The Higher Education Commission is made up of 20 leaders from education and business and exists to exam higher education policy for Parliamentarians.

The enquiry itself looked at the role of PG education can have in the future of the UK economy and is chaired by Dr Graham Spittle CBE, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at IBM Europe.

The questions asked were:

Q1: How well does the current PG system meet the needs of businesses? How can the system become more responsive?
Q2a: What is required for the UK to maintain its ability to attract and retain high-quality international students and international researchers?
Q2b: What are the long-term implications of the postgraduate sector’s dependence on international students?
Q2c: How might UK-domiciled students be encouraged to engage in doctoral study?
Q2d: In what areas can UK postgraduate provision be considered outstanding internationally?
Q3: How well does current practice support smooth transitions from postgraduate education into industry and academia?
Q4: How can postgraduate provision in the UK be made more accessible for students from less advantaged backgrounds?
Q5: What impact will the changes to undergraduate provision outlined in the recent Higher Education White Paper have on the postgraduate sector?
Q6: How should postgraduate education be funded?
Q7: Are you aware of any distinctive models of delivering postgraduate education which have been deployed with success in other countries?
Q8: How effective are quality assurance and student feedback mechanisms for postgraduate provision?

After consultation with postgraduates to gather further evidence we wrote our response and sent it the Higher Education Commission, and you can read the final response below:

There are 443,000 students studying in London. So, earlier this year we worked together with other Students’ Unions across London to put together a student manifesto that will hopefully ensure a Mayor that works to improve life for students living in London gets elected.

The Mayoral Manifesto covers the main issues effecting students across London: Transport, Housing, Employment and Crime. It covers the issues with nine simple solutions that will make London better for students, raises awareness of problems student face in London and has backing from Students’ Union all around London.

You can read our vision for London by 2016 below or view the official “Vision for London” website.

So, whether you are backing Borris, Ken or even Tempa T make sure you turn out on 3rd May and cast your vote for the Mayor of London AND the Greater London Authority (GLA) and check out the London Elects website for more information on the vote.

You can check out the video from the launch of the Vision for London at Kings Students’ Union by clicking here.

For more information on the election, make sure you read the below or check out the London Elects website which is easy to understand and well presented.

THE MAYOR OF LONDON:
The Mayor’s job ranges from developing policies to setting budgets and championing London around the world – all in line with his or her vision, and in the interests of London.

THE LONDON ASSEMBLY:
The 25 Assembly Members hold the Mayor to account by examining their decisions and actions to ensure they deliver on their promises to Londoners. They act as the eyes and ears of Londoners at City Hall. Assembly Members also champion Londoners’ concerns by investigating important issues and pressing for changes to national, mayoral or local policy.

WHAT THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR:
There are many areas of London life that are affected by the work of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly, such as policing, transport, housing, planning and the environment. The Mayor plays a key role by putting together plans and policies to improve the city and benefit Londoners. Before finalising any of his or her strategies however the Mayor must consult with Londoners and their elected representatives on the London Assembly. The responsibilities of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are detailed below.

THE BUDGET
The Mayor of London is responsible for a budget of £14.6bn which is used to run transport services, police and fire services and promote London’s economy. More information on these services can be read below. Part of the Council Tax levied by local borough councils is set by the Mayor to provide funds for these services.
The London Assembly can amend the Mayor’s budget when two-thirds of the 25 Members agree

POLICING
Policing in London is managed by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPC)
The Mayor sets the budget for the Metropolitan Police in consultation with the Metropolitan Police commissioner, and provides their strategic goals
The work of MOPC will be monitored by the London Assembly Police and Crime Panel
Operational policing decisions are not made by the Mayor or the London Assembly
The London Assembly highlight areas of concern for Londoners in relation to policing and police budgets, and encourage MOPC to tackle these

TRANSPORT
Transport in London is managed by Transport for London (TfL)
The Mayor sets the budget & appoints the board of TfL
The Mayor develops the strategy for transport across London, and looks at the ways Londoners get around the capital
The London Assembly holds TfL to account in relation to its budget, and its performance.
The London Assembly reviews the Mayor’s transport strategy, recommends improvements to it and tests the efficiency and effectiveness of its delivery
The Assembly also oversees the operation and budget of London TravelWatch, the capital’s transport users’ committee.

