Learning Through Action

UK plummets from third to 15th place in OECD university listing, behind Slovakia and Czech Republic

The UK's position in the graduate league table rankings has fallen sharply in less than a decade, with a higher proportion of young people now getting a degree in Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic, a report released today revealed.

Vice-chancellors and unions warned that the UK risked being left behind in the economic recovery, as analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed the UK had gone from having the third-highest graduation rate among industrialised countries in 2000 to 15th place in 2008.

The percentage of students finishing university was below the OECD average, according to its annual Education at a Glance report, and the UK also lagged behind competitors in public investment in higher education.

The figures come amid an intensification in the debate concerning the importance of higher education ahead of next month's publication of the Browne review into finance and funding and after a strict cap on student numbers this year left tens of thousands without a place.

The sector is facing cuts of more than £1bn between now and the end of 2013, and some believe Britain may have reached a peak of university participation.

In 2000, the UK had the third-highest graduation rate among OECD countries, with 37% of young people getting a degree compared with an average of 28%. Denmark and Norway scored the same and only Finland (41%) and New Zealand (50%) were higher. But in 2008 the proportion had fallen to 35%, below an average of 38% and behind countries including Iceland, Portugal and Ireland.

The level of public investment in higher education is 0.7% of GDP, below the OECD average of 1% and behind countries such as the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Slovenia. The OECD said governments had to aim for world-class quality in their education systems to ensure long-term economic growth, with experiences during the economic downturn, when young people with lowest levels of education were hardest hit, proving the value of investment.

Putting public resources into university education also paid off in bringing in extra tax revenues, it argued, calculating that on average, a man with a degree would bring in $119,000 (almost £77,500) in income taxes and social contributions over his working life than one who had only school-level education.

"Even after taking account of the cost to the public exchequer of financing degree courses, higher tax revenues and social contributions from people with university degrees make tertiary education a good long-term investment," the OECD said.

It added: "Labour market demand for highly qualified workers has grown significantly and countries with high graduation rates at the tertiary level are also those most likely to develop or maintain a highly skilled labour force."

Announcing the results in London, Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD's indicators and analysis division, said Finland, Canada and Japan were now major players in higher education. "For many years the UK was very much at the forefront," he said. "But now you do not see that competitive advantage."

Schleicher added: "The current flattening out in higher education participation means that in the long term the growth potential is more limited."

The vice-chancellors' body, Universities UK (UUK), questioned how long the country's higher education system could maintain its world-class position in the field given its comparative "under-investment".

Steve Smith, president of UUK, said: "At a time when many of our competitors are investing in higher education and research as a way out of the recession, we cannot afford to be left behind. The UK still shows below average levels of total investment in higher education institutions ... we must question the sustainability of this position."

The National Union of Students said the UK was being outpaced by countries who had recognised the importance of funding colleges, universities and students to produce a highly skilled workforce and further the economic recovery.

The general secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, said: "Today's report shows a worrying decline in the UK's standing in the world of education. We have plummeted down the graduate league table, going from a major player to a relegation candidate in less than a decade."

Wendy Piatt, of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, said the UK "risks jeopardising the competitive advantage which has made its universities the envy of the world".

The minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, said: "The OECD report shows that our higher education faces some real challenges, which the government is determined to tackle. We have already taken action to boost student numbers by funding an extra 10,000 places and more people than ever are starting university this autumn.

"Going to university is still a good investment. Graduates are more likely to be in work than non graduates and can expect to earn more over their lifetime."

State schools, even in difficult areas, are starting to adopt the international baccalaureate in place of A-levels

At CTC Kingshurst academy in Birmingham, girls in leggings and with black varnished nails are scribbling down notes, while boys in ripped jeans swing on their seats. Outside the smudged classroom windows is a skyline of highrise estates. The class English teacher, Roz Trudgon, fires questions at the students, which they answer insightfully in their Brummie accents. These students are just starting their second year of the international baccalaureate (IB) diploma programme, an alternative to A-levels.

Kingshurst isn't the sort of school normally associated with the IB, a qualification more often offered to fee-paying students and the children of diplomats. In Kingshurst and Fordbridge, almost half the population live in social housing, and 45% of 16- to 74-year-olds here have no qualifications. Although indicators are improving, one in five 16- to 19-year-olds is not in education, employment or training, and crime and antisocial behaviour rates are above average.

It might seem strange for Kingshurst to offer the IB, for which there are still more private school candidates than state, but comprehensives are catching up. There are now 149 UK state schools offering the IB diploma and another 11 applying to offer it. Of the 83 schools that have registered a formal interest in the past three years, 70 are from the state sector. After news that the A-level pass rate has risen for the 28th year in a row, concerns that mainstream standards are dropping continue to grow. In such circumstances, will more state schools turn to the IB as an alternative?

Trudgon, who is IB co-ordinator at Kingshurst, passionately believes the diploma should not just be for the children of the well-heeled. "It's unusual to offer the IB in a challenging area, but we open it up to all who want to take it," she says. "They must know how demanding it is, but if they're still committed, that's the biggest predictor of success – and our pass rate is 75%. If students want to switch, there's a lot of fluidity between the IB and the BTec here, but we don't offer A-levels."

According to Trudgon, the IB system – which requires students to take a broader range of subjects, complete an extended essay, take a course in the theory of knowledge and participate in extracurricular activities – appeals to students who might have chosen to leave school rather than take A-levels. "It instils a sense of confidence and standing on your own two feet," she says. "That's the real hallmark of the IB. If you're going to succeed, you're going to do so by your own efforts. I hate to use the term, but A-levels are often about spoon-feeding, and the narrowing down of the curriculum can leave students bored."

Others are not convinced. Brian Lightman, the new general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says: "For some groups of students in state schools the IB can be a good thing, but it should be an alternative qualification, not a replacement. The IB is a challenging course and it suits the most academically able students. The danger of taking away A-levels is that some may be left with qualifications that are too demanding. Every student needs a qualification that will help them best progress to the next step."

Gordon Collins, founder of Career and Education Services, which advises students on work and study plans, says: "A lot of students in the state sector fail their modules and can then resit. The IB doesn't have a modular system." This means students can't just resit a module, but would have to retake a whole year.

Collins adds: "You don't have to be super-bright to take it, but you need to be organised to balance your extended essay, your community work and a wide range of subjects. If students fail they'll find it harder to come back, making it harder to get into university."

Collins believes that although some schools are motivated to leave the A-level system because they believe it has been damaged by inflationary targets, many do so because they think it will push them higher up the league tables. Under the Ucas points system, a score of 38 on the IB is equivalent to four A*s at A-level, but the former seems easier to achieve.

Some students at Kingshurst believe from talking to older friends that university admissions tutors will be more lenient towards them if they just miss their IB grades than to students who fall short of A-level predictions.

Although 70 state schools have registered an interest in the diploma, the time-consuming and expensive application process may be putting others off. Sheila Coyle is the director of learning and IB co-ordinator at Durham Gilesgate sports college and sixth-form centre in Durham, which is launching the IB this month. She says that getting to this stage has cost the school three and a half years and £27,000. "We believe the IB is worth it, but you have to be determined and have real back-up to succeed," she says. "You have to work hard on creating demand, engaging parents, answering questions from the community, running taster sessions, filling in forms and hosting inspections. The process and the cost could put some schools off."

Coyle says her college – which has almost 50% of its students in receipt of the education maintenance allowance – was only able to pay for the IB application through Tony Blair's flagship funding policy. The former prime minister said he wanted to see at least one state school offering the IB diploma in every locality. In 2006, he announced £2.5m worth of funding that schools could apply for through their local authorities to help them cover the costs of applying for IB accreditation.

Now that funding is coming to an end, Coyle says other schools might not be able to afford it, particularly as the IB is about to require all new schools to have an allocated consultant paid for by the school itself to guide it through the application process. And there are ongoing costs, such as suitably accredited teacher training.

Adrian Kearney, regional director of the International Baccalaureate programme, says: "We are quite an expensive programme, but we are doing what we can to bring down the cost of professional development and we do offer help and guidance for funding support."

Kearney hopes that Conservative proposals to introduce more choice into education may encourage more schools to take up the IB programmes, including the middle years programme (MYP) – an alternative to GCSEs – and the primary years programme (PYP).

A spokesperson at the Department for Education said that the government wanted to see state schools operating on a "level playing field" with the independent sector, with the same access to qualifications. The education secretary, Michael Gove, is an open admirer of the IB, and has said he wanted to see A-levels moving towards a similar model. By reducing the number of modules in favour of exams in year 13, Gove says he wants to create a "revival of the art of deep thought".

Back at Kingshurst, students appreciate the IB diploma. Joshua Perkins, 17, says that although most of his friends are taking BTecs, he has no regrets. "A lot of my mates say that I get no free time, but I like the challenge. It makes you think more outside of subjects, about who you are and what's around you."

Let down by the bacc? Why Leila is going back to do A-levels instead

With 10 A*s at GCSE under her belt, Leila Murton Poole opted for the IB on the advice of her teachers at the Godolphin and Latymer school in Hammersmith, west London, who assured her the qualification was highly rated by universities. Two years on, having just missed the grades for her chosen university, she is wondering if A-levels might have been a safer bet.

IB students take six subjects over a two-year period (including an additional language), a philosophy-based course and 60 hours of community service, which means the IB is far more taxing than three or even four A-levels, says Leila. "I had just one free period a week, when my friends who were studying A-levels had as many as 12."

When it came to applying for university, Leila felt many institutions didn't recognise or reward the breadth and intensity of study involved in the IB.

The physics admissions test she sat at Oxford University was closely linked to the A-level syllabus, including topics she had not covered in the IB, so it came as little surprise when she wasn't called for a follow-up interview.

Durham University, which typically asks for at least two As and a B at A-level, wanted 37 out of a possible 45 points in the IB for a place on their physics degree, which equates to 545 Ucas points. An A-level score of four A*s would attract 560 points. "I think that the IB, and just how challenging it can be, is still not fully understood by many universities," she says.

Leila did achieve the 37 points required for Durham and her second choice, UCL, but did not get the required scores in maths and physics, which meant the offers were withdrawn. She now plans to take three A-levels in a year at a local college. "I've watched friends of a similar ability come out with all As and A*s in their A-levels and I can't help thinking that could have been me.

Richard Spencer, policy officer at Ucas, admits that the present system does not accurately reflect the breadth of study involved in the IB. "The current tariff doesn't give admissions staff at universities the information they need to make a judgment about a student's suitability for a course." In July, Ucas announced a review of the tariff system, due for completion in 2012.

But Nick Lee, university liaison officer at International Baccalaureate, the organisation responsible for the qualification, says universities are increasingly knowledgeable about the IB. While "reluctant to comment on individual cases", he says that with demand for university places at an all-time high, students such as Leila who miss their grades by a small margin are unlikely to have been turned away simply because they hold an IB.

And blaming the qualification is not helpful, he says, pointing to the recent example of Gary Lineker, who publicly blasted the new Pre-U exam, much loved by the Tories, saying it was responsible for his son not achieving the grades needed to get into university.

Meanwhile, Leila is looking around local colleges so she can get started on her A-level study. "Despite my excellent academic record I have been left without a university place. I can't help feeling that if the admissions tutors were more familiar with the demands of the IB, I might have been in with a chance."

Janet Murray

Mick Waters has probably changed secondary schools more profoundly than anyone in the past 20 years. Why is he cautiously pessimistic about the future?

Some people are not allowed out in newspapers without being shepherded by an adjective. So, for example, Katie Price, in redtop papers, is "busty Katie Price" while Myra Hindley is always "evil Hindley". In the same way, Mick Waters, former director of curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the architect of the latest secondary curriculum, is always, at least in the educational press, "charismatic Mick Waters". He has been described as "the teachers' hero", "the biggest champion for children out there" and even as "the Mick Jagger of education", though he says that was the result of a journalist's mishearing.

Waters attained heroic status while travelling the country to consult on, and then explain, the new curriculum to teachers. He pared down content, encouraged more links between subjects, introduced cross-curricular "dimensions" (creativity, healthy lifestyles, community participation, for example) and said lessons could last 10 minutes or half aday. But what's down on paper doesn't capture his impact. Hearing him, many teachers felt a sense of liberation, of an authority figure at last telling them they were trusted professionals, who were doing something right and should feel free to do more of it. What's more, once the curriculum came into effect in 2008, he offered a sort of after-care service, instead of the take-it-or-leave-it attitude schools normally got.

