The Londinian

Institute of Education

THE

ISSUE 2. 2017

LONDINIAN The magazine for alumni and friends of the UCL Institute of Education

IN THIS ISSUE

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Artificial Title Intelligence in the Classroom.

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CONTENTS

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UP FRONT 2

Introduction from Becky Francis, Director of UCL Institute of Education

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News

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Introduction

Professor Becky Francis

FEATURES 6

How risky is it to be a child?

Dr Sandra Leaton Gray explores the modern dangers to children and how parents react to them.

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Artificial intellegence Dr Rose Luckin talks about how Artificial Intelligence is relevant to education and what it can contribute to teaching and learning to help students and educators progress their understanding and knowledge more effectively.

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News

It’s All Academic Festival INTERVIEWS 10

Swaggarlicious Manisha Tailor talks about being awarded an MBE, mental health, football and her passion for teaching.

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Manny & Me Jamie Leith and James McCrossen, both former primary school teachers with over 15 years’ experience between them. Jamie share their journey from the classroom to the creation of their educational manny and nanny agency.

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Day at a Medical Centre for Homeless People Alumnus Serdar Arslan shares his experience of working as a healthcare professional at a multi-disciplinary centre that provides primary medical care for homeless people in Westminster.

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Teaching English A Q&A with N.D. Caroline Ambrosi de Magistris Verzier, the Founder and Director of Studies at The English Club.

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Is there life after the IOE? We asked Professor Geoff Whitty what a former director of the Institute does in retirement.

BACK PAGES

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Alumni Publications A list of publications written by our alumni.

How risky is it to be a child?

Dr Sandra Leaton Gray

Credits / Disclaimers Editor Andy Harris Editorial team Sophie Moore Sarah Hearne Illustration Kathrin Jacobsen (cover) Jenny Robins (page 6) Jenny graduated from the UCL Institute of Education with an MA in Art and Design Education in 2015 and works part time as an Art teacher when not working on illustration.

The Office of the Vice Provost (Development) Gower Street London WC1E 6BT +44 (0)20 3108 3833 alumni@ucl.ac.uk www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

Lori Houlihan Vice-Provost lori.houlihan@ucl.ac.uk © UCL. The opinions herein are those of the authors or persons interviewed only and do not necessarily reflect the views of UCL. All content correct at the time of going to press.

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10

Swaggarlicious

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Artificial intellegence in the classroom

Manisha Tailor MBE

Professor Rose Luckin

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Manny & Me

Jamie Leith and James McCrossen

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Day at a Medical Centre for Homeless People Serdar Arslan

Teaching English N.D. Caroline Ambrosi de Magistris Verzier

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INTRODUCTION

Professor Becky Francis It’s now a year since I took up the role of Director at the UCL Institute of Education. It’s been a hugely stimulating time, getting to know colleagues and students, and our alumni around the world, and understanding more about why the Institute has the standing it does internationally. I was delighted that, back in March, the UCL Institute of Education was ranked number one for the fourth year running in the QS World University Rankings.

So, we already have an impressive reputation. But we can never be complacent, and we have a number of initiatives in train to make that reputation even better.

When I arrived at the Institute, one of the first announcements I made was of my intention to invest further in the research and scholarship on educational improvement. Following development work with colleagues from across the Institute, we have formulated plans for two new research centres. These will be significant investments to strengthen delivery and raise the profile of our mission – to improve lives through education.

The first, the Centre for Education Improvement Science will provide a hub for cutting-edge research in relation to global educational system improvement.

There will be two main strands: one on education policy, focusing on institutional and system improvement, and one on neuroscience in education and improvement in learning. It will be interdisciplinary, working across education and the social and behavioural sciences, and we hope that it will draw on existing resources, such as the birth cohort studies, in pursuit of ground-breaking research and impact. The Centre will also serve as a repository of robust and original evidence, and work closely with schools and colleges on knowledge exchange.

The second centre, the Centre for Research on Teachers and Teaching, will support our vision for exceptional, research-led teacher education across all

phases – primary, secondary and postsecondary. It will run large-scale funded research on the teaching profession and teaching, informing our practice in (initial) teacher education as well as the international field, and play a role in supporting teacher education colleagues in their research activity. It will also have a specific information sharing and liaison role in relation to facilitating synergies between our teaching and the research evidence.

In June this year we went out to advert to recruit directors for the Centres and hope to launch them formally in the autumn term 2017/18.

Another initiative for developing the UCL Institute of Education as a place to study and work is our estates masterplan.

This is a major investment in the estate, made possible through the merger with UCL and the release of the IOE’s reserves that this facilitated. Over the next four years our iconic 20 Bedford Way building – our home for the last four decades – will be transformed, with revamped teaching, meeting and office space. These changes will encompass all aspects of the building, starting with our social spaces, which we’re consulting current students on at present.

I hope that as many of our alumni as possible will experience our new space first hand in the years to come. We are planning a new public events programme to tempt more people to visit.

Meanwhile, our successes continue.

In just the last few months there have been a series of large grant awards for our research, among them several prestigious Research Council awards. These include Andrew Burn’s £1m funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to build virtual reality play environments with a leading museum in the UK, the V&A Museum of Childhood; excitingly, this is a collaboration with the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the Bartlett.

Another is the Economic and Social Research Council grant for Eirini Flouri, –2–

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Over the next four years our iconic 20 Bedford Way building – our home for the last four decades – will be transformed, with revamped teaching, meeting and office space.

George Ploubidis, Emily Midouhas and Glyn Lewis on adverse life events and how they impact on emotional and behavioural problems in childhood.

Again, this is a partnership with another part of UCL, this time colleagues in Psychiatry. A final example that I’ll pick out is Rose Luckin’s and Kaska PorayskaPomsta’s British Academy award for an initiative to improve literacy and digital skills among young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, research that will be conducted in collaboration with the University of the Philippines.

In teaching we are delighted to have been selected as the London provider for Teach First’s provision – an initiative that’s seen in many countries around the world, under the ‘Teach First’ or ‘Teach for …’ banner. We have also launched two new undergraduate programmes in Social Science.

The merger with UCL continues to open up many and varied opportunities for the Institute of Education to extend its inter-disciplinary research and teaching and to offer an enhanced experience for our students – especially as we grow our undergraduate provision and open our doors to more of these students. It has been an incredibly exciting time to take the helm as Director. Here’s to the next twelve months.

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NEWS

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IT’S ALL ACADEMIC FESTIVAL

On Saturday 10 June, UCL opened its doors for the first ever It’s All Academic Festival. Attended by over 1,500 members of the public, students, staff and alumni, the day was a huge celebration of all that is great at UCL, with the campus bursting with a host of free indoor and outdoor events run by staff and students.

