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More than 500 people were arrested in Montreal on Wednesday night as protestors defied controversial new law Bill 78

• Collected commentary on the protests from around the web

Protests that began in opposition to tuition fees in Canada have exploded into a political crisis with the mass arrest of hundreds of demonstrators amid a backlash against draconian emergency laws.

More than 500 people were arrested in a demonstration in Montreal on Wednesday night as protesters defied a controversial new law – Bill 78 – that places restrictions on the right to demonstrate. In Quebec City, police arrested 176 people under the provisions of the new law.

Demonstrators have been gathering in Montreal for just over 100 days to oppose tuition increases by the Quebec provincial government. On Tuesday, about 100 people were arrested after organisers say 300,000 people took the streets.

But what began as a protest against university fee increases has expanded to a wider movement to oppose Bill 78, which was rushed through by legislators in Quebec in response to the demonstrations. The bill imposes severe restrictions on protests, making it illegal for protesters to gather without having given police eight hours' notice and securing a permit.

On Wednesday night, police in Montreal used kettling techniques – officers surrounding groups of protesters and not allowing them in or out of the resulting circle – before conducting a mass arrest.

Police immediately declared Wednesday's protest illegal, but allowed it to continue for about four hours before surrounding protesters and making arrests.

Martine Desjardins, who represents more than 125,000 students in her role as president of the federation of university students in Quebec, said protesters had been "peaceful" on Wednesday's march.

"It makes a lot of people angry," she said. "We fear that tonight, because there will be more demonstrations going on, people will become a bit more violent, because as you saw yesterday, when you are peaceful, you get arrested."

Police arrested 518 people at the demonstration, the largest number detained in a single night so far. Montreal police constable Daniel Fortier, who told reporters rocks were thrown at police, said most of those arrested would face municipal bylaw infractions for being at an illegal assembly.

"I was so so scared," said Magdalena, one of those arrested, who asked that her last name not be given. She told the Guardian that she had been taking part in the protests since February, and that Wednesday night's action had actually seemed particularly peaceful.

"This was one of the most jovial I've taken part in," she said. "We were commenting how in good spirits we were, how everyone seemed in such great energy. There were families, children, women with strollers, which you don't necessarily see at the night protests as much," she said.

Protesters were allowed to walk freely and briskly through Montreal, she added, but that changed when they came to certain intersection, the pace of the march slowing dramatically. "We didn't think anything of it," Magdalena said. "All of a sudden you just smelled tear gas and could see smoke, and people were running."

Magdalena said people from the front of the march came running back past her and her friend, who had been strolling with their bicycles. "We turned around and there was already a line of cops behind us. We tried to go on the other side but then there was cops there too.

Police officers then tightened their ring around the "hundreds" of protesters, she said, not allowing anyone in or out. Magdalena said this situation continued for an hour, before everyone in the group was read their rights. After that, it was another "hour or two" before she was detained with plastic handcuffs and led to a city bus. She said they were then kept on the bus for "hours and hours" and were not allowed to go to the toilet. "I have some medical problems, and I wasn't feeling well. I really needed some water and I needed some sugar, and they were really awful, they said they didn't care," she said.

Magdalena said she was eventually charged with being part of an unlawful assembly, and given a ticket for $634, which she said she planned to contest.

Protesters have vowed to continue the nightly protests that began on 14 February when Quebec's liberal provincial government announced it would introduce tuition fee increases over a five-year period. The Quebec government's department of education, leisure and sport says fees would go up by $325 (£200) per year for five years from autumn 2012, a total increase of $1,625.

The protests have resulted in a backlash against the Quebec prime minister, Jean Charest, who has refused to back down over the tuition fee increase, and the new law.

Students have been boycotting classes over the past three months, arguing that the increases would lead to an increased dropout rate and more debt.

In response to the protests, the provincial government rushed through Bill 78 on 18 May. As well as the restrictions on protests, it suspends the current academic term and provides for when and how classes are to resume.

Some student organisers said that the introduction of the bill, far from cowing the demonstrations, had actually brought more support for their cause.

'This draconian law has revolted me'

Mathieu Murphy-Perron, who has been helping to organise demonstrations against tuition fees since last year, said: "I would say that I've seen more individuals come out and say: 'You know what? I was neutral on the question of tuition fees, but to bring this draconian law has revolted me and I will take to the streets with you.

"There have been more and more people who recognise that Bill 78 is a breach of the right of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and they're not going to have it."

Some legal experts argue that the bill contravenes Canada's charter of rights and freedoms. Montreal constitutional lawyer Julius Grey told the Vancouver Sun that Bill 78 was "flagrantly unconstitutional". Opposition has come from the Quebec Bar Association and the Quebec human rights commission.

In an appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live in the US on Saturday night, the Grammy award-winning band Arcade Fire, who come from Montreal, wore symbolic red squares of cloth on their chests during their performance, in support of the protests.

Murphy-Perron said the red-hued, four sided shapes were visible "everywhere you go" in Montreal, adding that they show the "inter-generational aspect of this struggle".

"You see red squares on buildings, on homes, on children, on teenagers, on students, on bluehairs, you see them everywhere."

Desjardins said that she and other student representatives will meet with the government next week in Montreal or Quebec City to discuss tuition fees – the fourth meeting since strikes began.

In the meantime the daily marches would continue, she said, adding that protesters were also planning a protest in Ottawa, around 150 miles west of Montreal, on 29 May. Ottawa is in a different province from Montreal, and so safe from the clutches of Bill 78 – introduced only in Quebec.

"It's something to ridicule the bill," she said. "If we are restricted to have a demonstration in Montreal, or in the province, we are going to go outside the province, to Ontario, and have a big demonstration there."

The fact that tuition fees have been tripled twice in recent years can be a recipe for confusion. Professor Steven Cummins (Letters, 22 May) argues that the NUS is wrong to criticise the lack of improvement in student contact time since the three-fold increase in fees, and that the coalition should be blamed for simultaneously withdrawing teaching funding from universities.

Although we agree about the withdrawal of teaching funding, my original comments about the use of tuition fees by universities in fact related to new research from the Higher Education Policy Institute (Report, 17 May) which showed time spent with tutors has not improved since the implementation of "top-up fees" under the previous government, and therefore prior to the coalition's funding policy taking effect. Top-up fees were, at the time, additional to increases in public funding for teaching, and the rationale given by ministers and universities was that they would be put to use in improving the student experience: the HEPI's report and other evidence now gives us cause to doubt those claims.

The impact of the coalition's three-fold increase in tuition fees on the student experience has not yet been felt – the first cohort will enter university this autumn and we will be closely monitoring the impact. The NUS vigorously opposed both the introduction of top-up fees by the last government, and the rushed and unfair three-fold increase in fees and teaching funding cuts forced through by the coalition. We will continue to oppose the rationale of marketisation; the same cannot be said for most vice-chancellors.
Liam Burns
President, National Union of Students

You are absolutely right that the introduction of degree-level apprenticeships will raise the prestige of vocational education (A plan for apprenticeship success, 15 May). Which is why I will ensure that by 2015 at least 20,000 young people a year will embark upon degree-equivalent higher apprenticeships in sectors like aerospace and the creative industries (there were just 180 when I became the minister responsible). Not only will this create one of the best gateways to university-level study but it will change the perception of vocational education to being a highway, not a cul-de-sac.

In government I have made my belief clear that, as the cornerstone of our mission to reshape the character of learning and workforce skills, practical competence must be as valued as academic prowess. Already we are succeeding with record numbers of high-quality apprenticeships. Because quantity must be matched by quality, I've insisted all apprenticeships will be for a minimum of 12 months and that all 16-year-olds work towards English and maths at GCSE.

Lord Leitch's report on skills told us that to match our competitors we must radically reform the way we train young people. We are doing what the Labour government that commissioned his work failed to. This government understands that a skilled workforce is necessary to power economic growth and fuels social mobility.
John Hayes MP
Skills minister

• University education hasn't worked – one size doesn't fit all (Ed Miliband demands end to 'snobbery' over vocational courses, 21 May). High-value vocational learning and apprenticeships offer young people alternative pathways into professions. We have proof that rigorous and demanding vocational qualifications and apprenticeships contribute significantly to social mobility and widen the path for young people to get into the workplace.
Jane Scott Paul
Chief executive, Association of Accounting Technicians

Our political elites find the issue of social mobility to be both irresistible and intractable (Suzanne Moore, G2, 24 May). Irresistible because even rightwing politicians cannot ignore the fact that our unfair education system, through which parental wealth has a far more significant impact on life chances than ability, is neither fair nor meritocratic, and ensures that structures of power remain ossified throughout society. And intractable because in order to significantly increase social mobility, educational opportunities for less well-off children must be significantly boosted, which will necessarily lead to a diminution of the access presently enjoyed by privately educated children to the best universities and careers.

Michael Gove's speech on the "morally indefensible" dominance by privately educated people in British society, and Nick Clegg's 17 annual "trackers", are nothing more than fig leaves to cover the government's growing embarrassment at the huge chasm between the status quo of private school dominance and the equality of opportunity which any intelligent person must conclude is essential for a country like ours to be able to describe itself as "great".

I doubt this government of privately educated millionaires is up to the task.
John Slinger
Chair, Pragmatic Radicalism

• I applaud Nick Clegg's commitment to the cause of social mobility. I suspect, however, that a much braver and more radical approach will be required. For example, private schools should only be allowed to keep their charitable status if they agree to take into their schools a significant proportion of appropriately assessed children from the state sector who are entitled to free school meals. It would not be perfect but it would be consistent in that, to an extent, selection would still be based on parental income. If they refuse they should lose their charitable status and submit to the market forces so beloved of recent governments.
Gordon Morris
Sherborne, Dorset

• No major political parties are sincere about promoting social mobility because they will not tackle the privileges and powers of Oxbridge and private schools (Social mobility still leaves some living in the gutter, 24 May). But we can do something as individuals. Do not send our children to private schools or the elitist state ones. We can decline to be students at Oxbridge. We can refuse the high salaries and the connections which make us a part of the establishment and instead identify with and agitate with those who are victims of an unequal Britain.
Bob Holman
Glasgow

• Your thesis about "the slow return of rage" (Leader, 22 May) is surprising, as a lead of 5% is a disastrous showing for an opposition party in mid-term. In fact, the low turnout for the local elections shows that the public mood is one of indifference. Part of the reason may be found in a photo you recently ran in which the three leaders plus George Osborne stood side by side. They appeared virtual clones, all being about the same age and wearing the same uniform (dark suit, monochrome tie, middle-of-the road haircut) and the same sleek metropolitan look. It is not surprising that their policies are hard to distinguish, especially as Miliband refuses to tell us what his policy is.
Christopher Wrigley
Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

John Harris says children with special educational needs will lose out in a rush to reform. Far from it – they'll get a better deal

John Harris writes of the fight he had to simply get the basic support for his autistic child (Special needs kids deserve better than a rush to reform, 21 May). His experience is a story I have heard over and over again. It is precisely this problem that the coalition government is trying to fix.

John says: "It quickly became clear that NHS speech therapy was effectively nonexistent, no one mentioned my son's obvious problems with motor skills, and too often we were effectively told to go away, depend on threadbare arrangements and wait till he was eligible for school." I have heard from thousands of parents like John, who have battled to get their children's needs recognised. Parents go through repeated assessments; and all too often, even when their child's need is accepted, there are more delays as different parts of the system squabble about who should be paying for what. And when a child gets to 16 it can feel like standing on the edge of a cliff, as all the legal rights and support disappear.

I also know the system doesn't work well enough for children with less severe needs either, such as those with unrecognised language difficulties whose frustration in trying to communicate shows up as angry, even criminal, behaviour. For each child with an issue not picked up, there is one mislabelled as "special educational needs" (SEN) who is actually falling behind for another reason, perhaps because they're caring for a relative or being bullied at school.

But John's claim that the purpose of our reforms was to deliver some arbitrary reduction in the numbers on the SEN register is just scaremongering. These reforms are about making sure every child, whatever their needs, gets the right type of help early.

Neither is it true that the government's approach is "frantic" or that we are rushing into reform. We set out our plans in a green paper in March last year. Since then we have consulted carefully with parents. John says he's spoken to charities and pressure groups who reported "mounting concerns", but the detailed consultation on our plans has shown broad backing from across the SEN sector. We are now testing our plans in 20 areas, before parliament debates the legislation next year. These are the biggest reforms to SEN for 30 years and we are taking the time to get them right and to listen carefully to parents.

