Last week Google held an online conference exploring the skills young people need in the 21st Century. To support the conference, the Economist conducted a global survey of business leaders, teachers and students to discover the attributes most needed in the workplace. It won’t come as much of a surprise that the top five ‘21st Century Skills’ were:
Loughborough University has been named university of the year by WhatUni, based on the opinions of over 20,000 students, followed by Harper Adams and Swansea University. The results, were based on averages taken from reviews submitted by students to the website over the past year. In total 113 universities met the minimum threshold of 100 reviews to be included in the rankings. The figures also showed that student satisfaction has risen compared with 2014, with a 3.4% increase in the overall category. However, accommodation has seen a year-on-year drop, while facilities at London universities were rated lower than in any other region.
At least 20 universities are offering unconditional offers, a quadrupling in the past year. They include; Birmingham, Sussex, Nottingham, Queen Mary, Leicester, Lincoln, Lancaster, City, Leeds Beckett, Sheffield Hallam, Liverpool Hope, Swansea, and UEA. Reading has an ‘academic excellence scheme’, which removes some, or all, A-level conditions for selected “outstanding” candidates. Keele is making initial conditional offers, but switching to unconditional for students with high GCSE and AS results, and A-level predictions who accept them as their firm choice. Aston is contacting ‘strong’ candidates who have yet to confirm their first-choice institution, offering to change their offer to unconditional. 
The Institute of Physics said the number of UK students applying to study for a Physics degree has risen by 40% over four years, whilst Oxford University said it had seen applications rise by a third over five years. Applications for Physics and Astronomy at Manchester rose by 37% between 2008 and 2014, while its postgraduate applications increased by 40%. Laura Prichard, an astrophysics PhD student at Oxford, said that although movies may “push the realm of reality”, they are inspiring the children she speaks to at outreach events. She said that, “The easiest way to convey how cool a subject is, is to make it into a huge blockbuster.” 
The Institute of Maths has created an on-line quiz with the aim of explaining the types of careers you can enter using Maths qualifications. You can access it from this link. The quiz comes with the warning from the IMA: IMPORTANT NOTE! This quiz has been designed to give you a flavour of the types of careers that maths can lead to – in a fun and interactive way! It has been designed to pave the way for further thought and discussion. There are hundreds of mathematical careers to choose from – too many to be contained in this small quiz! That’s the beauty of maths – endless opportunities! For further ideas, check out the rest of the website. This quiz is not the end of your careers advice; but just the beginning! Good luck!
If you've even wondered what it would actually be like to work for MI5, here's an article from The Guardian newspaper which might answer some of your questions. Read it here.
The number of people on 'zero-hours' contracts increased to 697,000 in the final quarter of last year, according to the Office of National Statistics. This represents 2.3% of all people in employment, an increase from 1.9% for the same period in 2013. More than half of the employers in accommodation and food services use zero-hours contracts.