Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year from TEFS

Have a great Christmas - but please be kind to the staff when you are out - many are students that need the job.
They deliver, serve and clear up so others can enjoy Christmas.

Comments

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 This means they might not be published, and Ofqual will open themselves up to legal challenges.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

COVID-19, SAGE and the universities ‘document dump’

The recent release of several documents by SAGE all at once was described by one observer as a “dump of docs”. They relate to returning to education this autumn and are somewhat confusing as they illustrate the complexities of the challenges still to be tackled. But there is much not fully addressed. Outbreaks of COVID-19 at universities spilling into local communities might also trigger city-wide lock-downs and a bad reaction from the locals. The mass migration of students to their hometowns will spread the chaos wider afield as there seems to be little evidence of planning for this inevitability. Less advantaged students in poor accommodation or crowded homes will be at greater risk along with their vulnerable peers coping with health conditions. While students may be asked to ‘segment’ or form ‘bubbles’ staff might not have the same protection. Asking vulnerable lecturers and other staff with ongoing health conditions to move from classroom to classroom, contacting differen

Higher Education and the ‘intelligent plumbers’ theory

A common tactic when found out is to divert attention elsewhere. The release of student data from 2018/19 by the Department for Education (DfE) yesterday, ‘Widening participation in higher education: 2020’ and ‘Statistics: further education and skills’ tells the same sorry tale of a wide gap in access to universities between the most and least advantaged students. To divert attention from these stark facts in advance, the government used a diversionary tactic by attacking the effectiveness of universities and thus pointing the blame for poor social mobility someplace else. Advocating improvements in further education, something cut back by the same regime for years, hides the real intention. It seems that class divisions will be further exacerbated and any concession to universities fuelling improved social mobility has been abandoned. But the flawed theory is that at least the elite rulers will get access to intelligent plumbers . Three years ago, I heard a leading ‘You

Search This Blog