Education Directory

Two further education quangos were told today they are to be scrapped.

As first revealed in the Guardian two months ago, the government is getting rid of the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA), barely a year after it began operations, and the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL).

They are to be replaced by a single body, as yet to be named, which will combine their two roles: overseeing improvement in colleges and training their senior managers.

The skills secretary, John Denham, stressed that the new body, which will be launched in April, will mark a significant step towards self-regulation for colleges, he told the Association of Colleges' annual conference in Birmingham today.

It will be more within the control of the further education sector than has hitherto been the case with such agencies.

The membership of its board, for instance, will be elected by the sector, which is also expected to put together a panel to appoint a chief executive.

The CEL's chief executive, Lynne Sedgemore, and her QIA counterpart, Andrew Thomson, are to step down.

The writing has been on the wall for both organisations since last November when the then education secretary, Alan Johnson, responded to colleges' calls for greater autonomy. He challenged them to "develop a proposal for self-regulation".

A self-regulation group, headed by Sir George Sweeney, principal of Knowsley Community College, then suggested that there was "the opportunity of quick wins in the area of quality" by, for example, merging the CEL and the QIA.

The further education minister, Bill Rammell, confirmed in September that ministers were keen "to see how we might further simplify the support structure for quality improvement as the further education sector moves towards self-regulation".

The QIA's own birth came out of the blue in 2004 when the former education secretary, Charles Clarke, announced his intention to establish a "national strategic body to drive forward quality improvement".

The proposal of yet another body with responsibility for quality improvement took people by surprise.

The new body would "streamline" the quality improvement "landscape", Clarke said. And, indeed, as the new QIA came into existence in the summer of 2006, the standards unit that had been set up with the Department for Education and Skills disappeared.

The QIA, which had a budget of ?93m last year, has proved very much a middle organisation, commissioning others to sort out colleges that have been identified as failing by Ofsted, or at least failing to raise their game above satisfactory.

The CEL was launched in October 2003. It is a much smaller organisation than the QIA, with a turnover of ?12.3m last year. Its core business has been to run leadership courses for college staff of all grades of seniority to improve standards of senior management. Latterly, it has extended its activities to include the analysis of further education policy.

Federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd has made higher education his focus of one of the final days of the election campaign.

On his home turf of Brisbane, Mr Rudd has had a comparatively quiet day on the campaign trail.

Instead he has taken to the airwaves to sell his message, conducting about a dozen radio interviews around the nation.

This afternoon he held just one media event, heading to the Liberal seat of Ryan to conduct an education forum at the University of Queensland.

After questions from students worried about the rising cost of their higher education, Mr Rudd committed to tackling the issue if he wins the election.

"This is the beginning of an approach by us which has the affordability of higher education for kids from working families at its core," he said.

The paper, which has supported the Coalition at every federal election since 1998, said on its website today that the decision was helped by more than 900 direct conversations with its readers through the editor's blog.

Editor David Penberthy will argue that Mr Rudd has "shown a commitment to the future, with better policies for education and the environment".

The paper will say Prime Minister John Howard "has reached his use-by date - if for no other reason than he almost believes it himself".

Northen Cape

New research from Northwestern University finds that college students' choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents' education.

The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.

"That race, ethnicity and the education level of one's parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there's less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed," says Eszter Hargittai, author of "Whose Space" Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites."

That study, now in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, finds that Facebook is the social networking site of choice for white students, that Hispanic students prefer MySpace and that Asian and Asian-American students are least likely to use MySpace.

While prodigious users of Facebook, Asian and Asian-American students were found to use the less popular social network sites Xanga and Friendster more than students from other ethnic groups. It found no statistically significant SNS choices for black students.

The study did find statistical relevance between parental schooling and SNS preference. "There seems to be a positive relationship between years of parental schooling and Facebook and Xanga use, and a negative one between years of parental education and MySpace use," says Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern University and faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research.

Students whose parents have a college degree are significantly more likely to use Facebook than those whose parents have some college experience but no degree. MySpace users, on the other hand, are more likely to have parents with less than a high school education than those whose parents had some college experience.

Hargittai surveyed 1,060 freshmen from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). In 2006, U.S. News & World Report ranked UIC among the nation's top 10 universities in regard to student ethnic diversity.

She also compared SNS usage by students living with their parents to that of students living on campus, with friends or on their own. Paradoxically, those living with their parents -- the students who might be expected to benefit most from the online social opportunities that SNSs offer -- were considerably less likely to use Facebook than their more socially connected peers.

That finding is inconsistent with ideas about the Web's potential to improve people's lives by sidestepping physical constraints. "In this case, it is the already constrained students who miss out on the Web's potential benefit," Hargittai said.

adidas shoes | Football | Film Camera What's more, it suggests that social networking sites actually may contribute to a two-tier social system if, as the study suggests, people who already are interacting less with others on campus are also doing less interacting online.

When Michael Turchy sought a job with the state of North Carolina straight out of college in 2001, his interviewer seemed surprised that he had already published research on wetlands.

"I had direct experience others didn't have," says Turchy, environmental supervisor for the transportation department and a graduate of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. "I could tell he was a little impressed."

A leg up in the job market is just one way students can benefit when they work closely with faculty, sometimes side-by-side in research. And the degree to which faculty work with students is the kind of thing prospective students might want to look for when they consider where to apply for college.

Problem is, that kind of information hasn't typically been available to the public in a meaningful way.

The National Survey of Student Engagement wants to change that. While many popular college guides focus on things like SAT scores of incoming freshmen, or a college's party-school reputation, NSSE (pronounced "nessie") seeks to gauge the quality of an undergraduate education by looking at how actively involved students are with their studies, professors and the campus community. Decades of research shows that the more engaged students are, the more likely they are to learn.

Colleges appear to welcome such information. Since its 2000 debut, NSSE has surveyed nearly 1,200 schools at least once, and it has spawned similar surveys for law schools, community colleges and other populations.

Most colleges keep results confidential, using their data as an internal assessment tool. But this year, for the first time, NSSE is encouraging participating schools to make their scores publicly available.