News: 1996 was the year of waiting for Dearing. While politicians had a breather, campuses heaved with rows over cash, cows and hackers

Dearing:

Daze in wait

On February 19 higher education came to a hiatus when Education and Employment Secretary Gillian Shephard announced that Sir Ron Dearing was to head a Robbins-style inquiry into higher education. Painful decisions about funding were to be delayed until the summer of 1997 - after the next general election. Following the 1995 Budget, which had left universities Pounds 300 million worse off, vice chancellors had succeeded in grabbing the headlines with talk of a one-off levy on students. Now such decisions could "wait for Dearing".

Sir Ron was asked to recommend how the shape, structure, size and funding of higher education, including support for students, should develop over the next 20 years. The deadline for submissions to the inquiry was set for November 15. What has emerged from the hundreds of entries is that more money is needed to fund expansion and to pay academics better. Where this is to come from, and especially how much students should pay, is the 1997 battleground for Sir Ron. This year's Budget alleviates the strain on finances, but not by much.

Waiting for Dearing has got politicians off the hook; it has not helped cash-strapped institutions or their staff and students.

Politics:

Red faces as Labour labours

New Labour, new policy. Much derided for putting soundbite-friendly generalities where specifics ought to be, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition shocked just about everyone by coming out with a coherent higher education policy just when Sir Ron looked to have provided the perfect alibi for inaction.

The Labour conference endorsed the Lifelong Learning document, which upset assumptions that Labour would adopt the funding model pioneered by Australian Labor. Instead of looking for students to repay a share of tuition fees, they opted to make maintenance the repayable section of student support.

Not everybody was convinced. Embarrassingly, Baroness Blackstone, Master of Birkbeck and a Labour front-bencher in the Lords, suggested that too little money would be generated without a tuition contribution.

In the circumstances it was pretty ungrateful of the party to leave one of the architects of the policy, further and higher education spokesman Bryan Davies, still looking for a seat in the next Parliament. Next year may yet offer the irony of Mr Davies running up against Alan Howarth, the former Tory higher education minister who gave a warmly received party conference speech a year after his shift across the floor to Labour.

Mr Howarth's old job changed hands, with the abrasive Eric Forth giving way to low-profile hereditary peer Lord Henley - suggesting that the Government felt higher education had been defused as a potential election issue by the appointment of Sir Ron.

Gillian Shephard continued to win plaudits for her emollient manner, except from Tory chairman Brian Mawhinney, accused of undermining her. But the collapse of the dual-funding model for student loans did cause the Government serious embarrassment.

The Liberal Democrats wrestled with the funding gap which education spokesman Don Foster admitted existed in their plans, and looked seriously at the possibility of abolishing national funding councils and giving responsibility to newly-created regional authorities instead.

There were continuous calls for politics to be taken to a higher plane in a year in which "sleaze" was set permanently in 144-point type for headline purposes, making the membership drive launched among students by the yogic fliers of the Natural Law Party unusually well-timed.

Students:

Mount piggy-back

In March the National Union of Students gave up on a restoration of full undergraduate grants at 1979 levels in favour of income-contingent loans, where progressive repayments would be "piggy-backed" on to national insurance or income tax contributions.

And loan system supporter Douglas Trainer, won the presidential election over Campaign for Free Education candidate Clive Lewis. But both camps remain opposed to tuition fees for home and European Union undergraduates. A series of campus events for national No Fees day on November 5 urged vice chancellors to stay their hand on fees until after the Dearing inquiry.

Evidence mounted that grants and loans do not cover basic student living costs. A joint NUS and GMB survey, just before the NUS March conference, revealed that two in five students now work part-time throughout term. And in November the Policy Studies Institute found that students from poorer backgrounds were being held back because they could not rely on parents to make up any shortfall.

Despite this, more and more people are clamouring to become students. October figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency showed that numbers grew by around 10 per cent between 1994/95 and 1995/96. Approaching a third of the 1.6 million students in the sector in 1995/96 were aged over 25.

Finance:

Being hammered

1996 was the year universities and colleges feigned a knockout punch, driven to it by the shadow of massive funding cuts brought in by the 1995 Budget. The threatened introduction of an entrance levy which might hit the pockets of middle-class voters was an unsavoury prospect for the Government in the run-up to a general election.

