The good book should be read as a great work of literature – but it is not a guide to morality, as the education secretary Michael Gove would have us believe

For some reason the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) was not approached for a donation in support of Michael Gove's plan to put a King James Bible in every state school. We would certainly have given it serious consideration, and if the trustees had not agreed I would gladly have contributed myself. In the event, it was left to "millionaire Conservative party donors".

I am a little shocked at the implication that not every school library already possesses a copy. Can that be true? What do they have, then? Harry Potter? Vampires? Or do they prefer one of those modern translations in which "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity" is lyrically rendered as "Perfectly pointless, says the Teacher. Everything is pointless"? That is Ecclesiastes, 1:2, as you'll find it in the Common English Bible. And you can't get much more common than that, although admittedly the God's Word translation provides stiff competition with "absolutely pointless" and the Good News Bible challenges strongly with "useless, useless".

Ecclesiastes, in the 1611 translation, is one of the glories of English literature (I'm told it's pretty good in the original Hebrew, too). The whole King James Bible is littered with literary allusions, almost as many as Shakespeare (to quote that distinguished authority Anon, the trouble with Hamlet is it's so full of clichées). In The God Delusion I have a section called "Religious education as a part of literary culture" in which I list 129 biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise and many use without knowing their provenance: the salt of the earth; go the extra mile; I wash my hands of it; filthy lucre; through a glass darkly; wolf in sheep's clothing; hide your light under a bushel; no peace for the wicked; how are the mighty fallen.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian. In the week after the 2011 census, my UK Foundation commissioned Ipsos MORI to poll those who had ticked the Christian box. Among other things, we asked them to identify the first book of the New Testament from a choice of Matthew, Genesis, Acts of the Apostles, Psalms, "Don't know" and "Prefer not to say". Only 35% chose Matthew and 39% chose "Don't know" (and 1%, mysteriously, chose "Prefer not to say"). These figures, to repeat, don't refer to British people at large but only to those who self-identified, in the census, as Christians.

European history, too, is incomprehensible without an understanding of the warring factions of Christianity and the book over whose subtleties of interpretation they were so ready to slaughter and torture each other. Does the eucharistic bread merely symbolise the body of Jesus or does it become his body, in true "substance" if not "accidental" DNA? Prolonged wars have been fought over how we should interpret the words allegedly uttered at the Last Supper. Three bishops were burned alive just outside my bedroom window in my old Oxford college for giving the unapproved answer. Centuries-long schisms were based on nothing more serious than the question of whether Jesus is both God and his son, or just his (very important) son. Even bloodier wars were fought against a rival religion that sees him not as God's son at all but just reveres him as a prophet.

I have an ulterior motive for wishing to contribute to Gove's scheme. People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality. This mistaken view may have motivated the "millionaire Conservative party donors". I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments. The first two – "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" – come from a time when the Jews still believed in the existence of many gods but had sworn fealty to only one of them, their tribal "jealous" god.

"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy": this commandment is regarded as so important that (as our children will learn when they flock into the school library to read the Gove presentation copy) a man caught gathering sticks on the sabbath was summarily stoned to death by the whole community, on direct orders from God.

"Honour thy father and thy mother." Well and good. But honour thy children? Not if God tells you, as he did Abraham in a test of his loyalty, to kill your beloved son for a burnt offering. The lesson is clear: when push comes to shove, obedience to God trumps human decency, to say nothing of obedience to the next commandment, "Thou shalt not kill". This is the only one of the commandments that many devotees actually know. Its obviousness was appropriately mocked by Christopher Hitchens, but my imagination hears the response of the Israelites to Moses in the voice of Basil Fawlty: "Oh I SEE. Thou shalt not KILL. Oh how silly of me. You see, before you came down from the mountain with the tablets, we all thought it was perfectly fine to kill. But now that we've seen it written on a TABLET, well that makes all the difference. Thou shalt not kill, well, who would have thought it? Oh silly me … etc etc."

In any case, the commandment meant only "Thou shalt not kill members of thine own tribe". It was perfectly fine – indeed strongly encouraged throughout the Pentateuch – to kill Canaanites, Midianites, Jebusites, Hivites etc, especially if they had the misfortune to live in the Promised Lebensraum. Kill all the men and boys and most of the women. "But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves" (Numbers 31:18). Such wonderful moral lessons: all children should be exposed to them.

"Sophisticated" theologians (what is there in "theology" to be sophisticated about?) now treat these horrors as parables or myths, which is just as well. But many fundamentalist Protestants still take them literally and positively state that, if God told them to kill their own children, they would obey. Hard to believe, but it is fully documented in a brilliant film, In God We Trust?, by Scott Burdick. Other theologians will accept that the Old Testament is pretty horrible but will point with pride, and nods of approval from all sides, to the New Testament as a truly righteous moral guide. Really?

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist. In any case it never amounted to more than scrumping or, depending on your theology, seeking knowledge – which a minister of education should surely consider a virtue. But the unmistakable message is clear. We are all "born in sin" even if we no longer literally believe, with Augustine, that Adam's sin came down to us via the semen. And God, the all-powerful creator, capable of moving mountains and of begetting a universe with all the laws of physics, couldn't find a better way to lift the burden of sin than a blood sacrifice.

In the words of Paul, the inventor of Christianity (or whoever really wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews), "without shedding of blood, there is no remission". And the scapegoat couldn't be just anybody. The sin was so great that only his son (or God himself, depending on your Trinitarian theology) would do. It was necessary for God to come "down" personally to Earth and have himself tortured and executed, after being "betrayed" (though why it was a betrayal since getting himself executed was the main purpose of the visit, is never explained, nor is the millennia-long vendetta against Jews as "Christ-killers").

Whatever else the Bible might be – and it really is a great work of literature – it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite. The examples I have quoted are the tip of a very large and very nasty iceberg. Not a bad way to find out what's in a book is to read it, so I say go to it. But does anybody, even Gove, seriously think they will?

• Richard Dawkins
• The Bible
• Christianity
• Religion
• Schools
• Religion
• Michael Gove
• Ethics
• Science
• Religious studies and theology

Richard Dawkins
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Author of The God Delusion says providing free Bibles to state schools is justified by its impact on the English language

It sounds like one of the most unlikely alliances of recent years. Richard Dawkins, arch-atheist and scourge of the praying classes, has announced support for education secretary Michael Gove's plan to send free King James Bibles to every state school.

The proposal aims to help pupils learn about the Bible's impact "on our history, language, literature and democracy" and will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the authorised version's publication, Gove said earlier this year. Church leaders have approved, but the plan has fallen foul of most non-believers. An online Guardian poll showed an 82% opposition, while the National Secular Society said the £375,000 proposal wasted money and favoured Christianity in multi-faith state schools. Nevertheless, several rich Tory party donors agreed to back the plan and the first Bibles were sent out last week, to the derision of secularists – with the exception of their most prominent and pugnacious recruit: Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and critic of all things clerical.

As Dawkins reveals in today's Observer, support for the Bible plan is justified on the grounds of literary merit and he lists a range of biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise. These include "salt of the Earth", "through a glass darkly", and "no peace for the wicked". Dawkins states: "A native speaker of English who has not read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian."

Rapprochement would seem to be in the air – until Dawkins's thesis is studied more closely. While Gove believes the Bible is a guide to morality, Dawkins is sure it is not. "I have heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that without the Bible as a moral compass people would show no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself," he says.

In fact, its pages are riddled with the advocacy of murder, slavery and theft. Hence his support for Gove's plan: opening the Bible is the surest way to put young minds off its contents. From this perspective, the Dawkins-Gove alliance looks dead before it started.

• Richard Dawkins
• Michael Gove
• The Bible
• Religion
• Christianity
• Religion

Robin McKie
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Study of how things are made and could be improved – including materials science, minerals technology, ceramics and glass, polymers and textiles

What will I learn?
Engineering degrees cover all things related to developing, providing and maintaining infrastructure, products and services that society needs – from researching how to manufacture a product to building bridges and roads.

Students will find themselves studying all, or part, of the life cycle of a product, from conception and design to creation. Science and maths will be the core ingredients, but you will be required to be innovative and know how to use your creative flair within a legal and ethical framework, and in budget.

If you choose materials engineering, you will be entering the most specialist discipline in the engineering stable, which means there are fewer university courses to choose from. It does, however, cover a wide study area, as you will be looking at how everything is made and how it could all be improved. Materials engineering is the meeting point of science and engineering. You'll be required to develop the materials needed for new products, as well as find better, cheaper, quicker, stronger ways of producing those already out there.

If you choose minerals engineering, you will learn about geology, rock mechanics, engineering design, economics, surveying and management. You might focus on blast analysis, advanced-surface and underground surveying, health and safety, ventilation networks, rock mechanics or mineral processing.

What skills will I gain?
Lots. Not only will you have acquired the specific skills to your related engineering discipline, but you'll have learned the practical steps of taking your ideas from the drawing board to the real world. You will know how to solve problems and overcome obstacles, particularly when it comes to considering social and ethical difficulties your work could create. You will know how to work within a budget, be numerate and have good computing skills.

You'll also have an understanding of the legal implications of engineering (health and safety) and how to manage risk, particularly in terms of the environment.

