Graduate jobs: advice from the experts

You should be very conscious of your digital footprint and remember that nothing can ever really be deleted – someone will have recorded it somewhere. This includes social media profiles such as Facebook and Twitter as well as forums and websites.

The best advice to clean up your online image comes in three areas:

1. Privacy settings on Facebook and Twitter allow you to share your footprint only with those you allow as friends and followers – make sure you control who you accept into this loop. Of course, the most foolproof solution is to behave well and respect these networks.

2. You might not be able to fully delete some things from showing on search engines such as Google, but you can make the most of what shows up first. Use public professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Viadeo and Xing – fill out your profile, skills, interests and qualifications and you will start to build a much more professional digital footprint.

3. Finally, getting mentioned for extra-curricular activity can be gold dust – comment on blogs and articles, provide quotes for journalists and guest blog on things you're interested in or know a lot about – everyone is a marketer after all.

Barry Furby, digital recruitment specialist and director, fresh resources

By all means apply for vacancies on big job boards – but remember that if you've seen it, so has everybody else. If you've had no joy applying for positions this way, stop. Instead, start hunting for less obviously visible vacancies. It's time well spent – because when you do find one, your competition will be a fraction of those going for widely advertised positions.

Graduates should remember that different job-hunting methods work for different industries. Applying blind to ads for junior jobs in media is unlikely to reap rewards – but building a network of contacts will. For public-sector jobs, all the schmoozing in the world won't get you through the door – you'll have to apply through official channels like everybody else.

If you've only targeted big companies, broaden your search. Smaller companies have smaller budgets for advertising vacancies – and you won't find them at recruitment fairs as stalls are so expensive. So make it your mission to find out how they do recruit. Scour the industry press and see which small companies are thriving. Does their website have a "Work for us" page? Your odds are looking better already.

Keep trying different techniques – and chart how successful each method is for you. Then do more of what's working – and ditch what isn't. Your time and energy are limited resources, so make sure you're using them wisely.

Tanya de Grunwald, founder of careers website GraduateFog.co.uk

Strictly speaking, most unpaid internships are illegal. That means it's illegal for your employer not to pay you – and it's illegal for you to work for free, as you're both undermining the national minimum wage law. The problem is that this law isn't being enforced, so employers are free to exploit graduates who can afford to work for less than the minimum wage – and exclude those who can't. Because many graduates are desperate for experience, the result is that most internships now pay nothing, even when interns are effectively doing a proper job for months at a time.

Until things change, I'm afraid graduates will have to decide for themselves whether an unpaid internship is a good investment for them. This will depend on the calibre of the company (how impressive will it look on your CV) and what you'll be doing while you're there (it's hard to talk up tea-making in subsequent interviews). But remember, there is no guarantee of a paid job at the end of it – so you must keep applying for roles elsewhere before your internship ends.

If you can't afford to work unpaid, hunt for paid work in a related field instead, building your contacts and trying to move across later. Find out more about your rights at Intern Aware (internaware.org) and follow the name-and-shame campaign that we are running on Graduate Fog. It's vital we keep up the pressure on companies to start paying their interns the wages they deserve.

Tanya de Grunwald

A speculative letter or email shows initiative, and because you're not competing with other candidates, it stands a better chance of being read and acted on. First, identify companies that are expanding, operating in growth sectors, or need your specific skills.

Then, use your research to target your approach. Outline the skills you offer, matching them to the company's needs. Be specific about the type of work (or role) where you'd make the greatest impact. In short, set out a business case for hiring you.

Avoid the impersonal "Dear Sir/Madam", and find out the name of the MD if it's a small company, or the relevant department head in a larger company. In a speculative email use the subject line to flag up your key selling points. Instead of the bland "Inquiry for graduate vacancies" write "Marketing graduate with strong social media skills", for example.

Be concise. An introductory paragraph explains your interest in the company; the second summarises your key strengths and where these could be deployed; the closing paragraph asks for a meeting.

Clare Whitmell, business communication trainer

Clean up your online profile by activating your privacy settings on Facebook and other social media sites. Photograph: John Lamb/Getty Images

Be selective when you write your CV. Find elements from your background that match the job description. Voluntary, part-time or holiday work, side-projects, extra-curricular activities and work experience are all valid and will have helped you develop leadership, problem-solving or team-working skills.

Emphasise the commercial value of your degree and show how it contributes to the business. Add depth to your education with an "academic highlights" subsection focusing on coursework, dissertations, projects or awards that spotlight research or critical thinking abilities, or which are relevant.

Get the most from work experience. Don't just list duties, but highlight achievements, quantifying your impact in financial terms where possible. Avoid cliche. Use descriptive, strong vocabulary, and omit "I". ("Doubled profits" rather than "I doubled profits".) Aim for a maximum of two pages. This is a suggested CV format for a graduate:

Name and contact details.

Brief profile Your key selling points.

Skills Can include specific technical/business skills gained during degree.

Selected achievements (Optional) These can be from paid/unpaid work, extra-curricular activities, etc .

Education Degree, university details; brief educational history); academic highlights subsection.

Professional experience Dates, employer details, position held (short paragraph detailing scope of work followed by "success stories" giving context and impact).

Clare Whitmell

You've already done some preparation, now it's time to do more. Find out what's happening in the industry and this particular company. Find out about any problems, challenges, new contracts etc. Think about what you can say to demonstrate this knowledge, either in answering questions or for the questions you will ask at the end. You don't need to commit these to memory; you can write them down and refer to them.

Demonstrate good communication and interpersonal skills. Be pleasant to everyone you meet, make good eye contact, be ready to shake hands.

Successful candidates demonstrate energy and enthusiasm for the job so make sure you do this through the way you talk and body language. Sound interested, lean forward and put some energy in your voice.

You know you will be asked certain questions: why you want the job, your strengths and weaknesses. Prepare answers, not the ones you think the interviewer wants to hear, but based on what you know about yourself and the job. Choose weaknesses that are real but not relevant to the job, such as taking criticism to heart, or preferring time to make decisions.

Denise Taylor, career coach

Once your course has finished and you are looking for work, you may be entitled to claim jobseeker's allowance (JSA). It is paid by Jobcentre Plus and comes in two forms:

• Contributions-based: Paid for the first six months of unemployment, but to qualify you must have paid enough national insurance in the two years prior to your claim. This will rule out most recent graduates.

• Income-based: Paid after six months when contributions-based JSA runs out, or immediately if you have not paid enough NI contributions. Maximum rates for single people are £53.45 a week if you are under 25 or £67.50 if you are 25 or over. Unemployed couples can claim £105.95 a week. But you are not entitled to income-based JSA if you have savings of more than £16,000 or if you are living with a partner who is working more than 24 hours a week.

To get either form of JSA you must be out of work or working for fewer than 16 hours a week; and be capable of work, actively seeking and available for work for at least 40 hours a week. If you qualify for income-based JSA you may also be able to claim other benefits automatically such as housing benefit, council tax benefit, free prescriptions, dental treatment and so on.

To apply for JSA, phone 0800 055 6688 or fill in the online form (bit.ly/bSgaGO) on the government's public service advice website Directgov (direct.gov.uk), which has more information on benefits.

Graham Snowdon, Work editor, the Guardian

It's normal to feel low just after graduation. For some, it's because the energy they needed is still flowing but now it has no outlet, so they feel anxious. For others, it's because they've realised how much effort they've expended, and they feel exhausted. Whatever the reason, here are three tips to help you feel more positive again:

1. Pay attention to the words you use. Graduation represents an ending, it's true – but it also represents new beginnings. It's more energising to speak of new beginnings.

2. The key here lies in the word "beginnings" as opposed to "beginning". Instead of saying, "I need to start my career," break the task ahead into smaller steps and frame each step in a way that allows you to measure progress. So, for example, instead of expecting to "sort myself out", ask yourself to "prepare my CV", "find two referees", and "register with an employment agency". Put these goals in chronological order and focus on one at a time until you have achieved it.

3. In the long run you will almost certainly conclude that the most treasured aspect of your university experience wasn't your academic education or any careers advice, but rather the friends you made. Make it a priority to stay in touch with those who mattered most to you during your university career.

Linda Blair, clinical psychologist

How to teach ... archaeology

 Vikings are just one of the areas plundered for our resources on archaeology. Photograph: Peter Sandground

Offer a class the chance to make fake poo, and they might think the teacher had lost the plot.

But making fake poo and learning how to excavate it is just one of the resources lined up for teachers on the Guardian Teacher Network this week – in celebration of the start of the 21st British Festival of Archaeology.

And if constructing fake poo for an Aztec or a Viking doesn't appeal, then pupils can have a go at mummifying an orange, making a Viking braid, or even making a tussy mussy or medieval nosegay to ward off illness and disease.

These resources, which have been provided by the Young Archaeologists' Club (YAC), offer more than just a fun activity to fill a bit of space in the timetable. They are also not just about "history", but offer routes into drama, maths, science and geography.

There are also teacher packs on how to identify monuments, record findings and investigate historic buildings on the site – simply search Guardian Teacher Network under archaeology.

Wendi Terry, head of the YAC at the Council for British Archaeology, firmly believes the subject has many cross-curricular links and loads of opportunities for hands-on learning.

