Wanted: Party Organiser for Charlie Sheen!

Many of you will do something nice for your mum this weekend, but I very much doubt that you think it qualifies as deserving of a medal. Unless of course, you're Prince Andrew. He, like me, has just spent a day in Northern Ireland. Whereas I was running a series of college workshops and visiting the HEA ICS Subject Centre, he was there as part of his role as unpaid trade ambassador, something for which he's received his latest honour for personal service to the Queen, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to add to his earlier honours for the same thing, the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and the Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

Now I don't want to sound churlish, but how often has he been in the crush to get a seat on a north-bound train out of King's Cross, or spent the night in a Travelodge/Premier/Holiday Inn? His "business", as far as I can see, is all first-class and five-star, and while he might not receive a salary, he's unlikely to have paid for anything either.

Ten years travelling the world "representing British interests abroad", whatever that means, is not something most people outside of unelected dictatorships would consider worthy of a chest-full of medals, and is for most us, something we'd have preferred to have been an April Fool joke.

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?