At the heart of our reforms is the proposal to make the current statementing process simpler and stronger – so families like John's get a much better deal from the system. John says "there are clear signs that [the new plans] will not be as dependable as what they will replace". Far from it, the new education, health and care plans will keep all the existing legal protections, but will bring health and social care needs into a single assessment process. This will be backed by a new legal requirement for councils and health services to plan services together. And that cliff edge will disappear as we extend rights for young people in education or training up to 25.

As for personal budgets, there are many parents who do want to have greater choice and control over their child's specialist support package, but no parent will be forced down this route.

Finally, I share John's frustration about the lack of early intervention. That's why we'll be drawing up a clearer definition of SEN, so schools ask why children are falling behind, and put in place the right support. Children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities deserve a much better deal. We owe it to families to get it right.

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Pioneer of nursing who had a profound impact on training, research and practice

Jean McFarlane, Lady McFarlane of Llandaff, who has died aged 86, was one of nursing's great pioneers. Her work on what has come to be called the nursing process is now an integral part of every nursing curriculum and every nurse's practice. In 1974 she was appointed England's first professor of nursing, at Manchester University, where she developed a degree course and established the country's first professorial nursing unit. She was also responsible for England's first nursing research programme (the Study of Nursing Care), and was mentor to many of those who became the nurse leaders of the next generation.

Although most of her career was spent in England, Jean was born in Cardiff, the youngest of five children, and her pride in her Welsh roots was reflected in the title she took when she was made a life peer in 1979. She went to Howell's school, Llandaff, and after initial nurse training at St Bartholomew's hospital, London, returned to Wales to train and then work as a health visitor in Cardiff. The perspectives on healthcare afforded by her six years' health-visiting experience strongly influenced the nursing degree that she established later at Manchester – a four-year programme which prepared nurses to work both in hospitals and in community settings, as either district nurses or health visitors.

In the early 1960s, when Jean qualified as a nurse tutor and took a post as education officer at the Royal College of Nursing in London, the idea that nurses might benefit from a university education and even undertake research was greeted with incredulity, both inside and outside the profession. At the RCN, she became one of a small group of educators who formed the Association for Integrated and Degree Courses in Nursing and began to try to overcome these prejudices. In the absence of any university programmes in nursing, Jean took a BSc in sociology at Bedford College, London, and a master's in manpower studies at Birkbeck College.

Then, in 1967, on the initiative of Marjorie Simpson, a former colleague at the RCN then working at the Ministry of Health with a specific responsibility to develop research in nursing, came an invitation to lead the Study of Nursing Care. The enterprise was conceived as a series of linked individual projects on various aspects of nursing, in which students would also learn research methodology and gain academic qualifications. In the culture of the time, the initiative was revolutionary, and the results were equally startling. Some of the studies, produced over a number of years, are today seen as classics, and from the first cohort of six students later came the new generation of professors of nursing.

Over and above the massive task of co-ordinating the programme and supporting the students, Jean's particular contribution was her book The Proper Study of the Nurse (1970), which was both a synthesis of the first six studies and an argument for nurses to undertake research into their own practice and to develop the academic discipline of nursing.

In 1969 Jean handed over the project to become the RCN's director of education, then perceived as the leading post in nursing education in the UK. But following an internal reorganisation, she resigned – and was immediately snapped up by Manchester University. She remained there, as professor of nursing and head of department, until her retirement in 1988. She was able not only to initiate some of the most exciting developments in nursing – the first degree in nursing, the first professorial nursing unit, the first joint appointments for nurses between a university and a hospital, the development of "grand theory" in nursing, the introduction of the systematic problem-solving approach known as "the nursing process" – but also to act as support and mentor to many who were struggling in a still-hostile environment.

My personal debt to Jean is immense. I was a rebellious and arrogant young student nurse, and she took me under her wing, listened patiently to my sometimes wild ideas, supported me when those ideas got me into trouble and encouraged me to pursue them. Later, she guided and encouraged my research and academic career. I am proud to have been one of her "babies".

Jean's influence extended far beyond Manchester. Between 1976 and 1979 she served as a member of the royal commission on the NHS. She was one of the first fellows of the RCN, and the first chair of the RCN representative body (now called RCN congress). In the House of Lords, she was a member of four select committees. She served on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and was national president of the Girls' Brigade. She was a committed Christian, a staunch member of her local church, and between 1990 and 1994 a member of the general synod of the Church of England. She took particular interest in the hospice movement, and was until 2008 vice-president of St Ann's hospice in Heald Green, Cheshire.

• Jean Kennedy McFarlane, Lady McFarlane of Llandaff, nurse, born 1 April 1926; died 13 May 2012

Knitted bathing costumes and weird 1960s fashions in trigger lively debate among those whose minds are winding down

Yorkshire's exceptional collection of home movies has found a new use, in the treatment of elderly people whose minds are not what they were.

Working with the Alzheimer's Society, Methodist Homes for the Aged and Age UK, the Yorkshire Film Archive has created a 'memory bank' of clips collated according to subjects which stimulated most enthusiasm in trials.

At 62, you begin to take an increasing interest in such bright ideas, and there is much fun to be had in speculating about my generation's likely choice of films to stave off the worst effects of dementia. The current ones, which feature in the first package from the bank, include knitted bathing costumes, free school milk, 1960s fashion mistakes, favourite fireworks and clocking on at work.

Sue Howard, director of the archive says:

They became the immediate hot topics for conversations after test audiences watched the films. As one Memory Bank user involved in the pilot told us: 'It's like the years peeling back – the memories are all still there; they just need a trigger.'

The bank has been divided into themed sections on Holidays, Schooldays, Sporting Fun, Working Life and Domestic Life after the trials at St Leonard's hospice in York, care homes across the region and lively get-together organisations such as the Dementia Cafe Group in Penistone. Howard says:

Memory Bank is about opening up our collections to a huge range of older people, many of whom face a number of age-related challenges, and who often have very few opportunities to see and enjoy films such as these.

Reminiscence therapy and memory work play an invaluable role in improving a sense of personal identity and wellbeing, and stimulating communication and sociability. We're fortunate to have a fantastic visual record of everyday life over the decades – just the sort of films that trigger all of our collective memories.

The gerontologist Prof Dianne Willcocks calls the bank:

a compelling and fun way for people to reclaim their lived past – and to share it with family, friends and carers alike. It works both for those living with dementia and for those simply living with rich memories.

It may also contain me. We gave our family's home movies to the archive some years ago. They go back to the 1920s and I think that they do indeed contain at least one knitted bathing costume.

And talking of those, check out this film from 1926 in which they feature, kindly provided on YouTube by the British Film Institute.

In this week's jobs top 10, we countdown some of the teaching and research positions available to early career academics, and throw in some funded studentships for good measure

In at 10 is a PhD candidate in economics for the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

We open the charts this week with a vacancy for a PhD student at a Swedish institution. The focus of the research you will be assisting with is on green energy demand and consumer choice, and your aim will be to understand how consumers make purchasing decisions. If you're keen on the role, you might also like this interesting, yet completely unrelated, titbit: the post is in the northern city of Umea, which has been selected as European Capital of Culture for 2014.

At nine is a teaching fellow in European Union Politics at the University of Edinburgh

And on the theme of Europe, the University of Edinburgh is looking to recruit an academic with a specialism in politics of the European Union to teach at undergrad and postgrad levels. The post seems to have a broad range of responsibilities from the administrative to curriculum development and is also open to PhD students nearing the completion of the doctoral degree. Unfortunately, it's only a one year post. Still keen? Get your application in by 28 May.

Imperial College London is recruiting a research associate in sensor networks, at eight

There's so much about this job that sounds so trendy, starting with the fact that the post will be part of the Digital City Exchange programme (DCE), which aims to "discover and enable new technical and business opportunities by linking data streams to urban environments". So cool. But beyond the opportunity to drop that in dinner party chit chat, the successful applicant will also get the chance to collaborate across several departments, with an established community of academics.

University of Liverpool is also on the look out for a post-doctoral research associate, at seven

Here, a "self-motivated and ambitious" graduate with a PhD in psychology is invited to work on a collaborative project between the Universities of Liverpool and Lancaster. You'll be investigating the factors that inhibit team achievement, though I'm sure your own team at the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, will provide no relevant case studies.

A post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Kent is at six

If your concerns about academic life include isolation, the persistent need to find research funding and a cash-strapped faculty making cuts to services for staff, then you have nothing to fear at the University of Kent. According to its literature, the school of social policy has 101 staff, "outstanding RAE status and strong student recruitment which means it is well-funded and offers favourable conditions to staff". If you like the sound of that, closing date is 25 May so you have to be quick.

Five is for an LSE research assistant in the economics of climate change

With a job description that specifically targets early career researchers, LSE's Grantham Research Institute invites applications from students with a degree in economics and related fields. With LSE coming in third in the Guardian 2013 university guide, suffice to say there is an expectation that you will contribute to the institution's research excellence, collaborating on research programmes and with partner institutions.

In fourth place is senior research associate in applied computer science at University of East Anglia

Here's one for an academic with a little more practical experience: the Tyndall Centre in the School of Environmental Sciences is offering a student completing a PhD in computer science an opportunity to work on on a groundbreaking European computer modelling project. The successful candidate will be working on a web portal that will operate the model. Closing date: 15 June.

A research associate in combinatronics at the Open University enters the chart at three

Combina-who? If Mr Murtagh, my A-level maths teacher had told me that aptitude for his subject could lead to a career in combinatronics, I would have paid more attention in class. But I suspect Mr Murtagh knows nothing of combinatronics. Even my spell-check is having a tough time keeping up. If you, on the other hand, are well versed in this wizardry, get your application in by 14 June. For enquiries about the post (excluding calls for a definition of 'well-quasi-ordering') contact Dr Robert Brignall r.brignall@open.ac.uk

One from the top spot is an LSE fellow in international political economy

I like the word 'promising'. It's all about potential. It's an acknowledgement that you've got what it takes to go places, while accepting that you're not there yet. The word 'promising' gets LSE back in the charts and this time, it's recruiting a PhD student to teach the MSc in International Political Economy and the MSc in International Politics of Money and Finance. You're expected to have specialist knowledge of the latter.

And top of the charts is a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith fellow in social science at University of Glasgow

With interdisciplinary applications accepted, a three-year term that could extended, the opportunity to join a college with international links and not one but three deadlines for applications, there are many reasons why this fellowship at the University of Glasgow makes the top spot. To be in with a chance of securing the fellowship, you'll need to submit a two-page research proposal that covers one of the disciplines of the College of Social Sciences: business, education, interdisciplinary studies, law and social and political sciences.

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Global recession and failure to qualify rules out four other countries which had hoped to come. But Dutch and Canadian sportsmen and women will be in the Yorkshire city too.

We have the full range of martial arts belts from white 10th Kyu to
black 1st Dan in our Strange and Wonderful Cupboard here in Leeds. Their owner – a son fledged and departed for some time now – would be pleased to be back here in the run-up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The city council has just signed and sealed the deal reached last August for Chinese sportsmen and women to train here in July, including the Taekwondo team which will set up a base at Leeds university. We're also getting China's swimmers, track and field athletics and fencing contestants. Hockey, boxing and canoe teams will also be based in Leeds but do their practice sessions in, respectively, Wakefield, Bradford and Nottingham.

The agreement was signed this week in Beijing where Leeds sent a team including two chefs, at the invitation of the Chinese. They were given a tour and cookery demonstrations at China's main Olympic Training Centre. The city council says:

It gave them an insight into an environment that very few westerners have ever seen before, and will help ensure that the food prepared for the visiting Chinese athletes is of the required standard. Their enhanced knowledge of this type of cuisine will also benefit the many Chinese, Asian and other students on campus.

That sounds promising for the rest of us, too, with the uni regularly welcoming outsiders to its various cafes, restaurants and bars. On the sporting side, meanwhile, the final team coming to Leeds is the one which is likely to get the most attention: China's mighty table tennis players who hold all ten top places in world rankings – the five best women and the five best men and have won every title at the World Table Tennis Championships since 2003.

Leeds reckons to be making around £250,000 from hosting the 220 athletes and support staff, with many indirect benefits to the trade links which have been fostered over the past two decades. Although a Chinese archway offered by Leeds' twin city Hangzhou has yet to find a definite place here, there are many commercial and academic links and plenty of Chinese students at both the universities.

The city is also going to be host to the Dutch swimming squad, including Ranomi Kromowidjojo, the current Olympic and world champion women's 4x100 metre freestyle relay). Canada's wheelchair rugby team is also coming to train at Leeds university. But a combination of cutbacks overseas or failure to qualify means that other planned sporting guests, from the USA, Russia, Serbia and Australia, are not coming after all.

