In England, 14% of secondary school pupils – that’s about 400,000 – speak a language other than English as their first language. In English primary schools, one in six children don’t have English as a first language. Together this amounts to about 1 million children throughout the school system.

The Cambridge Bilingualism Network was set up in 2010 by Cambridge researchers to promote the public understanding of bilingualism through their work with schools and communities.

This short film was made as part of their activities. It features a group of multilingual students who describe the advantages of speaking more than one language and of having a qualification to show for it. This is a view shared in the film by Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, who was born in Wales to Polish parents.

"Research shows that children who speak more than one language have a considerable advantage over their monolingual playmates when it comes to communication, understanding and social interaction," explained Dr Dora Alexopoulou, researcher at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. "However, what we are finding is that it’s very common that kids don’t learn to read and write their language and therefore their linguistic skills do not develop fully. They kind of stall at some point and that puts a serious limitation on the range of situations in which they can use their languages."

Although many schools provide the support needed for students to take a formal qualification, the results of school census data suggest that only around half of pupils take a GCSE in their mother tongue. For some languages, including those in the 20 most common languages in the UK like Somali, Lithuanian and Filipino, there is currently no GCSE qualification on offer.

When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

The illusion, so-named after it was spotted on the wall of a Bristol café in the 1970s, is a much-debated geometrical trick of the eye and brain in which perfectly parallel lines of black and white tiles appear wedge-shaped and sloped.

It’s also an excellent demonstration of how the brain interprets the world in a way that moves beyond what the input is from the eye, as one of the experimental psychologists, Professor Zoe Kourtzi, explained. “In interpreting the world around us, our brains are challenged by a plethora of information. The brain is thought to integrate information from multiple sources and solve the puzzle of perception by taking into account not only the signals registered by the sensory organs but also their context in space and time.

“In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation.”

From the day we are born, neurons in the brain start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Neuroscientists refer to the brain’s ‘plasticity’ in explaining this ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions.

To unravel the mechanisms that underlie how brains learn, Kourtzi’s team is looking at how brains recognise objects in a cluttered scene. “This aspect is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments,” she explained. “It’s how we recognise a face in a crowd or a landmark during navigation.”

Visual perception is also highly trainable. The brain can use previous experience of similar cues to be quicker at identifying the image from the ‘noise’ – the proverbial needle from the haystack.

But although neuroscientists recognise that this type of brain plasticity is fundamental to our ability to cope with continually changing settings at home, school, work and play, little is known about how we can stimulate our brain to enhance this learning process, right across the life span.

“The process of ‘learning to learn’ is at the core of flexible human behaviours,” explained Kourtzi. “It underpins how children acquire literacy and numeracy, and how adults develop work-related skills later in life.”

One of the important determinants her team has discovered is that being able to multi-task is better than being able to memorise.

“The faster learners are those who can attend to multiple things at the same time and recruit areas of the brain that are involved in attention,” she explained. “Those who are slower at learning try to memorise, as we can see from greater activity in the parts of the brain connected with memory.”

“So, in fact, being able to do the sort of multi-tasking required when interacting in busy environments or playing video games – which requires the processing of multiple streams of information – can improve your ability to learn.”

She also finds that age doesn’t matter: “what seems to matter is your strategy in life – so if older people have really good attentive abilities they can learn as fast as younger people.”

This has important implications for an ageing society. In the UK, there are now more people over State Pension age than there are children. The UK’s Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2020, people over 50 will make up almost a third of the workforce and almost half of the adult population. The average life expectancy for a man in the UK will have risen from 65 years in 1951 to 91 years by 2050. Older age has become an increasingly active phase of people’s lives, one in which re-training and cognitive resilience is increasingly sought after.

Kourtzi and colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect when areas of the brain are activated in response to a sensory input and how these circuits change with learning and experience. While at the University of Birmingham, she showed that the visual recognition abilities of young and older adults can be enhanced by training, but that the different age groups use different neural circuits to do this.

Young adults use anterior brain centres that are often used in perceptual decisions, where sensory information is evaluated for a decision to be made; older adults, by contrast, use the posterior part of the brain, which is in charge of the ability to attend and select a target from irrelevant clutter. “The clear implication of this is that training programmes need to be geared for age,” said Kourtzi.

Crucially, what she also observed is that some people benefit from training more than others: “although it’s well known that practice makes perfect, some people are better at learning and may benefit more from particular interventions than others. But to determine how and why, we need to go beyond biological factors, like cognition or genetics, to look at social factors: what is it about the way a particular individual has learned to approach learning in their social setting that might affect their ability to learn?”

This multidisciplinary approach to understanding learning lies at the heart of her work. She leads the European-Union-funded Adaptive Brain Computations project, which brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists across eight European universities, plus industrial partners, to understand and test how learning happens.

“In our work, there’s a strong element of translating our findings into practical applications, so creating training programmes that are age appropriate is our ultimate goal,” she added.

“The reason we like the Café Wall Illusion so much is because tricks of visual perception tell us that the brain can see things in a different way to the input. How the brain does this is influenced by context, just as the way we interpret our environment is influenced by learning and previous experience.”

Inset image: Café Wall Illusion, Tony Kerr on Flickr

In total, Cambridge Digital Library (http://bit.ly/1y7q4e1) is releasing more than 12,000 hi-res images, alongside transcriptions and detailed notes as a result of an international collaboration with the Darwin Manuscript Project, based at the American Museum of Natural History. These papers chart the evolution of Darwin’s journey, from early theoretical reflections while on board HMS Beagle, to the publication of On the Origin of Species – 155 years ago today.

The launch of Darwin’s papers also marks the end of the first phase of funding for Cambridge’s Digital Library, launched to worldwide acclaim in 2011 with the publication of Isaac Newton’s scientific archive. Initial £1.5m funding for the Digital Library was provided by the Polonsky Foundation. Funding for the digitisation and transcription of the Origin papers was provided by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation.

Cambridge University Library holds almost the entire collection of Darwin’s working scientific papers and the ones being released today are the most important for understanding the development of his evolutionary theory. They are being published simultaneously on the Cambridge Digital Library and Darwin Manuscripts Project websites, with a further release planned for June 2015, covering the notes and drafts of his eight post-Origin books.

None of the Darwin documents available from today have hitherto been digitised to the present high standard of full colour and high resolution, and many have never been transcribed or edited before now.

Professor David Kohn, Director of the Darwin Manuscripts Project, said: “These documents truly constitute the surviving seedbed of the Origin. In them, Darwin hammered out natural selection and the structure of concepts he used to support natural selection. It was here also that he developed his evolutionary narrative and where he experimented privately with arguments and strategies of presentation that he either rejected or that eventually saw the light of day with the Origin’s publication on November 24, 1859.”

The current release includes important documents such as the “Transmutation” and “Metaphysical” notebooks of the 1830s and the 1842 “Pencil Sketch” which sees Darwin’s first use of the term “natural selection”.

It was in Transmutation Notebook B, that Darwin first attempted to formulate a full theory of evolution and it was in Notebooks D and E that natural selection began to take form in late 1838 and early 1839. The further maturation of Darwin’s theory is found in the three experiment notebooks he began in the late 1830s and mid 1850s, and above all in a large mass of previously unpublished loose notes, primarily from the 1830s-1850s, which Darwin organised into portfolios that generally parallel the chapters of the Origin.

