AFC Wimbledon each year runs WorldWide Wombles Weekend a special international celebration hosted by The Dons Trust, supported by Wimbledon in Sporting History (WiSH) and the Wimbledon Old Players Association (WOPA)

Plans for this year were made and communicated 5 months ago for the fixture against Northampton on Saturday 7 March, 3pm, fans from around the world have been booking to come to this game.

This week Sky Sports requested the game to be moved to Sunday 8th March 12pm, so it can be broadcast on TV. AFC Wimbledon requested that the game not be moved due to these plans but this request has been refused.

This fixture is also earmarked as the club’s Level Playing Field Unite for Access fixture, as well as a celebration of International Women’s Day with our annual Women at the Game lead by the Foundation.

Even for myself travelling from Southampton for a 12pm kick off is no fun on a Saturday when moved for TV and it’s made worse on a Sunday.

That weekend there are no premium league games so I guess Sky are just trying to fill their schedule with any football they can find.

This is such an outrageous move by Sky Sports and the EFL to refuse to listen to our club request.

My distaste for Sky is not new but this, this takes the biscuit.

After a competitive internal process in Nov/December I can now excitedly confirm I have been appointed as the new Head of the Department for Art & Media Technology at Winchester School of Art for an initial term of 3 years from Jan. This means I will be looking after staff and students across Fine Art, Games Design, Game Art, Creative Computing, Creative Technologies, Digital Media, Contemporary Curating and Arts and Cultural Leadership. I can’t wait to drive forward all the excellent research, education and civic engagement we have been undertaking already.

It will mean a very busy semester 2 for me as my games work with year 3 and our 10 year alumni show “Changing the Game” will still continue as we make more adjustments in the summer to support my new leadership role.

However even after that my main education practice will still be in games and digital practices and so I look forward to being based in our new Capital House campus in Winchester on the games studio floor working with the games students each week.

If you would like to know more about the department follow this link - www.southampton.ac.uk/about/fac…

Before the break I was contacted by our Press team as The Conversation were after someone to write about board games for the holidays. They had some categories they wanted the games to fit under so I said yes and consulted the games team.

The Conversation said they had a lot of interest - of course they are contacting a number of institutes and could I let them know the games we picked. We did. I never heard from them again and it appears this was the contact/article they went with - theconversation.com/an-expert…

I ended up buying Heat: Pedal to the Metal and played it with the family over the holidays—it’s really good.

However, I wanted to share the games we pitched with summaries based on their categories:

Love Letter - A TRAVEL FOR GAME

Love Letter is a compact travel companion, fitting easily into a bag or pocket. With just a small number of cards and a handful of tokens, this deduction game packs surprising depth into a tiny package. With a number of franchise themes you can pick your own family genre. Set up and play in minutes - www.zmangames.com/game/love…

Sushi GO! - A QUICK GAME

Sushi GO! delivers fast-paced card-drafting fun in 15-20 minutes. Simple rules, simultaneous card selection, and no downtime between turns make it perfect for squeezing in multiple quick rounds - www.hobbycraft.co.uk/sushi-go-…

Codenames - EASY TO RETURN TO

Codenames is brilliantly accessible for players who haven’t touched a board game in years. Giving and guessing word clues feels familiar with no complex rules, making it effortless for mixed groups and casual players - www.czechgames.com/news/code…

Wilmot’s Warehouse - FUN FOR ALL THE FAMILY

Wilmot’s Warehouse brings families together with charming cooperative puzzle-solving. Players organize and retrieve items from a chaotic warehouse, encouraging communication without competitive tension. Quirky humor and simple mechanics engage different ages and skill levels - wilmotswarehouse.com

Daybreak - GAME FOR THE BOARD GAME EXPERT FAMILY

Daybreak offers rich, strategic depth that enthusiasts crave. This cooperative climate crisis game features interconnected systems and meaningful decisions requiring careful co-operation. It provides satisfying complexity and replayability for families who enjoy sinking their teeth into a game - daybreakgame.org

And if you want even more recommendations check out this Guardian article - Plus FYI www.theguardian.com/lifeandst…

Recently @dajbelshaw@mastodon.social posted about the fact we cannot apply the “old” model for a “successful” life:

work hard, save patiently and climb the career ladder, max out your pension

It’s a depressingly accurate article and one I agree with. He also connects this to the issue of starting a career with university debt, which compounds the problem. Starting a career with £27,750 of graduate debt is far from ideal, and the current economic climate makes this burden even more problematic.

However, this raises a deeper question about the reductive argument that university education should command higher future wages.

I believe education should be free, with the state and universities funding study through to PhD level. At Winchester School of Art, we’ve taken a small step in this direction by introducing scholarships (from 24/25) that reduce fees for home students pursuing master’s programmes.

A well-educated society is vital—though universities aren’t the only institutions that can provide this education. The recent introduction of V-Levels (planned for September 2027) is a case in point. While these new vocational qualifications aim to simplify the post-16 landscape by replacing around 900 existing qualifications including BTECs, they exemplify a concerning trend: education increasingly designed around “real-world job standards” and employer-led outcomes. For creative disciplines, this creates particular challenges. BTECs have been a successful pathway into creative higher education precisely because they allowed for exploration and development rather than narrow technical training. Their replacement with qualifications explicitly framed around immediate employability risks diminishing the very qualities that make creative education transformative.

This brings me to my central concern: we must challenge the reductive framing that has taken hold—the idea that university education is purely an economic transaction where students pay fees in exchange for highly paid jobs. This transactional mindset has dominated since the introduction of fees and the subsequent push for mass university attendance. The declining graduate premium only exposes the hollowness of this framing: if the financial return is diminishing, the transactional model collapses entirely.

Education should be transformative, not merely transactional. When we reduce it to a financial exchange—or worse, to a skills pipeline for industry—we diminish both its intrinsic value and its broader social purpose. A well-educated society needs critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and people who can engage meaningfully with complex ideas, not just workers trained to meet current employer demands.