Leeds city council's Labour leader Keith Wakefield says:

As with all agreements things can alter after the initial negotiations, and especially due to the current very challenging global economic climate it is no surprise to see some of the elements have changed, But it remains an achievement to have secured these athletes from China, Holland and Canada to come to Leeds and we very much look forward to welcoming them.

We are absolutely thrilled to have signed the deal for China to send its athletes to Leeds to complete their preparations for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It is a historic agreement and a tremendous honour to be hosting some of the world's leading athletes in our city and we are sure they will enjoy their time in Leeds.

His Chinese counter-signatory Liu Aijie of the Chinese Olympic Committee says:

The friendship between China and UK will definitely make strides forward with the success of the pre-Games training camp and I hope more and more Chinese students will go to Leeds to pursue their studies in the near future.

And check out the work of those two chefs.

Should you say yes to life? Follow your passion? Dare to dream? Alice Cooper and Oprah Winfrey have the answers

Assembled readers, fellow bloggers, distinguished friends …

First, let me say what a great honour it is to have been asked to write this blogpost about commencement speeches. Where I come from, there isn't really any equivalent to this quintessentially American phenomenon; and as a result, every year, thousands of young British people collect their degrees and head into the world in a dangerously uninspired state – not knowing, for example, whether or not they should say "yes" to life, or follow their hearts, or dare to be different.

With these lost souls in mind above all, let's review what we've learned from 2012's speeches so far. By now, you'll have seen Barack Obama's, and maybe Mitt Romney's, and perhaps even Neil Gaiman's, which went justifiably viral.

But what about the others?

Aaron Sorkin at Syracuse: "Make no mistake about it, you are dumb"

"You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people," explains the West Wing creator, who oddly chose not to deliver this speech to graduating students at Syracuse University, in upstate New York, while pacing down one of its corridors in an extended tracking shot.

"I was there. We all were there. You're barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups … but they're coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb."

Another piece of advice not so much expressed in this speech as embodied by it: if you come up with some clever one-liners in your TV scripts, feel free to recycle them in commencement speeches.

Alice Cooper at the Musicians' Institute: "Apparently, chickens don't fly so much as they plummet"

The man known on his birth certificate as Vincent Furnier begins this speech with the observation that his being invited shows "a certain lack of judgment" on behalf of the Los Angeles Musicians' Institute. But it really doesn't: apart from the bit about almost shooting Elvis dead, it's a thoroughly classic genial commencement address.

"Whatever you do, avoid mediocrity. Mediocrity is your enemy," Cooper urges his audience. Instead, go out on a limb: you'll either be a big success or a terrible failure, but either is better than mediocrity. It's not that this is a bad message, exactly – it's just that it might be nice to hear it, now and again, from the non-millionaire, non-successful non-rock-stars.

Isn't it a little too easy to celebrate the risk of failure when, in your case, it happened to pay off so handsomely?

Oprah Winfrey at Spelman College: "You want to be in the driver's seat of your own life because if you're not, life will drive you"

With the exception of a powerful few of minutes near the beginning about the legacy of the civil rights movement, Oprah's speech is a tumbling waterfall of positive-thinking platitudes. But Oprah can be forgiven for this because she is Oprah, and the commencement speech is fundamentally the most Oprahesque of all rhetorical forms; it's thus a perfect match, and she wisely doesn't try to mess with the genre.

Quick summary: things that are good, according to Oprah, include persistence, goodwill, service, having a direction for your life, and knowing who you are. Things that are possible if you believe in yourself: all of them.

Tony Blair at Colby College: "Be a doer, not a critic"

Remember this guy? He's an old hand at commencement speeches, which he uses to deliver a message that seems painfully susceptible to armchair psychoanalysis: that the future won't belong to "commentators, critics and cynics", but to those who "have confidence", who "wake up every morning with a sense of purpose", who get out there and do things.

Regrettably, several moaning naysayers at Colby College in Maine seemed not to have heeded his point about not being a critic: his speech was interrupted at several points by shouts of "warmonger" and "war criminal". One man (not Tony Blair) was arrested.

Michael Bloomberg at UNC-Chapel Hill: "We're all computer nerds now"

Oh, the usual: competition is good, dare to be a maverick, smartphones are making the world a more connected place. Included here mainly for the New York mayor's amusingly awkward attempts at call-and-response chants in the first few seconds.

Jane Lynch at Smith College: "Say 'yes and'"

The star of Glee does it the way it ought to be done: audience flattery, mixed with actual humour.

"Smith women have transformed cuisine, spearheaded social movements, created great literature and, in the case of my friend Piper, class of '92, even gone to prison! But damnit – when a Smithie goes to prison – she writes a clever and compelling book about it!" Lynch steps onto thin ice with her angle, which involves applying the lessons of improv comedy to living a worthwhile life – motivational-speaker types are always making this tired analogy – but actually, she pulls it off brilliantly:

"'Yes and' is the vital and only rule of improvisation … if I say to you 'Stick 'em up!' and you say 'That's not a gun, that's your finger!', we've got nowhere to go … Life is just a big extended improvisation. Embrace the ever changing, ever evolving world with the best rule I've ever found. Say 'Yes And.'"

Brian Williams at George Washington University: "It's hot, and you're hungover … but enough about your parents"

The NBC news anchor has been developing an unexpected sideline in properly funny comedy, some of which is on show here, though it gets a bit lost in his efforts to make A Big Meaningful Point. Half of this speech is an entertaining tour through Williams's own story of academic failure; the rest of it is a box-checking list of rousing American cliches: the greatness of the space program, the importance of the military, the importance of ambition.

Not wanting to suggest that his listeners must necessarily build spaceships or become soldiers, Williams is reduced to urging them towards some kind of non-specific but nationally significant action:

"Please: take us somewhere. Keep us moving, push us somewhere, make us better."

Ira Glass at Goucher College: "Commencement speakers give doomed advice which is then promptly ignored"

It should come as no surprise that the host of This American Life gets all meta on his Baltimore audience. "The central mission of the commencement speech is itself ridiculous: to inspire at a moment which needs no inspiration," he points out.

"Look at yourselves at this moment. Something incredible is happening to you right now. The whole world is opening to you. You guys have been in school your entire lives. You have completed something difficult that took persistence and wilfulness, and probably you questioned yourselves again and again … What can words add to that except delay the moment you get your diploma?"

His real message: that you'll do mediocre work as part of any life path worth pursuing, and that you'll often suspect you're doing it all wrong.

"You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends … that's totally OK. That's totally normal. If that happens, you're doing it right."

Which is subtler than Alice Cooper. Although, then again, so are most things.

A draconian law to quell demonstrations has only galvanised public support for young Quebecois protesting tuition fee hikes

At a tiny church tucked away in a working-class neighbourhood in Montreal's east end, Quebec's new outlaws gathered on Sunday for a day of deliberations. Aged mostly between 18 and 22, their membership in a progressive student union has made them a target of government scorn and scrutiny. And they have been branded a menace to society because of their weapons: ideas of social justice and equal opportunity in education, alongside the ability to persuade hundreds of thousands to join them in the streets.

Under a draconian law passed by the Quebec government on Friday, their very meeting could be considered a criminal act. Law 78 – unprecedented in recent Canadian history – is the latest, most desperate manoeuvre of a provincial government that is afraid it has lost control over a conflict that began as a student strike against tuition hikes but has since spread into a protest movement with wide-ranging social and environmental demands.

Labelled a "truncheon law" by its critics, it imposes severe restrictions on the right to protest. Any group of 50 or more protesters must submit plans to police eight hours ahead of time; they can be denied the right to proceed. Picket lines at universities and colleges are forbidden, and illegal protests are punishable by fines from $5,000 to $125,000 for individuals and unions – as well as by the seizure of union dues and the dissolution of their associations.

In other words, the government has decided to smash the student movement by force.

The government quickly launched a public relations offensive to defend itself. Full-page ads in local newspapers ran with the headline: "For the sake of democracy and citizenship." Quebec's minister of public security, Robert Dutil, prattled about the many countries that have passed similar laws:

"Other societies with rights and freedoms to protect have found it reasonable to impose certain constraints – first of all to protect protesters, and also to protect the public."

Such language is designed to make violence sound benevolent and infamy honourable. But it did nothing to mask reality for those who have flooded the streets since the weekend and encountered police emboldened by the new legislation. Riot squads beat and tear-gassed people indiscriminately, targeted journalists, pepper-sprayed bystanders in restaurants, and mass-arrested hundreds, including more than 500 Wednesday night – bringing the tally from the last three months of protest to a record Canadian high of more than 2,500. The endless night-time drone of helicopters has become the serenade song of a police state.

In its contempt for students and citizens, the government has riled a population with strong, bitter memories of harsh measures against social unrest – whether the dark days of the iron-fisted Duplessis era, the martial law enforced by the Canadian army in 1970, or years of labour battles marred by the jailing of union leaders. These and other occasions have shown Québécois how the political elite has no qualms about trampling human rights to maintain a grip on power. 

Which is why those with experience of struggle fresh and old have answered Premier Jean Charest with unanimity and collective power. There are now legal challenges in the works, broad appeals for civil disobedience, and a brilliant website created by the progressive CLASSE student union, on which thousands have posted photos of themselves opposing the law. (The website's title is "Somebody arrest me" but also puns on a phrase to shake a person out of a crazed mental spell.)

And Wednesday, on the 100th day of the student strike, Québécois from every walk of life offered a rejoinder to the claim that "marginals" were directing and dominating the protests: an estimated 300,000-400,000 people marched in the streets, another Canadian record, and in full violation of the new law. They brandished the iconic red squares that have now transformed into a symbol not just of accessible education but the defence of basic freedoms of assembly and protest. Late into the night, a spirit of jubilant defiance spread through the city. On balconies along entire streets, and on intersections occupied by young and old, the sound of banging pots and pans rang out, a practice used under Latin American regimes. 

The clarity that has fired the students' protest has, until now, conspicuously eluded most of English-speaking Canada. This is because the image of the movement has been skewed and distorted by the establishment media. Sent into paroxysms of bafflement and contempt by the striking students, they have painted them as spoiled kids or crazed radicals out of touch with society, who should give up their supposed entitlements and accept the stark economic realities of the age.

All this is said with a straight face. But young people in Quebec, followed now by many others, have not been fooled. They know the global economic crisis of 2008 exposed as never before the abuses of corporate finance, and that those responsible were bailed out rather than held to account. They know that meetings of international leaders at the G20 end by dispatching ministers home to pay the bills on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable, with tuition hikes and a toxic combination of neoliberal economic policies. And with every baton blow and tear-gas blast, they perceive with ever greater lucidity that their government will turn ultimately to brute violence to impose such programs and frighten those who dissent.

To those who marched Wednesday, and the great numbers who cheered them on, the fault-lines of justice are evident. This is a government that has refused to sit down and negotiate with student leaders in good faith, but invites an organised crime boss to a fundraising breakfast; a government that has claimed free education is an idea not even worth dreaming about, when it would cost only 1% of Quebec's budget and could be paid for simply by reversing the regressive tax reforms, corporate give-aways, or capital tax phase-outs of the last decade; a government whose turn to authoritarian tactics has now triggered a sharp decline in support, and which has clumsily accelerated a social crisis that may now only begin to be resolved by meeting the students' demands. 

As the debate went on at the CLASSE meeting in the church last Sunday, the students' foresight proved wise beyond their years. "History doesn't get made in a day," one argued into the microphone. Not in a day, no doubt, but in Quebec, over this spring and the summer, history is indeed being made.

Fewer than half of schools that applied for PFI funding will be refurbished or rebuilt, Michael Gove announces

Fewer than half of the schools that applied for renovation under the government's privately financed school building programme have been successful, it has been announced.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, said just 261 schools out of 587 that applied would be rebuilt or refurbished under the £2bn PFI scheme, despite widespread concern about the state of school buildings.

A survey for the Observer revealed 39% of headteachers believed their school buildings were not fit for purpose, with complaints of overcrowding, leaking ceilings and poor ventilation.

Gove admitted the manner in which he cancelled Labour's mammoth school building programme had been "clumsy and insensitive". Within weeks of coming to power, the coalition scrapped the £55bn Building Schools for the Future project, saying it was wasteful and bureaucratic.

More than 700 school building projects were cancelled and Gove was forced to apologise after errors on a list of affected projects meant some schools thought their building work was going ahead when it had in fact been halted.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's The World at One on Thursday, Gove said: "I think it was necessary to stop the Building Schools for the Future programme because it wasn't efficient, even if the way I made the announcement was clumsy … it was insensitive, and more than that, it left people in a state of uncertainty because they were led to believe by the previous government that schools desperately needed to be rebuilt and were left high and dry."

The government announced the scheme to rebuild the most dilapidated schools, the Priority School Building Programme, last July. The deadline for applications was mid-October.

The announcement of successful bids has been delayed for months, while a baby boom has put intense pressure on space in primary schools. An east London council is drawing up plans to convert an empty Woolworths store into a classroom and teach children in two shifts as part of emergency measures to cope with the rising number of primary age pupils.

In a statement, Gove said rebuilding work would begin immediately and the new schools would be open in 2014.

"I recognise many of the schools that applied and have been unsuccessful will also have significant needs. Some will have their needs addressed through other funding we have made available for maintenance," he said.

The government has commissioned a survey of the school estate which will detail the condition of every school in England by next autumn.

There are 42 schools – those in the worst condition and all the special needs schools in the programme – that will be fast-tracked for urgent building work.

Gove's statement added: "I know many schools will be disappointed not to be included in the programme. We have had to take difficult decisions in order to target spending on those schools in the worst condition."

PFI, which involves private contractors paying upfront for schools and hospital buildings, then leasing them back for up to 30 years, has become increasingly expensive since the financial crisis.

Gove said the Department for Education was working with the Treasury to reform the PFI model and provide "cost-effective and more transparent" delivery of services. Under the school rebuilding scheme, schools will manage and control services such as cleaning, catering and security.

Traditional PFI deals involve the automatic bundling of services such as cleaning into construction contracts. This has been criticised by the Treasury for failing to deliver value for money.

Unions are concerned staff lose out on pay and conditions when such services are contracted out.

Nusrat Faizullah, chief executive of the British Council for School Environments, an education charity, said: "It's great to finally see some schools, at least, will be replaced or refurbished.

" It's also good to see that schools in the very worst condition will be fast-tracked."

"But this only is a beginning. Hundreds of schools have lost out after being told by the previous government their schools will be rebuilt; they too must have their building needs addressed."

Steve Beechey, head of education at construction firm Wates, described the statement as "light on the detail" of how the new school buildings would be procured and the timeframes involved. "Given that it typically takes at least two years from the time a decision is made to build a school until it is ready to open, it is essential that the government swiftly follows up today's announcement with more information on how it intends to prioritise projects for delivery."

In the same interview, Gove denied the closure of grammar schools was responsible for a decline in social mobility. He said: "Selection isn't a magic bullet. If you look across the worldat those countries that have successful education systems, yes, some of them are selective, like Singapore. Others, Finland, South Korea, Japan, aren't.

"So it's not the case that you need to have selection in order to have a successful education system which advances social mobility."

He added the decline in social mobility had more to do with progressive teaching methods and softer subjects in state schools. "In fact there were other changes occurring in education - a move away from traditional subjects rigorously taught in many cases. It would be wrong to look back at the 60s and 70s and say that the move away from grammar schools was the sole cause of adverse changes."

The 200 schools are:

Barking and Dagenham

Eastbrook Comprehensive School

Eastbury Comprehensive School

Barnet

Pardes House Primary School

Birmingham

Castle Vale Performing Arts College

Hallmoor School

Heathlands Junior and Infant School

Kings Norton High School

Plantsbrook School

Turves Green Boys' School

Blackpool

Collegiate High School

Hawes Side Primary School

Highfurlong School

Palatine Sports College

Bradford

Belle Vue Boys' School

Carlton Bolling College

Oakbank School

The Samuel Lister Academy

Brent

Alperton Community School

Copland Community School

Bristol

Hillfields Primary School

St Anne's Park Primary School

St Ursula's E-ACT Academy

Bromley

Harris Academy Beckenham

Harris Academy Bromley

Bury

The Elton High School

Cambridgeshire

The Manor

Camden

Hampstead School

Maria Fidelis Convent School FCJ

Cheshire West and Chester

Blacon High School

Crowton Christ Church C of E Primary School

Dee Point Primary School

Highfield Community Primary School *

J H Godwin Primary School

Neston High School

Coventry

Alice Stevens School

Ernesford Grange Community School

President Kennedy School

Richard Lee Primary School

St Thomas More Catholic Primary School

Whitmore Park Primary School

Wyken Croft Primary School

Croydon

The Archbishop Lanfranc School

Cumbria

Southfield Technology College (joint application with Stainburn School and Science College)

St James C of E Junior School

Stainburn School and Science College (joint application with Southfield Technology College)

Derby

Asterdale Primary School

Carlyle Infant School

Cavendish Close Junior School

Chaddesden Park Infant School (joint application with Chaddesden Park Junior School)

Lees Brook Community School

Reigate Primary School

Woodlands School

Derbyshire

Alfreton Grange Arts College

Devon

Chagford C of E Primary School

Haytor View Community Primary School

Ilfracombe Arts College

Ladysmith Junior School

Newton Poppleford Primary School

Newton St Cyres Primary School

South Molton Community College

South Molton United C of E Junior School

The Castle Primary School

The Grove Primary School

Doncaster

Askern Moss Road Infant School

Don Valley Academy and Performing Arts College

Durham

Durham Trinity School and Sports College

King James I Academy Bishop Auckland

Seaham School of Technology

St Joseph's Roman Catholic Voluntary Aided Primary School

West Cornforth Primary School

Ealing

Mayfield Primary School

East Riding of Yorkshire

Goole High School

Hessle High School and Sixth Form College

Withernsea High School

Wolfreton School

Essex

Lawford Mead Primary (replaces Lawford Mead Infant and Lawford Mead Junior Schools)

The Edith Borthwick School

Gateshead

Charles Thorp Comprehensive School

Front Street Community Primary School

Hill Top School

Lingey House Primary School

Roman Road Primary School

Greenwich

Eltham C of E Primary School

Invicta Primary School

Our Lady of Grace Catholic Primary School

The Eltham Foundation School

Wingfield Primary School

Halton

Halebank C of E (VC) Primary School

The Heath School

Harrow

Aylward Primary School

Cedars Manor School

Marlborough Primary School

Priestmead Primary School and Nursery

Salvatorian College

Vaughan Primary School

Weald Infant School (joint application with Weald Junior School)

Weald Junior School (joint application with Weald Infant School)

Hartlepool

Barnard Grove Primary School

Holy Trinity C of E Primary School

Manor College of Technology

Havering

Hacton Primary School

Suttons Primary School

The Mawney Foundation School

Hertfordshire

Bishop's Hatfield Girls' School

Garston Manor School

Goffs School

Kings Langley School

Longdean School

The Highfield School

Westfield Community Technology College

Hillingdon

Abbotsfield School

Northwood School

Swakeleys School

Hounslow

Hounslow Manor School

Isle of Wight

Carisbrooke College

Christ the King College

Oakfield C of E Aided Primary School

Ryde Academy

Kent

Aylesham Primary School

Castle Community College

Chantry Primary School

Culverstone Green Primary School

Halfway Houses Primary School

Laleham Gap School

Meopham School

Priory Fields School

Sevenoaks Primary School

Smarden Primary School

St Philip Howard Catholic Primary School

The Canterbury Primary School

Westlands Primary School

York Road Junior Academy

Kingston upon Hull

Ainthorpe Primary School

Eastfield Primary School

Foredyke Primary School

Francis Askew Primary School

Neasden Primary School

Wold Primary School

Kirklees

All Saints Catholic College Specialist in Humanities

Mount Pleasant Junior Infant and Nursery School

Whitcliffe Mount Business and Enterprise College

Lambeth

Allen Edwards Primary School

Charles Edward Brooke School

Glenbrook Primary School

Lansdowne School

The Orchard School

Leicester

Forest Lodge Primary School

Lewisham

Sir Francis Drake Primary School

Liverpool

Aigburth High School

Redbridge High School

Luton

Stopsley High School

Manchester

Camberwell Park Specialist Support School

Plymouth Grove Primary School

Stanley Grove Primary School

Newham

Little Ilford School

Stratford School Academy

North East Lincolnshire

Great Coates Primary School

North Lincolnshire

Baysgarth School

Brumby Junior School

Burton-upon-Stather Primary School

Crosby Primary School

Grange Lane Primary (replaces Grange Lane Infant and Grange Lane Junior Schools)

Henderson Avenue Primary School

The Vale Academy

North Tyneside

John Spence Community High School

Longbenton Community College

Marden High School

Whitehouse Primary School

North Yorkshire

Harrogate High School

Northumberland

Bedlingtonshire Community High School

Prudhoe Community High School

The Duchess's Community High School

Nottingham

Glenbrook Primary and Nursery School

Springfield Primary School

Top Valley School and Engineering College

Nottinghamshire

Abbey Primary School

Annie Holgate Infant School (joint application with Annie Holgate Junior School)

Annie Holgate Junior School (joint application with Annie Holgate Infant School)

Carsic Primary School

Ethel Wainwright Primary School

Fountaindale School

John Davies Primary School

Leamington Primary and Nursery School

Lynncroft Primary School

Rosebrook Primary School

Serlby Park Academy (Primary school co-location with Secondary school)

Serlby Park Academy (Secondary school co-location with Primary school)

South Nottinghamshire Academy

Sunnyside Primary and Nursery School

The Grove School

Oldham

Saddleworth School

Peterborough

St John's Church School

West Town Primary School

Poole

Montacute School

Portsmouth

King Richard School

Reading

Reading Girls' School

Redcar and Cleveland

Handale Primary School

Laurence Jackson School

Richmond upon Thames

The Queen's C of E Primary School

Rotherham

Oakwood Technology College

Wath Victoria Primary School

Salford

Mesne Lea Primary School

Sandwell

Hall Green Primary School

Harvills Hawthorn Primary School

The Phoenix Collegiate

Sheffield

Fox Hill Primary School

Prince Edward Primary School

Slough

Slough Grammar School

Southampton

Bitterne Park School

The Cedar School

St. Helens

Mill Green School

Staffordshire

Clough Hall Technology School

Gnosall St Lawrence C of E (C) Primary School

Moorgate Community Primary School

Stockport

Abingdon Primary School

Bridge Hall Primary School

St John's C of E Primary School

St Mary's R C Primary School

Werneth School

Stockton-on-Tees

Grangefield School

Ian Ramsey C of E Aided Comprehensive School

Mandale Mill Primary School

St Michael's Roman Catholic School

Suffolk

Chantry High School

Great Cornard Upper School and Technology College

Sunderland

Hetton School

Hylton Castle Primary School

Shiney Row Primary School

St Anthony's Catholic Girls' Academy

Usworth Grange Primary School

Surrey

Pyrford C of E Aided Primary School

Riverview C of E Primary and Nursery School

St Bede's C of E Aided Junior School

St Lawrence C of E Aided Junior School

Tameside

Broadoak Primary School

Flowery Field Primary School

Holden Clough Community Primary School

Silver Springs Academy

Wakefield

Castleford Redhill Infant School (with Castleford Redhill Junior School)

Castleford Redhill Junior School (with Castleford Redhill Infant School)

Waltham Forest

Buxton School

George Mitchell School

Hawkswood Primary PRU

Selwyn Primary School

St Joseph's Catholic Infant School

Wandsworth

Chestnut Grove School

Warrington

William Beamont Community High School

Warwickshire

Queen Elizabeth School

Wigan

Britannia Bridge Primary School

The Deanery Church of England High School and Sixth Form College

Wiltshire

St Mary's C of E Infant School (joint application with St Peter's C of E Junior School)

St Peter's C of E Junior School (joint application with St Mary's C of E Infant School)

Wyvern College

Wirral

Bedford Drive Primary School

Foxfield School

Ridgeway High School

Wolverhampton

Edward the Elder Primary School

Wood End Primary School

York

Carr Infant School

Lord Deramore's Primary School

Post your questions to our panel of environmental experts

Universities may have good intentions – but in practice, being eco-friendly isn't always high on the agenda.

Following on from next week's launch of the People and Planet Green League – which ranks universities to show how well they manage their environmental impact – we will be hosting a live Q&A with sustainability experts and students.

Join us from 1-4pm next Tuesday to discuss the ways in which universities can tackle their carbon footprints – and how students can benefit from green policies.

Would you consider a university's environmental record before applying for a degree? Perhaps your own university has introduced a successful scheme. Share your opinions and questions in advance by posting in the comments section below.

