Educational Disadvantage

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Athene Donald

With many schools in England apparently in danger of crumbling around or upon pupils, the start of the new school year offers the potential, once again, of being disrupted for thousands of pupils. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, generations of students have been impacted in ways it is hard to imagine won’t resound through the rest of their life.

This year’s A Level results combined the cohort who had not taken their GCSE exams with the retightening of grading.  (I am only writing about England, although similar implications to what follows are likely to be felt around all of the UK.) For many this will have been a disastrous combination, and teachers’ predictions have been shown often to be wide of the mark under the new grading guidelines. I think everyone understands in the abstract this group of students have not had it easy, although how that understanding will translate as their lives progress, be it at university or not, is far from clear.

However, the impact of the pandemic will not now miraculously disappear from all future schoolchildren working their way up the school ladder and, just as with future career progression for staff within universities who had to cope with pandemic fall-out, I worry the inequalities that the pandemic imposed on children living under different family circumstances, will propagate throughout their lives. If you missed the best part of a year of formal schooling just as you were beginning to learn to read, but are then presumed by the system to be a competent reader at 8, you may find yourself struggling to cope with all lessons thereafter. Will that be remembered when you sit GCSE’s in eight years time? If you and your four siblings were all squabbling over who had access to the single mobile device for your lessons, that will be an entire family whose learning will have been thrown into disarray. But will any allowance be subsequently made? What happened to all the extra tuition promised, given that much of the money has not been spent?

Those comments refer simply to the formal education that being present in a classroom might confer, but probably just as important is the disruption to a child’s developing social interactions. To be unable to mix with other children for extended periods is likely to have affected the development even of toddlers at the time, just when they were starting to understand a sense of self. Obviously, for adolescents the loss of opportunity to see friends in real life situations, rather than as a small face on a screen, will have done nothing for their own identities or ability to handle social situations. Of whatever age, I think adults too have exhibited many different manifestations of social unease from the repercussions of our long seclusion. It seems to me, in my own circle, that the after-effects of the pandemic are still very much in evidence. Everything from how often someone is expected to turn up at their place of work rather than work from home, to the use of Zoom and its like to running committee meetings, the world has changed. Sometimes I believe it has changed permanently in ways that are going to be detrimental to decision-making for all of us.

Amongst all the existential crises the world currently faces, social unease in the population is perhaps hardly top of the list of things to worry about. On the other hand, consequences of the loss of talent that poor ability to access education during the critical years of child development is something the country (and, of course, much more widely) should be very concerned about. It is something we will all have to face for an extended period. I worry people’s memories will be short. Those who had no trouble accessing online learning may not recognize the disadvantage peers may have had to contend with. The concept of excellence, of the A* star pupil who shone on the day of exams and fulfilled their teacher’s predictions, means those who come out on top may believe they are inherently superior to the kid from down the road whose educational experience was utterly different. I’m not sure what can be done about this, but I do hope people will ensure their memories are long enough to recall this societal disruption and how it has further entrenched inequality for too many in the next generation.

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Inefficiency as a Blessing in Disguise

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Athene Donald

In the process of tidying up my office I have managed to fill several large bins for recycling. I found many unremembered old reports. Indeed, sometimes I found multiple copies due to my incompetence in remembering where I filed the first one. However well-thumbed, most were by now ten or more years out of date and probably available on the web anyhow. To my surprise, I also found two files of print outs of blogposts dating back to the first couple of years I was writing (2010-12). Why I felt I needed to print them out I can no longer recall, perhaps I didn’t trust them to have a continuing life on the web, but looking through them reminded me of things I’d quite forgotten I’d written about.

One of the posts I came across was on inefficiency, something that preys on many a researcher’s mind. It is easier, to my mind, to keep pushing on with experimental work, which has its own rhythm and often the experiments dictate the timescale. It is when it comes to sitting at a desk, things get harder. For me, having multiple alternatives of the things I really ought to do, makes life easier. If I don’t feel like writing a letter of condolence to an alumnus’s widow, perhaps working my email mountain down will be better for the state of mind I’m in. If reading through some College committee paperwork does not appeal, perhaps thinking about an upcoming meeting on policy for science will feel more attractive. Having a wide range of options of what I absolutely need to do in the next few days means I can try to be as efficient as possible, by being inefficient about any single thing.