At the heart of the day was our flagship lecture, Back The Future, a lively discussion which brought together a range of leading academics to explore with the audience how exciting research happening at UCL now will have an impact on what the future will look like for us all. Alongside host Dr Chris Van Tulleken, the panel featured discussions from a number of pioneering academics including Professor Kate Bowers of the Department of Security and Crime Science; Hugh Montgomery, Professor of Intensive Care Medicine and Head of the UCL Centre for Human Health and Performance; Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, John O’Keefe and Dr Zoe Laughlin,

co-founder and director of the UCL Institute of Making and the Materials Library project.

Other highlights of the day included showcases from Global Challenges and Mechanical Engineering, a live performance from Impropera, and a special session from A Pint of Science’s Creative Reactions team. For those who missed the flagship lecture (or those who want to watch it again), it’s now available to view online on our YouTube channel.

It’s All Academic is the global philanthropy and engagement Campaign for UCL and aims to build our community of friends worldwide.

To find out more about the Campaign visit www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign

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THE CENTRE FOR EDUCATION AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT LAUNCH For over 90 years, Scholarship and practice in education and international development has taken place at the Institute of Education for over 90 years.

On June 15th 2017, the newest phase of this work commenced with the launch of the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID).

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GILLIAN ANDERSON RECEIVES HONORARY FELLOWSHIP For over 26 years, the reading recovery programme, which is based at the UCL Institute of Education International Literacy Centre (ILC), has been helping children who struggle to read. At its annual awards ceremony, it celebrated the achievements of pupils and honoured practitioners who have made outstanding contributions to children’s literacy.

Ms Anderson, a champion of both the Reading Recovery programme and the annual Read Aloud campaign, said: “As an activist, I am passionate about promoting equality in this world and literacy is a key to education and access to opportunities.”

Professor Becky Francis said: “As well as being a world-renowned actor, Gillian is an active supporter of many causes that resonate strongly with the IOE’s missions and values. She has been a committed and much valued supporter of the ILC and its work with the Read Aloud campaign to get all children reading. Her passion for supporting young people with their literacy and seeing their confidence grow from that, and her warmth in listening to the children read, has contributed so much to the campaign’s success – and it has

meant a great deal to the teachers and children involved.”

Pie Corbett, the English education writer and poet, presented the award winners with their trophies. Pie has written over 200 books, is well known for promoting creative approaches in the classroom, and has had a great deal of experience as a teacher, head teacher and Ofsted inspector. He said: “It is a real pleasure to support the Reading Recovery Awards. When you are a reader, you defeat wolves, meet talking bears and chase gingerbread men! Reading makes our lives more interesting as we build a magical world inside our heads.

“We know more, we feel more and we live more deeply. I’m so happy to support the work of Reading Recovery and the children who have worked so hard to become readers.”

Over 200 head teachers, teachers and children from schools around the country from North Tyneside to Plymouth attended the event, which was held at the UCL Institute of Education. Guest presenters also included Anne Lyons,

and equalities; peacebuilding and conflict; health and wellbeing; migration; poverty; and gender and women’s empowerment.

Comprising a team of globally recognised experts in development, education, and international educational policy, CEID is the largest community of education and international development scholars, students and alumni in the UK. Through its research, teaching and practice it investigates education and international development with particular foci on the contribution of education to social justice

The CEID launch represented a key event for the Institute. Beginning with an all-day Symposium, the event was attended by over 250 delegates, with more than 40 presentations by academics, as well as speakers from NGOs, government, think tanks and charities, across CEID’s five thematic research areas. Bringing to the fore the importance of intersectoral and collaborative research, the Symposium’s sessions showcased the theoretically engaged, methodologically rigorous and critically reflexive work undertaken at the Centre.

The Symposium was followed by a Keynote lecture given by Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner and Professor of economics and philosophy –5–

President of the National Association of Head teachers.

Other champions of the ILC’s Reading Recovery initiative are footballers Jack Butland and Gareth Bale, Journalist, author, presenter and producer – Janet Street-Porter, Scientist and author – Baroness Susan Greenfield, ViceChancellor of Sheffield Hallam University and former IOE Director - Professor Chris Husbands, Former Bristol MP Charlotte Leslie and speaker and writer on children’s issues – Jean Gross CBE.

at Harvard University. Attended by over 700 guests, and live streamed globally, Professor Sen’s keynote received a standing ovation and concluded with a lively and extended Q & A session with the audience in the Logan Hall.

As a leader in research and teaching excellence in education and international development, CEID is excited to develop its work further, and looks forward to welcoming our partners, students and alumni to future CEID events, including our exciting seminar series, alumni events and annual conference in June 2018.

For more information about CEID please visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe-ceid You can contact the Centre at ceid@ucl.ac.uk and follow us on Twitter @CEID_IOE

Dr Sandra Leaton Gray Senior Lecturer, Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, UCL Institute of Education

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Nobody wants children to be harmed. If we think about news coverage in relation to wars, famine, and even domestic policy, nothing sells a newspaper faster than a picture of a small child with large innocent eyes looking out at us pleadingly from the front page.

children walking unaccompanied. Social geographer Martha Muchow painstakingly mapped out the ersatz improvised playgrounds of children in urban spaces in 1930s Germany, for example. This type of spontaneous, unsupervised play taking place some distance from home has all but ceased to exist in England and America, now that children are constantly monitored.

HOW RISKY IS IT TO BE A CHILD? Dr Sandra Leaton Gray Senior Lecturer, Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, UCL Institute of Education

Human beings are hard-wired to protect their young, and a great deal of our conscious and subconscious thought goes into ensuring children’s safety and care.

Human beings are hard-wired to protect their young, and a great deal of our conscious and subconscious thought goes into ensuring children’s safety and care. We do this at an individual level, and we also do it collectively, through the development of policies and systems designed to promote children’s welfare.

In fact, the Institute of Education has been at the core of this activity internationally for the last century or so, in one way or another.

While we might have been concerned with assessing risk and avoiding danger as a species since the dawn of time, the particular types of risk that bother us have changed over the years. Historically, Western people used to fear children dying of infectious disease, or even worse, dying without being baptized into the Christian church, which they thought would have condemned their children’s souls to hell or purgatory. These are lesser concerns for the modern family, with most parents in Western countries feeling they have a reasonable amount of control over their children’s health and wellbeing.

There has also been a shift in the way people perceive issues such as the risk of –7–

Public health expert Dr William Bird has carried out research for the organisation Natural England, which shows how the distance from home that older children are generally allowed to travel alone has shrunk over the last four generations from around 6 miles to about 300 metres, for example. So whereas great-grandparents at the age of eight might have been able to walk a few miles in a group to find a decent fishing spot on a local river, grandparents might only have been allowed as far as a local park or woods (about a mile), parents as far as a local swimming pool or other organised activity (about half a mile) and today’s children only up to the end of their own road within sight of the family home (around 300 metres), with many longer journeys taking place by car. One of the reasons for this shift is the growth in traffic, and associated dangers on the road, but the other is more illogical, and that’s the fear of molestation, which represents a vanishingly small threat in statistical terms, more rooted in the philosophy ‘I could never forgive myself if …’. So we see that, at a time when it has probably never been safer to be a child, parents are misjudging different types of risk because even though something is

INFOR MAL LEARNING IN MUSIC

unlikely, it represents for them a worst-case personal scenario. In this way, children’s independence is stripped away, and with it, we strip away their ability to learn good judgement.