Also included will be images of nearly 300 of Darwin's letters with transcriptions and notes provided by the Darwin Correspondence Project, an Anglo-American research group also based in Cambridge University. 

Associate Director, Dr Alison Pearn, said: “The information Darwin received, and the discussions he conducted in these letters played a crucial role in the development of his thinking. It is a really significant step that now for the first time they can be studied and searched in the context of the scientific papers of which they are an integral part.”

Also being published on the Digital Library today is a catalogue of the University Library’s Sanskrit Collections, detailing more than 1,600 manuscripts, 500 of which are fully digitised. Along with important works from the many religious traditions of South Asia, including Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist texts – the collection also includes texts on “secular” topics, ranging from works of poetry and drama to treatises on philosophy, mathematics, grammar, astronomy, law, eroticism and medicine.

Anne Jarvis, Cambridge University Librarian, said: “With seed funding from the Polonsky Foundation, we launched the Cambridge Digital Library in 2011 with Isaac Newton’s papers, declaring our ambition of becoming a digital library for the world, opening up our collections to anyone, anywhere on the planet with access to the Internet. Now, after millions of visits to the Digital Library website, we bookend our first phase of development with the launch of Charles Darwin’s papers and our Sanskrit collection. These now sit alongside Newton’s scientific works and a wealth of other material, including the Board of Longitude papers and, most recently, our Siegfried Sassoon archive.”

Staff from across the University have been recognised for their work by the students they support and teach.

The CUSU Student-Led Teaching Awards 2015 saw 265 nominations from students who submitted testimonies about why their chosen member of staff deserved to win.

Among the nominees were lecturers, supervisors, tutors, chaplains, librarians, custodians, and a whole range of people who have provided student support and enhanced the educational experience at Cambridge.

The winners - judged by a panel of students working alongside CUSU - were presented with their awards at a ceremony on Tuesday, May 12.

Rob Richardson, CUSU Education Officer 2014-15, said: "It has been a pleasure to read the quality and passion of the testimonies from students. The CUSU Teaching Awards provide a great opportunity to highlight the world class teaching that students at Cambridge have access to, and the ceremony itself was an extremely enjoyable occasion. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in the awards."

The list of winners and the categories they were recognised in, is below:

Lecturer Category

Winners

Dr Laura Moretti, AMES

Dr Rory Finnin, MML

Dr Katharine Hubbard, Plant Sciences

Christine Counsell, Education

Dr Richard Turner, Engineering

Dr Fiona Maine, Education

Supervisor Category

Winners

Dr Richard Barnes, PDN

Dr David Whitebread, Education

Dr Jason Rentfrow, Psychology

Dr Helen Thaventhiran, English

Dr Jenny Koenig, Pharmacology

Special Mentions

Dr Ruth Abbott, English

Dr Julian Sale, Pathology

Dr Yannis Galanakis, Classics

Prof Graham Virgo, Law

Matthew Simpson, Philosophy

Pastoral Category

Winners

Dr Louise Joy, Homerton

Dr Paola Filippucci, Murray Edwards

Dr Kevin Greenbank, Wolfson

Non-Teaching Category

Winners

Don Stebbings, Divinity

Katheryn Ayres, Veterinary Medicine

Karen Kempton, Robinson College

Libby Tilley, English

Image: Thank You by Nate Grigg

“We arrived to our destination and we looked each other.”

To a native English speaker, the mistakes in this sentence are clear. But someone learning English would need a teacher to point them out, explain the correct use of prepositions and check later that they have improved. All of which takes time.

Now imagine the learner was able to submit a few paragraphs of text online and, in a matter of seconds, receive an accurate grade, sentence-by-sentence feedback on its linguistic quality and useful suggestions for improvement.

This is Cambridge English Write & Improve – an online learning system, or ‘computer tutor’, to help English language learners – and it’s built on information from almost 65 million words gathered over a 20-year period from tests taken by real exam candidates speaking 148 different languages living in 217 different countries or territories.

Built by Professor Ted Briscoe’s team in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, it’s an example of a new kind of tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to assess and give guidance on text it has never seen before, and to do this indistinguishably from a human examiner.

“About a billion people worldwide are studying English as a further language, with a projected peak in 2050 of about two billion,” says Briscoe. “There are 300 million people actively preparing for English exams at any one time. All of them will need multiple tests during this learning process.”

Language testing affects the lives of millions of people every year; a successful test result could open the door to jobs, further education and even countries.

But marking tests and giving individual feedback is one of the most time-consuming tasks that a teacher can face. Automating the process makes sense, says Dr Nick Saville, Director of Research and Validation at Cambridge Assessment.

“Humans are good teachers because they show understanding of people’s problems, but machines are good at dealing with routine things and large amounts of data, seeing patterns, and giving feedback that the teacher or the learner can use. These tools can free up the teacher’s time to focus on actual teaching.”

Cambridge Assessment, a not-for-profit part of the University, produces and marks English language tests taken by over five million people each year. Two years ago, they teamed up with Briscoe’s team and Professor Mark Gales in the Department of Engineering and Dr Paula Buttery in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics to launch the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) Institute, directed by Briscoe. Their aim is to create tools to support learners of both written and spoken English.

Underpinning Write & Improve is information gleaned from a vast dataset of quality-scored text – the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Built by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment, this is the world’s largest collection of exam papers taken by English language learners around the world.

Each test has been transcribed and information gathered about the learner’s age, language and grade achieved. Crucially, all errors (grammar, spelling, misuse, word sequences, and so on) have been annotated so that a computer can process the natural language used by the learner.

Write & Improve works by supervised machine learning – having learnt from the Corpus of errors, it can make inferences about new unannotated data. Since its launch as a beta version in March 2014, the program has attracted over 20,000 repeat users. And each new piece of text it receives continues this process of learning and improving its accuracy, which is already running at almost equal to the most experienced human markers.

Briscoe believes that this sort of technology has the potential to change the landscape of teaching and assessment practices: “Textbooks are rapidly morphing into courseware where people can test their understanding as they go along. This fits with pedagogical frameworks in which the emphasis is on individual profiling of students and giving them tailored advice on what they can most usefully move onto next.”

He regards the set-up of ALTA as the “best type” of technology transfer: “We do applied research and have a pipeline for transferring this to products. But that pipeline also produces data that feeds back into research.”

The complex algorithms that underpin Write & Improve are being further developed and customised by iLexIR, a company Briscoe and others set up to convert university research into practical applications; and a new company, English Language iTutoring, has been created to deliver Write & Improve and similar web-based products via the cloud and to capture the data that will feed back into the R&D effort to improve the tutoring products.

Now, the researchers are looking beyond text to speech. Assessing spoken English brings a set of very different challenges to assessing written English. The technology needs to be able to cope with the complexities of the human voice: the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, the uhms and ahhs, the pauses.

“The fact that you can get speech recognition on your phone tends to imply in some people’s minds that speech recognition is solved,” says Gales, Professor of Information Engineering. “But the technology still struggles with second language speech. We need to be able to assess the richness in people’s spoken responses, including whether it’s the correct expression of emotion or the development of an argument.” Gales is developing new forms of machine learning, again using databases of examples of spoken English.