Engineering will involve plenty of teamwork, so you will acquire the ability to argue your ideas, analyse those of others and be able to work towards a common goal.

You should be able to identify customer needs and ensure that your work is fit for purpose.

Chances are you'll get to work on real-life problems, and will probably do a spot of work experience, so you'll have a good idea of how the industry works.

What job can I get?
Careers in manufacturing, processing or in user industries are among the options for materials engineering graduates, perhaps working in research, production or even sales. If you want to research ways of making cars run cheaper and more environmentally friendly, then motor companies will probably want to hear from you. And local and central government are keen to improve their recycling processes, if you were interested in this area. You could also find work in non-governmental organisations, if you don't want to work for the private sector.

Materials and mineral engineering degrees provide an excellent basis for a career in technical management.

What will look good on the CV?
• A knowledge and understanding of scientific and mathematic principles
• The ability to define and develop an economically viable product
• An understanding of the commercial and economic context of engineering processes.

• University guide
• Materials and mineral engineering
• Engineering general
• Higher education
• Ceramics

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British Medical Association official says debts, rising pension contributions and salary freezes risk deterring potential doctors

Student debts of up to £70,000 and increased pension contributions could dissuade young people from entering medicine, a doctor has warned.

Tom Dolphin of the British Medical Association (BMA) told the Junior Doctors Conference that medical students paying the new £9,000 tuition fees, which come into force in September, will have debts of up to £70,000 by the time they graduate.

They will also face their salaries being eroded by inflation and increased pension contributions, which deter talented students from entering medicine, added Dolphin, chairman of the BMA's Junior Doctor Committee.

In a speech which criticised the government's health reforms, Dolphin encouraged delegates to back strike action to defend their pensions.

He told the conference: "At the moment, it is genuinely hard to find much cause for cheer.

"We need to put up a fight. Imagine for a moment you were applying for a place at medical school right now. With £9,000 tuition fees you will be facing debts on graduation of up to £70,000.

"When you start working, a big chunk of your salary will be used to repay these debts. With salaries frozen for many years, your starting salary will have been eroded by inflation.

"And on top of that you will be faced with increased pension contributions. The burden of austerity is falling too hard on the shoulders of the younger generation and we are seeing this in medicine, too.

"With a future like this, will medicine still be able to attract and retain some of the most talented young people? Would you still make the choice to study medicine?"

Ballot papers are being sent to 103,000 BMA members with the result due at the end of the month.

Should industrial action go ahead, it would be for the first time since the 1970s.

The BMA has ruled out a complete withdrawal of labour but if they vote in favour, doctors would not undertake duties that could safely be postponed.

The BMA argues higher paid NHS staff already pay proportionately more for their pensions than most other public sector workers, a disparity which it said increased in April when their contributions rose, and which is set to increase again.

By 2014, some doctors will see deductions of 14.5% from their pay for their pensions, compared to 7.35% for senior civil servants on similar salaries, to receive similar pensions, the BMA claims.

Doctors at the start of their careers would be hardest hit, having to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds extra – double what they would have paid – in lifetime pension contributions, according to the association.

Dolphin said: "The government wants us to pay more and work longer for what will probably be a worse pension.

"The extra contributions add up to more than £200,000 for many junior doctors.

"They won't negotiate any more, even though their 'final offer' is patently unfair."

• Doctors
• Medicine
• Higher education
• Tuition fees
• Public sector pensions
• Public sector pay
• Health
• Students
• Public services policy

David Batty
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Study of the management and dispensing of medicines (pharmacy), and medicinal drugs and effects on the body (pharmacology)

What will I learn?
With your three top-notch A-levels in chemistry, biology, physics or maths, your degree in pharmacy will teach you all about medicines, their uses, and how to manage and dispense them.

Four-year degrees, which will lead to a master of pharmacy qualification, will be followed by a pre-registration year of training in a hospital or in industry, after which you will qualify as a professional pharmacist, registered with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain and able to legally dispense drugs.

You will study the origin and chemistry of drugs, the preparation of medicines, their uses and effects, and good pharmacy practice. You will also need to keep up to date with new drugs that come on the market.

Pharmacy is a full-on, 9 to 5 degree, so expect to spend time in lectures, seminars, laboratories and, if possible, on hospital wards or in pharmacies.

Pharmacology, meanwhile, focuses on the ways medicinal drugs are delivered, the effects they have on the body and whether new ones could work better.

You will study cells and tissues in detail, taking modules in organic chemistry, control mechanisms and physiology.

You could also investigate specific diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or HIV and Aids, to examine infection rates and the effects of drugs in combating symptoms.

What skills will I gain?
Pharmacy graduates should be able to think clearly and systematically, know what drugs best tackle specific illness, and how to communicate information to the public, who will often want your advice on drugs and general healthcare.

Over the past few years, pharmacists have begun to be seen more as having a key role in dealing with patient care, so get a job in industry if you're not keen on dealing with the public.

By the time you graduate you will have mastered a substantial body of knowledge, and should be raring to get stuck into your pre-registration year.

You should have a thorough understanding of the legal and ethical issues that come with your work.

Good time management and organisational skills are essential.

Pharmacology graduates should also have developed a broad knowledge base.

You should have developed good analytical and critical skills, and be able to present you findings in a clear and concise way.

Your final-year research project (there is bound to be one) will show you can work independently and know how to best present your findings.

What job can I get?
Unemployment rates among pharmacists are low, and the majority of graduates will get jobs in NHS hospitals or in the local high street chemist. Some will venture into industry or stay in universities doing further research or teaching the next crop of students.

An obvious career choice for pharmacology graduates is in industry, either in the lab or working more in marketing or quality checking. If this doesn't appeal, jobs in forensic science or other health-related work are possibilities, or you could undertake further research or train to become a teacher.

What will look good on the CV?
• A multidisciplinary approach to solving healthcare problems
• An ethical attitude towards your role in society
• A high level of interpersonal skills.

• University guide
• Pharmacy and pharmacology
• Higher education

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The letter that can't be sent to your pupils' parents is published here: "I'm part of the this system. And I had to confess"

Dear Mr and Mrs Parent,

I'm sorry I have to write to you, but it is important you know that your daughter is not progressing as well as she could at school. This isn't her fault, it is the school's.

I only teach your daughter one subject, RE, which she is forced to do and she isn't terribly interested in it. I see her once a week for 50 minutes. As there are 30 other students in the class this means that, if I did nothing else all lesson, I could spend about 100 seconds with her as an individual a week. To teach her, to get to know her, to understand her as a young person. But, as you well know, there are some children in her class who demand much more of my time. This inevitably means that some students will be left with nothing. Unfortunately, that applies to your child. I'll be honest, I haven't held a proper conversation with her in weeks.

I teach 400 children. Slightly more, actually, but we'll call it 400. That means your daughter counts for 0.25% of the children I teach. It is difficult for me to honestly and accurately tell you anything about her, so please forgive me if I speak in vague generalities at parents' evening and try to avoid using your daughter's name. I might have forgotten it.

I teach twenty five lessons a week. Despite my best intentions, some of these lessons are boring. To plan an outstanding lesson can take hours. I can't do that for every lesson I teach. Sometimes I stand in class delivering a lesson I know isn't as good as it could be. I know how to make it better. I just didn't have the time to do it. I don't think the children notice, they are used to this.

Schools are full of middle-management types. They like to take "learning walks" around the school and "quality control". They sit at the back of my class and want to know if the students have been told their "learning objectives" and if they are sat in a "seating plan". They believe that learning simply cannot take place if the students haven't been told what to do and where to sit.  What you might consider real work: comprehension, creative writing, silent reading or a class questioning the teacher about the topic being studied is considered hopelessly old-fashioned and slightly abusive by my superiors. Instead they like almost anything involving power-points, scissors and glue. All work for students needs to be scaffolded. That means be done for them. The very notion of giving a student a task they might fail is considered child abuse. Every task must be completable within about ten minutes. 

The school needs to improve, but I'm not sure it can. Common sense and trust in human communication is being forced out of the profession. A lot of teachers seem to like being told exactly what to do and how to do it. The status quo is just fine for a lot of middle and senior management too. It allows them to wield power, justify inflated salaries and be recognised by their peers as being "outstanding" teachers. A recognition the children in their classes would never give them. Never mind. They never really liked teaching children that much anyway.

I'm sorry to have to write to you like this and tell you that your daughter is under-performing. But I'm part of this system. And I had to confess.

Yours

Secret Teacher

• Today's Secret Teacher teaches at a comprehensive school in Yorkshire.

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• Teaching
• Schools
• Teacher training
• Teachers' workload

The Secret Teacher
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For all that private schools uphold the privileges of money and class, to dismantle them would need the strength of will that dissolved the monasteries

To an extreme not reached anywhere else in the world, British railway locomotives carried names as well as numbers. Why this was so would make an interesting study – perhaps it came out of a kind of anthropomorphism that wanted machines to have personalities – but the consequence was that generations of boys (girls were peculiarly uninterested) got to know the grand nomenclature of the nation's story by climbing on fences and watching the trains go by. Few of us knew, of course, that Captain Cuttle and Papyrus were famous racehorses; that Edie Ochiltree and Luckie Mucklebackit were characters in the novels of Walter Scott; that Kolhapur was one of British India's princely states. To us, they were simply engines – "namers" in loco-spotting parlance. But not every name was opaque. Depending on the part of Britain they lived in, travellers and train-watchers became familiar with lists of castles and country houses, regiments, battleships, birds, kings, lochs and glens, and the countries and colonies of the empire. As steam locomotives might last 50 years, their names didn't necessarily reflect contemporary actuality (the Empire of India whizzed past our house most days throughout the 1950s). In south England, however, a group of them honoured a way of life that flourishes now as it did when they were made.

