of me I could overhear praise for the artwork’s playful grandeur. On the other side, someone was grumbling about how dull and pointless it seemed.
Continue reading...For some, they represent the very best of British, hubs of learning and commerce attracting the brightest and the best from around the world who bring huge wealth to spend. They can even breathe hope into rundown towns and cities, with the promise of jobs and cash to rejuvenate areas deserted by traditional industries.
But for others, Britain’s burgeoning universities are anything but a blessing, as the thousands of students they attract transform the neighbourhoods they move into, raising property prices, disrupting locals’ lives with their exuberant lifestyles, transforming areas that rush to cater for the tastes of their new young clientele. The process has even spawned its own, ugly term – studentification.
Continue reading...Scheme will train 17,000 teachers as part of effort to improve sports lessons
Sport England is launching a £13.5m scheme to train 17,000 teachers in delivering PE and sport in school, after research found that almost 20% of secondary students hated PE lessons.
With more than a quarter of the nation’s adults “inactive”, according to the Active Lives survey released in March, Sport England wants to ensure students are leaving secondary education with an active lifestyle.
Continue reading...Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner to reveal plan to axe free schools in proposed education reforms
Labour would scrap free schools and bring academies under greater local democratic control as part of a plan to unwind Conservative education reforms that it says have created a legacy of “fragmentation and privatisation”.
The new policy will be unveiled by Angela Rayner at the Labour party conference on Monday, the first time that the shadow education secretary has presented her own structural reform plan in her two years in the job.
Continue reading...Average Imperial graduate earns £37,931 in first year, £5,000 more than Oxbridge
Graduates from Imperial College London pick up the highest salaries in the first year after graduation, earning around a fifth more than students leaving Oxford and Cambridge, according to research by the job website Adzuna.
The average Imperial graduate earns £37,931 in their first year post-graduation, £5,000 more than the typical Oxbridge graduate, the report found.
Continue reading...Can young workers teach their elders anything about careers, politics and getting the most out of life – and vice versa? Two Guardian journalists give it a try
Coco Khan, 30, has worked for the Guardian since 2016, as a writer and columnist
Continue reading...A challenge for cunning linguists
Hi guzzlers,
Today’s puzzle concerns the South American language Aymara. It’s testing you on the sort of linguistics skills that might help you get you a job at Google, according today’s article in which a Google exec says that an understanding of language is the key to the next giant leap in technology.
Continue reading...San Francisco’s ‘Early Days’ statue was seen by many as a symbol of colonial oppression. What does its removal say about history and public art?
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.
Those who gathered at the removal last week didn’t celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.
Continue reading...Aditya Chakrabortty’s piece is absolutely right (Mis-sold and overhyped: our universities are now just a con, 20 September). The tragedy is that it was all so predictable from the outset. But it is even worse than he sets out. When fees were allowed to increase to £9,000 (and paid by students) the average cost of teaching was about £6,000 (setting aside grants for some high-cost subjects). So, in a time of austerity, there was a bonanza. Many vice-chancellors behaved like lottery winners, committing to building projects and expansion, assuming the good times would continue to roll. At the same time, salaries of all but the highly paid were held down and a strike provoked over a pensions dispute.
In addition the government thought that the new market required new regulation, hence the nonsense of the national student survey and teaching excellence framework, with the inevitable increase in managerialism and a downgrading of academic influence in university policymaking.
Continue reading...The solution to the fishermen’s tale
In my puzzle column this morning I set you the following puzzle from the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad:
The Uros people live on artificial islands made from reeds on Lake Titicaca in South America. They speak Aymara. (This is all true)
Continue reading...One of the odd things about being a parent is that we get a pretty good picture of what’s going on in our children’s schools but it’s hard to know whether this is a peculiarity of that school or part of a pattern. This is ideal for you, because when a story surfaces about something going wrong in a school, it’s up to you to say whether it’s typical or just a one-off.
For the past few months, I’ve been hearing and reading reports of cuts to school budgets, with consequent cuts in staff, subjects being taught, and maintenance of school premises. You and your department have tried to tell us this isn’t really the case and we have been served up the Protestant virtues of moderation, thrift, charity and efficiency instead. It suddenly becomes something noble that publicly maintained schools are levying parents for glue.
Continue reading...The outgoing head of the university that lost a third of its students warns the market could yet claim casualties
Ask a vice-chancellor which universities they would least like to run in today’s uncertain climate, and the answer is likely to include London Metropolitan. Squeezed by the fierce new higher education market and buffeted by past scandals, its back is against the wall. Yet its outgoing vice-chancellor, John Raftery, says his diverse institution is an unsung success story that is serving its students better than ever.
Student numbers at London Met fell by a third in the five years to 2017, according to the admissions service Ucas. Eighteen-year-olds accepting places dropped by more than half.
