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David Fletcher considers the role of students in the political sphere.

During Brian MacArthur's absence in the USA, David Fletcher of the Daily Telegraph takes over this column.

It reads like the comment of a disgruntled customer airing his views on the inadequacy of shop assistants or barmaids. In fact the remarks — and many others in similar vein — were made about teachers. And worst of all they were made not by people who have never been near a school since they left one at the age of 14, but by people in close touch with teachers such as education committee councillors, parents, and academics.

Tom Bradley has never lived in a house with a bathroom. Born and bred in the Lancashire mill town of Accrington, he lives in the two‐up and two‐down type of terraced house spawned in their thousands across the face of Northern England in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The stone‐built house, one of the scores clustered round a former mill, now converted into a dairy, faces on to a cobbled road and footpaths paved with slabs of hewn granite rather than the smooth concrete rectangles familiar to southern city dwellers. There are no trees in sight, no lawns, flowers or shrubs, no front gardens. The house is only one room wide; there is no provision for either a bathroom or a lavatory and there is no running water to either of the two bedrooms. The only lavatory is in a shed at the bottom of the back yard. It has no running water so there is no means of flushing it other than by taking a bucket of water from the house. The smell, summer and winter, is appalling.

A gloomy picture of the state of engineering education in British universities is painted by statistics published in recent months. So few school leavers appear to be attracted by the prospect of becoming engineers that university places go begging for want of suitably qualified candidates. The overall standards of those who do get in are so low that one in every five students leaves or is sent down without gaining a degree. And the gloomy picture does not end there. About 40 per cent of those engineers who do graduate each year join the Brain Drain to America, leaving Britain with the serious worry not only of how to keep abreast of new developments but of how to innovate in a period of rapid technological change when an increasingly high proportion of its intelligent young people either don't want to become engineers or else don't want to be engineers in Britain.

The uneasiest year for a decade in the education world creaked forward last month with the stresses and strains of living within a budget becoming ever more apparent. In schools, thousands of children were sent home as the National Association of Schoolmasters continued their militant action in dissatisfaction with the Burnham negotiating machinery. In local councils, details of cuts started to seep out as spending estimates were pruned to meet Government restrictions. In universities, the chill wind of financial cut back was also blowing and at least one university department was threatened with closure because of lack of money.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors perceived to be associated with the design and delivery of an effective Olympic Games preparation camp.

To identify and explore such factors, interviews were conducted with eight members of a preparation camp delivery team for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and with two athletes who had participated in Olympic preparation camps.

The results identified four overarching factors that should be considered when designing and delivering an effective Olympic preparation camp: planning, operations, environment, and the delivery team. To illustrate the interrelationships between these factors and situate them within the holistic preparation camp context, an operational model was developed. This model also portrays the chronological ordering of events, individuals involved at each stage, and athlete-centered nature of an Olympic preparation camp.

Despite the significant amount of Olympic-related research at organizational, environmental, and individual levels, no research to date has holistically examined Olympic preparation camps per se. This study provides the first insight into the factors associated with the design and delivery of an effective Olympic preparation camp, and potential interrelationships between these factors.

Education has become the sacred cow of British politics over the past 25 years. Since the 1944 Education Act was framed, it has won the unstinting support of parents who have come to regard it as the passport to success for their children — though rather more thought has been given to its effect on earning power than to its effect on the individual personality. There has been no disagreement between successive ministers over the sacred cow aspect of education. Not only has more and more money been lavished on education since the war but the actual proportion of the gross national product spent on education has been steadily increased by successive Tory and Labour administrations.

Student unrest at the London School of Economics and elsewhere has hit the headlines in Britain in recent months but the extent of the trouble and the depth of feeling involved pales into complete insignificance compared with the upheavals at some American universities. A hard line against student insurgents is often advocated by observers (often tax or rate‐paying observers) of the revolutionary student scene and it is salutory to see what happened at one American university where the ‘firm’ approach was carried to its logical conclusion.

Focuses on measuring quality in the security industry. Explains how quality concepts can be successfully applied to a service industry. Outlines the measurement criteria used by one security company which are designed to encourage its customers to scrutinize its operations in detail, and provide individual staff with an assessment of their function and ability, identify training requirements and allow prompt action to rectify shortfall.