My only sighting of one came at Cannon Street station in the summer of 1959, at the head of a Dover train that was taking our school excursion part of the way to Bavaria. I now can't remember the name – it might have been Radley, it could have been Stowe – but I knew immediately what it was: a member of old Southern Railway's Schools class, built in the 1930s to the design of Richard Maunsell, and in their day the most powerful small express locomotives in Europe.

How did I know this? Perhaps because in my older brother's hoarded copies of Meccano Magazine I'd seen a prewar Hornby model of one named Eton. Did the social inequity of this naming policy occur to me – that there were no engines named, say, Peckham Secondary Modern or (our party on the train) Dunfermline High? I'm afraid not. The blind snobbery of it passed me by. What the Southern Railway had done was to name 40 locomotives after England's leading public schools, partly as a marketing exercise (the railway delivered boys and their luggage to their schools every term) but also, surely, because the company's board and its chairman, Brigadier Everard Baring, saw public schools as representing the finest English traditions. They were more than schools. They were history, to be exalted like Lord Nelson, and King Arthur and his knights, after whom the Southern Railway named the fleets of engines (Howard of Effingham, Sir Percivale) that sailed out of Waterloo.

For their naming ceremonies, each locomotive travelled to the station nearest the school where boys queued on the platform to take their turn on the footplate and perhaps exchange a few words with the driver. In the 1930s, few nicer things could happen to shy 12-year-olds who were far away from their parents, and I like to imagine that in later years when grown into well-lunched men, they might come across Lancing or Charterhouse hauling the 5.15 and remember the old school song more fondly than they might otherwise have done. But by the end of 1962, this kind of encounter was no longer possible. All the engines, apart from three saved for preservation – Cheltenham, Repton, Stowe – had gone to the breaker's yard. They left behind only their brass nameplates, which British Railways donated to the eponymous schools. To him that hath, more shall be given, and so on.

"More than almost any developed nation, ours is a country in which your parentage dictates your progress," the education secretary, Michael Gove, said in a speech to independent school heads last week. "Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege in England than in any comparable country. For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible."

Good words, but they were spoken at Brighton College (which keeps its nameplate in the design technology department), where the fees are about £18,000 a year for day pupils and £30,000 for boarders. Gove attended Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, a day school that charges £10,215 a year. In that sense, as he confessed, he is his own scandal: only 7% of the English population is privately educated, but men like him continue to prevail disproportionately – in areas that you might expect, such as the cabinet and City, but also in areas where you might not, such as TV comedy, the BBC and the Guardian. "Indeed, the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last 60 years," Gove said. This is true: presently by a former pupil of Cranleigh (founded 1865, annual boarding fees £29,400); previously by an old boy of Loughborough Grammar (founded 1495, annual boarding fees £18,500); before him by a product of Gresham's School in Norfolk (founded 1555, annual boarding fees £28,300).

Politicians had failed to tackle this problem of dominance with "anything like the radicalism required", Gove said. But what he meant was that state schools needed to improve to private school standards, and not that private schools should be abolished or properly taxed so that, in the scenario of those who want charitable status removed, increased fees drive away everyone but the exceptionally rich, leaving many schools broke and empty while state comprehensives swell with the children of the professional middle class. It won't happen. Not enough of us want it badly enough. Those who never set a fee-paying foot inside a private school have had our attitudes softened by images of lovely architecture, straw hats, green lawns, steam engines and websites advertising extra-curricular activities such as bee keeping. My father, who left school at 14, loved the Greyfriars adventures of Bob Cherry. My children, who went to a state school, loved Hogwarts. For all that private schools uphold the privileges of money and class, to dismantle them would need the strength of will that dissolved the monasteries.

A few years before I saw Stowe or Radley at Cannon Street I was on another train with my parents at the village of Dollar in Scotland, whose Dollar Academy is a well-known private school. A tall teenager in short trousers came into our compartment and began to talk – about the weather, the school and his destination, Glasgow, where he was to meet a relative. "That laddie had no side to him and he had such good manners," my father said afterwards, and my mother agreed. The charm of private education had struck once again.

• Private schools
• Schools
• Education policy

Ian Jack
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Despite the recession, accountancy remains a stable career choice – and there is poetry in numbers, says one trainee

Accountants provide professional services to clients to ensure they are financially sound and compliant with the relevant legislation, including assurance, auditing, tax, insolvency, business and financial advice. Financial managers oversee an organisation's accounts and provide information and advice to its managers.

Graduates with a financial background will often be preferred to those without, but once on a scheme graduates will normally train for a professional qualification, typically working within a firm while they study.

Once qualified, the financial rewards can be substantial, and despite the recession, accounting remains a stable career choice.

Getting in

Sara Reading, senior manager in KPMG's graduate recruitment team

We take on about 600 graduates a year, but in previous years this has been as high as 1,000. We do the traditional "milk round" at universities.

Graduates will study for their ACA qualification from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, so we expect at least a B in Maths and English at GCSE and to be in line for a 2:1 degree or above. When we take a graduate on, we're pretty confident that they will do well in the ACA. We also look for qualities such as resilience and the ability to deliver quality and take on responsibility.

Over three years, graduates will study for the ACA as well as spend time in the office and work with clients. After three years they will have their qualification. The vast majority stay until they are qualified, and of those who leave once they have their ACA, a high percentage come back to us five or six years down the line.

Getting on

Dave Way, managing director of accountancy and finance recruiter Marks Sattin

There is strong demand for managers who have experience across multiple sectors and often in international markets. This means those starting out should aim to move internally as much as possible to build up a broader knowledge base and demonstrate flexibility, which is something expected of anyone hoping to become a fast-track manager.

Choose an employer which offers the chance to experience work in multiple sectors, allows secondments abroad and takes a proactive approach to training. Bigger firms tend to have a greater ability to offer exposure to multiple sectors, but smaller companies generally offer client exposure at an earlier stage, which is highly valued by those looking to hire managers.

Interim management is something experienced accountants may wish to consider. It allows greater flexibility than working as an employee and can be lucrative. Self-employment does create its own risks, but for those with experience they can sell, it is an established and attractive option.

View from the inside

Matthew Bolton, graduate trainee "with one of the big firms"

I was always better at maths than English and knew that accountants can earn a lot of money so I did maths, computer science and business studies at A-level before completing a maths degree and applying to a graduate trainee scheme at a large accountancy firm.

I think I was shielded from meeting any important clients for some time, but eventually I got face time with the accounts we were working on. They probably knew I was getting on well with my accountancy studies and so would know what everyone was talking about.

There are a lot of figures and maths involved and I guess accountancy isn't the raciest of careers, but there can also be patterns and poetry in numbers that make the work interesting.

I see myself staying where I am for a year or two after I qualify, then seeking a transfer overseas, or moving to a firm where I can get to work in the US.

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Mark King
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Science degrees are becoming increasingly popular with undergraduates, partly due to the 'TV effect'. But choosing a career path means thinking outside the box

What do you get when you mix popular family science shows such as Bang Goes the Theory with particle-physicist professor Brian Cox and natural-world treasure Sir David Attenborough? The answer is an explosive enthusiasm for science among the general public and, though not scientifically proven, a possible reason for a recent surge in the number of undergraduates applying for science degrees in the hope of an exciting career path.

In 2011 there was a rise in demand for all university courses as students raced to beat the higher university fees regime starting this autumn but, even so, science snuck ahead of its arts rivals, according to Ucas figures, with physics applications up by 11.7% on 2010, biology up 6.8% and chemistry up 3.5%. Compare that to no change in applications for English and a rise of just 2.4% for history.

Encouraging noises from employers also galvanised interest. They say they want to employ graduates of science, technology, engineering and maths (know as the Stem subjects) because of their "analytical, problem-solving, numeracy and intellectual-rigour skills", according to the National Higher Education Stem Programme – even if some graduates of these very subjects still seem to struggle to get a foot on the career ladder.

Charlie Ball, deputy director of research at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, says: "The recession hasn't been kind to science graduates for a bunch of reasons. Cuts in the public sector have hit life science graduates wanting clinical roles in the NHS and the ongoing problems in the pharmaceuticals sector have hit those in chemistry and pharmacology. Plus changes in the research councils, where they have been cutting their cloth, is making research funding difficult to get.

"That said, there are industries that are doing well, such as oil and gas, which have bucked the recession, especially in exploration, which needs engineers, geologists and geophysicists. They not only need to get the oil out of the ground and keep rigs going but they are constantly looking for new reserves."

He says that "fracking" is an obvious development that requires scientists and will have many and well-paid options … "so long as you are willing to travel. Science graduates have to be more flexible and if they are the awards can be great."

