- The Guardian,
- Tuesday May 13 2008
The Courtault Institute, based at Somerset House in London, is one of several small institutions high up the subject rankings. Photograph: Graham Turner
Who has gone up or down? In the ferociously competitive world of higher education, today's Guardian university rankings are bound to get a lot of attention. But the striking thing about this table is how little separates so many institutions. There is not a lot between Oxford and Cambridge at the top, and eight universities are crammed into three points separating Loughborough at number 10 and Durham at 17. These are obviously all very good universities. Imperial may have gone down three places and the London School of Economics risen three places, but one doesn't imagine either will lose any sleep over it.
The point is that they are good at different things. Even in the subject tables - the real core of the Guardian guide - where more direct comparisons are possible, there is great variation in the type and style of course.
The same goes for the small specialist institutions that we list for the first time in a separate table. In a sense, it's impossible to make a direct comparison between, say, the Courtauld Institute and the music conservatoires that cluster at the top of the specialist table. We are suggesting you can get a good education there. Guild HE, which represents some of these "minnows", argued strongly to the recent inquiry into league tables commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) that they were in danger of becoming invisible to potential students. So here they are.
The subject tables also point to the many excellent departments in universities further down the traditional pecking order that are also in danger of becoming invisible to students when they come to choosing degree courses. Thames Valley University and Plymouth-based Marjon (the College of St Mark and St John) are both in the top 10 for nursing, for instance. The small, locally focused mechanical engineering course at Teesside tops that table, ahead of mighty Imperial. That's not to suggest Teesside is a better university than Imperial, just that it does what it does rather well.
Donald MacLeod
Agriculture at Reading
Degrees in agriculture are staging a comeback after the dark days of the 1980s, the head of the country's top-ranking university agriculture department says.
Professor Richard Ellis is head of Reading's agriculture department, which today tops the Guardian University Guide's table in agriculture and forestry.
He says images of grain mountains in the mid-80s did no favours for recruitment to agriculture degrees. "I think potential students thought food production was sorted when the opposite was true," Ellis says. "In fact, we have a hell of a challenge on our hands. By 2040, optimistic forecasts say there will be 8.5 billion people on the planet, pessimistic ones say 10.5 billion."
And that's where agriculture graduates come in. Many more are needed to work as agricultural scientists or in agri-science business - working in crop protection and food testing, among other areas.
Recruitment to Reading's agriculture-related undergraduate courses is good, with 80 to 100 students starting per year. Ellis is pleased, but wants more to be done to attract urban teenagers who are not from farming backgrounds to the courses.
He says 30 years ago over half of all agriculture students at universities were not from farming backgrounds. Now more than half are. "We need to go back to how it was before," he says. "I suspect their teachers don't know about agriculture degrees."
Reading's agriculture degrees are particularly broad, with elements of natural science, economics, management, human resources and marketing. The courses have become more business-focused in recent years.
The Guardian University Guide judges courses on teaching quality and feedback from graduates, spending per student, staffing levels, job prospects and degree results compared with entry qualifications.
"I am delighted that our high-quality teaching and learning and the efforts of our staff and students have been noted," says Ellis.
Jessica Shepherd
Mechanical engineering at Teesside
Prejudice can be hard to shift. But with time, effort and a lot of know-how, it can be done. Last year, the University of Teesside came second in the mechanical engineering league table. This year the university has gone one better, but anyone surprised to find a university outside the Russell Group heading the rankings hasn't spent much time in the north-east, as Dr Paul Shelton, project tutor and assistant dean (education partnerships and opportunities) in the University of Teesside's school of science and technology explains.
"Our course meets the specific needs of the local engineering supply chain companies, many of whom support the process industries in the Tees Valley and the wider north-east region," he says. "But we also attract a number of sponsored overseas students from areas of the world such as the Gulf states.
"Much of the project work within the course is industry-based or aimed at solving real industry problems, and this is a major attraction, as is the fact that virtually all our graduates go on to have successful careers in the industry. And I would also pay tribute to a tremendous group of students, who are inspired and determined to make an impact in the engineering world."
Paul Booth, president of Sabic UK Petrochemicals, which has just taken over a large chunk of ICI, is happy to give Tessside his endorsement. "The university has worked hard with the processsing industry to improve the links between us through the establishment of boards dedicated to listening to the requirements of both business and the local community," Booth says.
Not that anyone at Teesside is taking anything for granted. Sure it's great to have their achievements acknowledged but, in some ways, getting to the top has been the easy part. The next challenge is to stay there.
John Crace
Anatomy at Cardiff
The word "anatomy" may bring to mind a 19th-century scene involving dissecting dead bodies and perhaps the grim ghosts of graverobbers Burke and Hare. But the subject has moved on and death is no longer a prerequisite.
