Research Institute, Awarding Organisation, HEI, Consultancy
According to a survey, staff and students in universities are reluctant to seek help for mental health problems. The Guardian’s Clare Shaw finds that they are worried about being treated differently if they reveal that they have been suffering from mental illness.
You can read the full article on The Guardian’s website:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/13/university-staff-scared-to-disclose-mental-health-problems
Take a look at this great video from The Guardian which looks how well children learn when they are taken out of the classroom:
The Outdoor Classroom Project at the South Devon Steiner School is one place where this approach is being put into practice right now.
Jo Johnson’s proposal for a TEF similar to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) has stirred up both approval and dissent amongst university staff. The REF was seen as skewing the focus of universities too far in the direction of high status research and away from the student experience. Will this address the balance or lead to similar problems? Problems such as the hiring fair scenario of well-respected teaching experts being wooed to well-resourced universities in advance of the data collection cut off for each TEF period.
There should be much debate about how teaching excellence is measured and the design of a metrics system to deliver robust information. Given that the final result will probably be a league table of universities – a further step toward the consumer model of education – the quick route would be to use data already available such as: HEA membership, teaching qualification, National Student Survey results, student retention, student results. This, of course, sidesteps the wider debate about what Teaching Excellence might actually be and how one might measure it.
You can read the speech at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/teaching-at-the-heart-of-the-system
Many children in war-torn countries are missing out on the type of education a lot of other children take for granted. In the Guardian article Bullets banish books in South Sudan as education becomes a casualty of war, James Copnall takes a look at the 4o0,000 children forced out of school due military action. Meanwhile, the BBC’s article Call for global education emergency fund looks at the education summit in Oslo, Norway, and discovers that as many as 124 million children worldwide are not in school.
Times Higher Education have published their University Workplace Survey 2015. The results show that while the majority of university staff have a high level of job satisfaction, a lot of academics feel under too much pressure. Overall, academics are less satisfied in their roles than in the 2014 survey, whereas employees in support or professional roles are actually more satisfied. However, it seems that universities don’t value their employees’ opinions as much as they should, and there are also issues with university pensions.
Read the full article:
https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/best-university-workplace-survey-2015-results-and-analysis/2018272.article?nopaging=1
An article in The Guardian asks the question: should Googling in exams be allowed? They present two opposing views from two different people:
What do you think? You can read the full article at theguardian.com here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/googling-in-exams-allowed-google-searches-gcse-a-level