She says: "By its very nature, archaeology involves primary sources, problem-solving and co-operation, investigating and interpreting, observing and describing, measuring and recording, preserving and protecting and communicating findings – all of which can be applied to a range of different topics and subjects.

"Archaeology offers a great range of practical, real-life starting points."

Some background resources are available on our network in the form of the Pocket Histories series from the Museum of London – themes include Queen Boudicca in London, the River Thames in prehistory and What Life was like in Roman London.

Archaeological images for use on the interactive whiteboard are another resource now available to use and download, thanks to the Higher Education Academy, Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology.

And to really get involved in archaeology, you could take part in one of the 800 archaeological events being showcased around the country for the festival. Highlights for families include getting involved with a community dig at a typical Victorian terraced house in Sheffield, drill practice for junior soldiers at the Housesteads Roman Fort at Hadrian's Wall, and Stone Age survival at Cheddar Gorge, Somerset.

For anyone living in or visiting London over the next couple of weeks, the Museum of London has a wide selection of Roman-themed events planned, ranging from Gladiator Games and an interactive Roman archaeology walk to how to make your own Roman mosaics or lamp.

The Tower of London is also opening its beach, for the one and only time this year, for a treasure hunt.

• The Guardian Teacher Network offers more than 70,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. This is being added to every day: 35,000 teachers have already registered. Go to teachers.guardian.co.uk. There are more than 1,000 jobs and schools can advertise free: schoolsjobs.guardian.co.uk

EMA reforms were rushed and ill-thought-through, say MPs

 Students protest against plans to cut education maintenance allowance in London in January. A group of MPs said on Tuesday they were not convinced that a bursary scheme to replace EMA would be fairer on poorer children. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Gove's replacement for the scrapped education maintenance allowance is a "rushed and ill-thought-through" reform that was unveiled too late for teenagers making decisions about study in September, according to a committee of MPs.

Michael Gove announced the abolition of EMA, which helped students in households earning under £21,000 a year, as part of the spending review in October 2010.

A replacement scheme of bursaries for the poorest students administered by colleges was unveiled in March.

In a report published on Tuesday, the education select committee warns that the changeover was poorly handled and funding allocated too late for 16-year-olds to make informed decisions.

The report says ministers should have done more to acknowledge EMA's impact on participation, attainment and retention, before they decided how to restructure financial support.

The MPs said they were not convinced that bursaries administered by schools and colleges would be fairer or better targeted than a slimmed-down version of EMA.

But the committee accepted that a change was inevitable. "The need to examine every area of public spending is not in dispute, nor is the need to make difficult decisions," the report says.

Conservative MP Graham Stuart, chairman of the education select committee, said: "Young people taking life-defining decisions at 16 need clear information on the support they may receive and deserve better than rushed and ill-thought-through reforms.

"We accept that changes and savings need to be made but the organisation of the change has been far from smooth. Decisions on how much will be available for distribution by each school or college have been taken far too late, and it is 16-year-olds who have suffered uncertainty as a result. That should not have been allowed to happen."

The MPs criticise the government's main argument for abolishing EMA, that 90% of recipients would have chosen to study without the allowance.

Proponents of this view argue the high "deadweight cost", in effect, becomes 100% once legislation to make participation in 16-18 education or training compulsory comes into force in 2013.

The MPs say the 90% figure may be a "rounding-up" of an 88% figure in a study of barriers to participation in education and training. The author of the study, Thomas Spielhofer, told the committee that the 88% included some for whom finance was a constraint if not an absolute barrier. He also indicated that the 12% who would not go on to study without financial support was a significant figure, and he described it as "a worrying statistic".

Gove's decision led to public protests by further education college students. The MPs' report also finds that there is a strong argument for saying that 16- and 17-year-olds subject to compulsory study or training should be eligible for free or subsidised travel. It also says there is no logic in making free school meals available to 16- to 18-year-olds in schools but not in colleges, and says that equal eligibility should be the medium- to long-term aim.

Nearly 640,000 students took up EMA in 2009-10.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the college lecturers' union the UCU, said: "We are pleased the select committee has acknowledged the complete mess the government has made of the EMA. Ever since the government started cherry-picking research to drive through the end of the EMA it has been clear to us that thousands of the country's poorest teenagers would suffer. It was insulting to hear Michael Gove dismiss the EMA as a deadweight cost – something that has now been proven incorrect."

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "We have always been clear that we will not allow financial issues to be a barrier to young people staying on at school or college post-16.

"We are pleased to see that the committee acknowledges the government's rationale for closing the very expensive and centralised EMA scheme. This decision was made based on thorough analysis of all the available evidence and we have worked with representative bodies such as the Association of Colleges throughout this process.

"We firmly believe that a more targeted approach is needed and it is right to put money in the hands of heads and college principals, who know their pupils best. This is precisely what the new bursary scheme will do."

A little competition

 A little competition is probably no bad thing, as long as children know that it’s the taking part, not the winning, that counts. Photograph: Martyn Annetts/Alamy

School sports days are no longer competitive. That is what popular wisdom would have us believe. Of course, those who proclaim it most fervently are the sort of people who make curly finger signs in the air whenever they say "political correctness" or "health and safety", conveying an inexplicable degree of fury that their God-given right to cause others both offence and physical injury is being curbed. But do they have a point?

In the spirit of investigative journalism for which this newspaper is famed, I am writing this having just returned from my daughter's sports day – at which, incidentally, she won the 100m sprint. You will have gathered from this that her school operates a pretty traditional kind of event.

It wasn't ever thus. In the past I have seen various bewildering team activities, such as passing a quoit backwards through a line of sack-wearing children jumping on balloons. But then just because an event doesn't involve running (at which my daughter – did I mention? – excelled) or jumping or chucking something, that doesn't mean it's not competitive.

In my son's first term at nursery he took part in a dressing-up race. He ran to the first post as speedily as any of the other children. But when he got there and found on the ground before him a big sweater that he was expected to put on before running onwards, he did what he always did when getting dressed in the mornings: he stood still, put his arms up and waited for me to haul it over his head.

Don't tell me that race wasn't about winning and losing. It was just that the loser in question was clearly me, a mother who had failed to teach her child a basic life-skill.

Anyway, more recent sports days have consisted of traditional races, which children clearly win or lose. In my daughter's case, for instance, she won. I apologise if I've mentioned that already, but I think it is important to paint an accurate picture. So maybe the "political correctness" bashers are winning the day, and teachers are ritually humiliating young children simply to put a stop to certain parents' Clarksonian sneering. Or maybe it's because, as children get older, it becomes unfeasible to protect them from failure.

Is that a good thing? Perhaps you should ask the little boy who streaked ahead of the field for the first half of the 500m before realising, with evident horror, that what he had thought was the finishing line was actually the halfway mark. As he limped home, red-faced and gasping, seemingly hours after his rivals, I wonder if he felt like someone who'd learned a valuable life lesson, or just a bit of a numpty.

Children are going to fail at stuff. They do not have to be taught to do it. But it probably does not hurt them to see that it happens to everyone. And, particularly when the kids who don't shine in the classroom get a chance to show off in some other arena, I reckon that affording them a moment of glory is an admirable thing.

My only concern, in an age when children take part in less physical activity than is good for them, is that the pressure to succeed can suck all the joy out of it and make them even less likely to think of sport as fun. The flipside of that is that a child like my daughter – who, although she loves dancing and long walks, has never considered herself to be sporty – was clearly delighted to find herself a winner. (I did mention that she came first in the 100m sprint, didn't I? I'd hate you to fail to grasp that point.)

I myself was that stereotypically swotty child who never understood the rules of netball. But I am sure that my own sporting achievement (year eight egg-and-spoon race) helped to nurture in me a can-do sense of ambition. It seems to me that, as long as we all emphasise that it's the taking part, not the winning, that counts, a little competition is probably no bad thing. And that's the message I gave my daughter shortly before she sped her way to glorious, unequivocal victory.

Massachusetts To Ban ‘Unhealthy’ Foods In Public Schools

The state of Massachusetts' health regulators are effectively banning the sale of foods they deem 'unhealthy' on public school grounds

Kay Lazar, writing in The Boston Globe this week, there will be some upcoming changes to the menu at all public schools in the state of Massachusetts.  Sugary soft drinks, diet sodas, and heart unhealthy food will be a thing of the past at school snack shops, vending machines, and a la carte cafeteria lines under rules unanimously approved yesterday by state health regulators.  The nutrition standards adopted by the Public Health Council take effect in the 2012-2013 school year and are believed by advocates to be among the most comprehensive in the country.

The council – an appointed panel of doctors, consumer advocates, and professors – delayed a ban on sweetened, flavored milk until August 2013 to give schools more time to find other ways to encourage children to drink milk.

“We knew that people were going to have strong feelings about this and were concerned that overall milk consumption would drop,’’ said Dr. Lauren Smith, medical director of the Department of Public Health. “We wanted to give schools time to prepare so it can be done in a seamless way.’’ Studies have shown that when flavored milk is banned, milk consumption drops slightly but then rebounds, she said.

