TOP 100 ENGLAND SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Cap on student numbers means one in three applicants will not get university places Up to 200,000 would-be students will be turned away this year because of unprecented demandUp to 200,000 prospective university students - around a third of all applicants - are likely to miss out on a place this year because of unprecented demand.It comes as statistics reveal record numbers of students are taking up places at UK universities. More than 1.14m students started undergraduate or postgraduate courses in 2008/09 – a jump of 7% on the previous year.Of these nearly 840,000 were undergraduates starting full-time degrees – another rise of 7% on the year before, according to figures published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) today.The boom has worried ministers that if numbers continue to grow, they will not be able to provide student loans and grants to all those eligible for them.This year the government has allowed an extra 10,000 students, after that student numbers are capped, and universities have been told that they will be fined if student numbers go above this small increase.Universities predict that they will be forced to turn away up to 200,000 well-qualified applicants this year.Last year a record 150,000 students were rejected by all the universities they applied to, after a surge in applications caused by the recession and high unemployment levels for young people. University heads warn this year will be worse as those who were turned away last year are likely to re-apply.The final number of applications will be published next month, but the universities of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Portsmouth say they have seen an increase of 38%, 27% and 20% respectively.Oxford and Cambridge universities, which have an early deadline for applications, have seen a 12% and 6.5% rise. This means that at Oxford, there will be more than five applicants per place and at Cambridge more than four.Pam Tatlow, chief executive of the university lobby group Million+, which represents 28 former polytechnics, said the government had a choice to either provide extra university places or give more funds to unemployment benefits as those who were rejected from university would be joining the dole queue.Patricia Broadfoot, vice-chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire, said students were "increasingly anxious" that they would miss out and were applying very early. "But there are going to be a lot who are disappointed all the same," she said.Les Ebdon, vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, said: "Universities will be forced to turn away up to 200,000 students who will be qualified for the places and very disappointed."The Hesa figures have also reignited concerns that universities rely too heavily on international students. One in five degrees – undergraduate and postgraduate – went to students who came from outside the UK.One in 10 undergraduate degrees were awarded to overseas students. Students from outside the European Union rose by 7% while those from inside the EU grew by 5%.John Craven, vice-chancellor of Portsmouth University, said some universities were "very heavily reliant on international students" and should learn from institutions that had had their "fingers burned" by relying on this as a source of income.Ebdon said: "Universities realise that the public purse is constrained and they are looking for other spheres of income. International students are perhaps the most obvious source of income."A record one in seven students graduated from university with a first-class degree – 14% compared to 13% the year before, the data shows. Nearly half of graduates were awarded a 2:1.The number of women taking science subjects at university fell by 2%, despite a drive to encourage more to do so. But two in five graduates had studied science subjects.Almost 19,000 people opted for a foundation degree – a work-based vocational qualification that can lead to an undergraduate degree. This is a 26% rise on the year before.David Lammy, the higher education minister, said he was "especially encouraged" to see the growth in foundation degrees.He said: "These help both full-time and part-time learners develop their skills and careers while helping businesses ensure they get, develop and retain the talent needed to remain strong in these challenging times. The number of undergraduates studying science, technology, engineering and maths is up."It is critical to our future growth that we have the graduates with the skills to drive the new industries and jobs of the future which is precisely why the government enabled an additional 10,000 student places in these subjects last year."Higher educationUniversity fundingStudentsUniversity administrationEducation policyJessica Shepherdguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
TV producer who stalked married woman and googled her name 40,000 times is jailed A producer who stalked a married woman googled her name 40,000 times and posed as a parent to get into the nursery her child attended. telegraph.co.uk |