Mindful of this, researchers Hillman, Adams and Whitelegg published a report in 1988 comparing the attitude of English and German parents to risk between 1922 and 1986, in light of statistical evidence. They found that while the occurrence of road traffic accidents and molestation was largely the same in both countries, English parents were a lot more risk averse when it came to allowing their children out. This tells us that risk can be socially situated rather than being based in fact. It certainly explains why it’s fine for my own children to walk to school in a little group with their cousins in Germany from the age of about 7, whereas if I allowed this in England I could reasonably expect a concerned telephone call from their school. The school would ring me because I would be out of line with local perceptions of risk, regardless of the fact that it might not be very risky at all in a statistical sense, done in the right circumstances.

One thing that fuels this is rolling news: barely a day goes by without a media story somewhere in the world covering apparently alarming topics.

These range from frequent, low risk events such as allergies, food hygiene outrages and cyber-bullying, to infrequent, high risk events including paedophilia-related crime, fires, terrorist attacks and serious adverse weather events. Stanley Cohen describes this tendency to calibrate collective anxiety in this way as a form of moral panic. The ubiquitous nature of modern media amplifies the sense of alarm we feel and, due to this, as a society we become worse at assessing risk.

Since the merger of University College London and the Institute of Education in 2015, I have spent some time working with UCL’s Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, headed by

Professor David Alexander, trying to map out and classify different forms of risk associated with children. In our book Invisibly Blighted: The Digital Erosion of Children (published by UCL IOE Press on 27th March 2017), Professor Andy Phippen from Plymouth University and I have listed a number of examples in modern Anglo-American society where it seems that either people have misjudged risk when it comes to children, or appropriated it as a device to further their own personal or organisational agendas. Three that stand out are the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) with its Green Dot/Full Stop campaign, the introduction of adult to child ratios in public authority swimming pools, and the introduction of routine criminal checks for adults having contact with children. We’ve tracked each of these back to its origins to work out the basis for their introduction, and looked at the impact each has had on wider society.

In the case of the NSPCC campaign, they engaged leading advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi to create advertisements with headlines such as Together we can stop child abuse. FULL STOP. This was very high profile and raised £250m for their cause, allowing them to grow in terms of their market sector. They were publicly criticised for spending half of this on marketing and advertising, and Frank Furedi and others have criticised them for creating a sense of moral panic over an issue when there might be more worthy causes. This is not dissimilar to campaigns run by UNICEF to advocate for children’s rights rather than their previous emphasis on child mortality. The charity had become well known for, amongst other things, keeping a young Audrey Hepburn alive through the provision of food and medical relief after World War II. It was repositioned to focus on children’s rights between 1995 and 2005 by chief executive Carol Bellamy, a former US

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financier and lawyer. In 2004, the medical profession fought back: A preoccupation with rights ignores the fact that children will have no opportunity for development at all unless they survive. The language of rights means little to a child stillborn, an infant dying in pain from pneumonia, or a child desiccated by famine. The most fundamental right of all is the right to survive. Child survival must sit at the core of UNICEF’s advocacy and country work. Currently, and shamefully, it does not.

In this way we see charities trying to achieve a tactical advantage in going about their business by appropriating the concept of risk for their own purposes.

An unintended consequence of this may be additional harm. We next looked at swimming risk, as we had become aware that UK rules for families in public leisure centres had become very strict over the last couple of decades, and we couldn’t understand why, as incidences of drowning in public swimming pools are incredibly rare and this has stayed remarkably consistent over the years.

We started by looking at the rules of the Tandridge Trust, which runs four public leisure centres in Surrey. The extract below is typical of the kind of information parents have to navigate when they are taking their children out for a family swim.

All Gentle Splash and under 8’s sessions have a ratio of 1 adult to 2 children under 4. All children under 4 are required to wear a swim aid unless they are being supervised on a 1:1 basis.

The ratio for 4-7 is 1:3 during these sessions.

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When we unpicked this directive, we found that it was based on a misapplication of guidance from the Institute of Sport and Leisure Management, which was a lot more measured and stated that there should always be flexibility. We then looked at the statistical accident data for swimming in the UK, and found that something very concerning was happening. Instead of taking early managed risks in lifeguardsupervised public pools, young people were taking them alone in their teenage years instead, and this increased the incidences of drowning in places such as lakes and rivers. It was clear to us that far from wrong-footing parents of young children at the reception desks of leisure centres, there was a case for more encouragement to take managed risks early on in life. This should be aimed at helping children learn how to get out of difficult situations by themselves, in a controlled environment. Once again, however, we have an example of an organisation bureaucratising risk, rather than considering whether this approach does long-term harm.

Our final investigation was into Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks, which have taken different forms since being introduced in 2003 in the aftermath of a double child murder and are currently known as a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. Tens of millions of adults have been screened for their suitability to have contact which children and vulnerable adults, a broad definition that can also include pregnant women. This has affected volunteering rates, as contact with children is now considered by some people to be a formalised, largely state-sponsored activity. Men speak about being afraid to come forward to assist children unknown to them in public places, in case they are thought to be potential molestors. The unintended consequence of this large-scale screening programme therefore may have been to make children less safe, as adults feel reluctant to engage with children they don’t know personally. Once again, risk

has been bureaucratised, possibly at the expense of children’s wellbeing.

We learn from all this that there is a particular narrative of risk in the 21st century that is often out of step with the reality of children’s lives. Children have never been safer, in Western Europe at any rate, yet we worry endlessly. Some of our well-intentioned but irrational worries lead to higher risks down the line, for example through increasing obesity rates as a result of increased car journeys, or teenagers drowning in rivers as a result of poor water survival skills. We justify this by telling ourselves that we are looking after our children well. This is not always the case, and if we want our children to thrive, we need to be better at assessing the real risks surrounding them, and letting them have a degree of freedom.

Perhaps then we will have more energy for addressing the problems of children in war zones and famine regions, or those affected by climate catastrophes, who are really the ones at risk.

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One thing that fuels this is rolling news: barely a day goes by without a media story somewhere in the world covering apparently alarming topics.

Sandra Leaton Gray and Andy Phippen Invisibly Blighted: The digital erosion of childhood UCL IOE Press ISBN: 978 1 78277 050 3 Published 27th March 2017

Swaggarlicious

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As the founder of Swaggarlicious, Manisha Tailor MBE combines her passion for education with the power of football, dedicating her skills to engage a diverse range of groups and organisations through a number of footballing initiatives.

With a background in teaching, her work as a UEFA B qualified coach focuses on motivating and empowering women, young people, BAME groups and disability groups, including individuals with mental health issues, through a variety of projects that have earned her a reputation as one of the country’s most dedicated coaches.