The new rules reflect concerns about growing numbers in obese children and adolescents.  Faced with the troubling numbers, lawmakers directed the Department of Public Health last year to create a healthier menu for students. Low-fat snacks, whole-grain baked goods, fruits, and vegetables will now be prominently featured.  Studies have linked even moderate consumption of soft drinks to substantially elevated risk of heart disease and diabetes. Harvard researchers have shown, for instance, that a 20-ounce soft drink contains the equivalent of 17 teaspoons of sugar.

In some schools, nearly half of students are overweight or obese.  Meanwhile authorities learned that students chose their milk primarily based on how it was packaged. The district wanted to switch from whole to low-fat milk but worried consumption would plunge. Working with researchers from the University of Massachusetts, the district studied students’ choices and found most were selecting blue cartons, which contained the lowest-fat milk.

HASS cedes to culture in draft research roadmap

HUMANITIES will lose their brief-lived priority status, but will benefit from a new focus on cultures and communities, under modified plans to guide spending on research capital.

The exposure draft of the ‘2011 strategic roadmap for Australian research infrastructure’ – currently out for consultation – outlines the 18 research “capabilities” where the federal government plans to target large-scale research infrastructure investment, up from 16 in the roadmap’s 2008 version.

But “humanities, arts and social sciences” – which was included in 2008 after being overlooked in the original 2006 roadmap – has been ditched, along with “heavy ion accelerators” and “disaster and hazard test-bed”.

Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences executive director Angela Magarry said the addition of a fifth national research priority – “understanding cultures and communities” – would “definitely” benefit the HASS sector.

Six of the 18 capabilities contribute to the new NRP, including the newly added areas of “cultures and communities” and “digitisation infrastructure”.

But the other four NRPS are far better represented, with the “environmentally sustainable” and “safeguarding Australia” priorities claiming 15 capabilities each. “Health” ticks the boxes of 11 capabilities, and “frontier technologies” claims nine.

The roadmap says the 2011 capabilities contribute to more than one research priority each, thus demonstrating “the benefits of a national, collaborative approach to research infrastructure investment”.

But two of the new capabilities, “cyber security” and “atmospheric observations”, contribute to just one priority each.

Another new capability of “biological collections and biobanking” has been added to the latest roadmap, while eight other capabilities have been refocused.

Ms Magarry commended the draft’s development and welcomed “the intention to examine the currency of mix between capability areas and researchers’ needs, and how that may enable innovation”.

“But there remains a lack of detail about what kind of eResearch facility the government has in mind,” she added.
The paper recognises eResearch as “a pervasive and underpinning requirement needed to support all research and research collaboration”.

“There is now significant acceptance by researchers and others that the opportunities generated by previously unimaginable amounts of data can only be realised through the use of an eResearch infrastructure capability,” it says.

“This requires both a foundational eResearch infrastructure base and eResearch solutions designed for specific domains.”

The paper outlines the eResearch requirements that need attention, including data, digitisation, high performance computing, networks, human capital, software and collaboration resources.

“CHASS urges emphasis on a targeted national investment which allows for the network of interoperable data repositories to be linked,” Ms Magarry said.

Comments on the exposure draft are due this Friday July 22.

What I wish I'd known when I graduated

 Emmy the Great. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

"I didn't use email properly until I went to university in 1997. The proliferation of social media and the internet into our lives was still at a fairly early stage then. I really wish I'd learned more about it then, and perhaps pursued a net-based commercial venture at that time. I've got friends who now run online-based businesses and what they do is incredibly dynamic and innovative. I feel like I missed a trick there, and that's one of the reasons I love my role as shadow minister for small business and enterprise.

"I adore my job. But the one thing I find difficult is managing the many demands on my time – I literally work a seven-day week. If I'd known I would be so short of time now, I would have made a lot more of the spare time that I had then."

"I got very depressed when I left university because I felt like I needed to know what I was going to do. I'd had those first three years to think about it, but still hadn't found it. What I've discovered over the past five or six years is that a lot of people don't know what they're doing; they just appear to you as if they do.

"I wish I'd known that you didn't have to have it all figured out straight away. The job that you do straight after university isn't going to define you for your whole life. Nobody gets it right immediately; there are people in their 40s who are starting something brand new and they're OK with that. So it's OK to be 21 without any definite plans.

"I wish I'd known not to be anxious about the future. I would like to go back in time and tell myself to relax, and just to do all of the work I did without the concern over where it would take me.

"It's OK to have an identity, but remember the world is wider than you think it is – that's something that I realise more and more every year."

After leaving Sussex University in 1999, I stayed on in Brighton, with my then-boyfriend, in a bedsit. I was taking a postgraduate course in magazine journalism, working at a call centre, running a cafe at a windsurfing club, and writing stories for local papers. It was a 90-hour work week, minimum. I had five pounds a week after bills, maximum. I was too broke to spend £300 on the optional shorthand course; I was scared of debt. But stinting here was a mistake. It was a fair price, a necessary skill, and a loan would have saved time and trouble later.
It would have been good if I'd presented myself professionally from the start. I wanted to write for national publications, but I didn't have any contacts or a clue how people behaved. So I guessed. I figured that the people who worked at style magazines were hepcats, and I should therefore email them in hepcat talk, with a hepcat idea. My subject line read: "Dudes who drink their own piss." Weirdly, they never replied.
At the end of my course, I sent my CV to all the newspaper sections I liked, asking if they had any short-term research jobs. It reached an editor at the Sunday Times who needed a full-time administrator; I landed the job. I was soon writing regularly. Starting a new job is hard, and starting your first is hardest. But you will settle in.

I'd say: "Don't expect to run before you can walk." It's a difficult thing to learn. In my first job, I had to make the occasional cup of coffee for people and stick newspapers up on the wall. I'd just come from being president of my student union with a big ego and thinking I was the bee's knees, and I was in effect back to doing an apprenticeship. I think we all have to do an apprenticeship in life. Think about it this way: if you've been working for two years and the person sitting next to you has been there 20 years, they've been in the working world 10 times as long as you. It's a whole new age and you're nascent. I wish I'd known at the time to take a deep breath, to bide my time and understand that actually, it was great.

"Don't panic too much about what you want to be. Unless you want to go into one of the vocational professions, such as law or medicine, you cannot know what work is really like and what you're suited for. It's a virtually impossible ask.

Don't be scared to go and get a job that seems decent, and then at 24 or 25, once you've got some experience of the working world, re-evaluate. At that point, don't be afraid to take the leap, even if it's a radical change, because you can work out what you're better suited for.

I'm glad I did the job I did – it taught me a lot about work and I gained skills. One of the greatest lessons you can learn in life is this: don't gain jobs as much as gain skills. If you're not learning extra skills, then you probably need to move on. It's what I did at 25 – I knew I was in the wrong job.

Connexions cuts could hit clearing students, expert warns

 Jobs at Connexions have been slashed across the country. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds face going through the post-exams clearing process without crucial advice about securing a university place because of cuts to the Connexions service, experts warn.

Andy Gardner, of the Institute of Career Guidance, said he had serious concerns about what would happen to pupils who failed to get the results they needed for their first-choice degree course, amid a race for places in the year before tuition fees rise.

Jobs at Connexions, which helps 13- to 25-year-olds, have been slashed across the country. A survey by the public sector union Unison this year found almost all local authorities in England were planning cuts at careers services, with some – including East Sussex and Lewisham, in south London – closing completely. At least 8,000 advisers were due to lose their jobs.

The government is planning a new national careers service but it is not due to start operating until 2012.

Gardner, who helped to write recent guidance for prospective students applying to the Russell group of research-intensive universities, said teenagers from the poorest areas were likely to be hardest hit by a lack of face-to-face advice this year.

At schools where careers guidance is weak, and where specialist help will not be available during the results period in August, Connexions has been key to helping young people decide what to do, he said.

"The ICG is very worried about A-level results time," he told EducationGuardian. "It's really helpful if you can see someone who has seen you before and knows you and your school.

"Unfortunately it's often in the schools that have the most social deprivation where the advice is weakest, and that's going to be exacerbated by the destruction of Connexions."

The Russell group guidance, Informed Choices [pdf], acknowledged officially for the first time that the top universities favour traditional subjects at A-level, and warned students against taking too many "soft" subjects.

This month the Sutton Trust published research showing wide variations in the numbers getting into elite universities among schools with similar results. Gardner said in many cases it may be down to bad careers advice in schools, with pupils who aspired to Russell group institutions not being helped to pick subjects that would impress admissions tutors. Cuts to Connexions services would make the problem worse, he said.

"Connexions was really getting into talking to young people about the Informed Choices decision. Middle-class parents are picking up on it and telling their kids, but if it's a working-class kid in a provincial school there's every chance they might not pick up on that. It looks pretty bleak."

How to survive looking for a job

 Find out as much as you can about your prospective employer. Photograph: Westend61

Reconnect with friends

Pick carefully. If you've not found a job then make sure the friends you see haven't either. Seeing friends with careers lined up for them will be more than a little dispiriting, and steer well clear of anyone currently choosing between two job offers who claims they "really, really need your advice" (the consult-o-brag). If you are one of those people who has had a job lined up since Christmas, then this guide isn't really for you.

