O'Really?

July 28, 2026

Celebrating Teaching & Learning at the “Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship” 2026

Filed under: education — Duncan Hull @ 1:53 pm
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Every year hundreds of my colleagues gather at a conference in Manchester to talk about teaching & learning at the Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship. It’s not actually called that but since there’s no actual Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts in this fallow year of 2026, I’m looking for alternatives to the midsummer Somerset vibes from my neck of the woods down in the West Country. Festivals and conferences have some similarities, so let’s see where this musical analogy works, and where it breaks, while reviewing some of this years conference highlights.

Figure 1: Delegates at the ITL Conference, if this is the Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship then University Place (pictured) is the Pyramid Stage

This particular annual festival and conference showcases some of the scholarship at The University of Manchester that makes teaching and learning better for everyone: students, teachers, staff, collaborators and employers. It’s called the Institute of Teaching & Learning (ITL) Conference. While Glastonbury passed its 40th iteration and 50th anniversary in 2025, the ITL conference is just getting going, with the 2026 conference being the 4th event in as many years. With more than 45,000 students on 1,000 different degree programmes at the University, there’s a lot of ground to cover during the two days. There are seven parallel tracks (or stages if you prefer) spread across several floors in University Place. This means you can only realistically expect to see about a seventh (~15%) of what’s going on while missing the other ~85% of the conference. I went to more than twenty presentations, including keynotes and plenaries. What’s ITL conference like and is it worth attending? How can you join in? Can you see any decent performances? How could it be better when it returns in 2027? Here’s some highlights from the 15% of the conference I managed to sample.

Partner-Enabled Learning

A central focus for this years’ conference was partner enabled learning where students work with employers, public bodies and community organisations in cross-disciplinary projects as an assessed part of their course. A good example of this is the partnership between the Manchester United Foundation, Oxfam, Age UK and the Department of Materials where Lindsay Pressdee, Dr Jo Conlon and Dr Amy Benstead have been teaching students about the circular economy with community embedded learning on the BSc Fashion courses. [1]

It has been estimated by This Is FC88 that 20 million shirts like the one in Figure 2 have been discarded since the FIFA World Cup 2026™ – Canada, Mexico and the United States finished last week, see for example this post from Joanna Czutkowna FRSA. In 2026, around 30 final year students will complete a course called Sustainability in Action where they will upcycle unwanted football shirts following on from earlier pilot feasability projects. Recycling all this “waste” is challenging not just because of the volume of it, but because there are strict rules about what can be done with logos and the synthetic material can be much more difficult to work with than natural fibres like cotton.

Figure 2: Three Lions On A Shirt, hung out to dry by Argentina. Sixty years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming. It has been estimated that that 20 million football shirts like this one will be discarded after the FIFA World Cup 2026

Another example of partner enabled learning was provided by Sarah Knighton, Harsha Parmar, Sadia Ibraham and Eisha M. with the Greater Manchester Cancer Alliance who have been teaching students on the Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) course. Trainee pharmacists act as a front door for patients talking about cancer, before they speak to a doctor. Pharmacists are the front line for NHS England, because they are often the first person a patient will talk to. See co-created learning through lived experience and partner engagement. [1]

From a pharmacy we moved to aphasia, an impairment in a person’s ability to comprehend or formulate language. Molly Smithies, Caroline Sutton and Steph Greenwood-Davies described The Connections Café: A service learning model for inclusive communication and community. [1] The cafe trains future language therapists on the BSc Speech and Language Therapy course who support people in the local community with language difficulties.

In her plenary Helen Walkington talked about partner enabled learning in the context of undergraduate research projects such as those found in the Get Published! initiative at Oxford Brookes University. GetPublished! supports students in developing research literacy and communication skills. Another example is GeoVerse, an undergraduate journal for Geographers. Undergraduate research has highlighted ten salient practices for providing robust and high-quality learning published by Centre for Engaged Learning at Elon University. Around 5% of undergraduate students at Oxford Brookes publish their research in GetPublished! For an example, see creating a prototype of a smartphone application to track the progress of individuals recovering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) in partnership with Oxford Head Injury Services.

Jennifer O’Brien described her work with the University Living Lab where research projects are framed within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The project returns quality research to partner organisations who provide problems for students to work on including from Manchester City Council, The Old Abbey Taphouse and many others, see University Living Lab: Addressing social and environmental challenges through existing assessment. [1]

Representing the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester, I gave a presentation on partner enabled learning describing our experience with building and running a mentoring scheme for students learning software engineering. We started this ten years ago by partnering with local employers starting in Manchester (Graphene Valley) including Booking.com, Arm, JLR, IBM, Siemens, the BBC and as the program got bigger we’ve had mentors from further afield including Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (Silicon Valley). Thanks to all our mentors which you can find out more about at industry-club.manchester.ac.uk/mentoring.html and in the paper. [2]

Figure 3: From Manchester for the world, taken from the Manchester 2035 strategy displayed in University Place. If you look closely, this panoramic picture has cloned Rachel Studd four times!

The AI in Higher Education Permathread

Predictably Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominated many of the talks and not just those where it was the theme of the session, it’s the permathread that’s here to stay whether we like it or not. Many delegates reported grappling with thorny and wicked problems that generative AI presents in Higher Education, particularly around academic integrity. What changes need to be made to teaching to help students use AI in a professional, responsible way that enriches rather than detracts from their learning? What skills should teachers focus on empowering their students with? Which are the most important and why? There are lots of difficult existential questions that have no easy answers.

Rather than using Microsoft CoPilot now available across the University, several groups reported making their own custom Large Language Models (LLMs) tailored to specific teaching tasks. An example was presented by Paul Baguley, Ian Stewart, Louise Edmondson, Auzair Khan, Ziru Tao and Linxi Xu. They’ve created tools based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for use in teaching the management of projects in collaboration with Sodexo, Bentley and Rolls-Royce, see a research informed generative AI framework to provide context in project management. [1]

Dr Homa Molavi and Dr. Kamal Qazi MAPM, SFHEA presented a Cross institutional AI-Driven Framework [1] while Salman Shahid talked about Evaluating Generative AI potential and integrating it in Chemical Engineering Education [1]. Lightning talks are a good way to see lots of stuff in a short period of time, here’s some I managed to see on AI:

  • The use of AI tutors in science and engineering with Daniel Engstrøm, Christina Picken and Patricia Munoz-Escalona. Good teaching often involves asking diagnostic questions of students using the socratic method. Daniel and co have created custom AI’s created with “personalities” to do some of this questioning. [1]
  • Writing an L-AI (lay article for the layperson) with Dirk Engelberg, Alison Harvey and Katie Moore gave an opportunity for students to have a discussion about boundaries and professional AI use by peer-reviewing an AI generated article. One problem is that with model capabilities rapidly changing, course materials need rewriting every year because what can’t be done by AI one year, is trivially done by AI the next. [1]
  • Teaching programming in the AI era with Lijing Lin. Lijing is teaching diverse students without a technical background to write code. The foundations still matter, even though a calculator can crunch numbers for you, students still need to understand what the calculator is doing on their behalf. There are big risks with AI in programming which include students trying to skip code comprehension. [1]
  • Designing AI-resistant Assessment and Perry’s scheme of Dualism, Multiplicity, Relativism, and Commitment within Relativism with Professor Jenni Rose. Jenni encourages her students to realise that sometimes there isn’t a “right answer” using a framework provided Perry’s scheme. [1]
Figure 4: Questions, questions so many questions! Many of the talks were accompanied by lively Q&A sessions

Sense of belonging and social justice

Sense of belonging and social justice were recurrent themes, two presentations I enjoyed on this were

  1. Belonging, Voice and Agency: Co-designing mentoring with international students with Lei Zeng, Wennie Subramonian and Lalrinzuali Fanai described creating materials to train 20 mentors working with 60 mentees for students outside the UK. Subjects include “speaking Manc”, travelling in Manchester, understanding the NHS – all things that UK students take for granted, but might seem incomprehensibly quirky and British to international students. I look forward to seeing this material when it is publicly available in the autumn. [1]
  2. In fashion again, Lisa Taylor talked about the KÁYÒMI Digital Sustainability Platform this looks like it would make a good student project for the Imago Software team. The project partners with African industry stakeholders, KÁYÒMI – ‘Cherish Our Garments’, a circular fashion initiative developed in collaboration with BITTANY. [1]

Which brings us full circle back to partners again …

Returning to partnerships and authentic assessment

Partnerships can make assessment more authentic, and authentic assessment is a subject in its own right. Two presentations caught my eye:

  • Elika Aminian, Louise Walker and Rose Wagstaffe presented work on developing an authentic coursework assessment for actuarial science. [1] I didn’t realise the maths degree had so many flavours, it’s available with Physics, Computer Science, Philosophy, Finance and Actuarial Science.
  • Stewart Blakeway and Uli Sattler presented work on scaling authentic learning: evaluating a large-cohort poster showcase in undergraduate Computer Science. [1]There was an interesting discussion on if this exercise should be formative or summative and if some kind of publication was possible.

The conference finished where we started with a final plenary with John Holden, Samira Kaissi from Unit M, George Moulton and Lee Pugalis, chaired by Jenn Hallam shown in figure 5.

Figure 5: From left to right John Holden, Samira Kaissi, George Moulton, Lee Pugalis and Jenn Hallam discuss Innovation in Action: Reimagining the Student Experience.

The panel explored how teaching and innovation can together become a defining feature of the student experience at the University of Manchester. The session examined how partner-enabled learning, entrepreneurship education, interdisciplinary collaboration and real-world challenge-led teaching can help prepare students to thrive in a rapidly changing economy and society. The panellists discussed how the University can create the culture, partnerships, and environments needed to turn learning, research and ideas into real-world impact within the context of the Manchester 2035 strategy.

One question I raised was, how do we mitigate the inherent risks to employers, students and staff associated with partnerships? What are the resources needed to make partnerships work at scale and who is going to provide and manage them? Part of the answer is, to manage expectations about what is required of partnerships and what they can deliver in practice.

How much is ITL actually like Glastonbury festival?

So, back to our festival analogy. How similar is the ITL conference to a musical event like Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts?


