New Labour and Higher Education: Dilemmas and Paradoxes

David Blunkett's Greenwich speech (2000) set out what have become the main themes of New Labour's engagement with higher education, themes which were elaborated in the recent White Paper ( DfES, 2003a ). This paper draws attention to the dilemmas and paradoxes which arise from the difficulties of simultaneously satisfying the objectives which were set out in the aftermath of the 2001 general election, and from the trade off solutions and policies actually identified. The most fundamental conflict is between the desire to expand the system and the costs of that expansion. The author also identifies a conflict between institutional diversity and hierarchy and between exclusionism and accessibility. The paper concludes by suggesting that exclusionism is still alive and well under the government of a party that still has ‘Labour’ in its title.     

Automatic search from streaming data

Streaming data poses a variety of new and interesting challenges for information retrieval and text analysis. Unlike static document collections, which are typically analyzed and indexed off-line to support ad-hoc queries, streaming data often must be analyzed on the fly and acted on as the data passes through the analysis system. Speech is one example of streaming data that is a challenge to exploit, yet has significant potential to provide value in a knowledge management system. We are specifically interested in techniques that analyze streaming data and automatically find collateral information, or information that clarifies, expands, and generally enhances the value of the streaming data. We present a system that analyzes a data stream and automatically finds documents related to the current topic of discussion in the data stream. Experimental results show that the system generates result lists with an average precision at 10 hits of better than 60%. We also present a hit-list re-ranking technique based on named entity analysis and automatic text categorization that can improve the search results by 6%–12%.     

Can Legislation Reduce Gender Differences in Subject Choice? A Survey of GCSE and A level Entries Between 1970 and 1995

This paper investigates the extent of gender differences in subject choice patterns at GCSE and A level between 1970 and 1995. A Gender Inequality Index (GII) is derived to analyse national examination entry data, in particular to compare the impact of the Sex Discrimination Act and National Curriculum on the overall time trends. The paper finds that the GII slopes downwards over time, but that neither intervention had a significant impact on the rate of decline at A level and only the National Curriculum did so at GCSE level.