An alumna of the Institute’s MA in Leadership, Manisha has experienced numerous personal and professional challenges in the 16 years that have passed between qualifying as an NQT in 2001 and taking up coaching part-time.

In spite of this, Tailor is widely respected throughout the sporting industry and, in recognition of her achievements, in 2017 she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s New Year honours list for her services to football and diversity in sport.

I went into teaching because of my passion for education. When I started to immerse myself in teaching and working with kids, I was then able to use my frustration to be able to empower and impact young people.

Manisha Tailor MBE in her role as a football coach and mental health advocate.

But her road to success hasn’t always been an easy one. At the age of 18, her twin brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia following on from a series of traumatic events and a long-term period of bullying at school. “What we didn’t actually know was that his bullying started in ’96 and went on over a two year period,” she explains. “The bullying was really bad to the point where he was then sectioned and then his diagnosis of schizophrenia came just after ’98. All of a sudden it was the case that he would say to us that he could see people that were not there and he could hear people telling him things, but of course the voices were in his head. It was only later that we found out that he was bullied when he was at school.”

It was an experience that would come to define much of the focus of Manisha’s later work and provided a motivator for

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success in the early years of her time as an NQT. “It a was struggle because, emotionally, it was so hard for me to deal with what was going on at home, but fortunately for me I passed my training and got a 2:1 with QTS. I found that the only way that I could channel my frustration was by doing the work and, because being involved in the teaching element absorbed so much of my time, it became a release.”

Throwing herself into educating the younger generation become Manisha’s get-away from her family’s struggles at home and saw her progress from NQT to head teacher in just under 10 years.

“I went into teaching because of my passion for education, but more so for young people. When I started to immerse myself in teaching and working with kids, I was then able to use my frustration to be able to empower and impact young people. Because I immersed everything into it, I found that as a by-product I was progressing in strategic roles in my career quite quickly.”

Manisha’s passion for teaching saw her work across a range of age groups and demographics including special measure, private and state schools which, crucially, lead to the development of many of the key skills that would later on support her transition into part-time coaching and educational delivery through her organisation. “One thing for me was that I always wanted to work with a diverse demographic,” she explains. And it was through working with such a diverse community that she first realised the potential impact that football could have as a tool for empowering and inspiring young people alongside the standard curriculum. “It started as a way of getting the girls more engaged and then looking at ethnic minority groups that would tend not to see football as being the most traditional sport. It was great, because then as the years went on I was finding myself doing that in all the schools that I worked in and then using that in terms of community cohesion, working with local groups and local governing bodies.”

The Football in Mental Health project I’ve had to carefully plan, and if I’m honest it’s been planned through my own personal experience.

Manisha applied her knowledge of football to both private and state school environments, becoming involved in the Learning Zone at Wembley while working at a state school in Brent, and using it as a tool to help to build closer relationships with the primary and secondary schools during her time spent teaching at a private Hindu faith school.

“It was simple things like setting up football matches with the sixth formers and the teachers, but the teachers from the whole school and not just the secondary school. It was particularly challenging trying to get the girls involved in a Hindu faith school, but what was really good for me was that the more I started to get involved and the more visibility I had, being Asian and female, the more interested the parents were.”

Having always had a strong relationship with football, she attributes her passion to her brother, who she would frequently play with during her early years. “My brother and I are twins and we’ve played football since we were little kids. We played football in primary school and I remember, actually, that there weren’t enough girls to field a whole team so then I became the goal keeper in the mixed team. It was when I went into secondary school that I found myself wanting to play more competitive

football.” In spite of her talent, she speaks of the stigma that was, at the time, attached to young women in the Asian community taking up the sport. “I got scouted at nine and so went for trials at Barnet and got in,” she explains. “It was never going to happen because at that age you need someone to take you to training and so on, and with my Mum, it was a case where she felt worried about how many other Asian girls played football. How would she be perceived, and how would it be perceived in the community if I was playing football?

But what she didn’t mind was me playing in school, because it was attached to a school.”

Sadly, following on from her brother’s diagnosis, Manisha found that the associations between football and their relationship were so strong that she was unable to enjoy playing in his absence. “My brother and I went to different secondary schools and we’d still play in the park. He’d get together with his friends and I’d play with them.

Then, when he became unwell, I detached myself from football for a few years because football reminded me of him and the things that we used to do. I was just so angry that I didn’t want any positive reminders,” she explains. “It was only when I was doing my NQT year, and I actually got into schools and saw

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the kids playing in the playground and I thought – what harm could it do if I just kick the ball around with them?”

Despite an initial instinct to remove herself from the game, as she began to become more immersed in teaching and coaching through her work in education, Manisha realised that football could become a way to emotionally reconnect with her brother. Having not been able to speak and converse as we do for almost 15 years, she recalls, “He started to recognise me in kit, he’d smile and go over to the equipment. He doesn’t really vocalise, but what he did say was “Manisha, football; Manish, football”.

I had had so many conversations with psychiatrists and social workers over the years about finding a trigger and it drew me to thinking that perhaps, if he were to see that regularly, it could help him with his recovery.”

It was this realisation that brought about Manisha’s change of career in 2011 and, ultimately, the formation of her organisation Swaggarlicious Ltd., a venture which enables her to deliver a series of projects encompassing football, education and the local community.

Inspired by her experience with her brother, one of Swaggarlicious’ key priorities is using football as a tool to tackle mental health – a strategy that she

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Manisha receiving her MBE from HRH Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

delivers through her involvement in programmes such as the Wingate and Finchley FC Disabled Fans Forum and the Football in Mental Health project.

“The Football in Mental Health project I’ve had to carefully plan, and if I’m honest it’s been planned through my own personal experience. I don’t claim to be a mental health academic expert, but I like to think that 19 years’ firsthand experience caring for my brother gives me enough credibility to know what would work and how we can engage people.”

Recently, Manisha’s expertise has seen her land a position as a part-time Academy Coach at QPR. “I had met Chris Ramsay three years ago when we were both panellists at St. George’s Park.

I didn’t have my UEFA B then, but what he said to me was that I could always get in touch with him for advice and watching training sessions”. Not feeling like she held the relevant experience to take him up on his offer, she initially declined this opportunity, opting instead to go away and train for her UEFA B. “I knew that there were not many females in academies, and not many ethnic minority females at all. If I’m going to go into that environment, I needed to be good and I needed to be confident and I’m not going to go in there when I don’t have my UEFA B first.”

Having gained her UEFA B and coincidentally meeting Chris again when the pair were both mentoring at Troy Townsend’s Kick Out, Manisha was finally persuaded to go into QPR. “I volunteered for six months – I was literally there at ten in the morning, and I’d leave at nine ‘o clock at night.

