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HRmagazine.co.ukEmployee engagement a challenge in higher education, research findsHRmagazine.co.ukIn the research of 94 HR directors from higher education institutions in the UK, the overwhelming majority of respondents (82%) reported that motivation and engagement had increased in importance over the past five years. However, less than half (47%) ......
Dr Selina Todd is wrong about our relationship with the University of Liverpool (Letters, June 16). Liverpool College is an independent school with 813 pupils which has chosen to become an academy. That decision was made by our governors, not the university. One reason for our decision – and the government's support of it – is that we have an established record of more than 50% of our pupils gaining admittance to a Russell Group university.We believe that, as an academy, we will be able to provide the excellent sixth-form preparation we provide to our fee-paying pupils to more pupils from a wider social and economic background, without regard to ability to pay. The more than 100 applications we have received for our sixth form and the 500 applications for year 7 seem to suggest that the people of Liverpool agree. In 2009 Liverpool College became an associated college of the University of Liverpool. This partnership has provided local state-school pupils with access to Latin and Greek; sixth formers, including those in state schools, with access to a philosophy course at the university; and has enabled the school to serve the community.No pupil in our boarding programme, either from the EU or outside the EU, is guaranteed an offer or a place at the University of Liverpool. I have no idea where Dr Todd got that idea – except, perhaps, in overhearing the idle gossip of fellow historians in the corridors of academia. Liverpool University far surpasses Oxford in its effective outreach to non-traditional students and in its enrolment of pupils from poorer backgrounds. We are proud to partner with the university in making Russell Group education more available to pupils from poorer backgrounds. Hans van Mourik BroekmanPrincipal, Liverpool College• Fiona Millar says that "converting all academies back into maintained schools would be a massive and costly undertaking" (Education, 11 June). But this is not what David Wolfe actually says in his Education Law Journal article. What would be expensive would be to transfer land ownership. But that isn't necessary – local authorities don't own the land of foundation schools, including voluntary-aided schools, but they remain maintained schools.Wolfe demonstrates that funding agreements can be overridden to bring academies into line with maintained schools, with the local authority as the admissions authority for all schools. The crucial question, then, which Fiona Millar doesn't address, is what a Labour government should do about chains of academies "sponsored" – ie owned and controlled – by private organisations. But the full integration of academies into a reconstructed – and democratised – local authority system requires that no school is controlled by an external private organisation. (I do not refer to denominational schools here: that's a separate issue.) It only requires the secretary of state to terminate the funding agreements with sponsors, including their control of governing bodies by appointees.If a school wants to continue a partnership with an ex-sponsor, as with any external organisation, it should be able to do so, but this does not require any power to be handed over to it from the reconstituted governing body. Let's see how many of these millionaires and overpaid officers who run chains of academies retain their enthusiasm for education when they are asked to support schools, but not control them.Richard HatcherBirmingham AcademiesSchoolsPrivate schoolsUniversity of LiverpoolHigher educationguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds...
Forget the US model. British academics should aspire to offer more than just intellectual fig leaves for policymakersFirst there was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. More recently, we had Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Cass Sunstein's Nudge: for years, it seems, big ideas have been heading our way across the Atlantic. It is hard to think of many similarly catchy slogans that have gone the other way of late – Tony Giddens' notion of "the third way" may be one.Some people think that is a problem. They are worried that Britain has been failing to produce big ideas that policymakers can use. They want to convert academic ideas into policy relevance and shake up the bureaucrats. Phillip Blond, who recently wrote a controversial article in Chatham House's magazine, is one of them. Francis Maude is another: he wants politicians to be able to appoint senior civil servants so that fresh thinking can enter Whitehall.It is certainly true that in comparison with their US counterparts, British civil servants mingle relatively little with thinktank policy wonks or academics. In Washington, by contrast, yesterday's professor or analyst is often today's presidential appointee. Thinktanks play a powerful and prominent role in Washington life. Public policy institutes at such places as Princeton and Harvard attract not only students keen to break into government but professors whose worth is measured by their public profile.And because every president since Harry Truman seems to feel the need to be associated with a doctrine, he and his advisers are always in the market for the next mantra to shape an era. So should British academics become more American? The real question is whether such a change is desirable.The man from the ministry may not know best. But does the man from the thinktank know better? I doubt it. For one thing, the thinktanker is often young and inexperienced, without the resources to conduct serious research or the institutional memory that allows a deeper understanding of background.And thinktanks are odd things. Most are funded by rich men's largesse and are therefore driven by ideology one way or another. This is why Thatcher and Reagan, at the dawn of the thinktank golden age, deployed them against their own civil servants. There is really only one test of value for money when you are bankrolling a thinktank and that is influence, and impact.And are big ideas the kind of ideas worth having anyway? They age badly for one thing and quickly look shopworn. Moreover, it's hard to think of many scholars whose best work has been directed explicitly towards such a goal. Take the example of Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, who moved from the rarified world of international relations theory to the heart of Washington as head of the state department policy planning staff. Yet compared with her early, rather theoretical, articles in professional journals, the stuff that got her noticed was (at least in my judgment) thin gruel. Do we need more books like her The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with our Values in a Dangerous World? It was lavishly praised by two former secretaries of state and one former national security adviser, and it certainly did not stop her landing an important job in the first Obama administration. But none of that alters its superficiality or its short shelf-life.The tendency in recent government policy here to demand demonstrable policy relevance or public "impact" from academics shows how far this mindset has spread. It may or may not produce some policy product. But what it will do is jeopardise British universities' ability to do what they have done so well for so long: world-class research. These days both government and business demand value for money when they fund academia, and this makes it harder and more vital to insist that there are many ways to demonstrate the value of ideas, not just policy relevance.Let me not be misunderstood: most scholars see themselves contributing in one way or another to the illumination, and sometimes, the potential resolution, of the problems, anxieties and dilemmas of our times. And a good thing too. But to say that the test of a good idea is that policymakers pick it up seems hopelessly limited. An awful lot of policymakers would not recognise wisdom if it came up and shook their hand: they are extremely busy, partisan hustlers driven increasingly by the short term.Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, the two US economists at the centre of a recent storm over the scholarly evidence behind austerity across the eurozone, have claimed, probably rightly, that those who enacted these policies would have followed them anyway: their articles, in other words, provided a kind of intellectual fig leaf. But there was a time when intellectuals aspired to offer more than fig leaves, and those who still do should be supported, not trashed.ThinktanksHigher educationUnited StatesCivil serviceFrancis MaudeConservativesUS politicsEconomicsEconomic policyMark Mazowerguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds...