That is as true in our universities and colleges as anywhere. Last year, the UCU took on 7,000 cases for individual members treated badly at work and our fine record of winning redress for them, including financial settlements, shows that we are a powerful and effective advocate for staff.

In the past year alone, the UCU has used its collective power to try to defend members’ pension rights, protect jobs and oppose cuts to our sector and its staff.

Many historians consider the period from the 1950s to the 1970s to be the golden age of trade unionism and say that our best years are behind us. However, the need for trade unions is stronger now than it has been for a generation. We have a real opportunity, but can we take it?

The challenge is to be as relevant in today’s world as we were 30, 40 or even 100 years ago. Because, despite our successes, past and present, union membership overall remains too low and support within the general population for our values is weak.

As much as it hurts to say, in the eyes of many of those we need to recruit, we can be seen as old-fashioned, and sometimes self-serving and self-interested. We can say this is unfair and we can blame politicians and the press as much as we like, but the truth is that unions, including the UCU, need to be better at engaging with society as it is, not as we would like it to be or as it may have been 40 years ago.

So how do we go about achieving this? The recent ballot of UCU members on change delivered a clear mandate to the forthcoming UCU Congress to transform our relationship with members and to give them a greater say in how the union is run. I hope we take that opportunity.

The changes I am proposing for the UCU are modest sounding but important and, if the recent ballot is anything to go by, extremely popular with members.

First, I propose to reduce the size of our National Executive Committee. Our NEC is currently bigger than that of Unison, which has 10 times as many members. What we need is to create a more effective, representative body comparable in size to those of other unions.

The money saved – more than £600,000 over my term of office – will be used to provide direct support for members and their representatives at the coalface. This change was supported by 88.6% of members in the recent ballot.

Second, I propose to give members a vote on any employer offer that the majority of our negotiators believe to be final, before the union takes big decisions about whether to accept, reject and take action. This can be done quickly and cheaply using modern technology, and it puts our members in the driving seat. This change was supported by 85.1% of members in the recent ballot.

Third, I propose that we elect our lay national negotiators not from the annual conference floor but from the members themselves using one-member, one-vote. This change was supported by 82.1% of members in the recent ballot.

I have heard it argued that these measures will weaken democracy in the UCU but I, and those who voted, believe they will strengthen it. Consulting members before we take action is what gives us legitimacy in our struggles. Letting members decide who represents them at the negotiating table makes us more accountable, not less. Investing in our local activists, rather than in internal bureaucracy, will deliver a union that is closer to its members.

Reform of the UCU is not about turning us towards the political Left or Right. It is about turning us towards our members. That means using our resources for the things members want us to fight on. It means choosing our battles rather than fighting ‘total war’, as some have argued. And it means using our brilliant staff to concentrate on supporting members, running campaigns and building a credible alternative to the cuts, rather than writing paper after paper for internal committees.

People will join unions if they see us standing up for them, they will stay with us if they see us listening to them and they will become active if they think their voice counts.

Richmond upon Thames council may not be alone in deciding to do this, but the chop-logic of its combined post-16 education policies still has the population fuming.

Coincidentally, the £25m saved is exactly what they need to allow five schools to open sixth forms in a borough with one of the more successful FE colleges, an adult education college and no surplus demand for such places. Furthermore, librarians in the borough have – until now – been playing a particularly strong role in supporting schools and colleges in both formal and informal adult learning.

The local authority says it has no choice because schools could get their way, in any case, by quitting and joining the free-for-all dash for academy and free school status, even though the sixth forms will be too small to be viable from the outset. So we can see the monumental mess looming, not only for FE colleges but the eventual erosion of A-level ‘choice’ for sixth-formers hoping for university. Or can we? Off the record, council officials admit that a head start in this race would allow schools to raid neighbouring borough catchment areas. And, if the schools take students from the colleges, so what?

Move east across the capital to Newham and you have an even more bizarre arrangement whereby a group of exclusive private schools including Eton is opening a state-supported sixth form, to compete with an already exemplary sixth form college (NewVIc), FE college and five thriving sixth forms. When asked by the media to justify the move, the new head Richard Cairns replied: ‘All we’re doing is providing a choice.’

But this is simply not true or necessary, Eddie Playfair, principal of NewVIc, insists. In a recent letter to the Guardian, having analysed the demographics, he said: This project is far from being a response to genuine local need. In fact it risks dissipating scarce funding and segregating young people. It may suit its advocates to ignore the facts and promote themselves as sponsors of social mobility, but their track record so far is the precise opposite.’

All this arises from the Coalition Government granting new ‘freedoms’. Ministers claim to be tackling disadvantage by freeing institutions to follow the market, but that is not how increasingly beleaguered further education staff and managers I have spoken to see it. They watch with alarm as the likes of former Express Journalist Toby Young and the head teacher Katherine Birbalsingh – darling of the 2010 Tory party conference where she chose to rubbish her comprehensive school – both plan new academically elitist schools where there will be no skills teaching under the age of 16.

So what is the solution?

To an increasing extent there is an attitude of ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ And so we see Barnfield college pushing to become the first FE college for profit and pleasure, Birmingham Metropolitan and Stockport are talking about going mutual, and all colleges are talking to one another about shared services agreements. Then there is the Gazelle group of colleges out to promote entrepreneurship ‘grazing in the wide open spaces of the savannah that is FE’ as Dan Taubman, senior national education official for the UCU described it to me. Also, we have Ofsted chief Michael Wilshire positively encouraging colleges to reach out – forget the depleted resources – and sponsor academies.

But haven’t we been here before? Many will recall with horror the enterprising zeal of the 1990s – an earlier age of austerity and cuts described as ‘efficiency savings’ – that went rotten. Then, I was FE Editor on the TES and remember Further Education Funding Council Chief Executive, William Stubbs, berating me for failing to report on the ‘genius’ of entrepreneurial colleges, which he named: Halton, Bilston, Clarendon, Stoke-on-Trent etc. Ministerial confidence that nothing could or would go wrong in any of these establishments was equally unwavering.