I’d watch the under-18 scholars, I’d go into the education room and then I’d go over and have a chat with all the psychologists and people in the department. Three months passed and I found myself doing little bits and pieces, then a further three passed, and in September Chris just said ‘you’re going to be coaching the under nines.’

Through her time at QPR, Manisha has been able to continue to combine the skills that she learnt through her time as a head teacher and apply them effectively within a football-based setting. Speaking of the impact that her professional relationship with Chris has had on this, Manisha explains, “I felt like I was in a bit of a mental block with my coaching and where I was going with it as I was going to be out of contract with Middlesex Girls Centre of Excellence as we were closing, but [Chris] came into my life again at the right time, and he’s most definitely guiding and facilitating my learning.”

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“He said, this is a big school and you have to see this as a big school. You’ve got to see it as these are children – players, but children first. Also that there are different departments, just as you would have had different departments in your school. And that’s all he had to say to me, and then everything made sense.”

Culminating in her recent MBE, Manisha’s work continues to go from strength to strength with projects that have drawn from her own personal experiences and diverse professional background in order to benefit minorities groups across a number of different communities. “The first thing I said to my mum [when I was awarded the MBE] was that it really shows that you can go through adversity and, no matter what hardship you go through, there’s triumph. It is a testament to the heartbreak over my brother’s illness and motivation to want to succeed and wanting to be the best.”

If you want to find out more about Manisha’s work then read more on her website swaggarlicious.com and follow her on twitter @swaggarlicious_

#Artificial

Intelligence in the Classroom {By Professor Rose Luckin}

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LON D IN IAN

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of our everyday lives, when we search the internet, translate text from one language to another, or use a personal assistant like Siri or Alexa. But how is AI relevant to education and what can AI contribute to teaching and learning to help students and educators progress their understanding and knowledge more effectively?

In order to benefit from the potential benefits of AI in the workplace, from personalized cancer treatment specified according to individual genetic profiles generated by AI, to workplace automation that increases productivity, we must attend to the needs of education as a matter of urgency.

To be blunt, none of these potential AI benefits will be achieved at scale unless we address education and AI now.

There are two key dimensions that need to be addressed: 1. How can AI improve education and help us to address some of the big challenges that we face?

2. How do we educate people about AI, so that they can benefit from it?

#

Imagine a classroom or lecture hall setting ten years hence where data about each learner’s movements, speech and facial expressions are automatically logged by passive capture devices within the fabric of the classroom.

AI TO IMPROVE EDUCATION The thoughtful design of AI approaches to educational challenges has the potential to provide significant benefits to educators, learners, parents and managers. However, it must not start with the technology, rather it must start with a thorough exploration of the educational problem to be tackled. A clear specification of the problem provides the basis on which a well-designed solution can be developed.

Only when a solution design exists, can we start to consider what role AI can best play in that solution and what type of AI method, technique or technology should be used within that solution. There is an obvious and important role for teachers in the pursuit of a problem specification and solution design. Without this enterprise, the technologists cannot design effective AI solutions to the key educational challenges recognised across the globe.

Imagine a classroom or lecture hall setting ten years hence where data about each learner’s movements, speech and

facial expressions are automatically logged by passive capture devices within the fabric of the classroom. This information is combined with data about each learner’s performance, recorded by the school’s assessment system, and by data input from teacher, parent and the learner themselves. All this data is used to update the class teacher’s pupil records and to provide data for an AI-based teaching assistant that keeps track of every learner’s progress: cognitive, emotional and metacognitive. The AI teaching assistant relieves the teacher of all record keeping and recording activities and is able to provide up to the minute information about any pupil through a teacher activated speech based interface or through a software application. Teachers can also ask their AI assistant to identify an appropriate tutoring application for a group of students who need particular support with an area of the curriculum. The AI assistant can search for resources or media to meet the teacher’s requirements for the day, or it can identify and contact local entrepreneurs who are willing to come and talk to pupils about future work opportunities or how to be an entrepreneur. The possibilities for the AI

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assistant are vast and encompass all the routine, data intensive, time consuming activities that are essential to the smooth running of the classroom, but that don’t need the expertise of a human teacher. This allows the teacher to focus on the process of teaching and learning, ensuring that all pupils benefit from the unique human skills involved in effective intersubjective teaching and learning interactions.

There exists more than thirty years of research on AI for education, which demonstrates that we can use AI to make teaching more effective and more economical. This can be done by augmenting human teachers with AI systems so that they can concentrate on the teaching activities that require the general and specialist intelligence that AI does not (yet?) have. The outputs from this research are now required to build the AI teaching assistants that schools and universities need, such as that described here. We have the technology know-how, we now need the initiative to make such assistants a reality. This initiative would need to engage educators across the sectors to help ensure that the capabilities of AI assistants address the requirements of their teaching realities.

EDUCATION ABOUT AI There are three key elements that need to be introduced into the curriculum at different stages of education, from early years through to adult education and beyond, if we are to prepare people to gain the greatest benefit from what AI has to offer:

The significant educational implications that AI brings to society, both when AI is viewed as a tool to enhance teaching and learning and when AI is viewed as a subject that must be addressed in the curriculum, make clear that teacher training and teacher CPD must be reviewed and updated in the near future. If teachers are to prepare young people for the new world of work, and if teachers are to prime and excite young people to engage with careers designing and building our future AI ecosystems, then someone must train the teachers and trainers and prepare them for their future workplace and its students’ needs. This is a role for policy makers, in collaboration with the organisations who govern and manage the different teacher development systems and training protocols across countries. If the need for young people to be equipped with a knowledge about AI is urgent, then the need for educators to be similarly equipped is critical and imperative.

On a more positive note, the development of AI teaching assistants will provide an opportunity for developing deeper teaching skills and enriching the teaching profession. This deepening of teacher expertise might be at the subject knowledge level, or it could be concerned with developing the requisite skills to support and nurture collaborative problem solving in our students. It could also result in teachers developing the data science and learning science skills that enable them to gain greater insights from the increasingly available array of data about students’ learning.

AI has the potential to bring about enormous beneficial change in education, but only if we use our Human Intelligence to design the best solutions to the most pressing educational problems.

a. Everyone needs to understand enough about AI to be able to work with AI systems effectively so that AI and Human I (HI) augment each other and we benefit from a symbiotic relationship between the two. For example, people need to understand that AI is as much about the key specification of a particular problem and the careful design of a solution as it is about the selection of particular AI methods and technologies to use as part of that problem’s solution; b. Everyone needs to be involved in a discussion about what AI should and should not be designed to do. Some people need to be trained to tackle the ethics of AI in depth and help decision makers to make appropriate decisions about how AI is going to impact on the world; c. Some people also need to know enough about AI to build the next generation of AI systems that will deliver the potential benefits.

Rose Luckin is Professor of Learner Centred Design at the UCL Knowledge Lab at the UCL Institute of Education and Director of EDUCATE: a London hub for EdTech StartUps, researchers, educators, learners and parents to work together on the development of evidence based EdTech.

