The biggest challenge in the education sector is to make it affordable to everybody, says Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the over 100-year-old Salford University, Manchester, UK.

Business Line caught up with him for an interview at the WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education) conference organisation by the Qatar Foundation in Doha, where he was a delegate.

Excerpts from the interview:

At the WISE conference, the focus was on education of children at the margins. How do you feel about quality education still being elitist in many Asian, African and South American countries?

I feel very strongly about it. So, in future, education between different countries should be a partnership. It’s not about us exporting a highly expensive product.

At our University, we’re examining how we can come into countries like India and work with partners to offer the best opportunities. I am very excited about the model we are developing for that.

Many international universities have joint ventures such as twinning programmes with Indian universities; you don’t have any such initiative in India?

We have a number of partnerships in different parts of the world… we’ve been in Sri Lanka for 25 years but are yet to come to India. We want to set up international hubs, where our expert staff will fly out from 5 to 8 days and provide quality teaching, and are excited about doing that in India.

And probably use technology through distance learning?

Yes, but the face time is really very important.

Have you faced problems in forging educational partnership in India because our Government has strict controls on who can come into the education sector… ?

We find India quite confusing because we get certain messages from the Union government and entirely different messages from the state governments and partners. And there are so many new private universities in India and we’d like to work with them. But we also respect the older universities because they have a higher status, but often not much money.

Tell us a little bit about Salford.

We are well over 100 years old and have over 20,000 students, including 2,000 international students. The three big countries which supply us students are China, India and Nigeria.

Nigeria is a surprise!

That’s because we teach a very good oil and gas programme for the petrochemical industry. For India it is computer science, we are mainly an engineering university. I am very interested in new and digital media and television and India is interesting for us because your media is shifting to the Internet, isn’t it?

Absolutely, I work for print, but we are paying a lot of attention to our internet edition too.

What impresses me the most about India is that a family with almost nothing will give everything to get their child educated and I admire that.

Along with the philosophy of Amartya Sen, a leading world economist and a distinguished Indian intellectual, I find his ideas on education inspiring too.

What about the status of education in Africa?

I worked in Africa for 30 years, in the University of Cape Town. Africa is another challenge, a main reason being the infrastructure there is so poor.

They need to rebuild that for education and that is a really big issue.

What can universities like yours do to help education in poorer or developing countries?

Let me put it this way… the economic growth in Britain last year was 0.2 per cent.

Yours was well over 5 per cent. The point is the global economy is shifting south, towards Asia, towards China, India, and to survive our universities need to build these partnerships because we live in a globalised world. We’d like to think our international education is good for India, but it’s also very good for our own students.

In my university, and I am very proud of it, half of my British students are the first in their families to come to a university. Lots of them haven’t had the opportunity to leave Britain; many haven’t even been to London. So for them to meet international students is a great opportunity.

Moving forward, what are the challenges in education?

There are huge financial challenges in making education affordable for many more students.

We’ve got to find very clever ways of using new technology in the best way to improve the quality of education, while we reduce the costs.

I also believe women’s education is important everywhere. If we don’t drive that we’re not going to get social change.

> rasheeda.bhagat@thehindu.co.in(The writer was in Doha on the invitation of the

Qatar Foundation)

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