Fair fight for HE

Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley

 

 

Letter  Guardian Education  24/06/08

 

 

Mike Baker raises some important points about A-levels

 http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2285812,00.html

While it’s true that only a minority gain three grade As, the general rise in standards at A-level is to be welcomed, though it reflects a situation where more and more young people feel they have to “go to uni or die” to secure employment and avoid McJobs.

However, the invention of the A* is a desperate attempt by the government to ensure the A-level continues as the main currency for admission to higher education. It may already be too late as, in addition to preparing their students for the increasing array of individual university entrance exams, many of the leading independent schools are signing up for the Cambridge Pre-U.

Welcomed by elite universities, this new qualification returns to the original two-year linear A-level designed for 5% of higher education entrants in 1951. The Pre-U will guarantee what private school parents are paying for: entry to elite universities. With variable fees in 2010, income rather than academic performance will then be key to selection.

We should campaign for comprehensive higher education. Rather than rearranging the A-level deck chairs, we also need a mandatory general diploma for everybody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Desperate diplomacy’ turns to meltdown

 

Martin Allen

 

 

The Government’s attempts at implementing the specialist diplomas - the cornerstone of the 2005 14-19 White Paper - continue to stumble. Earlier this year in a  effort to restore momentum, Children, Schools and  Families minister Ed Balls announced three more additional diploma lines in humanities, science and modern languages and a new ‘extended’ diploma worth four and a half A-levels. While some commentators suggested  this represented a change of direction and an indication that Balls and Gordon Brown wanted to return to the Tomlinson proposals, the National Union of Teachers Easter conference considered it amounted to  ‘desperate diplomacy’ by the Government in the context of continued ambivalence towards the diplomas from headteachers and universities.

 

 

The extent of the crisis facing the Government over its 14-19 reforms has been reflected in the publication of a hastily constructed ‘14-19 Strategies’ document in March, which confirms Balls’ earlier announcement and then in May, by an announcement conceding that only 20,000 students, rather than the 50 000 originally hoped for, would be starting the first batch of diplomas this September. Ministers argue that this will ensure ‘quality’, but Government may be hard pressed to ensure that even this figure is not optimistic.

 

 

A Times Educational Supplement (March 23rd) survey of institutions listed in the second diploma cohort found schools surprised about being named, or admitting joining consortiums through fear of loosing out on funding, rather than on the basis of any definite plans. While in marked contrast to Government claims about over 100 universities and colleges supporting the diplomas the Times Higher Education Supplement (May 15th) reported only ‘patchy and piecemeal’ involvement from Higher Education.

 

 

Needing all the friends it can get, New Labour has called on the support of Blair’s biographer, Dr Anthony Seldon, Headmaster of leading fee-paying school Wellington College.  However Seldon is only committing his franchise school the new Wellington Academy to the diplomas (Wellington College is only ‘hoping to’) yet another example of how different types of schools will increasingly offer different types of qualifications to different types of learners.

 

 

In contrast to many of the Government’s critics who concentrate primarily on design or logistical issues and on the manner in which the diplomas have been rushed through without proper consultation with practitioners, the NUT conference motion also raises major educational and curriculum questions about the diplomas. It reaffirms the Union’s critique of current vocational qualifications, arguing that the diplomas will not provide an adequate education for young people faced with the challenges of the 21st century and highlights the dangers of ‘functional skills’ replacing maths and English.

 

 

With Government now facing a potential meltdown over the diplomas it is time to intensify our opposition  not only to the diplomas but also to the vocational-academic divide behind what is essentially a new ‘14+’ and argue for a mandatory entitlement to a good general education for all young people. Here the NUT’s proposals for a multi-level diploma guaranteeing a variety of learning experiences for everyone, point the way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cambridge Pre-U: elitism goes marching on

Martin Allen                                                                                                                 

Post-16 Educator    March-April 2008

 

The Cambridge Pre-U, an alternative qualification to A-level, currently being piloted by schools in the Independent sector is set to receive the  backing  of  QCA, the government exam watchdog.  In contrast to the modular AS-A2 system used at A-level, the Pre-U returns to the more traditional linear approach.  With assessment of AS-A2 now increasingly ‘task based’- aiming to test a variety of analytical or interpretive skills, Pre-U’s creators want to restore the importance of essay writing and the end of course final examination. 