Rose’s research involves the design and evaluation of educational technology using theories from the learning sciences and techniques from artificial intelligence.

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LON D IN IAN

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The significant educational implications that AI brings to society . . . make clear that teacher training and teacher CPD must be reviewed and updated in the near future.

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Manny & Me Alumni Entrepreneurs

Founders of Manny & Me, Jamie Leith (left) and James Crossen (right).

London-based start-up, Manny & Me, was launched by Jamie Leith and James McCrossen, both former primary school teachers with over 15 years’ experience between them. Jamie shares their journey from the classroom to the creation of their educational manny and nanny agency.

Where did you meet and how did your business partnership come about?

“James and I met through mutual friends about four years ago. I had just finished my teacher training and James was already in the process of applying to the UCL Institute of Education to do his MA in Primary Education. We had a lot in common and both had some ideas of how we could work together. So, after James returned from Japan in 2015, we got together for a drink and a chat about how we could make it a reality.

“Manny & Me came from that meeting, the initial idea anyway, and from that point we worked evenings and weekends, teaching ourselves how to start a business and formulating what we thought was a business plan.”

What was the impetuous behind creating ‘Manny & Me’ and how did you develop the idea?

“As we both have a background in education and sports it seemed like a good fit. James started work as a male nanny (manny) and saw first-hand how much the children gained from his energy, enthusiasm and ability to combine the role of

pastoral carer and tutor. He was able to be whatever the family wanted him to be, if the children needed skiing coaching he could do it, if they wanted to play tennis he was able to help them improve their game. This led to many other families asking him where they could get ‘someone like him’ and that was where the idea came from - an agency to provide other families with like-minded male and female nannies. For me personally, I was drawn to the idea of encouraging more men into nanny roles. I was brought up by a single mum and through my upbringing and my years as a teacher have been able to see how important a balance of genders is in a child’s development.

“When we had the initial idea to set up the agency, we had no idea what we were doing and it was a very steep learning curve but we were lucky to get help from Virgin Startup.

They assigned us a mentor who has been instrumental in getting us to where we are now. Since we came up with our first concept, the direction of core business has stayed the same offering families well-rounded and multi-talented individuals that can look after children and inspire and engage them, too - what has also happened though, is that we had our business develop in many unexpected directions.”

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LON D IN IAN

Working with children is like no other job in the world.

It is one of the most exhausting, but also the most exhilarating and rewarding.

How has your study at the UCL Institute of Education shaped your career?

What advice would you give to alumni considering starting their own business?

“We both loved our time studying at the Institute, and gained so much from both the environment and the teaching staff. The comprehensiveness of the training we both received has given us a deep and rich knowledge, not just of education but of child-development and childcare as a whole. It’s an incredible place to study and having access to the resources made available to you makes it special. We are both still in touch with the tutors and mentors we had during our studies and this has helped us in many ways throughout our careers in education.”

“If you have an idea for a business and think you want to give it a go, then do it! You don’t know until you try and even if it doesn’t work out you will learn so much on your journey.

The best thing we were told is an obvious one, but in the excitement of a new idea, one that can be forgotten - don’t throw all your eggs into one basket. Neither of us gave up our jobs when starting the business and we both still work part time. This has meant we have a secure income, allowing us to remove the stress from the company, something that can make a new businesses fold early on. It also means we work every day of the week, but we know this won’t be forever.

How do you maintain your passion for education?

“Working with children is like no other job in the world.

It is one of the most exhausting, but also the most exhilarating and rewarding. I came to teaching after pursuing what I thought was my dream job in the Arts. I remember the feeling at the end of my first full week as a qualified teacher and knowing that I had never felt so tired but also so proud, and I knew I wanted more. I think this rush and balance of emotion is what makes education and working with children so amazing. Even now we have both moved away from the classroom, we use the skills we learnt as teachers in everything we do. It has prepared us for anything and ensured that we keep our core value, of creating educational and engaging environments for children to develop, at the centre of our business.

“If you’re thinking of starting a business, in my opinion, I think you need to do it with someone else. James and I working together is perfect. We complement and contrast each other and this has made things so much easier. You need someone to bounce ideas off and someone that can reign things in that aren’t benefitting the immediate plans. Also, it’s nice to have someone you can go for a drink with at the end of a long day.”

If you are looking for advice on starting your own business from established entrepreneurs or want a mentor to help you develop your ideas then join the UCL Alumni Online Community. More than 2,000 experienced alumni have offered their help and you can search the directory to connect with them.

Register now at uclalumnicommunity.org

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image: cgpgrey

A Day at a Medical Centre for Homeless People: A Healthcare Professional’s Perspective

Mother Teresa once said: “...we think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty”.

These remarkable words: “unwanted, unloved and uncared” have been the ethos and driving foundations at Great Chapel Street Medical Centre, a multi-disciplinary centre that provides primary medical care for homeless people in Westminster. The Medical Centre was set-up in the late 1970’s to tackle health inequalities and support the vulnerable, chaotic, stigmatised and socially excluded people that had been ignored and failed by the health system.

A report: “Rough Sleeping Count” by Homeless Link (a charity which focuses on homelessness) conducted in autumn of 2015, found that 3,569 people are estimated to be sleeping rough on any one night. This is an increase of 30% from previous year. Since 2010, rough sleeping has increased an estimated 102%. In London, it is reported that 940 people were sleeping rough. From 2015, this is an increase of 27% from the previous year.

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Westminster has the highest number of people sleeping rough compared to other London boroughs (265). Data from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN) reported that in London the number of people with an identified mental health support need who are sleeping rough has risen from 711 in 2009-10 to 2,528 in 2015-6.

I have been working as a Manager at the Medical Centre for the last 7 years. I have previously worked in legal practice and have experience in psychological assessments and interventions. I work with a range of people from different nationalities, ethnic and social-economic backgrounds. The nature of our working population have changed over the years, we work with long-term rough-sleepers, including social and economic migrants, sex-trafficked, failed asylum-seekers, those fleeing war or persecution, people in

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By Serdar Arslan - Dip (Law) LLB (Hons) Grad Cert (Psych) MSc (Psych) MBPSs

I have witnessed and observed the impact of homelessness and early traumas on physical and psychological well-being. hostels and temporary accommodations, released from prison, or in care or institutions. During our assessments, we are able to establish an extensive and complex co-morbidity of physical (related to liver, HIV and infectious diseases) and mental illness (personality disorder, psychosis and schizophrenia), psychological traumas (chronic depression, mood disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder), long term use of alcohol and substance misuse, forensic and severe social deprivation.

As a Manager, I have witnessed and observed the impact of homelessness and early traumas on physical and psychological well-being. These have ranged from self-harm, overdoses, suicidal ideation and a past history of admissions to psychiatric hospitals and mental health units. It is often the case that homeless people will seek help at a time of crisis and their situation will exacerbated by homelessness, leading to many having difficulty engaging in treatment. Some have experienced a traumatic event that leads to feeling hopeless and being at a breaking-point. These presentations can be challenging for healthcare professionals, requiring a holistic and multidisciplinary approach.