ICA warns staff it could close by May Institute could fall victim to recession with costs needing a £1m trimIn the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London there is a bloodstain on an office wall. This Is Norman's Blood, reads the label – the traces of a fistfight between former ICA curator Sir Norman Rosenthal and actor Keith Allen.More blood, of the metaphorical variety, is soon to be shed at the institute. Staff members have been told that a financial deficit currently at around £600,000 might rise to £1.2m and if radical steps are not taken the ICA could be closed by May.Minutes of a sometimes bad-tempered staff meeting held last month have been seen by the Guardian. The meeting was also attended by Alan Yentob, the BBC creative director, and Tessa Ross, Channel 4's head of film and drama, both of whom sit on the ICA's council.The meeting saw ICA director Ekow Eshun explain that a staff bill of £2.5m will have to be reduced by £1m for the organisation to survive. Without a wholesale restructuring, he argued, the ICA could be the first major British cultural organisation to fall victim to the recession.The ICA's management is now consulting on staff redundancies, with the process due to be completed by the end of March.Since its early beginnings just after the war, when the ICA was one of the few institutions to introduce avant garde art to Britain, the organisation has played a significant role in the UK's cultural and intellectual life. But critics believe that it has lost its sense of purpose, particularly when contemporary art is now well represented in London's museums and galleries.The financial problems emerged, Eshun told the Guardian yesterday, as a result of "a perfect storm of events that all came together".A fundraising auction of works donated by artists including Damien Hirst in October 2008 failed to raise its estimated £1.3m, instead realising about £673,300.Over the 2008-9 financial year, the ICA raised only £200,000, or half the projected revenue, from hiring out its premises on The Mall in London for commercial use, a problem put down to the recession.Eshun said that other traditional streams of income, such as the bookshop and the ICA film distribution arm, also suffered because of the recession.The ICA has been granted a package of £1.2m over two years by Arts Council England's (ACE) Sustain fund, which is designed to help arts organisations hit by the recession. The total turnover of the ICA is £4.5m, and it receives an annual ACE grant of £1.3m.But Eshun said the problems at the ICA ran deeper than the current financial climate, and in May last year, even before the scale of the immediate financial problems had emerged, a consultancy firm was commissioned to report on structural problems within the organisation.Yentob told the Guardian: "We've been managing a programme with a large staff running numerous individual projects. When trouble emerged and financial problems surfaced because of the recession it was as if we had been ambushed from every side."Instead of several, often competing departments devoted to exhibitions, talks, or films and so on, three larger teams – one devoted to the artistic programme, one to finance and operations, and one to communications – will be created to "deliver a more integrated programme", said Eshun. He said that the organisation's renewed vision would "address the big questions and lead debate and enquiry into culture and the arts ... We are here to bring together artists and audiences to ask questions about who we are and how we live."The minutes of the meeting seen by the Guardian, compiled informally by staff, report that one attender said he "didn't want to hear the word 'vision' coming from Ekow Eshun again – he had heard it at every staff meeting this year and it meant nothing to him".Eshun, who has been director of the ICA since 2005, said that he did take "responsibility for the ICA's present and future over the time that I've been here. But it has been going for 60 years. Trying to turn it round isn't straightforward."According to Yentob: "The ICA council acted nearly a year ago in consultation with the Arts Council, in commissioning the organisational review. Perhaps it could have happened even earlier, but this is a big step with serious consequences for many of our staff, so it was not a decision that could be taken lightly. Everyone on the ICA council believes that these changes will enable the ICA to fulfil its creative brief more effectively."Art on the edgeThe ICA was founded in 1947 by the critic Herbert Read, along with artists including the surrealist painter Roland Penrose and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. It mounted early shows of pop art and abstract painting, and provided a meeting place for radical artists. It continued at the cutting edge with events such as Mary Kelly's infamous "nappy show", an exhibition in 1976 officially called Post Partum Document, which included her baby's dirty nappies. The same year it was among the first venues to host a gig by the Clash. In the 1990s it played host to the first British showings of work by the sculptors Miroslaw Balka and the late Juan Muñoz, both of whom later created installations for Tate Modern's turbine hall. Staff alumni include Sir Norman Rosenthal, the retired exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts; Sandy Nairne, the director of the National Portrait Gallery; and Iwona Blazwick, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery.Arts fundingArts policyLondonRecessionCharlotte Higginsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Country diary: Wenlock Edge Wenlock EdgeThe whiteness of the snow changed everything: it covered the ground, dressed trees and hills, brought a silent music and made the familiar strange. When the thaw came it was as if the doors of a great cabinet had swung open and we could see the magician's glamorous assistant. She had stepped into the cabinet when the magician tricked the world out with snow, and now it had vanished the assistant made a miraculous reappearance. In a funny way, we were disappointed to see her. Perhaps we were expecting a metamorphosis; instead there was the same old assistant, not quite as glamorous as when she disappeared, a bit flattened, damp, spoiled.As the last of the snow melted away into fog and mud, the birds became agitated. With their flinty little calls and hesitant flitting there was little to distinguish them except for flashes of colour: the golden rump-spot of a green woodpecker leaving a molehill because the yellow ant mounds were still frozen; double white tail flashes of chaffinch flickering like lights in the hedge trees, red and white bullfinch all blood and bandages.The brightness of morning faded to a silver-blue. Warmer and sunnier now, the birds picked up the pace. I picked up a hazel stick and broke the end off to fit it for the miles it had to do, stabbing squalid bits of puddle ice, ratcheting up steep banks to skirt the cliffs, poking about in leaf mould. Ravens and buzzards were still quiet, ghosting through treetops. A kestrel hovered over a sodden meadow. The streams have got their chuckle back: intoxicated with snow melt and rain, their yellow and blue scoured-clean beds shine under racing cold clear water and its sound folds over little falls. On a bend of the brook there was a flash of white – the magician's glamorous assistant had rediscovered her smile: snowdrops.Rural affairsBirdsBirdwatchingPaul Evansguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Goldsmith: Saddam posed no immediate threat Former attorney general admitted to changing his mind over necessity of further justification for military actionLord Goldsmith at the Iraq war inquiry - liveLord Goldsmith, the government's attorney general at the time of the Iraq war, has told the Chilcot inquiry that he believed in 2002 there was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's regime that would have justified the use of force against him.While he told the inquiry this morning that he believed a second UN resolution would have been "safer" to justify military action, he admitted he eventually concluded that a further reinforcement to the earlier resolution 1441 was not necessary.Goldsmith has told the inquiry he changed his mind "for good reasons" but has not spelled them out, nor yet been asked by the inquiry what they were.The change appears to have happened in late February 2003, just before the war, when he told the prime minister's advisers that there was "a reasonable case" that a second UN resolution was not needed. This was sufficient to constitute a "green light," he said. His previous advice had been preliminary.The former attorney general spoke of the government as his "client". He said the prime minister had told him at a meeting shortly before the war: "'I do understand that your advice is your advice.' He accepted it was for me to reach a judgment and he had to accept that."Goldsmith told the inquiry that he subsequently learned, over lunch with the French ambassador to London, that the French government did not believe it was necessary either. In the run-up to the war, the French president, Jacques Chirac, had made clear that France would not support a new resolution.Goldsmith has also told the inquiry that in his judgment regime change was not a legitimate basis for the invasion.He told the inquiry he had not attended cabinet meetings or cabinet committees discussing the possibility of war during 2002 and that he gleaned information about possible allied military plans from the press. He said "it would have been better" if he had attended cabinet; his judgement would have been important once the government's course of action had been agreed.Goldsmith said: "My judgment was that there was not an imminence of threat that would justify us resorting to the use of force."He said that he did not think his advice was welcome to the prime minister. Smiling, he told the inquiry: "I don't know, you'd have to ask Mr Blair that." The former prime minister is to appear before the inquiry on Friday.He told the inquiry that he had told the then defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, that he was wrong to say that there was a clear basis for military action.Goldsmith told the inquiry that the three justifications for the use of force against Iraq would have been self-defence, to avert a humanitarian catastrophe or authorisation by the UN.He said he did not agree with the US policy of pre-emption. "The self-defence argument did not apply. There was no immediate threat," he said.Goldsmith added that he was frustrated by the government's decision not to declassify some documents – a frustration clearly shared by Sir John Chilcot, chairman of the inquiry.The former attorney general told the panel: "What I was anxious to do was to reach correct legal advice. I also had some concerns about public statements being made about what our position would be."Iraq war inquiryIraqLord GoldsmithPolitics and IraqTony BlairForeign policyStephen Batesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |