EducationWorld January 2019

As we enter 2019, Britain is evaluating the outcome of the first public secondary education examinations following the reforms of former education secretary Michael Gove who resigned his office in 2014. Our two main examinations are the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and the Advanced Level (A Level). The GCSE is taken at the end of class X (age 15-16) in preparation for either entering into the sixth form (classes XI-XII) at school, or leaving to start a job. The A Level exam is taken in class XII (age 17-18), mainly as a qualification for university entrance. For years, the quality of these examinations has been declining, with massive grades inflation exceeding even currency devaluation. Even as these examinations became easier, many were taken on a fragmented modular basis that made a deep and lengthy course almost impossible to achieve, and they often involved large components of course-work, which is easy to ‘fiddle’. In a society of seemingly ever-falling standards, it is reassuring to see that Gove managed to stop some of the rot in secondary education. Modular examinations and course-work contributions have been largely abolished, and the new syllabuses are much more demanding. The grading system has also been changed and stiffened to make it easier for universities and employers to assess the quality of candidates, and although the grading in the first ‘transitional’ year of the new examinations was softened so that the full rigour of the new system doesn’t apply immediately, the quality and reliability of the results have certainly improved, and are likely to continue to do so. Regrettably, Gove’s reforms in secondary education don’t solve the tertiary level problems caused by the vast expansion of universities 25 years ago, when all the technical colleges and polytechnics, instead of being upgraded in a way appropriate to what they were designed for, viz, to provide high-quality vocational education to less intellectual students, were designated universities. The result was a decline in their standards in technical subjects and a proliferation of third-rate pseudo-academic courses wholly inappropriate for universities worthy of the description, while leaving unemployable graduates saddled with student loans they are unlikely ever to repay. So desperate are some of these institutions to get “bums on seats” that they are admitting almost anyone who can write her name to remain in business and avoid insolvency. The ultimate irony, of course, is that Gove’s reforms, welcome as they are, would have been unnecessary if the excellent system of General Certificate of Education’s Ordinary and Advanced Level exams (GCE O-level and GCE A-level) of the 1950s and 1960s had been retained. Unfortunately, ever-meddling popularity-seeking politicians and educational babudom could not leave well alone. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!” should be written in huge letters above every government building in the country. (Dr. Peter Greenhalgh is a Cambridge classical scholar and former professor at Cape Town University)

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Avanti House in Stanmore, north London, is one of a new generation of religious schools. Some 94,000 children in England now attend a non-Christian religious school, up from 64,000 in 2011. Over the past two decades, the number of Jewish schools has more than doubled and the number of Muslim ones has roughly sextupled. Although just one in 20 Muslim children attend them, the proportion is rising fast. And there’s a small but growing band of Sikh and Hindu schools. A religious education is no longer the rarity it once was for non-Christians. Most of the recent growth has been in the state sector. Since the 1990s, governments have encouraged minority religious groups to set up their own faith schools funded by the state but allowed to select pupils on the basis of their religion. A few opened under Tony Blair’s first Labour government in 1997-2001. Since 2010, faith groups have benefitted from the Conservative party’s “free schools” programme, which lets a wide variety of organisations set them up. There are now 101 non-Christian religious state (i.e, ‘aided’) schools in England. Their growth redresses what some saw as an injustice. Whereas Christian families could get free religious education in church-run schools that have long been a part of the state education in England, followers of the other faiths usually had to go to fees-levying private schools. But the boom in religiously selective schools sits oddly with another government aim, to deepen community integration. Earlier this year, prime minister Theresa May called on the country at large to “do more to confront the segregation that can divide communities”. Non-Christian faith schools, in particular, seem also to deepen ethnic segregation. No nationwide data are available on the religious make-up of schools. But according to SchoolDash, a data-analysis firm, non-Christian secondary faith schools are more than three times as likely as non-faith schools to be ethnically segregated (measured by comparing their ethnic composition to that of other local schools), and a bit less likely to teach poor children. Some therefore suggest that religious state schools should encourage integration, by drawing pupils away from more doctrinaire private schools. Ghulam Abbas, an education consultant who previously worked at the department for education, says the growth of Muslim state schools has encouraged private ones to turn their attention from religious to academic instruction, as parents increasingly expect both to be of high quality. Indeed, many religious state schools have a sparkling reputation. The Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High in Blackburn is the most successful state school in the country, according to the government’s Progress 8 to score, which measures academic improvement from age 11 to 16. But religion sometimes feeds into the teaching of other subjects — in a few cases extraordinarily so. A recent inspection found that at Yesodey Hatorah, an Orthodox Jewish girls’ state secondary in London, staff did not teach reproduction (human or animal) and had censored textbooks to remove images featuring exposed ankles, chunks of Sherlock Holmes and much else. Ofsted considered the…