This won immediate concessions: a review of the impact of the Budget cuts, which amounted to Pounds 500 per student over three years, and a closer look at the Private Finance Initiative.

These reviews discovered what institutions knew already: that they were being hammered and PFI was not going to do much to cushion the blows.

Confirmation did not take long to come. Higher education institutions were soon predicting 3,000 job losses as their forecasts showed the sector expected to face a Pounds 17 million deficit. But the Government put a brave face on it, and continued to insist PFI was the answer. High profile success stories, however, were few and far between.

This year's Budget acknowledgeed that PFI was failing education, predicting that it would account for a mere Pounds 30 million for the whole education sector. As a consolation, institutions were thrown a Pounds 4 million bone in the form of value added tax relief on PFI projects, in the hope that this would improve uptake in 1997.

A much larger bone offered was the Pounds 280 million over two years - Pounds 200 million for higher education and the rest for further education - which came in a Budget package clearly designed to keep the sector quiet until after the general election. But higher education is still facing up to real-terms cuts of Pounds 86 per student over three years -unless Sir Ron comes up trumps.

Research:

Cows went mad, rockets went boom

The results of the Research Assessment Exercise in December showed that the quality and volume of research had gone up. But institutes have to wait till next year to find out how much money the funding council will give them: things don't look good for those with low grades. A good year. though, for Oxford, which knocked Cambridge off the top of the THES league, and for Goldsmiths College and Bath University which both rocketted up the tables.

1996 was the year of the mad cow thanks to the Government's devastating admission in March that the most likely explanation for a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease identified in ten people was exposure to BSE.

Since then the number of people officially clinically diagnosed as having contracted CJD has increased to 14, and scientists have been able to offer some further evidence suggesting a strong link between CJD and BSE.

The UK's premier centre for BSEresearch is the Institute of Animal Health, Edinburgh. But heavily pressurised IAH scientists, along with colleagues in other research council institutes, feared for their future as the Government's privatisation probe, called prior options, of more than 40 public-sector research facilities gathered steam.

Thousands of demoralised scientists in the institutes found support from MPs on the House of Commons science and technology committee. "Profoundly unsatisfactory", they said, suggesting the whole thing has been a waste of time and effort. The final fate of the institutes is still being awaited.

An alarming report in June showed that many university science and engineering departments were having to make do with clapped-out research equipment. Eighty per cent of university departments are unable to perform critical experiments because of a lack of funds for equipment.

Multinationals warned they were being forced to moved their university research collaboration overseas. But researchers were still shocked by the revelation that the Medical Research Council had accepted money for research from tobacco giant British American Tobacco.

It was a mixed year for space science. Europe's Cluster mission exploded in June and last month Russia's Mars 96 probe re-entered the atmosphere having failed to leave Earth's orbit. But Cluster could make a comeback of sorts thanks to a spare spacecraft and instruments from the original mission.

Space researchers were cheered by the success of the ISO mission, a space observatory charged with studying the birth of stars and detecting planets around remote systems. The SOHO spacecraft is also offering new insights into solar activity including flares and eruptions and their impact on earth.

American scientists breathed new life into that old chestnut: is there, or was there ever, life on Mars? In August Nasa scientists announced that they had found tiny fossils in a meteorite from the red planet. "Compelling but not conclusive," they said.

And Harry Kroto of Sussex University has achieved a very high profile, for winning the Nobel prize for chemistry for his discovery of a remarkable form of carbon whose structure matches the pattern of a football.

Sport:

Victory in Bannister's lap

More than 40 years after his greatest athletic achievement, British runner Roger Bannister once more dominated student sport. In the summer Sir Roger, who was a medical student when he ran the first sub-four minute mile in 1954, called for a national sports scholarship scheme to augment the current piecemeal provision. He secured the necessary rule changes and then in November the Pounds 10 million required from the National Lottery to create around 4,500 scholarships. As the year ended universities were also prominent among the major bidders for the planned National Academy of Sport.

Sports scholarships mean a significant proportion of the British team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney will be students. There was in any case a fair representation in the much-maligned UK team in Atlanta, among whom Oxford University hockey player John Wyatt contributed an entertaining games diary to The THES. Three of the University of Surrey's five overseas scholars also went to Atlanta.

