This site is all about the championing of students to enable them to get the best deal from all the competing universities out there, so we were dead chuffed when we heard about this little exercise by a team of consultants:

They posed as prospective students to test how good a customer service universities deliver in practice. The first victim was Sheffield University, who recieved a pretty poor grade all in all. The consultants headline findings were: 1 in 5 phone callers who asked for info recieved nothing, 1 in 3 callers leaving voice mail requesting a call back weren’t called while 30% of phone enquirers failed to get through after 3 attempts. Furthermore, 7 departments took more than a month to send requested material, with 1 department taking a staggering 3 months to reply.

In a response notable only for its obfuscation, deceit, and marketing babble, the Director of Student recruitment and marketing (thinly disguised propaganda to you and me) Jane Chafer stated that these results failed to highlight “the many areas of excellence within the university” and that she realised students expectations of the university were “changing” and that they wished to “continually improve and challenge themselves” to “enhance the service they offered” - all of which means their going to try better, but deny their crap.

What do these poor results show at Sheffield? We think they illustrate that staff-student ratios matter, and effect all areas of university life!

Edit: spelling (a pedant)

It may well be the fact that my new local secondary school has got a better ratio of teaching staff to students than does my local new university. I wonder how many students actually realise this?

This is principally because UK universities have seen big increases in productivity from staff, over the past 10 years full time staff totals have fallen from 111,000 to 107,000 when at the same time annual numbers of graduates climbed from 286,000 to 444,000, an increase of almost 50%! Resulting staff student ratios soared from 1:9 up to 1:20/1:25 (depending on who you read) all of which puts some new universities behind some secondary schools in the all important teachers to students stakes.

Pretty impressive eh? But what gets me is why does nobody start complaining … any students out there care to comment … or is everything really totally fine down there on campus?

Yes, Oxbridge and the Ivy League do keep an eye on each other, and Harvard says it can learn from Oxbridge .. and the lesson is ‘face time’.

The international university league table puts Cambridge - the English one - ahead of Harvard for teaching quality, and Harvard is listening up. Their recommending smaller classes and providing more, and substantially greater, inducement for faculty and students to spend time together.

But this should be no surprise, after all people pay hansomely for face time. A seat at dinner with someone like Blair will cost £1000 or more, a seat at his table, a hundred times that. But the rewards can be great, your there with the main man, the big cheese, the big whahoobah, and you can have your moment to influence and to learn. So why isn’t face time a bigger deal at univeristies? How come people aren’t demanding more of it? And why don’t the government start measuring it (they measure everything else!).

Oxbridge and Harvard aren’t wrong - face time with your professor/tutor is an excellent educational quality indicator, and only political expediency prevents its adoption. After all, how many British Universities would look bad if even Harvard are improving their act?

Its that time of year again, and my teaching duties have begun for the new academic term. I must confess this always makes me a bit nervous, although I can’t complain too much, I only have some occassional teaching, its not like I’m doing 20 hours a week or more.

Nevertheless, delivering the first lecture of the year is tense, even though I tell myself there is no reason to be. I guess its becasue its a ‘performance’ that you do - I don’t mean that I sing and dance type of thing - but you do walk in and there is an expectant audience, and as with any performance, it can go wrong and you can look really, really stupid! This is what we teachers all really fear, if were honest.

You may not know this if you have never taught, but the great fear is that whilst standing there doing your stuff, you suddenly dry up .. eeekk! Mind goes blank .. what do i say next???

But its an irrational fear - I find the answer is to simply go onto something else and come back to that point at a later stage (and tell the class your doing this without explaining its becasue you can’t remember a bloody thing!) this is what I think of as one of my ‘teaching skills’. Still .. the fear still haunts you in the back of your mind .. what if ..

Touch wood, no disasters this time .. everything went reasonably smoothly, I even got a decent classroom discussion going, and people were volunteering to say things, hands aloft… always a sign that your doing something right.

And what about the all important class size, well there were about 21, a few more than I had expected, but about an average ratio per staff member for a UK university.