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Increasing tuition fees for international students in France — a move described as a “paradigm shift” by university presidents — is a key plank of the country’s plan to double overseas enrolments in a decade. France, along with some other continental European countries such as Germany, has traditionally set nominal or non-existent tuition fees for students regardless of where they come from. But in justifying the price hike from about €170 (Rs.13,679) a year to €2,770 (Rs.2.2 lakh) at bachelor’s level and €3,770 (Rs.3.03 lakh) at Masters level — French officials are reported to be driven by the belief that ultra-low fees are seen in countries such as China as a sign of poor quality. Somewhat paradoxically, France is aiming to capitalise on the perceived dwindling attractiveness of the UK and the US in the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, and has set a target of hosting 500,000 international students by 2027, more than twice the 2016 number of just over 245,000. Observers say French officials’ concerns about their low fees regime might be justified. Derrik Karst, director of international engagement at EduFair China, a platform that informs Chinese students about Western universities, says the price increase “should help clear up some misconceptions about the quality of education at French universities. In my conversations with Chinese students, many students feel that tuition fees of a couple hundred (euros) seem too good to be true,” he says. The number of international students in France dropped by 8.5 percent between 2011 and 2016, meaning that France fell behind Australia as a destination country and was almost caught by Germany and Russia. The government is also worried about China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey eating into African student cohorts who traditionally study in France. The French government’s plan also proposes doubling the number of students taking courses taught in English, although such a move could prove controversial. The switch to English as a language of instruction is a vexed question across Europe that has become particularly acute in the Netherlands, where universities have faced a political backlash for moving away from Dutch. The French plan holds up the Netherlands as a — seemingly positive — case study, noting how a switch to English has coincided with a surge in the number of international students. Despite the prospect of greater fee income, the response to the plan from France’s Conference of University Presidents is cautious, describing the decision to raise fees a “paradigm shift” in French policy with as-yet-unknown consequences, and warning that it would be detrimental to universities if the changes put off high-performing students.

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Leading universities in Denmark are set to close several degree programmes and switch the medium of instruction from English to Danish in response to a government drive to reduce international student numbers. Aalborg University has announced that it will close seven degree programmes, change the medium of instruction from English to Danish in six and put one English-language programme “on standby”. It means that nearly all bachelor’s programmes at the institution will be taught in Danish in future, with two courses at its smaller Esbjerg campus being the only exceptions. Similarly, Aarhus University told Times Higher Education that it intends to close two degree programmes and change the language of instruction in two programmes and five specialisations or tracks. In August, the Danish government announced that it will cut between 1,000 and 1,200 English language university places across six of Denmark’s eight universities. It claimed that 42 percent of graduates of English language Masters programmes left the country after two years and only a third of international students made a “positive contribution” to Danish public finances over their lifetime. Hanne Tange, associate professor in the department of culture and global studies at Aalborg, views the policy as the result of “an unholy alliance between a government looking for savings that will not annoy voters too much and a party (Danish People’s Party) seeking any excuse to target Europe/foreigners/anything international”. She adds that as Danish universities cannot discriminate against European Union students in the admissions process, institutions have decided to cut or “renationalise” English-language programmes to abide by policy and the law. “They are introducing Danish modules, which is a smart way to actually exclude all people not speaking Danish without actively discriminating against European students,” says Tange. Meanwhile Copenhagen Business School says it has been told to cut 400 places in finance, innovation and management Masters programmes, but adds that it will not cancel any programmes or change the language of instruction of any courses.