Hit the gym

Odds are one too many biscuit-fuelled all-nighters have taken a heavy toll on your precious BMI. Getting back in shape after six months spent squatting in libraries should be the graduate's first priority. Not only will you be more confident in job interviews, you'll be more likely to find part-time work as a model or personal trainer. Get buff enough and you may find you don't need that degree at all.

Start a blog

Blogs are like hairdressing salons: they stand or fall on the quality of the pun in the title, so choose well. Blogging about your area of interest is a great way to demonstrate a passion for your chosen career. Just be careful. Never get drunk and blog about how much you hate your ex. Potential employers will visit your blog, read that post and hire the ex instead. Happens all the time.

Read for pleasure

Remember what it was like to read a book just because you could? To get from start to finish without whipping out a highlighter, nabbing a quotation or inserting a Post-it note? Well then, here's some good news: that rare and outdated pleasure can be yours once again. It's not just reading that you're free to enjoy now either. Remember all that time you spent attending lectures because you had to? Now you can go to those lectures just because that's who you are.

Get off Facebook

When you're hunting for jobs, your first urge each morning will be to hop on the big white book and see if anybody else has had an offer yet. Don't. Keeping tabs on the progress of fellow graduates may seem vital but it's really just a waste of your time. Would Usain Bolt be the fastest sprinter in the world if he turned round to check on his opponents all the time? No, of course not. If anything, he'd probably fall over. And that's Usain Bolt.

Choose a nemesis

Pick someone younger and more successful than you are and hate the living daylights out of them. Jack Whitehall is an obvious target, but the more obscure the nemesis the more rewarding the vendetta. Hating, for example, medical prodigy Akrit Jaswal – famous in India for performing surgery at the age of seven – should provide enough frustrated energy to propel even the weakest of candidates into a magic-circle law firm.

Keep your eyes on the prize

Create a collage of the lifestyle that awaits you when you finally land that graduate job. Take some scissors to a pile of upmarket catalogues and coat your walls in photos of woks, cafetieres and jars of pesto. Not only is this a great way to keep your spirits up, it will save you a fortune on wallpaper. If you're really feeling down try building yourself a papier-mache Vauxhall Astra.

Dress to impress

Ever heard the phrase: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have"? Well, it works. From 1958 to 1964, an anonymous Ohio bank clerk came to work every day in a spacesuit. People laughed, pointed and demanded to speak to his line manager. He laughed last. That bank clerk's name was Neil Armstrong.

Do the research

Above all, employers are looking for someone who's passionate about the company. Competition is fiercer than ever, so reading the Wikipedia page just won't cut it. Subscribing to industry magazines is a step in the right direction, but for real insider knowledge your best bet is to fish out those binoculars and take a trip to the firm's head office. All the most memorable telephone inquiries begin with the words: "I can see you."

Get networking

The seldom-appreciated truth about the job market is that it's not what you know or who you know. It's who knows that you know what you know. Look at the guy from Good Will Hunting. He was the smartest man in the world but he was working as a janitor. And why? Because while everyone else was out showing the world what they could do he was sitting in an Irish pub with Ben Affleck obsessing about being abused as a child. They might as well have called that film Bad Job Hunting.

Pimp your CV

Have you seen that clip-art image of a stick man using a rolled-up diploma as a surfboard? In more ways than one, that stick man is you, so let prospective employers know it and put that image right there by your name. Fonts, colours, glitter, Magic Eye – there are millions of ways to make a CV stand out without acquiring a single new marketable skill. So why bother?

Intern yourself

Where would Nick Clegg be today without internships? He would never have become deputy prime minister, that's for sure, and I think we can all agree that that would have been a shame for everyone. David Cameron has said it's fine to give an internship to a friend's child, so tell your parents to bite the bullet and spend more time hanging out with David Cameron. If they can't stand that, just ask them to buy you one. You should be able to pick up a two-week investment banking placement at auction for as little as £2,000.

Ideas are money

All successful businesses began as ideas. Therefore, as philosophy graduates will have recognised, all ideas are potentially successful businesses. Hats for doors? That's a business. Spanish pens? That's a business. Remote-control hair? That could be the next Facebook. Who needs a social network when they can steer their own beard round the garden? Probably no one. All I'm saying is there was an episode of The Apprentice where they literally made money selling wood.

Sell your books

There's a tidy sum to be made by sticking those old textbooks up on eBay, and more still if you can take the time to forge the author's signature. A signed first edition copy of Mathematics for Economists can sell for upwards of £11.50. If there's no one willing to buy them you can always save some money by putting them to work as makeshift firelighters. As the old saying has it: first they burned the books, then they found long-term employment.

Go door to door

In the words of Heath Ledger's The Joker: "If you're good at something, never do it for free." You're good at critically assessing things, or doing physics, or whatever your degree was in, so hit the streets and find the people who are looking for those skills. There's bound to be someone in your area hoping to discuss the role of class in the writings of John Stuart Mill. You can answer that very very weird person's prayers. For a fee, of course.

Temp (temporarily)

Think of temping as like being a superhero. Wherever there is photocopying, you will be there. Wherever there is thirstiness, you will bring tea. Wherever there is illness, you will find short-term employment. You are above petty office rivalries, detached from gossip, not invited to post-work drinks. You appear only when needed and vanish long before anyone can learn your name. You are The Temp. At least until you find something better.

Apply for a master's

Sometimes the smartest decision you can make is to decide not to make a decision. Taking on a master's will give you at least another year to work out what you actually want to do with your life. Plus, once that's over you can apply for a PhD, staving off "the real world" almost indefinitely.

Go travelling

Studying for a master's may be the more prestigious way out but taking a gap year has its own advantages. For one thing, it gives you a year-long amnesty from the question, "So what are you up to at the moment?" For another, when you return you'll have an arsenal of anecdotes with which to bore friends who whine-o-brag to you about their jobs. Spend your year abroad helping others and it might even look quite good on that CV. Which it'll have to, since by then there'll be another 150,000 graduates to compete with.

Don't worry

You'll be fine.

TED's Chris Anderson: the man who made YouTube clever

 Chris Anderson hosts Session One of TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinburgh Photograph: James Duncan Davidson/TED

A few minutes after Alain de Botton announced to a packed auditorium in Edinburgh that secularism needed to learn the lessons of religion and reintroduce the concept of the sermon, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, needed to fill a few minutes and asked for questions from the floor. "Is TED a new religion?" asked someone. "I can answer that," he said quickly. "Absolutely not."

And yet TED has brought back the concept of the sermon – 18-minute talks delivered by absolute experts in their fields. Five years ago, when YouTube started out, it was assumed to be where you went to look at cats that looked like Hitler, or people falling off skateboards, but TED Talks, with its short disquisitions on everything from neuroscience to creativity, has just celebrated 500m views on the site. By the end of next year, that figure is expected to reach a billion. In the month when the News of the World folded, Anderson has demonstrated that there is an enormous and still largely untapped appetite for actual news of the actual world.

But then, as media magnates go, he is about as far removed from the chairman of News Corp as you could imagine. He founded and made his fortune from not one, but two, media empires – first with Future Publishing, the Bath-based company he founded in the 1980s which exploited the appetite for computer and hobby magazines; and later in the US with Imagine Media, which at one time had 130 titles and 1,500 employees – but he is in many ways the anti-Murdoch. Not least because, apart from anything else, few people have heard of him.

However, as the owner of TED and its self-styled "curator", he has become a sort of global "ideas meister". Appearing at a TED conference, as more than 70 speakers did last week at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh, can have a transformative effect on an academic career. "We try to make our speakers look like rock stars," says June Cohen, the head of TED Talks. To a large degree, they succeed. A talk by Ken Robinson, a fairly obscure figure by anyone's standards, a Liverpudlian former professor of arts education at Warwick University, has now been viewed eight million times.

Is it a religion, though? Not yet, though it has its rituals – attendees of the conferences check their cynicism in at the door; standing ovations at TED seem, at times, like mandatory acts of obeisance rather than spontaneous moments of appreciation – and it's not far off De Botton's description of the Catholic church: "collaborative, multinational, branded and highly disciplined". Anderson himself is the child of missionary parents, born in Pakistan and educated in India. He isn't, he says, "an earnest do-gooder", though Bruno Giussani, TED's European director, who programmed TEDGlobal, notes that he can't hide his optimistic nature.

Giussani got his job at TED after sending Anderson an email out of the blue suggesting some speakers. "He wrote back within minutes. It tells you a lot about Chris. He's just very open to new ideas. He takes decisions quickly and he has the courage to do things that others wouldn't," says Giussani.

Things like the decision in 2005 to give away the content for free. Because what's most remarkable about TED and its transformation into an international media organisation and a global force for the dissemination for knowledge is that it all happened pretty much by accident. When Anderson bought TED in 2001 on behalf of his non-profit-making Sapling Foundation, it was more like an elite supper club for the masters of the universe.

It was where Bill Gates came to rub shoulders with Al Gore and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and the annual Californian conference still has that feel. And it's not cheap: the 850 attendees of TEDGlobal had paid nearly £4,000 a pop. But in 2005, Anderson listened to his speakers – people who had talked about the Creative Commons and the way the internet could be a force for good – and he put all the talks online.

"TED went from being 800 once a year, to half a million every day in a shockingly short space of time," says Anderson. "And instead of destroying the business model, which is what a lot of people thought, because essentially it's giving away the crown jewels, it actually boosts it because more people have heard about it."

