Fortnightly Mailing

A leaving speech

I stopped being chair of governors of The Sheffield College at the end of March 2021, after a 45 year connection. Here's the short speech I gave to an online staff meeting.

==

The invitation to speak caught me by surprise. It really is an honour. Today is my first day since 2008 without a Sheffield College role. To explain: 

In 1976 I did teaching practice here. In 1979 I got a permanent job here. In 2002 the College dismissed me as redundant. In 2008 the College appointed me a governor, on my second attempt. Until yesterday I was chair of governors. 

I’m going to talk about how I feel about the College, and then to offer three reflections.

What is a 45 year association with one institution like?

I’ll start with three snapshots: 

It is 1979

After teacher-training I’d worked for two years as a part-timer, cadging cars from friends to get between Chesterfield, Cleethorpes, Manchester, Scunthorpe, and Sheffield.  I’m being interviewed for my dream job as a Lecturer Grade 1 in Trade Union Studies at Granville College. As a part-timer I had often worn a so-called Chinese rickshaw driver’s jacket. And Doc Martens. Once I’d henna dyed my hair. Anxiously waiting after my interview I was called back by the panel: “We’d like to offer you the job: but only if you agree to smarten yourself up, put on a collar and tie, and wear a decent pair of shoes.”  Of course I swallowed my pride and said yes.  

Still 1979, it is my first team meeting

I’m wearing my new smart clothes. We are planning the coming term. Unknown to me, something is on the way up the inside of my trouser-leg. I shift my position. My knee sears with pain. I yell. I  reflexively start to hit my knee to kill whatever thing has done this to me. Next I tear off my trousers, to make sure that the thing - formerly an Autumn wasp - is dead. Rather anxious laughter ensues. I feel sheepish. My new colleagues look worried. Who exactly have they been landed with?

The 1980s now 

It’s the lunch break. A three-course student made and served meal in the subsidised staff restaurant. Over a  three-term cycle you could experience most of the culinary curriculum - including lambs’ brains au gratin. Afterwards there’d be coffee in the staff lounge, sort of “at the feet” of the Principal, the aptly-named Arthur Colledge, who was also the Regional Secretary of the lecturer’s union NATFHE. (Think about that for a minute….) Arthur, smoking his pipe, or knocking out the dottle, would converse intimidatingly with whoever was sitting nearby. The trick was to avoid catching his eye, to nod occasionally, but never to get drawn in, else you’d risk being made to feel a fool. 

As an aside, don’t do any of it Angela - not the pipe, not the dottle, not the intimidation.

Through these three snapshots I wanted to focus on what FE felt like at the time of my start in it.

But of course there’s a continuous “jostle” of other memories, of widely varying significance. Here are a few of them: 

• the annual staff/student summer cricket match on Granville College’s sports ground out towards Fox House - land and pavilion bought by a speculator and even now slowly going to ruin; 
• outright and unchallenged homophobia; 
• the City Council’s correct 1980s plan to set up a fully tertiary system, fatally weakened from the start by the Secretary of State’s decision to retain school sixth forms in the south west of the City; 
• guerrilla action by women staff taking down sexist calendars from male staff rooms; 
• the huge changes in Sheffield caused by deindustrialisation; 
• the giant, muddled institution that resulted in 1992 from the merger of Sheffield’s six FE colleges to form a Sheffield College nearly twice our current size, with over 100 locations; 
• leading a bitter and protracted industrial dispute about our lecturers’ contracts; 
• the creeping damage done by austerity over the last decade; 
• a full-to-bursting City Hall Ballroom for the union-run (but everyone attended) annual staff Christmas social; 
• the pain, anxiety and eventual liberation of being “restructured out” aged 50; 
• the long period when “things were just not quite right in the College”, when pride in what the  College does had somehow ebbed away; 
• my last three years here as chair during which we’ve all been engaged in turning the college around.

And I’ve ignored completely: 

• the tough collective experience we are going through with Covid;
  
• the long term harm the pandemic has done and will do to the fabric of the City; 
• and the completely admirable way in which you have responded to the pandemic.

Before I finish, I have three reflections:

Firstly, what makes FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973: 

“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”. 

She continued

“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.” 

It was, above all, the heterogeneity, the incredible range in its workforce, that Tipton pinpoints, which made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does.

Secondly, what can make a college great? 

Above all it is its climate or culture. The vibe has to be right. The way that all roles are vulnerably interdependent on each other must be always in the background. Nobel prize winner and arms control expert Thomas Schelling put it this way

“Most of what we call civilisation depends on reciprocal vulnerability.” 

