Education Resources

As the commercial director of one of the country's largest book-wholesaling companies, Annette Burgess makes an unlikely Eliza Doolittle. At the age of 44, she is responsible for a sales team that supplies books to the National Trust, Hamleys and hundreds of garden centres. Yet this successful bookseller shares one thing in common with the cockney flower-selling heroine of Pygmalion and My Fair Lady: she has taken up elocution lessons.

The mass closure of public libraries is hitting older people and retired people who want to learn and keep their minds active. The sort of learning that goes on in the University of the Third Age (U3A) – the learning that retired people do because they want to do it, not because they need it for their careers – will be worst hit.

Government proposals to radically alter the student visa regime have left colleges facing the possibility of having to cut recruitment of foreign students and move much of their international work overseas.

It's not every day that a former student stops you in the street and recites a poem about plant hormones which they learnt 15 years ago. But when your name is Richard Spencer and you have a following in Australia, the USA and Europe, it is perhaps hardly surprising.

For the past 150 years, the University of London has given students the chance to study for an external degree. Nelson Mandela took an external law degree while imprisoned on Robben Island; the Nobel prize-winner Charles Kao signed up for a course as a young refugee from Shanghai, and the Labour MP Gisela Stuart is another alumnus. The University of London has approaching 50,000 students studying by distance and flexible learning in more than 180 countries.

A gold-plated MBA from a leading business school is a welcome addition to any CV, but, in these austere times, some people are increasingly reluctant to commit the time and money to take a year or more out of the workplace. Individuals and employers want a rapid, cost-effective skills uplift that can be put to work within days, not months. This could either arise from a bespoke course, created to meet the needs of a single company, or a more generic programme that brings together people from many different organisations.

Earlier this month, 46 would-be Alan Sugars attended an intensive, four-day course on entrepreneurship hosted by Cass Business School. Despite the £2,000 fee – with generous scholarships given to those Cass considered to have a "killer idea" – course leader Professor Julie Logan says that demand for places was so great that the event is likely to be repeated in December.

Have you always wanted to spin your own wool or carve yourself a country-style stool, immerse yourself in Chopin's works, or master that digital camera you got for Christmas? If so, then there may well be somewhere nearby offering a course that fits the bill.

It's early evening, and Liverpool student Alex Le Roux is in a car with a couple of friends on the way to Manchester's clubland. These students are not looking for a night of relaxation to take their minds off their studies, but are heading for an activity directly linked to their degree programmes, as they are all music students at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (Lipa).

When students at North Warwickshire and Hinckley College recently turned up for class, they got more than they bargained for – the sight of a severed head (happily, not a real one) in the bushes. As if that wasn't enough drama for one day, they watched in amazement as tutors ran around panicking that the crime-scene investigation team wasn't available. There was only one solution, they said: the students would have to do the investigation themselves. "It wasn't like the recent case of a pretend shooting in a school, where students thought it was real," assures lecturer Paul Barlow. "We set the scene as being fictional from the outset, with things such as film-style music in the background."

If you go to school, you can be sure your teacher has a formal teaching qualification. Go to college, on the other hand, and you don't have that reassurance. But things are set to change, with all further education teaching staff now expected to gain a qualification within five years of joining.

Safeguarding students has become the single biggest issue for today's colleges. Not because students are at particular risk of harm in the further education sector, but because colleges have been expected to pay closer attention to the topic than ever before. But while the tighter structures being put in place might look like good news for all, they are fraught with difficulties.

British governments are convinced, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, that they can predict the future. You might think they would be disabused by the financial crash, our limping economy, and the yawning gulf between the Treasury's expectations and its confident predictions in times of plenty.

They live in swish city-centre apartments, have money in their pockets and work for go-ahead companies. They might not sound like postgraduate students but then theirs is no ordinary degree.

Restaurateur James Thomson didn't like school. Much of his time was spent looking out of the windows at the old buildings of Edinburgh, fantasising about their history and the people who had lived there. What Thomson did like was working. Aged 12, he became a dishwasher at Crawford's tearooms on North Bridge. "My grandmother had a cashier job there, and they were always short of dishwashers, so I was called in. I loved the theatre of the place – they served morning coffee, lunches and high tea, and had old-fashioned cake stands and waitresses who all mothered me and gave me strawberry tarts to eat. I also helped the chef. I loved things like the smell of the coffee and cheeses, and the whole ambience of the place."

With college alumni ranging from Baroness Boothroyd, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, to the author and academic Andrea Ashworth, the prevailing myth that colleges don't cater for the academically gifted is not a little surprising. But that's the thing with UK colleges – the sector appears to be burdened by outdated stereotypes.