Reprieve for university intake

- Scotland’s eight universities will honour commitments made to applicants for entry into courses in October despite the proposed cutbacks in home students numbers, but will tighten up on late and borderline applications. None of the universities felt they could go back on conditional and unconditional offers of places made for 1981-82 although the University Grants Committee recommended last month that the Scottish university home student numbers should be trimmed by more than 1,700 over the next four years.

Sociologists press on modern studies

- Sociologists in Scottish universities are stepping up their campaign to have their subject recognised as the main qualification for those wanting to teach modern studies in schools. They argue that the new syllabi for modern students, which from next year will embrace sixth-year studies as well as ordinary and higher grade, are mainly sociological in content.

Conference for the jobless

- Advice to newly-qualified graduate teachers without a job is being offered by Strathclyde University. A one-day conference is to be held next month by the student advisory service at the university to outline other career possibilities.

Paper explains rationale for RE

- “The pupil is not simply learning about religion, he is learning from it.” That is what a new curriculum paper for schools describes as the “rationale for religious education”. The paper is the second set of guidelines for teachers of RE. It comes from the Scottish Central Committee on Religious Education.

Esperanto royal wedding protest

- A teacher is accusing the BBC of pursuing an anti-Esperanto policy to the extent of having an Esperanto banner suppressed at the royal wedding. Mr Les Hartridge, an English and Esperanto teacher at Kelsey Park School, Beckenham, Kent, was in the crowds opposite Buckingham Palace on the wedding day and held aloft a double-arm length banner bearing the word Esperanto from time to time, subject to arm ache. But not for long. According to Mr Hartridge, he was soon told by police the banner was upsetting television crews because it obscured their view.