But in this case, I do. The context here is the same changing profile of international students in the UK, that I drew attention to in my previous post. There I talked mainly about the future effect of exchange rates on the affordability of UK university places for Chinese students. The longer term story is about UK visa and immigration controls, which has left students from many countries believing that they are unwanted in the UK and indeed viewed with suspicion. Johnson (the Boris version) has written to Johnson (the Jo version) asking for urgent reforms to the student visa system, as the number of Indian students coming to the UK has halved in the past three years (a drop of 20,000 per year). An historical and hugely beneficial relationship with India is in danger. The Government’s official line is that there is no limit on the number of students coming into the country; technically true, but then there is also no limit on the number of people who can hit themselves over the head with a ballhammer. Yet the popularity of that particular pastime has never been high. In other words, it is not an undistorted market. Not surprisingly, those missing 20,000 students, plus a fair few more, are studying in the US.

The Jo version, on his part, has been talking recently about prioritising teaching quality, and about encouraging competitiveness in the HE sector. On the latter point, it is worth noting that there is not, and never has been, a truly open market in HE in this country. For one thing, the ancient Universities were given truly enormous assets at the moment of their founding, and in the centuries thereafter, most frequently at the largess of the governments of the era. When Staffordshire (for example) was made a University, no one said ‘Hey, here’s a billion quid — go out and be world-class!’. For another, there are all kinds of caps and incentives and variable bits of funding straight from Government coffers. The £9000 fee cap is the most obvious; but lesser known is the funding received to aid disabled students, which has fallen through the floor, disproportionately affecting students without financial assets of their own. In future, I suggest not only that Jo listen to Boris, but also that he mask his patent ignorance of market economics.

Latest update December 2019 – A review by Prof Jon Fairburn

This blog is mainly aimed at visitors who are staying the night and looking for places to eat and drink. As a University we receive visitors from all over the world. These visitors want a convenient place to stay with a selection of places to reach by foot in the evening for food and drinks if possible.

Accommodation

PotBank – this includes an aparthotel, and a cafe you can book through their website. Some of the rooms are available for booking through booking.com and it is only a 5 minute walk from the train station and the University.

Verdon Guest House  is popular if you fancy a guest house

The Premier Inn in the City Centre has good reviews

The Premier Inn at Trentham Gardens has been getting very good reviews and lots of people like the shopping village and gardens that are on the site.

The Best Western Stoke on Trent Moat House is centrally located and incorporates some of Josiah Wedgwoods original house  and is another popular choice. It has spa facilities and a swimming pool.There is an excellent pub a short walk away called The Holy Inadequate

In Newcastle under Lyme,

The Clayhanger Guest House has very good reviews

and the Travelodge New castle under Lyme Central Hotel this is chain but it has a good price and standard.

AirBnB has quite a few places in the area

If none of these appeal then you are strongly recommended to check Tripadvisor before booking.   especially if you are thinking of booking the large hotel near the train station.

Food and drink

Near the University

Hawasana is based in Shelton and on Stoke Road (the next road over from the College Road campus), they will provide you with authentic Afghan cuisine including huge naans  and cheap food – on facebook  – here’s a good review by a local blogger

She also gives a good review to Beirut which is a short walk (10 mins up the road) away.

in Stoke town centre a short walk away

• The Glebe – a pub with good real ales –
• The White Star – a pub with good real ales –

Thalii Indian food which is good tapas style (again here is a review) , Planet Bollywood also does nice indian food

in Newcastle under Lyme

For breakfast and brunch Berts is excellent it is also open in the evenings and has a big stock of foreign beers.

Hong’s Kitchen -in Newcastle specialises in Hunan pot dishes – plus a lot of stuff you don’t usually see on Chinese menus in the Potteries.

The Blue Chilli Restaurant, 9 Berkeley Court, Newcastle under Lyme, ST5 1TT
Tel: 01782 715 885  great food, try the Thai Massaman curry.

The Art of Siam is another good Thai restaurant.

The Jalsa –  19-21 George Street, Newcastle under Lyme ST5  1JX, Tel 01782 611551     for good Indian food – try the Nowabi Chicken, Baza Lamb or the shashlik  dishes.

If you would like a drink after visiting either of the restaurants mentioned above then I would recommend The Greyhound which is owned by the local Titanic Brewery. This is a 2-3 min walk from any of the restaurants, just head straight up the road towards Hanley.

Bellini’s café 2 Pepper St, Newcastle-under-Lyme ST5 1PR. This is at the other end of Newcastle under Lyme. It is an Italian and has the best food in the conurbation from the places I have eaten. It is a little more expensive than the others but it is excellent.  Tel 01782 943541

Excellent places to have a drink near Bellini’s are The Bridge Street Ale House and the Lymestone Vaults which is in the same street as Bellini’s.

Ten Green Bottles is also very popular for gin and has a small outside area for summer.

Others to note

For authentic Polish food try Agie and Katie in Burslem (Agie is a Business School alumni).

Try the great pizzas from a clay oven at Klay Pizzeria in Hanley   also in Hanley is the Slamwich Club 

Finally, if you fancy something traditional try the excellent pies at Pieminster at Trentham Gardens

If you want to find out more on food in the area the following accounts are excellent

Eat Stoke on Instagram   

Moorlands Eater website

General info

General visitor information for the area including ceramic and factory tours can all be found on the Visit Stoke website

Trentham Gardens and Estate is very popular whether you want to eat, shop or walk around the gardens.

in the wider area

Enjoy Staffordshire has plenty of information for visitors and we are also only 10 miles from the Peak District National Park.

