News

News

REF Headlines for Sub-Panel 27: English Language and Literature

UE has co-signed the REF_English Studies_headlines report. The report attests to the robust health of the discipline in the UK, highlighting the transformational contribution being made by colleagues at every stage of career to knowledge, culture, well-being, and economic prosperity, locally, nationally, and globally, in units of all types and sizes.

Letter from colleagues from Bristol’s English Department to local MPs and Mayor on Brexit

We have posted here an intervention sent by colleagues at Bristol’s English Department to their mayor and MPs. We hope that colleagues in other institutions may use this excellent letter to construct similar appeals to their own representatives, using examples from their own localities and departments. If colleagues submitting such interventions would like to send us a copy of them, we would be keen to create a repository of them on our website. Professor Putter, Head of English at Bristol, wishes us to make it clear that signatures to this letter were gathered in 24 hours; absences should not be construed as implying agreement or disagreement with its contents.

We thank colleagues at Bristol for their willingness to let us publicise their intervention and hope that it provides a useful frame for others in the subject community.

Bristol letter

University English’s Response to Brexit

The University English executive is disappointed by the outcome of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, and deplores the likely consequences of Brexit for the UK HE sector. We will do all we can to support our many non-UK European colleagues and postgraduates teaching, researching, and studying English in HE throughout the UK. We are actively working to facilitate the creation of a caucus of those colleagues in the next few months and plan to devote some of our resources to this purpose. In the meantime, we re-affirm our commitment to our sister associations in Europe, to the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and to the unity of English as a discipline across the UK, in all of its areas.

Archived News

The QAA is working with experts from the Creative Writing subject community to produce guidance on what a Creative Writing degree should look like. Up until now, Creative Writing has been part of the English subject benchmark. If you’d like to contribute to the consultation, further details are available here. The deadline for submissions is November 23rd 2015.

A Level Creative Writing

Chair Susan Bruce writes in defence of Creative Writing A Level in the Times Higher: ‘Creative writing is an increasingly important player in a suite of humanities disciplines that train our young people in the arts of communication and persuasion.’

Barbara Bleiman of the English & Media Centre on why the DfE decision to turn down the AQA submission for Creative Writing A Level (2017) is misguided: “The DfE’s rationales for axing it – that it is too close to English Literature and that it is too skills-based – both fail to understand its contribution as a subject and show little respect for its growth in H.E. and the respect with which it is regarded as a valid subject for study.”

Jonathan Taylor argues that the decision seems to be “based on an outmoded and prejudiced interpretation of the subject, on its (mis-)perception (by ministers and, potentially, the media), rather than on actual evidence.”

You can sign Maggie Butt’s petition to Nicky Morgan here

Newsletter Archive