 

 According to Tony Little, Headmaster of Eton, (The Times. 20/11/2006) ‘Pre-U will offer pupils more stimulation and a system of testing that rewards creativity and lateral thinking. A-levels, he complains, only teach students to ‘think inside a very small box’ and discriminate against ‘highly imaginative students’, whose answers were often marked down because they are considered too sophisticated. ‘We want the best courses that challenge our students’. For Graham Able, Head of Dulwich College, Pre-U represents   a return to the original idea of A-level as a qualification for university. To gain the full Pre-U, students take three Principal subjects, but also complete a research project and a ‘Global Perspectives’ portfolio. Cambridge claim it will be ‘exciting to teach’ and develop ‘an independent and self-directed style of learning’. Pre-U will, they argue, ensure a subject’s ‘academic integrity’. 

 

Is the reason for the emergence of the Pre-U really concern about pedagogy and the need to ‘liberate learning’? The Pre-U reflects a style of learning that has constituted the ‘cultural capital’ of elite institutions, but this, like the AS /A2 approach also has its limitations. Despite almost every announcement about improved pass rates being accompanied by accusations about A-levels now being too easy, nobody has been able to prove categorically that standards have fallen. The real reasons for the emergence of Pre-U are somewhat different. A-level entries have risen to over 800,000 and pass rates have reached 97%. With 1 in 4 candidates now receiving an A grade, independent schools, despite a new A* grade being introduced, can no longer rely on the A-level being a ‘gold standard’. Pre-U principal subjects will therefore have 9 different grades.

 

 The Pre-U is unashamedly elitist. Its main purpose is to ensure that top schools can use their vastly superior resources to restore their positional advantage. Like A* A-levels, will mean, as the Daily Telegraph, January 23rd, assured its readers that  the independent schools are ‘likely to tighten their grip on the leading universities’  

             

 Needless to say, alongside independent schools  and  representation from the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust,  Russell universities, in marked contrast to their attitude to the new specialist diplomas, have been actively involved the development of Pre-U. Over 20 syllabuses are expected to be available from September 2008, the same time that a new A* grade in A-level begins. This new triumph of elitism can be contrasted with the failure to persuade large numbers of young people to forsake the A-level and sign up for a vocational middle track. In this respect, the Pre-U represents a reconstructed upper track. For the Independent sector, mindful of their charitable status, QCA recognition will be a double-edged sword. With qualifications now serving primarily as credentials providing access to higher education and the labour market, rather than diminishing the ‘examinations culture’ as Cambridge claim, Pre-U merely creates a new set of hurdles and restores periodic advantage.  

 

 If Pre-U becomes the new gold standard, then schools in the state sector will want to emulate it and, as with the A-level, will find ways of  subverting the Pre-Us ’distinctiveness’,  even if this will be more difficult. Ironically, the disingenuous agenda of the Independent sector means that reformers,  even if they are critical of its current design, may find themselves in the invidious position of at least partially defending the A-level as a qualification for the masses and, after the Tomlinson farce,  push for real alternatives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why we need a general diploma accessible to all

 

 

Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley

The Guardian 15/04/08

 

 

The government’s new strategy for 14-19 follows the peak in numbers of 18-year-olds entering higher education (42.5% in 2005-06), along with those achieving two A-levels (34% in 2006).

 

Although more than 80% remain in full-time education for a year after the compulsory school-leaving age, increased participation has been accompanied by increased division. The upper years of secondary education replicate past divisions as tripartism is reinstated at tertiary level. It is in this context that the government has launched its specialist diplomas in five vocational areas from September and in 17 “lines” to which all 14- to 16-year-olds will be entitled by 2013.

 

The academic-vocational divisions in many secondary schools will be intensified by further divisions between schools and also between schools and the FE colleges that are likely to be the main diploma providers in local consortia. About 100,000 14- to 16-year-olds currently attend FE colleges for part of the week but if, as the government wants, up to 40% of the cohort follow them on the diploma, colleges could become the new tertiary moderns.