"I don't think he has a distinctive curriculum philosophy," says Professor David Hargreaves, a former QCA chief executive. "He's a pragmatist. One of the problems with key stage 3 was that teachers always thought it more rigid than it really was. There was a climate of fear, and he removed many fears. He looked for what was good and supported it." John Bangs, former National Union of Teachers head of education, now visiting professor at the London University Institute of Education, says teachers were expected to resist more change. "But on this, we didn't hear a squeak from anybody." On the contrary, one head said, schools were "bursting to try things out". If children starting secondary school this month find it more stimulating and more fun, and their teachers a touch less harassed, than their predecessors did, much of the credit belongs to Waters.

At his home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, I ask him to identify his heroic qualities. After a long silence, he prefaces and concludes his remarks with "I wouldn't say I'm a hero". In between, he says: "I think I see life as teachers see it, that I'm able to talk with them about the reality of their world in a way that strikes a chord. I suppose people feel I talk the right language: persuasive, not confrontational." Nobody I spoke to would dispute this account.

Waters has made it his life's work to improve teaching and learning and, while that's what everybody from the education secretary downwards would say they're doing, he comes at it with a peculiarly personal and single-minded passion created, I think, by his own schooling. Born in 1949 in rural Northamptonshire – his father was a plasterer, his mother a school cook – he got a scholarship from his village primary to Magdalen College school, then a direct-grant grammar, now independent. He didn't exactly hate it at the time – children in those days took school as it came and had no particular expectations – but, looking back, he obviously feels it failed him badly, leaving him with a modest academic record and the sense he wasn't much good at anything. "It was hard, authoritarian. When I was first shown round, there was a brand new stage and, when I left seven years later, I'd never set foot on that stage, never performed, never been celebrated, never once been in the spotlight." He pauses, and shakes his head. "Every child should have a moment."

Sporting prowess was his saving grace. "It gives you a certain standing," he says. He was good enough for cricket trials with Northamptonshire, but missed them because he got appendicitis with complications, made worse because he delayed going to the doctor so he wouldn't miss a football final. After school, he played in the Northern League, sometimes with Test cricket stars, employed as club professionals while they were on the way up or down. He later appeared as Mick the Fiery Bowler in a Postman Pat story by John Cunliffe, who met Waters while teaching.

His youthful ambition was to be a professional cricketer, the school having convinced him he wasn't academic. But a careers adviser said he looked like a teacher. "He advised staying in the sixth form, which I wanted to do anyway so I could play more cricket." He chose Sheffield City College to do his teacher's certificate "because the city had two first division football teams and Yorkshire still played cricket there".

His college lecturers inspired him in a way none of his teachers managed to. "One talked about how and why children didn't learn and I thought: yes, that's what's been happening to me. Another talked about educational discussion and, for the first time, I realised you're supposed to talk in classrooms and put a point of view, without necessarily being right. A whole new world opened up. I got a distinction in teaching practice and I thought: yes, I've found something I can do and I'm good at it."

He started in a Nottingham primary school, got promoted after his first year and then, in his next job in Cumbria, covered for the deputy head during a secondment. After just seven years in teaching, he was head of a 230-pupil primary in Barrow, before moving to Cumbria's biggest primary, in Kendal. Until he became a head, he says, he didn't realise how much the quality of teaching varied, and he resolved to do what he could to improve it.

Teacher training

So the place to go was surely teacher training, and his next stop was Charlotte Mason College, later merged with Lancaster University. "But when I got there, I thought this is really silly because teachers are so much influenced by the schools they go to. So I started running courses for heads and deputies. We had them observing each other, swapping jobs. It was far ahead of its time."

In 1997, he became chief adviser in Birmingham, then being rescued from the educational doldrums by its new chief education officer, Tim Brighouse, who was widely regarded as resistance leader to the traditionalist counter-revolution and a pillar of the burgeoning school improvement movement. "Mick had an amazing capacity to tell schools the truth without removing their dignity," recalls Brighouse. "He had a very keen eye for what schools were and weren't doing well. He was a truly good critical friend."

When Ofsted descended to inspect the authority, Waters claims credit for helping see them off. "I talked to our statistics people. If we have to raise results by 2%, I said, let's find the 2% we can do it with – the children on the C/D borderline or the level 4 borderline – and get schools to focus on pushing them to the next level."

He's not particularly proud of this, but says it's the sort of thing that tests, league tables and narrowly focused inspections lead to. "The national curriculum could have been such a power for good. But along came inspectors, with checklists and demands to see your plans. Politicians became very good at targeting the 2% whose votes make a difference in marginal constituencies. Then people lost interest in politics. It's the same in schools. We've become so good at targeting and segmenting that young people, even some who do well, have lost enthusiasm for learning."

Waters moved in 2002 to become chief education officer in Manchester, where a stream of bright ideas emerged from his office – vouchers for children who didn't truant, exam revision evenings in curry houses, education officers teaching in classrooms for a day a month – which, he says, were mostly "just throwing pebbles in the pond, to keep the conversation going; the main thing was, I wanted teachers to believe in themselves and believe in the children they taught".

So why did he leave Manchester, where he saw exam results rise by more than 30%, after just three years? Waters says the switch to a "children's services" department, combining education and social care, was not for him. "I had no background in social care, no training or anything." A close colleague suggests he was also uncomfortable with the corporate aspects of the job, which included sitting in the chief executive's team talking about housing and so on. "He was absolutely preoccupied with how to make schools better. He felt every minute should be given to school improvement."

Designing a learning experience

The decisive factor, though, was the QCA post, which gave him a once-in-a-lifetime chance – for which almost his whole life had been a preparation – to improve teaching and learning nationwide. "My view was that it doesn't matter how good the curriculum is when it leaves London. If it doesn't work in schools, it's no good. The curriculum is packaged up when it leaves London in order to make sense of it. But it doesn't have to be taught in packages. It's like a salad" – Waters is very fond of food and cookery analogies – "and you don't eat tomatoes and then cucumber and then onions, one after the other. It needs blending. A school shouldn't start with curriculum content. It should start with designing a learning experience and then check it has met national curriculum requirements. That includes things that aren't thought of as curriculum: drama performances, sports events, overseas trips.

"The national curriculum never said how you should teach or anything about the timetable. But a history inspector would say: show me the history. Well, if he's the history inspector, he should be able to notice it. But he wants to be shown it and so schools package it accordingly."

Waters is as critical of testing as he is of inspection. "It's perfectly reasonable," Waters says, "to give tests and then report results to parents so they know how their children compare with the 'expected' level for their age. League tables are the problem. With all the practice papers, they create an awful, absolutely dire year six for children."

Off-message

Waters left the QCA last year. He says he didn't want to move with the authority from London to Coventry because "I'd be choosing curtains and interviewing staff". More important, I think, he had done everything he could to improve teaching and learning. He didn't get the chance to sort out the primary curriculum because ministers – who were none too keen on Waters's tendency to stray off-message or, for that matter, on anybody being a teachers' hero – gave the job to Sir Jim Rose, a former director of inspection at Ofsted, who was forbidden to touch the year 6 tests. Nor could Waters hope for much leeway from the Tory education team expected soon to take office. He is cautiously pessimistic about the future. "All the portents are that ministers want to emphasise what they call knowledge. By knowledge, they tend to mean facts. And facts are important: children love general knowledge and it builds articulacy, which gets you places. But it's not everything. We have to look at making children well disposed to learning."

Waters is still talking to teachers through projects such as the Black Country Challenge and the new Curriculum Foundation. But his long search for the key to changing teaching and learning – a search that began when he decided that all experiences of school didn't have to be as bad as his was – is over. He may not get more than a footnote in the history books. But he has probably changed secondary schooling more profoundly than anybody in the past 20 years. "He liberated teachers from being technicians and reawakened their professionalism," says Brighouse. "He's very, very special."

US college knocked off top spot for first time in seven years, while UK institutions 'struggle to compete on funding'

Both of them have earned fistfuls of Nobel prizes, have educated enough statesmen to table a string of international summits, and inspired eminent scientists, philosophers and poets.

But Harvard today forfeits first place to Cambridge in a league table of the world's top universities, the first time in the list's seven year history that the Ivy League institution has been knocked off the number one spot.

British universities made a strong showing, with University College London, Oxford and Imperial all appearing in the top 10, while King's College London and Edinburgh appeared in the top 25.

American institutions dominate the list, however, taking 31 out of the top 100 places in the QS world university rankings. The list also features 15 Asian universities, lead by the University of Hong Kong at 23. The QS table is based on measures of research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are.

Harvard, which takes its name from John Harvard, an alumnus of Cambridge who was its first benefactor, was still most popular among the 5,000 employers polled worldwide.

However, Cambridge was voted best for research quality in a survey of 15,000 academics. It has an outstanding pedigree: famous minds who pushed back the frontiers of knowledge there include Newton, Darwin and Wittgenstein. Cambridge took overall first place in the rankings, which also use citation counts from a database of academic publishing.

Professor Steve Young, senior pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Cambridge, said: "While university league tables tend to over-simplify the range of achievements at institutions, it is particularly pleasing to note that the excellence of the transformative research – research that changes people's lives – carried out at Cambridge is so well regarded by fellow academics worldwide."

A Harvard spokesman said: "Harvard University is always honoured to be recognised among such high calibre institutions of higher learning. However, we also continue to believe it is important that students select the college or university that best suits their individual needs."

John O'Leary, executive member of the QS academic advisory board, blamed a hiring freeze for Harvard losing its top spot. "Cambridge has gone top because it has improved its citations. Harvard has taken more students and had a hiring freeze amongst its academics. That's the reason these two have swapped around."

The impressive showing of British and US universities is because English is the favoured language of academia, O'Leary said. "In general terms, UK universities, like American ones, benefit from being English-speaking. If you're publishing in a language most researchers aren't using, you're not going to be picked up and cited ... in the mainstream journals."

However, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released yesterday shows the UK lagging behind competitors in public investment in higher education. The sector is facing cuts of more than £1bn by the end of 2013. The share of public spending in British higher education is 0.7% of GDP, below the OECD average of 1%, and places Britain behind the US, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Slovenia.

Announcing the OECD's results in London, Andreas Schleicher, the head of its indicators and analysis division, said Finland, Canada and Japan were now major players in higher education. "For many years the UK was very much at the forefront," he said. "But now you do not see that competitive advantage."

The vice-chancellors' body, Universities UK, questioned how long the country's higher education system could maintain its world-class position in the field given its comparative "under-investment".

The Times Higher Education magazine, which is publishing its own global university rankings next week, is no longer collaborating with QS. It is concerned that the careers advice company's rankings rely too heavily on subjective surveys of scholars and employers, and not enough on hard indicators of excellence. The THE's rankings are expected to contain disappointing news for some prestigious British institutions.

Ben Sowter, head of research at QS, said: "Unlike other rankings systems which rely heavily on statistical indicators of university research, QS also takes into account the most up-to-date views of employers and academics, reflecting the broader interests of students and parents. QS rankings reflect the highly competitive environment of global higher education."

The QS rankings are weighted 40% to academic reputation, 10% to employability, 20% to citations, 20% to the staff-student ratio and give a further 10% weighting to how international the make-up of the faculty and student body is.

Dr Wendy Piatt, the director general of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, which includes Oxford and Cambridge, said: "We are pleased these latest figures show that Russell Group universities still rank among the world's leading universities. However, two health warnings should be heeded. First, this latest league table, like all others, has its limitations and there can be no single correct way of measuring university performance or quality.

"Second, our world-class status is under threat from other countries who are ploughing billions into their top institutions in a determined bid to overtake the UK in the rankings. Data released by the OECD only yesterday shows once again that UK leading universities are already under-resourced in comparison with their international competitors. But now, while our competitors are investing in their future skills and knowledge base, UK universities are threatened with further cuts which will make it more difficult than ever to maintain their world-class status.

"Not only North America but, increasingly, countries like China and Korea are investing massively in their universities and as a result their best institutions are rising rapidly up international rankings."

How they compare

Cambridge

Founded in 1209 when scholars taking refuge from hostile townspeople in Oxford migrated to Cambridge. King Henry III took the scholars under his protection in 1231. Peterhouse, the first college, was set up by the Bishop of Ely in 1284.

Location Cambridge, England.

Famous alumni Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Milton, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage.

In numbers 11,815 students, including 1,257 from overseas, 1,590 academic staff.

Fees This year, the tuition fees for British and EU undergraduates are £3,290 a year on all courses.

Harvard

Founded in 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the local legislature. Named after first benefactor John Harvard, a minister and Cambridge alumnus who bequeathed his library and half his estate to Harvard.

Location Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Famous alumni TS Eliot, John Updike, Barack Obama, John F Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Alfred Kinsey, Robert Oppenheimer.

In numbers About 6,700 students at Harvard college, 2,100 faculty members and more than 10,000 academic appointments in affiliated teaching hospitals.

Fees For 2009-10, tuition fees were $33,696.