I believe that what is true for nations is true for organisations and is true for individuals. As chair I have tried to put this value into practice; I think governors have tried to do likewise; and I know that Angela shares this approach too. 

Finally, why is change for the better sometimes so hard? 

Because we don’t get or give enough time for things to run their course. If you make bread it takes the time it takes. If you lay concrete, you know it takes time to cure. If you grow veg you know that plants take the time they take to fruit. There are things you can do to improve the yield; sometimes you have to act fast - when frost threatens, say; but nature has to take its course. So, to get The Sheffield College back from its 2017 brink onto its current upward trajectory has taken you, has taken us, has taken our students, the time it has taken. Should you be impatient for improvement? Of course. But you must be patient too. 

To conclude: I wish The Sheffield College and you its staff, the very best for the future. From the side-lines, I know that I will see the College dealing with whatever challenges come its way; that I will see the College continue to go from strength to strength; that I will see the College, guided by a new strategy adopted yesterday by governors, being the anchor institution that the City of Sheffield needs and deserves.  

Thank you.

==

The bombing of Gaza: Gideon Levy in Haaretz

This piece by Gideon Levy in the 31/12/2008 web version of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the response it stimulated, caught my eye, and is in contrast to the anodyne discussion of Israel's actions in the mainstream UK media. It ends:

"Maybe if they [the pilots] were to confront the results of their "wonderful work" even once they would regret their decisions, they would reconsider the effects of their actions. If they were to go just once to Jerusalem's Alyn Hospital Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center, where for nearly three years Marya Aman, 7, has been hospitalized - she is a quadriplegic who runs her wheelchair, and her life, with her chin - they would be shocked. This adorable little girl was hit by a missile in Gaza that killed almost her entire family, the handiwork of our pilots.

But all of this is well hidden from the pilots' eyes. They are only doing their job, as the saying goes, only following orders like bombing machines. In the past few days they have excelled at this, and the results are there for the entire world to see. Gaza is licking its wounds, just like Lebanon before it, and almost no one pauses for a moment to ask whether all this is necessary, or unavoidable, or whether it contributes to Israel's security and moral image. Is it really the case that our pilots return safely to base, or are they in fact returning to them as callous, cruel and blind people? "

Sleep apnoea and road accidents - our memorandum of evidence to the Transport Select Committee

[This post is tagged "nothing to do with e-learning...]

Earlier this year the Transport Select Committee began an Inquiry on Road Safety. The then Chair of the Committee, Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, who sadly died in April of this year, helpfully agreed to allow my family to submit a memorandum of evidence, well beyond the closing date, concerning the problem of undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the large numbers of vocational drivers suffering from it. 

Our evidence is now available on the Parliament UK web site. One of the things we called for was for the  Health and Safety Executive, with its responsibilities for minimising work-related death and injury, and with its powers to insist on action by employers to prevent risks to non-employees (that is, road users at risk from drivers suffering from sleep apnoea), to play a much more prominent role in relation to work-related fatal road-traffic accidents and their prevention. The Transport Select Committee's  report, published on 15/10/2008, makes scant reference to sleep-related road accidents, and none to sleep apnoea, but it is nevertheless good to see that the report highlights, in paragraph 110 the anomaly that "the vast majority of work-related deaths are not examined by the Health and Safety Executive, purely because they occur on the roads", and calls for the Government to "review the role of the Health and Safety Executive with regard to road safety to ensure that it fulfils its unique role in the strategy beyond 2010".

BBC Radio 4 "PM" to cover sleep apnoea and road haulage at 17.30 on Saturday 13 September

Source: BBC

Sometime between 17.30 and 18.00 on 13 September, BBC Radio 4's Saturday edition of "PM" will consider the problem of sleep apnoea amongst HGV drivers. The coverage stems in part from my family's 22 August 2008 media release, posted here on Fortnightly Mailing, following Coroner Sumner's issuing of a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor calling for a toughening of the rule and procedures governing sleep apnoea and road haulage. Interviewees are likely to include my nephew's father, sleep apnoea expert Dr Dev Banerjee, as well as Colin Wrighton, the driver of the lorry that killed my nephew, who is now himself campaigning for action on the problem.