 

For, despite government claims that nearly 80% of schools have signed up for a local diploma consortium and that 140,000 places will be available from September 2009, closer inspection suggests the actual numbers will be well short. The strategy document therefore announces diplomas in more academic subjects and a new “extended” diploma supposedly worth four A-levels. It hints also that all current standalone vocational qualifications like BTecs will be absorbed into diplomas.

 

Diplomas replace applied A-levels, which thus join a long line of failed vocational qualifications supposedly promoting new workplace skills and designed to motivate the “non-academic”.

 

Having conceded that the diplomas are not really directly vocational but more “applied”the government seeks to revamp the faltering modern apprenticeship as a work-based alternative. But many private-sector employers do not need them, and modern apprentices only receive an “allowance” and no guarantee of a job.

 

 Meanwhile, students continue to flock to A-levels as the only reliable route to HE. But for private schools and the elite universities they supply, A-levels are no longer the gold standard. They prefer the new Cambridge Pre-U qualification. The Pre-U is unashamedly elitist, designed to re-establish the exclusivity of top schools while leaving A-levels - to which there are 800,000-plus entries each year - to the masses. And the 14-19 strategy announces that it will no longer support the international baccalaureate as an alternative to the Pre-U in all local authorities.                                                               

 

If private provision crams pupils for the Pre-U and other elite university entry exams, A-levels should secure entry to the next tier down of campus-based teaching universities, while diplomas may serve for the million-plus group of former polytechnics. Raised fees in 2010 will heighten these divisions by subject and institution. 

 

Rather than trying to resurrect Tomlinson’s “overarching” certificate, which Labour rejected in 2006, by “Tomlinsonising” the diplomas, a new multi-level general diploma accessible to all students is needed. Such a qualification must safeguard the right to a common core curriculum, while at the same time enabling genuine specialisation. It should also be binding on all institutions, including the private ones; otherwise diversity and division can only widen. To ensure this would require renegotiation of the current relationship between central government and schools, limiting school autonomy.

     

                                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SATs : It’s time to go

 

 

 

Martin Allen

Socialist Teachers’Alliance NUT Conference Bulletin 2008

 

The Government’s ‘standards’ agenda continues to falter. As the increases in the number of children meeting national targets begin to level off, research by Professor Robin Alexander and his Cambridge Review team show that for many pupils, reading standards have not significantly improved since the 1950s and point to the “persistence of a yawning gap between high and low attaining pupils – bigger than in most comparable countries”. In addition, OCED data shows Britain has fallen from 7^th to 17^th place in reading levels and from 8^th to 24^th in maths.

 

 Teachers remain in the grip of SATs, but optimism about the future has increased as a result of votes at NAHT conferences and also publications and policy statements that offer ‘alternative’ approaches. The General Teaching Council has called for more reliable types of performance data than SATs and league tables, a bank of tests for teachers to use when they consider it appropriate and the use of cohort sampling rather than blanket testing to monitor standards.

 

Though they still have their limitations - teachers would continue to plough through the various National Curriculum levels and remain locked into the culture of constant targeting and reporting, - coming from the professional body responsible for teaching, the GTC proposals reflect a serious lack of confidence in Government.

 

Anxious to be seen as responding to discontent over the reliability of SATs, the Government’s 2006 consultation document.  Making Good Progress proposed a move away from ‘raw data’ towards a focus on individual pupils, where testing it will be shorter, more flexible and children will be tested “when ready”. But all Making Good Progress can promise is twice yearly testing!  Government are not planning to end the culture of SATs (end of key stage tests will still continue) neither are there any moves to abolish school performance tables.

 

The current impasse gives campaigners and teacher union’s an excellent opportunity to reclaim the initiative by publishing and popularising its own alternatives– not only for assessment. but also to the stranglehold of the National Curriculum and the shortcomings of the Government’s interpretation  of standards. With the Union moving into action on pay and attracting a national profile; it’s time to build the campaign.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cruellest con of all

     

 

Patrick Ainley 

Times Higher Education Supplement 07/02/08

 

 

Widening participation is a cruel con but the people academics fool the most with it are themselves.  The government target of 50 per cent of 18-30 year-olds entering higher education by 2010 presents itself as a professionalisation of the proletariat but it disguises a proletarianisation of the professions.  Not only the academic profession but the professions which many graduates will enter – if they are lucky. 