Of course, one can get caught out. I do find it irritating when half-way through a piece of writing, sometimes even half-way through a paragraph or sentence, I look at the clock and realise I should be somewhere else. To return to my computer to find a sentence beginning ‘It is obvious that….’ when it breaks off, and with no memory of what was obvious to me a couple of hours earlier, is frustrating to say the least. To avoid this, I do try to jot down (metaphorically) a few key words to remind me what I had in mind when the words were flowing to make it easier to pick up later, but too often I don’t have the forethought/time to do this.

There is another aspect to inefficiency raised by the Guardian journalist Emma Wilkins this week, that of allowing time for thoughts to mature, including when doing something totally different such as going for a walk. As she put it

‘for me, taking time out for a walk or to visit a friend doesn’t necessarily make me less productive. Where do ideas and solutions come from if not from daily life? They are just as likely to emerge when I’m hanging out the washing or walking through the bush, as when I’m staring at a screen.’

I totally agree with that too, although I don’t think of that as being inefficient so much as creating the necessary time for ideas to crystallise or for a bit of lateral thinking to come into play. Having been staring at something on the screen for far too long and heading off to boil the kettle, often allows for the space for clarity to emerge. Time to separate the wood from the trees.

To my mind, the lack of such time was one of the issues that I found hardest during the height of the pandemic, and I know I’m not alone on this. When every meeting was mediated through the computer screen, when meetings ran on the hour every hour, often with inadequate time to get to the kettle in between, let alone the bathroom, provoked utter exhaustion. A feeling of total relentlessness and lack of control over the diary while trying to do, not only the day job, but also (as the Head of a College) keep up with the changing government regulations about meeting, catering, living together. It was a period of such intensity there was no time to think ‘am I being efficient?’, it was merely a case of ‘can I finally get up off this uncomfortable desk chair?’

The changes to our ways of working seem permanent. Whereas people used to phone for 1:1 conversations but committees were in person however far the travel (of course, that did mean some people might not show at all), that is no longer so. Phoning is rare, and I realised how used I have become to seeing people through the screen when I found myself opting for a Zoom call over the phone for a call with someone I’d never met. I used to think phoning was totally adequate, yet now it seems less than satisfactory.

But whatever changes in the way we interact with others at a distance, I am sure we will all need to continue being inefficient in whatever way works for us as individuals. Plenty of coffee and comfort breaks, plenty of brief walks around the place to clear the head, switching from task to task if that helps. Being hung up on never wasting a moment is, to my mind, the best way of wasting many moments while ostensibly sticking to the job in hand.

 

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Historical Female Scientists?

Posted on August 11, 2023 by Athene Donald

One of the aspects of how my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science) has been received which surprises me the most, is the interest shown in the chapter on women who managed to be active in the scientific arena in centuries past. As an example, this came up in the interview I did for Nature Podcasts. I felt it was necessary to include these early women as a backdrop to the more recent past and to examine how matters have evolved, but there seems more enthusiasm for discussing these historical figures than I expected. That is all the more interesting to me as an early (pre-publication) reader said the chapter should be removed completely, as either not containing enough information or too much.

I have written previously about how I got introduced to Mary Astell, who features strongly in this historical chapter. Known as an early feminist and philosopher, who moved in the literati circles in late seventeenth century London, I was fascinated to be offered a chance to take a peek at her books and accompanying marginalia in Magdalene College’s Library, from which it was clear she had an unexplored interest in the science of the day. One of the post-publication interviewers asked me, on the back of this, whether I thought that there were many such scientifically active, or at least scientifically interested women who we know nothing about, but who are still waiting to be ‘discovered’.

Sadly, I suspect the answer is no. Whereas, as I have also written about before, it would seem that more and more female composers from past centuries are being unearthed and their music given due prominence in concert and media playlists, I don’t think significant numbers of female ‘scientists’ (bearing in mind that term only came into being in the nineteenth century) are likely to be rediscovered in the same way. Even if, lurking in some bibliophile’s library, or an august institution’s collections, are additional books with annotations which some gentlewoman had penned, similar to the sort Astell had engaged in, how likely are they to be identified and put into wider circulation, particularly if they are not part of a wider group of books of known provenance.

