THRIVING AND NOT JUST SURVIVING THE FIRST TERM

By Akua J. Quao

As a student getting ready to head off to university, whether a new or a returning student, you may be excited or feeling anxious about starting a new course or returning to continue with your studies. Whatever thoughts are running through your mind, you will no doubt have questions about how you are going to keep safe and settle into some sort of normality following lockdown.

Whilst you can be assured that colleges and universities have been working throughout in order to help students get back to their studies, there are several crucial things that you can do yourself to ensure that you are updated and are able to access adequate support when you need it.

The hectic first term

Due to the often frantic nature of the first term, you can be forgiven for opting for the easiest ways to stay updated. After all, you must remember timetables, room locations, and deadlines, and all whilst also learning to navigate new and different systems such as how to correctly upload your assignment onto Turnitin! 

Temptation to follow the crowd is real

There is a real temptation to just engage with your college or university in the simplest way for you, and it’s very easy to simply join the group chat and keep updated through your peers. However, whilst this is a good idea and is important in keeping you in contact with people on your course, it is not to be relied upon as the only option for staying connected.

People can misinterpret information and do make critical mistakes. To avoid this from happening to you it is really important to remain up to date by engaging fully with the various communication systems in place at your college or university, especially as the pandemic continues to shape the way we do things. Some of these suggestions may seem like common sense, but often due to the busy pace of the first term, many students overlook or forget about the things which could save them valuable time and potential heartache as the course progresses.

Tips for thriving

Every college and university will assign someone to you to provide pastoral care. It is important to know who they are and understand their relationship with you, as they are there to help guide you through the academic system and help with accessing various support services. Like many students, you may at some point experience a stage in your academic journey when problems associated with family, finance, work or health may have an adverse effect on your studies. Students can often feel overwhelmed or embarrassed and disengage from student life, so this is when you must reach out to your tutor and get appropriate guidance. There is always a support team available to assist you through the challenging times, so do attend any appointments and let them know if you are having difficulties that could affect your studies.

You will be introduced to a virtual learning environment (VLE), but if you are not familiar or confident in using this then do not fret, as you are not alone.  With the right help from the technical team, you will be able to navigate it confidently.

You want to hit the ground running but pacing yourself is key to your success. If you know that time management and organisation is not your area of strength, then now is a good opportunity to get some books or videos where you can learn how to manage your time effectively.

Before you enrol on your course you will use a personal email address to communicate with your organisation, but you will be given a student email account once enrolled. Get into the habit of checking this regularly because this is one of the ways that your lecturers and tutors will communicate with you and you don’t want to miss out on an important update.

We all go through phases where we need someone independent to talk to in confidence and without feeling judged. The health and wellbeing team is a good place to start. Find out early how you can use the service just in case you do need it.

There will be times when you put your whole heart into doing your coursework only to be downhearted when you get your grade back. You may be asked to resubmit so then is not the time to try and find out about the protocol around resubmissions, capped grades and appeals. If you familiarise yourself with the academic regulations beforehand you will already understand how your organisation manages assessments.

With Covid-19 still making headline news, it’s no surprise if you have concerns about how to stay safe. If you have an underlying health condition, anxiety or other concerns about being on site, then speak to your personal tutor about this to find out what allowances can be made to support you with your learning. Following the mask wearing and hand sanitizing guidelines is priority for keeping you safe whilst you learn.

“Keep in contact with family if you have moved away from home, especially if it is your first time. Going to college or university is something to look forward to as you make new friends and learn new things, so make sure you are well prepared in order to make the most of this special time in your life.”
— Akua J. Quao
AQ-crop-Sept-12-number-1_opt-100x125.jpg

BAME BEAUTY AND THE COVID BEAST - THE UGLY TRUTH

By Pauline Lewis

In 2018, the British Beauty Industry employed over 370,000 employees and generated consumer spending of over £27 billion. Despite this, we were still confronted with scenes in the House of Commons in July of male MPs making light of the need to attend beauty salons.  Opening pubs so people could drink beer was seen as a serious issue, but women needing to dress their hair and deal with facial problems was treated as a non-essential luxury. In one sphere of the economy, beer drinking was seen as an economic imperative, whilst in the other, the huge value of female lead industries was not even noticed. With over 10 million women in the UK and Europe saying they have different textured hair from the average women, the ignorance shown to women from different cultural backgrounds was apparent.

It is common knowledge that the beauty industry is heavily dominated by females. Up to 80% of all employees are female. The majority of users are also female. It is also common knowledge that women, and particularly BAME women, are under-represented amongst MPs.  It is this imbalance that is playing out across the political spectrum today. There are many difficult situations when beauty services can help women manage after trauma, these include products and services for women who are victims of domestic violence, for women who are homeless, as well as for those already vulnerable in a society that judges by appearance. Despite this there have been so many inconsistencies in deciding which beauty services were allowed to open and which were not.

Guidance currently means that beauty salons cannot offer facials or massage services, even though these treatments form an incremental part of beauty services. The impact of this is seriously affecting salon owners, self-employed beauticians, employees, especially those on furlough, and most importantly of all, clients, the vast majority of whom, are women.  Apart from the British Beauty Council there is little government encouragement to set up more professional bodies within the beauty economy who can lobby and inform the government. Women’s business and women’s spending has gone unnoticed, despite the fact that HMRC benefits from over £7 billion in annual tax revenue. However, the importance of beauty treatments goes far beyond the financial cost, the mental health of women is a key factor as society judges so much on appearance.