But when the press did report on them it was for entirely different reasons – either they were reckoned to have failed spectacularly, as with Derby Wilmorton and Bilston, or were victims of malpractice and inadequate governance and leadership. Whistleblowers from within Natfhe were invariably the media’s sources of intelligence, while ministers continued in a state of denial. Inquiries by luminaries, such as Shattock on Wilmorton and Nolan on ethics ensued, resulting in the red tape and constraints which the government is now dismantling.

Bilston is probably the closest to an example of what is emerging now, with the college spanning all sorts of mini colleges, often based on good intentions located in and often run by local communities Big Society-style. In the end, however, it was one of a group of ‘rogue’ colleges accused of defrauding the government of millions by misusing educational funds, a claim that is contested by some to this day.

With new structures, new governance and new partnerships being promoted, following BIS’s tearing up of the model instruments and articles of governance, who is to say history will not repeat itself?

Already, we have seen how easily funding freedoms around Apprenticeships have been exploited, as reported recently on the BBC Panorama show ‘The Great Apprenticeship Scandal’, which found upwards of £250m wasted last year.

Having followed this throughout very closely, I reckon none of this would have been exposed – or at least not until much worse damage had been done – were it not for the dogged persistence of Nick Linford, Managing Editor of the new brash player in the education media FE Week. His accusations and claims of misuse, waste of funds and short 12-week training programmes masquerading as Apprenticeships were repeatedly rejected at press conferences by Simon Waugh, Chief Executive of the National Apprenticeship Service, who stood down last month. He insisted NAS was monitoring and assuring quality. But evidence mounted and Opposition MPs, notably Gordon Marsden, railed against them until the FE and Skills Minister John Hayes took action.

But that was not before he announced a record 440,000 learners starting an apprenticeship in 2010-11 – a figure that surely must be radically revised downwards in the light of the evidence. Can training schemes such as those at Morrisons supermarket, which has enrolled 40 per cent of its workforce on an apprenticeship with the private training provider Elmfield Training, really be deemed full Apprenticeships? What does this do to the brand image? And is it ethical that Mr Gerard Syddall, Elmfield’s director, should take a £3m dividend from a budget that came wholly from the SFA?

And it was not until the eve of the Panorama programme that Hayes announced that from now on all apprenticeships must be at least 12 months duration – nine months after the Skills Funding Agency had promised a crackdown on fraud and misuse of public money in the FE and skills sector, while admitting it was likely to get worse under government’s new sub-contracting arrangements. The extent of the concern was revealed in communications, leaked to FE Week between Geoff Russell, chief executive of the SFA, and Hayes. £11m had been lost to fraud or misuse in 2010-11 of which only £3m was accounted for. Police were involved in nine investigations, said the letter which revealed that the agency was pursuing 88 new allegations – ‘a record high’.

The real irony is that were the same rules and regulations that grew under Shattock, Nolan and the rest still in place, cowboy operations, exploitation, dead weight funding and excessive dividends from Apprenticeship schemes would be subject to ethical inquiries and in some cases deemed corrupt. What started under Labour as Train to Gain, where employers were rewarded for staff skills training they should have paid for themselves, continued under the Coalition in the guise of Apprenticeships.

Someone has to intervene and make sense of the disparate conflicting strands of education training policy before it is too late. This is a view emerging from the Parliamentary Skills Group, which I addressed at a recent seminar where concerns were expressed over the lack of joined up government. This is exemplified locally by Richmond upon Thames’s policies on cuts and nationally by a lack of synergy or coherence between DFE and BIS to the point where, to quote one speaker at the seminar, policies ‘may cut against each other’ with unintended and damaging consequences.

This seems to be increasingly the state of affairs between schools and FE where, if we are not careful, we will have an ultimately destructive free for all with the notion of ‘Winner take all’ which will not include the most disadvantaged.

A press release landed in my inbox this week with a typically ambiguous headline.

‘STUDENTS 1 – 0 UNIVERSITIES’ it read. Sounds a bit antagonistic, I thought, clicking on open. It turned out to refer to a piece of research conducted by a graduate recruitment service, which had found that 46% of the 596 students it had quizzed felt their university was overrated. The poll, the agency opined, served as a ‘timely reminder to universities that failing to deliver on the promise is all too easy’ at the point when the new funding regime is making competition for students a key consideration.

I’m constantly struck, when writing about higher education, by how entirely alien the university experience feels compared to when I was there in the late 1990s. Over the last year I’ve increasingly felt that that disparity is about to get even starker, and, of all the differences, this, perhaps, is the most fundamental: the sense of the student not just as a learner, but as a customer, not just a young person on the next stage of their education, but an investor, surveying the market, deciding how much they’re willing to stake, and naturally expecting a decent return.

That return, of course, is not intellectual agility for its own sake, but employability. When KMPG surveyed 1,000 students, school leavers and parents recently, 68% said that the most important thing about going to university was getting a qualification that led to a well-paid job. Just 12% went for the apparently embarrassingly anachronistic ideal of ‘getting a rounded education’.

The gulf with my own experience is hardly surprising: I started university in the last year before tuition fees were introduced. But as a wannabe journalist, thinking and writing about them quickly became part of my life, and has remained so ever since; melodically-challenged chants of ‘education is a right, not a privilege’ feel like the recurring soundtrack to my reporting career.

Those early stories feel rather quaint these days. ‘RIP Higher Education October 98’ reads the banner pictured hanging from a college window alongside my account of the protest billed by the student paper as ‘Oxford’s last stand against fees’ in May that year. (‘It was a really damn noisy march,’ was the curiously underwhelming conclusion of the student union president on this supposedly momentous occasion).

In the first week of the autumn term, when the £1,000 fees (imagine, just £1,000!) came into force – and in the same issue a feature about mobile phones boldly declared ‘everyone knows someone who’s got one’ – the story was the possibility of freshers planning to withhold payment of their fees in protest.

By spring four rebels were still standing firm, bringing the university an unexpected reputation for radicalism, but by Easter the student body’s enthusiasm for their cause had all but fizzled out.

By now editor of the paper, I wrote an editorial commenting on all ill-attended picket that warned, with all the sparkling insight of a sleep-deprived 20-year-old: ‘The tuition fee issue does need to be kept alive, because even if it seems acceptable to some people now, it will escalate.’