Today the Council for Industry and Higher Education's taskforce for the creative, digital and information technology industries releases its report, The Fuse: Igniting High Growth for Creative, Digital and Information Technology Industries in the UK. The CDIT industries are a vital part of the UK economy. Not only are they significant businesses and world-beaters, their fusion with the rest of UK industry underpins our future economic success. We believe that the CDIT industries should be a national priority, alongside traditional engineering, science and manufacturing, if we are to ensure our place in a fast-growing, multitrillion-dollar, global market.

To compete, these industries require a clear and sophisticated policy focus by government, the development of the right interdisciplinary skills in higher education, and strong ties between business, universities and government. Global experience demonstrates that when these relationships are correctly aligned they create powerful innovation ecosystems, but when they are unaligned, growth stalls or fails to ignite.

To support this growth, universities must embrace, and be rewarded for, the development of new interdisciplinary skills and research fundamental to the success of CDIT businesses. Leaders in these businesses must work with universities systematically to contribute to the development of CDIT courses, and to ensure a broad range of business "touch points" for students. Furthermore, the ICT curriculum in schools must be radically overhauled to prepare children for the digital 21st century, with relevant tools in education and for the new world of work. We must act now, or risk being left behind in the global digital revolution.

Professor Christopher Snowden Vice-chancellor and chief executive, University of Surrey, Rona Fairhead Chairman and CEO, Financial Times Group

Vice-chairs, CDIT industries task force

Dr David Docherty CEO, CIHE, Chair of Digital TV Group, and 12 others

The news that Michael Gove is proposing an "English baccalaureate" to sit alongside GCSEs (Report, 6 September) is to be welcomed by all those who would like our young people to be stretched beyond the limitations of the current system. However, there is an alternative that the government's proposal appears to overlook. The International Baccalaureate's Middle Years Programme (MYP), which Wellington students study as an alternative to GCSEs, covers maths, English, science, the humanities, technology and the arts, and all students must study a modern language. Crucially, it is an integrated programme which seeks to develop links between subjects. What is also appealing is that it returns responsibility of the curriculum back to the schools: a process of trust and independence that must surely appeal to the new secretary of state.

The government could save a lot of time – and money – by introducing the MYP to schools in this country: in one step they would begin to move our young people out from a rather insular educational system to a more liberated, modern and international system which will better prepare them for study and work in an increasingly interconnected world.

Dr Anthony Seldon Master

Dr David James Director of IB

Wellington College, Crowthorne, Berkshire

• Michael Gove's plans to consider a new baccalaureate certificate and combat the flight from languages should be warmly applauded. The repercussions of the last government's decision to remove the requirement to study another language to GCSE level are becoming clearer by the day. In our report Language Matters last year, the British Academy warned of the snowball effect on university language departments, and the long-term damage it will inflict on the international nature of modern research across all disciplines. Since then the situation has plainly worsened. Any moves to help reverse this dismal trend deserve support.

Professor Adam Roberts

President, British Academy

• Mr Gove claims parents worry that sixth-form students are denied "the chance to do sport and art and music as well as getting into deep study"; this reveals his lack of understanding of the inherent rigour of so-called "recreational" or "soft" subjects. Deep, sustained study, and the "deep thought" Mr Gove wishes to encourage, is by no means the sole preserve of the limited number of A-level subjects accepted for Oxbridge entry.

At the same time it is surprising that, given his concern for deep thought, Mr Gove doesn't seem to have included some form of certification for the QCDA's personal learning and thinking skills framework in his proposal for a broad and balanced GCSE baccalaureate qualification.

Tristram Shepard

Canterbury

• Unlike Andrew Penman (Can't do God, can't pay fees … so what next?, Family, 4 September) I believe children benefit from mixing with others from diverse backgrounds. All three of my children have gone to local state comprehensive schools, and my youngest is now receiving an excellent education at a secondary comprehensive in Merton. The Merton schools Mr Penman criticised are good, and – like most state schools – improving rapidly thanks to investment received in recent years and the efforts of children and teachers. Of Rutlish school, which he considered for his son, he wrongly states that only 49% of its pupils gain five or more GCSEs, including English and maths; the correct figure is 61%. He decries a college in Wandsworth for having too many pupils with English as a second language, and tells how he moved to Surrey so his children could attend other schools. Does he really want them to have only experienced life in white, prosperous Surrey before entering the workplace, very possibly in multi-ethnic London?

Cllr Peter Walker

Cabinet member for education, Merton

• Christina Strupinska Brown (Letters, September 6) commends Rutlish school, where her son is "learning well". I hope he does as well as its most famous alumnus, John Major. Actually, I hope he does better – Sir John would not have been eligible for the Gove diploma had it been around then. Just goes to show – it was a grammar school back then.

Professor Justin Dillon

King's College London

Cambridge is now the world's top university, according to a new report, which knocks Harvard from the top spot. See how it compares with the world's top 100 universities here
• Get the data

Harvard today forfeits first place to the University of Cambridge in a league table of the world's top institutions, the first time in the list's seven year history that the Ivy League university has been knocked off the number one spot.

The QS table is based on measures of research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are.

Harvard was still most popular among the 5,000 employers polled worldwide, but Cambridge was voted best for research quality in a survey of 15,000 academics and took overall first place. The rankings also use citation counts from a database of academic publishing.

The Times Higher Education magazine, which is publishing its own global university rankings next week, is no longer collaborating with QS. The magazine is concerned that these rankings rely too heavily on subjective surveys of scholars and employers and not enough on hard indicators of excellence. The THE's new rankings are expected to contain disappointing news for some prestigious British institutions.

Some of the key UK losers this year are:

• University of Oxford down to 6 from 5 last year
• University of Edinburgh, down two places to 22
• University of Lancaster, down from 161 to 182

However, some are doing better, notably University of Durham, up to 92 from 103 last year.

Thanks to QS, we've got the top 100 for you to play with - you can download it below. What can you do with the data?

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As a new book lays bare the inadequacies of the French education system, Emily Barr relives her own disastrous experience of trying to settle her son into a French primary school: 'I felt sick with recognition'

In his first year at his new primary school in Cornwall, my son Gabe gave a talk to the class about his experience the previous year at school in France. "The teacher shouted all the time," he informed his fellow pupils. "She wrote a 'naughty list' on the board. She waved a bamboo stick around. And the reading book was really boring." To emphasise his point, he ripped up a picture he had printed from the offending book and threw it into the air, concluding: "I like English school."

Seven years ago, James and I were thirtysomething backpackers with two small children, not quite ready to stop the adventures. We moved to France because, as a Tefl teacher and a writer, we could, uprooting a two-year-old and a tiny baby and taking them to live near Europe's best surf. We bought the regulation crumbling house and did it up. We spoke French, went to village functions and drove to the beach every weekend. When Gabe turned three, we sent him to the maternelle (nursery) section of the village school, where he settled happily and became bilingual. Many of our friends in Brighton were mired in panic about getting their children into the right schools, whereas everyone knew that the French education system was among the best in the world. It was academically rigorous, dependable, secular. We may have been slightly smug.

But five years later we returned to the UK, desperate to get our children into a good primary, to send them somewhere without a "get it right or you're rubbish" ethos. By that point, I only wanted Gabe to go to a school at which someone would notice or care whether the children were happy or not.

When I read the interviews that the journalist Peter Gumbel has given to promote his new book, On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers (They Shoot Schoolchildren, Don't They?), published this week in France, I felt sick with recognition. Gumbel is a journalist and lecturer at the elite Institut d'Etudes Politiques (better known as Sciences Po) in Paris, and he has two daughters in the French education system. His book lays bare the system's inadequacies. "French children . . . are more anxious and intimidated in school than their peers in Europe or other developed countries," he writes. "They're so terrified by the idea of making mistakes and being lambasted for them, that they'd rather keep their mouths shut than put their hands up." He found his children and his students stressed, ill and massively lacking in confidence.

I remembered the seven-year-old girl who was so scared of not progressing to the next class that she stopped eating. The 10-year-old who was put up a year because she was bright, and found herself in the first year of secondary school in a class with 14-year-old boys who had been kept back repeatedly and who were frustrated and aggressive.

However, this reality did not hit us for several years. Pre-school provision in France is second to none, and we managed to carry on being smug while Gabe, and his little brother, were happy at maternelle. The younger ones would spend much of the afternoon napping on camp beds. Lunch was a three-course meal, and the children danced, painted and played all day long, learned to write their names on squared paper and to count, but with very little pressure.

We moved to a different village an hour's drive away, for James's work, just as Gabe reached six. When we went to visit the new school, the head showed us around, on a day when no children were present. He seemed to be an "Etre et Avoir" kind of superman, running the school, teaching the last year of primary, and also – did he mention? – he was mayor of the village. Alarm bells should have rung, but I ignored them because I wanted it all to be wonderful.

When the new school year started, it did not take long for it all to fall catastrophically apart. Gabe's class teacher, whom we liked, left three days into the school year. She was replaced by a young supply teacher whose heart was not in the job and who had no idea how to teach.

On his first day, Gabe clung to me. On his second day, he clung harder. I waited for him to settle, but it got worse. He cast around for reasons not to go. He invented headaches, stomach ailments. I sometimes let him stay at home, but often sent him in because I had to work. Once or twice I peeled his arms off me and flung him at the teacher. Although he made friends quickly, and his teacher assured me he was doing well, it was heartbreaking, and I look back on this period now and feel I failed him.

School in France has no assembly, no school plays, no music, no clubs. There is a hastily thrown-together entertainment at Christmas. There is no pastoral care. Children go through the system and emerge with a body of knowledge, and everything else is down to the parents.

In CP (cours primaire, aged six), Gabe and his class sat at individual desks, copying handwriting from the board and taking dictation. They learned by rote, and every child in the class would read the same two pages of the reading book on the same day. Some would be bored and frustrated because it was too easy, others stressed because they didn't understand it. The teacher came down harshly on anyone who did not get to grips with the subject, or did not behave acceptably: there was always a "naughty list" on the board, never a "good list".

Victoria, an English woman with a French husband and two children, lives in north-east France, where her eldest child is at a bilingual secondary school. Her daughter "sees huge differences between her native English-speaking teachers, trained in the UK or US, and her 'normal' French teachers," says Victoria. "The former engage with the class, teach creatively, encourage discussion and mark positively, whereas the latter (with exceptions) tend to lecture rather than teach, and mark with terrifying harshness and negativity." Victoria's daughter cannot bring herself to ask if she does not understand something. "In the past we have encouraged her to speak up in class when she hasn't understood," she says, "but other pupils have been greeted with frosty sarcasm by some teachers and the ridicule of classmates, so she won't do it."

We had known for a long time that we were not going to stay in France for ever, but Gabe's unhappiness propelled us home sooner than we anticipated. Gabe and I came to Cornwall to look at schools. When we stepped into St Francis, his current school, his face lit up. The head showed us around, and I watched Gabe's eyes widen as he looked at the PE equipment, the art room, the playing field. Best of all, he plucked up the courage to tell her that he wanted to be a time lord when he grew up, and she said, "Oh good – can I be your assistant?" This is a school that has an overwhelming pastoral ethos, and is not all about the grades. It has a community choir and a vegetable garden. The school production of Alice in Wonderland was rehearsed to such a high standard that many of the children were performing like professionals. Gabe is happy, and there are no "boring" reading books.

That is not to say, of course, that the British system is perfect. There are good schools, and bad schools, and they are driven by the personality of the head. The unseemly scramble for places at desirable establishments would horrify French observers, and rightly so. As would the pretence at religion that goes on.

Dean Dorrell, a British man with a German wife and three French-educated children, also points out that, "One of the great advantages of the French system is the fact that there are basically no private schools. There is no 'them and us' attitude enforced from a young age, which I believe is endemic in the UK education system and translates into the class system that is still quite evident in UK society."

Now, if French schools could become less rigid, and if British schools could be more consistent, then we might all be on to something.

Survey shows children brought up 'in cotton wool', when they need boisterous play, say experts

A generation of "cotton wool" children are growing up without being exposed to risky play, experts have warned, as new research finds that parents are increasingly concerned about the health and safety culture in schools.

In a survey of more than 2,000 parents of primary school children commissioned by Play England and the British Toy and Hobby Association, almost three-quarters said they felt schools were too concerned with health and safety during playtime. The survey found the average child got just 37 minutes of time to play in the school day. Two-thirds of parents told researchers they felt this was not enough.

Dr Amanda Gummer, a psychologist who advises the association, said: "'Cotton wool' children are growing up without having been given the opportunity to learn how to assess risks. Children have to have bumps and scrapes to teach them what's safe and what's not. Children who have all elements of danger removed from their lives grow up to think they are invincible. This doesn't just affect the accidents they might have when riding a bike or exploring a river, but it has a knock-on effect in terms of drug culture and gang violence."