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Hangzhou, a city south-west of Shanghai, is freighted with meaning for Shi Yigong. His grandmother, a Communist, was jailed there by the Nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek government in the 1930s and died 18 days after giving birth to his father in prison. Personal links drew Shi to Hangzhou when he chose a location for the first private research university in China. He called it Westlake, after the scenic body of water for which the city is famed. The local government’s enthusiasm also helped. Hangzhou, though rich and historic, compares unfavourably with Beijing and Shanghai in terms of its intellectual endowment. Keen to host a top-class university, it offered Shi tempting terms. In October, he presided over Westlake’s founding ceremony. The university’s first cohort of research students is around 140 strong. It hopes, eventually, to have thousands of students, including undergraduates. China already has around 700 private institutions among its 3,000 universities, but most are vocational colleges which don’t aspire to compete with the research universities at the top of the global tree. Westlake University does. A former professor of molecular biology at Princeton, Shi, who still holds senior posts at Tsinghua, a leading university in Beijing, has Caltech as his model. “This is the first ever research university supported by both government and the private sector in the People’s Republic of China,” he says. “We’re making history.” Currently housed in temporary premises, Westlake will move into a grand purpose-built campus in three years’ time. It is private in two ways. One is its governance. Shi stresses that the Communist Party will have a big role in the university. Three of the 12 seats on the managing council are taken by party officials who will play a “significant” role in decision-making. But the idea is that, unlike in other universities, the board of governors will have ultimate authority. Westlake is also partly privately financed. Although the local government is paying to build the new campus, the university also has private donors, including Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, a tech giant, and Wang Jianlin, the founder of Dalian Wanda, a property-based conglomerate. Shi’s ambitions reach beyond the bounds of the university. His aim is to make China more innovative by adding a dimension to the current educational system. He laments that China’s contribution to science and technology in the past 400 years has been vastly below what it could have achieved. “There’s something etched into our brains: by the time we get to college, students have lost a major portion of their innovative potential,” he says. As dean of a department at Tsinghua — as high up the Chinese academic ladder as you can go — Shi has a lot to lose if Westlake doesn’t work. In his favour is the explicit endorsement of the venture by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Xi wants China to become an intellectual power as well as an economic one. Against Shi is the rivalrous nature of academia and China’s tradition of conservatism. “Everybody is watching him…

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Canada’s reputation for tolerance and inclusion is increasingly being tested on campuses in the wake of the country’s international student boom, a conference heard. The number of international students at Canadian universities increased by 11 percent in 2017, with learners thought to be increasingly shifting their attentions north from a US perceived to be more hostile under Donald Trump. But this year’s conference of the Canadian Bureau for International Education heard that celebration over increasing revenues and diversity is being accompanied by mounting doses of anxiety. Barbara Old, director of international education at the College of New Caledonia, a 5,000-students institution in British Columbia that offers university access courses, says 30 percent of enrolment is now from abroad, nearly all from India. This shift is strong enough to provoke disquiet on campus, Old warns. “I’m getting kickback from the classroom, kickback from the cafeteria, kickback from the library, the community,” she says. “There are allegations, and some of them are true, of sexual misconduct from some male students; there are rumours of rape of girls and their being threatened or blackmailed that this is going to be on the internet,” claims Old. The expansion of the foreign cohort has also led to a greater focus on the risk of plagiarism in classrooms, the conference heard. Martha White, assistant manager of international marketing and recruitment at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, an 18,000-students institution offering bachelor’s courses in Ontario, describes the amount of “push-back” from academics complaining about problems such as plagiarism as “terrible”. However, Sandeep Rane, an international services manager at 23,000-students Sheridian College in Ontario, acknowledges that plagiarism is a “very foreign” concept to many Indian students who are taught to complete examinations by repeating back as accurately as possible what their instructors say. Both he and White recommend aggressive efforts on campus to teach foreign students about the expectations of Canadian institutions.