Our panel:

Debby Cotton is head of educational development and pedagogic research at Plymouth University.

Danielle Gufferty is vice-president of society and citizenship at National Union of Students, and campaigns on environmental and ethical issues.

Gill Coleman is co-director of the sustainability and responsibility programme at Ashridge Business School.

Dr Chris Seeley is co-director of the sustainability and responsibility programme at Ashridge Business School. He is also a faculty member for the Ashridge doctorate in organisational change.

Louise Hazan is the creator and compiler of the People & Planet Green League and supports students campaigning to improve the environmental record of universities.

Darren Twort is the environmental officer at Oxford Brookes Student Union. He is studying environmental management.

Quebec last week passed emergency legislation meant to end Canada's most sustained student demonstrations ever

About 400 people have been arrested in the latest protest in Canada over higher university tuition fees.

Weeks of protests in Quebec have at times turned violent. The provincial government last week passed emergency legislation meant to end Canada's most sustained student demonstrations ever.

Protesters on Wednesday night threw objects at police in Montreal as a peaceful march fell apart. Police encircled the thousands of protesters and squeezed them into a tighter space.

Arrests were made in Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

Quebec's premier, Jean Charest, has refused to roll back the tuition fee hikes of C$254 (£158) per year over seven years. Quebec has the lowest tuition rates in Canada, and they would remain among the country's lowest.

A recent report reveals that only 12% of third year female PhD students want a career in academia. Curt Rice looks at the reasons why and warns that universities' survival is at risk

Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as PhD candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great.

This is the conclusion of The chemistry PhD: the impact on women's retention, a report for the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In this report, the results of a longitudinal study with PhD students in chemistry in the UK are presented.

Men and women show radically different developments regarding their intended future careers. At the beginning of their studies, 72% of women express an intention to pursue careers as researchers, either in industry or academia. Among men, 61% express the same intention.

By the third year, the proportion of men planning careers in research had dropped from 61% to 59%. But for the women, the number had plummeted from 72% in the first year to 37% as they finish their studies.

If we tease apart those who want to work as researchers in industry from those who want to work as researchers in academia, the third year numbers are alarming: 12% of the women and 21% of the men see academia as their preferred choice.

This is not the number of PhD students who in fact do go to academia; it's the number who want to. 88% of the women don't even want academic careers, nor do 79% of the men! How can it be this bad? Why are universities such unattractive workplaces?

Part of The chemistry PhD discusses problems that arise while young researchers are PhD candidates, including too little supervision, too much supervision, focus on achieving experimental results rather than mastery of methodologies, and much more. The long-term effects, though, are reflected in the attitudes and beliefs about academia that emerge during this period.

The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing: the constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, solitary and as unnecessarily competitive.

Both men and women PhD candidates come to realise that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment. Women are more negatively affected than men by the competitiveness in this stage of an academic career and their concerns about competitiveness are fuelled, they say, by a relative lack of self-confidence.

Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.

As if all this were not enough, women PhD candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them.

By following PhD candidates throughout their study and asking probing questions, we learn not only that the number of women in chemistry PhD programs who intend to pursue a career in academia falls dramatically, but we learn why. (See also Why go for a PhD? Advice for those in doubt.)

This research and the new knowledge it produces should be required reading for everyone leading a university or a research group. The stories surely apply far beyond chemistry. Remember that it's not just women who find academia unappealing. Only 21% of the men wanted to head our way, too.

Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realises that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit. We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest. When industry is the more attractive employer, our credibility as the home of long-term, cutting edge, high-risk, profoundly creative research, is diminished.

The answers here lie in leadership and in changing our current culture to build a new one for new challenges. The job is significant and it will require cutting edge, high-risk leadership teamwork to succeed. Is your university ready?

Curt Rice is a regular contributor at University of Venus and vice president for research at the University of Tromsø in Norway.

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Walls of glass get a £20 million refurb to refresh and enlarge University House

Here's another reproof to those who persist in regarding the north of England as dour and grim. We are are about to restore and revive one of the best glass curtain walled buildings in the world.

It is right in the middle of Sheffield, that airy metropolis of fine hills and wide views, at University House, which hundreds of thousands of past students from elsewhere, as well as locals, will know well.

It doesn't quite match the glorious Bauhaus at Dessau in Germany but its construction methods were very advanced for 1963 when it was unveiled as a centrepiece of 11 Sheffield university buildings designed by the same practice. A master plan was drawn up in the heady Coronation Year of 1953 by Gollins, Melvin and Ward which used the latest techniques to make maximum use of northern light.

The architect Robert Smith, who worked on all 11 buildings including the university's Arts Tower with its famed paternoster lift, says:

It was a groundbreaking design. We were pioneers in glass curtain walling and this was one of the very first of its type. It was a very fresh building design and very simple. It offered some of the best views of Sheffield, and still does now.

It was designed to be unrestricted and benefited from not needing offices or room dividers so it was much more open than the other university buildings. We wanted to get as much light in as possible.

The building has been adapted and enlarged on several occasions since and only the Glossop Road frontage gives a clear idea of the original scheme. But the new alterations will bring back more of the 'light and airy' notions, with the Sheffield architects HLM in charge of £20 million which will integrate the building with the student union, which has just had £5 million spent on improvements of its own.

The new composite arrangement, with improvements to the City View cafe and an amphitheatre called Octagon Plaza, will be renamed unromantically but practically, the Students' Union Building. Thom Arnold, president of the union says:

We're really pleased to be working in partnership with the University to develop this visionary facility. Providing an outstanding student experience is something the university and the union are fundamentally committed to and this project promises to further this.

Smith is also pleased with HLM's take:

I'm very happy to think the building will continue to be used into the future as it's a special building.

Work starts in July and should be finished in September next year. Meanwhile, rejoice in the fact that the very first glass curtain walled building were put up in Liverpool – Oriel Chambers, admittedly to hoots and whistles from critics who called it 'a great abortion' and 'an agglomeration of great glass bubbles'. The north of England is also rich in 'fresh air and light' schools built between the 1930s and 1950s and we should never forget the poet Swinburne's description of his friends in Northumberland, the Trevelyans:

That bright household in our joyous north. The crowning county of England – yes, the best!

Nor should we forget the National Glass Centre in Sunderland. And finally, here's the chance for you take a ride on the Sheffield University Arts Tower paternoster, courtesy of this clip from YouTube. It answers the fraught question: what happens if you stay on at the top, or bottom?

Further education colleges and apprenticeships provide a less costly alternative to university – and they have other advantages

If you're considering university, the increase in tuition fees – due to rise to £9k a year in many institutions from the autumn – might just have made you think again. And one option you could consider is studying at a further education (FE) college.

There are 362 further education colleges in the UK, offering courses in everything from A-levels to apprenticeships. Many now also offer degree courses, and you might be surprised to hear that one in eight students currently choose to complete their higher education at an FE college.

Many colleges offer two-year foundation degrees, which combine hands-on, practical learning with academic study and can be topped up to a full degree in a year (or longer, if you require).

And with the exception of a handful that can award their own foundation degrees, most colleges work in partnership with universities. So although you might be studying at your local FE college, your degree – and, crucially, the certificate that goes with it – will be awarded by the "partner" institution.

Students who do degree courses at FE colleges say the biggest benefits are smaller classes and more one-to-one contact with tutors.

"I had over 20 hours of tutorials and lectures a week, compared to seven or eight on many of the university courses I'd looked at," says Frankie Clarke, who recently completed a degree in digital media design at City College, Brighton and Hove. "It certainly focused the mind and stopped me from procrastinating."

It is also, generally, cheaper. When tuition fees rise in September, many colleges are planning to charge less than £6k a year – making them a much more affordable option. And students who opt to do a degree at their local college often carry on living at home, which cuts down on living costs.

But there are drawbacks. While some colleges – particularly those in bigger towns and cities – have active student unions and a lively social scene, most can't quite rival the buzz of the university campus.

And because the majority of higher education students at FE colleges are part-time (often because they are combining work and study), there may not be quite so much action at the college bar. But if you want value-for-money and can give or take the party scene, it's a much more affordable option.

If you're not sure if a degree is right for you, it's definitely worth looking at apprenticeships, which give you the opportunity to earn and learn on the job. While traditionally associated with "oily rag" trades, such as engineering, plumbing and mechanics, it is now possible to do an apprenticeship in practically anything, from accountancy to childcare. Apprentices typically spend most of their time in the workplace, with up to a day a week at college.

Average pay is around £170 a week (and significantly more at some companies), which rises with experience. And there are plenty of opportunities to progress to more advanced qualifications, including higher national certificates and diplomas, foundation degrees and even postgraduate courses.

If you think apprenticeships are for those who haven't got the grades for university, think again. Apprenticeship programmes, particularly at large bluechip companies, can be highly sought after. In 2010, BT had 24,000 applications for just 221 places on its scheme – more than Oxford University had for its degree courses.

And the government has recently launched a new degree-equivalent apprenticeship. While currently only available in engineering, it could soon be rolled out to other sectors.

There is currently no Ucas tariff (points allocated to qualifications for entry to university) for apprenticeships. But after lobbying from employers, lecturers and industry bodies, this could soon change.

Despite scoring top A-level grades, Jenny Westworth chose an engineering apprenticeship at BAE Systems over a university degree.

"I enjoyed school, but being stuck in a classroom and learning all that theory… I am definitely more of a hands-on type of person," she says.

Now 23, she has an apprenticeship, is partway through a higher national diploma, and is due to start a degree course in September – all funded by her employer.

"I weighed up my options at the time and chose not to go to university and I am now in a better position in my life. I have got really good work experience, I am far more mature, and I understand what it is that I want to do."

Case of 11-year-old with cerebral palsy and A* maths GCSE fuels wider concerns over education reforms and accountability

Two of the government's flagship academy schools are facing legal challenges for refusing to admit children with statements of special needs.

In one case involving Mossbourne academy in Hackney, east London, which has been celebrated for its academic record, the school refused to admit an 11-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, arguing it would compromise other children's education and it already has a higher than average number of pupils with special needs. The London Oratory, a Catholic school in Fulham which became an academy last year, is also facing a special needs legal challenge.

The cases suggest academies may not have the same legal obligations to children with special needs as maintained schools. While parents of children with special needs have the right to appeal against a decision at any other school, lawyers are concerned that academies can turn them away with no recourse. The legal cases could have widespread implications as more than half of secondaries in England are now academies.

There are up to 30 cases of children with special needs who have been refused an academy place, according to Ipsea, the special needs advice service. Eight involve Mossbourne which was one of the first academies and has won praise from both Labour and the Tories for its pupils' achievement. After last year's A-level results, seven pupils from the school won places at Cambridge.

The Learning Trust, which manages education in Hackney, refused to name Mossbourne in the boy's statement, the document setting out a child's needs and the help they should receive, including the name of the school they will attend. Such statements are given to children with the most severe special needs and 2.7% of schoolchildren in England have them.

While he is academically gifted – he already has GCSE Maths A* – his condition can make him unsteady on his feet. It also affects his ability at practical tasks such as using a ruler.

The boy's mother, Sarah Creighton, said: "We said, 'In what way can you possibly say [he] is going to interfere with the other children's education?' He's top of the year in all his subjects, he's got GCSE Maths A* already, he's won the pan-Hackney debating challenge two years running, he's a prefect and a reading mentor at his school. Obviously, I'm his mother, and I'm very, very proud of him. But I think I'm justifiably very proud of him."

The family's lawyers say Mossbourne has refused to accept that the Sspecial educational needs tribunal – a court which hears school place appeals by parents of children with such needs – should hear the case. They say the school claimed it was not governed by legislation for state schools but only by its funding agreement with the education secretary.

The Learning Trust applied successfully to have the case struck out but the family has lodged an appeal to a higher court.

Elaine Maxwell, a partner at Maxwell Gillott solicitors, for the family, said: "The academy may have good grounds for refusing to take a particular child in an individual case, … but that should be an argument they make before a tribunal – they shouldn't have it struck out before they get there.

"When you get a school saying it's full, that's not an end to it. The child or his parents should be able to say: does our disadvantage outweigh the disadvantage to other children? There's a balancing act that has to be struck."

She added: "How are academies accountable? This has been inherent in academies from the beginning. If academies aren't bound by SEN provisions and the tribunal system, then the parents of a child with a statement have fewer rights than anyone else."

Mossbourne told the family their son's admission "would be incompatible with the efficient education of other pupils at the academy". A local authority can legally decline to name a school in a statement if the child's presence would have a negative impact on the education of existing pupils. This could mean, for example, reducing the level of pastoral care available to other children.