Figure 6: How much are conferences like festivals? They have some similarities but many differences. CC BY-SA picture of crowd gathered at Glastonbury Festival by Czampal via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/SgyH

There are some similarities between Glastonbury festival (figure 6) and the ITL conference:

  • They both involve performers trying to connect with their audience on multiple stages of various sizes. Some performances were better than others, some of the artists you’ve probably heard of, many of them will be new to you
  • There is too much at both events to see in the short time available, seven parallel tracks at ITL and hundreds of stages at Glastonbury. This is a feature not a bug!
  • It’s better to attend the live event if you can, festivals and conferences are about the experience of being there and joining in the conversation, rather than catching up later, but see the Zoom note below.
  • Just like it’s easy too find some new music you like at Glastonbury, you’ll make lots of new connections with your colleagues at ITL, be exposed to some inspiring pedagogy that you can take away and use in your practice afterwards

But there are significant differences between them, because a conference isn’t like festival in lots of ways:

  • The ITL conference is free to attend for UoM employees whereas Glastonbury requires you to take out a bank loan or remortgage your house in order to buy a ticket, provided you can even get hold of one.
  • While there was lots fun to be had at the ITL conference, festivals are mostly about recreation whereas conferences are mostly about work. There is no music, there was no stage diving, crowd surfing, piggy-backing, camping and home-made flag-waving commonly found at music festivals, at least not in the sessions I attended! Maybe we should change this next year?
  • If you want to get up on stage and tell everyone about your work, that’s probably easier to do at the ITL conference than Glastonbury festival, unless you’re already an established superstar with a record deal, back catalogue and huge fanbase
  • If you’d like to get involved in ITL in 2027, there are lots of positions available on the organising committee and peer review panels, contact the organisers for details
  • The food is much better at ITL than Glastonbury. I thought the food was good, much better than over-priced junk fast food you find at music festivals from mobile vendors.
  • The toilets are much better at ITL than Glastonbury! Thankfully there are no long drops or portaloos, just well managed and clean facilities provided by the University. When you go home after the event you can have a proper shower and sleep in a decent bed. Phew!

So ITL is like a musical festival in some ways but not in lots of others.

How can ITL be better in 2027?

I thoroughly enjoyed the ITL conference, I’ve been every year for the last four years and I always meet interesting new people doing great projects, as well as catching up with old friends and getting the chance to share and reflect on my own practice. It was really refreshing to see members of the University executive team at the conference taking part this year. They didn’t just make a token appearance and then leave shortly after. The executive team took the time to listen to what people are talking about and contributed to the dialogue. Thanks to Duncan Ivison, Patrick Hackett, John Holden, Eleanor Morrissey FCIPD MA and Jenn Hallam for properly joining in.

Figure 7:The Dimensions of Activities Related to Teaching (DART), note the PUBLIC dimension, an important feature of scholarship is PUBLIC-ation. Image adapted from [3]

I’d like ITL to carry on growing and improving year on year, a bit like Glastonbury has done since starting in 1970. In order to continue growing, the ITL conference needs to:

  • Publish more of the proceedings. The abstract book [1] is handy, but it captures a small fraction of the data and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) from the conference. Authors should be publishing their slides too, figshare.manchester.ac.uk would be a relatively easy way to do that. Once authors have their paper accepted for publication, they could upload it to the repository, see an example at [2]. Scholarship is not really public if it isn’t a fully published PUBLIC-ation! An abstract is necessary but not sufficient, see figure 7.
  • Tell us where the catchup is: When you miss an act at Glastonbury, you can catch-up later on BBC iPlayer bbc.co.uk/glastonbury. Some of the ITL talks were streamed using Zoom, but if they were recorded, I can’t find them published anywhere. There are a few I would liked to have seen from the 85% of the conference I wasn’t able to attend, speaking of which…
  • Zoom out because we should stop using Zoom, we’ll probably be forced to next year anyway when IT services follow through on their warning about switching to Teams by the end of 2026. Some combination of meetings, webinars, and town halls on Microsoft Teams / 365 should do the trick – and this means there’s no more tedious zoom logins to worry about.
  • Anonymously peer-review As the conference grows, it gets harder to get your paper accepted. More submissions are great, and will hopefully increase the quality of the conference to. But quantity is harder to manage, especially when its anonymously peer reviewed. There are good, free and cheap tools to do this like EasyChair see easychair.org. A Microsoft form populating an Excel spreadsheet isn’t adequate for managing conference proceedings on this scale – and it means the peer review is not anonymous.
  • Help us scale it up. It’s great to hear about innovative pedagogy which often occurs in small classes of less than 30 students. Much of our teaching at the University of Manchester involves classes much much bigger than that. it’s not unusual for classes to have between 300 and 500 students in first and second year. So a key question is, not just how do we teach innovatively, but how do we innovate at scale?
  • Increase attendance and participation. Many colleagues don’t seem to know that ITL happening. Others aren’t willing or able to attend. While it was reassuring to see Pavlos Petoumenos and Stewart Blakeway, many of my Computer Science colleagues who would have attended were absent. For example, neither our Discipline Head of Education (DHoE) Andrea Schalk or Teaching & Learning Enhancement Lead (TLEL) Gareth Henshall have been able to attend any of the last FOUR conferences because it clashes with exam boards in Computer Science. These dates are fixed a long time in advance of the ITL conference. I might have missed them, but I didn’t see anyone from the Department of Physics and Astronomy (random example) – do they even know it is happening? Anna Scaife for example, is publishing lots of interesting positive (and evidence based) material on independent learning for undergraduate students at howtobeastudent.substack.com. Why aren’t there more people like Anna at the ITL conference?

So ITL is great, but there’s plenty of room for improvement next year.

Thanks Jenni, Hannah, Sarah, Holly, Freya and Nahid

If my criticism comes across as being ungrateful, I’m trying to be a constructive and critical friend so we can put on an even better event on next year. I’m very grateful to the huge team of people that worked extremely hard to make the conference happen again. Thanks Jennie Blake, Hannah Cobb, Sarah Dyer, Freya Corrywright, Holly Dewsnip, Nahid Farzalizadeh and many more for putting on another fantastic event. Thanks also to the photographer who took most of the photos that I’ve used to illustrate this report.

I look forward to ITL returning in 2027, hope to see you there. In the meantime, join us at the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN), we’re a friendly bunch and our members include inspiring people like Karen Lander, Rachel Studd, Nick Weise PFHEA IFNTF, Reimala Sivalingam, Sally Hickson, Lindsey Jones, Thomas Rodgers, Grazyna (Grace) Lipowska-Bhalla, PhD, SFHEA, Anna Goatman, Ali Owrak, Dr Rachel Parker-Strak, Doron Cohen, David Schultz, Nikesh Solanki and many more.

Come and join us! We organise and host regular events throughout the year about the Scholarship of Teaching & Learing (SoTL), in between the big Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) annual event.

References

  1. Jennie Blake (2026) University of Manchester Teaching and Learning Conference 2026 (Abstract Booklet) figshare DOI:10.48420/32802033
  2. Duncan Hull, Suzanne Embury, Tom Carroll, Christopher Page and Ben Possible (2026) Partner-enabled learning with local and global software engineers from Manchester to the world, Figshare DOI:10.48420/32745048.v2
  3. Beth Kern, Gwendolyn Mettetal, Marcia D. Dixson, and Robin K. Morgan (2015) The Role of SoTL in the Academy:Upon the 25th Anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered Journal of the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 1 – 14. doi: 10.14434/josotl.v15i3.13623

This post is also published at linkedin.com/pulse/celebrating-teaching-learning-glastonbury-festival-2026-hull–dvjae

July 4, 2026

Thanks to everyone who helped me graduate today

Filed under: education — Duncan Hull @ 4:29 pm
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Today is the 4th July, a day for celebrating independence. Alongside those who graduated with me in the Whitworth Building, I’m celebrating independence. Not national independence marked by independence days around the world, but independence of thinking and independence of learning. These are two of the most important things and education can give you. I’m grateful to have received these gifts from my teachers and fellow students.

Figure 1: Shaking hands with Tony Trinci at a graduation ceremony in the Whitworth Building at the University of Manchester on 4th July

Studying any subject for an extended period of time can give you two things that help you become more independent.

  1. Better critical thinking skills, since it’s the 4th July, let’s call “critical thinking” free and independent thinking skills. Raise a glass to freedom, something they can never take away.
  2. Bigger and more diverse social networks of friends, professionals, mentors, peers, role-models, task masters, teachers, influencers, experts, leaders, colleagues and collaborators that you meet in the communities you are part of. The teams you join at University are likely to be bigger and more diverse than those you were previously a member of.

If you’re graduating this year, you might be wondering what all those years of study were all about, particularly now that you’ve finally got some time to properly digest and reflect on your experience.

What was that all about? Are you stuffed? Was it worth it?

Studying anything is a like having a large meal. When you finish, you feel so full that couldn’t eat another thing, not even a wafer thin mint. Instead of having a bellyful of food, your head is crammed full of ideas that you learned in labs, lectures and across campus, from the whole community around you. Some of these ideas are quickly digested, others take longer. They all become a part of you.

Nourishing mother is a phrase used to describe what every University does, usually expressed in latin: alma mater. Our metaphorical mothers should be plural and neutral, not singular and gendered because we are nourished by many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents and so on. There’s a whole intellectual family around us in education, so alma familia: nourishing family, would be a more accurate description of what Universities, colleges and schools are actually doing.

If you’re graduating now, you might not feel like eating any more, but you can always come back later in the restaurant of lifelong learning when your hunger returns. There’s always something new on the menu, some “dish” you haven’t tried yet. The door is always open to learning and it doesn’t have to be in academia, you’ll learn just as much in the workplace.

Figure 2: Sat in the audience with my bestie Chris listening to Tony Trinci talk about student-staff ratios. I wonder what he’d make of the ratios and numbers today?

Thanks, plant scientists for your nature and nurture

My undergraduate degree is a BSc (Hons) Applied Plant Sciences, when you tell people that, the usual reaction is WTF? [1] The Applied bit is what the University now calls Industrial or Professional Experience (IE), as part its drive towards more Partner-Enabled Learning in the Manchester 2035 strategy. The discipline of Plant Sciences used to be called Botany, but since that usually invokes images of skipping through meadows, pressing flowers and speaking Latin binomials, it’s usually known as Plant Sciences because that sounds more modern. We did skip through meadows and press flowers, which I can thoroughly recommend, but it was only 10 credits out of 360 total. The rest of the degree studied the growth, reproduction and evolution of plant life at every level from the molecular, biochemical, genetic and cellular through to physiological and ecological over the last 3.5 billion years of life on earth.