Thirteen years later, with most would-be students now facing a bill of £9,000 a year, I am still asking the same questions about what fees will mean for who gets a university education, and how they go about it. Whenever I’ve spoken to prospective students in the last year, the same theme has recurred: a hope the course they choose turns out to be ‘worth the money’.

Higher fees won’t necessarily put them off – they’re smart enough to understand that it’s not an upfront cost – but they are at great pains to make sure that when they’re paying back that gargantuan loan, they’re doing it as quickly as possible, and in a job it was worth taking on such debt for.

Recently I was trying to find out if school leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds were taking into account what kind of financial help – discounts on fees or cash bursaries – different universities offered as they made their applications. In fact, it turned out that at that stage they were much more focused on choosing a degree that would pay dividends. ‘If the course is good it should lead to me getting a really good job, so the money I’m taking out now shouldn’t be an issue,’ was a typical comment. They might consider variables like financial support further down the line, they conceded, but even then the message was clear: employability is all.

Of course students should have high expectations of university; of course they should be well-taught and feel their teachers are interested in their progress; and of course having a degree should improve their career chances. None of this means I don’t have the greatest respect for institutions striving to make sure their students get what they pay for.

But educating someone is not the same as helping them get a job.

How will university life change if the relationship between student and academic morphs into one between client and employee, and learners assess the curriculum with one eye on how relevant it will be when they go job-hunting? Will more of those who aren’t getting the grades they think they deserve be inclined to complain it’s because they’re not being taught properly? What about arts and humanities, already battered by the removal of funding for teaching?

The subjects that held up best in applications for the first year under the new fees regime were those tending to lead to lucrative careers: medicine, maths, sciences, engineering, law.

Are the subjects traditionally most closely associated with learning for learning’s sake doomed to become the become the preserve of mainly middle class students at elite institutions?

I believe students will suffer under this pressure too. It’s a terrible responsibility, at the age of 17 or 18, to decide what you want from your degree studies, to pick exactly the right course, and do everything perfectly when you get there. Presumably if you’re paying 27 grand for a university education, you’re far less likely than previous generations to squander your time on booze and soft drugs before getting kicked out half-way through – and that’s no bad thing in my book. Just because education is a right, not a privilege, doesn’t mean you should be blasé about it.

But there are plenty of other reasons why university doesn’t work out for some students on the first go: the wrong course, the wrong halls, the wrong people, not to mention all the practical and emotional challenges of your first experience of independent living and studying. It hardly seems the fairest time to expect them not to make mistakes. And I can’t imagine turning up in freshers’ week, gritting your teeth and thinking ‘it had better be worth it’, is much fun.

How cruel too that this era of suffocating compulsion to make your degree pay should coincide with some of the worst ever prospects for getting a job – in the final quarter of 2011 one in every five new graduates was unemployed – and the increasing necessity of doing unpaid work before you are even considered worthy of being rewarded for your efforts.

When I was at university the dreaded internship was barely heard of, something reserved only for the most chillingly ambitious of would-be management consultants.

Journalism has long been a career where work experience is key. But in my era that meant a fortnight on a local paper in any town or city where you had relatives, in the holidays, not three months subsisting on travel expenses alone in the heart of London, if you’re lucky enough to be able to live there rent-free.

I read a suggestion recently that any graduates looking for work should be using Twitter to sell themselves, and felt a real pang of sympathy.

One minute we’re warning them not to jeopardise their future prospects by posting ill-advised party pics on Facebook, the next we’re expecting them to be masters of social media manipulation.

Naturally the pressure is on careers services too to beef up their offerings and with them their institutions’ performance in the employability league tables. While 82% of the KMPG survey respondents were happy with the teaching they were getting, only 48% were satisfied with the careers advice on offer. More and more are services offering specialised training in key job-bagging skills like networking. But it is still academics who’ll be in the spotlight if particular options can’t deliver the real-world returns students expect, especially when, under the government’s proposals to make universities ‘more accountable to students than ever before’, universities have to put employment and salaries data for all undergraduate courses on their websites.

I’m sure the writer of the ‘STUDENTS 1 – 0 UNIVERSITIES’ headline was only being playful, looking for a teaser that would catch the reader’s eye. But to me it brought home perhaps the most toxic effect of the marketisation of higher education: the pitting of students and teachers against one another. I can’t believe that creates the kind of nurturing environment in which young minds flourish.

The boycott, coupled with UCU’s threat of legal action if IfL or the employers attempted to persecute anybody withholding payment, forced the government to announce an independent review into professionalism in further education in England.

The deep felt anger at the imposition of a mandatory fee for IfL membership reflected the growing frustration towards an organisation that had lost its way and was largely irrelevant to lecturers just wanting to do a good job. It was also a conduit to express opposition to ever-increasing workloads and demands.

Criticisms of IfL have been a consistent feature of UCU annual congress motions since 2008 and that attempt to impose a fee for the privilege of enduring such a mediocre set-up was the straw that finally broke camel’s back.

The successful boycott was an example of UCU responding to a grassroots issue. The member-led campaign successfully utilised the union’s resources at a national level including lobbying, press work, petitions, industrial action, legal challenges, negotiations and ongoing consultation and involvement of members.

So how did it go so wrong?

How did IfL go from being a professional body that most people in the sector had been asking for over many years to one which managed to unite lecturers and their employers in calling for its abolition?

UCU had warned in 2010 that the majority of staff saw little value in its services, with a survey showing 84% saying they would not pay any sort of fee on principle. Yet the opposition to the fee seemed to take IfL completely by surprise.

Others in the sector were less shocked that compelling staff, already suffering pay cuts and increases in pension contributions, to pay to join a body few had much confidence in was not going to be a popular move. The fact IfL could not see this was an indication for many of just how out of touch it was with staff concerns and problems.

However, there are other reasons too. Performing the role of regulator and acting as a voice for the profession was always going to be difficult to achieve. Being the body which could find its members guilty of professional misconduct, and potentially deprive them of their livelihood, sat uncomfortably with it also being their advocate.

IfL didn’t stand up to ministers when it was announced that the government wouldn’t financially support IfL anymore. During the period of moving to being self-financing, IfL largely refused to criticise government initiatives, at a time when the sector and its staff needed all the support they could get.

The tone used in IfL’s communications was always to look on the bright side and support the government and its policies. They didn’t ever reflect the anger and pain its members and the members of UCU and other unions were experiencing in terms of harsher management, especially around lesson observations and losses in jobs and provision.

Part of the reason for these failures was its governance processes which left real decision making to a small leadership group, often ignoring what its own Advisory Council suggested. In the end IfL made the fatal mistake of believing its own propaganda that everyone in the sector loved and wanted it.

As we move on from the IfL debacle it is important to note that throughout the campaign UCU has always been acutely aware of the need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The issue around professionalism in the sector was not put to bed in the panel’s report, which was merely an interim report dealing with the IfL issue.

UCU, like others involved in FE, want the best teachers in our colleges delivering high-quality education with appropriate qualifications and access to further training and personal development. We are looking forward to contributing to the wider review of professionalism of further education, where we will continue to make these points.

While the review leans (not surprisingly from this government) towards the need for less regulation, UCU does not support a deregulated sector. Employers in the sector – both colleges and private and voluntary institutions – have been found wanting in providing consistent and high quality support and resources for professional development.

If not through government regulations, then it is vital that clear obligations are placed on employers through funding requirements and the Learning and Skills Improvement Service must be given adequate funds to meet those challenges.

Our next job will be to take this forward in the next stage of the review and to ensure that employers meet their CPD obligations.

You can read more about the IFL issue and the independent review here: www.ucu.org.uk/iflfee

The Review of Higher Education Governance was instigated by Michael Russell, the Cabinet Secretary for Education partly in response to UCU concerns over crisis’s in university governance and management that has led to a series of disputes across Scotland. The five man panel, including Terry Brotherstone, a former UCU Scotland President, as the STUC nominee, was given the remit to produce a report on governance reform.

UCU Scotland welcomed the report, which was published in February via a statement to the Scottish Parliament during which the Cabinet Secretary whilst welcoming it, stated that the proposals would now be subject to consultation with the sector.

• The recommendations are intended to increase the democracy and transparency of governance and university management and in particular calls for:
• Protection of academic freedom and institutional autonomy
• The appointment of two nominees of both students and staff unions to the governing body and committees
• Greater transparency in appointments and remuneration of senior management
• Election for chairs of governing bodies
• A broadening of the experience of governing body members and greater transparency in appointment procedures
• An evidence base on higher education in Scotland is built up to inform further reform

Press coverage has tended to focus on the opinions of interested parties responding to particular proposals that are easier to criticise in isolation than when considered as part of a well-made, historically literate argument.

Principals have questioned the need for change given Scotland’s relative success in league tables. They have given particular weight to the dissenting letter submitted to the Cabinet Secretary separately from the Report by panel-member Alan Simpson, chair of court at the University of Stirling who dissents from the view that chairs should be elected or unions included in governance procedures.

However, Scotland’s ancient universities (and Dundee) already have a system of electing Rectors, usually designated the chair of the governing body. This is an important part of the distinctiveness of Scotland’s higher education tradition – examined along with other important historical factors in the Report’s introduction. The idea is simply that a Scottish solution to the problems of university governance in the rapidly changing world of higher education should include an enhanced role for the Rector (or otherwise designated elected chair) who will be able to claim authority from the university community as a whole and ensure that all relevant internal and external interests are given due attention in the institutional decision-making process.

Further most governing bodies have reserved places for support-staff unions as well as the informal inclusion of academic staff unions through the senate or academic board. Hence neither of these proposals are alien to Scottish institutions.

UCU is joining with NUS to push for greater democracy and transparency in the governing bodies including decisions on Principal’s pay and gained support from the Minister at UCU Scotland congress.

This time last year, I felt like I’d reached a career crossroads. After a decade as a freelance education journalist, which had definitely been more ‘feast than famine’, I had this nagging feeling that I needed a new challenge.

Expanding my business was the obvious answer; despite employing a part-time administrative assistant, and paying contractors to do transcription and research, I was still putting in far too many late nights and early mornings. And I was regularly turning down work – something no freelancer ever wants to do.

‘Hire an intern,’ friends told me. A bright, enthusiastic graduate, intent on a career in journalism, who would take on some of my workload for a few months in exchange for a Travelcard, free sarnies and a few tips of the trade.

But it wasn’t an idea that sat comfortably with me. A trainee journalist needs to be an accurate writer, have good research skills and plenty of initiative and determination – things that are not necessarily learned in a lecture theatre. And taking on a graduate intern – without making a decent stab of training them up on the job – just seemed exploitative to me.

So I decided to hire an apprentice. While they were helping me out with transcription and story research, I could give them hands on experience in how to think and write like a journalist.

The first challenge was finding an appropriate course. Much to my surprise, I found there was no apprenticeship curriculum or ‘framework’ for journalism– a trade in which employers traditionally grew their own staff, on the job, using apprenticeships and other kinds of traineeships.

And while it confirmed something I already suspected about journalism (that it has largely become a graduate – or even postgraduate – entry occupation), I was even more shocked to learn that in a time of heavy government investment in apprenticeships (around £3bn last year alone), there were no firm plans to introduce a vocational route into the profession.

Like many freelance journalists, I have a portfolio-style career, which includes writing for national newspapers, copywriting, training – and even organising events and conferences.

Harlow College, which had already trained the first MP’s apprentice, suggested my apprentice could follow the Business Administration framework – which includes optional modules on audio transcription, analysing and reporting data and designing and producing business documents –and it proved to be a perfect fit. Being able to draw on the college’s expertise in teaching journalism  (Harlow has an impressive list of alumni that includes Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson and the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger) was an added bonus.

Following a national search, over 20 candidates were shortlisted for 30 hour a week role (including a day at college) at a rate of £6.08 an hour. And after a gruelling two-day assessment, which included tests in writing, spelling and current affairs, as well as a formal interview, the job went to 22-year-old Rhian Jones.