BAME women spend up to six times as much as white women on beauty because the market acts in marginalised way. There is a personal disadvantage in that accessing products and services is harder because the required services are not local. There is an economic disadvantage because products are less widely available and this makes them more expensive. Products for BAME women often have to be designed uniquely for darker shades and differing hair textures. This causes the research and the development of those products and services to be less accessible than for their counterpart white women.  The result is that the full variety of choice is not available to the BAME consumer.  In normal times this helps to create a parallel running market – a mainstream beauty market and a BAME beauty market rather than an integrated one. 

The British Beauty Council have stated that they are going to commission an independent study on diversity and inclusion in the beauty industry in order to assess issues and challenges as well as celebrating successes and creating future vision.   To address this, there is currently a petition being signed, which is supported by the British Beauty Council, to make education about Black and Asian Hair and Beauty mandatory in all beauty training.  But the government must now accept it’s ignorance and help this industry to grow and thrive and be counted as a vital economic engine..

It is clear that the beauty industry which is largely dominated by women is a major economic contributor to the economy and the figures alone show that it is an industry that should be taken seriously. It is also of great personal value to many women and has a social impact which carries a value far higher than pounds and pence.  It is hoped, therefore, that the interests of women in and affected by the beauty industry can now be taken up, not only by women, but also the men who have been voted in to represent them in Parliament.

“I am continuing to press the case to ministers – make-up artists can work in the film industry, but they cannot work for weddings – it just seems wrong! This is about getting our message across – there are women going through chemotherapy, or reconstructive surgery for nipples, and alopecia patients who need their eyebrows to be done. All of this is needed to give people more confidence letting them feel better about themselves. The beauty industry is huge and diverse.”
— Rt. Hon. Caroline Nokes MP, Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee
11031405%252BPAULINE%252B%252526%252BCHANTELLE%252B103.jpg

THE CHALLENGES OF HOME SCHOOLING - COVID SERIES

By Jay S Khan

Anna Dusseau, a teacher and home educator, mentioned in a recent article published in the Guardian online, that she felt her son and daughter were being ‘processed’ in school.  She is currently preparing to publish a book of advice outlining her own approach to home schooling her children, which includes 100 different learning activities that parents can try. Dusseau suggests that more families, including over 50,000 children, are rejecting institutional schooling for home education due to the “forced learning” in schools, the coercion of the national curriculum and the testing and results-driven English schooling system.

Whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all Dusseau’s findings, Dr Richard House has also suggested that current research gives further evidence that home-educated children achieve substantially better outcomes than the mainstream. Even more importantly, as Dusseau says, children are more able to discover “who they really are, and what they want to do in life”, as opposed to them having to develop a “false self” just to survive at the hands of a schooling system that is stultified by the soulless audit culture. Again I don’t necessarily agree with all the points as there is something to be said about children going to school and learning about the outside environment, particularly in terms of travelling, environmental structure and competition, and recognising the differences they have with their peers.

Many of you, I suspect, have taken to ‘Home Schooling’ like a duck to water whilst the rest of us dread our kids asking ‘Mum, Dad can you help me with my homework?’.  The panic starts and the sweat beads start to trickle down the side of your face whilst you try to retain some sort of composure.  Over the last few months, I have a much greater appreciation of those parents who home school as a way of life.  There are many aspects that need to be considered, such as structure, content, and discipline to name just a few.  This is in addition to getting your head around the school system of marking, grading, and examination boards.  There is a plethora of paperwork and red tape to endure and I tip my hat to those that have mastered it.

For many of us, attempting to put tried and tested structures in place, in addition to what we think is a good idea at the time, make us realise that not every home-schooling plan will be suitable for everyone and this will be dependent upon many factors such as the age of the children, home setting and availability of resources.

I must say that calling my attempts to tutor my kids ‘Home schooling’ is somewhat stretching it. Nevertheless, what I found in my own experience over the last few months is to give the children the freedom to express themselves, this will naturally be dependent on what key stage your children are at.  I have 4 children, twin 14-year-olds, boy and girl, a 9 year old boy and a 7 year old girl, and luckily for me none of them were at any significant key stages, allowing me to be able to have some sort of creative licence and experiment through trial and error.  With the twins it was relatively easy, even though they are at that awkward age with hormonal changes taking effect, as they were being set online work by their school on a regular basis, so it was more about monitoring that they were getting on with their work.  Although in certain subjects providing guidance was useful, what I found with them is that generally they were aware what they had to do and talking it through with them gave them the confidence to discover the answers for themselves. 

With the 2 younger ones, however, it was significantly different. Although the school provided some handouts for them to complete, I somewhat struggled to understand the work provided.  I therefore decided to create a weekly timetable, with the core subjects they were being taught in schools combined with additional fun activities which I put up on the fridge.  This included a ‘Choose your own activity’ which the kids really enjoyed and looked forward to as it allowed them to discuss with me and each other what they wanted to do. The home school day lasted 4 hours with breaks and lunch time.  I downloaded a lot of the materials from the internet and gave them folders for all their subjects. They were excited and took ownership immediately.  In the beginning I tried to implement a disciplined approach, routinely checking their work and losing my cool on occasions when they got things wrong, but I found that counterproductive.  I therefore changed my strategy to a ‘Have-a-go’ approach and allowed them to do the work themselves and told them not to worry about getting things wrong and that I will go through the work with them once they completed it.  This approach worked wonders for both of us, as they just got on with it and I was no longer losing my own discipline.  Although my approach is not ‘Home Schooling’ in its element or traditional sense, I knew it would be temporary and, as I stated earlier, I admire those that do it full time as it requires a lot of work, patience, and effort.