The Elephant in the Room..

The Higher Education Academy has apparently been informed by the funding councils that its grant will be reduced for the forthcoming academic year, something which the subject centre workers I've spent today with think is going to significantly impact primarily, and unjustly, on them.

It's my view, and it's also one apparently shared by all the delegates at today's event (not just those representing the subject centres), that whoever makes the decisions needs to very seriously consider the educational impact and current returns on expenditure.

The HEA board will doubtless claim to look at the big picture as it considers the challenge of managing the prospective funding cut, but given the contractual position of the subject centres, reducing/stopping their activities is relatively easy to implement and representatives of the central function are hardly likely to admit that their well-documented ticking of many boxes isn't a desirable output?

However, the easiest option is unlikely to be the best one, as the subject centres are not only the most visible part of the HEA, (other than running a recognition scheme, what do all those people at York actually do?), they are also, according to 2008's interim evaluation of the HEA "valued because they tackle enhancement from the ‘ground floor’" and “widely cited as the Academy’s flagship programme”.

It is also the regular engagement with those lecturers actually delivering the HE programmes, individuals who can have a direct impact on standards, that makes subject centres so effective: extensive repositories of generic information and strategy/policy documents do not have anything like the same potential for positive change as working together within and across learning communities.

Therefore, surely either reducing the size or number of the centres before, or instead of, reducing the size (& cost) of the central "coordinating body" first, will eventually lead to the closure of the HEA anyway, as without them what's left of the organisation won't be able to deliver anything of use to any of the people who want or need it?

Anyone willing to assuage the fears of centre personnel that they won't be bearing the lion's share of the Academy's cuts while the York white elephant is protected like the endangered species it now surely is?

Kirpaning it in the Family...

I'm currently sat in Leeds/Bradford Airport reading yesterday's remarks by Sir Mota Singh QC, a retired judge who's apparently stated that Sikhs should be allowed to carry their ceremonial daggers in public places, and wondering whether he's thought about how this assertion might apply to air travel since even nail files are on the banned list?

No exceptions are proposed in the BBC article, but it does describe a case where a boy was banned from wearing his Kirpan (dagger) at the Compton School in Barnet, and that even though the school offered to compromise by offering "the option of wearing a smaller knife, welded into a metal sheath" the boy's parents declined and removed him from the school; causing me to wonder what would happen if they (or their son) wanted to fly?

Mass homeopathic overdose - none dead!

Setting off to Derby on a 10.23 train to deliver an assessment workshop has prompted me to declare my admiration for all those who took part in Saturday's mass homeopathic overdose (at 10.23am: various locations around the country). Or not as it happens, since nobody succeeded in taking their own lives despite hundreds of people downing entire packets of homeopathic pills.

Hopefully the 10:23 campaign has succeeded in raising awareness (a form of education, just by another means?) of the inefficacy of homeopathic medicine, and the double-standards of leading pharmacists who happily stock them while admitting that they don't work.