 

                                                                                                          

Occupations of all sorts now calling themselves professional (not merely in the sense of doing a good job and being full-time as opposed to amateur, like footballers or criminals) have expanded with the decline of industrial labour and the expansion of service and office employment, especially for women.  These occupations have also professionalized themselves by their association with higher education.  Teachers were a case in point, moving from the teacher training colleges to Departments of Education in universities.  Now teacher education, as it briefly became, has once again reverted to teacher training in competences dictated by the central government Training and Development Agency, even though still nominally within higher education. 

 

                                                                                  

Widening participation on a reduced unit of resource was also a recipe for turning higher into further education.  Without the extra support necessary for ‘non-traditional’ students, ie. those without the top A-level grades guaranteeing their preparedness for traditional HE, it is impossible for them to reach the standards of academic literacy and numeracy demanded by the unchanged HE that lecturers persist in inflicting on the new mass of students. 

 

 

Meanwhile, the selecting elite have used widening participation to cream ‘bright working-class’ applicants in the way the grammars used to do.  As has been pointed out many times, this only makes the situation worse for the rest of us. Academics have only themselves to blame for this.  Partly we were arrogant in thinking that what we had to teach was what everyone else wanted and needed to know.  We did not recognise that knowledge is not power and that most of our students are not in the personal, social or economic situation to be empowered by it.  Partly we were stupid in not seeing that our eagerness to enlighten the masses entailed levels of support that are unavailable to us.  

 

 

Worse, since the polytechnics – as Tyrrell Burgess wittily said at the time – were allowed to become universities to disguise the fact many universities had become polytechnics, there is now no surviving alterative to academic HE.  Instead, all new and old universities compete on the uneven playing field of a traditional curriculum. 

 

 

When academics belatedly realise that ‘more means different’, our only option is to ‘dumb down’ towards competence-based programmes like many of the two-year Foundation ‘degrees’. 

 

 

This is the likely future for the vocational diplomas and apprenticeships government is conjuring up.  Since no schools want to run the dips and employers aren’t going to pay for them, they will predictably be picked up by desperate FE and then passed on as F‘d’s to what are becoming the training universities. 

 

 

 

Here comes the ‘Burgerluarette’ !

 

Martin Allen 

          

Campaign Teacher   Spring 2008

 

News that McDonalds are offering  employees a  ‘training’ equivalent to A-levels  got its fair share of media attention at the end of January, particularly when it became known that QCA was recognising it - along with courses from two other major companies, the airline Flybe and Network Rail.

 

 

From January 2008, McDonald’s will pilot what it is calling a basic shift manager’s course. The course will cover everything the 7,000 managers of McDonald’s outlets across the country need to know about the day-to-day running of a restaurant. This ranges from basic operational requirements, to finances, marketing and human resources. Learning on this course will be divided up into credits. The standard of these credits will equate with GCSE grades, A-levels or a national Diploma. 

 

 

Though an employee will not be completing a full A-level equivalent, only part of one, when 17 year olds are legally required to participate in education and training from 2013, a ‘Mcqualification’ will probably suffice (the fast food giant could design a course which was equal to a whole A-level). Gordon Brown quickly gave support, while skills minister  John Denham said it was an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications.

 

 

Criticising McDonalds is not an example of ‘academic snobbery’ towards practical/vocation learning as some daily newspapers implied.  In  an increasingly uncertain labour market, most teachers would welcome government backing for good quality vocational training delivered by  reputable employers preferably in collaboration with FE colleges, but many will be bewildered if not appalled at why this has been extended to the fast food chain. 

 

 

McDonalds have been exploiting youngsters  from the earliest opportunity, not just with the ‘Mcfood’ they sell to thousands everyday, but also through  ‘Mcjobs’ fitted around school and college hours and which any self respecting teenager seeking to earn a bit of cash will tell you, are the lowest of the low. Promoting ’Mclearning’ is the latest attempt at extending  ‘McDonaldisation’ into the lives of kids and young people. 