FIRE AND EMERGENCY PLANNING
The London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) runs the London Fire Brigade
8 Assembly Members sit on the Authority and are appointed by the Mayor so as to reflect the balance of the political parties within the London Assembly
The Mayor also appoints 7 borough representatives (to reflect the balance of parties in London local authorities), two Mayoral representatives, and the Chair
The London Assembly scrutinises the budget and performance of LFEPA

HOUSING
The Mayor is responsible for developing a housing strategy to meet the needs of London’s growing population.
The housing strategy may address issues such as homelessness, social housing, landlords, and renting
The London Assembly reviews the Mayor’s housing strategy, recommends improvements to it and tests the efficiency and effectiveness of its delivery

THE ENVIRONMENT
The Mayor develops strategies to address environmental issues in London such as air quality, water, noise, climate change, and public spaces.
The Mayor appoints members of the board of the Royal Parks Agency and is directly responsible for Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square
The London Assembly reviews the Mayor’s environmental strategy, recommends improvements to it and tests the efficiency and effectiveness of its delivery

PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
The Mayor develops a planning strategy for London which sets out a vision for the development of the capital for decades to come
In certain cases, the Mayor may act as the planning authority for London with the power to approve or reject planning applications for large developments
The London Assembly reviews the Mayor’s planning strategy, recommends improvements to it and tests the efficiency and effectiveness of its delivery

ARTS AND CULTURE
Supporting and promoting arts and cultural events – everything from film and theatre, to celebrations and music

HEALTH
The Mayor is responsible for promoting public health, and looking at ways of improving health and well-being of Londoners
The Mayor also works to reduce the level of health inequalities in London
The London Assembly reviews the Mayor’s health strategy, recommends improvements to it and tests the efficiency and effectiveness of its delivery
The Assembly also publishes a variety of research reports on how health changes impact London, such as obesity, epidemics and drug use
The Mayor of London and the London Assembly are not responsible for any aspect of the National Health Service (NHS)

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND REGENERATION
Promoting a strong economy in London and helping Londoners to create wealth

WHAT THEY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR
The Mayor and the London Assembly do not have responsibility for: council housing, schools, social services, hospitals, street cleaning, parking permits, or birth, death & marriage certificates. These services are all provided by your local council, government, or other organisations.

Rep Drive is here!

Rep Drive the new online resource for Reps. It’s a loadable folder on the Imperial network that contains all the information that you need to be a better Rep, and gives you a place to store important information and communicate with the Representation team at Imperial College Union.

It’s currently open to Departmental Representatives and above (AAOs, AWOs, FAculty Union Presidents, and Sabbatical Officers). But, if you’re a Year or Course Rep and you’re keen to see what’s inside, let us know.

For example, Rep Drive offers online storage for rep materials – meaning you don’t have to save SSC papers on your drive and then waste time moving them around to the Union, your successors or other reps.
It also gives you instant access to all of our Exchange distribution lists for reps, and has template emails for contacting your students – saving you the bother of manually adding names to emails, or rewriting the same emails each semester.
One of the principal ideas for Rep Drive was so that documents don’t get lost in e-mails and personal laptops. Rep Drive provides a central place where you can store everything to do with representation, from policies and SSC minutes to mailing lists and action plans.
There’s a whole lot more on Rep Drive too, with even more exciting stuff in the pipeline for the future.

But for now, please explore Rep Drive (starting with the Read Me) and read the awesome REP DRIVE booklet below:

The ICT Student Forum is a new initiative to provide ICT with input from the Student body about what their IT needs and priorities are and also to provide feedback to ICT on potential new initiatives.

The meeting was attended by 4 students, myself, the ICT Programme Manager, Head of Technology Operations and the Head of IT Services and Deputy Director.

This was the first of what I hope will become termly (or bi-termly) meetings between senior ICT managers and students, with free lunch, to help address any ICT issues and also come up with “student dream systems” for ICT to begin working on.

In this first meeting we covered SOLE on mobile, podcasting, outlook calendars (student raised agenda items), student e-mail, storage space, personal web pages (PWPs) and some AOB (ICT raised agenda items).
So here’s a very short summary breakdown of what was discussed in the meeting:

1) SOLE for mobile and Imperial Mobile

We discussed the possibility of getting SOLE on mobile. The outcome of which was we decided, if possible, we will work together to get SOLE onto Imperial Mobile so that you can do it “offline” (without internet connection) and it can then be sent, so that students can complete it on the tube. If successful we decided that we should look into having other surveys on the database and also look into have a database of information so that we could cut down questions in surveys.
We also talked about Imperial Mobile, and how My Imperial fits into Imperial Mobile in addition to praising the ability to see free computers in the library. It was discussed to see if we could expand this feature across college and also if it was possible to incorporate the print service to the app, i.e. students could check their status, add money and report printer or ICT problems via the app.