Rugby provided student sport's worst news of the year, the death of Oxford University student Ian Tucker, tipped as a future Australian international, from injuries suffered in a match against 11 Saracens.

Quality:

Woolly just won't do in prickly heat

If academics were unsure at the beginning of 1996 as to what was expected of them in terms of quality and standards, they had no excuse to have missed the message by the end.

Woolly notions of "acceptable levels of performance" would not do, Eric Forth, the former higher education minister, told them in March. At an academic standards conference he warned them against joining "the international bull**** league" by hyping up the quality of courses, adding that it was "no longer enough to be able to satisfy yourself that your standards are at the right level. You need to be able to satisfy others".

Exchanges at the conference proved that the heat generated by the quality debate in the previous year had not diminished. Comments from Mr Forth suggesting there was "no causal link" between funding and quality brought him under fire from vice chancellors.

By April the temperature dropped as university and college heads struggled to summon a dynamic response to the interim report of the joint planning group for a single quality agency. It almost seemed they had finally become bored with the issue. But as one leading quality official accurately predicted, they were about to become "very un-bored".

Many were worried by suggestions from Brian Fender, the Higher Education Funding Council for England's chief executive, that there should be a direct link between quality judgements and funding. The idea seemed to echo moves which were already being made by the Teacher Training Agency.

The joint planning group seemed certain to irritate ministers when it proposed a "more flexible" and "more streamlined" quality system. Institutions should be able to negotiate with the new quality agency to extend the period between inspections beyond two years, it said. But Mrs Shephard overlooked the fact that she had stressed the importance of inspections taking place at least every two years, and gave the plan her blessing.

Then just as vice chancellors thought they were getting it right, the tricky issue of standards came back to haunt them. The Higher Education Quality Council rolled out its reports on the two-year Graduate Standards Programme and joined Sir Ron in reminding academics they would not get away with fudging the question of how to be clearer and more explicit about standards.

Scotland:

Lone bargainer

Scottish higher education institutions may remember 1996 as the calm before the storm. The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council managed to minimise the funding misery last spring, with a cash cut of 0.2 per cent, but this was achieved through a drastic cut in top-slicing for national initiatives.

Institutions have warned SHEFC that it has no room for manoeuvre. The Committee of Scottish Higher Education Principals has collated confidential estimates of job losses from institutions, which it says could reach 16 per cent in the smaller colleges.

But plans for even more Scottish universities have been gathering momentum. The high-tech federal University of the Highlands and Islands has made a leap towards actuality. finding favour with Michael Forsyth, secretary of state for Scotland.

Local activists are also pressing for a university in Dumfries. Glasgow University is drawing up plans to establish a college on the site of the former Crichton Royal psychiatric hospital, and Paisley University has also expressed an interest. SHEFC and the Scottish Office have reacted cautiously.

The separateness of Scotland's higher education system was underlined on the joint union day of action: 13 of Scotland's 21 higher education institutions did not take part since they have their own national bargaining system. But its future could be threatened, with management warning that prospective strike action over a 2.5 per cent pay offer linked to changes in conditions of service could precipitate local pay negotiations.

The direction of teaching quality assessment north of the border is also unclear. SHEFC takes a parental pride in its system, and is adopting a cautious "wait-and-see" attitude to the new quality assurance agency, despite COSHEP's support for a system which covers the whole of the United Kingdom.

But attention is likely to focus increasingly on Scotland in the run-up to the general election, since Tory defeat could lead to a Scottish parliament. And it would undoubtedly face demands for tangible proof that education is valued more highly in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK.

Unions:

Dons unite with dinner ladies

SIMMERING anger over pay and increased workloads erupted this year into the UK's first joint strike by campus unions.

Eight higher education sector unions, representing more than 120,000 employees, took part in a one-day strike on November 19 which shut down the vast majority of institutions.

Dons and dinner ladies were among those on picket lines, both angry at the pay offers made by the Universities and Colleges Employers Association. Clerical and technical staff who along with academics have been offered 1.5 per cent, earn just over Pounds 12,600 a year on average. A 1.5 per cent increase would add about 10p to the average hourly rate of Pounds 6.65. Meanwhile, manual campus workers earn, on average, less than Pounds 8,000 a year. Their unions are calling for a minimum hourly rate of Pounds 4.26, a 12 per cent increase.