Having left school at 17, and spent four years working in shops, bars and call centres, she had everything I was looking for – drive, determination and good interpersonal skills – which (despite completing a year of a degree in English and media), I’m convinced she didn’t learn in a seminar room.

I spent four years teaching English in secondary schools and now lecture in journalism at a number of universities. But I quickly realised that classroom based teaching is a very different proposition to training someone on the job, in a real work situation. And it didn’t take me long to decide which method is more satisfying.

In a classroom environment, motivating even the most enthusiastic journalism students to find compelling stories and fascinating people to interview can be tough. Encouraging them to respond to feedback, and use it to improve their work, can also be a challenge – hardly surprising, given the fact it is only likely to be read by a handful of university lecturers.

Give a student  a real task, where they can see the results of their efforts in a newspaper, magazine – or even in a leaflet or brochure – and you see interest, enthusiasm and a determination to improve.  Few things are more motivating than knowing that if your work isn’t up to scratch you will have to do a rewrite – or worse still – your lovingly crafted article may not be published at all. These are tough lessons to learn and are not for the faint-hearted, but neither is journalism.

This is not to say classroom-based teaching doesn’t have value, or that universities don’t give students opportunities to get hands-on experience. But it is patchy: only a handful of universities facilitate really top-notch student journalism. And higher education institutions offering students access to high-quality work-based learning are still the exception rather than the norm.

Sadly, this is symptomatic of wider failings in the education system.

Young people are being educated in an increasingly narrow system that teaches them how to jump through hoops to pass exams. While I believe there is a place for learning for learning’s sake, this must be balanced with helping young people acquire knowledge and skills that will prove useful in the workplace.

I’d love to see some of the big newspapers publishing houses being bold enough to grow their own talent rather than cherry-picking the top graduates as they do now. Training an apprentice is time consuming, but the benefits of one-to-one to tuition, in a real work environment, are invaluable.

After six months with me (and three months earlier than planned) my apprentice is leaving me to take up a position as editorial assistant/junior reporter on the trade industry magazine Music Week – proof, if ever it was needed, that what do you can do is far more important than what you know.

As well as the ongoing controversy surrounding A4e (the beleaguered welfare-to work company who despite being investigated for fraud are still the preferred bidder for £30m prison education contracts in London and the East in England) the very nature of what we do is being re-defined.

Colleges and other providers have been instructed by the government’s offender learning agency OLASS to make offenders more ‘employable’ if they want to keep hold of their contracts.

On the face of it this seems like a reasonable call. Employability is important but it is not the be all and end all. An effective balance is required that also fulfils well the social and personal developmental needs of offenders and prepares them to reintegrate into society.

Whilst the new skills agenda attempts to address this, the overriding emphasis on employability may reveal limited opportunities for success. In times of economic hardship and with youth unemployment figures alone spiralling to one million, we must question the validity of a strategy that places so much emphasis on a single strand and a funding methodology that encourages colleges and private providers to crank up the churn in the pursuit of turning a coin.

Statistics reveal that prison is the preserve of the young, often uneducated offender and to be successful in their rehabilitation we must seek to educate in the round. Perhaps the greatest impact on effective resettlement is not just how employable an offender is as they go through the gate. We must not forget they will compete in a saturated job market with the hindrance of a criminal record, and this will de-motivate. For many it will break them despite often the best of intentions at the time of release. For these people it is the depth of knowledge and understanding of the situation, being equipped with the tools to react to the knockbacks, the difficulties and the hardships that will likely confront them upon release. This will define above all else, the chances of that individual resisting a return to offending.

Some prisoners will of course gain employment on release and this for them will be the key to their rehabilitation but for the many who do not it is the understanding, recognition and indeed enlightenment that comes from a full and rounded education delivered with the compassion, experience and professionalism of experienced educators that will deliver results. We must strive to redress the balance accordingly.

Compounding the difficulties we face is the ever tumultuous and cyclical round of re-tender after re-tender. The creep of privatised companies entering and showing interest in offender learning is worrying and again represents a threat to the quality of education on offer. With low wages touted and prevalence for ripping up professional terms and conditions, awarding contracts to these providers is short-sighted and in the case of A4e, embarrassing to the sector.

There are pockets of excellence in offender learning and these pockets reflect areas wherein internal stability has been maintained despite this cyclical process.

These are the establishments where staff are embedded and settled, they are often financially secure, undertaking the job for the love of it, for the difference they make, rather than the contractual rewards. They know how to teach and they know how to address offending behaviour and despite consistent change enforced upon them they manage to resist enough to maintain the core of what they do.

Management are left with the task of picking up their good work, re-badging it and making it fit the present model. These people are professional, seasoned educators and we need more of their ilk; we need more to be trained in their sphere of influence. New blood is entering the profession and whilst this is welcome it is likely staff turnover will increase dramatically with new entrants having little understanding of what really works. Frequently they are given inferior contracts to mainstream colleagues and less effective mentoring as their seasoned predecessors retire. They will be more inclined to unquestioningly tow the party line and true success will decline as a result.

To establish what works we must be looking to these pockets of historical excellence before they become too diluted by emerging ‘excellence’ as defined under more recent measures of success. If you look you will find an effective and complete education is the common theme.

For much of offender learning however it is true to say that improvement is required and it is no wonder that OFSTED have noted room for improvement in many establishments around the country when every three to five years we are again torn from our roots and thrown headlong into the instability and uncertainty of changes in funding methodology, strategic direction and often employer.

Having been through this process a number of times I can tell you that in year one following a change in employer little changes, management are focussed on laying the strategic path and contending with the operational difficulties offender learning presents. In year two we feel the impact on the ground and the tendency is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Existing systems, policies and quality procedures that are finely tuned to meet the requirements of OLASS in that specific environment, are binned by the ream and replaced with similar non-OLASS friendly documents.

In year three we start to get to grips with the revised documentation and start to make it work. At this point we are re-tendered and the process repeats. It is unsurprising this approach is of limited success.

Stability is the key; offender learning is best placed firmly in the hands of the public sector. It must be funded well and the constant cycle of re-tendering must stop. The best teachers should be sought to work within its confines and we should be charged with providing prisoners with a well-rounded and balanced education. Until we reach common consensus that this is the way to maximise a reduction in re-offending, we will continue on the treadmill.