What would be interesting to know is the cut off point at which students feel reluctant to stick their hand up and say something - I know this will vary depending upon the inidividual concerned, but reason dictates that there is an optimal size for an engaged discussion to take place. Even though the class went quite well (I have had sessions where resolutely they just sit there, petrified - nobody says anything despite endless promptings from me).

I reckon the number is about 6-10, that way everyone will have the opportunity to not just say something, but develop an argument, be heard, take questions and objections, and this process be passed around, to and fro. I think anymore than double figures this tends to go into free fall and you move from something which resembles a seminar group to a full blown class. There just seems to be a group dynamic that only holds up to a certian number, then it dissolves.

Of course, the contary is also true. I once rememeber teaching a seminar where only 1 lone student turned up! He was petrified, but having said who he was on entering the room he couldn’t just turn heels and flee, as much as he wanted to I’m sure. None of this was helped by the topic that week - a discussion of ‘post-modernism’!

There is a familiar ring when people start going on about the ‘good old days’, this was better, that was better .. and most of us start nodding off. The question as to whether a degree was harder to obtain, or exams harder to pass .. and of course, whether a university education was superior to what it is now, persist and are rehearsed routinely in the media.

Every year the A level results are announced, or university expansion ‘celebrated’, brings with it a chorus of dissenting voices, usually lamenting the past and decrying the present. Trouble is, apart from anecdotal evidence, how do you decide if their right or not?

Well, the AUT (the Higher Education Union) has recently flagged the much neglected issue of staff-student ratios as a useful metric - one which sheds some intriging light on the matter. For instance, when Tony Blair went to university there were just a mere 9 students to every member of staff! Of course everyone knows that there is now more people going to university, but this has led to a massive 21 students to every staff member!

You might think that common sense would dictate that this must mean a significantly increased work load and proportinoatley less time devoted per individual student .. and that something would suffer? Well not according to the government; their 2003 White Paper on Higher Education not only refuses to admit that this is emblamatic of a serious decline in the quality of a degree education, but rather that further increases in the staff-student ratio can increase further without detriment! This admission is not only counter-intutitive, its strangely like Orwellian ‘doublethink’ !

Strikes me the matter is quickly settled with a simple thought experiment, if Tony was sending one of his sons off to Uni this year, which would he choose between our two hypothetical institutions, one offering his previously enjoyed 1:9 staff-student ratio, or the contemporary other, offering a 1:21 ratio (assuming all things being equal) - its a no brainer as the Americans say. Our Tony got a good degree education (and not just becasue he went to Oxford). One of the principal reasons was there were plenty of talented staff on hand to devote personnal attention to his needs and flowering academic interests, to encourage and nurture, inform and inspire .. after all reading a book only gets your thinking so far, you have to actually engage with other human beings to really start thinking for yourself - books don’t answer back!

Not that this seems to worry Blair too much, political expediency has won out as is evidenced in their doublethink. I think in this respect University education has become poorer and the dissenters are right to be a tad cynical. At least this is one useful metric that can be compared to what should be the embarrasment of many.

Interestingly, the AUT are now calling for a staff-student ratio off no more than 15:1, still not quite what Tony experienced but an improvement none the less ..

This university promotes itself as having a low staff-student ratio. On its website it state that it has a 1 to 10 ratio, whereas the national average is 1 to 17.

It goes on to state that …

This ratio ensures that a high and continuous level of support is maintained, from an academic to a pastoral point of view. It allows a degree of interaction between staff and students rarely found in other universities

It also stressed the importance of small class sizes …

Our student:staff ratio and traditional Oxbridge-style teaching in small groups of around 6 means that teachers and staff will get to know you as an individual. You won’t get lost in a lecture class of 300 students, nor will you be 50th in line for borrowing a particular book from the library.

Full text at http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/standingout/ratio/

The AUT have said that “Academics overtake schoolteachers as student ratio surges”

They go on to say ….

“The ratio of students to staff in higher education is greater than that of teachers to pupils in the UK’s schools, new AUT research has this week revealed.

There are now 21 students for every academic staff member, compared with an average of 18 pupils per teacher in the UK’s schools - and the higher education ratio has been higher than the schools ratio since 2000-01. Overall, this represents an increase in the student to staff ratio of 150 per cent since the 1970s.”

Full text is at http://www.aut.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=1420