Society and schools have become increasingly risk-averse, according to Gummer. "Parents go nuts if their children get hurt at school," she said. "Litigation is every headteacher's worst nightmare."

Play England has launched a manifesto for children's play, to try to get the government to enshrine the importance of play during schooltime. Catherine Prisk, assistant director, said experts were beginning to realise how important it was for children to engage in boisterous, unstructured play.

"A generation of teachers have been trained to prevent all forms of play fighting in the playground," said Prisk, who was a primary teacher for seven years and deputy head of a children's play centre. "But rough and tumble play is vital for all children, particularly for boys, who learn social skills through free, physical play that they simply cannot learn in other ways.

"Children no longer go to the park after school now and nor do they walk to school," she added. "School playtimes are the only time left to children to figure out the pack mentality and learn co-operation, negotiation, compromise and teamwork skills that are vital to keeping them safe as adolescents and later as adults, too."

Government guidance dating from 2007 highlights the importance of play as an opportunity for young children to take risks and make mistakes. It emphasises the importance of a daily opportunity to play outdoors. But "there is much more guidance about the amount of land needed for free-range chickens than for primary children's playtime", said Michael Follett, the local authority adviser for play in South Gloucestershire.

"The way that play is managed in today's schoolyards is not based around what's good for the children but around the best way for schools to protect themselves against complaints and being sued," he said.

"Managing rough and tumble play can be difficult and requires quick and complex judgments by adults. It is much easier to close down that sort of play altogether and that, increasingly, is the option schools are taking, forbidding children to engage in any games that involve them even coming into contact with each other, for example, or running too fast."

When she arrived at Bromley Heath junior school in South Gloucestershire four years ago Faye Kitchen, acting headteacher, introduced a play scheme that recognises "children need and want to take risks when they play".

In an attempt to reduce high levels of playground bullying and to increase students' motivation in the classroom, Kitchen brought in just one rule for children in the playground: they are only allowed to hit each other with toys.

"It took a lot of work," said Kitchen. "We did lots of consultations with parents, staff and stakeholders but we got everyone on board and the impact on the children has been revolutionary.

"There were accidents at the beginning because the children were used to playtime being about speed and aggression, but once they got used to the fact that they had to take responsibility for their own safety the accidents disappeared almost entirely."

"Children need and want to challenge themselves and take risks when they play," she said. "By allowing them to do this, they learn to self-police themselves. Our best advert is our children: they come in from playtime now bubbling with creativity and happiness and are ready to learn."

With the death of Jefferson Thomas, one of nine teenagers to first test racial segregation in US schools, we look back at their battle for integration in 1957

The agency was created to place greater value on the people who work with the vulnerable. It should not be lost because of a wobbly beginning, says Nick Johnson

When new governments begin to rationalise the structures of their forebears, quangos are always top of the list. This usually precedes a point where the administration realises it cannot cope without a specialist body to deliver some aspect of policy, giving birth to its own crop of quangos. Some are political creations, hardly recognised in life and hardly noticed as they disappear.

The General Social Care Council (GSCC) does not qualify at all under this heading. Its creation was to register social care workers and to regulate their conduct and training. The work took about 25 years and passed between several governments, facing varying levels of reluctance until New Labour allowed it into the Care Standards Act 2000.

The sector always aspired to have similar recognition for its workforce as the health service. It rightly believed that raising the standard of the growing social care workforce and the self-respect of the individual worker could only be beneficial to the person using the services.

The GSCC managed to register all 120,000 social workers in England – despite many waiting until the deadline approached, seemingly more concerned about who would pay the £30 fee. The logic then would have been to register managers providing services for children and adults, cascading the process down, but it was decided to try first to register the care-at-home workforce.

The fledgling GSCC has not been without its faults. The decision in 2004, following a health select committee inquiry, to attempt to register care-at-home workers was seriously flawed and doomed, given that this was the most volatile workforce, working for multiple employers and changing jobs readily. The conflict that emerged between social care staff with regulated employers and those employed by an individual through a direct payment – who are not subject to the normal regulation applicable to an employee of a care home or agency and avoided any obligation to register with the social care regulator – presented an additional knotty problem of trying to balance safety and risk for people with some level of vulnerability.

The proposal last year by the Labour government to change the GSCC to the General Social Work Council and give up on 92% of the workforce (people who work in social care but are not qualified social workers) and pass them to the Health Professions Council (HPC) was bad enough. The move now by the new government to jettison the GSCC altogether and pass social workers to the HPC with no mention of the rest, is worse. How readily would we de-register 650,000 nurses? Yet, the numbers working in social care across England are vast – as many as work across all of the NHS – and the justification for a workforce regulator remains strong.

The GSCC was the result of a movement for social justice for more vulnerable people by placing greater value on the people who work with them. It should not be lost because of a wobbly beginning. A will to succeed is required.

The views here are not necessarily those of the other 1,499,999 people in social care. I don't know their take on the culling of the GSCC, but nor does anyone else. No one has asked them.

• Nick Johnson is chief executive of the Social Care Association.

Labour's leadership hopefuls are dispiritingly quiet on education policy and Gove's scrapping of 700 new school buildings

It was gratifying to read about Elaine Costigan, the Tory councillor who defected to Labour over her party's education policies and the shoddy way in which her own government withdrew funding for new school buildings.

Maybe she could encourage a bit more frankness among her new colleagues. Following the Labour leadership election from a distance has been interesting but at times dispiriting. If you want to know how to acquire a Twibbon, organise a house meeting, or hear what the candidates had for lunch, the camp followers are expansive. But don't hold your breath if you want to know what they would do if elected. Some policies have been relatively well aired; the living wage, aspects of deficit reduction, the universal but unsurprising endorsement of community activism. But education – and schools in particular – hasn't just been the dog that didn't bark. It has been a dog that has been locked in the cellar for three months. Why has a subject that is so close to the electorate's heart and such a key element of the coalition's plans been so studiously avoided?

Personal choices made by individual politicians may be one reason. Even the usually garrulous Diane Abbott was lost for words in one interview when asked about her choice of a private school for her son.

A more likely reason is that all the candidates are in a bind. On the one hand, they face Tony Blair hailing Tory policy and claiming anyone who deviates a millimetre from New Labour is a loser who doesn't "get aspiration". On the other, the central thrust of the coalition's "schools revolution", built almost entirely on legislation passed by the last Labour government, is causing dismay among thousands of Labour and Lib Dem members and already proving divisive between parents in many communities.

Some individual issues have popped up. Ed Miliband has promised to look at academic selection, and talked about a role for local authorities. His brother has floated curriculum reforms and charitable status for private schools. Andy Burnham has been refreshingly robust in his defence of comprehensive education and Ed Balls has made waves attacking the Tories.

But even the shadow education secretary has no big forward-looking plan. You would need to be completely inept not to put Michael Gove through the shredder once he scrapped 700 new school buildings. And some of the decisions Balls made as secretary of state undermine his assertion that the New Labour academies were only in deprived areas. One of his last acts in government was to approve a brand new academy, sponsored by an elite university, in one of the most affluent parts of my local area – a school that is now going to be funded by the coalition at the expense of all the others, to the dismay of local parents.

The crude caricatures of some candidates as old Labour luddites have rightly been treated with contempt. Even with the absence of detail, most appear fully signed up to fairness, responsibility, social justice and an understanding of people's desire to make a better life for themselves.

In education, translating those values into fresh, distinct policies must mean resolving the contradiction between investment in high-quality, non-selective neighbourhood schools, with a role for local authorities, especially when it comes to managing admissions, or the promotion of potentially divisive independent state schools with freedoms and funding other schools don't have.

Whoever gets the job, it will be a tough call, demand deft political footwork and a willingness to offload baggage from the past. Of all the candidates Ed Miliband seems the most prepared to do this, even if the details of what he would actually do are hazy.

By this time next year, the Tories' education policy will, I predict, be deeply unpopular. Gove has squandered massive political capital on what turns out to be 16 schools. The next stage will be the spending cuts that affect the rest.

Labour won't win again by offering a poor copy of the Tories' half-baked gimmicks. It needs a strong confident plan of its own. It's just a shame we haven't had a chance to debate it in this contest.

Cornish clotted cream's long journey, JK Rowling's wizard donation and the colossus of the Commons feature this week in Britain

Michael Gove, the education secretary, has a vision: a new generation of schools run by parents and voluntary groups. The so-called free schools – free, that is, of bureaucratic controls and targets set by central government – are due to spring to life next September. The transformed education network, Gove has boasted, could feature up to 700 free schools and up to 1,000 similarly autonomous academies.

Back in the real world, it has emerged that as few as 20 free schools will open next September, while only 32 new academies are opening this month. This watery version of the Gove masterplan has been gleefully condemned by the Labour opposition as a shambles but the secretary of state's vision is apparently undimmed. A loyal source says that, although the take-up of free schools has been limited, there are lots of proposals in the pipeline.

There had better be if Gove is to keep his job. School reform is a central feature of the prime minister David Cameron's pet vision of a "big society" in which power is devolved from government to the grass roots.

While he struggles to nourish the grass, Gove is gamely proposing a top-down reform of school exams, to counter the widespread, though contested, view that they are now too easy. He wants to introduce a kind of baccalaureate qualification for 16-year-old GCSE pupils who have completed a broad course of studies. Though no Tory minister would admit it, it is a system widely used elsewhere in the EU.

Long road to Rodda

Most of us are aware of the idiocy of transporting our daily bread by air, sea and lorry hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres. But occasionally an example is so barkingly mad it is worthy of note. Such is the case of Rodda's Cornish clotted cream, a product so splendid the company makes 80m splodges of the stuff every year.

Happily for the Cornish, the clotted cream is available not only nationwide but in the Tesco supermarket at Redruth, 3km from the Rodda creamery in Scorrier. But to make that journey, it is first trucked by Tesco to its distribution centre in Avonmouth and returned to Cornwall the next day – a round trip of 547km. Planet-threatening journeys are made by other Cornish produce, including the popular Ginster's brand of savoury pastries. It's worth pointing out that we still have butchers and bakers, greengrocers and markets who still sell locally produced food. And it tastes better than most supermarket-packaged pap.

Spell of good fortune

JK Rowling has made squillions out of her magical creation, Harry Potter, and good luck to her. Book snobs may sneer, but children love her work, as do lots of grown-ups, and we ought not to grudge her the reward of her creativity.

Indeed, we should be grateful to a woman who has resisted the temptations of fame and celebrity, and instead put her good fortune to work for others.

The latest example of Rowling's philanthropy is a cool £10m ($15m) donation to establish a clinic at the University of Edinburgh to research possible treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS), the degenerative disease that killed her mother at the age of 45.

The clinic will also investigate the causes and the possible remedies for other neurological conditions and diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Rowling has previously made large donations to multiple sclerosis charities and researchers, and to the Labour party. But the new Anne Rowling regenerative neurology clinic is clearly the cause closest to her heart.

A jolly populist giant

Sir Cyril Smith, who has died at the age of 82, did not bestride British politics like a colossus. He was simply colossal – at 190kg, he was almost certainly the biggest-ever member of the Commons and for obvious reasons stood out in any crowd.

It was that, perhaps, that made him one of the most popular of MPs. He loved his own carefully burnished image as a jolly giant; a man of the people who rose from working-class obscurity to success in politics and business, without every losing his splendid Rochdale accent. But Smith was not always as nice or straightforward as he seemed. Populist as well as popular, he supported capital punishment, was generally well to the right of Liberal colleagues, and made himself thoroughly disagreeable with his bluntly expressed views and comments.

Smith was undoubtedly a self-made man of the people. When he became mayor of his beloved Rochdale, he enjoyed making his mum, Eva, his mayoress, when she was still employed as a town hall cleaner.

Fit for a Bard

For more than three years, the lovely Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon has been without its best-known residents, the actors, directors, stagehands and spear-carriers of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). But now the main theatre has been transformed from a frankly rather ugly red-brick culture warehouse into a cutting-edge auditorium with all the latest bells and whistles of the playmaking arts.

Had the refurbishment been delayed, it might have been imperilled by the government's obsessive cost cutting. As it is, it has cost £112.8m ($173m) for which, as artistic director Michael Boyd says, it has become "the best auditorium for performing Shakespeare anywhere". With £5m still to be raised, the RSC is hoping that the crowds will flock to the theatre when it reopens in November. And also to the shop, restaurant, cafe and bar.

Heinz's latest variety

From the sublime to the ridiculous, but still pursuing a cultural theme, we can report a dramatic development in the wacky world of salad cream. Heinz, which introduced the stuff to Britain 96 years ago, has got round to developing a new variant: lemon and black pepper salad cream.