Continue reading...Long before dawn breaks over Cornwall on Friday, Bill Marshall will set out for London where he will join hundreds of other headteachers outside 11 Downing Street.
It will be the first grassroots uprising by England’s headteachers, and the organisers expect more than 1,000 to make the journey to hand a letter to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, saying their school budgets are in crisis because of seven years of cuts. They will speak of swingeing reductions in special needs funding that leave the most vulnerable children without equipment; of bereaved children and depressed teenagers without access to counsellors; of larger classes, staff redundancies and the erosion of curriculum choice.
Continue reading...Portraits of prominent alumni curated by current students go on show in university library
Diane Abbott, Naomie Harris and Thandie Newton are among the black graduates of Cambridge University who will be celebrated in an exhibition created by current students.
Black Cantabs: History Makers includes 14 portraits of Cambridge graduates – known as Cantabs – which will go on display in the university library from Wednesday. The display has been curated by the Black Cantabs Research Society, a group set up to explore the stories of black former students.
Continue reading...Survivors of sexual violence shouldn’t be forced to relive their trauma in the classroom
When Junot Díaz was accused of sexual harassment in May it divided readers who had heralded him a progressive icon for his work on race and masculinity.I had just finished a university project full of admiration for Díaz, who denies the allegations, as part of my “American ideas” module. It wasn’t even the first time my reading list had been hit; another author, Sherman Alexie, had been accused of sexual harassment two months earlier.
The allegations made discussion of the writers a minefield. To analyse their work with any critical distance so soon after the news felt impossible. Instead the seminars would frequently become an open forum on sexual assault, an exhausting and often upsetting ordeal for many women in the room.
Continue reading...Free state nurseries and increased funding are the right ways to patch up a fragmented system
Tony Blair was elected prime minister in 1997 on the back of a promise to prioritise “education, education, education”. Transformation of the economy, not schools, is the heart of the Corbyn/McDonnell programme. But the Labour leader knows that the former depends on the latter. When he announced plans for a National Education Service during his leadership campaign in 2015, the argument he made was about boosting productivity. Since then, the idea has grown. Rather than a single organisation, such as NHS England, the NES is a kind of shorthand for a set of universal, cradle‑to-grave entitlements – which would vary across the UK depending on which of the relevant powers and responsibilities have been devolved.
Most prominent among the policies under this umbrella is the promise to abolish university tuition fees. Shadow education minister Gordon Marsden has been tasked with coming up with a solution to Britain’s longstanding problem with training. In her speech to Labour’s party conference on Monday, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner set out her party’s plans for schools and pre-schools. The priorities are clear: increasing resources and accountability.
Continue reading...Only one sexual misconduct case out of 16 led to a staff member losing their job
A number of UK universities are failing to tackle sexual predators on their staff as a due to shortcomings in complaints and disciplinary processes, finds a new report.
The small-scale study, by the 1752 Group, a research and lobby organisation which addresses staff sexual misconduct in higher education, accuses some universities of “making it up as they go along”.
Continue reading...The global protest movement to tear down urban memorials that reinforce racism is rewriting the very story of our cities. Should any monument be safe?
Cape Town was the first. In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele brought a bucket filled with shit to the University of Cape Town, where there stood a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate, colonial politician and avowed white supremacist. “There is no collective history here – where are our heroes and ancestors?” Maxwele announced. He splashed the contents of the bucket over the monument.
The incident attracted national attention and within days had grown into a full-scale protest. Students covered the Rhodes statue with graffiti and plastic bags, and promised to demonstrate until it was removed. The statue had drawn criticism before, but none of such sustained anger, even though there was no mistaking what the Rhodes monument represented. Erected in 1934, it occupied the very centre of the campus, the bronze Rhodes gazing out over the city as though contemplating creation: his and, perhaps, God’s.
Continue reading...Every year, thousands of students descend on their new homes, generating waste and noise. How are universities cleaning up the mess?
‘At the end of the day, the place is bedlam,” says Sarah Jeal, a communications advisor at Kingston University, pointing to an enormous white marquee where music is blaring, sweet wrappers are strewn on the floor and everyone is carrying a sponsored plastic Domino’s Pizza bag stuffed with leaflets and party flyers. “There’s a big clean up overnight and then the whole thing starts again tomorrow.”
Outside the tent, busloads of new undergraduates are arriving on campus. Every trip is at capacity as more than 17,000 students descend on this leafy town for the start of freshers’ week.
According to the latest Ucas figures, a record 33.5% of the 18-year-old population in England are starting university this September. With universities running full pelt during the first week, campuses are busier and louder than ever. External companies and organisations are on site to reach new students, and with them they bring leaflets, branded freebies, balloons, sweets, plastic pens and a huge amount of waste.
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