Tag Archives: north staffordshire polytechnic

Thursday 10th June 2010 – Look what I’m having for tea!

home grown strawberries les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, strawberries. The first of the year, and all grown with my own fair hands too in my own garden.

Unfortunately there aren’t not all that many. It looks as if the local wildlife has been helping itself to them but nevertheless there were five left, and these, together with some soya cream, is a sure sign that summer is here at last.

Or is it?

rain fall in wheelbarrow les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt was raining again this morning and although it stopped for several hours, at about 18:00 it started up again in earnest and it’s still chucking it down now.

A quick look inside the wheelbarrow will tell you everything that you need to know about the amount of rainfall that we’ve had this last couple of days. Remember that this was empty just a couple of days ago when we were shovelling all of these stones around.

Liz came round this morning with my beans and vegan cheese and that’s good news. There are also some tins of curry and so it’s back to my Saturday night ritual again. We had quite a chat and it was a shame that she had to go.

And after that I carried on with the tidying up outside. Now that I have a hardstanding (or a wetstanding, or a notwithstanding) I’m moving over there everything that was propped up against the side of the barn. In a couple of weeks we’ll be putting up a scaffolding against the barn in order to do the barn roof, and I’ve been waiting years to do this. For many reasons actually – not the least being that I can finally move the solar panels off the roof of the Luton transit and onto the wall of the barn.

I’m tidying up a few other things too so I’m clearly not well. And when it clouded over at about 17:50 I called it a day and came up here. In fact I crashed out for half an hour.

In other news, I see that the new Conservative Government is planning to remodel University education. The Minister has considered several University models, including major part-time suppliers, ans has decided to try to remodel things on the lines of that well-known supplier of distance education, the … errrr … University of London.

As I said a few years ago when they set up a committee to consider part-time degree education and it consisted of staff from that other well-known supplier of distance education the … errrr … North Staffordshire University, the days of the Open University having any kind of significance and playing any kind of major role in shaping Government policy, these are long-gone. The OU has lost its relevance and has received yet another kick in the teeth.

Increasing prices and tuition fees brought an angry response from the National Union of Students. But of course they are a small-minded militant body made up of kids still wet behind the ears. So where was the response from the Open University Students’ Association – that body of 180,000 grown-up and mature students? The answer is of course “nowhere”. Either no-one considered the OUSA to have any relevance (which is a damning indictment of OUSA) or else whatever OUSA did say was considered to be not worth reporting (which is a damning indictment of OUSA).

It seems that OUSA has outlived its relevance too. But we all knew that, and a long time ago. A couple of years ago when the Labour government considered the idea of increasing costs and reducing subsidies, the response of that grown-up and august body of mature students was to … errr … sign a petition! I mean! We did things like that in Primary School when we were 10 and 11. Was that really the best that OUSA could come up with?

I once worked in a multinational multi-government organisation and we used to receive petitions from all kinds of people in all walks of life, on a regular basis. And do you know what we did with the petitions that we received? Well, we never bought any toilet paper, that’s for sure. That’s how petitions are treated in organisations such as that.

And the strawberries were delicious!

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Sunday 27th September 2009 – SO WHERE DID I GO TODAY THEN?

In fact, events resolved themselves, as they usually do if you let them.

Today being Sunday, I didn’t set any alarm and slowly came to in a kind of leisurely fashion putting this weeks’s plans into some kind of shape.

After a while and having the urge to go for a Gipsy’s, I crawled out of bed to notice the time – 12:24 pm. That put paid to any plans I might have had to go out anywhere. It’s been a couple of times that I’ve done this just recently. It gives you an idea of how hard I’ve been working during the week, even if it doesn’t look much like it.

A leisurely breakfast followed by some generally inactive kind of tidying up in the verandah and in my room and that was that, effectively. I haven’t done anything else.

In other news, the Confederation of British Industries, desperately in need of some brownie points and trying hard to ingratiate itself with Gordon Clown’s government, has leapt onto the bandwagon of demanding higher tuition fees and cutting back on student support.

It’s the Leitch Report all over again.

“At a time of economic crisis, when many hard-working families are struggling to support their offspring through university, I am astonished that the CBI should be making such offensive recommendations,” said NUS president, Wes Streeting – the NUS being for the most part a bunch of naive wet-behind-the-ears adolescents.

So, where’s the quote from the OUSA President?

OUSA is (so we are led to believe) a bunch of 200,000 or so distinguished grown-ups actively pursuing academic excellence in their own time at their own pace? Could it be that the BBC forgot all about the existence of OUSA? Or was it that the President had nothing to say on the subject? Or was it that whatever the OUSA President had to say wasn’t worth quoting?

Whichever way you look at it, it just shows how inconsequential OUSA has become under the “leadership” of the last few years. No concept of a sense of history, no sense of grasping the important moment, no sense of pushing themselves and their ideas into the limelight.

When the ideas of the Leitch Report were first sprung onto the unsuspecting masses (I say “unsuspecting masses” because there were a couple of us who had seen the Leitch Report mentioned in a paper of February 2007 and tried our best, but in vain, to urge the remainder to take it seriously) do you know what the clowns did?

They organised a petition.

We did things like that in primary school. I worked for 12 years or so in a major multinational organisation, the largest of its kind in the world, and I can tell you what happens to petitions because we used to get thousands from all over Europe. What happened to the petitions was that the organisations’s budget for toilet paper was zero.

During the review of the Leitch Report, the British Government set up a committee to look into its effects on part-time Higher Education. The Open University is the largest supplier, by a country mile, of part-time Higher education in the UK, if not the world and has the most students of any educational establishment in the UK. So which University was asked to send a delegate to sit on the committee?

You’ve guessed it. Those well-known suppliers of part-time Higher Education, the … er … Staffordshire University, or North Staffs Poly as it used to be called when I studied Accountancy there in the 1970s.

At an Open University committee meeting, I asked if this appointment was a slap in the face for the Open University. I was told “no – you can’t expect the OU to sit on everything that involves part-time Higher Education”.
So I asked “why not? It’s larger than all the other suppliers combined” and “what other equivalent committees are there in existence currently that the OU sits on?”
And no-one was able to give me a reply.

But that’s where the OU and OUSA sit right now – treated with total contempt by Government and the major British press. And having met personally many representatives of those two organisations, I have to say that I am not in the least surprised.

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