Online video, he believes, is the start of a revolution. He calls it "crowd-accelerated learning" and his latest initiative, TED Ed, is about creating a database of educational resources that can be used in any classroom in the world.

"But thank God it hasn't gone to his head," said John Lloyd, the veteran comedy producer of Blackadder and co-creator of QI, who was in Edinburgh this week. Anderson rang him up in 2005 and asked him if he would speak at the first TEDGlobal.

"Of course I'd never heard of it, but I liked him immediately. I thought he was brilliant. And now TED has become like Comic Relief: if you get the call, you can't say no." The old media is in crisis, claims Lloyd. "Television just assumes people are stupid, but if you're motivated there's all this amazing stuff out there. Intellectual mobility is where it's at, rather than social mobility. And in this the power of TED is almost limitless. It's kicking ass."

Yes, quite possibly, says the games designer Kevin Slavin. The world has become a place where algorithms battle each other for supremacy. He cites the example of the "Flash Crash" of last year, when, at 2.42pm on 6 May, 9% of the Dow Jones index simply disappeared "and nobody knew where it went". It was simply one bunch of computer algorithms battling it out against another bunch of computer algorithms, unmediated by man. Who is it who's running this world we live in? No one.

Forget teenage hackers, there are entire criminal networks out there dedicated to stealing your bank details and taking over your computer. According to Mikko Hypponen, a Finnish cybersecurity expert, they're impossible to find, and even if they are found, the local police don't tend to act. We need an Interpol for the internet, he says, and a safe and secure backup. Dust off your fax machine, he says, just in case.

Rebecca MacKinnon of the international bloggers' network Global Voices Online claims it is starting to act like one. Private companies, she argues, are starting to behave like governments. They're applying censorship or responding to requests from regimes and creating what she calls "a new layer of private sovereignty". In the old days, there were nation states; in the new world order, there are supra-national corporations exercising power without restraint. We need to lobby, she says, for a "consent of the networked".

No, it's a flying car, although according to one of the engineers who worked on it, Anna Mracek Dietrich, it's not so much a car that flies as a plane that drives. Still, the Transition is a "roadable light sport aircraft" and will be in an executive jet shop near you by the end of next year. It's not perhaps the greatest technological breakthrough ever, but it looks like it's out of Thunderbirds and will almost certainly inspire an episode of Top Gear coming to a TV near you soon.

Technology doesn't necessarily mean progress, according to the writer Malcolm Gladwell. As US drones have become more accurate and efficient, the Afghan people have got angrier, he points out; casualties have risen tenfold. New inventions are simply new inventions; they won't necessarily save us from ourselves.

Will Iowa Public Schools Be Able To Get Their Groove Back?

The Iowa public school system used to be a fine-tuned, well-oiled machine producing top-tier students. Columnist Lee Rood wonders if those days can return?

Writing in The Des Moines Register, Lee Rood asks the question: “Can Iowa School regain their luster?”

The last time Iowa was considered No. 1 overall in education, teachers faced fewer challenges in the classroom, students were more homogenous and school districts required less of them to graduate.

That was 1992.

Iowa’s problems in education are by no means unique in the United States right now.  Many states are scrambling to figure out how to impede the gradual (and in some cases, much more than gradual) decline in scores and achievement.  Iowa’s Gov. Terry Branstad is striving to restore the state’s standing as a national education leader.  But, not surprisingly, teachers, policymakers and politicians fiercely disagree over what it will take to get the state back on top. There are even some disputing that Iowa’s students have slid dramatically in performance at all. What the different factions do agree on is that Iowa is experiencing rapid change in the classroom.  For example, students are significantly poorer, more urban and more diverse than they were in 1992.  Also, the course work students are assigned is more rigorous than it was in the early 1990s.

Many believe state leaders should focus on those challenging issues as Branstad convenes his sold-out education summit July 25-26.

“What the summit should be about is the issues confronting schools over the next couple of decades,” Des Moines school board member Dick Murphy said. “We need to examine what resources are needed to ensure our students are getting the best education they can get.”

The stakes not only for Iowa, but for the country as a whole, are high.  According to a recent analysis from the Asia Society and the Council of Chief State School Officers, at least 70 percent of U.S. jobs in 2009 required specialized knowledge and skill, while only 5 percent did 100 years ago. Demand for an educated work force is only expected to increase.

To read more about Gov. Branstad’s ideas regarding ways to bring education in Iowa back up, click here.

A vocational course is not a 'dead end'

 Is a degree in chemical engineering a 'dead-end' if you finish up working in banking? Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

People are quick to condemn vocational qualifications as "dead-end" if they fail to lead directly to jobs, but have rarely subjected A-levels and degrees to the same test. This could change as degrees become more expensive and people question whether the qualification is worth the cost.

As colleges gear up for the autumn intake from schools, and send tens of thousands of students on to higher education, it is surprising so little has been said about this. After all, while the Wolf report praised some vocational qualifications, it claimed there were 350,000 young people on "dead-end" courses. Meanwhile we saw a hike in university fees to £9,000 maximum.

So how do you judge the value of a qualification? It is always assumed academic studies are valuable in themselves; people would never say an engineering degree is a dead end if you ultimately become a banker. So why should an IT qualification be a cul-de-sac, if you become a care worker?

The Wolf report struck chords, not least because people recognised the perverse incentives that drive schools to use so-called dead-end courses: school league tables and the contested idea of GCSE equivalence. But the assertion begs two questions. Are "dead-end" courses only available in vocational education? And can cul-de-sacs be changed into part of a highway to success in life?

In 2003, the government calculated that graduates earned an average £400,000 more during their working lives than non-graduates. There was an acceptance that it didn't really matter what the subject was because the degree itself said something about your value.

However, expanding the number of graduates is certain to reduce the dividend of a degree. And though some young people may be persuaded that the loan repayments are acceptable, others won't, and the number of applicants for HE will fall.

While the way degrees relate to jobs is not yet a subject for public anxiety, it's a different story for other qualifications at lower levels of the qualification tree. What value will A-levels have in a world where they are less needed – where progress to HE is seen as an expensive investment and not necessarily cost-beneficial? And what about A-levels that do not lead to HE? Another "dead end"?

There is a different way of doing things and it means being less obsessed with certificates and more concerned with education. The world ahead for young people is one of increasing need for high-value skills and the capacity to be entrepreneurs. We will never be able to match future job-specific needs to the supply of young people via training, in a democracy. So we need to develop a thrust in our curriculum, teaching and learning that promotes the wider skills essential to success in work.

We need courses and teaching that provide skills, nurture attributes and encourage ingenuity. The "dead end" is avoided if a person can transfer these things to their next stage in learning. The answer is not just to dump tranches of vocational courses or restrict A-levels – so long as they deliver these greater goods.

In 2007, Professor Michael Shayer of King's College London published research showing that as test scores for 11-year-olds had risen, cognitive abilities had declined: they passed tests better but they could not think as well. Our future prosperity depends on young people who can think. We do not need perverse incentives to drive schools to put certificates ahead of capabilities, school targets ahead of individual opportunities; the need to fill places ahead of the needs of young people.

We need the potential of our young people to be liberated, and while there is a focus on liberating institutions we risk losing this much greater good in yet more dead ends.

• Andrew Thomson is former CEO of the Quality Improvement Agency and currently interim CEO of the Association of Colleges in the Eastern Region

Celebrating the creativity of young people with autism - in pictures

The competition was open to all young people aged 11-25 diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD)

Evan Findlay-Dykes, 19, Ty Coryton School Photograph: PR

University access: why some schools are so much more 'successful' than others

From left: Grace Taylor, Mark Dickinson and Natalie Allmark, pupils at St Edward's college in Liverpool, which is very successful at getting students into top universities. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Last week, a Cambridge tutor was visiting St Edward's college in Liverpool to talk to students about her subject – Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic – when the subject turned to university admissions. Neither Grace Taylor nor Natalie Allmark fancies delving into the murkier end of the Middle Ages themselves – they're hoping to study nutrition and engineering respectively – or indeed going to Cambridge, but they still found the meeting enlightening as they prepare to apply to university in an ever more competitive environment.

"She told us you've got to show commitment to your course, and go out and do extra reading," Taylor says. "You've got to show you're actually interested in it," Allmark adds. "I think that was really important."

It's this kind of provision that helped St Edward's, a Catholic academy with 1,200 pupils, to become one of just four non-selective state schools lauded in a recent Sutton Trust report as punching well above their weight in terms of the number of pupils they get both into university overall, relative to their exam results, and also into the 30 institutions defined as the most selective (the "Sutton Trust 30").

Much coverage of Degrees of Success, the trust's study into the higher education destinations of pupils at every school and college in England, focused on the astounding fact that just five – Westminster, Eton, St Paul's, St Paul's Girls' and Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge – sent more students to Oxbridge over three years than 2,000 others combined.

The statistics also revealed predictable chasms between the success of state and independent institutions. But of equal concern to the Sutton Trust were the wide differences it exposed in the proportions getting into higher education between schools with similar exam results – especially for the highly selective universities.

