In England, applications before Christmas rose by 3.3% compared to the previous year, and in Wales they rose by 1.7%. The biggest rush was experienced during November. Applications from students from the rest of the EU and from non-EU countries also grew.

The rising of university tuition fees in the UK, meaning students will pay up to £9,000 a year, has led to a frenzy of students trying to start their course before the rise, along with the large numbers of students who did not manage to get a university place last year. Many of the extra applicants are from older students, with high increases in applications from 19- and 20-year-olds.

Competition will be fierce, with over 8,000 more students applying this year. However, there are the same number of university places as there were last year, so many students will be left disappointed; one in three applicants did not get a place last year.

Application numbers have risen most significantly in subjects related to medicine, law and education, but fell in linguistics and classics, perhaps supporting the view that rising fees will mean less people will study subjects that are not considered to lead straight into a specific job, such as the humanities.

Despite the rises in England and Wales, Scottish institutions saw applications fall by 15.2% from last year. This could be a backlash to new proposals to raise tuition fees for students from the rest of the UK by up to three times in 2012. Currently, students from England and Wales pay under £2,000 but Scottish students pay nothing, as do EU students due to European Union rules that state they must be charged the same as home students.

Russian academics have paid their first visit to the University of Lincoln as part of a major international project to raise standards of social work education in Russia.

Last year the University of Lincoln won more than €1,000,000 (one million Euros) in grant funding from the European Union under the Trans European Mobility Programme for University Studies (TEMPUS).

TEMPUS was established in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall to promote cooperation between universities in EU countries and their counterparts in neighbouring countries. It now covers 27 nations spanning Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.

The grant will fund a three-year programme to improve the quality of teaching and learning materials on social work courses at universities in the Volga region of Russia.

This will involve reforms to the teaching curriculum, development of new course material, production of new text books and improvements to placement opportunities.

Academics from Lincoln’s School of Health and Social Care are leading an international consortium of social work departments on the project, working alongside colleagues from universities in Germany, Greece, Poland and Lithuania.

Senior social work lecturers from the project team visited Russia in March this year and in September their Russian counterparts visited Lincoln for the first time.

The University of Lincoln welcomed senior academics from three partner Russian universities — Kazan State Medical University, Nizhni Novgorod State University and Saratov State Technical University — for a three-day visit.

The delegation discussed the format of undergraduate and postgraduate social work programmes, as well as issues such as e-learning, project planning and quality management. The visit also featured off-campus trips to a local family centre and a mental health day centre.

The delegation met with Lincoln’s new cohort of social work students, as well as senior University of Lincoln figures, including Vice Chancellor Professor David Chiddick.

Janet Walker, Principal Lecturer in the School of Health and Social Care at the University of Lincoln and Project Director for the TEMPUS project, said: “Our guests were extremely impressed with the University’s dynamism and the commitment and preparation of its staff.  Social work is a very new subject in Russian universities and the opportunity to support its development is very exciting.  Lincoln has worked hard to develop innovative social work courses that answer professional and community needs. It is therefore a pleasure and honour to share our experiences with overseas colleagues.”