22 November 1999
Remarks by Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
I am delighted to be here with you this evening. This is my first visit to Havering College and I am always pleased to add to my knowledge of the wonderful diversity of institutions and learning communities that make up the Open University’s accreditation network.
It is now seven years since the government invited the Open University to continue the work of the Council for National Academic Awards by providing a national accreditation and validation service. That development has been tremendously enriching for the Open University and we are very proud of our association with the staff and students of Havering College.
In that context it is a pleasure to begin by wishing your new Principal, Noel Utley, a long and happy tenure as your leader. I know that he can build on the excellent relations that you have developed with your vibrant local community. Furthermore, you have been designated by the government as a Beacon College and an Accredited Institution of the Further Education Funding Council, so you have a national role as an exemplar for other colleges.
I can see that you are also a role model in your ethnic diversity and in the opportunities that you have given to many women to continue their education and training. You are pioneers in the movement of lifelong learning that will define education and training in the 21st century.
Speaking for the Open University I must say that we are very pleased with the arrangements that you have developed for supporting your higher education programmes and assuring their quality. We have seen notable progress in the six years that the Open University has been associated with Havering College and I believe that you can justly be optimistic about achieving your vision and fulfilling your mission for the future.
I am sure that colleagues here must think it is just as well that Havering College is good at quality assurance because there is a lot of quality assessment about. With the breadth of your Higher Education and Further Education provision and the number of different validating and funding bodies that you have to deal with there is always some review current or in the offing.
In this context is a pleasure to acknowledge the good work of Alan Smith who deals with the administrative side of the OU-Havering relationship in a professional and constructive manner.
One of the first references to higher education in English literature is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The character in question is referred to by Chaucer as the Clerk of Oxenford, who must have been an Oxford don not long after the creation of that ancient university.
Chaucer tells us that the Clerk of Oxenford would rather have twenty books in his bedroom than nice clothes and that he was not a rich man. Some would say that little has changed in the academic community over the last six centuries! Chaucer then says about the Clerk of Oxenford:
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.
I have always felt that to be the best one line summary of the ambitions that we should harbour as students, scholars, teachers and academics. First, what we do should be done gladly. We should be pleased that our community values the academic mode of thinking, that great triumph of the human spirit, enough to support us to be people of learning.
Second, I like the order of the words. And gladly would he learn and gladly teach. Reminding us that learning comes before teaching and that the good teacher is always a learner.
That is the attitude that you try to foster at Havering College, learning and teaching with gladness, and I congratulate you for sustaining that atmosphere of study, reflection and the development of new skills.
It is for all these reasons that it is such a pleasure to be here this evening and to congratulate the new graduates and award winners whose success we have celebrated. We are proud of you, and you should be proud to carry with you the name of Havering College.
I hope that those of you receiving Open University awards will also treasure that association. Many consider that the Open University is the most important innovation in higher education that has been seen anywhere in the world in the century just ending. It is a wonderful example of how the experts can get things wrong.
When the Open University was created in 1969 the press and most of the educational establishment said that it would never work. They said that you couldn’t expand higher education that way and, even if you could, it would not be education of quality.
How wrong they were. Today there are more students in the Open University alone than there were in all UK universities combined in the year that Harold Wilson first launched the idea. Furthermore, the OU is now ranked in the top 10% of English universities for the quality of its teaching. It is one of only a small elite of universities that has most of its programmes rated as excellent.
So the students doing Open University validated programmes here at Havering College should think of themselves as belonging to a world-wide community of hundreds of thousands of OU students and graduates and part of one of the most successful innovations of our times.
Finally, on your behalf I also thank the families that have supported you during your studies and the staff of the College who have guided your learning. Learning is both an individual and a community activity. I congratulate you on your individual success and I commend the community that has supported you.
I thank you for studying with Havering College and I wish you every success in the future.