Another way of describing what a degree means is to thank all the people who taught it. So, thanks to Tony Trinci (microbiology), Bob Callow (Genetics), Jackie Potter (final year project supervisor), Liz Sheffield (botany), Joan Watson (palaeobotany) [2], Keith Gull (molecular biology), Amanda Bamford (physiology), Laurence Cook (genetics), Robin Baker (evolutionary biology), Sean Edwards (systematics & taxonomy), John Lee (ecology), John Tallis (ecology), Michael Emes (biochemistry), Caroline Bowsher (biochemistry), Cliff Bray (biochemistry), Allan G. Lowe (biochemistry), Roland Ennos (biomechanics), Phil Harris (placement year), Malcolm Press CBE (ecology), David Sigee (botany), Harry Epton, Dick Benton, Robert W. Foster (computational biology), Fred Rumsey. Thanks to all the teachers whose names I can’t remember. This is slightly embarrassing but it was a while ago! The unknown lecturer from the Department of Mathematics taught us differential calculus and statistics. Some more cell biologists & geneticists from first year are a hazy memory, an economist from Humanities at The University of Manchester taught us some environmental and agricultural economics. An army of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and technicians made the labs work. There were lots of wet labs in vivo and in vitro, with a few computer labs in silico and some field trips too. Then there’s all those administrators in the back office who kept the wheels turning. Different people are affected by different teachers in different ways. For me, out of all the teachers above, those that had the biggest influence on me were:

  • Tony Trinci (1936-2020) Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) at The University of Manchester, pictured above. Leaders are often sharp people and some leading Professors have sharp elbows and sharp tongues to accompany their sharp minds. Not Tony. He was approachable and treated students with kindness, patience and respect, while also being a razor-sharp leader in his field of mycology. Thanks Tony and RIP.
  • Liz Sheffield: Associate PVC and Emeritus Professor and Dean at the University of Liverpool. Liz successfully drilled into many undergraduates like me the importance of written English, not just as a tool for communication but as a tool for thinking. Some of this was done using the Biological Sciences Review a magazine distributed to thousands of A-level students across the UK and beyond. Liz lead a fantastic course called Photosynthetic Organisms where we used microscopes to study alien lifeforms like Volvox, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and many more weird and wonderful creatures. She also supervised my dissertation on how cells know their arse from the elbow which went by the more scientific title of Signal Transduction During Embryogenesis in Fucoid Algae. [3] It’s one of the pieces of work I was most proud of, largely because Liz gave me honest, personalised, timely and constructive feedback on it. She also ran a final year course unit in the style of a journal club, which was a big revelation for me – another aha! moment. This was the inspiration for UK ACM SIGCSE journal club, we meet on the first Monday of every month, join us at uki-sigcse.acm.org/journal-club. Thanks again Liz.
  • Michael Emes: Emeritus Professor at the University of Guelph near Toronto in Canada. When a subject gets difficult and technical, as biochemistry sometimes does, it can be tempting to dumb it down to make it more accessible for learners. Making a subject easier might improve your course evaluations, National Student Survey (NSS) scores and your institutions ranking in the endless jockeying of league tables. Mike Emes never did this with his teaching, and his labs were great, particularly the experimental study of an antiporter known as the triose phosphate translocator, an important membrane protein crucial to energy flow in chloroplasts. [4] This was authentic assessment at its very best, hard work and challenging, but worth the effort required of students and teachers alike. Learning is hard, and sometimes you’re going to have to suffer. There aren’t many short cuts that are worth taking. Thanks Michael for not taking short cuts.
  • Malcolm Press: Vice Chancellor of The Manchester Metropolitan University. Ecologists like Malcolm often go on interesting field trips and sometimes they take you with them. Malcolm led field trips and residentials to the Mediterranean and sub-arctic which were life changing experiences for many students including me. Thanks Malcolm.
  • Jackie Potter: Dean of Academic Innovation at the University of Chester. I was a humble field assistant to Jackie’s postdoc research at Abisko Scientific Research Station in sub-arctic Sweden which was run by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This was by far and away one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. Jackie had the unglamorous job of supervising my employment, reading my final year project report and giving me feedback. Thanks Jackie. [5]
  • Phil Harris: Emeritus Professor of Plant Science, Centre for Agroecology and Food Security at Coventry University, now retired. Phil supervised my placement year in industry. As an adolescent [6] I had a lot of growing up to do when I was an undergraduate and I did some of that growing up during my placement year which was hosted by Phil and his colleagues at the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA), affiliated to Coventry University and now known as Garden Organic. Thanks Phil.
  • Robin Baker: (1944-2026). There is no shortage of independent and free-thinking academics with bold ideas in what has become the The University of Manchester Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (FBMH). One of them was Robin, he lead popular courses on the crazy bonkers world of behavioural ecology. Thanks Robin and RIP, so long and thanks for all the sperm wars. [7]

Thanks to my family, especially my parents. Thanks to my alma familia too – all my fellow students, can’t name them all here but Christopher Gilbert, Lucy Harris, Guy Hanke, Erica McAlister, Paul Taplin CEng MIMechE, Rupert Blackstone, Clare Roebuck DipM MCIM, Hannah, Steph, Andy, Zoe, Alistair, Vanessa, Andy (BUNAC ambassador), Rebecca, Emily, Amy, Nick and Merc from the Mountaineering & Climbing club. Thanks to Helena, Terry Callaghan, Mats Sonesson, Nils-Åke Andersson, Rosie, Nick, Dylan, Karin, Kjell, Lennart, Marion, Martin, Ulf from Abisko Naturvetenskapliga (ANS) now run by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat . Why name all these people? Again? Gratitude goes a long way to improving everybody’s mental health but there’s another reason expressing gratitude matters:

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known” —Chuck Palahniuk Invisible Monsters [2]

So thanks to all my teachers for your combined efforts.

Lessons to younger students, graduands and graduates

A question I like asking students of all ages is to imagine that Chris parkes in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has lent us his colleagues experimental time travel machine and assured us that it works. Using this machine to meet their former selves, what would advice would they offer? What have they learned during their course? Everyone gives an interesting and different answer, so here’s mine:

  • Grades don’t matter as much to employers as you probably think they do. Like many students, I had an unhealthy, toxic, abusive and dysfunctional relationship with grades. Having spent the first half of the degree pretending not to care about grades, I spent the latter half of the degree caring far too much about them. A better strategy would have been to strike a healthier balance between caring and not caring, whatever the degree classification you’re after. Remember that many employers are significantly less interested in your grades than you are. Congratulations on whatever grade you’ve achieved but remember employers want to know WHO you are and what SKILLS you have learned and can offer alongside your specialist knowledge. Grades give employers a glimpse of some of that, but only a glimpse, as Bryan Mathers at Visual Thinkery puts it you are MUCH more than your grades.Never stop networking and learning from your peers. Learning has both social and solitary dimensions. For the social part, keep learning from everyone around you, deliberately and frequently, learning on the job, mentoring (or being mentored), managing (or being managed), study buddies, revision groups, peer support and peer learning, call it what you want. It’s all good. The medics call it see one, do one, teach one but this phenomenon extends far beyond the medical profession. [9] Graduation ceremonies are a great opportunity to refresh connections with peers you might not see again for a while, especially the weaker ties described in Coding Your Future [10]Extra-curriculars and experience are what make you unique – they also have the added bonus of being good for your mental health and wellbeing too. I’d done a tonne of extra-curriculars, but not fully realised their value personally or professionally. With two summer internships, a year in industry and a gap year, student societies like the British Universities North America Club 🇺🇸BUNAC and the Mountaineering & Climbing Club, I’d filled my boots with extra-curriculars because they were interesting and fun. I wasn’t thinking about polishing my CV, but it was all the extra-curricular activities that helped me build skills and knowledge you can’t get from formal academic study and helped job applications stand out later. Anything extra-curricular will distinguish you from the crowd. When you’re applying for graduate jobs, all of your competitors will have a degree of some sort, so what makes you different? Any side projects, hobbies, societies and experiences, including casual or part-time work are a key part of who you are. They are a crucial part of what you have to offer employers and how you can look after your mental health when facing a demanding workload.It can take years to fully digest whatever skills and knowledge you’re trying to learn, so reflect deliberately and frequently and be patient. Some lessons take time, some lessons are painful, humiliating, emotionally challenging or intellectually demanding. You might not be ready for them yet. You might not even realise what you’ve actually learned until you reflect on it because learning can happen slowly when you’re not looking, like sedimentation.

Three good diagnostic questions to ask yourself as your years of education settle are:

  1. How have you become more independent?
  2. Who in your professional and social networks can help you make the next moves in your career?
  3. Who is in your alma familia and what do you have to thank them for? Expressing your gratitude doesn’t have to take the form of a social-media-friendly, clickbait-optimised, attention-seeking and gushing LinkedIn post, like this one. Sometimes personalised and private thank you’s are more appropriate.

If you’re graduating this year, congratulations, best wishes and bon voyage for the next moves of your journey. If you’re graduating from The University of Manchester, check out the services on offer to graduates. If you’d like to use the careers service, they are available for you up to two years after you graduate: make sure update your contact email before your @manchester.ac.uk account is deleted at the end of July. See careers.manchester.ac.uk/graduates. 🎓

Independent time travel

The TODAY is the title of this article is not 4th July 2026, or even the 4th July 1776, but the 4th July 1996, I got here using a time-travel machine and a hole in the space-time continuum called the The University of Manchester Graduation Archive YouTube channel. There is footage here every year stretching back to 1987. The screenshot above is taken from this video: youtube.com/watch?v=tfF43_2i2XQ&t=1658s

Figure 3: Happy 250th anniversary to the class of 1776. Results from your class have been mixed. Raise and glass to freedom, something they can never take away, no matter what they tell you, let’s have another round tonight. Public domain image of the United States Semiquincentennial logo by Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/HGZ3

Thanks to Julian Skyrme for pointing out the graduation archive which captures the Happy Days of the Summer of ’96, and many others. Back in the summer of ’96. Woah Yeah!