Such contrasts appeared at all levels of results, the report says, and are a genuine cause for concern. It highlights two grammar schools with almost identical exam scores, one of which got 61% into Sutton Trust 30 institutions, while the figure at the other was only 27%. At two comprehensives in the north of England with similar results, the proportions were 23% and 55%.

Such disparities may be due in part to the backgrounds of pupils' parents and geographical factors, if schools are not close to any of the top universities. But the subjects offered and the information and guidance given to students are also likely to be to blame in many cases, according to the Sutton Trust. In February, the Russell Group published Informed Choices, its guidance for applicants, which acknowledged officially for the first time that the top universities favour traditional subjects at A-level, and warned them off taking too many "soft" subjects.

"Beyond the results they produce, schools appear to differ considerably in the levels of aspiration they engender in their pupils and in the quality of preparation for selection for higher education," the report says. "There are many good examples of effective IAG [information and guidance] throughout the state sector, but there is widespread concern that poor advice may be contributing to the low progression rates in many comprehensive schools and FE colleges."

Admissions staff in several of the top 30 institutions complain that it is commonplace for able candidates to apply for places on courses they're not qualified for.

Lee Elliot Major, the Sutton Trust's research director, says schools may be offering too many soft subjects. "It could be that students are doing the wrong subject mix. That can maximise league table performance, but it's not particularly good for kids' prospects after school."

So who's getting it right and how?

Pupils at St Edward's achieve an average score of 793 points in their A-levels – a little over the 2010 national average of 744.8. An A is worth 270 points, a B 240 points and a C 210 points in the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) scheme. But over three years (2007-2009) the school saw 91% of its year 13s go to university, and 46% get into Sutton Trust 30 institutions. Other schools with similar Ucas scores see between 60% and 80% of students go to university and 15% to 30% reach the most selective institutions.

The key to the school's success in these terms turns out to be fairly simple: the headteacher, John Waszek, has a firm philosophy of "quality over quantity" when it comes to exams, with most students studying four subjects at AS-level and dropping down to three for their A2 exams. Similarly, most do no more than nine GCSEs. So while their average overall scores are not sky-high, what the tables don't show is that pupils are doing pretty well at the exams they are sitting, and those are the results that are getting them into the best universities.

The school has also put particular effort into working out the most reliable way of accurately predicting A-level grades, to give all pupils the best chance of choosing their strongest subjects.

"It's about looking at where they are and trying to give them a range that's right for them," Waszek says. "I know very few universities that focus on overall scores. Offers are about what goes on in your best three subjects." Limiting the number of subjects means students are likely to do better in those they're focusing on, and means they also have time for activities such as music, sport and "just being teenagers".

St Edward's, a former grammar school, is a highly successful, hugely oversubscribed school – it has been graded as outstanding three times in a row by Ofsted, and last year saw 670 applications for 150 places. It selects 10% of its intake on musical aptitude, as it is entitled to do as a specialist school. The proportion of pupils on free school meals is well below the national average. In other words, its students are by no means disadvantaged.

But Waszek reckons it's probably still the case that the majority of pupils' parents did not go to university themselves. He points out that four out of five of the students given Oxbridge offers this year are from families in which the parents did not go to university. Pupils are encouraged to aspire to higher education from the time they enter the school, and in the sixth form there are frequent talks from staff and experts about applications. For a communications skills day in year 12 they must all produce CVs and covering letters, and have mock interviews with local business people and professionals.

Allmark says she feels well supported over what is an increasingly fraught decision. "They don't just push you to apply for Oxford and Cambridge just because they're supposed to be the best. They're good at helping you make the decision that's right for you. Everyone feels the pressure to choose the right university. You don't want to go and then hate it."

Fellow student Mark Dickinson chips in: "Especially with the fees now."

It's a theme picked up by Andy Gardner, a careers adviser and a representative of the Institute of Career Guidance (ICG) who helped to write Informed Choices. Too many schools still don't give pupils enough decent advice, he says.

"If you're buying a house, you've got two people to help you, a solicitor and a surveyor. If you're buying a car, you get the AA to check it out for you. But when young people are choosing a university, they're making this huge decision with a really patchy system of advice.

"Many schools don't have a system whereby young people in the sixth form can book in with somebody who's trained in advice and guidance and talk through their individual situation.

"They're often making choices that are not informed. It's as simple as that."

The problem can be particularly acute for students destined for sixth-form college who are choosing A-level subjects at schools that don't have a sixth form and are not investing time in guidance.

And incredibly, admissions tutors at all types of universities report coming across students who have picked first-choice and insurance offers that have the same grade requirements, apparently failing to understand that the insurance offer should be a back-up if they don't make the grades. "That has to be an example of schools not having good systems of IAG," Gardner says.

One of the Sutton Trust's aims with the Degrees of Success report was to give parents and pupils a league table that would be more meaningful than one that gave exam results but did not indicate what success they had translated to in the outside world. Yet it admits that there are bound to be subtleties that the figures cannot convey, especially when it comes to reasons for an apparent lack of success in translating results into degree places.

Burgate school and sixth form centre in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, has an average QCDA points score of 886, higher than that of St Edward's, but according to the report gets only 65% of students into higher education and 19% into top 30 universities.

The assistant head, Katja Gibson, says the trust's overall figure is lower than the reality because it doesn't take into account all students who went on a gap year. The figure for the number of 2010 leavers going to university is 83%.

As for the number getting to the "top" universities, it may have more to do with geography and economics than anything else. Careers guidance is full and thorough, with a strong focus on how to get to Russell Group institutions, Gibson says, but students may choose different institutions. "We've got some other good universities around here. A lot of it is students aren't going so far away from home, for financial reasons." Both Portsmouth and Winchester are popular.

It's a similar story elsewhere. Dover Grammar school for girls is the school highlighted by the Sutton Trust as getting a much lower proportion of pupils into top 30 universities than another grammar with similar results, Torquay Boys – both are rated outstanding. Dover's QCDA points score is 1,091 and Torquay's 1,061.

But the headteacher, Matthew Bartlett, says the disparity is partly because around 20% of his students go to the University of Kent, which the school rates highly, but which is not in the Sutton Trust 30. "This choice is in many instances a pragmatic one, based on the need to live at home due to economic and social factors," he says. "Students choose Kent as the best university closest to them."

Dover students take more subjects on average than those in the Torquay school – five as opposed to four, based on a belief that breadth and depth will make them "well-educated young adults who are ready for their futures". That means the grades they are getting to achieve similar overall scores are lower and they're making fewer applications to the top universities.

"Why are the grades lower? Simply because we are committed to access for all of our students, and set a lower entry criteria, welcoming not just the highest achievers at GCSE," Bartlett says. "The lower grades at A-level will represent a very significant achievement for these students." Overall, 92% of students go to university, higher than Torquay's 87%.

Waszek, too, points out that a large number of his pupils, for financial reasons, go to Liverpool University. It is one of the Sutton Trust's top 30, and if it weren't, he admits the school probably would not be doing so well in the table.

Gardner's fear is that for pupils lacking good advice – very often those from disadvantaged backgrounds – the situation is only going to get worse, given the huge cuts to the Connexions careers service. Earlier this year, a survey by the public sector union Unison found that 8,000 advisers across England were losing their jobs, with some services closing completely. The ICG is worried many will have no one to give them crucial advice during clearing.

"Connexions was really getting into talking to young people about the Informed Choices decisions," Gardner says.

"Middle-class parents are picking up on it and telling their kids, but if it's a working-class kid in a provincial school, there's every chance they might not pick up on that. It looks pretty bleak."

What’s Gone Wrong With Testing In Public Schools?

This question has been posed by Emily Alpert, writing at Voice Of San Diego.com. With testing scandals rocking cities like Atlanta, Alpert wants to know "why?"

One would have to be living under a rock not to have heard all about the cheating scandals in Atlanta and Pennsylvania in recent months.  Writing at VoiceOfSanDiego.com, Emily Alpert wants to know why, and takes a closer look at what the causes of problems in standardized testing may be.

The fact of the matter is that the Atlanta scandal put a bright spotlight on how schools could potentially cheat on standardized tests.  In Ms. Alpert’s home state of California, schools are supposed to report any irregularities in testing and investigate them themselves. The state no longer collects data on erasures, one of the ways that investigators detected cheating in Atlanta. Nor does it do random audits during testing.  Irregularities can range from teachers accidentally not following exact instructions on how to administer state tests to outright cheating. The state then decides if it needs to adjust school scores to discount some of the test results. California keeps the records of testing irregularities for just one year.

I last requested those records for all schools in San Diego County in April. Keep in mind, these are the school districts that followed the rules and reported irregularities, just like they are supposed to.

The bigger problem is if cheating is going unreported and uncorrected, which is what happened in Atlanta. But these records give a sense of what kinds of problems can crop up during testing.

Here is what the documents turned up:

• Chula Vista Elementary School District found that at Veterans Elementary in spring 2010, four students said their teacher had pointed to specific questions they had answered on a state English test and told them to check their answers.  Afterwards, “she came back around and either said, check it one more time or just reviewed the next answers and didn’t say anything,” the report says.

• National School District reported that a school employee alleged that the principal of Rancho de La Nacion School had been erasing and making marks in test booklets for students with disabilities. The principal said she was just erasing stray marks and darkening answers. Four students were involved.

