You can lead a horse to water, and while you might not be able to make it drink, you can make it run on an aqua treadmill – at least you can if you are a veterinary physiotherapy student at Writtle College.
The four-year integrated master’s course in the subject is just one of about 50 higher education courses available at the Essex-based institution, which in March was granted the power to award its own degrees.
Currently, Writtle’s degrees are validated by the University of Essex, but from September 2017, students will be able to study for degrees awarded by the college itself.
Writtle currently has about 1,000 full-time equivalent higher education students, and about 675 studying further education courses. Principal and chief executive officer Steve Waite believes that degree-awarding powers will allow Writtle to become “masters of our own direction”.
“Essex has been very supportive, but the types of skill set you want to develop at the university…are quite different to what we want to develop here,” he told a Times Higher Education podcast.
Under the existing system, “validation and approval” for Writtle’s courses come “from an institution that doesn’t have expertise in our subject area”, he added.
Writtle is part of a network of former agricultural colleges “established to meet the needs of land-based industries, and those would originally have been largely in further education-type qualifications”, Dr Waite said.
“As those industries have developed, the science has become more applied, the technologies have become more demanding, so there has been a natural progression [and a need for] the development of higher education courses. Who’s going to provide this? A specialist college that has got the history of developing those skills…or a university that has never had a farm or managed a farm? That’s how we’ve ended up in this current situation.”
Walking around the institution’s 220-hectare estate on the outskirts of Chelmsford feels more like a visit to a zoo than a college. Writtle has – among countless other animals – 50 head of beef cattle, 85 pigs, an iguana, six bearded dragons, two pythons, 55 horses, eight goats and a chipmunk.
“Some other institutions try and teach about large animals when the biggest thing they have is a rabbit,” Dr Waite said during a tour of the college’s reptile house.
But Writtle is not all about vocational study. It currently has about 30 research students, and Essex will continue to validate research qualifications at the institution for the foreseeable future.
As a result of this activity, Writtle entered the 2014 research excellence framework, the first time it has been involved in such an exercise. Twelve full-time-equivalent members of staff submitted work across two units of assessment.
Although the institution finished near the bottom of the overall REF league table ranked on grade-point averages, Dr Waite said it was a worthwhile exercise and the outcome matched fairly well with his expectations.
“We believe that staff should, as a matter of course, be involved in scholarship and research, so it is useful to engage in a benchmarking exercise like this,” he said.
“If you take the agriculture and veterinary submissions, it showed that over 70 per cent of our outputs were of…international significance. For an institution that is the size of a small university faculty, actually the output was pretty good.”
Dr Waite hopes that over the next five years, he will be able to facilitate Writtle’s growth and move closer to his aim of it becoming the “leading national institution for land-based industries”.
A successful application for a change of title could see Writtle become “University College Writtle or Writtle University College”, he said – although a consultation would need to take place before any such modification could be made.
There are plenty of challenges ahead, though. The sector as a whole has to “be much more efficient” while delivering a “higher-quality product”, he said, “and for us as a small institution it is a real problem”.
“If you are a very large institution, you can have your teaching and learning centre staffed by a professor and several colleagues who are focused on how they are going to develop pedagogy and improve the delivery.
“If you are a small institution like ourselves, you don’t have…the additional cash to actually do that, so you have to be really clever about it.”
<榴莲视频>In numbers
85 – the number of pigs on Writtle College’s 220-hectare estate
<榴莲视频>Campus news
Robert Gordon University
Robert Gordon University has received the second-largest donation yet awarded to a Scottish higher education institution. The Aberdeen-based university has been given ?4.5 million by the Wood Foundation, set up by oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, building on its announcement of an initial ?500,000 gift in November 2013. The money will be used to support Robert Gordon’s Oil and Gas Institute, and to support research into remote healthcare.
University of Glasgow
Classics students at the University of Glasgow will soon be able to get academic credits for teaching Latin to the city’s schoolchildren. The Literacy through Latin programme has been running at the institution on a voluntary basis for two years. From October it will be recognised as an official part of the curriculum. The students will be able to gain academic credits for teaching an hourly lesson each week over the course of the school year.
Universities of Southampton and Bristol
Archaeologists have revealed evidence of a gold trading route between Ireland and the South West of England. Academics at the universities of Southampton and Bristol believe that people traded gold along the route in the early Bronze Age, around 2500BC. Their research measured the chemical composition of early gold artefacts held by the Museum of Ireland using a new technique, and found they were made from examples of the metal likely to have come from Cornwall.
Queen Mary University of London
Historians have identified a 300-year-old stash of tea while researching a book on the subject. The dried green tea was found in the Natural History Museum’s botanical collection. It was labelled as a “gift” from James Cuninghame, a Scottish trader and surgeon who joined an expedition to the Far East in 1697. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London, who are due to publish a book titled Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World, have identified the plant as the oldest physical remnant of the nation’s favourite drink.
University of Sheffield
People with blood type O have a lower chance of cognitive decline, a study has confirmed. Neuroscientists at the University of Sheffield and the IRCCS San Camillo Hospital Foundation in Venice found that people with the blood type have more grey matter in their brains, which helps to protect them against diseases such as Alzheimer’s. They speculate that blood types influence the development of the nervous system.
University of Hull
A university in the North of England generates close to ?1 billion for the UK economy, an independent study has revealed. The report, by Biggar Economics, shows that in 2013-14 the University of Hull supported nearly 8,000 jobs, including 5,000 in the Humber region. It also generated more than ?900 million in gross added value, ?500 million locally. David Richards, pro vice-chancellor for research and enterprise at Hull, said the figures show that the university is “a significant anchor institution”.
Warwick Business School
London mayor Boris Johnson has officially opened a university business school’s new base at the Shard. The Warwick Business School site, on the 17th floor of the tallest building in the European Union, is already hosting evening courses for its MScs in finance and in human resource employment and employment relations. A two-year, part-time executive MBA is set to be delivered at the Shard from September.
University College London
An acclaimed Egyptology museum has celebrated its centenary. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London, which has more than 80,000 artefacts, celebrated its milestone year on 7 June, with further special events planned throughout 2015. Named after the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, the museum will open an exhibition on 1 July displaying some of its most fascinating objects, including texts from Sudan’s ancient Meroitic civilisation, which no one has been able to translate.
Article originally published as: ‘It didn’t make sense to farm out degree-awarding powers’ (18 June 2015)