After a career in the armed forces, deciding what to do next can be a challenge for some ex-servicemen and women.
As they return to civilian life, many may not consider higher education an option, but an initiative at the University of South Wales aims to change that.
The institution has introduced a scheme that awards veterans academic credit for the training they undertook and the knowledge they gained while serving, equivalent to up to the first two years of an undergraduate degree, or two-thirds of a postgraduate qualification.
This can help people to reskill and join the workforce more quickly, and at a substantially reduced cost, while also giving them the opportunity to gain entry to a course for which they lack the formal entry requirements.
Since the scheme was launched in November last year, 260 applications have been received from across the country, and 50 people will be starting at USW next month.
The applicants range from those who served in the rank of private or equivalent up to senior officers. It is hoped that many more of the 260 applicants will be placed on courses once their assessment processes are complete.
Credit can be given for qualifications gained in the armed forces, with many applicants opting for courses in fields such as engineering, construction and sport. But recognition can also be given to broader experience, such as leadership skills, with business and management courses proving popular.
The architect of the recognition of prior learning scheme for the armed forces is Ross Hall, principal lecturer in sport psychology and USW’s armed forces champion, and the idea came from his own personal experience.
After a 30-year career in the Royal Engineers, during which he carried out tours in the Falkland Islands, Northern Ireland and Bosnia, Mr Hall studied sport and exercise science at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, before becoming a lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton.
As a specialist in sport psychology, Mr Hall supported the British wheelchair rugby team at the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games, and the British men’s handball team at the 2012 London Olympics.
“Education can be the cornerstone for a new career or [can serve]?to enhance an existing career,” said Mr Hall. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do but thankfully someone took a chance on me, and that was a turning point in my life.”
Support for ex-service personnel has improved since Mr Hall left the military in the mid-1990s, when, he says, it was “pretty much a wave and off you go”.
Since 2008, former personnel who have completed at least four years’ service can have their tuition fees for an undergraduate degree paid by the government.
But there remain a significant number of veterans who completed their service before 2008 and are looking to reskill, and the demands on the military nowadays mean that someone could see active duty and still have been enlisted for fewer than four years.
This is particularly relevant to South Wales, where the Welsh regiments have traditionally been big recruiters, and USW offers bursaries to former service personnel, as well as free specialist assessments and advice.
It is not just a matter of helping ex-service personnel, Mr Hall said. Having these individuals and their experiences in the lecture theatre and seminar room can enrich the learning of everyone on the course, he argued.
Ultimately, Mr Hall hopes that universities across the country will expand their efforts to give recognition to veterans’ experiences, and that the forces will help too, by aligning their qualifications more closely with the activities of higher education institutions.
But he believes that the work at USW is an important step towards making university study an option for more former service personnel.
“Ninety per cent of the guys I served with were capable of completing a degree, but it was not something they would ever think to do,” he said. “They do have the relevant experience, but it’s just applied in a slightly different context, so it’s about guiding these applicants.”
In numbers
260 – the number of applications that the USW has received from veterans since November
Campus news
University of Liverpool
Sixteen computer scientists from the University of Liverpool travelled to Argentina to deliver papers at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Widely regarded as the most significant conference in its field, it attracted a record-breaking 1,996 submissions for papers this year, of which 575 made the cut. As an institution, Liverpool was second only to the University of Oxford in the number of papers that its researchers presented to IJCAI 2015, on topics ranging from automated planning and intelligent data integration to auctions, voting protocols and models of negotiation.
Leeds Trinity University
A PhD student has discovered a forgotten 18th-century ballad that suggests that Robin Hood’s generosity and popularity may have been short-lived. The text, discovered by Stephen Basdeo, a PhD student at Leeds Trinity University, depicts the famous former outlaw in later life as a corrupt, embezzling official of King John, by whom he had been pardoned. Mr Basdeo said that the discovery illustrates that Robin “was not as popular with people in past ages as he is today”.
De Montfort University
People who use the internet or mobile phones are more likely to report cognitive failures, research suggests. In the first study of its kind, Lee Hadlington, a senior lecturer in cognitive psychology at De Montfort University, found that the more time a person spent on the internet or a mobile phone, the more likely they were to forget things, make mistakes and lack awareness of their surroundings. The research has been published in the journal Computers In Human Behavior.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/University College London
A ?56 million infectious disease research centre could be built in central London. Plans for the Bloomsbury Research Institute – a joint initiative between the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University College London – have been submitted to Camden Council for consideration. If approved, the five-storey institute in Tavistock Place, in Bloomsbury, will house laboratories containing more than 200 scientists when it is completed in 2018. Funding will come from the two higher education institutions, as well as the government, charities, research councils and companies.
University of Kent
The battle against illegal ivory trading could be made easier by a new programme designed to automatically sift through adverts on eBay and find banned products. Academics from the University of Kent, who developed the system, hope that the algorithm could save huge amounts of time and money in the effort to stop ivory being sold online. The programme proved to be almost as effective in detecting illegal ivory as human experts.
University of Bristol
Bipolar disorder could be the evolutionary price that humans pay for traits such as intelligence and creativity, according to a study that showed a link between the condition and high IQ in children. The research, which involved scientists from the universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and Texas, used birth cohort data from Bristol’s “Children of the 90s” longitudinal study to establish the link. Bipolar disorder was most strongly linked to verbal IQ, it found.
Swansea University
Researchers from Swansea University have agreed to work more closely with colleagues in Southeast Asia. The Welsh institution has signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Malaysia Pahang, clearing the way for collaboration in fields such as engineering, medicine, energy technology and biosciences. As a pilot project, closer links will be built between UMP’s Center of Excellence for Advanced Research in Fluid Flow and Swansea’s Energy Safety Research Institute.
University of St Andrews
Tall, masculine men who are around the age of 35 are perceived to be most dominant by others, according to a team from the University of St Andrews. Carlota Batres, Daniel Re and David Perrett from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience used computer graphic manipulations to make subtle alterations to images of men’s faces. Simple increases in a man’s height and age automatically made them appear more dominant to study participants, according to a paper published in the journal Perception.