References

  1. Mary Williams (2009) Why Study Plants? The Plant Cell. 21 (10) Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) doi.org/cwk56d (TL;DR “Plants provide us with oxygen, food, medicine, energy and materials. Scientists study plants to improve and secure the food supply for an increasing world population, identify new sources of medicines, improve production of materials and identify sources of biofuels and renewable resources. Studying plants increases our knowledge about life in general and helps us to work with them to keep us fed, healthy, sheltered, clothed, entertained and happy.”)
  2. Joan Watson (2005) One hundred and fifty years of palaeobotany at Manchester University, Geological Society of London, Special Publications, Volume 241, Pages 229 – 257 DOI:10.1144/GSL.SP.2003.207.01.16
  3. Duncan Hull (1995) Signal Transduction During Embryogenesis in Fucoid Algae, BS304 dissertation, School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester.
  4. David Walker (1992) Energy, Plants and Man, Oxgraphics Limited, Brighton, Sussex. ISBN:1870232054
  5. Jacqueline A. Potter, Malcolm C. Press, Terry V. Callaghan, and John A. Lee. (1995). “Growth Responses of Polytrichum commune and Hylocomium splendens to Simulated Environmental Change in the Sub-Arctic.” New Phytologist 131 (4): 533–41. (I get name-checked in the acknowledgements, the first time I’m mentioned in any scientific literature, woohoo!) DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8137.1995.tb03089.x
  6. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (2019) Inventing ourselves: The secret life of the teenage Brain, Black Swan, London, ISBN:9781784161347 (Sarah argues that adolescence extends beyond our teenage years and into our twenties)
  7. Robin Baker (1996) Sperm Wars: Infidelity, sexual conflict and other bedroom battles, Fourth Estate, London, ISBN:9781857023565 (Some plants have motile sperm too, not the confusingly named Spermatophytes but Bryophytes, Pteridophytes, Ginkgos and Cycads.)
  8. Chuck Palahniuk (1999) Invisible Monsters, Vintage, London: ISBN:9780099285441 (From the author of Fight Club)
  9. Grainne Kearney, Nick Gardiner, Davina Carr, Martina Kelly, Gerard J Gormley, (2025) See one, do one, teach one: other professionals don’t accept this so why should the medical profession? BMJ 2025; 389 DOI:10.1136/bmj.r432
  10. Duncan Hull (2026) Coding Your Future: A guidebook for students, cdyf.me, University of Manchester
  11. Bryan Adams (1984) Summer of ’69 in Reckless. A&M Records. “I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five and dime. Played it ’til my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69… Those were the best days of my life”

This articles is also available at linkedin.com/pulse/thank-you-everybody-who-helped-me-graduate-today-duncan-hull–dxq2e

Figure 4: In case you’re wondering how I remembered all those names, I didn’t remember all of them. I had some help from the handbooks above. Note the change of logo midway through the degree, its changed again since, with another change on the way. More logo changes than the BBC?

July 3, 2026

Praying for divine intervention in Mexico’s mythical high temple: The Estadio Azteca

Filed under: football,sport — Duncan Hull @ 12:50 pm
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One of the reasons the World Cup is enjoyable to watch is the memories. Despite all the blatant FIFA corruption, despite all the amateur dramatics, questionable decision making, greenwashing, sportswashing and over inflated egos that FIFA promotes, the tournament resurrects many memories. Some are happy, some are painful. Who were you with, where were you, what were you doing and how did it feel the last time you watched this team or match?

The moment after divine intervention from the infamous Hand of God at the Estadio Azteca with Diego Maradona and Peter Shilton in 1986. Public domain picture from the El Gráfico newspaper via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/R$NM

The greeks have a name for all this sporting drama: the Olympic agonies (αγώνες). What better way to describing the experience of being a football fan. Agony. Talking of which, the England National Football Team will face Mexico in Mexico City on 5th July at the magnificent Estadio Azteca. Do you remember the last time your team played the Estadio? The venue has some distinguished history including:

The Estadio is the only stadium to have staged two FIFA World Cup finals. While it wowed Pele, Maradona and the Pope, it looks like an Aztec temple of human sacrifice especially for European football teams. Thankfully there’s less blood and no murder, but of the 89 competitive games that Mexico have played there, they’ve only lost two of them. The omen’s aren’t good and neither is the Mexican weather forecast.

While I’m pleased to watch the England national football team make progress at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, they haven’t done so very convincingly, especially in defence. There’s plenty of Dad jokes circulating about England’s defenders being “left-back” (groan) in England. The national team look in need of divine intervention, in their favour this time, for any chance of beating an impressive Mexico on their home turf at high altitude.

So, bring on the agony and if you’re supporting England, get down on your knees and pray for divine intervention. It’s likely to be memorable.

Terry Butcher’s English agony accompanies Diego Maradona’s Argentinian ecstasy at the Estadio Azteca in 1986. Public domain picture by Dani Yako from the Clarín newspaper via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/R$P$

May 5, 2026

Why is Learning So Challenging?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 10:35 pm
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There are plenty of reasons that learning is challenging but there’s one reason that really stands out: feedback. We learn more efficiently when we can get timely, constructive and personalised feedback on our work from somebody who knows what they are talking about. Whatever you are learning, in the finite time you are learning it, answering these three questions will provide feedback to help you progress:

  1. Which skills and knowledge should have the highest priority in your life (both curricular and extra-curricular)?
  2. What skills and knowledge are you learning best and how do you know you are making progress?
  3. What skills and knowledge do you need to improve and how are you going to learn them?

These simple questions often give complex feedback that consumes time and resources, both of which are in limited supply for you and the community that teaches you. You can’t always get what you want, when you need it. That’s why learning is so difficult.

Hosts and winners of the University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU) Awards 2026 on stage in the Whitworth Building.

Teaching is Really Challenging Too

If learning is really challenging then it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that teaching is really challenging too, for the exactly the same reasons. Like you, your teachers are only human (honest!) and we make mistakes – I’m sure you’ve noticed. We’ll be more likely to learn from our mistakes if we can get timely, constructive, actionable and personalised feedback from students. We ask ourselves the same three questions above to help us make progress, but like you, our time is finite as well so:

  1. Which knowledge and skills should we give the highest priority to in our teaching? Where do they fit inside, alongside and outside of curricula?
  2. What skills and knowledge are we teaching best and how will we know when our students are making sufficient progress?
  3. What skills and knowledge do we need to teach better and how are we going to assess them?

Right across the higher education sector, it’s a struggle to get feedback on teaching, positive or negative. Students are very busy, have higher priorities, suffer from endless survey fatigue and don’t always recognise the value of giving constructive feedback. Disengaged students don’t believe that their feedback will be listened to or acted on. All of this results in unit surveys that typically have response rates so embarrassingly low (less than 1%) that some UK Universities have abandoned using them completely. The tiny amount of data they provide is often meaningless, distorted and unreliable. Yet Universities continue to use them to assess the quality of their teaching and inform decisions about promotions.

So it’s really reassuring to get positive feedback when we are teaching things well. Thanks to the anonymous students who nominated and voted for me for the Excellence in Embedding Employability in the Curriculum award. I almost blubbed uncontrollably on stage like Gwyneth Paltrow when this nomination text was read out by Freya Weetch: 😭

“Duncan Hull is an outstanding Employability Lead who goes above and beyond to prepare students for the world of work. From connecting students with industry to creating exciting opportunities and careers events, he inspires confidence and ambition at every step. His energy, dedication, and genuine passion for student success have made a huge impact, empowering students to step boldly into their future careers. ”

Those very kind and moving words from an anonymous student will help me stay motivated and remind me why I get out of bed in the morning. Thanks to Alexandra (Lexie) Baynes, Krystyna Drewenska, Freya Weetch, Alec Severs, Amrit Dhillon, Bo Ana Murphy, Ben Ward, Katie Jackson and everyone at the University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU) for hosting these events, past and present. It felt appropriate to receive this award in the magnificent Whitworth Building where thousands of former students like me have graduated accompanied by their friends, supporters and families. It was also an opportunity to speak in front of the senior leadership of the The University of Manchester including Duncan Ivison, Jenn Hallam, Peter Green, Colette Fagan – thanks to Andrew Mawdsley for recording my fifteen seconds of fame. 🙏

Congratulations and jubilations to my fellow nominees and laureates: Hanan El-Wandi, The Diversify Politics Society, Dr. Pietro Paolo Frigenti, SFHEA, CMktr, The University of Manchester Women In Business Society, The University of Manchester Neurology and Neurosurgery Society, Alejandra Vicente Colmenares, Transforming Assessment Together, Breaking the Barrier to Let a Voice Out, Lei Zeng, The Inclusive Classroom Project, Alan Davies, Harsath Udayakumar, Vuyo Dube, Maria-Michaela Vierita, Matt Dalgliesh, Yuxin Yan, Abdelrahman Shaaban, Ishnoor Kaur, Fiona Chan, Anahita Jayaram, Christian N. Nwosu, Brogan Pritchard, Md Faisal Mahmud, Adella Tobing, The North West Biotech Initiative, Laura Swain, Adam Danquah, The University of Manchester Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health Maria Mercè Canal, Sohini Biswas, Carl M. Kulimushi, Anna Hood, PhD, Sam Rodgers, Louisa Shirley, Samhita Mukherjee, Lorraine Brobbey, Clara Dawson, Danny Dresner FCIIS, Doron Cohen, Neil Morrison, Saralees Nadarajah, Alison Hassett, Abdullatif Alfutimie, Venus Muscat, Stephen Craig, Sam Thozer, Mariangela D’Acri, Abbie Jones, Hala Shokr, Michele Caprio, Paul Tobin and Dr. Miri Firth PFHEA. Special thanks to Miri wooping loudly and gratifyingly when the winner was announced. 🏆

What was it Andy Warhol said? “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes seconds”. Enjoying my fifteen seconds of fame (top left) during evening in the Whitworth Building (top right) for an award (bottom right). Thanks again UMSU

Teaching is a team sport, not an individual one. Teaching professional skills by embedding employability in the curriculum is no different, we’ve had ongoing help from a large team of people from industry and academia. I’d like to thank the employers in our industry club, particularly Apple, Arm, Booking.com, BNY the BBC, Bloomberg, Couchbase, IBM, Apadmi, Matillion, Bet365, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, SeeChange Technologies, Morgan Stanley, Roku and many other members of our industry-club.cs.manchester.ac.uk who’ve helped us run a range of events for students in Computer Science. Many of these events have been organised in collaboration with our fantastic student societies UniCS Manchester, The Manchester Intelligence Society (MIS), The Manchester AI Society, RoboSoc (University of Manchester Robotics Society) and MathSoc Manchester who remind us what the joy of learning as part of a community is all about.