Furthermore, had there been such books, even if in small numbers, it seems to me they are likely to have been long since disposed of, if the woman in question was not a personage of some stature: a duchess perhaps, or the wife of someone who is well known today. But so many women of the seventeenth and eighteenth century would have had educations that ill-equipped them for forays into tomes relating to science, particularly as much would have been written in Latin, or as in Mary Astell’s annotated copy of Descartes, French or another foreign language. There may have been women who discussed scientific matters of the day with male family members in their homes, but I’m not convinced they would they have had the (foreign language) literacy and sufficient freedom from domesticity to have the time and space needed to delve into such books and write their comments?

Education for girls along these lines would have been uncommon, as not likely to lead to a good marriage and a robust financial position. Blue-stockings and salons were not a feature of the general squirearchy or wider middle classes and educating women in scientific matters would probably have been limited for most to a smattering of botany, aided by some gentle painting in watercolours of the plants they found. As an aside, I cannot imagine how young girls didn’t get completely stultified by a diet of sewing samplers, toying with the harpsichord/pianoforte and a gentle walk around the shrubbery (or perhaps I have been reading too much Jane Austen or, after a bad day at work, the lighter tales of Georgette Heyer).

Come the Victorian era, of course, things began to change, with schools that actually educated young women opening up, rather than one of the kind harshly depicted in Jane Eyre which was little more than a place to dispose of inconvenient children. Myself, I went to a school founded in 1871 for girls. And the fact that it was called Camden School for Girls (still a very good school) is indicative of its market: tradesmen’s children, as opposed to its sister school also founded by Frances Mary Buss, North London Collegiate School for Ladies. Interestingly, whereas the former has left its name unchanged since its foundation, the last word in the name of the latter has disappeared from public view. The school founded by Buss’s school contemporary Dorothea Beale* retains that same word in its name: Cheltenham Ladies College. To some, these distinctions matter, now as then.

In my book I identified a few women who had – for instance through virtue of family connections (Caroline Herschel) or place in society (Emilie du Châtelet) – been able to make inroads into the world of science. If you want a wider diet, I would point you towards books like Patricia Fara’s Pandora’s Breeches. In this book she refers to Bathsua Makin, a woman who taught the Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. She was ardent in her calls for educational reform for women. She noted that being a housewife required many skills that might be deemed ‘scientific’. As Fara quotes from Makin:

‘To buy Wooll and Flax, to die Scarlet and Purple, requires skill in Natural Philosophy. To consider a Field, the quantity and quality, requires knowledge in Geometry, To plant a Vineyard requires understanding in Husbandry. She could not Merchandise without Knowledge in Arithmetick…’

In many ways those statements are as true in the modern world as when Makin wrote them in the seventeenth century. You’re not going to get very far in any field without ‘Arithmetick’, hence Rishi Sunak’s desire for everyone to study maths till 18. Perhaps less obviously, but relevant to getting on in today’s job market, if you are stuck at home with domestic ties such as small children, you are undoubtedly going to get better at multitasking, creativity (think Blue Peter and one hundred things you can do with a loo roll and some string) and (small) people management. These things may be hard for a woman to put in a job application, even allowing for a so-called Narrative CV, but they are nevertheless invaluable skills you may be harder pushed to pick up in a lab setting. Being a good scientist is not all about expertise gained at the bench.

*Celebrated in the anonymous poem I well remember from my school days:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

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What’s Wrong with T Levels?

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Athene Donald

If you are an English reader, reading this blog, the chances are high that you studied (or are studying) A Levels before going to university. Alternative options are available post-16, but they are currently in a state of flux, whether or not you intend to go to university. Frankly, sitting outside that part of the system, it all looks a bit of a (predictable?) mess. The Government’s own flagship programme of T Levels, introduced in 2020 (T for technical) are intended to be the vocational equivalent to A Levels. They are still being introduced across the full gamut of topics, but started out in 2020 in the areas of

  • design, surveying and planning for construction
  • digital production, design and development
  • education and early years such as construction

with more topics rolled out in successive years and more still to come.

