Thank you for that kind introduction and can I say what a great pleasure it is to be here and to welcome you to Bristol. This is a very historic city which has a slight tendency to hide its light under a bushel, but there is much to see and enjoy and I hope you get some time to wander.
I gave this talk the title it has because the title of your conference is ‘From Good to Great’. I am going to start by defining what a ‘great’ graduate is and then analyse the university’s and the school’s role in producing such a person. I think we can all agree that we both have a role to play and I think we can also agree that there are at least two other major players – home and the individual’s domestic peer group. However, I fear I have not got the time to address those latter two; I will simply acknowledge their importance, particularly that of the home environment.
So, what makes a great graduate? I believe it to be a combination of intellectual and personal skills. Some years ago, it was quite trendy to talk of ‘graduateness’, which was an attempt to describe the different qualities that a graduate should have. A Google search brought up papers from the mid- and late-’90s, but they sounded a little dated to me and didn’t ring true. So here are my ideas.
Let’s start with the individual skills a degree brings. Undergraduate degrees teach students to find information, to analyse and assimilate it, to construct an opinion or new thoughts from such analysis and then to synthesise it and present it either orally or as a written document. Postgraduate degrees take that one step further. Our daughter has just finished a Master’s at the LSE – for some reason she wouldn’t come to Bristol, I can’t work out why! – and there was substantial intellectual stretch in comparison with her Batchelor’s and much more self-directed learning. She found it profoundly developmental. I have always said that there is probably nothing more intellectually challenging than writing up your doctorate. The reason is that you have to keep the whole of the doctorate in your head even when you’re writing just one piece, since everything has to fit together. So for our students there is not only the hard work of doing their research but also the huge challenge of turning into a 250- to 300-page thesis. Thus all degrees bring significant intellectual challenge and development.
On top of these personal intellectual skills, there are the profound formal and informal intellectual interactions with their peers and academic supervisors. Many of you are more than aware of the debate surrounding widening participation and I am frequently asked why we are committed to creating as diverse a student body as possible. The first, obvious reason is equity, but equally as important is the evidence from the United States that the more diverse the student body with which you are educated, the better you are educated. Students learn from each other and that is significant variable in creating a ‘great’ graduate.
Finally, there are the interactions with the academic staff. It’s curious how little we all know about universities and how often our impressions remain from our days as an undergraduate, which for some of us are now becoming rather distant memories! Universities like Bristol are huge concentrations of enormous creativity. Many of our academic staff are right at the forefront of knowledge creation in their disciplines; they are acknowledged international experts. This is not an idle boast – the UK had seven universities in the world top 50 and I have calculated that there are about 40,000 institutions of higher education in the world. It is our academic staff who get us into those top positions. So students are learning in an atmosphere of intellectual creativity and challenge. Just as we can all remember the teacher who made a difference for us, most of us can remember an academic who did the same for us when we were at university.
I think our view of what we feel the intellectual development should be is best summarised by quoting the message to our students given by the Faculty of Arts when discussing the contentious issue of contact time:
‘For every hour in class, students need to spend on average five hours of reading and directed preparation, and they are provided with information about which books and articles they should be reading for each class. In addition, there will be time required for doing assignments and preparing for assessment. The overall workload is calculated in detail in the programme specification, on the basis of an expectation of an average 40 hours per week.
‘University is a completely different environment from school, and should be. Students are expected to develop their independence, to identify their own needs and priorities and to take responsibility for their studies; they are expected to develop their own ideas and their own approach to the subject. As students progress through their course, they will find that the curriculum promotes greater freedom and independence, and imparts a more and more sophisticated level of skills.
‘The range of work students can undertake is impressive. In addition to directed reading, they may write essays of various lengths to exacting standards, compile in-depth research reports, make oral presentations singly or in groups, write tests and examinations, or undertake many kinds of practical work. Undergraduate degrees usually culminate in a formal dissertation or practical project. This is a substantial piece of research carried out under the close supervision of an academic colleague, wherever possible one doing professional research in the area.
‘All this means that Arts students spend a lot of time reading at home or in the library. It is their equivalent of the scientists’ and engineers’ laboratory hours.
‘A university isn’t like a supermarket, where you pick your degree off a shelf because you’ve paid for it; it’s more like a gym or a health club, where the university provides the training and the facilities but it’s your responsibility to make the best use of them. If you skip all the preparatory reading for class, or try to get by with only the minimum amount of reading, or question-spot for exams rather than developing a proper understanding of the subject, or refuse to engage in discussion and debate, there’s a serious risk that you’ll still be intellectually flabby and unfit by the end of the course.
‘The positive side of having fewer scheduled classes is that you have far more freedom to develop your own approach to the subject, pursuing the aspects that particularly interest you, rather than having to stick rigidly to a prescribed reading list and a set curriculum. You can also arrange your work in a pattern that suits you, if you find that you work best first thing in the morning or late at night. One of the most important skills you need to develop at an early stage at university is how to organise your own learning, making effective use of the time and resources that are available. It is perfectly possible to keep certain times free for sport, or to reduce your commitments to a minimum for a week so that you can appear in a play, or make time for any other activity — provided that you make up the time somewhere else, and still meet your deadlines. Another ‘skill for life’…’
Of course, the experience will be different in those subjects where the intellectual challenge is less abstract, such as Medicine, but it will still be challenging and developmental.
However, great graduates are not just intellectual creatures; they are also social animals. At university, they spend three years in very close social interactions with their peers – I stress social, not intellectual. Large amounts of their personal development take place as a result of those interactions, which is, of course, another reason why the diversity of the student population is so important. It is self-evident that they should be able to interact with individuals from every social, cultural and ethnic background. I would argue that these interactions are different from those at school. They occur at a different phase of an individual’s life, when they are beginning to embrace independence and all that that means. They are not so intimate or consistent as those interactions at school and there are many more ways they can come across different people both within and outside the university. Perhaps most importantly, these interactions are not as closely governed as they are at school. Students have fewer boundaries – quite rightly so – and in many cases have to define those boundaries for themselves.
