Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year from TEFS

If you have time please look back over the TEFS offerings of 2018. Hopefully you will find them informative. It has been a stormy year that will proceed into 2019 unabated. To help track things, you can download a free TEFS Calendar for your office or study.

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A plea for some Christmas goodwill.

When celebrating Christmas with family, friends and colleagues, please spare a thought for the staff that serve you. Many will be students with considerable financial challenges. Not all students will be home with family that is the experience of most of us. Some will have no family to fall back on or visit at Christmas. Some will be away from far flung homes. Some will be living with unsupportive families or unable to return home. Yet, in my experience, they rarely complain and soldier on as best they can.

At a function in England recently, I discovered that all of the staff serving were students and that the floor manager was also a student preparing for examinations. I am about to go to a Christmas function in Edinburgh this afternoon and expect similar. Please take time to notice them in the background and be considerate if you are one of the ‘fortunate ones’. They may have just completed semester examinations whilst working extra shifts in the run up to Christmas. They may have examinations in January but have little time to revise until after New Year.

In the meantime.....

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Ofqual holding back information

Ofqual has responded to an FOI request from TEFS this week. They held a staggering twenty-nine board meetings since March. Despite promising the Parliamentary Education Committee over a month ago they would publish the minutes “shortly” after their meeting on 16th September, they are still not able to do so. They cite “exemption for information that is intended to be published in the future” for minutes that are in the “process of being approved for publication” . More concerning is they are also citing exemption under the “Public Interest Test”. This means they might not be published, and Ofqual will open themselves up to legal challenges. If both the Department for Education and Ofqual are prevented from being more open, then public interest will lie shattered on the floor and lessons will not be learned. Ofqual finally responded to the TEFS Freedom of Information (FOI) request to publish the minutes of its board meetings on Tuesday. It should have been replied to by 17th Septembe

Research and Teaching: The price of researchers not teaching

Has the emphasis on research and REF damaged the teaching and support for students by front-line academic staff? "Your teaching is trivial, anyone can do it”. After 35 years of academic life as a scientist teaching Microbiology and Biochemistry in a Russell Group university, this is exactly what a ‘senior’ manager told me as I negotiated my ‘smooth’ career exit when I decided to retire early. I left at the end of 2016 after spending a year working part-time whilst winding down my research group. I offered to continue with some teaching over that time simply to help out colleagues. But that was the response to my offer and my teaching ended more abruptly than expected in the summer of 2015. How had things come to this? The remark was probably a careless throw away comment but it was made by someone more ‘senior’ to me who had comparatively little experience of teaching undergraduate students. It betrayed an attitude that had been gaining ground for some time. I wondered

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