Thursday, October 02, 2008

Oxford 'is not a social security office'

Chancellor of university rejects government plan to attract more state pupils

Oxford University should not be treated by the Government as "a social security office" to widen participation in higher education among disadvantaged pupils from state schools, its chancellor said yesterday. Oxford had "no chance" of increasing state school admissions to meet targets so long as the gap in exam performance existed, Lord Patten of Barnes told the annual meeting of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC).



Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed the gap in performance between Britain's private and state schools was the widest in the Western world, he said, adding: "The sense that many universities have is that they are being asked to make up for the deficiencies of secondary education. If this were the aim, it would be a fool's mission."Latest figures show that 53 per cent of Oxford's student intake is from state schools. The target is to raise this to 62 per cent by the end of the decade.

Lord Patten's comments were coupled with a plea to charge middle-class parents more for a child's university tuition by lifting the current fees cap of 3,140 pounds per annum. "It is surely a mad world in which parents or grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands to put their children through private schools to get them into universities and then to object to them paying a tuition fee of more than 3,000," he said. His long-term preference would be for no cap at all, which could lead to universities charging up to 20,000 for some courses.

The chancellor's remarks coincided with a study for the HMC, carried out by Buckingham University's Centre for Education and Employment, which showed that independent schools were concentrating on "hard" A-level subjects such as further maths, rather than "soft" ones like media studies and psychology - which are more popular in comprehensive schools. The study's authors said: "Independent schools have above-average A-level entries in further maths, physics, French, economics and classics, while comprehensives have above average entries in sports studies, media studies, law, psychology and sociology."

The Schools minister, Lord Adonis, also addressed the conference, insisting there was plenty of teaching of the "harder" subjects at state schools.

Source







Most Australian university students now need to be taught grade-school English

MONASH University will teach its first-year students grammar and punctuation after discovering that most arrive without basic English skills. Baden Eunson, lecturer at the university's School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and convenor of the new course, said about 90 per cent of his first-year students could not identify a noun. "If you ask them to identify adjectives and other parts of a sentence, only about 1 per cent can manage," he said, according to The Australian. "It is not really a surprise as only about 20 per cent of English teachers understand basic grammar."

Mr Eunson described his remedial program as a US-style "freshman composition course, mainly covering material that should have been covered in school but wasn't". He pointed to a 2003 study by the Economic Society of Australia which found school leavers "are functionally illiterate because standards in Australian high schools have collapsed".

Mr Eunson said students' inadequacies emerged when they were asked to hand-write answers to test questions and without the aid of spell-checkers. "I think we'll see more and more of these university-level courses springing up to do the schools' work for them," he said.

His comments come after Monash colleague Caron Dann said the majority of her 500 students in communication were strangers to English grammar. "Marking essays, I discovered the majority had no idea how to use apostrophes, or any other punctuation for that matter; that random spelling was in and sentence construction out. About half thought plurals were formed by adding an apostrophe-s, as in apple's and banana's. "Marking the final exam, it emerged that few could write neatly: From bold childlike printing to spidery scribblings in upper case, it is obvious that handwriting is a dying art," she said.

Swinburne University has said it will test the literacy skills of domestic and international students next year because of concern about standards.

Source

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