 

 

QCA support  for McDonalds is particularly nauseating, considering the Government’s own vocational diplomas have been plagued with problems, not winning support from parents, headteachers or universities and when many Modern Apprenticeship schemes continue to flounder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crisis of childhood. A critique of the Children’s Plan

 

 

Richard Murgatroyd and Martin Allen

 

Morning Star  04/01/08

 

 

New Labour’s recently published Children’s Plan sets itself the modest target of making Britain the “best place in the world to grow up.” Unfortunately, the mixture of good intentions, technocratic changes and small-scale reforms on offer don’t add up to sort of radical vision that is needed to tackle the growing crisis of childhood. But a little caution is needed before the left throws this particular baby out with the bath water.

 

 

For, whatever its other shortcomings, the plan does at least identify the real issues that are blighting the lives of so many children in the real world - child poverty, the commercialisation of childhood, the near-replacement of independent outside play with indoor screen-based entertainment, fatty foods and childhood obesity. Hidden away in chapter 3 is also the first real indication that the current version of scholastic aptitude tests (SATs) might be replaced by a more personalised “test when ready” approach, even if this does not guarantee that comparative school performance tables will necessarily disappear. The plan’s proposals are also wide-ranging and include many things that reformers would want to support, such as more and better playgrounds, youth clubs, the integration of children’s services and more effective use of school resources in the community.

 

Children spend only one-sixth of their waking hours at school, so it is perhaps surprising that so much of the plan focuses on education.

The reality is that the plan has been published at a time of increased concern that the school “standards agenda,” which is still a major cornerstone of government policy, is running out of steam, the education system is not quite as “world class” as it should be and that there appears little chance of reaching the 90 per cent A-C GCSE target by 2020. In many respects, the plan is largely an extension of the standards agenda. If things were not going wrong for Labour with schools, it’s questionable whether it would have even reached print. For example, a whole chapter is devoted to the government’s proposals for “staying on” in education, such as raising of the leaving age and creating new vocational diplomas. It also reiterates that every secondary school should have specialist, trust or academy status and a business or university partner.

 

 

Libertarians from both the left and the right might fear a further extension of the “surveillance culture” that is creeping into more areas of family and personal life, but the plan is careful in its language and its tone and designed to be supportive rather than coercive, while many of the proposals are too shallow and far too limited to represent anything Big Brother-like. Pointing the finger at schools and teachers is another matter. The plan continues to do its fair share of this - “weak and failing” teachers are criticised, schools are set a minimum standard of 30 per cent of students attaining five A-C GCSEs and, in future, all teachers are to be expected to gain masters degrees. Labour strategists, however, understand that blaming parents, who are ever more financially overstretched despite working longer and working harder, could spell electoral catastrophe.

 

The only section of parents directly addressed by the plan are from “disadvantaged” areas. These will receive expert parenting advice, encouragement to access Sure Start and 20,000 subsidised places in nurseries for up to 15 hours a week.

 

 

A disappointing number of the commitments contained in the Children’s Plan are either too small-scale to make a difference or are unlikely to be adequately funded. Some spending commitments are paltry, the largest being £220 million on playgrounds over the next three years. Most kids would soon be able to calculate that the yearly spending increases are unlikely to be more than their monthly pocket money when divided by the total number of children in the population.This last point is going to become ever more relevant as Brown’s bubble economy deflates over the next few years, squeezing public-sector resources. Perhaps that explains the emphasis on information and consultation, with new parenting advisers, personal progress records and new focus groups called “parents’ panels.”

 

 

However, other key proposals need to be carefully considered. While reformers have rightly sought to extend subsidised nursery places as a means of liberating women and teaching co-operative and communal values to the young, the plan clearly envisages more target-based, formalistic and standardised early years provision. This raises the question, is it really a good idea to ratchet down the sorts of prescriptive regimes to ever younger children?

 

 

Some commentators on the plan have also noted that many action points only involve publishing and commissioning further reviews and reports, the most important of which will look at the commercialisation of childhood and on the risks of video and internet games. There is also a lot of technocratic tweaking and rearranging of departmental deckchairs on offer, but these sorts of organisational solutions will not transform those aspects of everyday life in advanced consumer capitalist societies that are fuelling the crisis of childhood. And this perhaps brings us to the real empty hole in the plan - the lack of any clear vision. For there is nothing at all to suggest that the government is ready to start questioning the free-market dogma that has helped fuel the crisis of childhood. Instead, the plan continues to parrot the increasingly empty claim that unlimited opportunities and personal fulfilment are available to all in a globalised economy.