Another vibrant area is small business manufacturing. Ball says there are opportunities in hi-tech manufacturing, biosciences, life sciences and biotechnology and he points to the materials sector providing opportunities for chemists whether it is their input into developing building materials or sports kit. He reckons job hunters often neglect pigments, paint and lubricants.

Ball says: "These companies keep industry going and there is a lot of research going on." Agricultural science is also relatively fertile ground, with Ball adding: "A lot of the people are chemists, plant scientists and biologists. Graduates do have to consider their personal views about this sector as it covers fertilisers and pesticides and genetically modified foods. But feeding the population is a huge challenge and the UK has a significant presence in this area of research."

Physics

The Institute of Physics says the subject is fashionable: with students taking the subject at A-level rising by 19.6% in the past five years compared with a 7.7% rise across all subjects. Career paths for physics whizzes can be found in areas such as nuclear, space technology and computer games industries, all of which are predicted to grow over the next few years, the institute says.

According to a 2011 report by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) for the government, about 20% of graduates working in the £2bn-a-year UK computer games industry have a degree in maths, physics, engineering or other science but it also suggests physics graduates – whose skills help the games look more realistic – consider the area; and they get paid more than their non-physics counterparts, too. The £7.5bn UK space sector employs more than 24,000 people and is expected to grow to £14bn by 2020.

Engineering

Paul Jackson, chief executive of Engineering UK, an independent organisation promoting the importance of engineering to the UK, says graduates looking beyond traditional areas such as manufacturing, industry and construction are finding exciting opportunities in areas such as alternative energy, where engineering skills are required to help develop solar, wind and tide technologies. Jackson says: "They are all looking at effective ways to store the energy, for example." Other hot areas include Formula One racing, with the UK a leader in this area. Jackson says: "They employ a lot of engineers, especially electrical engineers."

Even in construction, which has been in the doldrums, there are new areas of opportunity for developing energy-efficient buildings.

Biology

Bioscience graduates embark on a wide range of careers in both research and industry, says Dr Mark Downs, chief executive of the Society of Biology. He says: "The first step towards being a research scientist is to do a PhD, often funded by a government research council. Academic research in biology covers everything from biodiversity to neuroscience. I think food security is one of the most exciting areas of study at the moment: how are we going to feed a growing population in an environmentally sustainable way?

"Drug discovery is also changing rapidly. Chronobiology is a hot topic: studying our body's circadian rhythm. It is revealing that different drugs will be more effective if they are delivered at specific times of day. Our growing understanding of epigenetics – how the structure of DNA is important, not just the genetic code – is already altering the way we view certain diseases."

When it comes to industry, Downs says biology jobs crop up everywhere. He says: "You only need to walk around the supermarket to see how many scientists were involved with filling the shelves. From ensuring that cosmetics and medications are safe, to developing the varieties of crops we are familiar with, scientists are vital. Companies developing prescription drugs have a variety of openings too, from multinational pharmaceutical companies to small biotech startups."

Science communication and public engagement has potential for biologists, with museums, conservation organisations, businesses and magazines on the look out for scientists who are good communicators. The society's spokeswoman Rebecca Nesbit says biologists are adaptable: "It is easier to teach law to a biologist than biology to a lawyer."

Many biology graduates would be green with envy at Robert Hollingworth's job. The 32-year-old former Bath University biology student has combined his academic qualifications with a love of photography to become a natural history cameraman. While at Bath he also attended many lectures and workshops at the BBC's Natural History Unit in Bristol and Wild Screen, while honing other practical skills through lighting work at the Theatre Royal in Bath.

He has just completed work on Kingdom of Plants 3D with Sir David Attenborough, to be shown on Sky 3D and Sky Atlantic HD on 26 May. Hollingsworth says: "My biology knowledge has been vital. You need to know how a plant or animal is going to behave in a particular habitat. You also need to be able to communicate with the scientists." Kingdom of Plants, which involved Hollingsworth patiently filming plants at Kew Gardens for long spells to capture them bursting into bloom, including the Queen of the Night cactus, which flowers for night only each year, is his first major camera credit.

It is not an easy career path to join, he admits: "Perseverance and passion are key. For a long time I did weddings, events photography, PR shots, and developed a stock archive all of which helped hone my skills and enabled me to concentrate on the natural history."

Computing and IT

Graduates of IT can sometimes be blinkered, thinking the only sensible career paths are with the big-name technology companies such as Google or Microsoft, according to Joanna Poplawska, performance director of The Corporate IT Forum. She says: "Less than half of IT graduates go into IT, with many working in the non-IT areas, helping businesses use technology to grow. They just have to realise there are plenty of exciting opportunities out there. It's realising that buying a carton of orange juice involves a lot of information technology skills, starting from the plantations to the packaging to the recording of the transaction when you pay for it."

Romeena Mann, 27, graduated with a degree in business management and computing from Brunel University in 2007 and is now a manager in the global IT strategy division of healthcare firm GlaxoSmithKline, specialising in monitoring IT developments in the outside world. West London-based Romeena joined the company's IT graduate programme in 2008 after previously securing a work placement there as part of her degree. She says: "I find out about latest trends and look at promoting it and how technology can add to the business. I really enjoy what I'm doing as the technology changes so fast and I'm always learning something new. The great thing about a career in IT is you learn transferable skills. You can choose technical or non-technical."

Chemistry

Chemistry graduates heading along more classic career routes have been hampered lately by the cyclical downturn in the pharmaceutical sector and the contraction in areas such as the printing industry. But the Royal Society of Chemistry says most graduates find work quickly and points to several areas with opportunities, including sustainability, nanotechnology, and the nuclear industry as well as pure research, research and development, analytical chemistry, quality control and policy. The society's careers adviser Charlotte Ashley-Roberts says: "Some do accounting or patent law and quite a few go into publishing. In fact, we take on 35 students a year into our publishing division."

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'So many people now don't know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure'

Love, says France's greatest living philosopher, "is not a contract between two narcissists. It's more than that. It's a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself."

Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline "Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?", smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. "Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!"

In his new book, Badiou writes about his love life. "I have only once in my life given up on a love. It was my first love, and then gradually I became so aware this step had been a mistake I tried to recover that initial love, late, very late – the death of the loved one was approaching – but with a unique intensity and feeling of necessity." That abandonment and attempt at recovery marked all the philosopher's subsequent love affairs. "There have been dramas and heart-wrenching and doubts, but I have never again abandoned a love. And I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always."

But isn't such laborious commitment a pointless fuss in this age of ready pleasures and easily disposable lovers? "No! I insist on this – that solving the existential problems of love is life's great joy," he says and then looks across the coffee table at his translator, Isabelle Vodoz, with a big, half-ironic grin. "There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise," he adds, popping a biscuit in his mouth and giggling. She giggles, too. "I am not only his translator," she tells me later. Below this sixth-floor apartment, an RER train screeches along the rails out of Denfert-Rochereau station.

I think about the distinction Badiou describes in In Praise of Love. "While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock," writes Badiou, "love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned."

In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one's life. He puts it philosophically: "The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright." Love's work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as "chance defeated word by word". A loving relationship is similar. "In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure," writes Badiou.

But this encomium to creative fidelity surely shows Badiou to be a man out of his time. "In Paris now half of couples don't stay together more than five years," he says. "I think it's sad because I don't think many of these people know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure – but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure."

Indeed. Jacques Lacan argued that sexual relationships don't exist. (Badiou will shortly publish a book of conversations between Lacan and his biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco.) What is real is narcissistic, Lacan suggested, what binds imaginary. "To an extent, I agree with him. If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them."

But wasn't the rampant hedonism unleashed during Paris's May 1968 événements, in which Badiou participated, all about libidinal liberation from social constraint? How can he, of all people, hymn bourgeois notions such as commitment and conjugal felicity? "Well, I absolutely agree that sex needs to be freed from morality. I'm not going to speak against the freedom to experiment sexually like some old arse" – "un vieux connard" – "but when you liberate sexuality, you don't solve the problems of love. That's why I propose a new philosophy of love, wherein you can't avoid problems or working to solve them."

But, he argues, avoiding love's problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Méetic such as "Get perfect love without suffering" or "Be in love without falling in love". "For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Méetic try to go back to organised marriages – not by parents but by the lovers themselves." Aren't they meeting a demand? "Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn't like that. You can't buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover."

For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n'est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn't a Commodity). Badiou's book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L'Amour n'est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn't a Commodity Either).

Surely that makes him an old romantic? "I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages – hence l'amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I'm neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love – live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening."

This new book on love is an application of Badiou's singular philosophy of the subject and his outré conception of truth set out in incredibly forbidding books steeped in mathematics and deploying Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, such as Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. These books have led him to be hailed as a great philosopher. "A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us," Slavoj Žižek has written.

Badiou's philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre's existentialist slogan "Existence precedes essence" and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It's also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? "Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of '68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics – all these chance events made me what I am."

How does truth come into all this? "You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that's not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value."

Badiou's very odd, post-existentialist, heretically Marxist and defiantly anti-parliamentary conception of politics has a similar trajectory. "Real politics is that which gives enthusiasm," he says. "Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism."

He defines his "real politics" in opposition to what he calls "parliamentary cretinism". His politics starts with subjective experience, involves a truth procedure and ends, fingers crossed, in a communist society. Why? "It's necessary to invent a politics that is not identical with power. Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It's not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it's not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics."