The school district investigated the allegation in spring 2010 and enlisted the San Diego County Office of Education to investigate as well. It concluded that no adults had changed any student responses. The County Office applauded National for “the rigorous review of the incident.”

• Poway Unified reported that a student used a calculator during a math test in spring 2010 at Monterey Ridge Elementary. The student had a disability that allowed him to use a calculator during other math tests, but that still isn’t allowed on the state test, the school district and the state concluded.

You can read about more of the schools Alpert investigated right here.

The state of California wants schools to be self-reporting and on the honor system.  California has stopped collecting data on erasures and dropped random test audits.  It relies even more on school districts to report and investigate irregularities that could taint test results. In all five of these cases, the California Department of Education agreed that a violation of state law or testing regulations had occurred.

Sir Paul Stephenson's strange definition of 'restraint' | Nina Power

 Mounted police drive their horses into protesters during student demonstrations in London, 9 December 2010. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

In Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation as Metropolitan police commissioner on Sunday night, one of the things he claimed he was most proud of the Met for was "the professional and restrained approach to unexpected levels of violence in recent student demonstrations". There are, however, many people who'd disagree with Stephenson's assessment, not least the scores of people from the student protests and other demonstrations now passing through the courts on serious charges of violent disorder, affray and criminal damage. In many of these cases the nature of the charges are ludicrously minimal: a lobbed lightweight stick here, a tipped-over bin there, and even the objectively not-violent-at-all-in-any-way offence of talking back to a police officer.

We have seen in the past couple of weeks the sentencing of Francis Fernie, jailed for 12 months for throwing a couple of banner sticks on the 26 March TUC protest, injuring no one. Much more widely covered was the 16 months handed down to Charlie Gilmour for sitting on the bonnet of a car that was part of the convoy carrying Charles and Camilla, and for throwing a bin, which may or may not have been done by him. Much has been made of Gilmour's other "crimes", the things he wasn't charged for: holding on to the Cenotaph flag being the favoured stick to beat him with according to the more moralising elements of the media, but also for things that by any reckoning, are neither crimes, nor Gilmour's "fault" as we would usually understand it: having a famous father, being relatively privileged and studying at Cambridge, being unhappy, and so on. But Gilmour, who is to appeal his sentence, is being punished not only for what he represents economically and socially, but above all for what he stands for politically – a student protesting against fee increases and education cuts.

It serves the interest of the press, the police and ultimately, parliament if protesters are isolated, pilloried and made examples of (as Gilmour, Fernie and, before them, Edward Woollard have all been). It does not serve them, their families, or those who defend the right to protest in general to demonise specific individuals. We run serious risks of undermining the legitimate reasons why so many hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in recent months if we start making arbitrary and prejudiced separations between those protesters we support and those we do not: many have made the point that real violence lies not with protesters, but with policies that increasingly destroy lives, as benefits and jobs are cut and cut again.

There are many, many cases to be processed in months to come as police have devoted hundreds of officers and man hours to identifying people they don't like the look of from the student protests as well as the TUC march and the strikes on 30 June. All of these charges have to be seen in the broader context: a government pushing the population to the streets through unpopular polices and into the hands of a police force that feels perfectly at ease to beat up, kettle and threaten protesters then arbitrarily arrest dozens of them with the complicity of the courts, which appear to think nothing of ruining the lives of people, many very young, by sending them to jail for actions that outside of a protest situation would be deemed to be of very little significance at all.

So why the crackdown on protesters, all the example-making? As the Met finds itself increasingly entwined in media and parliamentary corruption, it will need more scapegoats to lash out against. Students and young people, so long attacked and ridiculed as lazy and apathetic but now, conversely, for being politically active, seem to have provided the establishment with a recognisable enemy within. Incredibly harsh individual student prosecutions are being explicitly described as punishment not only for the actions of other protesters on the day, but as a warning to future protesters. Sentencing Fernie, Judge Nicholas Price QC said: "It is clear that not only must I take into account your actions but the general day", punishing Fernie for whatever description of the day the police decide to push for. (In initial plea hearings, prosecutors described the atmosphere of many of the protests as being "violent", pre-emptively determining how the situation might be understood – many would indeed describe the protests as violent, but coming from the police rather than the protesters.)

The case against UK Uncut for aggravated trespass in Fortnum & Mason on 26 March has provided one of the clearest images of the way these charges are designed to wage a form of psychological warfare not only on those charged, an isolating and harrowing experience for anyone, but also on future protesters. After months of delay it was finally announced on Monday that charges are being dropped against all of them except 30 UK Uncut protesters because the charges are "not in the public interest": not yet a complete victory, by any means, but hopefully an indication that as the Met's power and reputation crumbles into the dust, the growing public opposition to political policing and punitive sentencing of protesters will become cacophonously loud.

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How Murdoch's philosophy created a climate of misbehaviour

I was delighted that Rebekah Brooks resigned, thus becoming News International's second red-top casualty of the phone hacking scandal.

But I was upset that she chose to quit on one of the only days this year that I regarded as sacrosanct – the reunion after 45 or so years of colleagues from my first weekly newspaper.

So I was able only to knock out fewer than 300 words of initial reaction on Friday before travelling to Dagenham to meet my old friends.

In spite of our desire to reminisce about our past, the opening hour and more of our meeting was taken up with talk of Rupert Murdoch's meltdown.

No one in the newspaper trade can talk about much else. It has been the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped up daily shock.

And this is not the end. Remember what Brooks told the News of the World staff: some time in the next year you'll understand why we had no alternative but to close the paper.

Now she has gone, along with one of Murdoch's closest and longest-serving aides, Les Hinton. So has Tom Crone, the paper's lawyer. The editor during its final five years, Colin Myler, looks set to go too.

I know these people. I have, at various times in the past, enjoyed their company. I have certainly been critical of them in recent years for a variety of different reasons, but I had no reason to imagine them acting in any way that would lead to them departing from the company in such ignominy.

That said, I was acutely aware that the paper they were responsible for editing, legalling and managing was a cancerous growth in the newspaper body. In company with other red-tops, they have followed an editorial agenda that trivialised the activity of journalism.

I have been a critic of the direction taken by popular journalism for something like 20 years. Newspaper owners and editors have allowed entertainment to dominate information. Indeed, in some cases, information has all but vanished.

Desperation to supply entertainment material, especially in the face of increasing media-savviness by the people that feature in their pages, inevitably led to the adoption of questionable practices.

Nowhere was this more obvious than at the News of the World, which pioneered intrusive news-gathering techniques.

By the time I took the chair in journalism at City University London in 2003 I was thoroughly disgusted by the red-top agenda, the resulting content and the methods some papers employed to obtain such material.

That was obvious from the title of my inaugural lecture the following year – "Prejudice, distortion and the cult of celebrity: Is the press going to hell in a handcart?"

I referred sarcastically to the News of the World as an "academy of journalistic ethics" when talking about one of its most notorious "world exclusives" – a fabricated story about a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham, which led to innocent men being arrested and held for months in prison.

In my subsequent lectures in the following years I made it clear that the News of the World was taking us down a dark journalistic road. One immediate consequence was the paper's removal of a bursary that had funded two students to take the year-long post-grad course at City.

Though at least one of my senior university colleagues was upset, I welcomed it. How could we justify any formal link with such a venal newspaper?

Incidentally, The Sun took similar action. I lost no sleep over that either. There is no point in teaching young people the value of public interest journalism when, back at Wapping, they were expected to engage in an exercise that was a travesty of our trade.

In the lecture theatre and in the pages of The Guardian, I campaigned against the News of the World's routine reliance on subterfuge, covert filming, entrapment and the use of agents provocateur. At that time, we did not know about phone hacking.

It's fair to say that my campaign was anything but popular. Aside from many of my former tabloid colleagues seeing me as some kind of traitor, several journalists in the serious press thought my assaults were irrelevant. Though they conceded that the red-top agenda was mucky and its methods were murky, they took the view that the tabloids' activities were a sideshow that had no effect on the rest of the press nor, indeed, on the body politic.

Plenty were outraged by Murdoch's political influence, which stemmed from his ownership of papers that were prepared to publish almost anything to assassinate the characters of politicians who dared to adopt an anti-Murdoch stance.

But they failed to acknowledge that the link between degraded editorial content and disgraceful methodology was itself the consequence of the climate created by Murdoch himself.

His philosophy is simple – let the market decide. He is so wedded to this spuriously democratic formula that he believes it is elitist for journalists to set standards of taste and ethics. If the people want it, give it to them. The inevitable result was appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Murdoch's success rubbed off on rivals, most obviously on the once-dominant Mirror titles and it also spread gradually across much of the rest of an intensely competitive press at a time when the mature newspaper market was clearly in decline.

I should add that I was slow to catch on to Murdoch's baleful influence. I have had my differences over the years with John Pilger – well, to be honest, he has had his differences with me – but my hat is off to him. He can now be seen as Murdoch's first and foremost critic, and he will be the least surprised by the turn of events over the past fortnight.

PS: This piece was written before the resignation of the Met police chief. Its publication has been delayed for reasons beyond my control.