“The data-driven approach is the only way to create tools like these,” adds Briscoe. “Building automated tests that use multiple choice is easy. The stuff we are doing is messy, and it’s ever- changing. We’ve shown that if you train a system to this year’s exam on data from 10 years ago the system is less accurate than if you train it on data from last year.”

This is why, says Briscoe, it’s unimaginable to reach a point where the machines have learned enough to understand and predict almost all of the typical mistakes learners make: “Language is a moving target. English is constantly being globalised; vocabulary changes; grammar evolves; and methods of assessment change as progress in pedagogy happen. I don’t think there will ever be a point when we can say ‘we are done now’.”

Inset image: Professor Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge).

Thirteen inspirational academics have been honoured for the outstanding quality and approach to their teaching.

The 22nd annual Pilkington Prizes, which honour excellence in teaching across the collegiate University, were held at Corpus Christi College last night.

The prizes are awarded annually to academic staff, with candidates nominated by Schools within the University.

The Pilkington Prizes were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington, the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, who believed passionately that the quality of teaching was crucial to Cambridge’s success.

This year’s recipients received their awards at a ceremony attended by Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor  for Education.

Dr William (Bill) Allison – University Reader in Physics, Department of Physics
Dr Bill Allison, Reader in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, has made a huge contribution to physics teaching during his career, and inspired many students both in the lecture theatre and the laboratory.  His innovative lecture courses on topics such as condensed matter physics and thermodynamics have been well received by students, and he has always been a willing contributor to the teaching program.
Dr Allison has made a significant effort in the undergraduate laboratories to make sure students appreciate the importance of experimental physics and enjoy learning practical physics skills. Student feedback such as ‘Head of Class Bill Allison is absolutely brilliant…’ is a testament to this.  In addition to this wide-ranging and high-quality contribution in the laboratory and lecture theatre, Bill has in previous years played a leading management role, organising the laboratory's teaching and serving as Chair of the Physics Teaching Committee.

Dr Stephen Barclay – University Lecturer in Palliative Care and General Practice, Department of Public Health and Primary Care
Dr Stephen Barclay leads the Clinical School’s teaching programme in Palliative and End of Life Care.
This is a challenging topic for medical students, confronting their expectations of what a doctor can do, often in emotionally charged situations. Stephen and his team help students to develop the knowledge and skills required, culminating in the highly regarded two day “Death and Dying” course for final year students.  Dr Barclay has taken Cambridge’s programme, nationally recognised for its excellence, and used it to lead the development of a national curriculum.
Graduates regularly contact us to share how valuable the Palliative Care teaching has proved to be, sharing feedback such as: “The palliative care teaching I had in Cambridge was amongst the best student teaching I had… Since qualifying it has been immensely useful and I have often used what I learned.”
Dr Barclay is a truly excellent and inspiring teacher who willingly gives his time to students.  More widely, he is a clinical pastoral advisor, sits on the Fitness to Practice Committee and plays a major role in the development and implementation of high quality written and clinical assessments.

Dr Paula Buttery – Senior Lecturer, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Dr Paula Buttery has played an instrumental role in developing the new Linguistics Tripos. As the teaching coordinator for this new Tripos she has worked tirelessly to ensure the successful delivery of its courses. She is also involved with a new MML initiative to develop a course of inter-departmental translation seminars in which she will contribute a session on machine translation.
Dr Buttery applies equal energy to her engagement in the Department’s MPhil course, in which she coordinates the Research Methods Seminars and the Computational Linguistics course. She is respected by both colleagues and students who recognise not only her organisational ability but also her excellence as a teacher at every level, reflected in consistently outstanding feedback from students. She inspires the gifted, motivates those who struggle and is unstinting in giving extra time to those who need it, supporting them with great patience and good humour.
Last year Dr Buttery was awarded funding from the Cambridge-Africa Alborada Fund to build a spoken language corpus of an indigenous Ugandan language with partners at Makerere University, Uganda, and to develop a teaching skills exchange.

Dr Nik Cunniffe – Lecturer, Department of Plant Sciences
Dr Cunniffe began teaching maths to biologists in 2007, firstly as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a Lecturer. In that time he has taught mathematical modelling, statistics, ecology and computing to students in the Department of Plant Sciences. In particular, he is making the computational tools that pervade modern biology accessible to undergraduate students.
His numerous exemplary citations, taken from student feedback over the years, identify his abilities as being sympathetic and subtly humorous, yet mathematically precise and accurate. Anyone who can teach mathematics to biologists and win plaudits such as “amazing”, “the best maths lecturer I have ever had”, or “brilliant lecturer, change nothing” clearly excels in explaining the significance of mathematical biology to undergraduates.
Dr Cunniffe makes an outstanding contribution to teaching practice and learning outcomes in mathematical biology, and demonstrates excellence in style, consistency and diligence. He has been keen to adapt his teaching methods, both in terms of revised lecture content, style and delivery, as well as administration. He has also introduced an additional practical class on epidemiology to the 1B Plant and Microbial Sciences course, as well as contributing lectures and programming practicals to the zoology module “Population Biology”.
Dr Cunniffe is an invaluable contributor to the Department both through his independent research group, and via his continued collaboration colleagues. He also makes an active contribution towards the administration of graduate progression and supervision, as well as driving forward an important research programme which includes key issues such as ash dieback and sudden oak death.

Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais – Senior Lecturer, Division of Archaeology, Faculty of Human, Social and Political Sciences
Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais has been nominated for her consistently exceptional record of development and delivery of innovative new teaching in Archaeology and the Faculty.  Her teaching activities have covered a broad range but her primary focus is on archaeology of the Americas, particularly South America.
Since arriving in Cambridge in 1998, Dr DeMarrais has created three new course offerings at undergraduate and MPhil level, as well as working with Dr Robb to set up and run the Material Culture Laboratory. This centre for interdisciplinary research provides a lively forum for theoretical debate among students, post-doctoral researchers and staff. Dr DeMarrais regularly supervises undergraduate and MPhil dissertations, encouraging students to make use of the first-rate collections held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Of a total of 21 undergraduate dissertations supervised since 2000, five of her supervisees have won the Departmental Prize for best dissertation of the year.
Feedback from her students is overwhelmingly positive in describing her teaching and pastoral abilities.  Students frequently share comments such as “Elizabeth’s take on the politics of material culture still tinges the way I think about both archaeology and the world I live in. In short, she is a great, great teacher.”; “Elizabeth cares deeply for her students. She always took time to meet with me when I needed advice, and she was always supportive and encouraging” and “She always encourages her students to think independently, and challenge everything we thought we knew about how human societies should work. Her lectures are outstanding: she effortlessly communicates complex ideas and theories, and presents the material in a clear manner.”
Dr DeMarrais has inspired several generations of undergraduate and graduate students by her adept academic guidance in an impressive array of subject areas within Archaeology. She is an outstanding teacher and most deserving recipient of this award.