Badiou hasn't voted since 1968, a habit he didn't break in France's recent presidential election. But he says he is writing a book about politics, a sequel to his 2007 succès de scandale De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (The Meaning of Sarkozy), in which he notoriously called the last French president "rat man" for playing on public concerns about crime and immigration. Earlier this month he wrote a marvellously vituperative column for Le Monde that has been trending across the francophone world. Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, he maintained, weren't the only politicians responsible for "the rise of rampant fascism" in France. He argued that there was a Socialist party tradition of colluding with right-wing racism – from Mitterrand through Jospin and, no doubt, into Hollande's first term. Ingeniously, Badiou suggested that mainstream politicians were disappointed in the French people for having a racist sensibility for which they, the "parliamentary cretins" (aided by some fellow intellectuals whom Badiou excoriated), were actually responsible for creating. "It is this stubborn encouragement of the state that shapes the ugly racialist opinion and reaction, and not vice versa … In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed." The article nicely conveys his sense that democracy as currently practised in France is a charade inimical to true rule of the people.

Badiou's far-left politics were burnished in the late 60s. In 1969, he joined the Maoist Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), enthused by Mao's Cultural Revolution that had begun three years earlier. Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a "fossil of the 60s and 70s", but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love – despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated.

When I ask him why, Badiou explains that the success of Lenin's disciplined Bolshevik party in the 1917 October Revolution spawned a series of other workers' revolutions, notably in China in 1949. "One soon saw that this instrument that was capable of achieving victory was not very capable of knowing what to do with its victory." Maoist bureaucracy was corrupt and self-serving, party activists were bourgeois and anti-socialist, and the communist revolution under threat. "So the Cultural Revolution was important because it was the last attempt within that history to modify that in a revolutionary manner. That's to say they made an attack on the communist state itself to revolutionise communism. It was a failure but many interesting events are failures." He cites the Paris Commune and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht's failed German revolution among such interesting failures.

In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou wrote about the importance of failure for like-minded communists (many of whom gathered with him and Žižek at Birkbeck College, London in 2009 for a conference called On the Idea of Communism). "Any failure," he writes, "is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth." Which means that Badiou at least has not lost faith in communism. "The old Marxist idea of creating an international society is truly the order of the day now," he says. "Today things are much more international than they have ever been – commodities and people are much more international than before." So the time is more ripe than ever for international workers' revolution? "I wouldn't say that. Certainly at the world level there can be more hope than hitherto. We're climbing a very big ladder."

Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937. His mother was a professor of philosophy, his father a maths professor and socialist mayor of Toulouse from 1944-58. His philosophical training began in 1950s Paris. He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved "a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience".

In a new book of essays entitled The Adventure of French Philosophy, Badiou argues that between the appearance of Sartre's Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? in 1991, French philosophy enjoyed a golden age akin to classical Greece or Enlightenment Germany. Badiou's great fortune was to be part of that adventure. Like wine and cheese, French philosophy should, he says, be considered part of France's glory. "I tell our ambassadors you have with us philosophers the greatest export product."

He speaks fondly of his times at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis which, founded in the late 60s, fast became a bastion of countercultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors Deleuze and Lyotard, even though he considered them traitors to the communist cause. "These men were my rivals and my neighbours, people whom I admired and differed profoundly from."

But why, if he's right, did France have this postwar adventure, this dizzying explosion of intellectual life? "I think because of the political catastrophe in France – Pétain and the disaster of collaboration. That resulted in a philosophy that had a duty to respond to those disgraces, to propose a different way. What's more, there is a French model of being a philosopher which isn't enclosed in the academy as in England – a philosopher who is an intellectual interested in all the things in their age. Such were Diderot, Rousseau and above all Pascal."

He credits Sartre with revivifying that French model of what a philosopher could be. "All my eminent colleagues were profs because they had to live, but that wasn't their vocation – they wanted to be politically engaged public intellectuals and often artists, like Sartre. Me, too." Badiou, like a mini-Sartre, is not just a publicly engaged philosopher, but a dramatist and novelist. Unlike Sartre, he has appeared in a Jean-Luc Godard film - as a philosopher lecturer on a luxury cruise ship in 2010's Film Socialisme. His says his overwhelming ambition has been to change the relationship between workers and intellectuals. "For me what was especially important from May 1968 to 1980 was that we created new political forms of organisations linking intellectuals and workers. Those links helped me reinvent myself as a human subject. One could say that attempt failed, but I keep dazzling memories of that time." Badiou's eyes gleam as if he's recalling an old love affair he can never forget, still less disown. Perhaps politics and love are not, if you're a French Maoist, so very different.

Badiou chuckles bitterly. "France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren't representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Pétain, Sarkozy." And you're one of those exceptions? "Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been."

• Philosophy
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Stuart Jeffries
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Jeanette Winterson believes that learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life

Hi, I'm currently doing a creative writing essay and I'd like to ask for advice on how you would describe a bomb …

That is my favourite Google search for creative writing. There are hundreds of courses currently on offer in the UK, ranging from tried and tested success stories such as the Arvon Foundation and UEA, through to writers you have never heard of offering "mentoring" services.

Contradictions are everywhere. Print media is shrinking, perhaps disappearing. At the same time, festivals and live events have never been more popular. Every tiny town seems to have a literary festival. Writers are out of the study and on the road – and when they are not entertaining readers they are invited to enlighten would-be writers. The most solitary of pursuits has become communal, organised, live, extrovert and competitive.

Is this because writing has become a commodity – "cult cargo", as Val Mcdermid puts it?

I travel a lot, and in the signing queue these days I get given piles of work – some of it touching, much of it terrifying; touching, in the effort to communicate, terrifying when the writer is lost in language as though it were a maze.

And yet the need to express, even where there is no communication, seems urgent. When I was in Seattle recently, at the Amazon HQ, the people running the new publishing programme there told me they have been overwhelmed with would-be authors. The creative writing moment/movement baffles me and it intrigues me. What does it signify, all this creative longing? And why through language? Specifically fiction, poetry, memoir?

When I left Oxford and wrote Oranges in my spare time, to be a writer was still the most hopeless and reckless of ambitions, as lofty as it was unlikely. Now it is as ubiquitous as coffee shops on street corners. If you keep a notebook or blog or even tweet, you call yourself a writer. Is it about recognition? Contribution? Identity? It can't be about money, because it costs more to go on a good course than most people will ever make back from their writing. It isn't about fame in any obvious X Factor way either. Few writers are well-known. Almost none of them are stopped in the street.

The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy – that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all.

Is the world of work plus the leisure offerings of mass entertainment now so banal and unsatisfying that creative writing offers a fight-back? If the society we are making – that is, the society unelected big business is making for us – is both soulless and soul destroying, then micro solutions such as creative writing could return some sense of both individuality and community. And if learning to communicate goes beyond talking to yourself in a private language, then it might become an instrument of change.

The arts are responsive to social change. Writing isn't something handed down from a big brain in an ivory tower – that's the academy, not the rough and tumble of creativity. Writing is a conversation, sometimes a fist-fight. It is democratic.

If writing is becoming its own kind of mass movement, using both new technology and global platforms, then writers with well-earned reputations should be involved. If not, this protean possibility too easily becomes an institutionalised hobby.

So when I was asked to follow on from Martin Amis and Colm Tóibín and take up the task of professor of creative writing at Manchester University, I decided to say yes – for two years. My duties will be to run an MA seminar and workshop for 11 weeks of the year, and to organise events with other writers. I also intend to get involved at undergraduate level.

I am bringing with me all my doubts and uncertainties, my blank spots and my questions. I know what I want to say. I am wondering what my students will want to say to me.

Manchester has a strong teaching faculty – MJ Hyland is there, as well as the Irish poet John McAuliffe. The Centre for New Writing is involved in the local community and in the world of international writing. I want to bring over some Chinese writers and this will be supported by the growing Centre for Chinese at Manchester University.

Writing should be personal but not insular. If we are not readers we cannot be writers. Reading widely is necessary. A course that encourages students to read outside their own interests will expand what they have to say. One of the problems with US courses – those ant colonies – is that students read nothing except contemporary American writers. This produces the factory fiction so typical of writing programmes. Worse, it sets up a resistance to anything that is not immediately recognisable. What the Americans do better than us is to pay and persuade the best writers to teach on the best courses.

If the new writing phenomenon is to be positive it needs to be bold. I believe that we are all part of the creative continuum, but I am sure that there are different doses and dilutions of creativity. We are not all the same and we do not have the same aptitudes or talents. I can't make you a writer. What I can do is show you how to strip a piece of text like dismantling an engine – and put it back and see why it roars or purrs. My own method is oily rag and spanners. Words and how they work is what interests me.

I was born in Manchester and I grew up in a working-class tradition of self-help that included Worker's Extension Lectures and the Mechanics Institute – one of many radical and pioneering Manchester initiatives for uneducated workers. I know from my own experience that learning how to read deeply – and that means diverse and sometimes difficult texts – trains your brain and improves your sense of self. Learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life.

Manchester used to be the engine of England. Now that the BBC has moved to Salford, Manchester is at a new and exciting moment in its creative history. This is an opportune time to be a writer here.