In order to prepare the student for the world of work, a mandatory part of the course was a minimum of 315 hours (around 45 days) work placement, and all the courses taught were supposed to have been developed in conjunction with employers.

In the abstract it sounds excellent but, as a recent report from Ofsted has shown, there are many problems. One of these most easily foreseen is connected with those required days of industrial placement. As the report says

The number of suitable placements is often limited in any given area because of the specific employment sector where the placement is required and the length of time students are required to attend.

Here we see regional issues raising their ugly heads. In those areas with few major employers – think Fenland or the Black Country – it will be particularly difficult for providers to source appropriate placements. Yet, to use a phrase that is barely now seen except in the name of Michael Gove’s department, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DHLUC for short), these regions are exactly those for whom levelling up is most important. Urban areas may fare better in provision, but large rural swathes of England, or former mining communities for instance, will be hard-pressed to provide appropriate on-site hours of training to fulfil the placement requirement.

Even where placements have been found, the report says:

Often employers are poorly informed about the content and structure of T Levels. In these cases, activities that students complete on industry placements are not well aligned with the T Level course content.

Things have obviously not gone to plan, if this is happening when employers were meant to be involved in the development of courses.

The reports criticisms continue: it’s been established that there is a very high drop out rate without a successful completion of the course, noting ‘In at least one provider, no students progressed from the first year of the T Level course to the second year.’ That’s a lot of wasted effort on many people’s part. The course teachers are also finding things tough, which is probably relevant to this last point. Vocational teachers, used to other formats of courses, often seem to be struggling with the more theoretical aspects, finding it hard to set work that is appropriately challenging. Staff also worry ‘that parents and school staff do not understand T Level qualifications.’ Furthermore, universities aren’t always ready to accept these qualifications, so upon completion students may end up disappointed that they hit a dead end in their specific aspirations. All these impacts combined mean it can be no surprise that institutions running the courses are finding it hard to recruit and retain the teachers to teach them.

It is of course not all bad news, with the report highlighting they found some satisfied students, employers and teachers, but overall Ofsted are clearly not impressed. What I find particularly sad is that the challenges identified were known from the outset, with many people speaking out against the reforms. The regional issues, in particular, will always have been an obvious barrier to the successful delivery of such courses, yet the Government seems to be pressing ahead with defunding BTECs (Business and Technology Education Council) at Level 3, so-called BTEC Nationals, in the hopes that T Levels may be an ‘improved’ replacement. In contrast to the last point above, universities do understand BTECs as a well-established ‘brand’, that will qualify a student for admission to many courses. With the T Level requirement of 315 hours of placement being a mandatory part of the qualification, parts of the country are simply going to have less opportunity for their young to follow a vocational path. Apprentices, after all, are no more likely to be available in these places if the employers aren’t there, so what are those for whom A Levels are not the appropriate route (or for which their GCSE grades do not qualify them) meant to do?

The UK needs a more skilled workforce, skilled at all levels. For all the apparent attention being given by the government to routes to eventual employment which don’t involve universities, for all that universities are definitely not high on the government’s list of friends, the introduction of T Levels just seems to have muddied the post-16 education waters further. It is a sad, missed opportunity and, as the Financial Times reports today in a long article about the UK’s weak productivity, our companies will continue to suffer from ‘patchy educational outcomes and skills gaps‘ in their workers, which these changes will do nothing to address.

 

 

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Bin the Past

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Athene Donald

My last post talked about binning a word, ‘boffin’, but currently I’m literally binning my past. As my former home of the Cavendish Laboratory prepares to move into its shiny new buildings, the Dolby Centre, I need to clear out my office. Clear it out of decades of my working life. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do such a clear-out when I move office: I believe, since I returned to the Cavendish as one of the very first generation of URFs (Royal Society University Research Fellow, if the acronym is unfamiliar), I’ve occupied a total of four offices. On each occasion, I would like to think I threw out many bin bags worth of rubbish, or at least outdated paperwork. My last move, which must have been not long before I took up the Mastership of Churchill College, permitted me not simply to throw stuff out, but pass it on, since the College Archives were interested in ‘archiving’ my past. Sadly, I only worked that out part way through the clear out and maybe ‘treasures’ they might have wanted had already been tossed away.