I am pleased our general secretary has repeatedly stated her belief that we do need the very best teachers in OLASS and we must seek a strategy to ensure terms and conditions are conducive to this. Only through retaining and attracting the calibre of staff capable of turning around the most disaffected in our society, will we realise true success.

The total number of full-time undergraduate courses offered by UK  universities and colleges has fallen by more than a quarter since 2006 as funding cuts and increases in tuition fees hit higher education.

And analysis of a sample of single-subject degree courses showed a 14% cut since 2006, although the number rose slightly in 2012

Sir Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer at the New England Biolabs and Nobel Laureate for Medicine or Physiology, said in a report published in February by UCU, Choice cuts – How choice has declined in higher education: ‘The decisions currently being undertaken by many universities and encouraged by the British government seem completely contrary to the idea of providing a broad and balanced education for university students.

‘For instance, I notice that some universities have been closing chemistry departments where one of the key subject areas for understanding biology is taught.  This just makes no sense. Others close humanities departments presumably because they are not viewed as “profitable”. In my mind such decisions need much greater thought than appears to be undertaken at present. Chemistry and the humanities need to be taught if students are to develop critical thinking skills and to acquire a broad knowledge about the world we live in.’

Research by University and College Union based on data provided by UCAS shows that between 2006 and 2012, the total number courses offered in the UK fell from 70,052 to 51,116, a reduction of 27%.

Since institutions may withdraw offered courses during the applications cycle because, for example, insufficient students apply for them, UCAS also produces data on the number of courses available at the end of the applications cycle. This is called the final or published number of courses, and showed a fall of 29% in the UK, from 50,077 to 35,687 courses, between 2006 and 2012.

The reduction of total courses on offer during the applications cycle was greatest in England, with a drop of 31%, followed by Northern Ireland (24%), Wales (11%) and Scotland (3%).

Is there a link between the reduction in courses and the public spending and tuition fee regime in the different parts of the UK?

While tuition fees for full-time undergraduates from the UK at HEIs in England will be up to £9,000 a year in 2012-13, Northern Ireland-domiciled students studying in Northern Ireland will only have to pay £3,465, Welsh-domiciled undergraduates studying throughout the UK will only have to pay £3,465, and Scottish-domiciled undergraduates studying in Scotland will not have to pay any fees. So England, the country with the highest rates of tuition fees, is facing the biggest reduction in the number of undergraduate courses, and the country with the most benign fee regime – Scotland – has much the lowest level of course cutting.

In addition, public spending cuts are the most severe in England, where funding reductions are being implemented at the same time as public spending on teaching in higher education is being replaced by full-time undergraduate tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year.

Nevertheless, within the regions England there is a wide range in the extent of course cutting. Nearly half (47%) of undergraduate courses are being cut in the South West, but only 1% of courses are being cut in the East Midlands.

Philip Schofield, professor of the history of legal and political thought, and director of the Bentham Project at University College London (UCL), told UCU: ‘ … limiting the number of courses will diminish the student experience by curtailing their choice of subjects. It will adversely affect new and innovative research by taking away the opportunities for researchers to present their latest findings and discussing their latest theories to a receptive and inquisitive audience of students. It will close off sources of knowledge. To sum up, it will make UK universities a much less attractive proposition for both home and international students, who value the depth and diversity of our research and teaching.’

UCU’s analysis of single-subject or principal degree courses showed that in 2006, UK higher education institutions and further education colleges provided 7,002 principal subject degree courses, across 141 subjects from Pre-Clinical Medicine, to ‘Others in Education’. This number fell to 6,182 courses in 2010, a reduction of 11.7%, then to 5,968 in 2011, before rising slightly to 6,024 in 2012. In all, between 2006 and 2012, there was a 14.0% reduction in provision of these single subject degree courses.

While single subject STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degree courses fell by 14.6%, there were slightly lower reductions in social sciences (12.8%) and arts & humanities (14.0%). Although student numbers continued to rise through this period, the prospect and implementation of public spending cuts from the financial crisis of 2008 onwards, will have had a significant impact on single subject course provision, as HEIs and Further Education Colleges providing higher education have sought to reduce costs.

Although the reductions in principal subject courses in England was similar to the overall picture in the UK, there was a decline of almost one quarter in the number of principal subjects provided in Wales between 2006 and 2012, with the falls slightly sharper in social sciences (25%) and arts and humanities (25%) than in STEM (22%).

The fall in principal subjects provided in Scotland, of 8% overall between 2006 and 2012, was around half the rate of decrease in England, and more than three times less than in Wales.

While STEM and social science subjects were reduced by 9% each in Scotland, arts and humanities subjects only fell by 2%.

Northern Ireland, like Scotland, showed only a relatively small decline in the provision of principal subjects. This may be linked to the small number of HE institutions in Northern Ireland, and a sense that, because of the greater separation of the province from the rest of the UK, its HEIs have an obligation to maintain a breadth in provision for home students.

To look in more detail at the change in courses, UCU selected a sample of principal subjects in STEM, social sciences, and arts and humanities, and analysed their provision on a regional basis in England. In the UCU sample, some STEM courses were cut between 2006 and 2012, particularly in biology, physical geographical sciences and computer science. In social sciences, there was some reduction in provision between 2006 and 2012 in some subjects in England, particularly in human and social geography, and sociology.

And in arts and humanities subjects there was a reduction in the number of institutions providing some single subject courses in England, particularly French studies, German studies, and history by topic.

Some of these subjects were not provided in some English regions, particularly the Eastern region (since 2010: no Latin studies, Classical Greek studies, French studies, German studies, or Chinese studies); North East (in 2012: no Latin studies, Classical Greek studies, French studies, German studies, or History by topic); South West (in 2012: no Latin studies, Classical Greek studies, Chinese studies, or History by area).