Dr George Follows – Consultant Haematological Oncologist, Addenbrooke’s Hospital
Dr George Follows’ is a specialist in haematological oncology, particularly caring for patients with lymphoma and leukaemia.  He has an extensive research portfolio in Clinical Trials and was awarded a University Associate Lectureship in 2008 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to teaching. 
Dr Follows has an extremely busy clinical practice but despite this workload, students have ranked him as the best clinical teacher in Cancer Medicine over the past ten years.  In the last five years, he has consistently received three times more "Outstanding Teacher Nominations" than the next highest ranked colleague in a department of over 60 oncologists, thus repeatedly being awarded the departmental Watson Cup for teaching.  In 2013 he was awarded the national Stanley Cup for teaching students in oncology.
Dr Follows has all the best attributes of a successful clinical teacher.  His teaching is grounded in clinical experience for the students and he finds the time and space within his clinical practice to deliver huge amounts of bedside teaching of the highest quality.  Students describe him as “outstanding” and “inspirational” and he is rarely seen in the hospital without a retinue of eager students following behind!

Dr Julia Gog – Reader in Mathematical Biology, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Dr Julia Gog is both an excellent lecturer and supervisor, as questionnaire feedback from students has consistently shown.  Those students who were already interested in mathematical biology, and those who hadn't previously considered studying the subject, have commented on how inspiring her lectures are.  She combines innovative teaching methods to great effect, including vivacious handwritten lecturing and sharing supporting materials online.
In addition to her lecturing, she is committed to supporting students and helping them reach their full potential. For example, she has helped undergraduates find summer research placements in various branches of mathematics, and has given many stimulating talks to student societies.
The Faculty is grateful for her insightful statistical analyses of student Tripos performance and her input into framing policy for the structure of credit for project work, on gender issues relevant to its recent Athena SWAN award, and on ensuring fairness of admissions between Colleges. We think that Julia Gog is an outstanding teacher and highly deserving of this prize.

Dr Bart Hallmark – Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology
Dr Bart Hallmark has shown sustained excellence in teaching in the Department. He has transformed our teaching of Process Design by completely rewriting the lectures that cover the material, and setting a variety of exercises for students on this topic. Dr Hallmark’s lecture courses are always well prepared and students enjoy his lectures, commenting favourably on his explanations and enthusiasm.
In particular, Dr Hallmark has developed the main Design Project, which is an essential element of professional accreditation. Teams of third year students have just five weeks to design a solution to an issue faced by a particular industry, set by the industrial partner. The Design Project is largely responsible for transforming them from undergraduates into engineers who can face the challenges of real world problems. The work required for the Design Project to run smoothly is enormous and it is largely thanks to his efforts that the Project is so successful.
Dr Hallmark makes a number of other significant teaching and outreach contributions. He promotes the undergraduate course at Open Days and answers queries from potential students. He organises the Department’s Teaching Consortium of industrial companies. In particular, he brings industrial visitors into the Department so that they can run transferable skills workshops for undergraduates.

Dr Adrian Kelly – University Lecturer, Department of Pathology
Dr Adrian Kelly has been a Teaching Officer in the Department of Pathology since 1997, and became a University Senior Lecturer in 2012. Over this period he has made a sustained, outstanding contribution to the teaching work of the Department.  He is a popular teacher in the Natural Sciences Tripos, the pre-clinical Medical and Veterinary Sciences Tripos, and for the second MB qualification.
Dr Kelly has consistently delivered excellent teaching through his lectures, project supervision, (senior) examining and practical demonstration. He is a popular teacher at IB and Part II, noted in particular for his clear and concise handouts and lecturing style.  He has been the Part II course organiser for the Department for many years, and has more recently played a key role in streamlining Part II admissions, maximising the course options to attract the best students, whilst balancing this against the available departmental resource.
Dr Kelly has played a key role in strengthening links and fostering positive relations between the Department and the Colleges. He has established a strong process in the Department for dealing with student and College concerns, and is a committed and well-liked supervisor at both Trinity and Wolfson Colleges.
Dr Kelly has established and maintained productive funded research in immunology, but nonetheless he has been keen to commit substantial time to teaching. In all his teaching roles he has always remained very positive, collegial and constructive. He is a truly excellent colleague.

Professor James (Jim) Secord  – Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Professor Jim Secord is one of the outstanding teachers of his generation. Combining the innovative approach exemplified by his own superb publications on nineteenth-century sciences with a shrewd sense of student needs, he has made a huge contribution to education and training in the subject at every level.
Professor Secord began teaching in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 1992, after having developed a major teaching programme at Imperial College, London.  At Cambridge he has always been deeply engaged in teaching, both in terms of course administration and design, and as a lecturer, supervisor and mentor. His lectures set complex scientific material within a rich social, economic and cultural context, in a way that is accessible to students who have typically not studied any humanities since GCSE.  Students consistently describe his lectures as ‘a joy to listen to’, ‘genuinely interested in everything he was speaking about’, and ‘awesome’.  As one student summed it up: ‘Jim Secord is a fantastic lecturer’.
Professor Secord combines outstanding lecturing with famously brilliant supervision of coursework, from undergraduate dissertations to PhD theses, distinguished by gentle but probing questions that push students to learn for themselves how to research and write.  Secord has an admirable record of working with students who are in potential difficulty or have not been able previously to achieve to their full potential.  His care in dealing with students is also evident in his work as a college Director of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, a role he has undertaken at various colleges in the past, including Churchill, Clare and John’s.  As a fellow of Christ’s since 2008, he has developed a strong group with one of the largest cohorts of HPS students in any of the colleges.
As an equally effective and caring mentor to colleagues locally, nationally and internationally, time and again his engagement has turned inquiry in more productive directions and shown us how to draw our audiences in. Having thus taught the teachers too, he is an exceptional candidate for a Pilkington Prize.

Ms Mary Ann Steane – Senior University Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture and History of Art
Over many years Mary Ann Steane has made an enormous contribution to the Department of Architecture as coordinator of Tripos teaching and lecturer in environmental design. She became a Lecturer in in 2000 and has been Senior Lecturer since 2012.  These official titles do not sufficiently convey her deep understanding of and commitment to the problem of how architecture students learn to design. To successfully learn such a personal and subjective discipline requires both a teacher and an enabler: as well as conveying knowledge and experience, one must ensure that the student is in a position to be able to learn creatively.
Ms Steane does a superb job of balancing these different aspects of teaching. By interacting with students and coordinating the Department’s design teaching fellows, she has devised undergraduate programmes that promote students’ imaginations yet serve to establish them as responsible young designers in the profession.
Her first year lectures in environmental design focus on introducing the complex problem of human ecology in architecture. Students have praised the direct encounters in her field trips, in the UK and beyond, for ‘looking at light in real buildings....’ and her lectures for ‘allow[ing] me to see what we should be constantly thinking’. Her influence also extends to more mature students, with a recent MPhil supervisee having won the 2014 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s prize for his dissertation.

Dr Edgar (Ed) Turner, Teaching Officer in Biological Sciences, Institute of Continuing Education
Since joining the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) in January 2012, Dr Edgar Turner has been Academic Director and ICE Teaching Officer in Biological Sciences. He is also an affiliated researcher in the Insect Ecology Group, University Museum of Zoology, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. 
As well as being a charismatic and enthusiastic science communicator, Dr Turner supervises undergraduate and graduate students, has taught an undergraduate zoology field course since 2001, gives Part 1A and 1B lectures, and is Director of Studies at Clare College. Outside the University, he has presented over 70 public lectures since 2006.
As ICE Teaching Officer, Dr Turner has made an enormous difference to the Institute’s Biological Sciences teaching and strengthened our links to the School of Biological Sciences, particularly to Zoology, and to the Museums and Collections. Ed’s teaching includes short courses on topics including evolution, zoological collecting, and the secret lives of insects.  He also leads well-received biodiversity tours of Madingley.
Dr Turner has also designed and delivered several new University of Cambridgequalifications, including a Certificate and Diploma in Evolutionary Biology and an Advanced Diploma in Ecological Monitoring and Conservation. Some of his teaching is fully online and his associated open-access online tasters are very popular.
Dr Turner is full of creative ideas and is a committed and collaborative colleague who contributes fully to the Institute’s work.

