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The Famous Four Go To Cadbury Manor

ASET Conference, 5-7 September, 2006

The Famous Four** (Azam Ali, Karina Bolivar, Nick Bowen from European Busines School London and Mariona Centellas from Regent's Business Scholl London ) had a spiffing time in the autumn when we went on a super adventure to the Midlands. It was jolly good fun and we had lots of work and play at a pretty place called Cadbury Manor. Most of the time we had yummy food – but one meal was very yucky – and lashings of soft drinks and booze. Although “Timmy the dog” couldn’t come with us, we hope to be able to take him on our next ASET adventure – or on our trip to the Global Internship Conference in South Korea in April 2007.

**(with acknowledgements to Enid Blyton’s stories for children about the Famous Five – two boys, two girls and Timmy the  dog)

In the splendid setting of Cadbury Manor on the Edgbaston side of Birmingham, the famous four presenters of Regent’s College discussed their critical views of international placements within the ASET three-day conference (Integrating Work and Learning) in early September. The conference was attended by about 100 participants from universities and institutions around Europe: Queen’s University (Belfast), Danube and Leo-Net, University College Cork, the Universities of Bath, Kent, Liverpool, Cardiff and Plymouth. The four of us from Regent’s College were not the only contingent that came in force – there were also teams from Huddersfield, Salford, Leeds and Middlesex. Although we were among the more sober and serious-minded of the teams, we did not do ourselves intellectual justice in the Tuesday evening quiz in the Manor bar. It was jolly difficult and we tried jolly hard: we had lots of right answers but not necessarily to the right questions.

Over the three days, we did lots of hard work, making our own presentations, attending other workshops (‘Learning through engaging’, ‘Pyramids of outreach’, ‘Accrediting placement providers’, and so on), and participating in a range of plenary sessions. We also had the opportunity to go on guided tours of Cadbury World (Mariona and Karina) or Edgbaston cricket ground (Azam and Nick). At the latter, we were privileged to meet Alan Oakman whose great claim to cricketing fame is the five catches he held when Jim Laker took 19 Australian wickets at Old Trafford in July 1956.

The central thrust of the paper that we presented was that, whether placements are compulsory (as in the BAIB degree at EBS-L) or optional (as in the 3-year undergraduate degrees at RBS-L), business students are always keen to ensure that placements appear on their CVs. We asserted that international placements form a significant part in the undergraduate degree programmes at European Business School London and Regents Business School London, even though the rationales are fundamentally different. For students studying on the BA in International Business degree at EBSL, placements are a compulsory and an integral part of the degree programme whereas, at RBSL, placements are optional for students studying the various undergraduate business and management degrees. However, initial exploratory analysis undertaken indicates that the take-up of placements does not differ in any significant way between the two cohorts of students over the duration of the degrees. The paper analysed the reasons for this possible convergence of experiences and evaluated the lessons to be learnt.

In the paper, we organised international placements into three principal categories:

The paper attempted to adopt the following methodology in the collection and analysis of data. For both schools, data was obtained from the students who graduated in 2005 and were featured in the respective Graduate Profiles Portfolio. 100 undergraduates from EBSL and 60 from RBSL were sampled.

Due to the international focus of this paper, the sample was divided into three main groups of students:

• United Kingdom (UK);
• European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) and
• non-European Union/European Economic Area (non-EU/EEA)

Furthermore, the country where the placements occurred was divided as follows:

• Home;
• United Kingdom (UK);
• European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) and
• non-European Union/European Economic Area (non-EU/EEA)

For both Schools, placements are handled by the Careers, Placements & Alumni Service (CPAS) at RBSL and the Careers Guidance and Internship Services (CGIS) at EBSL. We, therefore, outlined their roles and functions and the main similarities and differences between the two.

The Rationale of Student Placements from an EBSL and RBSL perspective

The European Business School tackles the issue of placement in two ways, via a compulsory 36 weeks placement spread across the whole of the undergraduate degree programme, or by formally awarding credits towards a 16 week placement through the Placement Learning Project (PLP). For our earlier work on the latter, see ‘Real Learners…Doing Real Work’ in the EBS London Newsletter for Autumn 2004 and the more formal paper, Ali, A., Bowen N. and Centellas-Melia, M. (2004) Real Learners Doing Real Work, taken from “Partnerships for Placement” the ASET Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge 7^th – 9^th September 2004, pages 83-88.

In contrast, the Regent's Business School London defines student placement as an activity which forms part of a student’s learning and development; it is related to but not part of their programme and it takes place during vacation periods on a voluntary basis.

Conclusion

Regardless of the element of compulsion, there is only a difference in the number of weeks of placement, when compared with each other: RBSL students spent 24 weeks average on a placement compared to the compulsory 36-week period for the EBSL.

For category 1 (Placements outside the UK undertaken by UK students), 58% of EBSL UK students had an international placement whereas 98% RBSL UK students had a UK placement.

For category 2 (Placements outside the UK undertaken by international (non-UK) students), 25% of RBSL students had international placements compared to 43% of EBSL students.

For category 3 (Placements with an international focus inside the UK undertaken by UK students) - due to the lack of reliable data, we found it difficult to quantify this accurately.

Even though the 36 weeks are compulsory, all the students sampled have achieved the desired amount of weeks at EBSL. In addition, a small proportion of students at EBSL have carried out more than 36 weeks.

Even though it was not compulsory, all RBSL students with no exception had undertaken placements for an average of 24 weeks.

Epilogue

And what did the Famous Four do afterwards?

Well, we travelled back to London in three separate ways: Azam by train late at night on the second day, Nick by car direct to his home in Hertfordshire after lunch on the third day, and Karina and Mariona as an all-Spanish-speaking pair by train in the late afternoon of the third day.

We staggered into work in undergraduate induction week so there was no real rest once we were back at Regent’s College.

We all promptly forgot to contact any of the people we had met at the Conference and whom we had promised to get in touch with because we had so much in common with them or had such interesting things to tell each other.

Most interestingly, perhaps, one of us (Karina) has now abandoned the team in order to follow her husband to Iceland – what will we do without her?

For the rest of us, life goes on in the Park and we begin to think of another ASET Conference – next year in …

[Thanks must be given to the Learning, Teaching and Research Committee at EBSL, and to RBSL, for their support to us for participation in the Conference.]