Donald Braben, honorary professor in life sciences at University College London, expressed his concerns about the negative impact these changes are having on higher education: ‘I fear that we are going backwards. Universities exist to challenge what we think we know and offer well-argued and coherent alternatives. They are unique in these respects. However, if we limit their scope and oblige them to concentrate on short-term practical problems their advice might be indistinguishable from that provided by many other sources. Meanwhile, the big problems would continue unresolved.

‘All major developments in the last century were unpredicted. Take the internet: were the universities being urged to offer lessons on the internet in the 70s and 80s? Industrial opinion notoriously changes with their balance sheets.  If we gear institutions solely to what we perceive students and employers want then that is precisely what we will get. Stagnation will follow. But who was asking for the internet, for example, in the 70s or 80s?’

And James Ladyman, professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Bristol, told UCU: ‘I am really concerned that under the new funding environment universities will look at concentrating their resources on courses which they believe will deliver the highest financial return. The loss of the block grant has taken away an important measure of financial security that allowed institutions to plan for the future.

‘Provision shouldn’t be decided on the basis of short-term popularity contests but when you introduce a market that is what happens. Institutions need to be able to offer a wide breadth of courses, especially with more students likely to study closer to home in the future. It is very easy to undermine capacity quickly but takes years to rebuild these knowledge bases. The intellectual culture of a university is massively enhanced by having students studying a range of disciplines living and studying together.’

Universities as centres for teaching and research in a broad range of disciplines have always existed alongside more specialised institutions such as colleges of law and the performing arts, and institutes of one kind and another. 

Without demeaning the latter it is important that we recognise the special value of the former that inheres in their breadth. UCU’s recent important report about the reduction in courses in core subjects available over the last few years should focus our minds on the need to articulate and defend the conception of universities as broad-based centres of education and scholarship. That the elimination of many single honours courses to which the union has drawn attention has happened in advance of the present government’s disgraceful drive to commercialise higher education does not augur well for the immediate future. There is a great danger that universities will base decisions about what subjects they offer on the short-term popularity of courses and so undermine our medium and long-term national interest. Academic capacity is easily undermined but takes years to develop, so disinvestment cannot easily be reversed especially when the capacity in question is significantly reduced at the national level.

To abet and reverse the current trend for universities to close courses perceived to be insufficiently important we must challenge the crass instrumentalism that characterises contemporary debate about education in general and higher education in particular. Instrumentalism need not be crass because a proper appreciation of what universities contribute to society need not be based on lofty ideals of education for its own sake. On the contrary, even if all we care about it is the economy and equipping students with the skills and wherewithal to take their place in it, we ought still to recognise the importance of exposing them as whole to a good portion of the full range of the traditional university curriculum. Our national competitiveness in the global economy is not going to be based on natural resources or cheap labour markets, so it can only be based on the education of our population.

We cannot predict what exactly the future will require of us, but we do know that education in traditional academic disciplines teaches people how to think and how to learn making them adaptable and providing us with a national insurance policy against future contingencies. Already, European universities are seeking to capitalise on our disinvestment in higher education and the uncertainties about our commitment to it by offering English language degree programmes to recruit UK and foreign students that would otherwise study in our universities. We spend a smaller proportion of our GDP than any developed nation on higher education; now is not the time to further undermine our universities by reducing the range of degree programmes they offer, while other countries are increasing their investment across the board.

Students who attend a university that offers a wide range of subjects enjoy important benefits that do not derive from their own curricula.

Perhaps most important among these is that they are exposed to the rest of culture by mixing with other students who are studying very different things. In terms of the vulgar but ubiquitous contemporary idiom, part of the student experience is conversing about the meaning of life, politics, art, literature, history, science and religion with a range of people each of whom brings their own disciplinary knowledge and sensibility to the discussion. To deny future generations of students that experience unless they happen to be at one of the handful of elite institutions that remain universities in the full sense of the word will be to impoverish them and thereby further to atomise and diminish our culture as a whole.

The internet is reducing our exposure to ideas and values that are not already our own as search engines filter content based on our habits and interests, and as on-line communities enable people with highly idiosyncratic cultural identities to ensure they only mix with others like themselves. Universities are an indispensable counter-balance to this trend but only to the extent that they continue to offer a wide range of courses. It is important to note that it is not only the arts and humanities that are under threat but subjects such as biology and chemistry; while universities rush to offer the latest new subjects such as nanotechnology or bio-engineering they must ensure that the foundations of science in the basic core disciplines are secure.

There is no list of subjects that must be represented in a university for it to count as one. However, as the number and range of disciplines is reduced the intellectual culture and context of those that remain is impoverished. Eliminate enough of them and nothing worthy of the name university remains. There have always been institutions such as Imperial College that have specialised and not hosted a full range of subjects. However, they have hitherto been exceptions to the general rule and exist in cities where other universities fill the gaps they leave.

As financial pressures on universities grow and as their leaders increasingly think in terms of the bottom line and commercial and market values, we face the prospect of whole regions in which fundamental academic subjects cannot be studied. This is a dire threat to our economy and our intellectual culture, and we must recognise that the former depends on the latter as a whole and not just on those subjects that are presently in vogue. ^

The fight against unannounced lesson observations in FE colleges could be UCU’s next big battle following its trial of strength with the Institute for Learning (IfL) over membership fees. Discontent is smouldering around the country among lecturers who feel harassed and undermined when managers walk in at the drop of a hat.

Although united and well-organised branches seem to have won concessions in London and Manchester, overall the picture is deteriorating. For UCU, this isn’t a blanket protest about lecturers being assessed and graded, but the way it’s done. ‘We recognise some teachers aren’t very good or may get burnt out,’ says national FE officer Dan Taubman. ‘But we’d argue that best practice with lesson observation is to have support that can help people improve.’

Although UCU hasn’t collected figures, Taubman believes that the unwelcome drop-in by management is becoming ever more commonplace, ‘ramped up because of increasingly high stakes over poor quality – the possibility of a bad Ofsted report and funding being withdrawn from poor courses’.

‘We’ve had instances of colleges trying to link (observation) grades with student attendance,’ says Taubman. ‘That’s bonkers – there are lots of reasons why students don’t always turn up, especially adults who lead untidy lives. The issue isn’t going to go away – I think it will get worse.’