Academic unions have shown that members' salaries have declined massively against comparable professions. Real earnings for male university teachers grew by 8.8 per cent between 1981 and 1992 while male primary and secondary school teachers saw theirs increase by 35 per cent.

On top of this lecturers became increasingly disgruntled with their workloads. A survey by Natfhe, published earlier this month, showed that 80 per cent of respondents would seriously consider early retirement if offered because of the stress they were under due largely to heavier workloads.

The unions stressed that the current wave of redundancies, estimated at 3,000 across the sector in this year alone, will only exacerbate the workloads problem and, in turn, impact on staff-student ratios and inevitably the quality of teaching and research.

The new spirit of union cooperation led to renewed talk of merger. In July the AUT, which has long been an advocate of a single union representing academics, reached agreement with the Association of University Teachers and Lecturers to work more closely together.

The move seemed to rekindle stalled efforts by the AUT and Natfhe to seek closer links. Previous attempts to build links had run aground but in October they agreed to restart official talks aimed at generating closer co-operation.

Qualifications:

Who are you calling a quanca?

In March Sir Ron published his long-awaited Review of Qualifications for 16-19-year-olds. His big idea was to create "parity of esteem" between the vocational and the academic routes into higher education and employment. The key to wiping out decades of entrenched prejudice, he suggested, was to create a common framework of national awards, to "recognise explicitly" the equivalence of A levels, GNVQs and NVQs.

Sir Ron's parity objective was given a big boost in September when education secretary Gillian Shephard introduced the education community to a new and amusing acronym - Quanca. Sir Ron had recommended that a single statutory regulatory and awarding body be created to cover all qualifications pathways. The Qualifications and National Curriculum Authority, will bring together the work of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) and the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority, but is not expected to come into being until September 1997.

Further steps towards Sir Ron's goal in 1996 have been hesitant, and often stumbling. A blow came in October from higher education minister Lord Henley when he rejected the plan to change the Advanced level GNVQ into the Applied A level. "It would only confuse," he told the Conservative party conference in Bournemouth. "I made 198 recommendations," said Sir Ron, "I didn't expect every one to be a winner."

The year culminated with the publication of the long-awaited Standards Over Time - SCAA and Ofsted's 15-month investigation into exam quality. It prompted Mrs Shephard to herald a return to rigour in A levels. But in the year's typical slapstick style, the standards investigation appeared to have been conducted at a complete tangent to all the work set in motion by Sir Ron. Indeed, Mrs Shephard's call for a vigorous return of the A-level "gold standard", seems totally at odds with Sir Ron's idea of parity.

Information technology:

A beautiful barn in the playground

In the United States, a Philadelphia court froze legislation which would have censored the Internet and made scholarship and teaching difficult. But several universities over here decided there were limits to free speech as they clamped down on Internet pornography. There were court cases and at least one suicide.

By 1996 the Internet, once the private playground of academics and government researchers, had become determinedly commercial and desperately overloaded. So US academics at 52 institutions planned to recreate the old days with an exclusive broadband network called Internet II.

UK academics already have a private network in Janet and SuperJanet, but the Joint Information Systems Committee, through which the funds flow, saw a potential cash crisis coming during the next five years.

Information technology is high on the agenda for Sir Ron Dearing's inquiry. As the deadline for evidence to the inquiry came down in November several organisations warned that IT requires large investments, any cost savings will be long-term, and the quality of education will need to be zealously guarded as more and more of it takes place through the computer screen.

As tangible evidence of the investment that New Learning requires, institutions spent millions on that essential landmark of the 1990s campus, the learning resource centre.

Thames Valley University nicknames it the "beautiful barn". Jesus College, Cambridge opts for the traditional "library". Elsewhere it is the "multimedia centre". By any name, it is a building equipped with computers, CD-Roms, Internet connections, and maybe some books. Like cyberspace itself, a truly serious LRC will be open 24 hours a day.

In the search for savings, universities are going high-tech. Electronic cash in the form of Mondex smartcards was issued to Exeter and York students. The trend to cybercash suffered a minor setback when Cambridge University cryptologist Ross Anderson claimed to have hacked through the security on the Mondex smartcard.