The academy said nearly 1,600 children applied for 200 places in its September 2012 intake. Of those, 53 have statements. Of the 53, 28 named Mossbourne as their first preference. Nationally, 21% of schoolchildren have some form of special needs but at Mossbourne the proportion in each year is 26%-28%.

The boy's family argue that his statement comes with funds that would help the school to provide for him.

Creighton said: "Part of me feels that this seems so blatantly wrong: that a school can say, 'These regulations set up to protect disabled people don't apply to us, so we don't have to live by them.' That seems so wrong, that anyone would be able to do that."

A spokesman for the Learning Trust said: "As a matter of policy we do not comment on cases of this nature. Depending on the terms of the funding agreement between an academy and the secretary of state, the academy may not have to admit a child even if the school is named in the child's statement."

The London Oratory case concerns an 11-year-old boy from Croydon. The school declined to be named in his statement, arguing too that it would compromise the "efficient education of other children."

Chris Barnett, lawyer for the family concerned and head of the education and disability law department at Levenes solicitors, said: "If it hadn't been an academy, the authority would have named it [in the statement]. Croydon's position seems to be that it doesn't accept the arguments the school has put forward, but they still won't name it. It seems to me that the LA [local authority] doesn't quite know how to deal with it because it's an academy."

A tribunal hearing in the London Oratory case is due next month.

Young people need comprehensive sexuality education, which will help them make more informed decisions

Sex education polarises opinion, sets legislators against parents and parents against schools and regularly inflames media opinion. Somewhere in the middle sit young people: ill-served, receiving confused messages and gaining their information from famously unreliable sources, such as peers or the internet.

Sex education, as all too many experience it, is like teaching people how to drive by telling them in detail what's under the bonnet, how the bits work, how to maintain them safely to avoid accidents, what the controls do and when to go on the road. It's all about the mechanics. And that's it.

There's a growing consensus that young people don't need sex education, they need comprehensive sexuality education. CSE is sex education plus: the mechanics, plus a lots more about sexuality.

That means not just teaching young people about the biology of sex, but also teaching them about the personal, emotional, societal and cultural forces which shape the way in which they choose to conduct their lives. Armed with this understanding, young people can make far more considered decisions.

This approach has the potential to unite the warring factions that bicker over the fundamental rights and wrongs of sex education: CSE equips young people with basic biological knowledge, but at the same time it equips them to question why they act in certain ways, and whether or not it is right, valuable or desirable to do so. CSE imparts information, and promotes responsibility.

CSE contains components which allow learners to explore and discuss gender, and the diverse spectrum of gender identities that exist within and between and beyond simple heterosexuality. It also contains components that examine the dynamics of power in relationships, and individual rights.

These are not taught as theoretical concepts. They have serious practical effects on the way in which young people interact with each other, both in the sexual and the wider social and educational spheres. Studies have shown that addressing such issues can have a marked impact both in school and the expansion of young people's social networks.

CSE also engages with what some doubtless regard as difficult territory. Sexuality – however, individually, we choose to regard it – is a critical aspect of personal identity. The pleasure that we derive from sexuality, even if that pleasure is the pleasure of feeling that a reproductive duty is being fulfilled, is a vital part of our lives: it's what makes us human. CSE views sexuality as a positive force.

CSE exploits a variety of teaching and learning techniques that are respectful of age, experience and cultural backgrounds, and which engage young people by enabling them to personalise the information they receive.

What is most telling is that a large number of studies have reached the clear conclusion that CSE does not lead to earlier sexual initiation or an increase in sexual activity. To paraphrase, traditional sex education seems to say: "If you're going to do it, this is how everything works and you need to protect yourself in these ways to prevent this." CSE says all that, but it also asks young people to ponder what exactly "it" is, and to deepen their perception of its implications.

In a political environment which is quantitatively driven, we measure the success of sex education in straightforward health behaviour indicators. These are easy to manage: numbers which build on existing health surveillance and measurement systems, and which are simple to understand from an objective point of view.

However, CSE is a far more nuanced discipline, and it will be necessary to include other measures of programme success: qualitative, subjective indicators which relate to gender equity, empowerment and critical thinking skills.

While governments have recognised young people's right to CSE via various intergovernmental resolutions and conventions, the journey from recognition to delivery will be a long one. Even in the UK, there are notable differences, with England having a bare-bones biological approach "puberty, menstruation, contraception, abortion, safer sex, HIV/Aids and STIs should be covered", while Wales and Scotland have curriculums which incline far more towards the CSE agenda.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the organisation I work for, and its 153 member associations around the world, has been instrumental in pressing for the adoption of international policy commitments to CSE. For many, it may seem like we are pushing 10 steps ahead of the agenda when the basic principle of young people's right to even the most basic introduction to the biology of sex is still not universally accepted.

Our view is different: it is that CSE is what will secure widespread acceptance of sex education, because it is about more than the mechanics of sex. It is about helping young people, the world over, to become more healthy, more informed, more respectful and more active participants in the life of their community and their nation.

Doortje Braeken is IPPF's senior adviser on adolescents and young people, responsible for co-ordinating programmes in 26 countries implementing a rights-based approach to youth friendly services and comprehensive sexuality education. She will be among the panellists for a live discussion on sex and sexuality education, taking place on the SocietyGuardian site from noon to 2pm on Thursday 31 May

Working with industry – beyond the confines of the curriculum – has a huge impact on both pupils and teachers as well as providing 'golden teaching' moments

As most people are aware teaching can be a very challenging and demanding job. Constantly changing curriculum models and exam syllabuses put a huge strain on teacher delivery of teaching and learning in the classroom. The feel good factor however, can be immense when you witness the impact a teacher can have on achievement and motivation.

Recently I had one of those golden teaching moments when an ex-student, Zainab, emailed me to say thank you, and to tell me that what she was doing now was because of the work and opportunities that I had given her. Zainab is on a gap year programme called the Year in Industry which is organised by an educational charity called EDT. Zainab is working at the Royal Institution of Great Britain and has been organising mathematics and engineering master classes for enthusiastic students across London.

Another student now in Year 13, came back with an enthused attitude towards engineering after attending Arup's International Women's Day event at their offices last year. "I now know that I want to be an Engineer," said Jessica. Jessica, like Zainab, had been fully involved in the EDT programmes at school. Jessica was outstanding demonstrating her project management skills. She has offers to study Engineering at Bristol University.

I have been in charge of Science, Technology and Engineering enrichment at Fortismere School since 1995 and hundreds of students (aged from 11-17) have participated in experiences focused on personal development and careers awareness. These experiences have been outside of the taught curriculum through the Engineering Education Scheme (EES), one of a number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) programmes run by EDT.

On the EES these students worked as a team of four supported by myself and an engineer from a large civil engineering company, Arup, on a bespoke project set by the company. The team worked together for six months to solve the engineering problem set by the company. Numerous visits were made to the company and by the engineer to the school. As part of the project phase the team, engineer and I spent three days at a university working on the project eventually culminating in a celebration event where the team project was assessed by high ranking assessor from industry.

The impact on the students was immense resulting in three of the team deciding to be engineers. It is often the case that students on this programme seem to have a seminal moment regarding their future plans and aspirations and start to ask questions on careers advice and other enrichment possibilities. The experience of the project and company and the information picked up about being an engineer from the mentor often cement their decisions to take a degree in engineering at University. The icing on the cake for me is when I hear that my students access gap year placements in engineering particularly with the sponsoring company who set the EES project. A number of my students have also gone on to employment with the company.

In my experience these are not isolated cases and it fuels my appetite for enrichment and my absolute certainty that extra curricular provision of this sort makes a huge difference to student achievement and attainment. School commitment to such activities requires senior management team backing which is not always forthcoming in all schools because of pressures due to curriculum delivery, time out of school for supporting teachers, etc. I have always been fortunate to work in a school that sees the bigger picture in terms of the effect that these extra commitments and school resources require.

An often forgotten fact is the benefit it brings to the teachers supporting such activities. Adopting different teaching methodologies results in genuine continual professional development and the opportunity for students to view their teacher outside of the normal subject delivery mould of teacher/pupil relationship. The observed maturation development of students working on these programmes is often quite remarkable. For teachers contact with outside companies and organisations can enhance their curriculum delivery and outline subject relevance. I have managed, supervised and mentored dozens of teachers of enrichment activities, there is no doubt that whilst they require a degree of extra workload, the outcomes are both motivating and morale-raising for all concerned.

To successfully engage in enrichment studies and maximize their impact the school needs to buy into them completely with a shared vision and mission. Individual department or faculty participation is of course valuable but to embed such programmes into the school ethos and agreed priorities, an understanding of their value and willingness to support is essential. Teachers who are willing to go the extra mile deserve the recognition and backing that will guarantee better staff teamwork and greater ownership of student achievement.

• Peter Crompton teaches technology at Fortismere School, Haringey, London Associate Assistant Headteacher with responsibilities for work related learning and enrichment in STEM. He has facilitated the participation of large numbers of students in STEM enrichment schemes across all secondary key stages since 1994.

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The "muted" response of US academic experts to the global financial crisis has been noted, as has its partial nature. (Heist – Part 2, G2, 22 May). More remarkable, perhaps, has been the extraordinarily limited response to the crisis of the mainstream economics profession as a whole. The background to this lies in the extent to which so-called "neoclassical" economics has succeeded in purging the subject of the so-called "institutional" factors that embrace the political, economic and social organisations primarily responsible for the creation and management of the crisis in the first place.

And so long as prevailing economic theory is dominated by models abstracted from such "exogenous" factors, it is unsurprising that its practitioners have so little to say about the real world. I found this illuminated, if parochially, by the University of Glasgow finding, some decades ago, that the name of Adam Smith's "department of political economy" was unfortunate, being a possible deterrent to the recruitment of students from countries such as Saudi Arabia. The "political" element in the economics of its founding father was therefore removed, with the Adam Smith Building now housing the more respectable "department of economics".
Brian Pollitt
Honorary senior research fellow, department of economics, University of Glasgow

• Cometh the hour cometh the man … Thank the Lord for Alexis Tsipras challenging the crazy economic orthodoxy that has gripped our pedestrian and unimaginative coalition government here in the UK, and the leaders of much of mainland Europe, since 2010. Even the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, is warning George Osborne that he needs a Plan B (Report, 23 May). Along with Monsieur Hollande in France and, hopefully, a re-elected Barack Obama, there is some hope for the unemployed people of Europe, particularly those aged between 16 and 24. Just imagine if the likes of Cameron, Osborne et al had been in power in the years after 1945. There would have been no commitment to reconstruction, full employment, social welfare, and no preparedness to borrow American money to finance it. Capitalism needs managing and directing by progressive governments, otherwise it tramples people into the ground. Greece is fortunate to have a party leader who is not prepared to allow this to happen to his fellow countrymen and -women without a fight.
Sean McGrath
London

• As ever, Seumas Milne gets to the heart of it (In or out of the eurozone, we must ditch this failed model, 23 May), focusing on the crucial point that mainstream politicians seem so blithely to forget: "the eurozone's implosion [is] the product of the wider crisis of neoliberal capitalism that first erupted in the banking system five years ago and has since wreaked havoc on public finances, jobs, services and living standards throughout the western world". John McDonnell (our Alexis Tsipras?) is calling on his blog for signatories to a statement on the radical alternative to austerity. In defence of us, the people of Europe, sign up!
John Airs
Liverpool

• Many of us are looking round for reassurance and leadership during the continuing financial turbulence, but Christine Lagarde's visit hasn't helped. The suggestion that lowering interest rates could help our financial situation betrays ignorance of Japan's long-running economic difficulties, and the continued determination of British banks to play hardball with commercial and domestic customers while sitting on the reserves with which they have been provided.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon

• Your image of the BAE workers at the rollout of a section of HMS Queen Elizabeth showed highly skilled people watching a billion-pound (of taxpayers' money) white elephant for which there is no useful future or export market (Carrier build on course, 15 May). Like most of the carrier sections, it is probably to be towed to Rosyth by Dutch tugs. For the foreseeable future at Portsmouth and other naval bases, thanks to the PFI, it will be handled by Dutch-designed tugs on Polish-built hulls for which there is a huge export market, costing the taxpayer multimillions. We are in a double-dip recession not least because successive governments have wilfully sent taxpayers' capital monies (and thousands of skilled jobs) abroad for spurious accounting reasons.
Robert Straughton
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria

• Pat McFadden writes "Sending out signals that we don't want the highest-value workers to come here is a huge mistake" (Creating the future, 21 May). Yes, but is it not also a huge mistake to send out signals to business such as "No need to pay taxes to educate British youth – there are other countries fool enough to pay for decent education, you can pick your talent from them"?

