Physics Teaching at Sussex
In the beginning, all students in the School of Physical Sciences took the first-year course Structure and Properties of Matter, in line with the ethos of the new university for cross-disciplinary teaching - see the article by Roger Blin-Stoyle. The laboratory component is described in Geoff Jones's reminiscences, while the development of the Socratic method of teaching is described by David Betts and Alan Walton in an article written for Physics Education.
Two particularly important later initiatives were the development of the Physics with European Studies degree, proposed and developed by John Venables and described here, and the introduction in 1989 of the Preliminary Year (later called the Foundation Year), which was the brainchild of David Betts and Colin Finn, and was developed in conjunction with Engineering.