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Jeanette Winterson
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In the run up to our live chat exploring the how-tos of teaching, we asked our community on Twitter to share their tips on the key traits of good lecturer, using the #GoodLecturer hashtag

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DfiD aid programmes pay too much attention to enrolment and not enough to whether children are learning, says report

UK aid programmes to support education in three east African countries – together worth more than £1bn – are failing to improve children's basic literacy and maths skills, according to a report published on Friday by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI).

The commission said UK aid has helped fund the expansion of education systems in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania, boosting enrolment and helping close the gender gap in local schools. However, it criticised the Department for International Development (DfiD) for its "lack of attention" to whether children are actually learning.

"The quality of education being provided to most children in these countries is so low that it seriously detracts from the development impact of DfiD's educational assistance," said the report, which failed to find evidence that DfiD was considering "basic preconditions for learning" such as whether students and teachers actually attend class after the first day.

"To achieve near-universal primary enrolment but with a large majority of pupils failing to attain basic levels of literacy or numeracy is not, in our view, a successful development result. It represents poor value for money both for the UK's assistance and for national budgets," said the report giving the programmes an "amber-red" rating signifying that they need significant improvements.

DfiD funding for education in the three countries is expected to top £1bn over the 2005-2015 period. The majority of this has been delivered through "budget support" – money given directly to recipient country governments. While this has helped DfiD to concentrate on promoting policy reforms, said ICAI, the department should now consider a more "hands-on approach".

More should be done to help local ministries of education tackle the practical obstacles to improving quality, said the report, pointing to issues such as the need for teachers to travel miles to collect their salaries, delays in providing funding to schools, corrupt inspection practices, and bureaucratic procedures for buying textbooks.

Over the past decade, donor funding for education has soared as countries race to meet the millennium development goal to ensure all children complete a full course of primary school by 2015. But critics say the focus on getting increasing numbers of children in school has often come at the cost of declining quality of education.

"The assumption that has underpinned past donor support to education – that a simple focus on enrolment would translate into learning – stands disproved," says the report. "There is a clear, common message: a major shift in approach is needed."

In 2010-11, education was the fastest-growing part of Dfid's bilateral aid budget. The ICAI report cites data from DfiD's country-level plans, compiled and analysed by the Guardian last year, suggesting that education will grow to become the single largest sector for the department's bilateral aid by 2014.

A second ICAI evaluation, also published on Friday, said UK funding for education and health efforts in India's Bihar state have succeeded in improving both the quantity and quality of local services. A third report said channelling UK aid directly through recipient governments – "budget support" – has been largely "effective", but that its value varies from country to country.

Graham Ward, ICAI chief commissioner, said: "These reports show that some of DfID's work is having a real impact on the lives of the poorest people, particularly in India, which has seen considerable improvements in health and education. They also show, however, that there is more to do to get the most out of budget support and to make sure that education programmes in east Africa build on progress in enrolment to focus on ensuring a good education."

Joseph O'Reilly, chairman of the policy group for the Global Campaign for Education UK and head of education at Save the Children, said ICAI's reports will "provide extra impetus" for efforts to improve the quality of education in poor countries.

He welcomed the recommendation that DfiD support local communities to monitor education spending and promote accountability. "DfID needs to ensure that its investments are effective and working with communities to help them monitor what's happening is an essential element that DfID should prioritise."

International development secretary Andrew Mitchell said: "We will use their [ICAI] findings to further improve the way we deliver aid around the world."

He added: "In the past there has been too much emphasis on just getting children through the door and not enough on quality. The coalition government is addressing this with our pilots on payment for results for education in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania.

"We are clear that it is not enough to simply have children sitting in a classroom."

• Universal primary education
• Aid
• Millennium development goals
• Ethiopia
• Rwanda
• Tanzania
• International education news

Claire Provost
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The Environment Agency has warned the UK to expect more floods but its advice seems to be falling on deaf ears

A moving new exhibition of photographs at Somerset House shows the human impact of flooding around the world over the past five years and provides an insight into how climate change may already be disrupting lives and livelihoods.

The images from major flooding events in the UK, Pakistan, Australia and Thailand feature victims and survivors as they cope with the inundation of their homes and the aftermath. The photographer, Gideon Mendel, says his intention is "to depict them as individuals, not as nameless statistics". He adds: "Coming from disparate parts of the world, their faces show us their linked vulnerability despite the vast differences in their lives and circumstances."

One of the most striking exhibits shows Margaret Clegg standing knee-deep in water in the living room of her house in Toll Bar, Doncaster, which was flooded when the River Don overtopped its banks in June 2007, following a record downpour.

It is not clear to what extent, if any, climate change contributed to the occurrence or intensity of the summer 2007 floods in England and Northern Ireland, which cost the UK economy more than £3bn. A single extreme weather event cannot be definitely attributed to climate change, the influence of which can only be detected and measured through the analysis of statistical trends looking back over many decades. That means we will not be certain for many years to come about how flood risk is being affected.

We know from basic physics that a warmer atmosphere can become more humid and holds more water vapour, theoretically increasing by about 7% for every extra centigrade degree. As a result climate change is expected to increase the intensity of the water cycle in many parts of the world, causing both more droughts and more floods.

An analysis of UK weather trends between 1961 and 2006, during which the average temperature increased by about one centigrade degree, indicated that although our winters have not become significantly wetter, the number and severity of heavy rainfall events has increased. Meanwhile, summers have become drier and heavy summer downpours have decreased in all parts of the UK, except in north-east England, where some of the 2007 flooding occurred, and north Scotland.

Climate change is expected to increase the risk of flooding in many parts of the UK. Projections published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2009 suggested that, under a "medium emissions scenario", overall winter precipitation should be higher in the 2080s, while summer rainfall should generally be lower, particularly in the south.

The UK climate change risk assessment, published by Defra earlier this year, calculated that these potential trends mean the annual damage from coastal and river flooding in England and Wales could increase from about £1.2bn today to as much as £12bn in the worst case scenario over the next 80 years.

Such an increase in the risk of damage would have major consequences, not least in terms of the affordability and availability of flood insurance for homes and businesses. Indeed, a crisis is already approaching, with insurers warning that from next year they may not continue to offer cover for 200,000 high-risk properties, exposed to a greater than 1 in 75 annual risk of flooding.

Under an arrangement dating from 2000, insurance companies have subsidised flood cover for those in high-risk properties in return for greater government investment in coastal and river defences.

At present, the Environment Agency is responsible for building and maintaining these defences. The agency has told the government it needs to increase its annual flood risk management budget by 9% by 2014-15. However, the House of Commons public accounts committee has highlighted government plans to reduce the agency's flood risk funding by 10% over this period, and to shift more responsibility on to local authorities, even though their overall budgets are shrinking.

Perhaps even more worrying is the neglect of the risk of flash flooding, caused by heavy downpours from often very localised storms that can inundate poorly drained areas, particularly in cities. Of the six million properties in the UK that are currently exposed to some degree of flood risk, four million are threatened by surface water flooding.

Yet when the climate change risk assessment, upon which the government is basing its national adaptation plan, was published earlier this year, scientists warned that it was flawed because it had neglected possible future changes in flash flooding and other important threats.

The assessment stated: "Whilst the number of properties at risk from surface water flooding is similar to the number at risk from tidal and river flooding, suitable information for analysis were not available at the time of writing this report."

In his official review of the assessment, Prof Martin Parry of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College expressed "concern that the risks identified do not necessarily represent the full range of potential risks, and the metrics were selected not on the basis of importance but on the availability of evidence". However, Defra ignored his advice, surprisingly admitting that "the risks provided in this report are not intended to be a full range of risks".

This lack of attention to flash flooding could make it much more difficult to implement an important part of the government's national planning policy framework, which states that local plans "should apply a sequential, risk-based approach to the location of development to avoid where possible flood risk to people and property and manage any residual risk, taking account of the impacts of climate change".

The likely increase in the risk of flooding is just one of the many ways in which unmitigated climate change will significantly affect homes and businesses, and will create larger societal and economic costs for the UK. These serious long-term impacts are often overlooked by those who complain about the cost of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to limit the future impacts of climate change, yet they are just as important.

• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Drowning World exhibition is showing at Somerset House until 5 June.

• Flooding
• Climate change
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Climate change
• London School of Economics and Political Science
• Photography
• Meteorology

Bob Ward
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Poignant, thoughtful and exhilarating by turns, the art of the family comes to the Laing in Newcastle. The Guardian Northerner's arts explorer Alan Sykes finds much to enjoy and admire

Family Matters, which opens at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle today, Friday 18 May, shows over 60 artists and their very differing depictions of the family, going back to a 1542 portrait after Holbein of Edward VI aged six, and on to the 21st century.

The exhibition is organised around five broad – and overlapping - themes:
inheritance; childhood; couples & kinship; parenting and home.

Perhaps not surprisingly, death is frequently in the foreground or background of the paintings. Poor young Edward VI, dressed up in imitation of Holbein's grandiosifying iconography of Henry VIII to symbolise the power and continuity of the Tudor dynasty, only survived his father by a few years and died a teenager. Donald Rodney's 1996-7 "In the House of My Father" is a photograph of a miniature house held in the artist's hand. The house is made of skin removed from Rodney in operations for the sickle cell anaemia which was to kill him only a year later, aged 37.