If country A’s currency becomes less valuable with respect to the UK, then their cost for goods from the UK goes up — and, everything else being equal, the number of sales drops. When politicians, economists and city commentators talk about how currency exchange rates might affect the UK’s exports, their words are generally illustrated by manufacturing names: the sales of Jags and Land Rovers to China, for example. Well, no one is too worried: both the Telegraph and Guardian note that only 4-5% of UK exports go to China, so the overall effect on the economy will be modest.

However, there is one industry whose exports disproportionately go to China: higher education. We are not used to thinking of this as an export industry, but that it is — and a very successful one at that. Not only are there more Chinese students studying in the UK than students from the whole of the EU, but there are also as many Chinese students as the next five biggest non-EU nations combined. (See also this comment piece in the THE.) All in all, roughly 20% of all non-UK students are from China. It follows, again roughly, that a ten percent drop in the number of Chinese students in the UK would be a £140m annual loss to UK Universities in tuition fee terms, and as much again in associated economic activity. But of course the direct financial cost is not the only thing here: also a long-term loss would be cultural and political connections between the UK and China, that aids both prosperity and peace. I would like to know what the UK government is doing to help what could easily be a crisis in the higher education sector (other than macho posturing on immigration targets, which hardly helps)?

The latest trend in HE admissions in the United States is to move away from standardised tests. George Washington University has just joined the well populated ranks of universities who feel that the tests may be doing more harm than good in expanding the range of their student bodies and allowing them to pursue their access agendas. Advocates of tests like the SAT or ACT in the United States have always argued that they can evidence a student’s intellectual abilities, regardless of that student’s background; critics have argued that such tests are more closely correlated to zip code, and to hot-housed test preparation, than to anything else. Wesleyan University has found that using school grades (as determined by individual schools and teachers) as a predictor of university success not only works well, but increases the intake of first generation and minority students.

Curious, then, that the UK should be so adamant that moving from course work to standardised national tests is the only way forward. I am thinking of the currently-being-introduced changes to GCSE and A level — although to be fair, these are subject exams rather than general aptitude tests. Curious, also, that in the US there are calls to expand the standardised testing that takes place after graduation from university.

This new report on Tourism and Sustainability includes:

• The most beautiful bicycle festival in the world L’eroica Britannia held at Bakewell in the Peak District
• New EU project to support sustainability in the tourism sector – SMARTOUR
• Totally Locally strategic marketing – a grass roots campaign being used in towns and villages across the UK
• Great weblinks for visiting the Peak District, Staffordshire and Derbyshire
• Tourism Management, Events Management and other courses you can study at Staffordshire University
• Discussion of the Fairbooking campaign to support businesses
• Some articles en francais

A print version of the report can be found here (23mb)

A web version of the report can be found here (1.5mb)

THE reports on a study done for the HEA about the attitudes of part-time students at UK HEIs. P/T students feel like an after-thought at Universities, even including the OU (and, perhaps surprisingly, even more so at the OU). The way terms and classes are scheduled, deadlines, library loan periods — all are founded upon the traditional full time students, and part-timers just have to fit in best they can. It’s not a pretty picture, and although the main drivers for the dramatic decline in p/t are of course financial, this doesn’t help.

Nevertheless, the report doesn’t distinguish between undergraduate and postgraduate students — to me it reads as if undergraduate just assumed to be the big issue and postgrad is left to be an … after-thought. Full time pg numbers have held up pretty well over the past five years (other than a significant dip in 2013), but part-time pg numbers have been falling dramatically: 40,000 down from 2009 to 2013. P/T postgraduate students are the forgotten among the forgotten.

Numbers wise, they are hardly an after-thought, though: fully one third of all part-time students in the UK are postgraduates. Moreover, p/t pgs make up a much larger proportion of total pg numbers (just under half, believe it or not), than is the case in ug numbers (less than a fifth). Therefore, more of a problem, not less.

The 2nd annual Stoke Literary Festival is nearly upon us, which includes such luminaries as Michael Palin and Margaret Drabble. Everything is pretty much sold out, which is good news for the Festival and the city, but not such good news for anyone who still wanted to attend! The program includes research on Arthur Berry by our own Emeritus Professor Ray Johnson and Visiting Research Fellow Dr. Catherine Burgass.

Until fairly recently, the vast majority of funding for came from two sources: the students themselves, and State governments. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, the last year or so has seen some desperate maneuvering by State legislatures to cut the higher education bill (see here and here, for example). But this has been going on for a decade and a half, with a real crescendo around the time of the global financial crisis. A new report from the Pell Trusts provides overwhelming evidence of a massive shift in funding from States to Federal government. Now, since most of this shift is in Pell grants — the major Federal support given to low-income students — perhaps this is no surprise, what with a major recession and all. However, what the recent battles have shown is that the trend towards Federal dependence is not reversing, and States are refusing to pick up the slack again in improving economic circumstances, but rather have taken advantage of Federal funding to permanently reduce their higher education budgets.

Rolling Stone has a good  article on how higher education is being dismantled in many parts of the USA – a word of warning for those that would like to see more market forces being allowed to run free. The UK seems to be following down this road at the moment as been discussed here

Only one University in the UK (as far as we know) ever got into very serious trouble , the question is would any Minister want to be the first to have a University go bankrupt on their watch? I suspect not.

In the US the latest problem in the private sector is “the high-profile bankruptcy of Corinthian Colleges earlier this month amid a wave of fraud investigations shows that the expansion of for-profit schools has hit its limit.”  I am unsure of the latter point given the worship of market forces and the general disdain for the public sector in the USA.