ABSTRACT
This question has been deliberately left to the last. It is all too easy for teachers and lecturers to blame all their troubles on lack of resources, but before they do so they need to think whether they are making the best use of what they already have. So it was necessary to work through all the preceding sections in this chapter, to do with organization, planning, development, morale and so on before coming to this final crunch. The issue of resources came up before in Section 14 but there it was in the more limited sense of learning resources, that is, the materials that students need to pursue their learning. Here, ‘resources’ is being used in the generic sense of the financial, physical and human inputs to education. Some of these resources-sites, buildings, facilities, libraries, equipmentaccumulate or depreciate over time, but most resources are more immediate or temporary than that, and this fact makes teaching particularly sensitive to short-term, year-on-year changes in funding. And, depending on the type of institution, 60-90 per cent of that funding may go on staffing. It is no wonder therefore that the most obvious indicators are those to do with human resources, such as funding/income per student, staff-student ratios or age profiles of staff. The question is a basic one: are there sufficient human and other resources to carry out the process of teaching effectively?