PPS: Should you wish to comment on this posting, or any other about phone hacking, you must visit our open thread

Music festivals: the sound of escapism

 Revellers at T in the Park, sponsored by Tennents Lager. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

You fetch up at a festival, bop to the bands, get trashed and then hunker down in your sleeping bag for a nice bit of shut-eye. It's been a heavy night, and you wait for the inevitable hangover to arrive. As the smell of frying sausages drifts across the early morning damp of the camping field, how do you reckon you feel when an academic researcher comes knocking on your tent flap asking if it would be all right to ask you a few questions?

Though he doesn't say how many retreated swiftly, Dr Andrew Bengry-Howell, visiting fellow at the University of Bath, confirms that he and his team managed to persuade 98 people at four of the UK's largest music festivals to have a chat.

Prompted by his earlier research into how alcohol is marketed and consumed, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, these breakfast conversations made up part of Bengry-Howell's study examining what festival-goers get out of attending this kind of live music event.

"We became interested in the sponsorship of festivals by large drinks companies at the end of the previous piece of work," Bengry-Howell explains.

As the number of music festivals soared by over 70% between 2003 and 2007, various big brands, he continues, began exploring what they call "experiential marketing".

"The idea is that you can attach a brand to a particular experience, like music festivals, where that experience is quite intense," he says. "People then – the marketers hope – associate the brand with that experience."

When Bengry-Howell was planning his research, "quite a few festivals were completely branded by beer companies," he explains. However, after the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and Alcohol suggested in 2006 that sponsorship of festivals attracting under-18s should be banned, the alcohol industry started to shift away from completely branding events – a notable exception being T in the Park, sponsored by Tennents Lager. Instead, they focus on sponsoring bars at festivals, and certain companies, including Tuborg Lager, have bought up the "pouring rights" at festivals so that they are the only beer that can be sold there.

As well as visual reinforcement of the brand around the festival site, the enforcement of pouring rights can be strict, with security guards searching festival-goers' bags to ensure that no alcohol is brought in from outside.

Most of the major festivals operate this type of sponsorship restriction, says Bengry-Howell.

"We were interested in how this very regulated environment was being marketed to people as a place where they could be free. But we were also interested in how people perceived that environment, in the context of going to festivals, which are traditionally seen as anti-corporate."

The University of Bath team mapped out where and how brands were profiled on each festival site, and noted how they were being marketed and sold.

"A lot of brands were making great claims about their ethics and how those ethics resonated with the values of the festival," says Bengry-Howell. "Brands were consciously positioning themselves within festival culture."

While his interviewees downed their first cup of coffee of the day, Bengry-Howell quizzed them. Did they mind that big companies had become so deeply embedded in their festival experience? What did they reckon to having just the one choice of beer for which they had to cough up £4 a pint? How did their hopes for the festival experience compare with the reality when they arrived?

"We found... that a lot of the younger people didn't really care or see it as an issue," he says.

"A small minority were irritated by the cost of brands. Some moaned that they had to pay so much for a lager they didn't particularly like. I think some people did feel ripped off, but had resigned themselves, because they felt sponsorship kept these events going."

Dispiritingly for the companies themselves, who pour millions into sponsorship, it looks as if some of this could be going down the drain. In follow-up focus groups, Bengry-Howell found that some interviewees had "ended up going away not having the sense of it being a branded event".

What most surprised him, however, was the way people talked about why they chose to go in the first place. Having expected them to rave about the music, the message he got was that festivals were a way to help them to cope with their increasingly dull and stressful lives.

"One person said that without music festivals there'd be no point in living in this country at all," he recalls.

"Others talked about freedom and being able to totally forget about your rubbish job in a call centre. Many started talking about the pressure they felt under ... and about seeing festivals as havens."

There was a sense of release in being able to drift aimlessly and not feel guilty while inside the protected "world" of the festival site. Some said they tried to "disappear" into a festival and would purposely leave their mobile phones at home.

The overall message was that festivals provided an escape for young people who felt ground down by the competitive nature of finding work that wasn't either satisfying or enriching, the constant pressure to achieve and the sense they got from society that it was their personal failure if they didn't manage to make the grade – financially, socially and on the career ladder.

"I'm interested in this idea about festivals being where people go to experience a kind of freedom, and that they feel so restricted even though we now have more freedoms than ever," says Bengry-Howell.

If that all sounds rather sombre, Bengry-Howell notes more optimistically that his interviewees were also consciously using their time at these events to develop a sense of belonging and community with other like-minded people.

A possible new area for research is the post-event flurry of social networking that now occurs – a way for people to maintain the communities they start to build while at the festivals and to deal with the festival "come-down", he says.

University tuition fee hike will hit 100,000 of this year's unlucky students

 Students at St Andrews University take their weekly Pier Walk. Photograph: public domain

More than 100,000 students will face a double disappointment when they fail to find a place at university this summer and are hit with the prospect of trebled tuition fees when they try again in 12 months' time.

Official figures reveal the size of the group who will fail to attain a university place in the last year before fees shoot up. It is made up of 75,000-85,000 who would have gone on to standard university courses and a further 10,000 to 20,000 nursing, midwifery and teacher training applicants.

It is about 10,000 people larger than it would have been because of the coalition's decision to renege on the Labour government's pledge to increase the total intake in 2011 as they did in 2010.

Usman Ali, the National Union of Students' vice-president for higher education, said the stakes were high for students. "For several years now we have seen the numbers of qualified and ambitious students applying to university outstripping the number of places available, forcing those young people to fight for jobs in an ever-shrinking youth job market," said Ali.

"The most determined choose to reapply the following year, but those who miss out this year will find themselves with fees trebled and government funding slashed simply because the government is not willing to expand investment in skills and education for young people when it is most needed.

"Those students will find themselves stuck between the rock of high youth unemployment, and the hard place of spiralling debt.

"Those who do enter university in 2012 will accrue more debt at university than any generation before, and once the implications of the white paper become clear, they could even find that their fees are higher than those who follow them."

According to the research from the House of Commons library, those most likely to miss out are mature, disabled or black students, or those with lower educational attainment.

Meanwhile, the Royal Society of Chemistry has raised concerns over the debts prospective scientists face. Using the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills' own figures, it claims a senior academic on a salary of £75,000 would pay back three times the £45,000 loan they would be expected to take in order to complete their studies.

However, Professor David Phillips, president of the society, said that the publishing by universities of employment prospects by degree would highlight how well the sciences fare against other subjects.

He said: "These consequences affect all students, whatever subject they study. However, students would do well to consider what the employment prospects are for any course they undertake.

"For some subjects these are bleak, but for the 'hard' sciences, and particularly chemistry, employment prospects are very good, so we urge schools to encourage science students into subjects like chemistry [and engineering and physics] where employment is not only highly likely, but fills a national need also."

A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: "Going to university has always been a competitive process and not all who apply are accepted. Despite this, we do understand how frustrating it is for young people who wish to go to university and are unable to find a place.

"We are opening up other routes into a successful career. Our reforms will make part-time university study more accessible."

International student group ousts inaugural president

International student group ousts inaugural president

MI Districts’ Robocall Service Used In Political Campaign

Jack Spencer is reporting at Michigan Capitol Confidential that a school district in Michigan used its robocall service to encourage parents on how to vote

In the on-going struggle to find the appropriate level of involvement public school officials and educators should be playing in political campaigns, we have this story out of Michigan from reporter Jack Spencer at Capcon.  The story appears to be that a public school district in Michigan has used its phone alert system to point voters toward the recall effort against Gov. Rick Snyder (pictured left). In early June, shortly after the Snyder recall reached the petition-gathering phase, the alert system for Lawrence Public Schools sent out the following robocall to residents of the district:

“This is a message from the Lawrence Public Schools (inaudible) alert system. This is an informational item and not directly associated with the school. Concerned parents interested in cuts to education . . . we’re here to inform you that there is information about the problem. Also, be advised that there is a petition to recall Governor Snyder. If you want, stop by Chuck Moden’s house right by the school June 7th/8th between 3:30 and 4:00 pm. Thank you. Goodbye.”

The superintendent of the Lawrence Public Schools, John Overly, is chalking the whole thing up to a combination of a bad mistake and poor judgement.  The school alert system is used for special announcements, such as school closings due to snowfall, lock-downs or other school-related information. In such situations, the robocalls go out to “alert” residents of the district about a special circumstance that is taking place. Though it is uncertain without an official investigation, use of the system to advance a political endeavor, such as the Snyder recall, appears to have been a violation of the state’s campaign finance law.

“It will never happen again” Overley told Capitol Confidential today, referring to the alert that went out about the Snyder recall. “It will not be done again, ever.”

Capitol Confidential asked Overley if the use of the alert in connection with the recall had been a mistake.

“Yes, a big mistake,” Overley responded.

Capcon reports that individuals found guilty of violating Section 57 could face a fine of up to $20,000. However, one might reasonably ask to what extent the current law, and how it’s implemented, actually serves as a deterrent.  Those attempting to recall Snyder have the daunting task of trying to collect 806,522 valid signatures in just a few months. Logic dictates that fertile ground for at least starting to harvest the signatures would be in state’s K-12 community. With that in mind, the core question might be whether the possibility of getting caught and fined is likely to outweigh the opportunity of bringing in a lot of signatures.

Read the full report here.