In Gainsborough's charming "The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly" from the National Gallery, it is thought that the fragile butterfly may have been the painters way of depicting his older daughter Mary, who had died young. Sometimes the portraits are even done post mortem. In Pompeo Batoni's "The Hon Thomas and Mrs Barrett-Lennard with the daughter Barbara Anne", the daughter had been dead for a year when the grieving couple arrived in Rome on a grand tour. The painter had to make the likeness of Barbara Anne from a miniature which the Barrett-Lennards carried with them. Van Dyck's portrait of Venetia Digby was apparently commissioned by her widower, who had plaster casts of her face, hands and feet taken after her death. The sitter had died very suddenly and mysteriously aged only 32, and some suspicion of foul play fell on the husband, but nothing has ever been proved.

It's not all doom and death, however. Zoffany's amusing picture of David Garrick in drag and a rage in Vanbrugh's "The Provok'd Wife" is here, contrasting with the amusing for different reasons and much more overtly theatrical "The Prodigal Daughter" of 1903, by John Collier, in which a modern and independent-minded young woman is pitched against her Victorian-in-every-sense parents.

David Hockney's "My Parents", of 1977, shows his mother smiling fondly at her talented son, while his father is hunched over a copy of "Art & Photography" - apparently he was inclined to fidget when sitting if not allowed to read - while in a mirror on the chest we see a reflection of Piero della Francesca's "The Baptism of Christ" from the National Gallery. Michael Andrews' touching "Melanie and me Swimming" shows the artist teaching his daughter to swim, and looks at parenthood from the opposite end of the lens to Hockney.

Of course, one can have fun thinking of works that could have been included – I would have loved to have seen the extraordinary 1635 portrait">portrait of Sir Colin Campbell, 8th laird of Glenorchy, and his seven ancestral predecessors as laird, by George Jamesone, from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. And some one can do without: even the Laing's Marie-Thérèse Mayne admitted that Joshua Reynolds' "The Age of Innocence" portrait of a young child is "cloyingly sweet", and it certainly makes one understand why the Pre-Raphaelites lampooned him as "Sir Sloshua Reynolds".

Although the "themes", which are enforced through colour-coding in the labels and in the catalogue - which is irritatingly divided into 5 flimsy pamphlets with no index, rather than being in a single handy volume - are too vague to be of any real use, there are certainly enough treasures to make it worth visiting the Laing to enjoy this free show. Other artists in the show include Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread, Vanessa Bell, Mona Hatoum, Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Lely, Julia Margaret Cameron and Allan Ramsay.

Councillor Ged Bell, Chair of Tyne & Wear Joint Museums & Archives Committee (which runs the Laing and other museums and galleries in Tyne & Wear), says:

"It's very exciting to see the North East being involved in a partnership such as this Great British Art Debate project. The North East, as well as the rest of the UK has a wonderful artistic heritage which powerfully illustrates our sense of who we are and the Great British Art Debate is designed to encourage people to take part in an important debate about Britishness."

The Laing is one of the venues in Newcastle and Gateshead which will be taking part in this year's "The Late Shows", which takes place on the evenings of Friday 18 and Saturday 19 May, and this year includes a ukele jam session in the Sage Music Centre, a Space Hopper disco in the Shed, Gateshead, tours of the Victoria Tunnel under the streets of Newcastle, new sculptures at the Mining Institute and exhibitions and events in over 50 other venues – all accessible via a free bus service. Last year 24,000 people visited the 46 participating venues over the two nights, and this year the organisers hope to break that record.

"Family Matters" has been seen at the Norwich Castle Museum and at Museums Sheffield. It is on at the Laing until 2 September and then travels to Tate Britain (1 October to 21 December).

• Art
• Newcastle
• Family
• Children
• David Hockney
• Museums
• Museums
• National Gallery
• Tate Britain

Alan Sykes
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Post your questions now for Ucas adviser Scott Elliott who will be offering his expert tips next Tuesday

Applying to university is a daunting prospect. With campus open days, student loans and Ucas forms – it's hard to know where to start.

Following on from next week's launch of the Guardian University Guide 2013 – a combination of tables and guidance to help students find the right course for them – we are linking up with Ucas and Student Finance England to host a live Q&A session.

Perhaps you're overwhelmed by the number of courses on offer? Or you want tips on how to get the most out of a university open day? Put your questions and dilemmas to our experts, who will be online from 1pm to 4pm next Tuesday.

Our experts

Scott Elliott is customer service adviser at Ucas, where he has worked for four years. He has a wealth of knowledge about all aspects of the application process.

Nichola Malton is an assessment manager at Student Finance England. She will answer questions about the student finance process, ahead of the application deadlines of 31 May for new students and 29 June for returning students.

To ask a question post it in the comments section below.

• Students
• University guide
• Higher education
• Advice for students
• Sixth form

Rebecca Ratcliffe
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In response to the government's SEN progress report, Wendy Lee argues recognition and understanding of children's speech, language and communication needs must improve

Few people are aware of the fact that over one million children and young people in the UK have some form of speech, language and communication need (SLCN) and numbers are growing; over the last five years, there has been a 58% increase in the number of children and young people with SLCN as a special educational need.

These children have difficulty acquiring and developing speech and language, though often their needs are "hidden". These children can have lots to say, many are bright and able in other ways but really struggle to communicate.

SLCN is the most common childhood disability, higher than autism or hearing impairment, just as impactful, yet least understood.

In socially disadvantaged areas, upwards of 50% of children start school with delayed speech and language because of social and environmental factors – and though many of these children have the potential, they often don't catch up.

This week's release of the SEN progress report has highlighted the importance of early identification; a well evidenced and fundamental approach to SEN, though our research has shown us that identifying and supporting children with SLCN has been a real challenge for the children's workforce.

Many teachers we at the Communication Trust speak to understand the importance of communication and are committed to supporting its development in the classroom, but can struggle to pick out those children with language difficulties.

Understanding and knowledge of teachers in what is "typical" development in speech, language and communication is fundamental.

We would all notice a child who isn't speaking at all when they are say three or four, but how many of us will notice that a 13 year old who has the vocabulary of a 10 year old?

More importantly, how many teaching professionals will notice this difference? Yet this is a massive three year difference. Imagine the impact – how would an average 10 year old manage in a classroom where the teaching and language was at a level suitable for 13 year-olds?

The tragedy is that we know if we identify these children early and throughout their education, they can be supported to do well, communicate to the best of their ability and do better at school.

Simplifying statements and joining up to form Education, Health and Care Plans is a welcome aim of the SEN progress report, simplifying things for parents, particularly of children with complex needs, but the reduction of other educational categories poses a significant risk to children with SLCN.

People notice what they understand; poor literacy, poor behaviour or lack of confidence but often not the SLCN difficulty that sits at their foundation. There is a huge emphasis on literacy in our schools – and rightly so – but if a child cannot understand or say a word, a sentence, an instruction or conversation – how can they be expected to read it or write it down?

Teachers cannot help but notice poor behaviour, but may be unaware of the language needs of a child. Figures show that more than half of children excluded from school have an unidentified SLCN and in our youth justice system, more than 60% of young offenders have some form of communication difficulty.

A staggering amount of young people in our police interview rooms, courts and young offending institutions have SLCN. Their difficulties have serious implications on their sentencing and reoffending behaviour. Recently a lad at a youth attendance centre when asked to explain the word "remorse" just looked blank.

Staggeringly, research shows that more kids get sent down for breach of their order than for burglary! As the Audit Commission points out, this is a huge cost to the public purse, which could, with the right intervention be avoided.

Recently, the Trust launched a new film - Sentence Trouble – for educators and youth justice professionals to learn more about SLCN and its impacts.

Our work training Youth Offending Teams is reaping huge benefits as there is less frustration, better understanding of instructions and fewer breaches of orders - ultimately less reoffending. And there is an impetus for more skills and knowledge in the law courts with calls for mandatory training on SLCN for lawyers and magistrates.

The aims of the SEN paper, to integrate health, care and education, to make the often difficult journey easier for parents and to extend support to age 25 are great, but as always, the devil is in the detail.

We need to ensure that children with SLCN do not get left behind as the specialist support available and the health and education landscape continues to shift. It is in our collective interests to get this right.

• Wendy Lee is Professional Director at The Communication Trust, a consortium of nearly 50 voluntary organisations with expertise in speech, language and communication. Last year, the Trust ran the National Year of Communication (Hello campaign)

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• Schools
• Teaching
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The rise in academic book bannings and firings is compounded by the US's growing disregard for scholarship itself

Recently, I found out that my work is mentioned in a book that has been banned, in effect, from the schools in Tucson, Arizona. The anti-ethnic studies law passed by the state prohibits teachings that "promote the overthrow of the United States government," "promote resentment toward a race or class of people," "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group," and/or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." I invite you to read the book in question, titled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, so that you can decide for yourselves whether it qualifies.