To demonstrate a case, I recently assessed a patient under the supervision of my colleague (a psychiatric nurse). GB presented to our centre with a complex history of mental illness with thoughts of

harming others, feeling anxious and frustrated. His mood was low and he expressed graphic pictures of killing people.

He said: .‘ ....I am depressed, I have no energy and my appetite is reduced, I feel an urge to assault people’. He had thoughts of murdering his parents. His past history revealed that depression had a profound effect on his sleep, causing him to feel less motivated and hopeless. He also had past admissions to psychiatric hospitals and received extensive psychotherapy treatment and oral medication. His psychiatric history revealed drug and alcohol use with paranoid thoughts about people and events. This case had a complex background; I felt that this was a challenging and difficult case to be managed in primary care and that his needs would be better cared for and monitored in a specialist setting. He also had no recourse to public funds and no connection to the local area. Therefore, he had limited access to local services and housing options.

patients. We believe that a consistent response and support-led (with care package) approach to frequent attenders will help us to understand and assess the underlying triggers.

As this case demonstrated, we deal with difficult and complex cases that are better managed in secondary care, with more expertise from specialist services involved in order to meet demands and expectations.

We conducted a brief audit on frequent A/E admissions. The audit reported that almost 90% of our population who attended A/E have a background history of alcohol, drugs and mental health as a contributory factor or main complaint.

We discuss complex cases at our weekly multidisciplinary meetings with external partners and formulate care packages and plans on individual cases. This has been useful in order to maintain close working relations. We have also worked closely with hospitals to reduce A/E admissions. We have introduced a nurse-led outreach service to work and liaise with a number of A/E departments (homeless pathway teams), to manage the frequent attenders from the homeless population, particularly for some of the challenging and difficult

My experience has demonstrated that homelessness is increasing on a daily basis. Primary care services have limited resources to deal with complex cases, especially those that are chaotic, challenging and difficult. A package of care and support needs to be designed, working with partners to assess the needs of vulnerable people and recommend joint physical and psychological interventions (focusing on substance misuse, alcohol, mental health and psychological therapy).

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We continue to encourage homeless people to attend hospital appointments. A peer advocate will support and engage them to attend appointments and cooperate with hospitals investigations and routine follow-ups. This has been successful in reducing cost and resources on the NHS as, generally, homeless people are more likely not to attend hospital appointments.

In light of cost-saving measures being introduced by the government, the NHS is under increasing pressure to cut funds and resources for long A/E admissions. There is no doubt that this will impact the homeless population who attend A/E more frequently than the mainstream population, and who are more complex cases to be treated in hospital beds.

TEACHING ENGLISH A Q&A with N.D. Caroline Ambrosi de Magistris Verzier possible means: these past 13 years running my own school have been thoroughly rewarding and have kept motivating me further - through witnessing the children’s growth – both academically and on a personal level. Academic and social education go hand in hand and together become the most powerful tool and means to equip our society.

N.D. Caroline Ambrosi de Magistris Verzier is the Founder and Director of Studies of the English Club- a language school based in Switzerland that she founded in 2004. Caroline completed her MA TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in 2010.

Q What first attracted you to working in education?

Q

A

A

My family heritage was the main driver in attracting me to education. My family has always taken academic education very seriously (education was not free even back then), the only existing educational system present in West Africa in those days was the British one. This is documented in archives dating as far back as the 1800s in the British Protectorate of the Gambia -which became a Crown Colony in 1888 - where English was one of the national languages.

My great grandmother (1870-1938) had a sound education and ranked top in her Senior Cambridge Exams, the British benchmark testing system, equivalent to present day ‘A’ levels. She in turn gave her children a sound education too, which ever since has been a prime value within our family.

How do you sustain your passion for education?

The opportunity of having an existing educational structure empowers me and is what gives me the enthusiasm to continue pursuing a career in education. Education itself is my motivation as it is my firm belief that starting from the root of any matter is the best way to build a healthy and stable future: an early start is the key here. Giving our children a good education from a very young age will equip them with sound social and civic skills which, together with their academic and technical capabilities, will ensure their healthy, respectful and tolerant growth. As an educator, it is my endeavour to provide children with the best

My grandfather (1897-1977) followed suit passing his Senior Cambridge Exams with flying colours; my mother (1934) and her sister (1929) also ranked high in their Junior and Senior Cambridge School Certificates in the 40s. It is therefore hardly surprising that my own generation, being born in London in the 60s, also pursued our education in the UK from boarding schools to Universities such as University of London, the UCL Institute of Education, Bedford College, SOAS, LSHTM respectively.

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My role as Director of Studies of the English Club school involves choosing and trialling didactic material content; coupled with that, I am the Head Oral Examiner for my school as well as one of the External English Oral Examiners for the Swiss State School Exams equivalent to O levels / GCSE’s. Having been able to acquire first-hand knowledge of our students’ diverse backgrounds, I have concentrated my efforts on encouraging students to approach others and their cultural heritage with respect both in and out of the classroom, helping them develop into model, socially-conscious citizens.

Q

How did your studies at the UCL Institute of Education influence that passion?

A

My studies at the Institute gave me the tools to greatly ameliorate my educational research and work, my teaching philosophy and principles, and equally provided me with the appropriate background to positively interact with my peers and share a blend of personal and academic experiences. All of these greatly contributed to the quality of the courses delivered by my school.

Acknowledging the importance of content in didactic material has been a particularly enlightening moment, one that I still treasure and promote among peers as an invaluable tool for establishing the right cornerstones Responsible and sensible language materials writers are extremely aware of the importance of including subjects such as

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respect and diversity, and include language transfer activities in their books, allowing the adolescents to transcend their own culture and language.

Q

What are your goals for the future?

A

My next main focus will be a project I will be developing together with my children.

We are planning to set up a Foundation aimed at making higher education more accessible in Third World Countries especially for the underprivileged - through a cooperative platform with existing and long standing Academic establishments such as UCL. We are looking at creating a partnership with main universities interested

in extending their candidate base to other countries around the globe.

Q

What advice would you give to recent graduates who want to follow in your footsteps?

develops new ways to spread education.

Education is a means, your extremely valuable tool which nobody can take away.

A

Many of us tend to think about our studies in a linear fashion – limiting our possibilities to one path only, forgetting that the power of education is endless, opening all the doors to numerous possibilities.

Our studies can act as a stepping stone, a platform, launching us into any field of choice or interest. You can be a teacher, as well as an entrepreneur, a leader who

Caroline has volunteered share her professional experience and become a mentor in the UCL Alumni Online Community. Register now to connect with 1000s of experienced professionals all over the world at uclalumnicommunity.org

PUBLICATIONS

ENGAGED LANGUAGE POLICY AND PRACTICES Prem Phyak (MA Teaching of ESOL 2009)

Engaged Language Policy and Practices re-envisions language policy and planning as an engaged approach, drawing on and portraying theoretical and educational equity perspectives. It calls for the right to language policy-making in which all concerned — communities, parents, students, educators, and advocates — collectively imagine new strategies for resisting global neoliberal marginalization of home languages and cultural identities.