Is the purpose of our government to work for the interests of the British people as a whole, or for the interests of global companies with a base in Britain? Sections of the right seem to have shifted to the latter, and the left, out of fear of accusations of racism, are not challenging it. Industry complains that British people have no sense of work discipline, but what has it done to create it? That discipline went hand in hand with job security and long-term loyalty. No wonder people have lost confidence.
Matthew Huntbach
London

• Can someone explain to me how "making it easier to dismiss workers" is "a way of boosting employment" (Too chillaxed? No, I'm driven like Thatcher, says Cameron, 21 May)? What perverse logic makes Cameron believe this? Surely if you sack someone you create unemployment? Does he conversely think that making it easier to take people on will create unemployment?
Michael Miller
Sheffield

Schmidt warns about rise of censorship and government cybercrime in speech at London's Science Museum

Nations that carry out cybercrimes and wreak online havoc pose the greatest threat to the future of the internet, the chairman of Google has warned.

In a speech delivered at London's Science Museum on Wednesday, Eric Schmidt said the internet would be vulnerable for at least 10 years, and that every node of the public web needed upgrading to protect against crime. Fixing the problem was a "huge task" as the internet was built "without criminals in mind" he said.

"While threats come from individuals and even groups of people, the biggest problem will be activities stemming from nations that seek to do harm. It is very difficult to identify the source of cyber-criminality and stop it," he said.

The Google chairman raised a series of fears in a speech that announced a new initiative to send teachers into UK schools to teach computer science, and called for more people to enter science and engineering to drive industry.

Speaking at the museum, Schmidt said he worried about the permanence of information on the internet and its impact on individuals in future. "The fact that there is no delete button on the internet forces public policy choices we had never imagined," he said. "A false accusation in your youth used to fade away; now it can remain forever."

Schmidt also used his speech to warn about the rise in governments that censor online material, up from four a decade ago to at least 40 today. Through filtering, governments could build their own "Balkanised web", where people saw different information online depending on who and where they were, without anyone knowing what had been censored.

"Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the web, and there is no room for complacency," he said.

Last year in the annual MacTaggart lecture, Schmidt was highly critical of Britain's failure to teach computer programming in schools. Continuing the theme at the Science Museum, he blamed a lack of exposure to computer science in secondary schools, where only 4,000 students studied the subject in 2011, making up less than half a percent of that year's A-level results.

A January report from the Royal Society agreed there was a shortage of teachers equipped to teach the nuts and bolts of computer science, from computer architecture to the concept of an algorithm and writing software. Since then, the education secretary, Michael Gove, has scrapped the existing ICT curriculum, freeing schools to teach a broader mix of computer science and programming.

Schmidt conceded that "rebooting computer science education" would not be straightforward, and announced plans to fund a training scheme for teachers to help improve Britain's failing computer science education system.

Working with the charity Teach First, Schmidt said the first batch of 100 "first-rate" teachers would be trained this summer and have bursaries to buy teaching aids, such as cheap Raspberry Pi or Arduino computer starter kits. They will receive on-the-job mentoring and training for a further two years. The Google project aims to help around 20,000 pupils from the most disadvantaged communities.

A vocal champion of engineering, in his speech on Wednesday Schmidt also emphasised the need to dispel the "oily rag stereotype" view of engineers. Research by Intel in the US, he said, found that two thirds of teenagers never considered a career in engineering. But simply learning about their roles in making video games and social networking, and in high-profile incidents such as the rescue of the Chilean miners, made half reconsider.

"Put simply, technology breakthroughs can't happen without the scientists and engineers to make them. The challenge society faces is to equip enough people, with the right skills and mindset, and to get them to work on the most important problems.

"This is where education comes in. Great scientists are a rare breed, so the more who study science, the greater chance of finding those for whom it becomes a vocation. Although there are some signs of progress, so long as more kids aspire to win X Factor than win a Nobel Prize, there's room to improve," Schmidt said.

Last year, Google donated more than £1m to the Science Museum to fund a gallery on the history of communications, from telegraphs to tweets. Part of the money has funded an exhibition devoted to the life and legacy of Alan Turing, often described as the "father of the computer", which opens next month. Among the exhibits will be installations that anyone in the world can control over the internet, including one that allows people to make music through remote controlled robotic instruments.

Nick Clegg's desire to fast-stream clever kids out of deprivation leaving the rest facing shabby prospects is hardly communism

It's an interesting week that sees Vince Cable accused of being a socialist (by the Tory donor Adrian Beecroft) and Nick Clegg accused of "communist tactics" (by the headmaster of a private school, Tim Hands). What would Marx say? (Coincidentally, I have this written on my mug.) Leaving Cable's firebrand trottery aside for a second, Clegg's Stalinism stems from his speech on social mobility, to launch the Sutton Trust's report.

The figures in this report are stark but unsurprising – one child in five is on free school meals, but only one in 100 Oxbridge entrants is; that's probably the most arresting statistic in terms of how poverty suffocates one's prospects. Just as enraging is the fact that only 7% of children attend private schools, but these schools provide 70% of high court judges.

Nick "Commie" Clegg concludes that the government needs some targets; except because that word is so last century, they now talk of "annual trackers" – 17 measures, including the number of A to Cs in GCSE results among children on free school meals, and participation in higher education of those from poorer backgrounds.

Tim Hands' objection is that if factors such as background are taken into account by universities, it will be commensurately harder for kids from great privilege to get into Oxbridge. He calls this "capping the achievements of pupils in independent schools".

I think he's a really good example of my new theory; just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence.

It's a precarious, unenviable position, particularly for those with enough dog sense to be aware of it. When the suggestion is made that universities should broaden their criteria, and look at factors beyond a pupil's accent and how many times they've read the Iliad, you can hardly blame the insecure creatures of privilege for freaking out.

Social mobility sounds unarguable, but like so many other ideas that are apparently self-evident – the primacy of the "hard-working family", the ubiquity of "generations of worklessness" – its apparent simplicity is a cover. It's not Clegg's fault, incidentally: social mobility has been a policy-wonk buzzword for as long as child poverty targets have been in place – targets which, incidentally, will not be met.

This brings me to my first point: you can call it a target or a tracker, but this school of governance – imagine your ideal outcome, plot the signs that your outcome is being achieved, codify those signs into a "target", but never actually change anything – doesn't work. The child poverty targets weren't achieved because no serious attack was made on income inequality.

The social mobility "trackers" will most probably lead to the blaming of schools in poor areas, as they try to achieve those five A to Cs for disadvantaged kids; schools will learn to game the system, resulting in grade inflation; there will be an annual ding-dong with rectors from Oxford and Cambridge as it emerges that they've managed in yet another year not to find a single black person clever enough to study history. And that will be that. No serious change will occur because no serious policy lies behind the call for change.

Moreover, even if social mobility was achieved, what is so great about a society in which the outliers of each class can move relatively freely up and down the hierarchy? What's so great about being able to escape the gutter, when the bulk of people are still in it?

Part of the reason that class has become so ossified is that, in this time of great inequality, the consequences of dropping from any given class to the one below it are severe – you would move heaven and earth to prevent your children fetching up in blue-collar employment when wages at the bottom are no longer enough to live on. No wonder people try to lock in their privilege by paying for education. The only rational solution to that is to work towards a time when there is less difference between the classes.

This new-soft-left alternative, where you fix it to fast-stream the clever kids out of deprivation, leaving the rest to blame themselves for their shabby prospects because they turned out not to be clever enough … well, obviously it's not what any sensible person would call communism. It's not what you'd call socialism either. It's not liberal egalitarianism, or any of those more fine-tuned theories that make it possible to be a leftie and still own a house. It's not left wing and, fundamentally, it doesn't make anything any better.

Even if the waters of the social fountain were in perpetual motion (and you can bet that Clegg doesn't mean that by "social mobility" – he's talking about other people's kids having the freedom to rise, not his own having the potential to fall), you'd still have to accept, even embrace, the idea of some people living and dying in the sludge. Who could ever line up behind such a laughably shoddy vision of the future, a world in which everything looks roughly the same, but each class has had a very slight reshuffle in personnel?

This debate, as it's framed by the coalition – do you believe in social mobility, or do you believe in sink or swim? – is bankrupt (like so much else). I don't believe in either.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

On Friday 25 May our live chat panel will discuss the challenges facing HR professionals and how how they can work better with academia. Join us on the blog at 12 BST

Writing for the Guardian Higher Education Network, Universities HR chair and head of human resources at the University of Leeds, Matthew Knight, said that as universities are "people enterprises, the quality of the people working in the sector, the way they work with each other and what they achieve will, over time, mean the difference between institutional success and failure."

This implies that HR professionals, who are responsible for recruiting and nurturing the human capital at universities, have an important role to play in the long-term success of their institutions. And it would seem that even before the major reforms of the last 12 months, policy makers have been investing in human resource management in HE so that the sector can be supported through times of change.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) invested £888m in English universities, between 2001 and 2008, to modernise HR. Commenting on the subsequent Hefce report in 2009, David Lammy, the then minister of state for higher education, said: "Flexible, adaptable and strategic human resource arrangements will be vital in enabling institutions to tackle emerging challenges head-on."

And what were once "emerging chanllenges" are now upon us. In the last year, there have been protests over pension reforms, blogs expressing anxiety about shrinking departments and fewer post-doctoral posts, services outsourced and a myriad other changes in working life for both academic and administrative staff. Internationally, HR professionals are having to deal with demographic changes, the effects of the recession and the 'Asian expansion' leading to stiff competition for talent.

With issues like this on the agenda, it's little surprise that academic staff don't always feel HR professionals are on their side - as the comment thread on Matthew's blog shows.

One commenter wrote: "For HR, academic staff are just drones to be classified, measured, assessed and used or disposed of accordingly. Insight, inspiration, the advancement of human knowledge and civilisation? Oh no, say HR, we need benchmarks, impact statements, performance evaluations, and in the end it is about cutting jobs and getting people to do more with inadequate resources. Tools of managerialism."

What's an appropriate response when academic purpose and HR practice clash? And are human resource managers as flexible, adaptable and equipped as was hoped?

On Friday 25 May, our live chat panel will consider the challenges facing human resource management in HE but will also explore the ways HR professionals are contributing to the mission of HEIs as places of learning and research excellence, but also as efficient and healthy organisations. Join us online at 12 BST.

The live chat takes place in the comment threads beneath the blog. If you would like to join the panel, please email me.

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Performing Freshwater in the writer's former home revealed a different side to the serious intellectuals who frequented 46 Gordon Square

Keynesian interpretive dance is not a familiar concept. But John Maynard Keynes played a starring role in an unlikely history: he (and other members of the Bloomsbury group) regularly dabbled in amdram. "Bloomsbury parties" often involved parodies, plays and musical numbers performed for tipsy audiences of family and friends. Keynes, for example, took a lead role in a skit called Don't Be Frightened, or Pippington Park, dancing a duet with his Russian ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova, at the conclusion of the play. This is one of the hidden histories of 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, London, the house where Virginia Woolf lived from 1904-1907, and where Keynes himself lived until 1946.

These days, the house is home to the school of arts at Birkbeck, University of London, where I teach. Working at Birkbeck means teaching among ghosts. We like to imagine that the high-mindedness of the original residents somehow rubs off in our classrooms; even the original dumbwaiter for the building is still in situ. Last week, in order to pay homage to those Bloomsbury ghosts, the academic staff of the department of English performed a rehearsed reading of Woolf's play Freshwater in the JM Keynes library.

Yes, Woolf wrote a play. There is a good reason why you've probably never heard of it: it's pretty terrible. First written in 1923, and then revised for a performance at Vanessa Bell's art studio in 1935, Freshwater is a gentle satire of the bohemian world of her great-aunt, the early Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, famous for her impressionistic pictures based on Arthurian legends and Shakespearean scenes. The plot (such as it is) centres on the real-life story of the departure of 16-year-old actor Ellen Terry from her marriage to the much older painter George Frederick Watts. The dashing Lieutenant John Craig whisks her away to live in 46 Gordon Square and "lead a life of corruption […] in Bloomsbury", as the character of Watts exclaims disgustedly in the play.