Principals may claim this is an essential part of upholding standards but UCU members believe that often the practice is intended to be punitive rather than helping professional development.  ‘It ratchets up the stress level and is used by rogue managers to harass staff, ‘said the branch officer of one London college ,

‘We’ve had members who’ve been seen every day for a week. Teachers feel constantly on the back foot.  It’s like ‘we’re going to catch you out – we know you’re lazy and cut corners, and we’re going to prove it’.’

There the dispute was over ‘quality monitoring’, curriculum managers making regular sudden visits known as walk-throughs to all classes – ‘observation by stealth, when managers come in not ostensibly to observe, but say…check if students are there on time.’

The notorious walks-through have antagonised many a staffroom and are just one aspect of unannounced observation, now said to be among the most common reasons FE lecturers are quitting their job. Lecturers at one central London college (City of Westminster) say the whole process has been abused. Anyone receiving successive Grade 4s for poor classroom performance found management turning this into a question of competence – which then raised the spectre of possible dismissal.

‘A grade 4 in our college covers things such as attendance and punctuality of students, but that isn’t the responsibility of teachers,’ said one UCU negotiator. ‘You can have a teacher who’s loved by the students but because attendance isn’t good you get a grade 4.

Andrew Harden, the UCU officer who’s advised FE members at local level, believes unannounced observation could become the union’s next cause celebre having squared up to IfL. In London – albeit that firm action has wrung concessions from management – it remains, he says ‘a huge issue’.

But whereas IfL is one entity, there over 300 colleges, each run differently. So, plenty more battles to fight. As an industry benchmark, Harden is calling for at least three weeks’ warning for lecturers before they’re observed – ‘though three weeks isn’t worth what it was, because so much more has to be crammed into that time.’

‘We also argue it should be agreed for a named lesson,’ Harden says. ‘Where we don’t achieve that, we should be looking at the smallest possible window. But in some cases that can be a week. That’s ridiculous when an Ofsted inspection is over three days.’

Observations take numerous forms, none regarded with affection. One college in the north west has endured departmental observation by line managers; whole college observations by managers and advanced teaching practitioners; ‘themed’ walk-throughs; mock Ofsteds conducted by consultants; Ofsted itself; ‘drop-ins’ by line managers; and extra observations for staff who had previously fallen short.

Then there’s the growth of peer observations, ‘a result of targets set by management – as distinct from peer observations organised by tutors as a supportive exercise’.  ‘Some staff have been observed three times in a week,’ said one branch officer . ‘We had a colleague told that she ‘had to get used to it’; while another said that students were unsettled and upset by the level of observations. This never seems to be considered by management.’

Lecturers from a college in Hampshire report that the principal considers it her right ‘to walk into any classroom at any time’. ‘Her gripe is that don’t have any form of lesson plan,’ said the branch secretary.  ‘We’re told that for every lesson, a plan, course file and scheme of work must be available for inspection.  A handwritten plan needs maybe 10-15 minutes extra time for just one lesson – that’s adding 3-4 hours work per week.

‘The principal thinks we should use plans from previous years. But it’s not possible for, say A Level business studies – new materials are produced each year; case studies need to be topical.

‘Oddly enough, the main complaints came from diligent and conscientious teachers who’d often get a grade A on a lesson observation anyway.  But…  UCU members are probably more likely to be chosen for a random check than non-members, and some notably poor teachers escape scot free while others are observed over and over again if problems are identified – regardless of their track record of effective teaching.’

Insult was added to injury at one west country college where management referred to unannounced observations as ‘mystery shopping’.  Staff protested both against the name and the practice; only to find it re-badged as the ‘learning walk’.

But, says local UCU officials, it amounts to the same thing; though management have since spoken of limiting unannounced observations to a two-week window.  Moreover, students can also be disconcerted when managers drop in out of the blue, a source of ‘considerable stress or anxiety’ especially for those  with learning disabilities and/or depression.

‘Learning takes place in students’ minds – the policy of unannounced  observations is not based on any recognised theory of learning,’ the lecturer said. ‘Subjectivity makes the process prone to abuse.  It can be subtly turned into a tool to intimidate staff.’

And yet the college’s own training-related literature states that ‘every teacher needs.. .the time and tools to think about their own individual part in the educational enterprise’. That’s left staff wondering why the college doesn’t practice what it preaches, and, rather than spend money on its ‘observation regime’, invest in professional development.

Unannounced observations can add pressures to deploy ‘good’ teaching techniques ‘on occasions we would not normally consider appropriate …we’re being led to deny our intuitive professional judgement,’ the lecturer added. UCU has long identified that there’s a temptation for people to devote time and effort into ‘faking’ an outstanding or good lesson.

Last autumn, one lecturer at another college in the north west was driven to institute a grievance over unannounced observation. He said it was being used as harassment and ‘a cause of such stress that this would be considered detrimental to health by any reasonable person’.

He was awarded a Grade 4 (unsatisfactory). ‘As a direct result…my performance in teaching suffered,’ he said. ‘I felt undermined and this led to periods of depression. Having a policy in which any lesson may be observed at any time is stressful to an intolerable degree – like being permanently under an Ofsted inspection regime.’

The good news is that vigorous action by branch members can change minds. At Westminster and Kingsway, after a battle lasting several years, management offered a deal whereby for two years out of three, one lesson only, chosen in advance, will be observed – though in the third year, as part of the college’s review week/internal inspection, lecturers may be observed at any time during a three and half day window. UCU members see this as ‘a significant improvement’.

At Hackney College, local UCU staff and management also joined forces to avoid future conflict.  It’s resulted in a system where one year there’ll be a formal graded observation; the next, peer observation, ungraded. In each case there’s five days’ notice ; and two lessons identified for possible observation.

Vice principal Lois Fowler conceded that ‘there’s always an issue with stress and how useful feedback is’. ‘With unannounced observations there can be severe potential consequences for a member of staff if it doesn’t go well,’ she said. ‘As a teacher I can understand why people feel apprehensive.’

Thanks to UCU’s intervention several disputes in London have receded or been resolved. But for every outpost of enlightenment, there appear to be many more colleges – far too many – where management remains bent on operating in the dark ages.