education

The UK's education sector is extremely welcoming to foreign students, with universities and colleges across the country boasting a healthy proportion of students from overseas. Whether students are looking to come to the UK to study for the first time, or are looking to continue with current or previous studies, there is a wide variety of options open to those from overseas. Here, we take a look at a small number of these options, looking at both academic and vocational opportunities.

Law conversion courses

The choice to work on a law conversion course is a popular one for graduates. While not everybody is keen to enter the world of law at undergraduate level, it often appears as a far more attractive option post-graduation.

The great news is that students are accepted on to law conversion courses from a variety of subjects. Typically the candidate will have experience of study in an area which exemplifies a strong grasp of the English language and good argumentative skills. Evidence of elective courses in legal matters will be to your advantage but will by no means be seen as necessary.

Malala Yousafzai attended her first day at school in Birmingham, yesterday. She described this day as: "the most important of my life", and I believe it should represent an achievement for all of us and a reminder of the struggles of people in other countries.

The braveness of a Pakistani adolescent, who was shot in the head by Taliban for asking education to be granted to girls in Pakistan, has to remind us that what we have is still denied in other places.
However, the irony is that while in some parts of the world people risk their lives to gain access to education, somewhere else the importance of a hard-won historical right is denied.

I often happen to hear youths lamenting because they have to study: it is too boring and useless.
I see so many teenagers, forgotten by their parents, wandering around the city smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and ‘acting cool'. None of them has a dream, a purpose, a motivation and the more I witness this, the more I think about Malala and how differently education is conceived today in modern societies.

A recent report placed Finland and South Korea as the best two education systems in the world. Student writer Jacqueline looks at these two very different school systems:

The Finnish education system is far from demanding of its students and adopts an emphasis on development instead of competition. The relaxed system possesses principles of comfortable learning and provides merely a play date for students, leaving them with a lack of preparation for the real working world. The 6 hour school day is acknowledged as the "least number of hours in class per week in the developed world" which is hardly comparable to South Korea's intense 13 hour school days which push their students to extremes to achieve astonishing results whilst robbing them of their childhood.

The Impact of Culture

Culture is a large contributor to the success of an education system and its chosen teaching styles. The South Korean system is based on strong Confucian ideals including high culture, hard work and social relations between the young and old. After evaluating the recent learning curve report, the Times Higher Education presents the argument that "promoting a culture that is supportive of education is more important than the amount of money invested".

Every week we bring you a round up of all the student news from the past week, as well as the trends hitting the web at the moment. This week's includes university deficits, Facebook buttons and an Enzo crash.

Student News

26 UK Universities in Deficit

A new report has revealed that one in five British universities are in deficit. Whilst investigating the financial health of the Higher Education sector, accountants Grant Thornton found that 26 universities are in deficit, and almost half are below the recommended minimum of surplus. However, overall, the news is good, with total surplus up from £345m to £811m.

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University Family Traditions

More and more universities in the UK are seeing generations from the same family attending. Whilst it has always been traditional for sons to follow their father to the same college at Oxbridge, this trend has now spread to other British universities. Three families have revealed the differences and similarities between when the parents went to university and now.   

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a conference on the future of education in Britain. It was an independently organised event arranged by TEDx London- a branch of the TED Talks network.

TED Talks is a platform that invites speakers from various fields and professions to share innovative ideas, and since the talks started being streamed online their popularity has been phenomenal.

The Current State of Education

The event was inspired by a famous TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson in 2010, where he called for an ‘education revolution' and the need for educational institutions to fundamentally change the way they operate.

At the talk, participants were presented with three areas of discussion, and firstly, responding to Ken's analysis of education, speakers looked at education's current state.

Various speakers shared their views on how education fails to engage young people due to the curriculum's lack of relevance and the rigidness of educational models that are currently being used.

An eloquent address by 14 year-old student Georgia Allis Mills described how the education system needs to adapt to the mind state of young people today, whilst artist Goldie shared his thoughts on how education fails to prepare students for the ‘real world'.