A grateful nation will doubtless reward the US food giant by flooding its salads, and indeed its chips, with the yellow stuff. After all, salad cream was developed for the UK market, though how they knew we would take to something so unlike anything else beggars imagination.

Ten years ago there was a consumer hullabaloo when Heinz threatened to withdraw salad cream, blaming falling sales on a move towards factory-made mayonnaise. But recently the mayonnaise tide has turned, as shoppers return to the lower fat and cheaper salad cream.

NHS has a word for it

Foreign nurses, of whom there are a great many, in the National Health Service are to be given a crash-course in Britain's more bewildering everyday words and phrases. They will learn, for example, that patients who want to spend a penny are not necessarily looking for a bargain in the hospital shop.

The language lessons are being offered by the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Norfolk, mainly to its large contingent of Portuguese staff. All of the overseas recruits speak excellent English, says the hospital, but still can't fathom what patients mean when they say they feel under the weather, can't find their jim-jams, or are tickled pink. Given Norfolk's proximity to the eponymous Broads, patients too could perhaps benefit from language tuition, and be told never to refer to their waterworks.

The UK is matched only by the US in the comprehensiveness of its scholarly research capability. A historic retreat looms

In 1960, Harold Macmillan announced the abandonment of Britain's colonial aspirations with his famous "wind of change" speech. The empire had become too expensive, it was time to withdraw. This Wednesday, Vince Cable is poised to signal an equally historic retreat, this time from the empire of knowledge.

Britain has an unusually comprehensive capability across all the disciplines of scholarly research. Only the US can match our diversity of expertise. Everywhere else has concentrated on disciplines directly relevant to their commercial ecosystem. Germany is famously strong in engineering, Japan spectacularly weak in the social sciences.

Our expertise resides largely in our universities and has been irrigated for decades by increasing funding for research under both Conservative and Labour governments. The water of funding has allowed academics to spend time exploring the frontiers of knowledge, maintaining British outposts in many far-flung realms. Now the Treasury is considering cuts of 35% in research funding, turning off the tap to many fields. If that happens, expertise will rapidly wither, and our empire will fragment.

To understand the coming drought, consider just one of the government's two main channels of funding for academic researchers, the quality-related (QR) fund provided by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce). Hefce's QR budget is over £1.6bn a year. In recent years it has ringfenced the part of QR given to science and engineering disciplines. So when funding has been squeezed, it has been the social sciences and humanities that have borne all the cuts. If that policy is maintained in the face of cuts of 35%, there will be virtually no money left for the humanities or social sciences. Huge swathes of scholarship will lose half their irrigation. Many outposts will be abandoned. It will not be a case simply of trimming here and there.

Fear of such devastation is why learned societies, usually the most cordial of allies, have started attacking each other's turf. The Royal Academy of Engineering, for example, has recently advised ministers to make cuts in physics.

So as Vince Cable comes to make his first major speech on research on Wednesday, the stakes are high. It is of course inconceivable that the business secretary will say anything as frank as that he wants us to abandon much of our empire of knowledge. But then, Macmillan was also diplomatic in his language.

In his speech, the strongest Macmillan came up with was: "The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it."

On Wednesday, it is quite possible that the heart of Cable's speech will be something similar – perhaps: "The need to reduce the budget deficit is pressing, and whether we like it or not, the cuts required are a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our policies on science and research must take account of it."

If so, then we will know the battles with the Treasury are over, deep cuts are coming, and that Britain has finally given up trying to maintain expertise across the entire empire of knowledge. The chill wind of history will have arrived. And the only question left will be which outposts to abandon first.

If you have experienced depression following the birth of your child, G2 would like to hear your story

New research released this week has revealed that one in five men suffer from depression after becoming fathers. The study, which was funded by the Medical Research Council, suggestes that 21% of fathers experience depression at least once before their child is 12.

If you are male and have suffered from depression following the birth of your child, G2, the Guardian's daily features section, would be interested in interviewing you. Please email your full name, details about your experience and a daytime telephone number to g2@guardian.co.uk, with 'Fatherhood' in the subject line, by 10am on Wednesday 8 September

One of nine teenagers to first test racial segregation at US schools in 1957 dies, aged 67

Jefferson Thomas, who as a teenager was among nine black students to integrate a Little Rock high school in America's first major battle over school segregation, has died. He was 67.

Thomas died on Sunday at a care home in Columbus, Ohio, of pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, who also enrolled at Central high school in 1957 and is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.

The integration fight was the first real test of the federal government's resolve to enforce a 1954 supreme court order outlawing racial segregation in public schools. After Governor Orval Faubus sent National Guard troops to block Thomas and eight other students from entering the school, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered in the army's 101st airborne division.

Soldiers stood in the school halls and escorted each of the nine students between classrooms.

Each of the Little Rock Nine received congressional gold medals shortly after the 40th anniversary of their enrolment. President Bill Clinton presented the medals in 1999 to Thomas, LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Terrence Roberts and Thelma Mothershed Wair.

Clinton issued a statement yesterday calling Thomas "a true hero, a fine public servant, and profoundly good man".

"Jefferson and I had a long visit when he came to my presidential centre for the 50th anniversary in 2007, and I was struck again by his quiet dignity and kindness. America is a stronger, more diverse, and more tolerant nation because of the life he lived and the sacrifices he made," the former president said.

In 2008, Barack Obama invited Thomas and other members of the Little Rock Nine to his inauguration as the nation's first black president. During his campaign, Obama had said the Little Rock Nine's courage in desegregating Central high school helped make the opportunities in his life possible.

"Even at such a young age, he had the courage to risk his own safety, to defy a governor and a mob, and to walk proudly into that school even though it would have been far easier to give up and turn back," Obama said in a statement yesterday. "Our nation owes Mr Thomas a debt of gratitude for the stand he took half a century ago, and the leadership he showed in the decades since."

Thomas played a number of sports and was on the athletics team at Dunbar Junior high school, but other students had little to do with him once he entered Central, the state's largest high school.

"I had played with some of the white kids from the neighbourhood," Thomas said. "I went up to Central high school after school and we played basketball and touch football together. I knew some of the kids.

"Eventually, I ran into them ... and they were not at all happy to see me," Thomas said. "One of them said, 'Well I don't mind playing basketball or football with you or anything. You guys are good at sports. Everybody knows that, but you're just not smart enough to sit next to me in the classroom.'"

Beals said yesterday Thomas was nicknamed roadrunner because of his speed. "You could sometimes avoid danger by running fast."

She said by phone from her home in California that Thomas always seemed to bring a light moment to the crisis.

"He was funny, he had a most extraordinary sense of humour. He did sustain an enormous amount of damage and pain during the Little Rock crisis, but no matter what, he always had something refreshing and funny to say," she said. "It could be the most horrible day and he would say, 'Yes, but how are you dressed and are you smiling?'"

Thomas also brought levity to the 50th anniversary commemorations, telling the audience how angry LaNier was with him when he stood up and cheered at a Central high Tigers pep rally.

Thomas thought the white students were carrying the school flag and yelling the school cheer. He said LaNier glared at him and later set him straight: it was the Confederate flag and the students were singing Dixie.

Born in 1942, Thomas was the youngest of seven children. After graduation, he served in the US army in Vietnam. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from Los Angeles State College and worked as an accounting clerk with the department of defence, retiring in 2004.

The Arkansas governor, Mike Beebe, praised Thomas's lifetime of service.

"Arkansas and America have lost an unassuming hero whose role in the fight for equality and justice will never be forgotten," Beebe said.

Following the 2008 election, Thomas said in an interview that he supported Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primary and he also liked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who made a bid for the Republican nomination.

"It would have been a hard decision for me to make if Huckabee was running against Obama," Thomas said.

Still, he said, he was overjoyed with Obama's victory.

"This was really the non-violent revolution," Thomas said. "We went and cast our ballots and the ballots were counted this time. I'm thinking now we've got to do something. I don't know what. But there are a lot of things Obama ran on, what he's saying he wants to do."

Holidate | Eddie Waring - Mr Rugby League | The First Day of the Blitz | The Big School Lottery | Mercury Music Prize | This is England '86 | Tonight's TV highlights

Eddie Waring – Mr Rugby League
9pm, BBC4

Holidate
7pm, Bio

The First Day Of The Blitz
9pm, UKTV

The Big School Lottery
9pm, BBC2

Mercury Music Prize 2010
10pm, BBC2

This Is England '86
10pm, Channel 4

Citizenship is not just an academic subject, but a way of life that children must learn, says Peter Mortimore

I hope you enjoyed the summer holiday. Good luck for the new school year – whether you are a pupil, teacher, parent, governor, academic, civil servant, minister or simply an interested citizen. With a new – and differently composed – government in charge, we will witness a number of battles over our education service. Different ideologies, practical considerations and the need for economies will be used to promote change. Whether the outcome will be a better or worse experience for the majority of pupils will only become apparent when new policies – and their unplanned consequences – have been fully experienced.

Changes of policy direction are a consequence of living in a democracy and, imperfect though this is, no one has yet invented a better system of government. So preparation for participation in a democratic society should have been one of the major tasks of schooling since the days of Aristotle. Sadly, it hasn't been.

Despite the pioneering work of political scientists such as Bernard Crick, citizenship was only introduced into the English national curriculum in 2002. And many schools, rather than being democratic, are still lauded for being authoritarian institutions. Of course, schools cannot be democratic all the time: five- or six-year-olds cannot be expected to appreciate what citizens will need to function successfully as adults; a carefully structured, incremental approach is necessary.

But our society probably underestimates young children's ability to work for interests other than their own. This summer, I have attended three events that illustrate how well young pupils understand fairness and can participate effectively in democratic projects.

The first was the summer Youth Assembly organised by London Citizens – a non-partisan group that brings together community, religious and trade union organisations to work for the common good. Many school and youth groups participated in the assembly, demonstrating their understanding of, and commitment to, topics as diverse as making inner cities safer for young people, the need for a living wage and the desirability of keeping the children of asylum-seekers out of prison settings. Each group reported on how it had pursued these goals and on the successes it had achieved. In a masterstroke of adventurous planning, the assembled young people enjoyed an insight into some of the "difficult questions" of political philosophy given by Harvard professor Michael Sandel, last year's BBC Reith lecturer.

The second event was lunch with student council representatives at a secondary academy. When academies were introduced by the last government, I expressed reservations, not about providing the most generous resources for the neediest pupils, allowing freedom for innovation or creating exciting school buildings, but about the over-powerful role of sponsors, the secrecy of deals and the potentially divisive impact on other schools.

The new government has expressed its intention to offer the possibility of academy status to all schools. I hope sponsors will use their powers to enhance democracy in schools (rather than, as currently feared, reduce the number of parent governors). I detected a small, but hopeful sign that some might do so at a summer lunch I enjoyed with six young academicians. These – popularly elected – young people demonstrated that they had learned the skills of negotiation and how to take responsibility. Participation in the academy's mentorship programmes and leadership courses had nurtured articulate and confident young people and contributed to the obviously very good pupil/teacher relations.

The third event was attendance at the annual grandparents' day at my grandsons' school. If you have never been quizzed by a class of lively eight-year-olds about what life was like when you were a child, be warned: it can be testing. But, in seeing grandparents questioned by children about the differences in social norms and school conditions between the 1950s and today, I was reminded of how much more democratic, for most people, life is today.

So, minister, please ensure that any new policies you introduce take seriously the need for young people to learn how to participate in a democracy. That means promoting citizenship – not just as an academic subject, but as a way of life.

Excellent research is one thing, but for many academics, their time would be better spent doing what they do best – teaching, says Jonathan Wolff

When it was announced, a few months ago, that there would be a pay freeze for public sector workers, a somewhat sheepish question ran through common rooms. Are we public sector employees? I asked this myself several times, and received a number of confident, though contradictory, answers. It seems that we are not, officially, but in many ways it feels as if we are, not least in our dumb resignation to our presumed fates.

Still, we are not quite the quasi-public servants that we once were. As contract research, and, more importantly, student fees, become ever larger slices of income, universities rely less on public funding than they did. Indeed, we might now regard the universities as a living example of that oft-thought mythical beast: the successful public/private partnership.

But successful for how much longer? The cuts are not here yet, but they are on their way. There has already been an unseemly public squabble about which bits of the sector should be the first out of the balloon, but that seems to have died down, at least in public. When firm plans for cuts are announced, we'll see how well the truce holds.

Cuts in public services will be a huge setback for those already struggling, and possibly self-defeating in the longer term, when a future government has to mop up the damage. But the higher education sector looks like a softer target, for cuts to us won't victimise society's most disadvantaged (although they will hit the most vulnerable in the sector: those on temporary contracts or just coming on to the job market). Still, if they are handled badly, university cuts could be financially self-defeating almost right away.

