Your Views

Dons' pathetic pay

There is a clear link between Lucy Hodges' article about the remuneration of external examiners ("Dons who are paid a pittance", EDUCATION, 29 April) and the letter from Dr Brian Anderson ("The Prof must look deeper", same issue) about the decline in collegiality in British higher education as a result of Government policies over the past 10 to 15 years.

External examiners are one of the last relics of that collegiality. The system's attachment to them is shown by the willingness of academic staff to serve as external examiners and moderators in spite of the remuneration.

However, a new system is about to be introduced by the Quality Assurance Agency. Academic reviewers will have the job of making judgements and reporting to the agency on the academic standards achieved at subject and programme level within institutions. Given that they will also be funded by the institutions, through their compulsory subscription to QAA, perhaps it is time to bow to the inevitable and accept that it is the agency, through its academic reviewers, which will validate institutions' academic standards in future.

Dr ROGER BROWN

Principal

Southampton Institute

External examiners certainly are underpaid. There are two reasons for this. First, their method of appointment: typically, people are approached by fellow academics who know them, or know of them, in a professional context. The approach emphasises collegiality, or flatters the vanity of younger externals. Money is not mentioned, as academics don't handle pay issues. Only after the external has effectively accepted does the university's administration make its niggardly pay offer and lays out conditions of appointment.

This is wrong. It encourages croneyism (with adverse consequences for academic standards) and divorces pay from responsibility. It would be far more professional to advertise openly for externals with a clear job specification and pay scale. This openness would drive up pay and standards.

Second, pay is set anti-competitively. Registrar of University A rings counterparts at Universities B and C and they all agree a rate. Registrar A reports back to the academics that pounds X is the going rate. This sort of practice in the commercial sector might fall foul of the 1998 Competition Act. Perhaps somebody ought to challenge it on that basis.

J R SHACKLETON

Head, Westminster Business School

It is interesting that you printed your report on the miserable wages for external examiners in the same issue as an article on widening access to Oxford and Cambridge.

In the late 1980s, I was paid pounds 12 as external assessor for some human resource management papers for finalists of the engineering department at the University of Cambridge. For this sum, I was expected to work for two days and read a hundred examination papers and then discuss them. The main task overseer was a female member of the engineering department.

JACK EATON

School of Management and Business

University of Wales Aberystwyth

All friends together

Dr Helen Mathers (Your Views, EDUCATION, 15 April) raises the issue of the Open University's relationship with the University for Industry (UfI) project. I am pleased to reassure her that the Open University has played a large part in informing and supporting the development of the UfI initiative. I am myself a member of the UfI board.

UfI promises to bring greater integration of effort and better opportunities for access to education and training for those who are not now well served. It is essentially a networking approach which will need the goodwill of all to succeed. The Open University has benefited greatly from the strength of its own national and international networks, most particularly the many thousands of associate lecturers who are in close contact with students and who feel a passion for their task. I hope that Dr Mathers will see the UfI as a further step in the task of making education and training open to people that the OU has pursued with signal success for 30 years.

Sir JOHN DANIEL

Vice-Chancellor

Open University

English A-level should change

Robert Eaglestone ("English Canon Fodder", EDUCATION, 22 April) is absolutely right to suggest that it is high time we changed the way English is taught at A-level. His article is also opportune; at this very moment the finishing touches are being put to new A-level syllabuses ready for 2001/2002.

He must also understand, though, just how privileged academics are. No government would dare to tell a university department what its students should read, but politicians have no such inhibitions when it comes to the reading curriculum in schools and its assessment.

While desperately hoping that the revised syllabuses will move in new and progressive directions, I am also aware that even more of the canon has, by order, to be incorporated into them. Mr Eaglestone and his colleagues at Royal Holloway wouldn't stand for such interference. We have no choice.

ADRIAN BEARD

Gosforth High School

Newcastle upon Tyne

Brown knows his history

As someone who was present at the inaugural lecture of the director of the Institute of Historical Research, David Cannadine, I can confirm that it was a tour de force. An unanswerable case was made for strengthening the academic quality of research against the Gradgrindism of the research assessment exercise, and for funding to make sure that places like the IHR can truly become world centres of excellence.

Sadly, I fear that Professor Cannadine was rather too diplomatic to mention that while these aims are essential, it is going to be a hard slog to make progress on them with a government that is so obsessed with modernisation that it has forgotten the little it ever knew about history.

Professor Cannadine pointed out, correctly, that the Chancellor Gordon Brown is a history Phd. It would be hard to tell from his Commons performances, although I suppose it may explain his rather low profile during the present Balkans conflict.

KEITH FLETT

Tottenham, London

Stop knocking the US!

I am writing in response to the article "Tragedy of the Stepford Children" (EDUCATION, 8 April). Like its author, Anne Marie Sapsted, I am English and living with my family in a suburb just outside Washington DC.

I am saddened by her portrayal of the American system and the way she has taken several unfortunate incidents and presented them as the general trend. It is a gross exaggeration to imply that all American children living in these affluent areas are under constant parental pressure and live in fear of failure.

A reader of Ms Sapsted's article would probably think children are committing suicide all the time, everywhere. While not wanting to belittle this serious issue, this is terribly misleading. Increases in the rate of teenage suicides is a world-wide phenomenon.

In fact, I know that the overall rate of suicide in the US, while higher than that of Britain, is lower than the vast majority of countries including most of Europe and Japan.

With regard to parental pressure, I can say from experience in London that this is also a worldwide phenomenon. Plenty of parents in the UK push their children to succeed academically.

PHILIPPA WELLBORN

Potomac, Maryland, USA.

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