They’ve been a key part of what we’ve managed to offer students alongside Coding Your Future, the Wednesday Waggle with help from Imago Software (with Suzanne Embury), the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre (with Dan Syder) and UoM alumni. None of this would have been possible without ongoing support from my colleagues. Thanks to everyone who leads and delivers on the Herculean task our teaching and assessment Paul Nutter, Andrew Stewart, Steve Pettifer, Gareth Henshall, Stewart Blakeway, Louise Walker, David Petrescu, Sean Bechhofer, Uli Sattler, Andrea Schalk, Markel Vigo, Bijan Parsia, Toby Howard, Afrodite Galata, Tom Carroll, Chris Page and everyone else in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester. 🐝

We’ve also been supported by Professional Services (PS) staff across the University, particularly Mabel Yau, Ruth Maddocks, Cameron Macdonald, Lisa Wright, Nanna Pedley, Caroline Whitehand, Penney Gordon-Lanes, Ben Carter, Amanda Conway, Helen Frost, Anna Lomas, Jenny Sloan, Kelly-Ann Mallon and everyone in the careers service.

Our teaching and research in Computer Science is part of something bigger, that students don’t really see directly: the School of Engineering (SoE) and The University of Manchester Faculty of Science and Engineering. Thanks to leadership and management from academics and administrators alike, including Sarah Cartmell, Sarah Sharples CBE FREng, Carly Peesapati, Akilu Yunusa-Kaltungo (PhD CEng FIMechE FHEA) and many more.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN) who help all staff across the University to improve the quality of teaching and learning, wherever they work and whatever they do. The TaSN is led by Hannah Cobb and Jenni Rose NTF PFHEA with help from Eleanor Aspey, Helen Baxter, Elaine Clark, Karen Lander, Jen McBride, Dr Rachel Parker-Strak, Thomas Rodgers, Reimala Sivalingam, Rachel Studd, Lisa Taylor, Holly Dewsnip and Nick Weise PFHEA IFNTF. If you care about improving teaching, you should come and join us in the TaSN. We host regular events online and in person which anyone from The University of Manchester (and beyond) is welcome to join. Our next TaSN meeting is Thursday 7th May, see the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN).

You can find out more about the UMSU awards, which continue this week with the Arts and Media Awards on Thursday 7th May at manchesterstudentsunion.com/awards.

The UMSU awards continue on Thursday the 7th May 2026 ❤️

(You can cite this article using its full Digital Object Identifier DOI:10.59350/1y79e-6mn80 or the shorter doi.org/q6bx, both of which identify the same article. A modified version of this article is available at linkedin.com/pulse/why-learning-so-challenging-duncan-hull–i4qlc)

March 11, 2026

TITLES ARE TINSEL!

Filed under: bookish,education,notmyking — Duncan Hull @ 3:24 pm
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It’s easy to be impressed by people’s titles. From the Chief of this, to the Director of that and from the President of this, to the Leader of that or the Head of whatever and Manager of so-and-so or Founder of an organisation: Titles tell you something about the person that holds them. In the UK we have more than our fair share of extraordinarily grandiose and pompous titles, some of which have been in the news recently, often for the wrong reasons:

  • Lord Mandelson (formerly “Prince of Darkness”), now Peter Mountbatten-Darkness
  • Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, to give its full name (KBE)
    • Commander of the British Empire: what’s left of it (CBE)
    • Order of the British Empire: what’s left of it (OBE),
    • Member of the British Empire: what’s left of it (MBE)
  • Sir, not like “Yes Sir” in school or “SIR, YES SIR!” in the military but:
  • Kings and Queens from a medieval history like:
  • Other Fairy Tale Titles from Feudalism like:
    • The Duke (of Cambridge) William Mountbatten-Windsor #NotMyDuke
    • The Duchess (of Edinburgh) Sophie Mountbatten-Windsor #NotMyDuchess
    • The Princess (of Wales) Catherine Mountbatten-Windsor #NotMyPrincess
    • The Prince (of Entitlement) Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, this is less of a fairy tale and more of a horror story for anyone who associated with the disgraced collaborator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Formerly the Prince of York, he’s now simply known as the Prince of Power, Corruption & Lies and definitely #NotMyPrince

Universities everywhere are stuffed full of people with fancy sounding titles too: Professors, Chancellors, Masters, Fellows, Doctors, Proctors, Bachelors, Presidents, Deans, Principals, Rectors, Wardens and so on. Churches love to lord it over us too with their Archbishops, Bishops, Deacons, Priests, Canons and Vicars etc. In many organisations you’ll find plenty of Associate do-da’s, Assistant so-and-so’s, Deputy what-nots, Senior thingamajigs and Vice bla-blas.

Titles, titles everywhere! Some hard earned, some inherited, some awarded, some bought. Some meritocratic, some theocratic, some democratic, some aristocratic. While there are many good and legitimate reasons for using titles, they aren’t always used with honourable intentions. I’m thinking of scenarios like:

  • “Don’t you know who I am?”
  • “We’re not on first name terms yet”
  • “You must use my titles when addressing me…”

Titles can be dehumanising for both addresser and addressee. When titles are stripped from their holder, it is a good reminder that we shouldn’t be too enamoured by them in the first place, especially when they carry lots of baggage. The weightier the titles, the more cumbersome they can be.

Titles have a tendency to put people on a pedestal, which they inevitably fall off at some point. Shelley puts it better:

According to Percy Bysshe Shelley “Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor” [1] Public domain image of a portrait of the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint via the UK National Portrait Gallery in London on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/p3h

So, titles are tinsel because we’re all human, decorated or otherwise. Maybe you like a bit of tinsel on your Christmas tree, who doesn’t, but a tree is still a tree – with or without the fancy decorations. So the next time you’re impressed by somebody’s title, remember that the titled, en-titled, un-titled, de-titled, re-titled and stripped of their titles, are all just people with very human flaws which might otherwise be obscured by the decorative titles we give them.

We should treat people with respect, not because of their titles, but because they are human.

References

  1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1812) “Declaration of Rights.” In The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 1, edited by E. B. Murray. Romantic Poetry; Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/actrade/9780198127482.book.1

You can cite this page using the Digital Object Identifier provided by rogue-scholar.org either the long DOI:10.59350/1fs12-2z824 or the shorter doi.org/qvd8, both of which point to the same thing.

Cover Stars of February 2026 editions of Private Eye Magazine № 1669 www.private-eye.co.uk/covers/cover-1669 (left) and № 1668 www.private-eye.co.uk/covers/cover-1668 (right) with two former Princes, The Prince of York (left) and of The Prince of Darkness (right)

January 9, 2026

Improving practical software engineering teaching with industrial mentoring of open source team projects

Filed under: conferences,education,engineering — Duncan Hull @ 11:33 am
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Screenshot from stendhalgame.org, the software used in this project

Mentors can enrich and extend your teaching by supporting students learning during their study. Here’s a paper I presented yesterday describing some teaching we’ve done over the last decade (2015-2025) mentoring software engineers on a second year undergraduate course in Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK. Our mentors have come from around forty different organisations from startups to BigTech and everything in between, using a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) called stendhalgame.org for the project. Here’s the abstract of the paper below [1] published open access in the full conference proceedings from Computing Education Practice (CEP) at Durham University via the ACM Digital Library [2]:

Employers often remark that Computer Science graduates do not have the right skills to work on modern software engineering projects where agile practices, continuous integration, test-driven development, git workflows and regular code reviews are commonplace. To address this issue, we designed a course to introduce students to some of the realities of software engineering outside of academia. We describe the journey of building and running an industrial mentoring scheme for this course where students are assigned an experienced engineering mentor from industry who each guide a small team of six through an open source project.

This sets the course apart from the more traditional engineering projects, where students build small and simple system from scratch. Instead we ask students to fix bugs and add features in a large and unfamiliar open source codebase, a game called stendhalgame.org. The mentoring scheme is a key part of enabling that, both in terms of motivating the students but also in providing guidance and advice on how to tackle these kinds of software engineering task. We reflect on the program, which has been taken by more than 2000 second year students over a nine year period. The main contribution is the combination of human mentoring with software that facilitates more meaningful discussions between mentors and mentees that would otherwise have not taken place. As far as we can tell, this is novel in the UK in terms of scale and approach.

Thanks to the students, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), mentors and my co-authors (especially Suzanne Embury but also Ben Possible, Christopher Page and Tom Carroll) who made this work possible by designing, developing, delivering, improving and (in the case of students) actually doing the course. Thanks to Karl Southern and Steven Bradley for organising CEP, which celebrated its tenth birthday 🎂 this year. We wrote a paper about that too, but that’s another story for another post. [3]

If you teach some kind of Computing, you might enjoy attending CEP, even if you don’t want to publish anything. It’s a good place to learn about what others are doing, because the focus on Practice, rather than Research. [3] CEP is full of lots of good ideas, papers, workshops and interesting people teaching Computing at a wide range of institutions from primary school through secondary school, from FE Colleges, Apprenticeships and a range of different Universities. I’ll post the slides and recorded presentation talk here shortly. The full course material is at software-eng.netlify.app

References

  1. Duncan Hull, Suzanne Embury, Ben Possible, Christopher Page and Tom Carroll (2026) Improving practical software engineering teaching with industrial mentoring of open source team projects. CEP ’26: Proceedings of the 10th Computing Education Practice Pages 29–32, DOI:10.1145/3772338.3772350
  2. CEP ’26: Proceedings of the 10th Computing Education Practice, Durham University DOI:10.1145/3772338
  3. Steven Bradley, Rosanne English, Sally Fincher, Duncan Hull and Mark Zarb (2025) From Marco to Maria: Ten Years of the Computing Education Practice Conference, Koli Calling ’25: Proceedings of the 25th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research Article No.: 15, Pages 1 – 11 Article No.: 15, Pages 1–11 DOI:10.1145/3769994.3770003

Cite this blog post using the full DOI:10.59350/w8xkx-sa110 or the shorter doi.org/qmmf, both point the same thing. Get DOI’s for your blog posts at rogue-scholar.org

July 16, 2025

…from my students I have learned most of all

Filed under: education — Duncan Hull @ 12:21 am
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“I have learned much from my teachers and even more from my friends, but from my students I have learned most of all”

From left to right, Minahil, Sambbhav and Muna, the latest graduand (now graduate) guests on the Hearing Your Future podcast. As of July 2025, there’s twenty one lessons (aka episodes) that students have taught me, maybe you’ll learn something from them too. 🎧

Graduation is one of the most enjoyable milestones in the academic calendar. It’s a chance for everyone to celebrate and reflect on what students have learned and how they have grown during the time they have spent at University. What makes it special (and possible) is the help of friends, families, speakers and supporters who come to mark the occasion with style and substance.