                                                                                               Nevertheless, the publication of the first ever Children’s Plan will hopefully encourage wider discussion and debate among socialists and radicals about the condition of our young people. The left urgently needs to sharpen up its thinking about contemporary childhood. That calls for some honest discussion about the relationship between young people and their parents or carers. About the ways in which young people are being encouraged to think and act. About the limits of the education system in a society like this. About the ways in which parents may be able to reclaim the spaces in our children’s lives that have been colonised by commercialism, consumerism and the state, but also about the way in which the “workaholic” culture inhabited by many parents actually props up the sort of economy that new Labour says that it wants to protect children against.

 

Above all, the left needs to ask more searching questions about the way in which our young people are being prepared to respond politically to the economic and environmental crisis that they are likely to experience later in their lives. If youth is the future, what next?   

 

Functional for who? A quick assessment of the new functional skills

Martin Allen   

Post-16 Educator  March-April 2008

‘Functional skills’ are being piloted in 1000 schools and colleges. Part of the Tomlinson working group proposals for 14-19 education, their introduction is a response to demands from employer representative for higher standards in literacy and numeracy amongst young people. Completing functional skills will be a necessary requirement for moving on to a GCSE grade C pass in English, maths and ICT from 2012. They will also be mandatory in the specialist diplomas.

 

 

Despite being promoted as part of the ‘new’ secondary curriculum, the reality is that functional skills are hardly new. Looking at the specifications, teachers and lecturers who have delivered ‘key skills’ and adult ‘basic skills’ programmes will quickly spot similarities with these existing programmes. For example as in key skills Communication units, Functional English will be divided into speaking and listening, reading and writing. Unlike key skills however, there will be no requirements to submit course-work. 

 

 

Even if students have often used them as ’second chance’ qualifications -recruiting universities accept them as alternatives to GCSE passes in English and maths- Key Skills were designed to be ‘generic competences’ reflecting new kinds of working practices. This was particularly the case with the ‘wider skills’ of Working with Others, Improving Own Learning and Problem Solving. Even is elite schools and ‘selecting’ universities largely ignored them, Key Skills were promoted as being important for everybody.

 

 

In comparison, Functional Skills are seen as ‘compensatory’ skills. This is reinforced by the QCA’s decision to rebrand them as ‘stand alone’ units rather than embed them into GCSE syllabuses and to assess them on a ‘test and task’ basis, details of which will emerge from the pilots. Functional Skills are also distinguished from the more ‘finely tuned’ and higher level ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’ (PLTS)

 

 

Having to complete additional tests in basics before proceeding to GCSE is unlikely to inconvenience ‘high flyer’ students - schools will be able to enter these students early, maybe even during key stage 3. More of an issue is the sizeable number of students whose access to the rest of the GCSE syllabus may now be restricted because they cannot clear the functional skills hurdle.

 

 

The replacement of English by what is essentially literacy instruction will not only impoverish students, but will worry English teachers trying to safeguard the more creative aspects of their subject. It is a further example of how divisions are appearing in the upper years of secondary schools.

 

 

Once again the push towards this style of learning raises questions of alternatives. We should be concerned about the types of skills young people need in the workplace, but we should also recognise that employers’ leaders, regardless of changes in the curriculum, have consistently criticised schools and derided the abilities of their students. Surveys also show that many individual employers are unclear about which skills they really need. Many reformers would support the inclusion of ‘basic’ education for those needing it, but as part of a general core-curriculum that provides a variety of learning experiences in a variety of settings. Unfortunately there is little current discussion about this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping selection? UCL and the Camden Academy

Patrick Ainley  

Letter   Education Guardian   27/11/07 

 

Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London and chair of the Russell Group of universities, is sponsoring a non-selective mixed academy in his borough of Camden as a way of widening participation to elite higher education (A university is the best kind of sponsor for an academy, Education Guardian November 20)       

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2213577,00.html).

 

I take it, then, that UCL will now be dropping its use of specially selective super academic pre-U tests and similar for medicine, law and other subjects. Or will the new University of Camden London run in parallel to the existing University College London?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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