Lesson plans
Any questions?
(Filed: 04/06/2003)
John Clare answers your queries on education
My wife and I are currently trying to guide our son, aged 17, in his choice of university. Although he is clear about what he wants to study, we can find no objective information about which institutions are the best in his chosen field. Can you help?
Until recently, I would have directed you to the inspection reports published by the Quality Assurance Agency on each department offering the subject. These would have told you about the nature of the curriculum, the quality of the teaching, the success rate of the students and much else, culminating in a numerical score that would have enabled you to rank the institutions.
Unfortunately, universities resented the exposure, banded together and persuaded a supine Government (which claims to be in favour of informed choice) to scrap the system, replacing it with one so anodyne as to be useless. So the only reliable guide now is academic reputation – essentially a reflection of how well funded a university is for research (especially expensive research in medicine and the sciences) – and how selective it is, as judged by the A-level grades required for entry (which may be no more than a reflection of how popular it is).
On that basis, and making due allowances, it would be generally agreed that the 25 best are: Cambridge and Oxford (still in a class of their own), closely followed by four London institutions – UCL, Imperial, LSE and King's – and 19 others most realistically ranked in alphabetical order: Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Loughborough, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Lancaster, Leeds, St Andrews, Sheffield, Southampton, Umist (soon to merge with Manchester), Warwick and York.
Not far behind would be a dozen others: Aberdeen, Dundee, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Leicester, Liverpool, Queen's Belfast, Reading, Royal Holloway, Sussex and Surrey. Universities aggrieved by their omission, particularly those that did well on the teaching assessments, should address their complaints to Margaret Hodge, the minister for higher education obfuscation.
Secondary schools in Bromley, Kent, where I work as a temporary teacher, have begun advertising in local newspapers for unqualified supervisors to take the classes of teachers who are absent. Shouldn't pupils be taught rather than "supervised"?
Since the Department for Education is planning to institutionalise the practice, and teachers take nearly three million days' sick leave a year, it is an interesting question. The constraints are that there is a limit to how often a school can ask a teacher who has a free period to cover for an absent colleague, and hiring a "supply" teacher costs about £125 a day.
In both cases, pupils may not get much teaching, not least because many supply teachers are poor at their job. So, hiring an unqualified supervisor at £10 an hour to ensure that the pupils get on with work they have been set is a realistic and cost-effective solution. Parents, though, will want to know how frequently it happens.
以上内容出自www.telegraph.co.uk/edu，非常客观，想看其他专业的情况和各个学校的情况都可进去看一下，绝对的英国人评论英国自己的大学，比我们在这里猜想要客观的多！ |
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