Students are provided with a unique opportunity to develop in a quite protected environment. At Bristol, there are over 160 clubs and societies covering every conceivable activity. They range from the purely social (The Cocktail Society) to the sporting and then onwards to the artistic and cultural. The students have their own theatre in the Union and put on plays and opera; there is a full orchestra; I could go on and on and on. These provide students with massive opportunities for personal development.
Perhaps the thing I am proudest of is our Student Community Action, the umbrella body in the Union that organises student volunteering in the community. This activity is led by a full-time student sabbatical officer and has over 60 projects in six main areas: Children, Community, Disabled, Elderly, Schools and Sports. They have two main methods of working – they either run an activity completely themselves, or they work with an established local or national charity. Over 1,000 students take part in this volunteering and last year they combined to give over 100,000 hours of volunteer activity back to the community. This must be the largest such organisation in the city, with a massive positive impact on the local community. Just as important is the profound developmental impact exposure to these activities will have on our students.
This whole collection of social and intellectual opportunities and challenges will create graduates who are not only highly intelligent but also highly emotionally intelligent. The description of emotional intelligence bears repetition because it highlights skills that I think are essential in a ‘great’ graduate.
Self-awareness – the ability to recognise and understand your moods and emotions as well as the effect these have on others
Self-regulation – the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods; to think before acting
Motivation – a passion to pursue work for reasons that go beyond money and status; a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence
Empathy – the ability to understand the emotional make-up of other people; skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions
Social Skills – proficiency in managing relationships and building networks; an ability to find common ground and build rapport.
There is one final set of skills which are part of the above but have other aspects – the so-called ‘employability’ skills. There are general skills under this heading, such as self-determination, the ability to cope with uncertainty, the knowledge of when to move on and when to re-skill and the understanding that it really is a global village and you may end up anywhere. There are also more specific skills that it takes to be a good and productive employee. Employers are constantly complaining that British graduates are noticeably lacking in these skills in comparison to their continental and US counterparts. These are punctuality, looking smart, politeness, working beyond normal hours, understanding hierarchy, ambition, flexibility, understanding reality and the ability to work in teams.
So a great graduate is knowledgeable, intellectually powerful and willing to take intellectual risks; has great emotional intelligence and social and personal skills; and understands importance of employability and behaviour in the workplace. Perhaps they also have another rather special but indefinable quality: a certain zing, an aura which means you want to meet and talk to them, you want be in the room with them. I would argue that a university is an important mechanism for creating all or some of these powerful life skills – life alone could do it as well but certainly not as quickly and probably not so predictably or safely.
So where do schools fit into this picture and these personal trajectories? I want to start by saying that we get fantastic young adults entering this university. I still find it amazing that older people continue to repeat the refrain that the youth of today are not as good as the youth when I was young. I asked Bob Fowler, our Dean of Arts, if he could tell me the first known incidence of this complaint. He told me it was by Nestor, an old warrior complaining that the young warriors were not as good as they were when he was young. That was in the Iliad, written by Homer in approximately 500 BC. A whine it is, and a persistent one at that.
The 18-year-olds of today are different from when I was 18 in 1971, but they are not lesser. They may not be as packed with knowledge as we were and their grammar may not be as solid as ours was. However, some of the work they do for A-levels these days is what we did in our degrees and they have been taught to seek knowledge in new and effective ways. They help each other more – I am always amazed by how much they gather round a colleague in difficulty in ways that we just didn’t. They may not follow political grand narratives, but I find they are individually as motivated by justice and equity as we were and many of them are doing something about it. They are not lesser or better – they are just different and the ‘youth of today’ complaint says significantly more about the complainer than the target.
So if we take what I have said as a given and there is no implicit or explicit criticism of secondary education, what can a school do to help create the ‘great’ graduate? It is self-evident that these young adults are already on a specific trajectory before they come to university. Very significant educational and personal development has occurred long before the age of 18. It is here where your input is so important. I fully understand that all schools must firstly ensure examination success. I understand that both as a parent and a parent governor for four years of my children’s secondary school. However, it is my impression that the current exam structure gives little space for intellectual free time. In my youth, we took six O-levels a year early, which meant there was time in between the ages of 15 and 16 for continued education that was not exam orientated. The first year of A-level also provided time and space for a little more intellectual freedom. It is not for me to question the current exam structure and as I have already said, we certainly get able and educated students; but I suppose that, if you could, finding some time for intellectual wandering would help very much in the trajectory towards ‘great graduates’.
One major difference that many of our lecturers highlight between UK undergraduates and those they have taught elsewhere is that the UK students question and question all the time. That’s what great undergraduates should do and please continue to stimulate your pupils to behave like that. Questioning is the first step on the journey of taking intellectual risk and is almost a sine qua non. I have used the term ‘intellectual risk’ and by that I mean the ability of an individual to take a personal intellectual line which may prove to be illogical or unworkable but that they are encouraged to learn from – I know you foster that in your schools, but please continue so to do.
One more important point: please set their expectations of what university is going to be like. Discuss with them that it will be much more self-directed and much less subject to external discipline, and that the outcome will depend very much more on their self-determination and self-generated application. Nobody will be holding their hand. However, that is a positive – this is about a transition from one sort of learning to another and is to be welcomed. It is an essential part of their intellectual trajectory and their determination of self. The combination of your teaching and preparation and our differentiation of their intellectual and social development is what produces ‘great graduates’.
Thank you