For the last three years, I’ve been hosting a fringe graduation event with graduands and graduates from a studio in the the Kilburn building, as part of an ongoing audio podcast. [1] The latest three episodes of the podcast are now available including:

Thanks to Minahil, Sambbhav and Muna for taking part, it’s always a pleasure to record these episodes, hear your stories and learn from the unique journeys you are taking. Listen or subscribe at:

Unless you count programming languages, I’m agnostic when it comes to religion, but the quote at the top of this page about learning most from your students comes from the Talmud. [2]

P.S. Sambbhav is looking for work in the UK, if you’re looking for engineers with experience, adaptability, good communication skills and intelligence, you should invite him to interview before somebody else snaps him up! linkedin.com/in/khare-sambbhav

References

  1. Hull, Duncan (2023). Amplifying student voices on employability with podcasts. figshare. Presentation. DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.23726541.v1
  2. Chanina, Rabbi (Various dates) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud (Taanis 7a) 

Cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/oreilly.11426 from rogue-scholar.org

July 2, 2025

What’s the Story, Learning Glory? How we can start telling better stories about teaching in Higher Education

Filed under: education,engineering — Duncan Hull @ 6:58 pm
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All your dreams are made, when you’re chained to the lecture and the teaching trade. Was that lecture, lab or lesson a dream or a nightmare? Exactly what did you learn from the experience? When you reflect on it, how will you tell yourself and others the stories of your study?

The stories students tell about what they have learned, the teaching they experience and research they are exposed to are a key part of the story of every University. These stories demonstrate the value that a University adds to society through the people that it educates, the knowledge, skills and abilities that students at that organisation acquire alongside the research that the institution does.

How are teaching and learning represented in stories online? We analysed the frequency of the keywords TEACH*, LEARN*, STUDENT*, RESEARCH* and SCHOLAR* in ten years of stories summarised in annual press releases. These stories were published by the University of Manchester every December from 2015 to 2024. The main results of the analysis were presented this week [1,2,3] at the Institute of Teaching and Learning (ITL) conference are shown below in Figure 1. There is bad news and good news:

Figure 1: Average frequency of keywords per article over ten years, 2015-2024. On average the words TEACH* and LEARN* occurred just 1.3 and 0.6 times per article in comparison to STUDENT* and RESEARCH* which occurred more than 9 and 15 times in each press release respectively. In theory, teaching has parity of esteem with research, but in practice, this is clearly not the case when counting words in press releases. See [1] for full data.

The BAD NEWS is, the words in our press releases are a long long way off from the words in our strategic vision. [4] This will be disappointing and demoralising for anyone who cares about teaching and learning because our press releases mis-represent a huge amount of important learning done by thousands of our students. They also under-represent massive amounts of teaching delivered by our colleagues across the University. As Duygu Candarli and Steven Jones have shown, this a common pattern repeated across the Higher Education sector. [5] This isn’t just a Mancunian problem, there is a lack of integrity in much of the UK HE sector, what Steven Jones calls “integrity deficits”. [6]

However, the GOOD NEWS is there’s plenty we can do to improve the narrative, by getting on what Sue Beckingham calls the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) staircase [7]. There are some simple and easy steps we can take to tell better stories that represent more accurately what our University (and wider HE sector) actually does. There is a good chance these steps could lead us upwards towards better teaching and scholarship, with students learning more skills and knowledge to prepare them for the world beyond University.

The presentation makes some suggestions for how academic staff can go about climbing the SoTL staircase to deliver even better teaching and an even better learning experience for students. For example, you could:

These are small steps that go in the right direction towards rebalancing the imbalance above. So whatever you are learning and whoever you are teaching, what’s your story, learning glory?

References

  1. Hull, D. (2025) What’s the Story, Learning Glory: Why we need to hear more stories about teaching and learning at the University of Manchester, White paper DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15684409
  2. Hull, D. (2025) What’s the Story, Learning Glory: How we can get better at telling teaching stories at the University of Manchester, Poster presentation #ITLConf25 DOI:10.48420/29360969.v4 (Low resolution screenshot below, for higher resolution use the DOI above)
  3. Blake, J (2025) University of Manchester Teaching and Learning Conference: Abstract Booklet, DOI:10.48420/29371811.v1
  4. Rothwell, N. (2024) Our future: vision and strategic plan. manchester.ac.uk/about/vision
  5. Candarli, D., & Jones, S. (2022). The representation of students in undergraduate prospectuses between 1998 and 2021: a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study. Critical Discourse Studies. DOI:10.1080/17405904.2022.2130952
  6. Jones, S. (2022) Universities Under Fire: Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education. (Palgrave Critical University Studies). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7
  7. Beckingham, S (2025) SoTL Staircase, National Teaching Repository. Figure. DOI:10.25416/NTR.29438096.v1

You can cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/oreilly.11284 and get Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for your blog posts at rogue-scholar.org

Thanks to Hannah Cobb and Jennie Blake for organising the conference. There is some extra commentary, acknowledgements and discussion of this post at linkedin.com/pulse/whats-story-learning-glory-how-we-can-start-telling-better-hull–dwyxe

February 1, 2025

One hundred albums you might enjoy listening to

Filed under: joshua tree,music,wikipedia — Duncan Hull @ 4:14 pm
Tags: , , , , ,

Any list of 100 best anything is going to be riddled with biases, flaws and omissions, but here’s a list of albums you might enjoy listening to from 100best.music.apple.com. I’ve posted them here because my family are listening to three albums a week throughout 2025, and discussing them as we go. The albums are listed in reverse order of “greatness“ below, as we’re starting from the top. The №’s link to music and listening notes on Apple, other streaming services are available. The rest of the links go to the English Wikipedia article for the album in question. What’s missing and what’s in the wrong order? What doesn’t deserve to be mentioned on this list? There’s a strong American bias, with 65% of artists hailing from the USA and 24% from the UK. There’s only 1% representation of artists from each of Jamaica, Iceland, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Germany and France and a big fat 0% for many others.†

Public domain image of a One Hundred Dollar bill from 1862 via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/Cwbe

When it comes to music, Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV), actually your mileage will definitely vary. So here’s an opinionated view from Apple Park on the ”definitive list of the greatest albums ever made” assembled with the help of ”artists and experts”. There’s plenty of bangers in here, amongst the clangers. Judge for yourself:

  1. 🇸🇪 № 100 (2010) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Talk_(Robyn_album)
  2. 🇺🇸 № 99 (1976) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_California_(album)
  3. 🇺🇸 № 98 (2018) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroworld_(album)
  4. 🇺🇸 № 97 (1992) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine_(album)
  5. 🇳🇿 № 96 (2013) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Heroine
  6. 🇺🇸 № 95 (2004) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Usher_album)
  7. 🇬🇧 № 94 (2007) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untrue_(album)
  8. 🇺🇸 № 93 (2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Seat_at_the_Table
  9. 🇺🇸 № 92 (2017) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Boy
  10. 🇬🇧 № 91 (1990) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listen_Without_Prejudice_Vol._1
  11. 🇦🇺 № 90 (1980) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_Black
  12. 🇺🇸 № 89 (2009) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fame_Monster
  13. 🇺🇸 № 88 (1965) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Put_a_Spell_on_You_(album)
  14. 🇬🇧 № 87 (1991) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lines
  15. 🇺🇸 № 86 (1994) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_(Mary_J._Blige_album)
  16. 🇺🇸 № 85 (2018) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hour_(Kacey_Musgraves_album)
  17. 🇺🇸 № 84 (1993) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggystyle
  18. 🇺🇸 № 83 (1975) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_(album)
  19. 🇺🇸 № 82 (2003) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Rich_or_Die_Tryin’
  20. 🇨🇦 № 81 (1970) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush
  21. 🇺🇸 № 80 (2000) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Mathers_LP
  22. 🇺🇸 № 79 (2019) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Fucking_Rockwell!
  23. 🇬🇧 № 78 (1973) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Yellow_Brick_Road
  24. 🇺🇸 № 77 (1989) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Prayer_(album)
  25. 🇵🇷 № 76 (2022) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Verano_Sin_Ti
  26. 🇺🇸 № 75 (1997) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supa_Dupa_Fly
  27. 🇺🇸 № 74 (1994) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Downward_Spiral
  28. 🇺🇸 № 73 (1977) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja_(album)
  29. 🇺🇸 № 72 (2022) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS_(SZA_album)
  30. 🇩🇪 № 71 (1977) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Europe_Express_(album)
  31. 🇺🇸 № 70 (1989) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_Outta_Compton
  32. 🇺🇸 № 69 (1986) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Puppets
  33. 🇺🇸 № 68 (2001) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_This_It
  34. 🇬🇧 № 67 (1994) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_(album)
  35. 🇬🇧 № 66 (1986) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_Is_Dead
  36. 🇺🇸 № 65 (1989) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Feet_High_and_Rising
  37. 🇺🇸 № 64 (1997) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baduizm
  38. 🇺🇸 № 63 (1967) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Experienced
  39. 🇺🇸 № 62 (1996) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Eyez_on_Me
  40. 🇬🇧 № 61 (1992) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Deluxe
  41. 🇺🇸 № 60 (1967) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground_&_Nico
  42. 🇬🇧 № 59 (2013) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_(Arctic_Monkeys_album)
  43. 🇬🇧 № 58 (1995) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(What’s_the_Story)_Morning_Glory?
  44. 🇺🇸 № 57 (2000) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_(D’Angelo_album)
  45. 🇬🇧 № 56 (1989) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintegration_(The_Cure_album)
  46. 🇺🇸 № 55 (2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_(album)
  47. 🇺🇸 № 54 (1965) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Love_Supreme
  48. 🇬🇧 № 53 (1972) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_on_Main_St.
  49. 🇺🇸 № 52 (1987) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appetite_for_Destruction
  50. 🇺🇸 № 51 (1987) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_o’_the_Times
  51. 🇬🇧 № 50 (1985) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounds_of_Love
  52. 🇮🇪 № 49 (1987) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joshua_Tree
  53. 🇺🇸 № 48 (1989) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul’s_Boutique
  54. 🇨🇦 № 47 (2011) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care
  55. 🇯🇲 № 46 (1977) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(Bob_Marley_and_the_Wailers_album)
  56. 🇮🇸 № 45 (1997) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogenic
  57. 🇺🇸 № 44 (1973) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innervisions
  58. 🇺🇸 № 43 (1980) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remain_in_Light
  59. 🇺🇸 № 42 (1986) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(Janet_Jackson_album)
  60. 🇺🇸 № 41 (1998) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquemini
  61. 🇺🇸 № 40 (1967) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Never_Loved_a_Man_the_Way_I_Love_You
  62. 🇺🇸 № 39 (1994) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illmatic
  63. 🇺🇸 № 38 (1971) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_(Carole_King_album)
  64. 🇺🇸 № 37 (1993) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_the_Wu-Tang_(36_Chambers)
  65. 🇺🇸 № 36 (2013) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyoncé_(album)
  66. 🇬🇧 № 35 (1979) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling
  67. 🇺🇸 № 34 (1988) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Nation_of_Millions_to_Hold_Us_Back
  68. 🇬🇧 № 33 (2000) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_A
  69. 🇺🇸 № 32 (1994) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_to_Die
  70. 🇨🇦 № 31 (1995) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagged_Little_Pill
  71. 🇺🇸 № 30 (2019) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_All_Fall_Asleep,_Where_Do_We_Go?
  72. 🇺🇸 № 29 (1991) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Low_End_Theory
  73. 🇬🇧 № 28 (1971) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon
  74. 🇬🇧 № 27 (1969) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin_II
  75. 🇺🇸 № 26 (2010) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Beautiful_Dark_Twisted_Fantasy
  76. 🇺🇸 № 25 (1959) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind_of_Blue
  77. 🇬🇧 № 24 (1972) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Ziggy_Stardust_and_the_Spiders_from_Mars
  78. 🇫🇷 № 23 (2001) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(Daft_Punk_album)
  79. 🇺🇸 № 22 (1975) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Run
  80. 🇬🇧 № 21 (1966) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolver_(Beatles_album)
  81. 🇺🇸 № 20 (1966) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds
  82. 🇺🇸 № 19 (1992) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronic
  83. 🇺🇸 № 18 (2014) wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor’s_Version)
  84. 🇺🇸 № 17 (1971) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What’s_Going_On_(album)
  85. 🇺🇸 № 16 (1971) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_(Joni_Mitchell_album)
  86. 🇬🇧 № 15 (2011) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(Adele_album)
  87. 🇺🇸 № 14 (1965) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_61_Revisited
  88. 🇺🇸 № 13 (2001) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blueprint
  89. 🇬🇧 № 12 (2001) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Computer
  90. 🇬🇧 № 11 (1977) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumours_(album)
  91. 🇺🇸 № 10 (2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_(album)
  92. 🇺🇸 № 9 (1991) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevermind
  93. 🇬🇧 № 8 (2006) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Black
  94. 🇺🇸 № 7 (2012) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Kid,_M.A.A.D_City
  95. 🇺🇸 № 6 (1976) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_in_the_Key_of_Life
  96. 🇺🇸 № 5 (2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_(Frank_Ocean_album)
  97. 🇺🇸 № 4 (1984) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Rain_(album)
  98. 🇬🇧 № 3: (1969) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road
  99. 🇺🇸 № 2 (1982) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(album)
  100. 🇺🇸 № 1 (1998) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miseducation_of_Lauryn_Hill