Cuts mean cutting staff. It is already taken as given that as staff leave and retire, they will not all be replaced. This will lead to rising staff-student ratios, and, it is supposed, rising class sizes and deterioration in student experience.

This is problematic both educationally and financially. Recruitment of overseas students makes higher education, in effect, one of the UK's largest export industries, as well as bringing income to local economies. If cuts damage our reputation, they will affect our ability to recruit overseas students, potentially causing a greater loss of revenue than they save.

This will be shrugged aside, of course, as special pleading. By cutting "waste", there need be no loss of quality. We will be leaner, fitter, hungrier, and better able to compete in the world market, so goes the mantra. This rhetoric is puzzling, though. You don't increase a boxer's chances by cutting off his food supply, even if it does make him leaner.

Nevertheless, I would be the last to argue that there is no waste in the sector. But we need the government's help to deal with it. There is another way to square the circle without compromising teaching quality or the production of genuinely excellent research.

I've moaned before about the research assessment exercise, which was renamed the research excellence framework (REF) in order to mark the fact that it now … actually, I'll have to get back to you about that. But whatever the changes, current plans still create pressure for every academic to strive, in their research publications, to reach at least the lower foothills of international excellence, whether or not this is the best use of their time. Many mid-career academics would be much better employed updating their lecture notes, paying more attention to their students' work, and maybe even doing a bit more teaching, rather than beavering away on research that barely anyone will ever read. Not the right thing for everyone, everywhere, of course, but that's the whole point.

If the government had the courage, it should put an indefinite hold on the REF and undertake a review of university funding so that excellence in teaching is treated as comparable in importance to excellence in research. I doubt that I'll like what comes out the other end, but we have to do something new. New, but in this case not very radical. It is simply a matter of creating incentives for university staff to concentrate on where they can make their greatest contribution. From each according to their ability.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly

Why does a posh agricultural college open its doors in summer to urban teenagers?

It's 10 in the morning in a sunny Gloucestershire field, and four teenagers in pristine wellies are gathered excitedly round as a man in office trousers and white shirt introduces them to two giant tractors. "Anyone driven before?" he asks them.

"The last time I drove a car it ended up in a tree," volunteers one.

The other three laugh, but it soon becomes clear that the multiple gears, knobs, buttons and pedals in the tractor's cab are going to challenge even the most proficient young driver, and very soon they'll all be in the hot seat.

These teens are not used to being in this sort of environment, and their teacher, Nicholai Thomasin-Foster, is more accustomed to students who not only know their way around a tractor, but who quite possibly own a few hundred acres of their own, or stand to inherit them.

The Royal Agricultural College (RAC) in the leafy Cotswolds isn't where you'd expect to find urban youngsters from areas of disadvantage around the UK, but these are here for the RAC's Young City Farmer two-week summer school .

Agricultural settings are dangerous places, Thomasin-Foster, a lecturer in farm mechanisation, explains. So, if an accident happens in the countryside, how long does the group reckon it'll take for an ambulance to arrive?

Well-drilled by their ex-SAS first aid and health and safety instructor earlier in the week, the group know that it's likely to be the best part of 40 minutes before they'd see any flashing blue lights: should their tractor end up wrapped round a tree this morning, complete with injured driver and/or onlookers, they've been taught that the remoteness of the location means that someone will need to leg it to the main road to guide the ambulance in.

Farming as an industry is losing people fast – young people are moving into towns, and put plainly, older farmers are a dying breed. If it's to have a future in the UK, agriculture can no longer be the preserve of the double-barrelled. This is the fourth year the summer school has been run by the college as part of its efforts to interest more students from non-traditional backgrounds in a farming career. Offered completely free to successful applicants aged 16+, it gives a dozen city-based young people identified as coming from backgrounds of social, economic or educational disadvantage the chance to live the reality of what farming life is all about.

Even though by definition they won't have easy access to countryside, applicants have to demonstrate a passion for it in some way, says Emma Thomas, the RAC's widening participation officer – even if that's just an enthusiasm for growing vegetables in pots in their back garden. She targets her recruitment through town- and city-based Aim Higher co-ordinators, Connexions in urban centres, city council youth services and city farms.

"We want to give them a quality of experience, not just a dip-in and dip-out," she explains. "That's why it's two weeks."

The programme's length, she acknowledges, may put off some young people who lack the confidence to be away from home for such a long time, but it does mean that those who are selected on the assessment day are in for an intensive and hugely diverse fortnight.

"We don't usually finish until 11pm," says Thomas. "And we pack it in – there are some very early starts. The day we visited the dairy farm, they had to be on the bus at six."

Given that some participants have dropped out of school or are neets (not in education, employment or training), the routine, structure and pace of the programme can be tough – one participant, currently working as a butcher but with aspirations to be a chef, had to be up this morning at the crack of dawn to get to his one-day placement in the kitchen at a local gastropub.

From what the young people say, however, the sheer thrill of trying out such a range of new and exciting things has made it more than worth the effort. For some, it changes the direction of their lives: one student last year who'd dropped out of education was motivated to start again and is now studying animal science at Aberystwyth University. A girl who did her placement at a polo yard two years ago was taken on for six months' training and got a job as a groom. For others the change may be less dramatic, but many who have struggled to find a direction gain in motivation or refocus their plans.

Back at the skills training centre, Sam Thompson, 17, from Rotherham, sporting cool aviator shades, says that the fishing trip was a particular highlight. "We had to catch it, kill it and grill it," he grins.

Louise Williams, 16, from Salisbury, who was recruited through Aim Higher, says she had originally planned to work with animals and is about to start a veterinary science course at college; this course, however, has given her an insight into how she might integrate her love of animals with a career in an agricultural setting "and being outdoors, which I love".

"We had a talk about the issues of the future, and only 2% of UK industry is farming," she continues. "It used to be 80%, and I think they're trying to encourage young people into farming more."

Having climbed down from the cab to let the others have a turn, Ben Clark, 16, who explains that he lives on a Swindon housing estate that was built on former agricultural land, says he came because he wanted to learn how food from farms gets to supermarkets.

Clark thinks he may be interested in a career working in the organic side of food production: another course participant, Peter Chaloner, 16, says his interest in science – he's about to start on four A-levels including biology – means he's more interested in how developments in scientific research are driving farming practices.

Chaloner is spending the day on placement down the road at Butts Farm "doing a lot of cleaning out," he says, relatively cheerfully, considering the muckiness of his morning so far.

Originally from Cheltenham, he has spent much of his life moving around in foster care. One foster placement he loved, he says, was on a farm, and this course has helped him to appreciate "the troubles that farmers have, the changing prices of wheat, for example. I've got a lot of respect now – farmers work really hard and they don't make a lot."

His fellow cleaner-out, Naps Williams, 17, from Hackney, London, started volunteering aged 12 at her local city farm and is doing a diploma in animal management at Capel Manor Agricultural College in Enfield. "None of my friends or my family are interested in animals or farming," she says. "I'm probably a bit of a rebel."

But Williams has a clear vision for her future: she wants to open up her own farm-based educational centre. Until this summer school, she had been totally resistant to the idea of going to university. "I'd got fed up with the whole academic thing," she says.

"I had the idea that doing a degree was a lot of theory and only a bit of practical, and I'm a practical person. But I've come here and it's definitely changed my view. I'll probably apply to the RAC now."

While teaching footballers management skills, Sue Bridgewater saw plenty of scope for research

Although the football season is only a few weeks old, it's easy enough to predict which Premier League clubs will be "there or thereabouts" next May. Only multi-millionaire and, increasingly, billionaire chairmen can buy a seat at the top end of the table.

Dr Sue Bridgewater has set out to offer an alternative analysis of what makes a successful coach, taking into account the resources they are working with. Bridgewater, who is associate professor of marketing and strategy at Warwick business school and director of its centre for management in sport, runs a course offering former footballers the chance to learn the skills necessary to become successful managers. But she freely admits that she has learned plenty from them and quickly saw their professional insights as a source of research.

"I became interested in the notion of what really constitutes success in football," she says. "On one level it's about winning points. But straightforward league tables don't reflect the full measure of success. It's rather like comparing a headteacher at an inner-city school with the head at an affluent independent school. Football has similar issues in terms of the resources the club is working with."

In her book, Football Management, she provides an alternative table of managers, taking into account the finances of each club, particularly the wage bills, which are a good measure of ability to attract top players. It was published shortly before the World Cup finals, and England fans would have been surprised to see the name of Steve McClaren lying second, with only Tony Pulis of Stoke City ahead of him. McClaren was dubbed the "wally with the brolly" after his tenure of the national side ended when they failed to qualify for the European Championships of 2008 and the heavens opened over Wembley.

"But before he became England manager, he had consistently over-achieved with Middlesbrough," Bridgewater insists, "and he's since gone on to take FC Twente [of the Netherlands] to the Dutch championship." Meanwhile, his successor, Fabio Capello, has become the new target of media scorn after England failed so lamentably at the World Cup finals in South Africa. Why is it that managers with such honourable records at club level are so often brought down to earth by international football?

It's an issue that Bridgewater has pondered after discussions with three former students on her course – England under-21 manager Stuart Pearce, former Manchester City and Wales manager Mark Hughes – currently Fulham manager – and Newcastle's Chris Hughton, who was assistant manager of Spurs and Ireland at the time.

"It became clear to me that club and country are two very different challenges," she says. "Admittedly there are some elements that are similar, insofar as you have to get the best out of a team. But at international level that team is made up of players who are stars at their clubs. They know each other, but they don't play together regularly. An international manager has to get the best out of them in a very intensive block of time, which often comes at the end of an exhausting league season. An international tournament is a big project, an event that you build up to under intense media scrutiny. There's always an element of luck in management and, if it goes against you at the knock-out stage, it's more significant because there's no way of coming back. "

Before it became clear that Capello's contract had made him too expensive for the Football Association to sack, Roy Hodgson was touted as a potential successor – until, that is, he accepted an invitation to take over at Liverpool. Hodgson's great achievement last season was to take Fulham, forever cast as humble neighbours to wealthy Chelsea, all the way to the final of the Europa League. So why was it that he was not in Bridgewater's alternative table when it was first published?

"He would have been right up there," she concedes. "But he had spent a lot of time coaching abroad before he took over at Fulham and there was a bit of a time lag in getting hold of the accounts that tell us how much money a manager has at his disposal."

She pauses, before adding: "This table was never intended to be viewed in isolation. It will be seen alongside the real league tables, which show what great managers like Sir Alec Ferguson or Arsène Wenger achieve season after season, albeit with high levels of resources. I'm just looking at a way to be fairer and highlight the achievements of some of the unsung heroes."

Bridgewater's latest strand of research looks at other career options faced by top-class sports people when they have to step down from the pinnacle. "It's not just about footballers," she stresses. "I'm also working with the Professional Cricketers Association and the Dame Kelly Holmes Legacy Trust. Olympic athletes, gymnasts and jockeys can face the same issue. They're people who have been very focused on achieving a status that begins to elude them in their 30s. What do they do with the rest of their lives?"

Top Premier League stars should surely have earned enough. "Yes, but everybody needs something to get up for in the morning. There's only so much golf you can play."

Transparent academies, defending the A* grade and the problem with school IT

See-through academies

Last week Jeevan Vasagar reported that just 32 schools are converting to academy status this term

In the interests of transparency, I hope full accounts are published each year for all academies. So we can see

1 How much was spent on wages – including the salary of the head and other key staff members;

2 Who the contracts for supplies were signed with and on what basis they were chosen, along with the terms;

3 A full disclosure of the business interests of the staff and governors and any links – business/social/religious – between suppliers and staff/governors;

4 The amount of time staff spent on non-academic work, to see if we are getting highly paid teachers doing basic admin tasks previously performed by local education authority admin staff.

PridesPurge via EducationGuardian.co.uk

• Perhaps I could add to your admirable list: 5 Full details of all examinations taken and results achieved.

RickoShea via EducationGuardian.co.uk

• When we received Gove's letter [inviting applications for academy status], we had a special governors' meeting at which we agreed unanimously that we didn't have enough information. As a first step, the headteacher sought further information from the DfE. When the list of schools that had "expressed an interest in becoming an academy" was published, our school was on the list. The only thing that we had expressed an interest in was having more information. I suspect this is the case for the vast majority of the 2,000 schools that are reported to have "expressed an interest".

JayZed via EducationGuardian.co.uk

The case for the A*

University admissions tutors do not set entrance conditions first, then accept however many or few reach them (Trouble with the stars, 17 August). They have a fixed quota to recruit, so entrance conditions will be set accordingly. The introduction of the A* grade in A-levels gives additional data for those relatively few university departments where even setting an AAA grade offer would result in the quota being exceeded.