2) Podcasting and OpenCourseWare

We discussed the paper recently passed at Union council showing student desire for podcasting and an OpenCourseWare platform. There was unanimous support for these to be set up by all. The e-Learning Strategy Committee are currently looking into this, having decided that Panopto video recording software is by far the most efficient for Imperial College. The next stages are to write up an implementation plan to be approved before progress can be made.
It was also discussed if there would be the possibility to add personal annotations to these.

3) Outlook Calendars

These discussions revolved around getting student timetables onto Outlook which, this year, was introduced across several departments. The discussion was how to make it easier to do so ALL departments can take up the opportunity and also how to personalise the calendars as many final year students take options and see all modules on their outlook calendar. It was suggested that we could input an “opt-out” option to help final years, look into having an option to turn off synchronisation with central college and look into whether students can add their own appointments with the calendar on. This linked back to Imperial Mobile and the VLE where we would want to set up an exchange between the three to ensure students can always find out what their doing.

4) Student e-mail

ICT were approached by external companies (e.g. Microsoft and Google) who host university e-mail accounts about whether Imperial wish to have their e-mail/exchange accounts hosted externally, most likely by Microsoft or Google. Royal Holloway have taken this option up and list the benefits to university costings, larger online storage, free skydrive space and others – read here. However, there were security/privacy concerns raised over Google or Microsoft owning all our students e-mails and data as they would run the entire service. There was also issues raised over advertisements and the loss of our prestigious “@imperial.ac.uk” e-mail account suffix. The main positive of outsourcing would be that of the increased storage space for Imperial students, but as long as the college continued to support the 1GB allowance in e-mail it wasn’t too much of a concern for students.

5) File Space

ICT asked about the popularity of the H drives and got a mixed response. The general thoughts that came out was that Drive mapping is too cumbersome for the majority of students and as a result most students use DropBox or USB sticks (which is true of me while I was studying). The discussion then moved to the installation of DropBox onto college computers. This could be done with set storage space at a cost which ICT said they will look into. Overall, from the students who attended the size of our H drives is less of an issue than our e-mail space.

6) Personal Web Pages (PWPs)

Personal web pages are for the academics and staff of Imperial College. They contain basic academic and contact information. These are being looked into for a college-wide update. They are under college branding on the Imperial website currently and prove to be surprisingly useful for students (both Imperial and non-Imperial) wanting to find out about research opportunities as well as for other miscellaneous information. However, some suggestions were made by the students as to how to maximise the impact of the redesign. Some of these included linking news/journal entries to their page as well as student newspaper “Felix” references to their page, i.e. a media feed with all their references on. Also, the addition of a tabs for research groups, covering the groups areas of interest in research and their papers and although the academics are responsible for the pages the responsibility should perhaps be shifted slightly (as academics often overlook it’s importance to their own and the college’s image).

7) Any Other Business (AOB)

Students expressed their desire to have more updated versions of IE and Firefox installed across the college computers as well as installing Google Chrome. ICT did explain that they are very careful about browser upgrades because of their interactions with other software; if something goes wrong they would impact 12,500 students using 3,000 teaching machines.

ICT also explained after being asked that they will be moving away from Flash towards more HTML5.

Next meeting
The next ICT Student Forum will Thursday 17th May. If you want to take part (or have any comments whatsoever) let me know below or drop me an e-mail at: dpeducation@imperial.ac.uk

Student representatives play an essential role in maintaining and improving the student experience here at Imperial. As a student rep, you are a conduit between the students and staff, helping to keep us informed of your fellow students’ views, concerns and suggestions. All your hard work so far is greatly valued by me and my by colleagues across the College. I hope you enjoy the experience; there is much to be gained from taking on this position of responsibility – both now, in supporting the community during your studies here, and in the future, thanks to the skills you will develop during your tenure.

I would like to extend my thanks to each one of you for volunteering your time to represent the student body.

Best wishes,

Keith

IC Marrow, Nick Holgate and I have teamed up to bring blood, marrow, and organ donation to Imperial. If you want to save a life, which of course you obviously do, go to the JCR 12:00-14:00 or SAFB 10:00-17:00 to register. We will be taking your names for the organ register, your saliva for the bone marrow register and your email addresses for our (Imperial’s first) blood drive. We had hoped to bring the National Health Service Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) team on campus to take blood but despite efforts since November this hasn’t been possible.

Imperial is a remarkably clever place to source donors. Only 2% of registered donors in the UK are from ethnic minorities but at Imperial 65% of the undergraduate population represent said ‘minorities’.