† NOTE: Some artists don’t fit into a neat singly rooted hierarchy, for example, are Fleetwood Mac British or American? Is Alanis Morissette Canadian or American? etc

Cite this post using DOI:10.59350/sf65z-3fc66 provided by The Rogue Scholar rogue-scholar.org

December 11, 2024

SO, WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO?

Filed under: education,social mobility — Duncan Hull @ 7:08 am
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Have you ever been asked WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? I was once asked this in a high-stakes job interview and my answer was that of a startled rabbit caught in the headlights before becoming squashed roadkill on the highway to hell. Nobody has asked me that question before or since. How can such a simple question be so difficult to answer?

Figure 1: Check out my awesome founding members badge! 📛

WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? is a Big Friendly Question (BFQ) that triggered lots more questions in my head rather than a composed answer from my mouth. My brain started work on Questioning The Friendly Question (QTFQ):

  • Why was the interviewer asking, when I could see him reading it off the top of my CV from across the table?
  • How the hell was the school I attended relevant to my suitability for the role?
  • Was this a friendly warm-up question, an innocent icebreaker or a inappropriately tricky tiebreaker to sort the men from the boys and the women from the girls?
  • Was the purpose of the interview to enable someone in the Human Resources department to cynically tick some state school box for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) before abandoning me by the roadside as unfortunate (but deliberate) interview roadkill?
  • If I’m just here to make up the numbers, maybe the interviewer would like to know where they could shove their stupid question and the interview with it?

Years later, I still can’t decide what to make of the WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO interview question. If you were asked this question in a high-stakes job interview what would your answer be?

This is my answer.

Beware of the heavily loaded juggernaut

The heavily loaded question of WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO is a very personal one. The personal is political and the political is often provocative. It proved to be a fatally political question in a Great Gatsby Scholarship interview I had for a DPhil at the University of Oxford. I wasn’t expecting the question or the abusive reply to my bewildered (but factually correct) answer. As with many job interviews, there was a big power imbalance between the interviewer and the interviewee. The Professor interviewing me was a member of some exclusively professional gentlemen’s clubs in London. One of these clubs serves as UK’s National Academy of Sciences (the royalsociety.org) whose members, or Fellows (as they like to be called), use the letters FRS after their names. Alan Turing, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and Stephen Hawking were all FRS alongside 8,000 other fellows in total. Around 80% of Royal Society fellows are no longer with us, which is why they are sometimes called the Dead Scientists Society. To keep themselves relevant in the land of the living, they invite around 60 new fellows to join their esteemed club every year. Although the society started as the oldest of old boy networks for scientists back in 1660, women started joining relatively recently in 1945. Newer members include Nobel laureates like Jennifer Doudna and Demis Hassabis (of Google DeepMind) alongside business leaders like Elon Musk, although his fellowship (like most things he does) is controversial. There is still lots more work to be done improving diversity at the Royal Society, because only 12% of their ~1,800 living fellows are female. (1)

The other professional club my interviewer sported membership of was another exclusive invitation-only outfit, let’s call it the Imperial Club. As a Commander of the British Empire CBE, this Professor was awarded a premium Imperial Club membership by the royal family alongside 99 other newly appointed commanders each year. Diversity in the Imperial Club is actually a bit better than that of the Royal Society (and certainly the royal family), but still not generally particularly representative of society as a whole. (2)

Figure 2: Just before becoming interview roadkill, I froze like a breathless rabbit caught in the headlights of the question many state schoolers dread: WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? (3) This interview wasn’t looking like the Stairway to Heaven I’d hoped for, (4) but more of a Highway to Hell. (5) Rabbit sketch by Visual Thinkery is licensed under CC-BY-ND  🐰

The odds are about 5:1 that my interviewer was also a member of the 7% club (6), that’s the elite minority group of the UK population who are privately educated by one of our formidable Engines of Privilege. (7) But who knows? This Professor was justifiably proud to be a Fellow the Royal Society (FRS) and a commanding member of the Imperial Club (CBE), because they are both significant awards in their own right. Only about 0.002% of the UK population are deemed worthy of the award of club membership. (8) Membership of these London clubs does not come easy because the bouncers working the doors are notoriously powerful, opinionated and they love a good fight. They don’t fight with their fists, they wage war in words. If your name isn’t down on their closely guarded list, you’re not coming in. The Professor interviewing me was down on the list and up there in career clubbers heaven with other Gods because he was appointed CBE by Queen Elizabeth II. That same Queen (and her son King Charles III) were appointed to their posts as head of state by God using a special hat – so I’m literally only three steps from God:

  • ✞ God
    • step one takes you from God to:
  • 👑 The Queen (or The King)
    • step two takes you from the reigning monarch to:
  • 🎓 The Professor
    • step three takes you from the Professor to:
  • 😀 Me


Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices! Alternatively, if you’re an agnostic republican like me who can’t tolerate watching any more nonsense on the premium subscription channel Monarchy+, at least show some R.E.S.P.E.C.T. in this High Temple of Science. Despite my republican agnosticism combined with a healthy dose of scepticism, I dress appropriately, take my metaphorical shoes off and respectfully leave them by the door of the interview room. I am grateful, incredibly lucky and immensely privileged to have this unique once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of an interview and I really wanted to make the most of it. Bring it on!

Stairway to Heaven or Highway to Hell?

In stark contrast to my interviewer, the only letters I had after my name were the humble BSc (Hons). That’s a Bachelor of Science degree in Plant Sciences with Industrial Experience, also known as a year in industry. On being asked WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO, the letters BSc (Hons) were rapidly followed by a collection of other post-nominals including: 

  • WTF? 
  • OMG
  • FFS!


The only clubs I was a member of at the time were the climbing club and the all inclusive 93% club, a group for the overwhelming majority of the UK population educated in state schools. The 93% club didn’t actually exist back then but I’m really glad it exists now.

While I ended up as yet more roadkill on the interview highway to hell, just another casualty of the Oxford juggernaut, I learned a painful, humiliating but important lesson about pride, or what 93% clubbers call State School Pride. (9) That’s a badge I’d been wary of because my mum, a very wise and stoic woman that I love and listen to, warned me about pride. “Pride comes before a fall, Duncan” – she said. She’s right, especially when you see how the proud have fallen, all those privately educated cocksure Oxford graduates. The likes of Blair, Cameron, Johnson and Sunak haven’t exactly showered themselves in glory since graduating have they? When it comes to school badges, some of the alternatives to the pride badge are:

  • 📛 State School Fear
  • 📛 State School Loathing
  • 📛 State School Shame
  • 📛 State School Embarassment
  • 📛 State School Inferiority complex
  • 📛 State School Impostor syndrome
  • 📛 State School Taboo: It’s a bit awkward, so let’s change the subject shall we?

I’ve worn all those school badges and even been employed as a Science teacher in secondary schools that are accused of minting them such as the (supposed) Scumbag College. If you’re not familiar with the infamous College, it’s a bog standard comprehensive state school in AnyTown, AnyWhere which feeds into another (supposed) Scumbag College, part of the University of AnyCity. These school badges are uncomfortable to wear, they don’t look good and they don’t help you, the school or the University you attended make a useful contribution to society. If you’re a state schooler like me, I don’t recommend wearing any of them unless you want to become squashed roadkill too.

