making comparisons

Meetings today with the Director of Student Learning Support at Waikato University (Dr Marcia Johnson) and with Teresa Fernandez and some of her team who deliver the bridging programmes within the Waikato Pathways College. Concerns around academic literacy came up in the first meeting as well as Marcia's development of thesis writing circles for doctorate students. In the absence of a Graduate School, doctoral students can feel isolated among individual departments and have welcomed the workshops and social networking Marcia's pilot programmes have provided.

In the second meeting I learned more about the place of bridging programmes in NZ higher education - these are very much seen as providing a step up for 'weak' students into the degrees they aspire to - possibly similar to UWE's Foundation Years but much shorter (around 12 weeks). The focus is very much on qualifying the students for entry into Waikato degrees, although the qualification they receive is nationally transferable. In comparison, today's meeting made me more appreciative of the robustness and recognition of the Access to HE Diploma and of its relevance to a range of potential applicants to HE. The bridging team expressed an interest in tracking their students' success or otherwise once they begin their degrees - this tends to be done informally at the moment. Some of the tutors talked about having to deal with behavioural issues arising from students who have 'failed' in their final year at school, coming straight into a university setting and facing the pressure to succeed in a relatively short time. They also talked about the positive relationships these students can build with the bridging tutors, which they then miss once they move into their degree departments - this reminded me of the experience of Fd students being taught in smaller groups and building a strong link with their tutors.

In all my meetings so far, I've been searching to identify equivalent practice or comparisons between the UK and NZ but I realised today that in some cases, there simply are none to identify. The NZ system has, to date, prided itself on providing a university education for anyone who wants it (hence the free or special admission policy for those over 20) - this is vastly different from the UK's selective system. NZ universities have historically not been in competition for students. Not only is the population too small (4.3 million) and the universities too few in number, until fairly recently universities were obliged to take a proportion of their intake from within their catchment area. This obligation has now been removed and it now as common for students to travel away to university than to study locally.