Professor Jim Woodhouse – Professor, Department of Engineering, School of Technology
The breadth and consistently outstanding quality of Professor Jim Woodhouse’s contributions to the teaching of Engineering in Cambridge over the last 30 years is remarkable. His experience spans the teaching of first year undergraduate mathematics, through instruction in advanced experimental techniques for graduate students, to providing leadership to his colleagues across the Engineering Department in course design and delivery.
Professor Woodhouse has made good use of his mathematical background to teach widely across the disparate aspects of mathematics used in engineering, from complex analysis to vector calculus to variational methods.  He has created well organised and coherent courses that have lived on well past his lecturing tenure. But Professor Woodhouse is also a practical academic, as will be clear to anyone who has heard his wonderful outreach lectures on the engineering of a violin.
He has designed and taught courses on almost all aspects of vibrations and dynamics, and has been instrumental in setting up many hands-on laboratory activities that play such a valuable role in the teaching of engineering. Professor Woodhouse has made an exceptional and enduring contribution to education in Cambridge.

It’s a numbers game. Three million households, seven million children, 30,000 volunteers, and a decade of assessing the basic reading and maths abilities of 3–16-year olds across India.

This is the size of the largest non-governmental survey of the state of Indian education ever conducted, and it’s a key source of information for communities and policymakers on children’s learning outcomes available in India today. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is all the more impressive given the deceptive simplicity and fundamental importance of the question it seeks to answer: how many children are learning the basics in mathematics and reading?

But the numbers have to be huge given what’s at stake. The education system in India is in crisis; in rural areas, fewer than one in five poor children of around 11 years of age have even the most basic of literacy and numeracy skills, although most have been in school for five years. And it’s a pattern echoed worldwide in what UNESCO has declared “a global learning crisis” – even after going to school, 250 million children globally cannot read, write or count.

“What’s the point in an education if children emerge after years in school without the skills they need?” says Professor Pauline Rose from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, whose team collaborates with the organisation in India responsible for ASER. “The rhetoric about education used to be about giving children access to school but now it must also be about making sure they learn what they need to learn once they are there.”

Rose was previously Director of UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report. In 2014, the Report assembled the first evidence on the scale of the education crisis. “There was already a debate rumbling. It was becoming clear that increasing the number of children enrolling in school was not enough. But the report brought the evidence into one place. That number of 250 million children without basic skills slaps you in the face – you can’t ignore it. It’s also an entry point to understanding why we have got to this situation and what we can do about it.”

Rose leads Cambridge’s Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, which has highlighted some of the factors that limit children’s learning in India and Pakistan. Among them are an over-ambitious curriculum that leaves children behind and a lack of training and support for teachers, who may themselves be the product of a poor education.

Now the Centre has been awarded funding by the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to look at ways to improve the effectiveness of teaching quality in India and Pakistan.

“Education increases opportunities in life, it can pull people out of poverty, with better jobs and higher wages; for girls, education often results in delaying marriage and having fewer children, who as a result are healthier,” she explains. “Nationally, a young, educated workforce can transform the wealth of a country.”

India has made a significant investment in schooling over the past decade, achieving near universal enrolment in primary education. According to government figures, around 195 million children are currently in primary school. However, the question of how effective is the teaching within the classroom has largely been overlooked.

Over the past few months, Rose and Dr Ben Alcott have been using the ASER datasets, covering all of rural India, to identify the extent to which children are learning and who in particular is being left behind.

“Among the most disadvantaged girls, fewer than 10% are learning by the time they should have had five years in school,” says Rose. “Some aren’t learning because they’ve dropped out of school, others because of the poor quality of education. Governments, schools and teachers have tended to focus on the more advantaged, able children. But to close educational inequalities, they must focus on the disadvantaged, whether it’s by poverty, gender, caste or disability.”

Rose and Alcott suggest five key steps: encourage children to start school as young as possible; set the curriculum at the right pace for the majority of learners, not the minority of able learners; train teachers to teach the most disadvantaged learners; provide schools with appropriate textbooks in the right language; and hold schools and policy makers accountable for improving learning outcomes for those who would otherwise be left behind.

Of course, improving the quality of education requires a better understanding of what is actually going on in the classroom. In the newly funded ESRC–DFID programme, Rose, Professor Anna Vignoles and Dr Nidhi Singal are working with an independent education research group in India – Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD) – to create a new dataset that will follow children through their learning experience, from home to school.

Singal’s focus is on children with disabilities: “In many cases, children with disabilities are given access to mainstream school just for ‘socialisation purposes'– there’s an assumption that they are not there to learn.

“My reason for researching what happens to children with disabilities in school is not only to do with issues around social justice and human rights, but also because problems will be magnified for the most marginalised of the marginalised – if teaching can be more effective for this group then it can respond to the needs of all disadvantaged children.”

The research will assess children both in the household and in schools, testing their basic skills on a yearly basis. The aim is to identify what makes a difference to learning, and to understand the problems teachers face and the support they need.

“There’s a big debate on how the global Sustainable Development Goal of all children learning by 2030 can be achieved,” adds Rose. “This project will help understand what we need to do to make sure we are not failing children who are coming from some of the most disadvantaged of backgrounds.”

Will governments take notice? “I don’t think we as researchers can always go knocking on doors and say look at our evidence. But I do think that, through the networks that CORD and ASER have, this research can have an influence. These partnerships are really central to what we do: it’s no good us sitting here doing all this wonderful research if it’s not actually changing anything for children’s experiences on the ground.”

As part of the Festival of Ideas and WOW Cambridge, Pauline Rose is participating in a panel discussion on this topic with Philippa Lei from the Malala Fund on October 27. Visit http://www.equality.admin.cam.ac.uk/events/school for more information.

The grants aim to promote innovative practice in teaching and learning techniques by providing start-up funding for creative or exploratory projects ineligible for other sources of funding. Bids should focus on new approaches or initiatives that enhance teaching and learning.  Any innovative project will be considered – they do not need to be IT-focused. However, bids in support of developing technology to support teaching and learning are particularly welcome.

Many creative projects have been supported by the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund, including a collaborative learning initiative between University criminology students and offenders, and an online project to help new students in the Faculty of English make the step up from A-level to higher education. Further details about previous award winners, and case studies of their work, are available on the fund website.

The 2015-16 bidding round will open on Wednesday, 4 November, and will close on Friday, 22 January.  Staff interested in making a bid should visit the fund website or contact Melissa Rielly in the Educational and Student Policy Team for further information.

The Learning and Teaching Strategy builds on the work that is already being done to ensure high quality teaching and learning throughout the University and introduces new areas of focus, including the use of technology to enhance education.