If you haven’t already, you should burn these badges immediately and replace them with your State School Pride badge! 🏳️‍🌈

Whatever school badge you decide to wear, the education your school(s) gave you is a paradox. It’s both incredibly relevant and completely irrelevant on your CV and in job interviews. My state schooling, funded by the taxpayer, was relevant because I’d been invited to interview thanks to years of hard work by my teachers. If it wasn’t for the teachers who patiently taught me (and my friends and my siblings) during thirteen years of primary and secondary school education I wouldn’t have been able to express myself to create a CV accompanied by a persuasive covering letter that convinced decision makers to interview me. If it wasn’t for my maths and science teachers, I would never have been able to study Science at University in the first place. My Mancunian teachers at the University of Manchester extended this education, building on the foundations of my compulsory state school education.

But at the same time, that very same education was completely irrelevant, it should not affect how I was treated. Should it have even been an interview question at all?

In its defence, WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO is an open-ended question that invites the interviewee to challenge the authority of the interviewer. There are many possible answers to choose from including: Why the hell are you asking me that? I didn’t have either the guts or the gift of the gab to think of that under pressure. Rabbit. Headlights. Roadkill. On the other hand the irrelevance of the question will probably make the admissions and HR department blush because it doesn’t comply with their new EDI policy. 😳

The school anybody went to shouldn’t be a factor in either being invited to interview or being offered a job. With help from Viktor Polyakov and Ellie Wardrope, I recorded a video testimonial to that effect last month at the Founding Member’s Reception in Manchester of the 93percent.club. Thanks to Sophie Pender, Imogen Carr and Lorna Culpin for inviting me to (and hosting) the reception at ey.com. I had a blast, it was good to speak to you Conor Churchman from ada.ac.uk, the National College for Digital Skills, Sarah Mohammed-Qureshi from the University of Law and Benjamin Hobbs from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. I’m looking forward seeing you again and meeting more kindred spirits at future events online and in person. 🙏

Answer The Friendly Question (ATFQ)

So I need to practice what I preach by doing what I tell my students to do: Answer The Friendly Question ATFQ after carefully Reading The Friendly Question RTFQ …

SO, WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? It’s not really any of my business and certainly won’t affect how I treat you. Wider society may differ so there’s an argument for making whatever kind of education you’ve had another protected characteristic. (10) Just as your age, your race, your religion or beliefs, your sexual orientation, your gender, your disabilities, your marriage or civil partnership, your pregnancy and maternity, your education should not determine how you are treated either. These characteristics are covered by the Equality Act of 2010. Your education (private or state) is your own business, and you probably didn’t have that much say in which school you went to anyway.

Figure 3: Anyone can become an owner of an awesome 93% club enamel pin badge by joining us at 93percent.club/join 📛

What I definitely care about 100%, is the school I went to, especially when asked in a high-stakes job interview where my reply is mocked by the abusive and memorable comment:

“I’VE NEVER HEARD OF IT”!

At this point, my dæmon (that rabbit I was talking about) died a quick but horrible bloody death and although the interview continued, I was barely able to function, let alone be my very best. The education we receive is an integral part of who we are and what makes us, so when someone demeans it, its like they’ve had a head-on collision with your soul. Juggernauts and rabbits don’t work well together. 🐰

I’m lucky and privileged to have attended the kind of state schools that never held me back and got me, my friends and my siblings to wherever we wanted to go. Thank you Fitzmaurice Primary School and St. Laurence School. Thanks to my amazing state school teachers and thousands more professionals just like them working incredibly hard in an increasingly challenging state sector to educate EVERYONE inclusively across the UK:

  • regardless of their socio-economic background
  • regardless of their ability to pass an extrance exam
  • regardless of their families ability to pay the school fees, with or without VAT (11)
  • regardless of their families ability to live in the catchment area of the “right” school
  • regardless of their ability to win competitive scholarships, assisted places or other bursaries

That’s an extraordinarily diverse group of millions of students in state schools across the UK. I’m proud be one of them. I’m proud to be a card-carrying, badge-wearing, box-ticking, word-spreading and founding member of the UK’s least exclusive members club: the 93percent.club. 💪

Join us in tackling inequality across the UK

Not everyone educated in the state sector gets the headstart in life that I did. (10) As the former Education secretary Justine Greening once put it, talent is spread evenly but opportunity is not. (12) There is a class ceiling to accompany the glass ceiling which prevents many students educated in the state sector from getting the opportunities they deserve. (13) That’s just plain wrong. It’s indefensible. It’s immoral and it’s an injustice. Unfortunately, the UK is still a country where the school you went to definitely counts, and the higher you want to go in pretty much any profession, the more it will tend to matter. Your education has a huge influence on how society treats you but unfortunately our educational system in the UK is riddled with inequality from the bottom up to the very top. The Elitist Britain report by Martina Milburn and Peter Lampl at the Social Mobility Commission and Sutton Trust provides an unappetising taster of the scale of the problem we face. (14)

Would you like to help us tackle inequality through the power of our community? Would you like to empower state-educated students by giving them access to more social capital, better opportunities, improved careers advice and more mentoring? By bringing together thousands of like-minded individuals across the country, we are breaking down the structural barriers to social mobility and building a future that’s fairer for the next generation. Find out how to join at 93percent.club/join

If you’re a student studying at a University in the UK, see if your Students’ Union has a 93% club, for example you could join:

If your Students’ Union doesn’t have a 93% club yet, why don’t you start one?

P.S. Sophie, speaking of word-spreading, when is the next episode of the WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO podcast due? It’s been a while… (15)

Epilogue

POST PUBLICATION UPDATE № 1: Several readers of this article have pointed out that the abuse I received is mild compared to the daily torrent of invective and unfair treatment they are subjected to as a non-male, non-white, non-heterosexual, non-middle class, non-binary, non-Southern English, non-privileged, non-RP, non-whatever person. I agree with you. I’m definitely not claiming to be an excluded member of any under-represented, marginalised or minority group. Thanks to all those readers for correcting what I’d initially overlooked from my self-confessed position of middle-class middle-England mediocre male white privilege. I’m doubly, triply or quadruply lucky that I don’t have to deal with anything like the same level of abuse and unfairness that many of you routinely do every single day. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must be like, I am definitely not claiming to “feel your pain”. Maybe (just maybe) I got the faintest whiff of it for a few minutes in a high-stakes job interview that didn’t go my way. So, yes abuse and unfairness might be an all too familar stench to you, but it was a new and unexpected odour for me at the time in the circumstances. Just sayin’

POST PUBLICATION UPDATE № 2: A lot of abusive and unfair behaviour is not reported and goes on behind closed doors. The incident described above took place behind a closed door because it was a one-to-one interview, part two in a series of three. The other two interviews were much smoother, they must have been using the classic good cop, bad cop interrogation technique to give me a good grilling. I dealt with the fallout of this bad cop interview as many people do using the Chris McCauseland method of: “I take every emotion, I dig a big hole, bury it in the ground and then I build a car park on top of it.” I didn’t report or reflect on the experience very much, because it was too painful to do so and I blamed myself for my stoopid stoopid naive rookie interview technique. Other than briefly discussing it with close family and friends, it has been buried deep in my subconscious for 27 years. A bit like 28 Years Later, it re-emerged uninvited after a period of dormancy. So if you think I’m woefully ignorant of all the horrendous abuse and unfairness going on in the big bad world, I disagree. A big part of the problem is that people don’t talk about it, myself included. If you’re able to talk about it, don’t be yet another one of those people who buries bad behaviour . 🤦‍♀️

References

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Sanders J. (2024). Equality, diversity and inclusion at the royal society: “Currently, only 12 percent of the society’s fellows are women.” https://royalsociety.org/current-topics/diversity/
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Office C. (2024). Diversity in the honours system of the united kingdom. https://honours.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/diversity/
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Brown D. (2020). “What school did you go to?” – why we need to change the way we discuss pre-university education. https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/19188
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Page J, Plant R. (1971). Stairway to heaven. In: Page J, editor. Led Zeppelin IV [Internet]. Led Zeppelin; Atlantic Records; Available from: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q192023
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Scott B, Young A, Young M. (1979). Highway to hell. In: Lange M, editor. Highway to hell [Internet]. AC/DC; Atlantic Records; Available from: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1508213
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Lampl P, Milburn M. (2019). Britain’s most powerful people 5 times more likely to go to private school. https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/elitist-britain-five-times-more-likely-to-go-to-private-school/
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Green F, Kynaston D. (2019). Engines of privilege: Britain’s private school problem [Internet]. Bloomsbury Publishing; 320 p. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Privilege
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Smith A. (2024). Outstanding scientists elected as fellows of the royal society. https://royalsociety.org/news/2024/05/new-fellows-2024/
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Nye C. (2021). Being proud of going to state school. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57580910
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Rajan A, Hix C, Radford M. (2022). How to crack the class ceiling. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fygm
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McGough K, Clarke V. (2024). Private schools vote for legal action over VAT plans. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98d3xr0290o
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Greening J. (2017). Unlocking the potential of a new generation: The education secretary addresses the social mobility commission conference about transforming social mobility. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/justine-greening-unlocking-the-potential-of-a-new-generation
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Friedman S, Laurison D. (2020). The class ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged [Internet]. Policy Press; Available from: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/trade/the-class-ceiling
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Milburn M, Lampl P. (2019). Elitist britain: The educational backgrounds of britain’s leading people. The sutton trust & social mobility commission. https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/elitist-britain-2019/
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Pender S. (2023). What school did you go To? The 93 percent club podcast. https://open.spotify.com/show/3e8K1fcNbqck9k9pFIGlG8
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Linklater R, White M, Rudin S. (2003). School of rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Rock
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Young A, Young M, Scott B. (1975). It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock ’n’ roll). In: Vanda H, Young G, editors. TNT [Internet]. AC/DC; Albert Productions; Available from: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2550514

Figure 4: So tell me girls and boys, WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? “We went to the School of Rock (16). Yeah Baby! It’s on the Highway to Hell (5) because It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Went to a State School) (17)” 🎸

You can join the discussion of this article at linkedin.com/posts/duncanhull_so-what-school-did-you-go-to-activity-7272560839159599104-bef8

Cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/3ecps-nb811 and get DOI’s for your blog posts at rogue-scholar.org

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