And so it grows. Exeter (led by Steve Smith, president of Universities UK) has announced it plans to charge the full £9,000 in student fees from 2012. And the chilling significance of its announcement is that Exeter is not even part of the prestigious Russell Group of universities, all of which might be expected to charge top whack.
Thus far only Cambridge and Imperial, both Russell Group, have announced their intentions to charge £9,000. In the Guardian league table of universities, they hold second and seventh places respectively. Exeter comes in at 14 (though interestingly it takes ninth place in the student satisfaction rating).
In the most recent QS table of the world's top 100 universities, Cambridge comes first and Imperial seventh. Exeter does not feature at all among the 19 UK institutions that make the cut.
@MckRich tweets:
"Exeter will charge £9,000 for every course rather than some courses. How long before every uni charges 9K for every course?"
David Willetts, the universities minister, says institutions should be able to charge much less for arts courses because they are cheaper to run than science ones.
Meanwhile more than 600 Oxbridge academics have written to Willetts and the business secretary, Vince Cable, demanding the whole process of implementing a tuition fee hike is halted.
They say universities are being forced to "fly blind" because a white paper outlining how the new system will work is being delayed until later in the year.
"We note with dismay and alarm that universities are being forced to take major decisions, with unknown consequences, at a breakneck speed. We are being asked to 'fly blind' over matters of the utmost importance in respect of our ability to continue to deliver world-class education and research."
More education news from the Guardian
• Government reforms will make the admissions code harder to enforce, the children's commissioner Maggie Atkinson has warned. She says the education bill currently before the Commons will remove checks and increase social segregation in schools.
• Children in year 6 have been finding out which secondary school they'll be going to in September. We have an expert coming in again today to give advice to parents on what to do if their child has missed out on a place at their first choice of school.
• The LSE, in an attempt to defuse the growing row over a £300,000 donation from a charitable foundation run by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Muammar, is looking at setting up a £300,000 scholarship fund for Libyan students.
• Mary Beard tells us what is was like to teach Latin in Jamie Oliver's Dream School. Unsurprisingly, she found discipline a bit of an issue:
"It's not that students at Cambridge hang on your every word. Far from it. But they have learned the fine art of passive disobedience - sitting in the back row of the lecture, texting their friends and simply hoping to avoid detection. The kids in my class (and in others, I heard) had a more active approach to disobedience. If they didn't want to concentrate, they got up and went to the loo, fetched bottles of water, fought with their friends, or chatted loudly. My mother was a trained teacher and could shut a kid up with just a single steely glance. I couldn't."
She reckons historian David Starkey made a calculated decision to highlight the problem.
"The Jade Goody principle is that no one gets noticed by being quiet, or by doing what they are supposed to do. So David Starkey walked determinedly into his on-screen strop about the kids' behaviour, and picked up top billing at the same time."
On the whole though, it sounds like she had a jolly good time.
• @AndrewSparrow tweeted this morning:
"Michael Gove is 'the worst driver in England, possibly the Western world', according to his wife".a link to the story
Education news from around the web
• The pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline says it will pay off the tuition fee debt of its 100 or so graduate trainees when university fees rise in England, the BBC reports.
• Actor James Purefoy, whose latest movie Ironclad is based the 13th century siege of Rochester castle, has said that boring history teachers should be "banged up" for making the subject seem dull. He told the website Digital Spy that he'd had a bad experience with a "terrible history teacher" at school. Purefoy apparently left school with only one O-level, though later he went to night school and got 11 more.
• Education writer Francis Gilbert is delighted his son has a place at the local comprehensive in Tower Hamlets.
Insight into journalism seminars for teachers
A unique opportunity for teachers to spend a day at the Guardian, find out how a national news media organisation works and get ideas and resources that can be used in the classroom.
News 11 March Learn about the 24 news cycle; meet news reporters, feature writers, picture and sub editors; understand the role newspaper advertising; go on a tour of the editorial floors and take part in a workshop creating you own news front page which will be evaluated by an editor.
Multimedia 31 March Writing for a news website, web editing, blogging, the use of social media, video production; podcasting.
Places are limited and likely to fill up quickly, so book soon.
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