The strategy introduces the idea of having ‘digital champions’, individuals identified by the General Board’s Education Committee, who will promote ways for staff to complement their teaching through digital learning. For example, technology could be used to improve access to learning materials, making them available to students outside of term-times, or for examinations.

Prior to the launch of the strategy Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, said: “Our primary aim is excellence in teaching and learning – and we will use all tools, both traditional and innovative, to achieve this goal. So while the supervision and lectures remain right at the heart of a Cambridge education, we must ensure we make the best use of technological advances to enhance our provision.”

“In lectures and supervisions, we are considering how we might introduce greater digital interaction. For example, students might work from iPads or other personal devices, with information being transferred from the lecturer directly to the student.”

Other key themes covered in the strategy include a review of the University’s examination arrangements and plans to improve student wellbeing. The strategy is supported by an action plan which details how the proposals will be implemented. Both documents will be reviewed annually by the Education Committee and will be adapted to take into account changes to the higher education sector, such as the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework announced in the recent Higher Education Green Paper.

The full strategy and action plan are available on the Education and Student Policy website. If you have any feedback on either document you can email the team on educational.policy.online@admin.cam.ac.uk.

The award offers grants of up to £20,000 for University staff to fund creative projects. It aims to promote innovative practice in teaching and learning techniques by providing start-up funding for creative or exploratory projects ineligible for other sources of funding. Bids should focus on new approaches or initiatives that enhance teaching and learning. Any innovative project will be considered – they do not need to be IT-focused. However, bids in support of developing technology to support teaching and learning are particularly welcome.

Many creative projects have been supported by the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund, including a collaborative learning initiative between University criminology students and offenders, and an online project to help new students in the Faculty of English make the step up from A-level to higher education. Further details about previous award winners, and case studies of their work, are available on the fund website.

The 2015-16 bidding round opened in November and will close on Friday, 22 January. Staff interested in making a bid should visit the fund website or contact Melissa Rielly in the Educational and Student Policy Team for further information.

Twelve inspirational academics have been recognised for their outstanding quality and approach to teaching. The winners, listed below, will attend an awards ceremony at Queens’ College in June, where they will receive a prize from the Vice-Chancellor.

The Pilkington Prizes are awarded annually to academic staff, with candidates nominated by Schools within the University. The awards were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington, the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, who believed passionately that the quality of teaching was crucial to Cambridge’s success.

The 2016 Pilkington Prize winners are:

• Dr Christof Schwiening – Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
• Dr Sandra Fulton – Department of Biochemistry
• Dr Noel Rutter – Department of Materials Science
• Dr Emma Mawdsley – Department of Geography
• Dr Matei Candea – Division of Social Anthropology
• Dr Carl Watkins – Faculty of History
• Dr Karen Ottewell – The Language Centre
• Dr Sophia Connell – Faculty of Philosophy
• Dr Keith Seffen – Department of Engineering
• Dr Robert Harle – Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
• Dr Nicola Jones – Cardiothoracic Anaesthesia and Intensive Care (Papworth Hospital)
• Dr Ruchi Sinnatamby – Cambridge Breast Unit

More information about the awards, including a list of winners from previous years, can be found on the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning website.

Geneticists and historians, lecturers and librarians, staff from departments and tutors from Colleges all rubbed shoulders yesterday at the University’s inaugural Teaching Forum.

The forum – a new annual event – has been designed to provide a stimulating environment where those who teach and support education at Cambridge can share ideas, learn about innovative approaches to teaching, and discuss wider higher education issues.

Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, and Robert Cashman, Cambridge University Students Union Education Officer, opened the forum with a talk on how great teaching is recognised and celebrated across the University and Colleges.

Other talks were given by a range of University teaching staff, including those from the Department of Physics, Faculty of Education, Department of Plant Sciences and Computer Laboratory. Some of the subjects covered included students’ transitions to studying at Cambridge, innovative uses of learning technologies, wellbeing and learning, inclusive teaching, and measuring learning gain.

The event was considered a success, with many positive observations from those who attended. Delegates described the day as “inspiring”, “a great opportunity to talk about teaching” and “a significant step in putting Cambridge on the teaching map”. There were many similar responses during the event on Twitter.

The Teaching Forum is one of several recent initiatives set up and run by the Centre for Teaching and Learning.

The centre was launched earlier this year to provide a strategic focus for educational enhancement at Cambridge. It draws together support and advice on training, professional development, funding and best practice – all of which can be accessed via a new website. It organises teaching fora and networks, and celebrates the many examples of outstanding teaching that contribute to the student experience at the University.

Planning is underway for the next annual Directors of Teaching event to take place in September – this year focusing on examination and assessment – and networking groups organised around themes such as school-to-university transition, knowledge and skills development, diversity in the curriculum and presentation skills.

Professor Virgo said: “We are delighted that the collegiate University’s first Teaching Forum was such a great success. The collegiate University takes excellence in teaching and learning very seriously, and the forum provided an ideal opportunity to exchange best practice and ideas about what makes a great educational experience for our students.”

Staff who are interested in learning more about the work of the Centre for Teaching and Learning can email enquiries@cctl.cam.ac.uk and visit http://www.cctl.cam.ac.uk/.

Nine new projects are benefiting from the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund.

They were selected following a call for bids at the end of last year by the Digital Teaching and Learning Sub-committee, which is responsible for steering the development of innovation in education across Cambridge.

The fund is awarded yearly and provides grants of up £20,000 to teaching staff at the University. If successful at pilot stage, many will have the potential for wider application throughout the University.

Among this year’s winners was an idea for a ‘flipped-classroom’ by Dr Michael Ramage from the Department of Architecture. Students will learn new concepts online ahead of their lectures allowing their classroom time to be used to reflect on what they have learned.

Elsewhere, Dr Nicola Jones and Dr Priya Sastry from the Department of Medicine will use the funding to create online role-playing scenarios for medical students and junior doctors that simulate real-life emergencies. And at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dr Chris Wingfield is creating a 3D image library of artefacts to supplement hands-on practicals.

A full list of winners can be found at the end of this article and summaries of their proposed projects are available on the Centre for Teaching and Learning website.

The best student hackers in the UK will take place in a cyber security competition this weekend, in order to demonstrate and improve their skills both as attackers and defenders in scenarios similar to the TalkTalk hack and the leak of the Panama Papers.

The event, hosted by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in partnership with Facebook, will bring together 10 of the UK’s Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research– the first time they have taken part in such an event together. The hacking event will take place on Saturday, 23 April.

Cyber security is considered one of the biggest threats facing our economy and infrastructure today, and talented hackers are being recruited by government and other agencies to fight cyber criminals. This hacking event will showcase the best student hackers in the country.

The students will be working on challenges which require them to exploit some common vulnerabilities - the very type that underpinned recent high-profile hacking incidents.

Each of the 10 universities is sending a team of four students to this ‘Capture the Flag’-themed event. Throughout the afternoon, the hackers will attempt to solve a series of puzzles, with the winners gaining points; and compete in a series of challenges by attempting to hack the other teams.

An example of the type of challenges the hackers may face is to hack into a server and attempt to keep the other teams from getting in for as long as they can. The Panama Papers hack likely involved exploiting vulnerabilities in Wordpress and Drupal and the competitors may be tasked with finding similar holes in other software.