Modern, cutting-edge anatomy as it is studied at Cardiff University involves looking at the way the brain lights up in response to thought patterns. This is called neuroanatomy.
Another new aspect of the subject is embryology - linking in to the work of Sir Martin Evans, who brought a Nobel prize to Cardiff last year.
But tradition - including the art of dissecting a human body or cadaver - is still a core part of this branch of medicine.
Professor Bernard Moxham, who runs the department and is one of the UK's foremost practitioners, attributes the success of the course to "a good mixture of traditional and modern. That is very popular with the students. We also have very good staff."
He says he is "delighted" to be named second in the subject. "But why not first?" However, he says that he and colleagues at Oxford University, which came first, are working in a similar way to bring anatomy into the 21st century without losing the skills of the past.
Moxham has worked hard to defend a subject that some have seen as being in danger of decline. There are fewer hours devoted to dissection on medical degrees than in the past, and a culture that is less comfortable with gritty reality has seen dissecting rooms close for reasons of health and safety. Some argued that it was too stressful for students to dissect the dead and there has been a shortage of bodies bequeathed to them.
In the 90s, the number of anatomy departments in the UK was in decline and it threatened to be swallowed up by "integrated courses".
But Moxham and Cardiff have put their faith in anatomy as a separate subject with a bright future. In a research paper published in the European Journal of Anatomy last year, Moxham concluded that medical students still consider anatomy "very important" to the study of clinical medicine both for developing skills and for understanding, and that they would prefer it to be taught practically via dissection rather than theoretically. Medical educationalists needed to ensure that
it survived, he concluded, as a "significant and important" stand-alone subject.
Jackie Kemp
History at the Courtauld Institute
The Courtauld Institute of Art - where just 165 undergraduates study each year - has come second to Oxford University in the Guardian University Guide's rankings of history departments, published today.
The influential institute, which just teaches history of art to its undergraduates and postgraduates, came top of our history and history of art table last year.
Professor David Solkin, the Courtauld's dean and deputy director, says students are made to feel part of a small intellectual community on their first day. Undergraduates are never taught in groups of more than 10 and are always led by senior teachers who are mostly world leaders in their fields.
"Our students feel part of a very high-powered academic cohort. They are given access to a community of academics through very intimate ways of teaching," Solkin says.
The Courtauld wants to improve the diversity of its student population, though. History of art continues to be considered exclusive and elitist. "But we believe it is for everyone," Solkin says. It is for this reason that the institute is trying to increase the numbers of its "non-traditional students".
"We have traditionally drawn our students from those who have been taken to museums as children," Solkin says. "They have come from traditional backgrounds for higher education and tend to be mainly female. We want to have a more heterogeneous student body. In the coming years, our main change is to focus on widening participation."
Jessica Shepherd
Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama boasts a good hand of famous alumni, from the composer James MacMillan to the Celtic fusion artist Martyn Bennett. Ex-students are in many of the world's famous orchestras, including Fergus McWilliams in the Berlin Philharmonic and Rob Roy McGregor in the Los Angeles Phil.
The principal, John Wallace, is "overjoyed" at the news that RSAMD has made the top of Education Guardian's table. "Britain needs to be able to compete internationally and I think we are doing that," he says. "But there is some very tough competition out there from China and the US and Europe."
Next year, the RSAMD will be the first conservatoire in Britain to add dance to its programme, with new degrees in modern ballet and music theatre, in collaboration with Scottish Ballet and the Dance School of Scotland. In 2009, Blue Note jazz artist Tommy Smith will lead a new jazz degree.
Wallace says: "We have not re-invented the wheel. We have dedicated teachers putting in the hours with the students. The students are talented and committed. I think the chain has not been broken in Scotland. We have a lot of children coming through from early-years music education and we never lost instrumental teachers in the 90s as they did in England. The number of Scots being accepted to conservatoires and music degrees in Britain is higher than London and the south-east put together."
He also puts the success down to "a real buzz" in music in Glasgow and in Scotland generally. Glasgow has three well known classical music orchestras, which perform regularly in the city, and the highly regarded composer Donald Runnicles is returning from the US to conduct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2009.
"A lot of people think the conservatoires in London must be better because they are more expensive and because London must be where it is all happening, but there is a real boom in all kinds of music in Glasgow at the moment."
The RSAMD has been in the news recently due to a funding row. It gets £12,000 per head from the government for music students but only £7,000 for drama students. A recent plan to save £600,000 by offering voluntary redundancy and merging brass and woodwind caused protests. Wallace says the aim of this was to enable the college to implement the new pay agreement. The financial problem at RSAMD was, in part, initiated by the signing of a pay award for lecturers in the UK in 2006 worth 13.1% over three years.
Another reason for the move is to substantially raise pay rates for part-time teachers from professional practice. "This is not a crisis. I am trying to make changes so that I can manage the budget the best way I can," says Wallace.
Jackie Kemp
