UFO Info Week-End

If they have someone mentoring them from within the school whom they see on a weekly basis it has much more

If they have someone mentoring them from within the school whom they see on a weekly basis it has much more effect.” Universities and schools are not the only organisations trying to raise pupils’ aspirations. For the National Black Boys Can Association, families are central. The NBBCA works with universities, including Oxford, schools, families and community groups to encourage teenagers to go on to university. At Christ’s College, bright black students in the sixth form mentor younger pupils.

“It’s in Years 9 and 10 where the disaffection begins,” he says. “There’s peer pressure and a subculture of not being seen to be clever. At one-offs like last week’s event, and at school visits, the emphasis is economic rather than ethnic. One of the indicators is the “international student score”, which accounts for five per cent of the overall marks: maybe not quite as crucial as the number of citations per faculty member, but not to be sniffed at, nonetheless. And it is the one measure where the LSE knocks Harvard into a cocked hat.I have had to deal with league tables in previous jobs. Management consultants like McKinsey are typically ranked by billings per partner. The Audit Commission was, and is, fertile in the production of tables on almost anything that moves in local government.

There are tables of central-bank cost-effectiveness (usually held in the decent obscurity that characterises central banking) and even a sort of league table of financial regulators. The FSA was, internationally, the least popular – apart from all the others.It is an iron rule, I have found, that enthusiasm for any particular table on the part of an organisation listed in it is tightly correlated with the position at which that organisation appears. Just at the moment, we Manchester City supporters think the Premiership quite accurately reflects the quality of our team, after many years in which the table has failed properly to measure intrinsic worth. So with the LSE holding its position in the global first 11, and tucked in at number two in social sciences (after the inevitable Harvard) we can afford to take a relatively positive view.And yet, it is clear that some funny things are going on.