If the admissions tutors there choose not to use the A* factor, they will still pick the same number of students, but using other factors. Those other factors are likely to be the manner, confidence, and use of wealth and contacts to engage in interesting extracurricular activities, most likely found in those from an upper middle-class background. In allowing those who are quiet and have nothing but their intelligence to offer to distinguish themselves, the A* may help to widen access, not restrict it.

Dr Matthew Huntbach, London SE9

Change the IT curriculum

I, too, have been dismayed by what my children have been taught about IT, especially at GCSE level (Is school IT failing to click?, 17 August). However, it's not the technology that is the issue, it's the curriculum. There is too much focus on IT as an information-processing tool – word processors, spreadsheets and Google searches. Children need to know a lot more. You don't need state-of-the-art hardware and software, just a more balanced programme of study.

Computers affect almost every area of our lives, with huge implications around digital privacy, security, intellectual property and safety, for individuals and for society as a whole. The next generation will be poorly equipped to deal with these issues, since most of them will have only the vaguest idea how computers work, how they can improve our lives, and how they can be misused.

Nick Rozanski, London NW9

Rare childhood cancers are the subject of an award-winning essay by Nicola Harris in this year's Max Perutz prize

My palms are sweaty and my mouth is dry, but it's more excitement than nerves, though of course the nerves are there, too. I've got my cells out of the incubator and now I just can't resist having a quick glance at them down the microscope – will I see more dead cells floating in one set than the other? I know I can't tell properly till I add some staining solution and analyse them accurately, but that will take hours and I just can't wait that long to find out: has it worked or not?

If you've ever held that envelope of exam results and been desperate to tear them open and find out how you did, but also terrified to look in case you didn't get what you were hoping for, then you'll know exactly the sort of feelings I'm talking about.

I'm working on tumour cells from two childhood cancers, called neuroblastoma and Ewing's sarcoma. These are both very hard to treat, with less than half the children surviving for five years after their diagnosis. That's the problem with treating cancer: some patients do brilliantly on a particular drug, but for others it'll have little effect. At the moment, it's often a case of trial and error working out which drug is going work – and some people simply run out of time before we can find the right one. So what I'm trying to find out is what causes the differences in responses and how can we use that to our advantage.

The drug I'm using is called fenretinide, and it's similar to vitamin A (the vitamin found in carrots). It's able to kill cancer cells, while normal cells remain healthy. It works by causing a build-up of oxidants in the cells (you'll all probably have seen the adverts for beauty creams offering anti-oxidant properties to get glowing skin – that's because oxidants are bad news for cells!). Normal, healthy cells should be able to cope with the presence of a few oxidants, but cancer cells will already be exposed to high levels as they're produced when cells divide, and so they can't cope with the extra oxidants produced from fenretinide treatment.

Due to its similarity to vitamin A, fenretinide can get into receptors meant for that vitamin and so the main side effect with fenretinide treatment is that the patients get what's called night-blindness; basically, you can't see very well in the dark. This makes it particularly suitable for treating childhood cancers as it's a much easier side effect to deal with than many other treatments – it's easier to give a five-year-old a night light than to comfort them as they're losing their hair. The problem is that fenretinide seems to work really well for some neuroblastoma and Ewing's sarcoma tumours, but not others. And I want to know why!

I've found that some of the tumours have more of an enzyme called CYP26 than others, and this enzyme helps to metabolise fenretinide in the body. Usually, you'd expect the patients to do worse if their body is breaking down the drug, but fenretinide is a little different. As well as the drug itself being able to kill cancer cells (what we call an "active" compound), one of the metabolites of fenretinide is also active. This means there could be an extra hit from this second compound to those cancer cells where there is metabolism occurring. This is the reason I'm desperately hoping to see more dead cells in some of my flasks than others – these should hopefully be the cells with more CYP26.

So what would it mean if I'm right about the link between CYP26 and how many cancer cells die? There are a few options, actually – we could be selective and only give the drug to those whose cancer has been tested and shown to have CYP26, or there are other drugs that have been shown to increase concentrations of CYP26 in the body, so alternatively these could be used in combination with fenretinide. The important point is that we could decide on which drug or combination of drugs to use based on what should work for each particular patient, and that's what this is all about – taking the guesswork out of cancer treatment.

I've already analysed these cells to see how much CYP26 they have, and then I've added the drug and left them to grow for a few days (having a quick peek every day to see how they're getting on). Now it's the moment of truth, as I look down the microscope and bring the cells into focus...

The prize

The Max Perutz Science Writing Award, now in its 13th year, encourages young Medical Research Council scientists to communicate their research to a wider audience. The competition is open to all MRC-funded PhD students and asks them to describe the importance and excitement of their research.

The 2010 award received a record number of submissions, with 114 entries. Twelve essays were shortlisted and judged by the MRC's outgoing chief executive, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the Guardian's science and environment correspondent Alok Jha; the head of the MRC Centre, Cambridge, Dr Megan Davies; the former winner Dr Jacqueline Maybin; and the author and broadcaster Dr Alice Roberts.

• Nicola Harris is at the Northern Institute of Cancer Research, Newcastle University

• Parent groups driven by need for more places
• Number of schools have strong religious flavour

With its emphasis on the role of the community, the free schools announced today by the government will arguably be the single most prominent part of David Cameron's "big society".

Drawing on 700 expressions of interest, the education secretary, Michael Gove, approved 16 projects – subject to them delivering a business plan that passes muster – to form the kernel of a new generation of independent state schools led by parents and teachers.

Most are grassroots groups, though there are two backed by private education firms, and a number of the schools will have a strong religious flavour.

Driving many of the parent groups is a simple desire for extra school places: seven of the applications are in London, where getting into the best state schools is fiercely competitive.

But the free schools template, which lets schools set their own curriculum and control their own admissions, encourages experimentation.

Penny Roberts, co-ordinator of the parent group behind St Luke's primary in Camden, north London, said the school might conduct immersion sessions in children's home languages. The school will have an initial intake of just 15 pupils being taught in a church hall, allowing it to be flexible with the curriculum.

"One of the big advantages of being a very small school, is to be able to adapt and vary the curriculum according to the children we have," Roberts said. "We will want to value children's home languages – we may well run immersion sessions in some of these home languages, just as a way of valuing them."

Keith Haisman, of the Stour Valley Community school in Suffolk, said the school aimed to integrate mobile and smartphones into the curriculum, as well as placing an emphasis on children's self-confidence and teamwork.

There is a strong emphasis on academic performance across all the free school projects. The Stour Valley school plans a traditional core of subjects, based on the "gold standard of GCSEs" but tied in with this will be an awareness of which courses will prove useful at work. "You might want to be a car mechanic and run your own garage – it would be really handy if you knew a bit about science, a bit about finance," Haisman said.

There will also be an emphasis on career mentoring at the King's Science Academy in Bradford. Sajid Hussain, who hopes to be the new school's head, said: "Every child in that school [will have] a three-year and five-year plan of what they're doing in terms of their careers."

Because the free schools will start afresh, the groups plan to be rigorous about selecting teaching staff. There are concerns that at present struggling teachers are simply shuffled between schools.

Free schools in England are inspired by the US charter schools movement, where such schools educate more than 1 million children. These schools often demand longer hours from teachers in return for better pay.

Mark Lehain, a maths teacher and spokesman for the Bedford and Kempston free school, said: "I'm absolutely passionate about teachers being free to do whatever the kids in front of them need them to do.

"We believe that free schools are part of a re-professionalisation of teachers, what they teach, how they should teach, and when they should teach it. We'd like to see every school in the country given this freedom."

Results from the US have been mixed, however. Research carried out at Stanford University and published last year found that more than a third of charter schools had results that were worse than the traditional system. But the US also found that poor children and those with English as a second language did well in the schools.

James Turner, projects and policy director of the Sutton Trust, which will work in partnership with one of the London schools, said: "The evidence shows that, of those factors which the school can control, the impact of teachers is critical. The best teachers can make a huge difference to the performance of their students, even when background and prior achievement is taken into account."

Identifying the best teachers is difficult, Turner said. "They are not always the high-fliers. But as a starting point a good academic grounding and a high-level qualification in the subject you are teaching – or one closely allied to it – must make sense. A number of the 'no excuses' school chains in the US pay more to attract and retain exceptional teachers with good track records of boosting results – and that's something we'll be looking at too." There is some unease over the prominent role of religion among the first crop of free schools.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: "The secretary of state suggests that he wants free schools to be engines of social mobility. But in many cases the free schools announced so far will only fragment communities and lead to greater social segregation and separation."

Some of the schools with a religious framework stressed the community aspect of their faiths.

Peter Kessler, who is leading a campaign to create a Jewish primary in Haringey, north London, said: it was true that some faith schools were "restrictive" and "blinkered".

"We will teach pupils to be broad-minded. You get a sense of community with a faith school."

Roberts said that while St Luke's would have a Christian ethos, the church was a focal point in the community. "We 're very family oriented. We have after-school clubs, drop-in clubs, not only attended by church families but by people who wouldn't dream of coming to church on a Sunday."

The first XVI

Bedford and Kempston Bedford

The Childcare Company Slough

Discovery New School West Sussex

The Free School Norwich Norfolk

Haringey Jewish Primary Haringey

I-Foundation Primary Leicester

King's Science Academy Bradford

Mill Hill Jewish Primary Barnet

Nishkam Education Trust Birmingham

North Westminster Free School (ARK)Westminster

Priors Marston and Priors Hardwick Warwickshire

Rivendale Free School Hammersmith & Fulham

St Luke's Camden

Stour Valley School Suffolk

West London Free School Ealing/Hammersmith and Fulham

Wormholt North Hammersmith Free School (ARK) Hammersmith & Fulham

New research suggests that pupils should hold up whiteboards rather than hands to attract the teacher's attention. But have they really thought this through?

There seems to be no end to research on teaching methods. I often pray for it to stop, but it never does. The latest suggests that academic performance improves if children are not allowed to put their hands up in class. This ghastly old method encourages a minority of brighter pupils to dominate, says Professor William of the Institute of Education.

But teachers have known about the hands-up problem for decades, thank you very much. Children stick their hands up and shout "Miss! Miss! Miss!" for different reasons. They may not be that bright, just desperate for attention. The clever ones may just shut up and get on with it. And most teachers have worked out strategies to deal with hands-up.

In my 24 years at the chalkface teaching Music and English, I learned to encourage the more timid and explain to the show-offs that it was someone else's turn. Luckily teachers often don't have to do that nowadays, because children don't always sit in regimented rows. They often work in groups or pairs, put all their ideas together and elect a spokesperson. That way, everyone contributes.

Prof William's researchers recommend the use of whiteboards. Instead of putting hands up, pupils write on their board and hold it up. But isn't that rather gruelling for everyone? How long does it take the teacher to read all the answers on the 30 or so boards? Can she or he remember them all, select an interesting one, while also keeping an eye on what the pupils at the back are doing behind the screen of massed whiteboards? How long does the class have to wait until the last person has finished writing, and what about the poorer writers with squiggly, all-over-the-place letters? Will the teacher be able to decipher it? Or will he or she just pick the clearer ones? And while the teacher does this, do the pupils' arms tire of holding up the boards? Have the researchers thought this through?

If this method is adopted nationwide, how will the children manage when they hit the real world, where there is always some pushy toad with a big mouth who barges to the front and gets in first? Because no one gives a stuff about fairness out there.

One of the world's leading scholars of ancient Greek texts

Colin Austin, who has died of cancer aged 69, was one of the world's leading specialists on ancient Greek texts. Thanks to his technical expertise and power of conjectural divination, Colin had a remarkable gift for the reconstruction and interpretation of fragmentary poetic texts preserved on Egyptian papyri. The monumental edition of the fragments of Greek comedy which he completed with Rudolf Kassel set new standards of scholarly accuracy. The first volume of Poetae Comici Graeci, or "Kassel-Austin" as it is usually known, was published by De Gruyter in 1983; seven further large-scale volumes followed.

At the time, the remains of Greek comedy, other than the extant plays of Aristophanes and some Menander, were only available in editions which were either completely out of date or marred by fantastic and improbable reconstructions. Poetae Comici Graeci put hundreds of verses of Greek poetry into the mainstream, so other scholars could no longer think of them as inaccessible or unimportant. The fragments are accompanied by a full textual history and a commentary which always goes straight to the point and the problems.

Poetae Comici Graeci has already transformed the way in which the fragments of comedy can be used to shed light on Greek cultural and literary history. From the biting satire and high farce of the Old Comedy of classical Athens to the social comedy of Menander, the ancestor of the western tradition of the comedy of manners, Greek comedy reflects the evolution of both political structures and moral attitudes. Poetae Comici Graeci offers scholars in those fields a fresh start with some crucial evidence. It is unlikely to be superseded for many decades.

