Last week, the government published the long-awaited independent panel report for the review of post-18 education and training funding. The panel, chaired by the former banker Philip Augar, was initially established by Theresa May in early 2018. Its remit was to look at the long-term funding of universities and the balance between university-based higher education…
I love books. I always have two or three books on the go. Always a novel, which tends to get read in bed. I’ve just finished Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley, which opens as a pastoral idyll of England in the 1930s but darkens and deepens, with fascism more than in the background and a…
I’ve written about my dad in this blog before. He sadly died last year, a few months after his ninetieth birthday. He had left school in 1941 when he was fourteen. He worked first for a small engineering company and then, after national service, for most of his working life in a textile factory. I…
I’m well aware of the date on which this blog post will be published. There’s a long tradition of memorable April Fools’ Day spoofs. One of the most-often quoted was a 1977 Guardian supplement lauding investment opportunities in the (sadly fictional) island state of San Seriffe, which apparently tricked a good number of people, but…
I was in Germany when Theresa May’s ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit took place last week: I had been asked by the German government to evaluate the University of Cologne as part of the country’s ‘universities of excellence’ programme. I was a member of a multi-national review team, which meant that late into the evenings of…
How do you feel when you’re asked how you feel? University Mental Health Day (UMHD) is this week – a national initiative on Thursday 7 March to focus attention on mental health: on the importance of good mental health and on the challenges – for all of us – of mental ill-health. Deborah Harry, our…
I’m writing from Australia, where I am a few days into a fortnight of working abroad for the University. In this blog post, I want to explain what I’m doing. Universities are rooted in place. The first thing I spotted about Sheffield Hallam when I came to look around before my interview for the job…
Sitting at the back of a cupboard, we’ve got several boxes full of very old 35mm slides – most of them accumulated when we had to clear out my parents-in-laws’ house. They are a fairly defunct technology now, but it turns out that you can buy slide scanners which convert the slides into picture files…
Traditionally, it’s the time of the year to look ahead and make predictions about what the New Year has in store for us. But predictions are – mostly – a mug’s game. The New Yorker magazine had great fun a couple of weeks ago revisiting an article it published in 1968, in which it invited contributors…
Most of us have our festive traditions – the family meal, the Boxing Day walk, the silly sweaters. My definition of a tradition is that it begins when something happens two years in a row for the same reason. And so, like last year (and looking forward to next) here are 2018’s twelve Hallam days…