In fact, I invite you to take on as your summer reading the astonishingly lengthy list of books that have been removed from the Tucson public school system as part of this wholesale elimination of the Mexican-American studies curriculum. The authors and editors include Isabel Allende, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Kozol, Rudolfo Anaya, bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, Rodolfo Acuña, Ronald Takaki, Jerome Skolnick and Gloria Anzaldúa. Even Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and Shakespeare's The Tempest received the hatchet.

Trying to explain what was offensive enough to warrant killing the entire curriculum and firing its director, Tucson school board member Michael Hicks stated rather proudly that he was not actually familiar with the curriculum. "I chose not to go to any of their classes," he told Al Madrigal on The Daily Show. "Why even go?" In the same interview, he referred to Rosa Parks as "Rosa Clark."

The situation in Arizona is not an isolated phenomenon. There has been an unfortunate uptick in academic book bannings and firings, made worse by a nationwide disparagement of teachers, teachers' unions and scholarship itself. Brooke Harris, a teacher at Michigan's Pontiac Academy for Excellence, was summarily fired after asking permission to let her students conduct a fundraiser for Trayvon Martin's family. Working at a charter school, Harris was an at-will employee, and so the superintendent needed little justification for sacking her. According to Harris, "I was told… that I'm being paid to teach, not to be an activist." (It is perhaps not accidental that Harris worked in the schools of Pontiac, a city in which nearly every public institution has been taken over by cost-cutting executives working under "emergency manager" contracts. There the value of education is measured in purely econometric terms, reduced to a "product," calculated in "opportunity costs.")

The law has taken some startling turns as well. In 2010 the sixth circuit upheld the firing of high school teacher Shelley Evans-Marshall when parents complained about an assignment in which she had asked her students in an upper-level language arts class to look at the American Library Association's list of "100 most frequently challenged Books" and write an essay about censorship. The complaint against her centered on three specific texts: Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. (She was also alleged, years earlier, to have shown students a PG-13 version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.)

The court found that the content of Evans-Marshall's teachings concerned matters "of political, social or other concern to the community" and that her interest in free expression outweighed certain other interests belonging to the school "as an employer." But, fatally, the court concluded that "government employees… are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes." While the sixth circuit allowed that Evans-Marshall may have been treated "shabbily", it still maintained (quoting from another opinion) that "when a teacher teaches, 'the school system does not "regulate" [that] speech as much as it hires that speech. Expression is a teacher's stock in trade, the commodity she sells to her employer in exchange for a salary.'" Thus, the court concluded, it is the "educational institution that has a right to academic freedom, not the individual teacher."

There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all. After the Chronicle of Higher Education published an item highlighting the dissertations of five young PhD candidates in African-American studies at Northwestern University, Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote that the mere titles of the dissertations were sufficient cause to eliminate all black studies classes. Riley hadn't read the dissertations; they're not even published yet. When questioned about this, she argued that as "a journalist… it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them," adding: "there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery." Riley tried to justify her view with a cliched, culture-wars-style plaint about the humanities and higher education: "Such is the state of academic research these days…. The publication topics become more and more irrelevant and partisan. No one reads them." This is not mere arrogance; it is the same cocooned "white ghetto" narrow-mindedness that allows someone like Michael Hicks to be in charge of a major American school system yet not know "Rosa Clark's" correct name.

Happily, there is pushback occurring against such anti-intellectualism. One of the most vibrant examples is a protest group called Librotraficante, or Book Trafficker. Organised by Tony Diaz, a Houston Community College professor, the group has been caravanning throughout the south-west holding readings, setting up book clubs, establishing "underground libraries," and dispensing donated copies of the books that have been removed from Arizona's public school curriculum. You can donate by visiting librotraficante.com.

• United States
• Freedom of speech
• Censorship
• Race issues
• Equality
• Schools
• Higher education

Patricia Williams
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Students clash with police as Quebec introduces emergency laws to close universities and crack down on tuition fee demonstrations

Quebec's provincial government, facing the most sustained student protests in Canadian history, has introduced emergency legislation that would shut some universities and impose harsh fines on pickets blocking students from attending classes, as it looks to end three months of demonstrations against rises in tuition fees.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in downtown Montreal on Thursday night as the government introduced the bill, with protests spilling over onto an expressway between stalled cars. Tuesday will mark 100 days since the demonstrations began.

Authorities said 122 people were arrested on Wednesday as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Montreal. Bank windows were smashed and missiles thrown at police.

The prime minister of Quebec, Jean Charest, said the proposed legislation would not roll back the tuition increases. Instead, it would temporarily halt the spring semester at faculties paralysed by walkouts and bring forward the summer holidays. Classes will resume earlier in August.

The legislation contains provisions for heavy fines for students and their federations. Fines range from $7,000 to $35,000 (£4,000 to £22,000) for a student leader and between $25,000 and $125,000 (£15,000 to £78,000) for preventing someone from entering an educational institution. The bill also lays out strict regulations governing student protests, including having to give eight hours' notice for protest itineraries. A vote on the measure is expected on Friday.

"This legislation strikes a blow to the freedom of expression," said student leader Leo Bureau-Blouin.

Dozens of protesters stormed into a Montreal university on Wednesday, breaking up classes. Tensions continued on Thursday in Gatineau, Quebec, the site of previous protests against the tuition rise that resulted in hundreds of arrests. Three junior colleges were evacuated after a bomb threat. Courses resumed later in the day.

The government has pointed out that a majority of students in Quebec have quietly finished their semester and are not striking. But many remain angry over the proposed tuition hikes.

The three-month conflict has caused considerable social upheaval in the French speaking province. There have been numerous clashes with police, traffic chaos, subway evacuations and disruptions to the academic calendar.

The protests have at times mushroomed beyond the cause of cheap tuition, attracting other participants who dislike the provincial Liberal government, including environmentalists, supporters of independence for Quebec and anarchists.

Biomedical student Sebastien Potvin, 30, wearing a red cowboy hat and holding a red banner, said from a Montreal street corner he feared the new law would only bring more violence. "I don't think it will solve the problem, I think it will anger students twice as much," Potvin said.

He said the coming tuition hikes could jeopardise his remaining studies.

Under the latest version of its tuition plan, the government would increase fees by $254 a year over seven years.

Quebec has the lowest tuition rates in Canada. The provincial government took out advertising in Thursday's newspapers explaining how it has already made adjustments to its tuition plans to soften the impact on the poorest students.

The dispute has claimed the province's education minister, who announced her resignation from politics earlier this week

• Canada
• Higher education
• Protest
• Americas
• International education news

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Carrie Wilson explains how support and encouragement could help those leaving care achieve success in life

"We don't care if you don't get the grades, but you have to go to the lessons or we won't get paid for you"

These words were said to me by my school teacher – someone who should encourage a child to succeed. They still affect my self-confidence and self-belief.

I am a care leaver. At the time, I was trying to the best of my ability to tell my teachers how I was feeling, how I had lost my way and got behind with work over the Christmas holiday due to a difficult incident with my birth mother. Instead of advising and supporting me, they threatened to throw me off my courses. They said they did not expect me to pass them anyway. This left me feeling uncared for and unsupported in a place where every child should be supported to learn.

I decided after the meeting to go to college instead of sixth form as I felt the school did not support or care for me as a looked after child.

I chose to attend Burnley College and achieved highly. I was supported throughout my time there by my tutors and peers and as a result I achieved a distinction level BTec national diploma. I went to university, took a good degree and now have an amazing job. I also have parental responsibility of my younger brother, which keeps him out of the care system.

It is quite clear that I am 'able' to achieve, the degree I have put on my livingroom wall is evidence enough of that. Yet my school did not see this. Instead I was stereotyped as a student who couldn't achieve good grades and was a waste of money to have on their roll.

My story has been a 'lucky' one, I had a good support network in my support worker and leaving care team and also my dad and my stepmum, whom I found after 12 years of lost contact during the week of my 16th birthday, not every care leaver has such luck.

Every day looked after children and care leavers face unfair and unjust discrimination. They have to deal with personal issues of low self-esteem, low self-confidence and low achievement expectations, alongside having to fight against negative stereotypes and avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. This is hard for anyone, never mind a young person who is most likely to be in a vulnerable and precarious position in life.

While studying at the University of Leicester, I worked as a mentor for the outreach team with looked after children and care leavers. I was shocked that having me there, sharing my experiences had such a positive effect on the young people involved. When I was made aware that Sheffield Hallam University was recruiting for a care experienced graduate to be a lead officer on its looked after children project, I jumped at the opportunity. I have been in my role for nearly five months now, and every day I look forward to coming to work because I know I am fighting the stereotypes of looked after children. I am able to positively influence current looked after children and care leavers by inspiring them to aspire to higher education.

For me to succeed it took one person to believe in me, this was my support worker, Janet. She pushed and cared for me when I didn't feel like anyone cared if I succeeded or not. It doesn't take much for a looked after child or care leaver to believe they are destined to fail because most people that they come across will expect them to. The general attitude of people towards them is and will be negative. However all it takes is for one person to spend the time, believe and encourage them to succeed and achieve in life. Is this a hard thing to do? I know it isn't. Like any child, looked after children want to make the adults around them proud, provide them with that positive environment and attitude. Such children can and will achieve success in life.

Carrie Wilson is the pre-enrolment care leaver officer at Sheffield Hallam University

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• Children
• Work practices
• Fostering
• Children
• Social care
• Teaching
• Schools

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