This book subsequently emphasizes the means by which engaged dialectic processes can inform and clarify language policy-making decisions that promote equity. In other words, rather than descriptions of outcomes, the authors emphasize the need to detail the means by which local/regional actors resist and transform inequitable policies. These descriptions of processes thereby provide all actors with ideological, pedagogical, and equity policy tools that can inform situated school and community policy-making.

This book, written from the perspective of a designer and educator, brings to the attention of media historians, fellow practitioners and students the innovative practices of leading moving image designers. Moving image design, whether viewed as television and movie title sequences, movie visual effects, animating infographics, branding and advertising, or as an artform, is being increasingly recognised as an important dynamic part of contemporary culture. For many practitioners this has been long overdue. Central to these designers’ practice is the hydridisation of digital and heritage methods.

HYBRID PRACTICES IN MOVING IMAGE DESIGN: METHODS OF HERITAGE AND DIGITAL PRODUCTION IN MOTION GRAPHICS Paul Shrimpton (MA Teaching of ESOL 2002, PhD Education 2012)

The ‘Making of Men’ is an original study of the educational work of John Henry Newman, first in reforming Oxford University, then as founder and first rector of the Catholic University in Dublin – now known as UCD. It is the story not so much of the thinker as the doer, of a brilliant mind turning an improbable dream into a bricks-and-mortar reality. This study illustrates the pastoral idea of an academic university by one of the great Christian humanists, and from it emerges an inspiring vision of what education should strive to accomplish, a vision which challenges the modern university to be true to itself.

The Right to Education and Schooling explores critical thinking around the Right to Education Act (RTE) in India in its different facets ranging from its historical antecedents to contemporary times. The various provisions of the Act have been discussed, apart from its implementation and the challenges faced. The book draws from a range of empirical studies which will help in improving good practice among practitioners and researchers.

RIGHT TO EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING Deepa Idnani (Affiliate Research 2016)

Using interviews with world-leading motion graphic designers, Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisors and moving image artists this book examines hybrid moving image that re-invigorate heritage practices, the handmade and the analogue crafts. Now is the time to ensure that heritage skills do not atrophy, but that their qualities and provenance are understood as potent components with digital practices in new hybrids.

THE ‘MAKING OF MEN’: THE IDEA AND REALITY OF NEWMAN’S UNIVERSITY IN OXFORD AND DUBLIN Paul Shrimpton (PhD History of Education 2000)

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When I retired, I told people I was going to sleep for a week and then decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

STAFF PROFILE

GEOFF WHITTY Is there life after the IOE? Professor Geoff Whitty became Director of the Institute of Education in September 2000. He retired in December 2010 after ten successful years and he is widely credited with taking the Institute to new heights in terms of its local, national and international standing. We asked him what an Institute Director did in retirement.

When I retired, I told people I was going to sleep for a week and then decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

It didn’t quite work out like that, partly because of illness, but I have managed to do a number of interesting things over the six years since I stepped down from the Director’s role.

Some of my predecessors have stayed on as professors after standing down as Director, while others have cut ties completely. I guess you could say I took a middle way. I was pleased to be given the title Director Emeritus and a desk away from the main site, but I tried to keep out of the hair of my immediate successor as far as possible. I did not even enter the Bedford Way building for nearly a year after my retirement and then only for a social function.

Instead, I worked on a part-time basis at Bath University and Bath Spa Universities in the UK, Bath being my home. Much of the work I did there was similar to what I might have done had I stayed on at the Institute. At Bath I lectured and carried out research on higher education policy and management and at Bath Spa I have helped colleagues with a research project on different modes of teacher education.

I have also been working in Australia, China and the USA. In Australia I have held a part-time Global Innovation Chair in Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, which has

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been among the most successful of the 1960s universities in Australia. Rather like Bath University in the UK, it has challenged the longer established universities in important fields of research. Unlike Bath, though, Newcastle also has a reputation as an inclusive university, taking around 25% of its students from low SES backgrounds compared with only 8% in the Group of 8 (Russell Group equivalent) universities, as well as having among the highest number of students from indigenous communities.

So, given that we are so often told in the UK and USA that research intensive universities can’t also be inclusive, I could not resist the invitation to help Newcastle set up a Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE).

This has been one of the most stimulating experiences of my professional life. CEEHE combines research and practice in unusual ways; it both runs outreach programmes to attract under-represented groups into higher education and conducts research on the best ways ensuring they have successful careers at university and beyond. The new Centre is now up and running and led by a former IOE colleague, Professor Penny Jane Burke. Its work has attracted significant funding from the Federal Government and is receiving increasing attention from other universities in Australia and beyond. I am sharing ideas with colleagues here at UCL while I am in England.

The work I have undertaken in China has also been stimulating – and challenging.

While I was Director I visited China every year but, apart from short visits to Jiangsi and Gansu provinces, I was mainly working with colleagues from the Han-dominated east coast. This is China as most of us know it. In retirement, I have had the rarer privilege of visiting the far west of China, which has distinctly different characteristics.

I have found myself involved in debates about the place of the mainly Muslim Urghur people in the education system of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region and have written about this with help from a Chinese doctoral student at the IOE. While Urghur students and faculty welcomed what we had to say, some of my Han friends are now a bit wary of me in a context where political dissent is increasingly frowned upon. Yet, while China struggles to develop an inclusive concept of ‘Chineseness’, the UK itself struggles to define what might be meant by ‘Britishness’, so we have much to learn from each other if only we will listen.

I am now back at IOE most of the time and it reminds me just how wonderful it has been to study and work here at various stages of my life from 1968 onwards. I am most grateful to Professor Becky Francis for the warm welcome she has given me on my return to the Bedford Way campus.

One of the most important things I am doing at the moment is recalling my time as Director of the Institute for Tom Woodin who is updating Richard Aldrich’s centenary history of IOE to include the years 2002 to 2014. I am sure this will be a fitting record of IOE’s past achievements as it seeks to build upon them in a new context as the UCL Institute of Education.

Geoff Whitty is Director Emeritus of the UCL Institute of Education. He was awarded a CBE for services to teacher education in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2011 and an Honorary Fellowship of UCL in September 2016. His most recent books are Research and Policy in Education: Evidence, Ideology and Impact (UCL IOE Press, 2016) and (with John Furlong) Knowledge and the Study of Education: an international exploration (Symposium Books, 2017).

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I remember the feeling at the end of my first full week as a qualified teacher and knowing that I had never felt so tired but also so proud, and I knew I wanted more. I think this rush and balance of emotion is what makes education and working with children so amazing.

Jamie Leith Co-founder and Director of Manny & Me