JCR 12:00-14:00
SAFB 10:00-17:00

Should you think that organ donation means lying on a table as a doctor takes a rusty scalpel to your abdomen, it may well be worth reading the following myth-busters kindly provided by Marrow:

• Donation Always involves surgery
• Bone marrow is obtained in one of two ways. Three quarters of people will donate through peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation, which doesn’t involve any surgery. Only the remaining 25% of donations, where marrow is taken from the pelvic bone, involve a surgical operation.
• Need to give Blood to sign up
• Not any more! You now only need to provide a spit sample to register.
• You can’t Change your mind you’ve signed up
• You can indeed change your mind. However, it does cost about £125 of charity money to register a single donor, and changing your mind can cause dangerous delays for patients. So ideally you should be sure before you sign up or let the Registry know as soon as you decide you don’t want to donate anymore!
• The need for donors is Declining
• Definitely the opposite. Every year, thousands of people are diagnosed with blood cancers. For many, transplantation is the only hope of a cure, so we need new people to constantly sign up to the register.
• Everyone can join the register
• Only those between the age of 18 and 40 are potentially eligible to register.
• You can only donate to Family and Friends
• Nope. Actually, the chance of someone finding a match within their family is only 30%. So most of the time, patients need to find unrelated donors.
• General anaesthetic is always given
• PBSC doesn’t involve any anaesthetic. The donor is given a series of injections to stimulate the bone marrow and increase the number of marrow cells in the blood. Blood is taken from one arm, the marrow cells are filtered out, and the remaining blood is put back in the other arm. Simple.
• Donating Harms the donor
• As with any medical procedure, there are risks involved. But, the small amount of bone marrow taken isn’t enough to cause any harm. And these cells replace themselves within six weeks, so the donor will be completely back to normal in no time!
• I can’t pick the method by which I donate my marrow
• You can choose!  However, when you sign up, you have to agree to be willing to donate by both methods. If the way you picked is unsuccessful, you may be asked to attempt the other.
• Donors are Just matched against English patients
• Actually, the patient receiving the donation could be literally in any corner of the world.
• You’ll Know who you’re donating to
• You won’t know who you are donating to, and nor will you find out till at least 2 years after donating (if both the donor and the recipient agree to it, that is).
• Lengthy recovery process is involved
• Side effects are short living. These last for two to five days for PBSC donors and two to seven days for marrow donors.
• You have to pay Money to donate
• Donors don’t have to pay.  And, even better, any costs incurred for travel, meals, lodging etc. are reimbursed.
• Need only Caucasian donors
• While 80% of Caucasian patients will find matches, only 30-40% of those from ethnic minorities are as lucky. So, although Caucasian donors are needed, it is especially vital that more donors of ethnic backgrounds are signed up…not that this is an issue at Imperial College.
• Organ donors are automatically on the bone marrow register
• Organ donors are on a separate register to bone marrow donors- so you have to sign up for each one individually.
• Painful procedure
• Those who undergo surgery will be given anaesthesia, so they will be unconscious/numbed and will feel no pain when the bone marrow is taken out.
• The donors don’t Quit the register until their death
• Nope, members will be taken off the register on their 61st birthday.
• Donating involves Removing pieces of bone
• Donors give up cells found in the pulpy marrow within the bone. No bones are taken!
• Bone marrow is taken from the Spinal cord
• Bone marrow in the surgical method is taken from the pelvic bone, and not from the spinal cord. If PBSC is used, the cells are taken from the bloodstream.
• You have to Take months off from University/work
• Most donors go home the same day they donate and are back to work within a week.
• U have to be the same blood type as the donor
• The donation is based on matching up tissue type (HLA), so the donor’s blood type doesn’t really matter.
• It’s Vital that more women are signed up
• Men produce more stem cells than women and are more likely to be chosen as a match for patients. However, currently, only 12% of members on the bone marrow register are men. Shocking!
• You won’t have to Wait for long to donate once you’ve signed up
• A donor could be called up anytime from the day after they have been put on the register until their 61st birthday. On average one in every 540 members on the register will actually go on to donate.
• Side effects are eXtremely unbearable
• Not true. Those who have gone through the donation process say that PBSC leaves them feeling like they’ve just had the flu and the surgical method gives them an achy back for a few days.
• Younger donors aren’t needed
• Using cells form younger donors result in more successful transplants. If there is more than one potential donor with a suitable HLA match, the age of the donor is one of the factors that is taken into consideration.
• Zo, I can’t sign up at Imperial.
• Yes you can! This week, we are holding a clinic on campus. Just fill in a form, give us your spit…and you could potentially save someone’s life.