Inevitably, performing in Keynes' library became a kind of archeological dig, in which the layers of the building's history emerged, revealing – perhaps a little unexpectedly – that sometimes the Bloomsbury group actually had fun. The earnestness that we often associate with the mix of painters (Bell, Duncan Grant and Angelica Garnett, who died this month), writers (Woolf), psychoanalysts (Adrian Stephen) and publishers (Leonard Woolf) – all of whom performed – is replaced by a rather more endearing picture of clumsy and drunken amateur theatricals. Not all the fun was in good spirits, however; the play somewhat nastily describes Lopokova as "an exquisite but not altogether ethereal nymph".

Nonetheless, the play's farcical humour, its in-jokes and its pleasure in the exaggerated bohemianism of Cameron's world reveal an unexpectedly silly side to these most serious of artists. Perhaps Keynesian interpretive dance is an aspect of the great man's work that, in these difficult economic times, we should continue to celebrate.

The new of measure of research excellence has increased the workload of academics and many are struggling to cope. So when will VCs do something about it?

In every university department this year there has been a grim conversation, repeated with increasing frequency, about the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Researchers who have their publication quotas console those who now have a frenzied six months to get theirs done.

I have not heard a single positive comment about the REF from anybody. On the contrary, it is cultivating an environment of fear and despondence and encouraging researchers to pursue merely popular research choices. When will vice chancellors, collectively, make a stand against this?

Sadly, it seems the question is not "when will they?" but "will they?"

Rosalind Gill recently published a piece called 'Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia' and it makes for sobering reading. Gill begins with two conversation transcripts that are worth quoting: "I am totally stressed at the moment, to be honest. Work is piling up and I'm just drowning. I don't know when I'm going to have time to start on that [...] book chapter." The second goes: "How are you? Do you really want to know?! (laughter) (Yeah) well, awful actually. I'm really fed up. I heard yesterday that my article for x journal was turned down. (Oh no!) You know, the one I worked on for ages and ages. I poured so much of myself into that piece (I know). And one of the referee's comments was vile".

Gill is correct. "A punishing intensification of work has become an endemic feature of academic life" and persistent grovelling at the feet of the REF, strengthened by a divide and rule strategy in which universities must compete, is the cause of this misery.

This seems strange because there is even intense scepticism over the metrics deployed in the exercise: nobody believes that the panels will really have time to evaluate on anything beyond journal brand and citations while there is a simultaneous critique of that very phenomenon underway in the area of publishing reform. Furthermore, almost everybody believes, as has been pointed out with acerbic wit by the Department of omnishambles Tumblr (the Wittgenstein entry is a classic), that such quantification of research is far-fetched and absurd. The results of research are not known in advance and the pressure to produce publishable results only encourages research into areas where the payoff is known, rather than riskier fields that could yield a higher return.

The question, then, is: what is to be done? The current crop of vice chancellors have an opportunity before them at the end of this assessment cycle. Do they wish to fade into the insignificance on a line of wall portraits alongside their predecessors, or do they want to be remembered as the group who united and fought for their staff? Do they want to go down in history as the group who let much of what was worthwhile in higher education and research go down in the flames of neoliberal competitive frameworks, or the group who envisioned a better world? Of course it would require an extraordinary degree of unity from institutions of every size, era and demography to resist the governmental agenda, but we all believe in the same thing: advancing the world through research and education. Call it utopian, but were I at the top of the pyramid, I'd be having some serious words with my peers right now.

Martin Paul Eve is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. He tweets at @martin_eve

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Sarcophagus containing bones of Roman woman and rodents that chewed her ankle go on show at Cambridge museum

The skeleton of a Roman woman and the bones of the mouse and shrew that gnawed her ankle in her coffin, inspiring one of Sylvia Plath's most haunting poems, have gone on display.

Plath saw the massive stone sarcophagus and its contents soon after it was excavated in the 1950s, when she was a student at Cambridge.

Staff at the university's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology mounted the rodent bones on a piece of card – also on display again – and showed them in the coffin alongside the remains of the middle-aged woman, which is grimacing as if in pain.

The viewing prompted Plath's 1957 poem All the Dead Dears, in which she describes "this antique museum-cased lady" and the "gimcrack" bones of the rodents "that battened for a day on her ankle-bone", and fears that the "barnacle dead", strangers or members of her family will drag her down and suck her life away. Six years later, the poet killed herself.

The sarcophagus, with its inner lead coffin, was one of a group of high-status burials discovered by chance by builders clearing land for a housing estate at Arbury, on the outskirts of Cambridge.

The curator, Mark Elliott, said: "People see the wealth of finds from Arbury, and the classical imagery and Latin inscriptions all over our buildings, and think – wow, Roman Cambridge must have been really something. But the truth is, the money was at places like Arbury, from anything we've found Roman Cambridge was a crossroads if that, a Little Chef halt on the main road to somewhere more important."

The sarcophagus was taken off display a generation ago due to overcrowding. Donations to the museum, founded in 1884, have poured in from academics and wealthy former students around the world, who have sent crates containing items such as a South Seas dragon with Chinese tea bowls for eyes; a group of freeze-dried 500-year-old potatoes from Peru; and a mysterious object believed to be a Viking ironing board.

Other unusual Roman finds include a pot considered so obscene by Victorian excavators that it was not listed among the discoveries from the site in Great Chesterford, Essex. The pot, believed to have been made near Peterborough, shows naked women driving a carriage pulled by four penises, with phalluses floating overhead.

Speculation that the item was a good luck symbol or fertility charm have been put forward, but the museum's director, Nick Thomas, is convinced the pot was created as a bawdy joke. "Other almost identical pots, but with conventional versions of the scene, are known. I think you'd have put the two side by side and people would have roared," he said.

Although twice as many objects are on display in the remodelled galleries, they represent less than 1% of the collection.

The museum's most precious new acquisition is a front door, the first in its 99-year history on the present site. The old entrance was a narrow, arched doorway in a turret in the corner of a courtyard. "The old entrance had its charm," Elliott admitted, "but we don't want to be Cambridge's best-kept secret anymore."

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, free from Tuesday to Saturday from 25 May

Researchers push for end to publishers' default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases

Professor Peter Murray-Rust was looking for new ways to make better drugs. Dr Heather Piwowar wanted to track how scientific papers were cited and shared by researchers around the world. Dr Casey Bergman wanted to create a way for busy doctors and scientists to quickly navigate the latest research in genetics, to help them treat patients and further their research.

All of them needed access to tens of thousands of research papers at once, so they could use computers to look for unseen patterns and associations across the millions of words in the articles. This technique, called text mining, is a vital 21st-century research method. It uses powerful computers to find links between drugs and side effects, or genes and diseases, that are hidden within the vast scientific literature. These are discoveries that a person scouring through papers one by one may never notice.

It is a technique with big potential. A report published by McKinsey Global Institute last year said that "big data" technologies such as text and data mining had the potential to create €250bn (£200bn) of annual value to Europe's economy, if researchers were allowed to make full use of it.

Unfortunately, in most cases, text mining is forbidden. Bergman, Murray-Rust, Piwowar and countless other academics are prevented from using the most modern research techniques because the big publishing companies such as Macmillan, Wiley and Elsevier, which control the distribution of most of the world's academic literature, by default do not allow text mining of the content that sits behind their expensive paywalls.

Any such project requires special dispensation from – and time-consuming individual negotiations with – the scores of publishers that may be involved.

"That's the key fact which is halting progress in this field," said Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the Wellcome Trust. "For a lot of people, though there is promise there, the activation effort is just too great."

The restrictions placed by publishers on text mining has led campaigners to view the issue as another front in the battle to make fruits of publicly funded research work available through "open access", free at the point of use. That would allow researchers to mine the content freely without needing to request any extra permissions.

The scale of new information in modern science is staggering: more than 1.5m scholarly articles are published every year and the volume of data doubles every three years. No individual can keep up with such a volume, and scientists need computers to help them digest and make sense of the information.

Bergman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester, used text mining to create a tool to help scientists make sense of the ever-growing research literature on genetics. Though genetic sequences of living organisms are publicly available, discussions of what the sequences do and how they interact with each other sits within the text of scientific papers that are mostly behind paywalls.

Working with Max Haeussler, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bergman came up with Text2genome, which identifies strings of text in thousands of papers that look like the letters of a DNA sequence – a gene, say – and links together all papers that mention or discuss that sequence. Text2genome could allow a clinician or researcher who may not be an expert on a particular gene to access the relevant literature quickly and easily. Haeussler's attempts to scale up Text2genome, however, have hit a wall, and his blog is a litany of the problems in trying to gain permissions from the scores of publishers to download and add papers to the project. "If we don't have access to the papers to do this text mining, we can't make those connections," says Bergman.

Murray-Rust, a chemist at the University of Cambridge, has used text mining to look for ways to make chemical compounds, such as pharmaceuticals, more efficiently.

"If you have a compound you don't know how to make and it's similar to one you do know how to make, then the machine would be able to suggest a number of methods which would allow you to do it."

But, although his university subscribes to the journals he needs to do this work, he is forbidden from using the content in what he calls "a modern manner using machines".

A member of his research group accidentally tripped the alarms of a publisher's website when he downloaded several dozen papers at once from journals to which the university had already paid subscription fees. The publisher saw it as an attempt to illegally download content and immediately blocked access to its content for the entire university.

Asking for permission from publishers is an option, though time-consuming. The University of British Columbia (UBC) researcher, Heather Piwowar, was trying to map the ways scientists use and share papers.

She was eventually contacted by Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access, who convened a conference call with Piwowar, a UBC librarian and five Elsevier colleagues. That conversation led to permission for UBC researchers to text mine the Elsevier journals to which they already had access.

Piwowar said: "It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and doesn't scale at all. To me it's a good result because now I have access to things I didn't have access to before and also it will also hopefully drive change by people saying, 'This is not an OK way to build on our scholarly literature.'"

Wise said that, in principle, her company was happy to enable text mining for its content. "We want to help researchers deepen their insight and understanding, we want to help them to advance science and healthcare and we want to be able to do that in ways that help realise the maximum benefit from the content we publish. Text mining is clearly a part of this landscape and it will continue to be and we're keen to support it."

The UK government supports open access to publicly funded research and the text mining that it would allow. In a report for the Intellectual Property Office last year on intellectual property and growth, Professor Ian Hargreaves proposed that researchers should be allowed to text mine articles to which they had already subscribed – a position supported by science funding organisations such as the Wellcome Trust.

"Imagine a world where you weren't allowed to use powerful computers to use weather patterns and astronomical data – it's just nonsensical," said Kiley. "Even in commerce, the reason Amazon knows what records I should buy or what books is because it knows what I've bought before, it knows what other people have bought similar to what I've bought and it can suggest things.

"To not be able to exploit that technology in healthcare and life sciences, that doesn't make much sense nowadays."

Warning for publishers

The brewing controversy between scientists and publishers over access to scientific information has also caught the attention of investors. In a briefing note on the publishing company Elsevier, Claudio Aspesi of Bernstein Research warned investors that publishers might be on the verge of falling out with scientists. "We continue to be baffled by Elsevier's perception that controlling everything (for example by severely restricting text and data mining applications) is essential to protect its economics," he wrote.

He said some of the commercial restrictions from publishers seemed not only to be restricting access to the scientific community, but also hindering the work of researchers. "Elsevier needs to take a much harder look at what it is doing to work well with the academic community at large, since it believes that its future lies in tapping the funding for science," he wrote.

Elsevier bosses have long told investors that the publisher's relationship with academics is excellent. But Aspesi doubted that things were so rosy. "If the academic community were to conclude that the commercial terms imposed by Elsevier are also hindering the progress of science or their ability to efficiently perform research, the risk of a further escalation in what is already an acrimonious debate would rise substantially," he wrote.

None of which would be beneficial for Elsevier's bottom line. "Adding confrontational relationships with the research community to the difficult ones it already has with academic librarians looks self-defeating," wrote Aspesi"Elsevier needs to rethink altogether how it thinks of researchers as customers, or it could end up, in a few years, facing the same hostility it encounters with much of the academic librarian community. Governments and other funding bodies may then look a lot less kindly on subscription publishers if they antagonise scientists as well." The note was written before Heather Piwowar's discussions with Elsevier had concluded but Aspesi said those results did not change his conclusions. "If anything I would say that ... my impression is that more issues were raised by the meeting with Elsevier rather than fewer," he said.

A Reed Elsevier spokesman pointed to reports from other analysts which, he claimed, demonstrated that Elsevier still had good relations with librarians. "We continue to look at ways in which we can benefit the research community, and our position to enable text mining is just one recent example," he said.