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After five months in solitary confinement, his final court appearance lasted barely five minutes. On November 21, a court in Abu Dhabi convicted a British academic of espionage and sentenced him to life in prison. Matthew Hedges (31), a doctoral candidate at Durham University, travelled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) early last year to study its internal security policies. He became an unwilling participant in his own research in May, when police arrested him at Dubai’s airport. The UAE government hasn’t offered a shred of evidence, nor even named the country for which Hedges was supposedly spying. But the case is thought to be connected to neighbouring Qatar, which the UAE and three other Arab states have kept under an 18-month embargo. Hedges’ wife says he wasn’t allowed access to a lawyer until mid-October, and that his appointed counsel doesn’t speak fluent English. He was also allegedly made to sign a confession in Arabic, which he does not read. He has 30 days to appeal the verdict. With its ‘happiness ministry’ and tourist attractions, the UAE presents itself as a cheerful, cosmopolitan corner of the Gulf. It has also built a vast surveillance state to keep tabs on citizens and visitors. Government critics and human-rights activists have received long jail terms for social media posts. The climate grew even more repressive last year. “Showing sympathy” to Qatar is punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a 500,000 dirham (Rs.1 crore) fine. In 2010, New York University (NYU) started offering classes in Abu Dhabi, one of several Western universities to inaugurate campuses in the region. Administrators promised the same freedoms as its American parent. Academics say otherwise. Andrew Ross, an NYU professor who has criticised labour practices in the Emirates, was barred from travelling to the country in 2015. The UAE is not alone in this practice: a graduate student doing similar research at Georgetown University, which has a campus in Doha, was denied a visa by Qatar last year. Cultural institutions steer clear of controversy. Booksellers in Dubai’s shiny malls do not have politics sections. Professors of English literature might see parallels with the sort of happiness Aldous Huxley satirised in Brave New World (1932). But they would do well not to make that comparison in the UAE. (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)

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After five months in solitary confinement, his final court appearance lasted barely five minutes. On November 21, a court in Abu Dhabi convicted a British academic of espionage and sentenced him to life in prison. Matthew Hedges (31), a doctoral candidate at Durham University, travelled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) early last year to study its internal security policies. He became an unwilling participant in his own research in May, when police arrested him at Dubai’s airport. The UAE government hasn’t offered a shred of evidence, nor even named the country for which Hedges was supposedly spying. But the case is thought to be connected to neighbouring Qatar, which the UAE and three other Arab states have kept under an 18-month embargo. Hedges’ wife says he wasn’t allowed access to a lawyer until mid-October, and that his appointed counsel doesn’t speak fluent English. He was also allegedly made to sign a confession in Arabic, which he does not read. He has 30 days to appeal the verdict. With its ‘happiness ministry’ and tourist attractions, the UAE presents itself as a cheerful, cosmopolitan corner of the Gulf. It has also built a vast surveillance state to keep tabs on citizens and visitors. Government critics and human-rights activists have received long jail terms for social media posts. The climate grew even more repressive last year. “Showing sympathy” to Qatar is punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a 500,000 dirham (Rs.1 crore) fine. In 2010, New York University (NYU) started offering classes in Abu Dhabi, one of several Western universities to inaugurate campuses in the region. Administrators promised the same freedoms as its American parent. Academics say otherwise. Andrew Ross, an NYU professor who has criticised labour practices in the Emirates, was barred from travelling to the country in 2015. The UAE is not alone in this practice: a graduate student doing similar research at Georgetown University, which has a campus in Doha, was denied a visa by Qatar last year. Cultural institutions steer clear of controversy. Booksellers in Dubai’s shiny malls do not have politics sections. Professors of English literature might see parallels with the sort of happiness Aldous Huxley satirised in Brave New World (1932). But they would do well not to make that comparison in the UAE. (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)

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