Facebook has chosen to visualise the progress of the game on a board loosely based on the classic game Risk. The goal is to conquer the world, with points awarded for each country that is captured. Each country has a couple of challenges based on different areas of cyber security, and students must be able to extract the ‘flag’ to claim the points for that country.

In addition to the teams taking part in the event in Cambridge, other students from the participating universities will also be able to take part in the event remotely, in order that additional students can polish their hacking skills.

“We have a huge cyber security skills gap looming in the UK, and we need to close it,” said Dr Frank Stajano of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, Head of the Cambridge Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. “Training our students for those challenges closes the gap between theory and practice in cyber security education. With any type of security, you can’t develop a strong defence against these types of attacks if you’re not a good attacker yourself – you need to stay one step ahead of the criminals.”

These hacking events also help highlight the different challenges involved in attack and defence. “Attacking is more difficult in general because there is no guaranteed recipe for finding a vulnerability, but in many ways it’s actually easier,” he said. “If you’re defending something, you have to keep absolutely everything safe all the time, but if you’re attacking, all you’ve got to do is find the one weak point and then you’re in – like finding the one weak point in the Death Star that allowed it to be destroyed. When attackers and defenders run on similar platforms it is also the case that, if you attack your opponents, they may reverse-engineer your attack and reuse it against you.”

In a meeting last year, Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama agreed to strengthen the ties between the UK and the US, and to cooperate on matters of cyber security affecting both countries.

A ‘Cambridge 2 Cambridge’ cyber security competition, held last month at MIT, was one of the outcomes of the meeting between the two leaders, who also expressed a desire that part of this cooperation should include an improvement in cyber security teaching and training for students.

From next year, some of the exercises prepared for these events will be part of the undergraduate teaching programme at Cambridge.

“Our team was able to gel well together, and that feeling of being ‘in the zone’ and working seamlessly together in attacking other teams, scripting our exploits and rushing to patch our services was fantastic,” said computer science undergraduate Daniel Wong, following last month’s Cambridge 2 Cambridge event.

“Maybe somewhat surprisingly for a computer hacking competition, the Cambridge 2 Cambridge event was also an exercise in interpersonal skills, since effectively collaborating with people you have just met under significant time pressure in a generally stressful environment does not come naturally, but I was very fortunate to have had teammates that really made this aspect feel like a walk in the park,” said fellow computer science undergraduate Gábor Szarka, a co-winner of the $15,000 top team prize at the Cambridge 2 Cambridge event.

The Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) scheme is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, Government Communications Headquarters, the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance and Research Councils UK.

The 10 universities sending a team to Saturday’s event are: Imperial College London, Queens University Belfast, Royal Holloway University of London, University College London, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge, University of Kent, University of Oxford, University of Southampton, and University of Surrey. 

The wealth of untapped academic talent inside the criminal justice system has been illuminated by a ground-breaking project in which people in prison studied in equal partnership with Cambridge students.

To date, 22 prisoners have participated in the Learning Together initiative at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, which completed its second term last week. Many students have described it as a life-changing experience, and one student who is currently in prison has already had a paper accepted by an academic journal.

The project was funded by the British Academy and consists of carefully-structured, eight-week courses involving both graduates studying for the MPhil in Criminology at the University of Cambridge and students from the prison itself. All of the participants co-operate on equal terms, sharing exactly the same study materials, and working together in small group sessions.

In a report due to be published in the next edition of The Prison Service Journal, the organisers, Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow, argue that the course has dismantled stereotypes and prejudice in both directions. While it overturns the assumptions of many prisoners that a university education is something that they will never be able to achieve, it does so by highlighting their ability to handle complex subject matter on an equal footing with their Cambridge peers.

The forthcoming report argues that more should be done to develop models of prison education which, rather than teaching prisoners in isolation, are built around active collaborations with organisations beyond their walls. In particular, it presents powerful evidence – drawn from interviews with the students who took part – that the experience of studying with others profoundly affected the ways in which all students viewed themselves and thought about the future.

One participant, Gareth, has already written a review of an academic book that he will publish alongside Ludlow and Armstrong in a peer reviewed journal next month. In his graduation speech, Gareth said: “For a large part of my sentence, who I am has been entirely synonymous with the reasons I ended up in prison. Reflecting on the initiative, it seems that the overwhelming product was that I was reminded of being someone other than the person who committed these offences.

“I am someone who has valid and useful opinions, I have an interest in how society works, and the connectedness we feel with the other people who we share this world with. I am developing a sense that not only do I want to help people – I am starting to believe I can.”

The course organisers suggest that such experiences point to the capacity of projects like theirs to improve current prison-based learning and transform the learning cultures of both prisons and universities, in ways that help all students to realise and develop their skills and talents to support social progress.

They point out that a pathway out of crime relies on something called “Diachronic Self-Control” – the idea that a person can have ideas about what they want to achieve in life, but that these will remain unfulfilled unless they can also access the places and connections which make them achievable. “People have to be able to perceive a different future to be able to move towards that future,” the study observes.

The Learning Together course involves weekly sessions, each lasting two and a half hours, and covers a series of topics such as the legitimacy of power, and the rebuilding of non-offending lives.

Each week’s reading list typically involves an academic paper and a more accessible piece of content. For example, for the session on Trust and Democratic Voice, students were also asked to read an article about how marginalised groups in Tunisia used hip-hop as a means of self-expression with which to confront state power during the Arab Spring.

Armstrong, who is a Research Associate in Criminology at St John’s College, Cambridge, said that much of the course drew on ideas from more general research into education. In particular, it applies the principles that students learn better when they absorb new information through dialogue and shape it in light of their experiences, rather than through instruction alone. When students realise they have potential, they adopt a “growth mindset” and are more able to capitalise on it.

“When we move some of those ideas from the learning environment into criminal justice, what we show people in prison is that they are not fixed and defined by their offending, but that there are avenues for them to progress,” she said. “That’s a very powerful message.”

Ludlow, a lecturer in Law and Criminology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, added: “That message is just as powerful for the Cambridge students. Many of them talked to us about how, before Learning Together, their world views were small. Studying together, in dialogue, helped everyone to see how individual ideas and experiences interact with bigger institutions, histories and social forces.”

Their views are echoed by extensive feedback from the students themselves, much of which is reported in the forthcoming journal article. In one particularly moving graduation speech, a student called Zaheer reflected: “It gave me self-esteem and confidence in my own abilities… Being able to put our past behind us and do something positive like this has helped our confidence, transforming our lives.”

The project has received praise from the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove. “We must be more demanding of our prisons, and more demanding of offenders, which means giving prisoners new opportunities but expecting them to engage seriously and purposefully in education and work,” he said. “I have seen for myself that the Learning Together Initiative at HMP Grendon provides the chance for prisoners to work towards their full potential and gain qualifications as a result. It does great work and it is a testament to the scheme and the hard work of those involved that so many are able to attend the graduation ceremony.”

The Governor of HMP Grendon, Jamie Bennett, said: “The therapeutic work of Grendon helps to explore and manage some of the profound traumas and problems experienced by the men in our care. Whilst doing this, it is also important to offer opportunities in which they can discover and develop their talents. This course is an example of that.”