But this move is, I guess, my final one. I’m retired from the Cavendish and so, if I get assigned any space at all in the new building, it will only be in a shared office and as a place to hold professional meetings if needed. My research career is, sadly, over. Hence, the research papers, carefully xeroxed long ago or more recently printed from the web, are no longer of any use. They reflect the different stages of my research career, although I know the very earliest years when I worked on metals got chucked out at that last office move. So, instead, there’s my earliest polymer work on crazing, which was what really set my career alight, through liquid crystalline polymers, to starch, to Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy, protein aggregation and finally cellular adhesion. Not to mention some dead ends that didn’t progress far: chocolate, cell wall polysaccharides and using a quartz crystal microbalance to study protein adhesion, to name but three. Based on all of which PhD students successfully got their degrees, but which clearly were either not my intellectual forte or best suited to the equipment at my disposal.

Throwing out the papers will have been the easy part of my move and I’m about to move on to tougher challenges of decisions and disposal. I know, if I suddenly wanted to reread one of those old papers, I could most likely find it on the web. There were an awful lot of them, to the extent I essentially filled two whole recycling bins. The ones that gave me most of a pang were, interestingly, not the most recent ones that contained the clues to my lattermost projects, those that faded out as I moved on to other things (such as being Master, but also – and before that – being the University’s Gender Equality Champion, sitting on University Council and many dependent committees, and chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee). There were questions I would have loved to pursue, but there came a point when I realised that I simply didn’t have the time left over from my other roles to dig down sufficiently into the literature and to mull over what I saw as the key issues and questions, in order to formulate a sensible, well-thought through research proposal. So, I had to walk away, however frustrating.

No, it wasn’t throwing those papers away that I had carefully gathered for the time that never came, that I found most upsetting. It was the papers on which I really cut my research teeth back as a young postdoc. Those that date to the time I worked with Ed Kramer when I was at Cornell. I hadn’t seen that coming. Elderly though so many of those papers were (1970s primarily, but some even earlier; my research on polymers started in 1979), those were the ones I felt most inclined, in a silly, sentimental sort of way, to keep. But I didn’t. I tossed them out with all the others.

Of course, no one works with piles of paper like this anymore. There is less excuse to accumulate the same amount of stuff in an office. I’d already thrown out, probably at the last move, many of the boxes of printed micrographs my early years had produced and the original negatives from which the prints had been made. Few research students will now have to spend hour after hour in a dark room surrounded by smelly chemicals, trying to print out images that reveal just what key feature had been spotted in the long shifts spent staring into an electron microscope (also in the dark). How quaint and out-dated that must seem to recent generations of students, who only know digital recording which can be brought up in an instant on a computer screen. Certainly, dark room work was a skill I wish I’d never had to learn, and I can instantly conjure up the somewhat unpleasant smell of the solutions that needed to be used back then.

However, there is still an enormous amount of stuff left in the office for me to dispose of in the weeks ahead. Reports from many bodies, notably around gender or from the Royal Society, that maybe I always intended to read but never got around to. They will need to go, just as much as those that I carefully studied or perhaps even contributed to. Papers, including minutes, from many committees I sat on or sometimes chaired. Not grant-giving commitees. For those, it always seemed wise to leave the papers behind in the room once the decisions had been made, not least because the weight of paper that had to be transported was ridiculous (I once damaged the forks on my bicycle when I loaded a day or two’s worth of committee work into my basket), but also of course due to the confidentiality.

Preparations for conferences; notes of student progress and all their reports as they moved through their PhDs; teaching preparation, including for the practicals I taught, notes evolving over the years; and goodness knows what other clutter I can no longer recall because it really should have been chucked out years ago. It’s a bit wrenching to chuck out what represents so much of my life, time and energy, but out it all has to go.

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