Colin was born in Australia to Lloyd Austin, an Australian professor of French, and his French wife, Jeanne-Françoise Guérin. The family moved to Britain when Colin was five and then to France. He was educated first in Paris, at the Lycée Lakanal, and then at Manchester grammar school and Jesus College, Cambridge, before moving to Christ Church, Oxford, where Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones supervised his DPhil on Aristophanes, for which Colin edited Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes's play about the women of Athens' plans to take revenge on the playwright Euripides for the ways he has depicted them in his plays. Colin's translation of Thesmophoriazusae was published by the Oxford University Press in a 2004 edition co-edited by S Douglas Olson.

While in Oxford his aptitude for papyrology was nurtured by Peter Parsons. When he returned to Cambridge in 1965, as a research fellow and director of studies in classics at Trinity Hall, his future academic path was set. His growing reputation led to invitations to transcribe and edit several important papyri, including Martin Bodmer's Menander codex, one of the main sources for the plays of a major poet who had otherwise been lost to the world. The fruits of these labours appeared in vastly improved texts of the Aspis and the Samia in 1969-70. Colin kept up his love for, and services to, Menander throughout his life. At the time of his death, he had been working frantically to complete a new edition of Menander's plays for the Oxford Classical Texts series.

Colin's particular gift lay not merely in the fine detail of fibres and ink smudges with which papyrologists must be concerned, but with filling in the gaps of broken lines with supplements. He revelled in what he saw as the supernatural nature of the gift he had been given, and he likened such conjecture to a mystery or a dream. A childlike wonder at what the sands of Egypt had preserved for us and the puzzles they set us shone through his public lectures in which he delighted to read aloud the newest piece of Menander-Austin.

One of his notable projects was a remarkable papyrus containing more than 100 new epigrams by Posidippus, a poet of the third century BC, which was acquired by a Milan bank and of which the world only learned in 1993. Colin was asked by the Italian papyrologist Guido Bastianini to help with the editing and writing the commentary, and a lavish edition appeared in 2001, followed shortly afterwards by an editio minor of Posidippus by Austin and Bastianini. Much of this work was done while Colin was suffering from the effects of unstable angina; the major surgery it necessitated, and his excited devotion to the project, was to foreshadow the resolution with which he worked through great suffering at the end of his life.

Colin was appointed a lecturer in the faculty of classics at Cambridge in 1969; a readership followed in 1988 and a personal chair 10 years later. In 1983 he joined his father as a fellow of the British Academy. He served as treasurer of the Cambridge Philological Society for 40 years, and at Trinity Hall was a much- loved wine steward and praelector. If Colin felt a lack of sympathy with some aspects of academic life – computers and modern literary criticism were never to his taste – he was very generous with his time and his learning to those who shared his enthusiasms.

His greatest pride was his family and he took delight in writing Greek or Latin verse to accompany the marvellous batiks made by Mishtu, his wife of 43 years. She survives him, along with their son, Topun, and daughter, Teesta.

• Colin François Lloyd Austin, scholar of ancient Greek, born 26 July 1941; died 13 August 2010

A new elementary school in Los Angeles named after giants of environmental movement is courting needless controversy

Here's a problem for any new school: what to call yourself. Do you opt for an iconic figure from history? Or what about a name which reflects the school's location? The first rule, however, should be not to choose a name that can in any way be deemed controversial. In other words, avoid any name that even has a passing whiff of politics about it.

Bottom of the class, then, for the governors of a new school set to open this month in Los Angeles. Not content - and who can blame them - with the name "Central Region Elementary School #13", as their new school was being described by architects and the local board of education, the school-naming committee decided to pick one of six possible suggestions.

The first suggestion - the Pete Seeger Community School, in honour of the folk singer - was rejected because the singer had "affiliations with the Communist party".

Such a decision suggests that the committee members were astute enough to avoid controversy. But this conclusion crumbles to dust when you hear what name they finally settled on: the Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences.

To name your school after one controversial figure might be judged careless by some. But to name it after two just seems positively reckless. Al Gore, the former US vice-president and force behind An Inconvenient Truth, and Rachel Carson, the author of the seminal environmental text Silent Spring, are deemed by many to be giants of the modern environmental movement. But they are also among its most divisive figures.

The school-naming committee surely must have known that by picking such an eye-catching name they would be casting an unnecessary spotlight on their new school?

Don't get me wrong: personally, I think it is refreshing that a public elementary school wishes to give such a heavy emphasis in its curriculum to environmental science. But, equally, there will be many out there – not least, the Glenn Beck/Tea Party contingent – who will think this is nothing less than the devil's work, with or without reference to Carson and Gore. (Just as I was writing this sentence, I noticed that the rightwing site NewsBusters had got hold of the news and reacted with predictable results.)

Spin it round the other way: would environmentalists be happy if a school was named after Glenn Beck? It doesn't even bear thinking about. That's my point.

The Los Angeles Times, which broke this story earlier today, is not really focusing on the naming of the school. It says the source of a bigger controversy is that the $75.5m school has been built on contaminated soil. It quotes a letter from a local environmental group called the California Safe Schools coalition which says the site has not been cleaned up properly:

Renaming this terribly contaminated school after famous environmental advocates is an affront to the great work that these individuals have done to protect the public's health from harm.

I don't know the ins and outs of this particular clean-up operation, but I would have thought the rules in California for cleaning up brownfield sites, particular if they are to be used to build schools, must be pretty exacting. Therefore, this is possibly the one time when Rachel Carson's name might actually seem appropriate for a school. But I can also understand why these parents are concerned that the site be unequivocally cleansed of the benzene, ethylbenzene, naphthalene, tetrachloroethylene, vinyl chloride and trimethylbenzene which California's Department of Toxic Substances Control said (pdf) it had detected in soil at the site before the clean-up began.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that the school principal Kurt Lowry says he intends to invite both Al Gore and members of Rachel Carson's family to the school's official opening in October. It adds:

Lowry said the school's environmental emphasis will do Gore proud, including recycling projects and research and beach cleanups. Cross-curriculum efforts will include environmental speeches and presentations in English, topsoil measurements in math and climate study in science. The principal also envisions an organic garden that could produce a student-led farmer's market.

No word yet on whether the pupils will get to watch An Inconvenient Truth in class. If they do, the school best prepare itself for a fresh round of outrage and controversy.

It's a difficult decision to send your children to different schools – even if you think it's the best thing for them

If parental angst were an Olympic sport, I'd be on a podium next to Michael Phelps. I fret over whether the sun cream has been properly applied. Mention the word "schools", and my angst radar's on red alert. Nothing is of greater concern.

I blame it on having twins. It seems to have doubled this predicament. It began after their birth, watching them reach their developmental milestones. Which twin would smile first, roll over first, sit first or walk first? Which one would beat the other to saying "Mummy"?

Contrary to expectation, most twins aren't born an exact replica of each other. They develop at their own pace, and the biggest challenge is to treat them as individuals and to not make constant comparisons. Thankfully ours are a boy/girl duo – Holly and Alexander. Just as well, because when they started school, it became harder not to make comparisons. At the local state primary, Alexander made an exponential leap in reading and writing, while Holly, bang on target for her age, still grappled to sound out basic words.

Holly became increasingly sensitive to the fact that her brother was racing ahead. When Alexander bragged, we'd stamp on it, focusing instead on what Holly excelled in: drawing, beautiful handwriting, gymnastics. "Girls aren't the same as boys," we'd say. In that respect, their gender difference was a godsend.

Their school has a two-form entry, and at the end of reception Alexander craved independence, preferring to be placed in a different year 1 class from his sister. Holly, by contrast, preferred the security of having her brother close by. In letting one have their way, I'd be letting the other down.

I called a helpline for parents of multiples. "Tell me what I should do," I cried. "What are you most scared of?" "They're so young that it feels cruel to split them up, especially for Holly who doesn't want to be split." "Maybe," they said, "it would be better for Holly in the long run. They can't stay together forever. And it's not like she won't see her brother. He'll be in the classroom next door. They can play together at break-time."

The teachers were brilliant. Several discussions later, we decided to take the plunge. The worry was needless. Holly was happy in her new class and settled instantly. Indeed, out of his shadow, she began to flourish.

Fast-forward a year, and out of the blue a letter plopped on to our doormat. Having anticipated a house-move and uncertain we'd be in the catchment area of the primary we eventually sent the twins to, we'd put their names down for a private school as an insurance, and had forgotten all about it. The 7+ loomed – prospective parents and pupils were invited to an open day. I suggested to my husband that I might take Alexander to have a look.

"Why would you do that?" he asked.

Alexander was thriving at his school. He was excelling in literacy and maths and was well ahead of where he should be for a child his age. He devoured a book a day and was always searching for more homework. But there was a "but". In a mixed-ability class of 30 it's hard to focus on every child's needs, however great the teacher. At the private school, the class size would be smaller and the pupils all of a similar standard, allowing them to push ahead quicker. I knew that Alexander would relish the challenge. So we went to look. And Alexander liked what he saw. Science labs, sports fields, umpteen tennis courts, French lessons led entirely in French.

My husband tried to deter him. "You don't want to go there, do you?" "Yes, I do." "Why?" His answer was remarkably mature. "Because I like to learn." So we sat him for the 7+. And we didn't sit Holly. Not because she didn't stand a chance of getting in, but because she would be horrified by all the extra homework. She is a creative at heart, driven by art, drama and music, and we felt a turbo-charged environment would stifle her. We wanted the best for both of them, and to achieve that, we had to treat them as individuals.

I half wanted Alexander to not get in, so I could avoid the potential heartache. He did get in though, and a lot of soul-searching later, we decided to accept the place. Telling Holly was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do as a parent.

On the surface, sending one twin to a private school and the other to its state counterpart looks odd. A neighbour stops me in the street. "Is it true you're sending Alexander to the posh place?" Her expression resembles Prince Charles at his most quizzical.

"Yes," I admit.

"And leaving Holly where she is?"

Not for the first time, I find myself embarrassed into an outpouring about my decision, which tails off into a sort of apology. I walk away with faux confidence and a smile, but underneath, a whoosh of angst courses through my veins. And even now that term has started, the tension remains. Alexander loves his new school uniform. Holly wants one, too. Alexander raves about the "posh place". Holly now wants to go with him. The whoosh feels more like a tidal wave.

Genevieve King is a pseudonym

• Is it acceptable to send just one child in a family to private school? Education.letters@guardian.co.uk

The stock market can bring out some strange metaphors in people

In struggling to make sense of the stock market, people reach and stretch for metaphors. Sometimes they even contort, dislocate, and mangle. In 1995, Geoff P Smith of the University of Hong Kong made a grand unified effort to gather and classify those metaphors.

Smith congealed the metaphors and his thoughts into a monograph called How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market. It appeared in the journal Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching.

Smith collected mostly from three sources: the South China Morning Post's business supplement, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Asia Business News television programme.

Here are verbatim snippets, which I present in the form of a mixed-metaphor story.

"Strong bears came out of the woods determined to drag the market down."

"The bears had their claws firmly dug in and were not letting go."

"Optimists saw the makings of a baby bull, but naysayers warned it could be a bum steer ... after last year's grizzly bear market."

"Speculators played a cat-and-mouse game with stocks."

"The stock remained a dog."

"Investors [ran] like a herd of startled gazelles."

"The market was very nervous."

"The market was having trouble focusing on issues."

"Sick dollar ... groggy dollar ... dollar cringes."

"The market was suffering vertigo."

"The market started to drift and lose direction."

"[The market] precariously balanced on the 10,050 mark."

"The index hovered."

"[The market was] losing its footing."

"The index fell off the cliff."

"The Hang Seng Index dropped like a brick." (This one's a simile. I know, I know.)

"[The] index continued its tailspin."

"The market seemed to have come out of its freefall."

"Stock prices took a rollercoaster ride and ended up in the subway."

"The bounce was more technical than substantial."

"Those hoping for a big rebound to catapult it out of this bear trap would probably be disappointed."

"The question every trader will be asking himself this week is: just how high can a dead cat bounce?"

Surveying the hodgepodge of stock phrases and market-driving hype, Smith sighs: "Rarely do commentators say 'These events are totally unpredictable; I haven't the slightest idea what caused them to occur.'"

The possibility flaunts itself that no one quite understands what the stock market's doing. If that's the case, everyone's unlikely to come up with metaphors that truly fit. But that won't stop them from trying. Smith tells why, at the end of his report:

"A group with a significant stake in the maintenance of an impression of certainty are the financial 'gurus' whose words and actions can have profound effects on the way markets move ... To a lesser extent, a host of commentators, analysts and advisers benefit from the illusion that market events are controlled and rational and can be explained and predicted."

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel prize