Rod Clark, Chief Executive of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, highlighted the value of Learning Together as an initiative with benefits both for the students within the prison and those at Cambridge.

“Problems within prisons – safety concerns, overcrowding, limited access to classes – can make creating a healthy learning environment incredibly difficult,” he added. “Projects like Learning Together help to achieve just that, offering tremendous benefits for people on both sides of the prison wall. They allow prisoners to recognise their ambitions and motivations, while giving the student population an understanding of prison life.”

Armstrong and Ludlow are supporting the creation of similar partnerships between other universities and prisons and other departments within the University of Cambridge. They are also involved with further collaborative initiatives focused on different skills, such as cooking and making music.

Their report calls for the development of an approach to prison education that is “more porous” in terms of its creative engagement with the outside world, and its approach to prisoners as potential assets to society rather than people who merely require correction.

Further information about the Learning Together Programme can be found here. 

Additional images reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Justice/Learning Together project.

New and innovative plans to enhance Cambridge’s already outstanding teaching and learning were laid out at last week’s open meeting for administrative staff.

Speaking just before Friday’s historic referendum result, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education Professor Graham Virgo said that the collegiate University was rightly renowned for its educational excellence – but that a range of challenges meant that a renewed focus was required.

It is clear that important questions remain as to what the impact of last week’s referendum vote will have on higher education tuition fees, loans and bursaries. However, the University can confirm that:

• Undergraduate EU students who are already studying at Cambridge, who have an offer to study at Cambridge, or who apply in 2016 to start their studies in 2017, will continue to be charged the UK fee rate applicable at the time, provided this continues to be permitted by UK law. The UK fee rate may be subject to increases, which may be annual. The fees for all applicants, including Home/EU students, considering entry in 2018 (including deferred entry from 2017), have yet to be set

• Graduate Home/EU students who are already studying at Cambridge, and those who have applied or are applying to start their studies in the academic year 2016/17, will continue to be charged the Home/EU fee rate applicable at the time of their application, provided this continues to be permitted by UK law.

Speaking to more than 200 staff at the meeting, Professor Virgo began by summarising his PVC portfolio, which covers undergraduate and graduate students, part-time students, libraries and library services, sport, and the University of Cambridge Primary School. He explained that much of his focus since taking over as PVC 18 months ago had been on the Teaching Excellence Framework, with the University having agreed to implement TEF1 from October 2017. This would see HE providers meet basic quality assurance standards in return for being able to raise fees by 2.8 per cent. As of last week, implementation of TEF2 was subject to a technical consultation, although the future of the Higher Education and Research Bill is now unclear following last week’s events.

Promoting innovation

Turning to developments within Cambridge, Professor Virgo reported on the work of the recently launched Centre for Teaching and Learning, which aims to promote, capture and share outstanding teaching and pedagogical innovation across the collegiate University. The Centre is doing this in a number of ways. A new annual Teaching Forum took place in April this year and was attended by 130 people from across faculties, departments, Colleges and other institutions. There are also plans to run a series of workshops looking at important issues such as digital education and examinations. And considerable thought is going into how outstanding teaching should be appropriately recognised.

Digital education will become increasingly important and a new strategy is being developed to ensure that Cambridge seizes opportunities in this area. This strategy will be pedagogically focused, will support both the educational and student experience, and stimulate innovation. There are three principal strands of activity underway: a pilot looking at lecture capture; another pilot examining the potential of computer-based exams; and the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund.

Other key developments in relation to teaching and learning include: the decision to discontinue the public display of class lists; student and teacher workload; a review of the examination process; how the University handles and responds to various student disciplinary matters; and consideration of how best to use the University’s estate for teaching and learning.

Professor Virgo also spoke of the importance of supporting the University’s ambition to grow graduate student numbers by two per cent a year, and a new recruitment strategy was being implemented with this in mind. The University and Colleges fundraising campaign will also play an important role in helping to realise plans for postgraduate education at Cambridge.

Earlier at the meeting, the Registrary, Dr Jonathan Nicholls, spoke about the Higher Education and Research Bill, the plans for implementation of which now look uncertain. He also mentioned some of the recent developments within the University and UAS, which can be read in detail in the UAS’s latest annual report. He mentioned too that the search for the new Vice-Chancellor was well advanced, with an announcement expected to be made some time in the Michaelmas Term. The search for a new Registrary had also begun, with that process being overseen by the Academic Secretary. The University Council had also agreed to strengthen the University’s senior leadership team by appointing a Chief Finance Officer. Talent at all levels of the University would be vital in meeting the considerable challenges ahead for Cambridge and the higher education sector, he added.

The ‘Lecture Capture’ pilot, which launches as part of a new Digital Education Strategy, will see staff from five departments using a variety of recording methods – including audio, video, and presentations with commentary attached – throughout the Michaelmas term.

The recordings will allow students to spend more time reflecting on content in the classroom and less time taking notes, and to revisit complex concepts during revision. While Lecture Capture will not replace face-to-face lectures, it may also allow many students across a range of disabilities to access materials and information from lectures more effectively and inclusively. Teaching staff will also have the option to access analytics for their recordings to identify how regularly students are viewing each topic, and help inform future teaching.

Dr Dee Scadden, from the Department of Biochemistry, will be one of the lecturers taking part in the pilot. She said: “We are really looking forward to being involved. It will give students greater flexibility in how they choose to learn and the availability of online lecture material will also enable academic staff to try out new teaching methods that will enrich the learning experience.

“For example, if the pilot is successful, we could potentially share content that is typically delivered in the classroom – such as videos and presentations – online before the lectures, therefore freeing up more time for discussion.”

Lecture Capture is the first pilot being launched as part of a new Digital Strategy for Education, itself part of the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy. The success of the pilot will be measured at the end of term through focus groups and surveys with the teaching staff and students involved. This will be overseen by the University’s Digital Teaching and Learning Sub-committee, which will review progress on a regular basis. Examples of good teaching practice that result from the strategy will be shared with the academic community through the Cambridge Centre for Learning and Teaching.

The full list of departments taking part in the trial includes: the Department of Biochemistry, the Institute of Continuing Education, the Department of Chemistry, the Department of Engineering, and the Department of Veterinary Medicine.

The grants aim to promote innovative practice in teaching and learning techniques by providing start-up funding for creative or exploratory projects ineligible for other sources of funding. Bids should focus on new approaches or initiatives that enhance teaching and learning.  Any innovative project will be considered – they do not need to be IT-focused. However, bids in support of developing technology to support teaching and learning are particularly welcome.

Many creative projects have been supported by the fund, which runs annually and is overseen by the University’s Digital Teaching and Learning Sub-committee.

Among last year’s winners was an idea for a ‘flipped-classroom’ by Dr Michael Ramage from the Department of Architecture, which has involved students learning new concepts online ahead of their lectures, allowing their classroom time to be used to reflect on what they have learned. Elsewhere, Dr Nicola Jones and Dr Priya Sastry from the Department of Medicine used the funding to create online role-playing scenarios for medical students and junior doctors that simulate real-life emergencies.

Further details about previous award winners, and case studies of their work, are available on the fund website.

The 2016-17 bidding round will close on Monday, 23 January at 4.00pm. Staff interested in making a bid should visit the fund website or contact Melissa Rielly in the Educational and Student Policy Team for further information.