Coroner calls for Government action on sleep apnoea

Today my sister and brother in law issued a media release stemming from last month's Inquest into the death of their son Toby. Regular readers of Fortnightly Mailing may remember from a long post I wrote in October 2007 that my 25 year old nephew was killed 2 years ago on his way to work in Liverpool. His car was waiting in a morning rush hour queue on the M62 motorway approaching the Rocket Interchange. The queue was hit from behind by a heavy goods vehicle and Toby’s car was crushed. The driver of the HGV had fallen asleep at the wheel, and was later diagnosed to be suffering from Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA).  When we investigated OSA we found serious weaknesses in the way that the condition is controlled by Government, by the road haulage industry, and by General Practitioners.

Following the Inquest, the Coroner issued a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor, calling for major changes in the way that sleep apnoea amongst lorry drivers is dealt with. The media release [137 kB PDF] provides full details, and includes the Rule 43 Report itself, as well as the bulk of a fascinating and comprehensive report to the Inquest by Dr Dev Banerjee, who is Consultant Respiratory and Sleep Physician at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital.

The Coroner's Rule 43 Report calls for the following:

• regular medical screening for all lorry drivers;
• amendment of the DVLA Medical Examination Report form to improve identification of undiagnosed sufferers from OSA;
• fast track medical assessment of commercial drivers involved in road traffic collisions;
• better education of all drivers on the dangers of tiredness when driving, in the same manner as drink-driving campaigns;
• better education of commercial drivers to make them aware that a diagnosis of OSA is almost certainly not the end of their livelihood as a driver.

Under new rules that came into force on 17 July, the Lord Chancellor is required to respond to a Coroner’s Rule 43 Report within 56 days.

Across Hardangervidda in Norway

Harteigen, 1690 m, from Hadlaskard, 18 March 2008

This Easter, after three days alone a bit further north, skiing from lake Tyin to Bygdin, I went hut-to-hut with two friends across Hardangervidda in Norway, Europe's biggest mountain plateau, from Haugastøl on the Bergen to Oslo railway, south-west to Haukelisæter east of Stavanger. The weather was best described as "variable", hence a paucity of good pictures, particularly at the end of the journey when it was cold, snowy, and misty, with very strong head-winds. In the continuation post below there is a rather fragmented set of pictures.

Sleep apnoea: joined up government needed to prevent road deaths

23 August 2008 update. Here is a link to a 22 August 2008 post and media release following Coroner Sumner's release of a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor calling for a toughening of the rule and procedures governing sleep apnoea and road haulage.

19 April 2008. Here is a link to the recently published United States Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration 28 January 2008  [216 kB PDF], which contains a comprehensive review of the evidence that sleep apnoea suffering drivers are at substantially greater risk of crashing than non sufferers, along with a comprehensive set to (joined up) recommendations on how to lessen the risks.

2 April 2008 update. Here is a document I've had a hand in writing: Preventing death and injury caused by LGV and PSV drivers falling asleep at the wheel – the case for a joined-up approach by Government [10 page 55 k B PDF]. Please feel free to pass the URL of the document on to interested parties.

26 March 2008 update. Today the National Institute for Clinical Excellence published its decision that sufferers from sleep apnoea should be eligible for NHS treatment [34 kB PDF]. Meanwhile the British Government yesterday launched a campaign to increase awareness of the danger of tiredness in drivers, saying that about 1 in 5 road accidents are caused by tiredness - perhaps equating to 600 deaths a year. So far these two developments have not been properly integrated by Government, with the campaign materials bizarrely silent on the problem of sleep apnoea. But with luck, it will now only be a matter of time before further measures are introduced to ensure that employers conform to their obligations under Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, by identifying sleep apnoea sufferers in their workforce and preventing them from driving until they have been successfully treated.

Yonatan Mendel on the lack of objectivity of Israeli journalists

Grim and informative piece reflecting on the deeply rooted lack of objectivity of Israeli journalists concerning Palestine, in the 6 March 2008 London Review of Books, by Yonatan Mendel, who until recently was the Middle East correspondent of Walla, which he describes as "Israel's most popular web site". This short extract does not do the article justice:

"When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?"

Henry Siegman writes about Gaza’s future in the London Review of Books

Henry Siegman is the director of the US/Middle East Project, served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, ans was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994. I do not know how long the whole of Siegman's scathing and depressing attack on current US and Israeli policy in relation to the siege of Gaza in the 7/2/2008 London Review of Books will be visible to non-subscribers, but I hope LRB will include it amongst the articles that it does not password protect. Here is the start:

"The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres."

Continue reading Siegman's article.