Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

Unfortunately, Martin Bean has been appointed in what seem sure to be “interesting times” for the OU thanks to the ELQ funding fiasco that’s going to start hitting them particularly hard quite soon.

Sadly, there seems to be little that can be done whilst the current government is in power but at least that seems sure to change soon. However, it may not change soon enough to avoid significant damage being done throughout the higher education sector.

Although the timescale for the implementation of the ELQ policy seems relatively relaxed for most universities, for the OU it’s incredibly rapid. Remember that in the OU most degrees take six or seven years to complete and can take as long as 11 years, even without taking breaks between courses. Thus a change that kicks in within just two or three years can easily derail a lot of people aiming for a particular degree.

Thus, the proposals of the science faculty to eliminate all of their current range of named degrees seems sure to hit an awful lot of students who’ve already started on their degree programme. However, let’s not forget the very large number of people who browse through the OU courses and mull over the issue for a number of years before finally starting their degree. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who watched the Saturday morning OU broadcasts of many years ago (stopped only a few years ago) and thought that they’d quite like to do a degree in this or that at some point.

Even more unfortunate is that the OU are attracting a much larger number of school leavers than in years past and many of them would like to have the degree options in the OU that are available in normal universities.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the elimination of the named science degrees would be accompanied by an elimination of the summer schools associated with the various named degrees. Their argument that few people do the named degrees because of the requirement to do a set number of summer schools seems to come from a particularly short memory. The named degrees were introduced at around the same time as the separation of the summer schools from the courses which they were previously an integral part of. That separation means that it’s MUCH more difficult for those with any kind of sponsorship to get funding for what then became an optional course in the eyes of sponsors.
What’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing in all this is that it could all be avoided if we were each prepared to pay £1.50 PER YEAR in extra tax.

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.

We were on the go from our afternoon departure from our place in France right through to 4am on Sunday morning which was as tiring as it sounds. Worse actually as thanks to the pretty stormy weather during the crossing I was the only one that wasn’t feeling a bit off.

That wouldn’t have been sooo bad but then James caught his usual Belfast asthma as midnight on Sunday approached so it was off to the hospital with him for another 3am bedtime on Monday morning. As if that wasn’t enough school was starting on Tuesday so we’d heaps to do on Monday.

It was John’s first day in school today which went really well. We’d been expecting awful things from him as he’s been with us every day his entire life up to today. The really big problem was getting him out of bed as school started at 9.30 and he usually doesn’t wake up ’til well after 10. That did show though: he conked out in the car on the way home and had a couple of hours of sleep when we got home.

Surprisingly we managed to get James to his Kumon class. Two months of that over the summer has really brought on his reading and it looks like he’ll be where he should have been by Christmas or so.

Tomorrow should be a relatively normal day though we’ve a heap of things to catch up with and it looks like it’ll be a week or more before we’re back to normal.

When we moved here it took us four years before all the various authorities recognised that we were actually living in France. That started quite a flurry of back-administration obviously and it still isn’t entirely cleared up (eg we still get three separate bills for the TV license).

However, it would appear that it’s going to take quite a substantial amount of time for the authorities to recognise that we have now left France and are no longer French residents. Although we ceased to be French resident in January we are still receiving reminders that we’ve not paid various social security and health charges some eight months on.

It’s not that we have ignored their demands for money though. In fact, we informed them in January that we had left, then again almost every month since using their Internet service, email, fax, letter and even recorded delivery letter. In fact, it would appear that all missives from us are completely ignored. Last week we even resorted to writing to them in English as it would appear that they don’t understand French!

Actually, that last letter from us was in a response to a demand from them that it would actually be illegal for us to pay!

Perhaps another couple of years will see it sorted out…