BRITAIN "PLUMMETS" DOWN LIST OF "EDUCATED NATIONS"

The Telegraph reports that Britain has plummeted down the graduate league table to 15th in what it describes, somewhat haughtily as the list of ‘educated nations’, and that this has damaged its future.

Horror of horrors, the UK is behind Poland, Iceland, Portugal and Slovakia. How absolutely terrible! Clearly no one from the Telegraph staff has visited any of these countries recently!

I read with disbelief the rubbish that the general secretary of the University and College Union, trotted out about other countries preparing to play a leading role in the new knowledge economy while we risk consigning a generation to the scrapheap of inactivity. What garbage.

The Director of the Russell Group of universities also had a self serving message. She complained that whilst the UK was cutting back on university places, other countries were pumping billions of dollars into their tertiary establishments.

Over the last 20 or so years we have been sending more and more students to universities to do ever more simplified degrees.

Despite denials all education has been dumbed down. Schools eager to be placed as far up league tables as possible have chosen commercially run exam boards which can produce the highest grades. SVQs are module taught and frequently fail to build upon previous work, so that material is learned over a short period and forgotten once the test is over and the module secured. Lecturers, with a career interest in the success of their students, often double as examiners.

Universities, keen to take advantage of the funding system that pays for bums on seats, and aware of the lowering rigour of Highers and A levels, adapt their courses appropriately.

And what do so many of these graduates do at the end of the course? Sainsbury’s, Tesco, BT call centres and bars employ a fair number of them.

The universities say that we should be preparing for the end of the recession, and so we should, but not the way that we have been doing in the past. (If we must have degree educated staff in Tesco, could they please do a degree in retailing, including a module on customer service?)

We have no plumbers, no electricians, no bricklayers, and no joiners (well not that aren’t called Warszawski or Krakowski!) Although to be fair, both the Scottish and English governments are increasing apprenticeship funding, and that is a most welcome move.

But we don’t need many more people with degrees in media studies or sports science. There are no jobs for them.

It occurs to me that one of the problems with our analysis of success is that we rely on naked figures; targets that are set and achieved, in a soviet fashion (and it happened under the Tories too!!)

From a commercial point of view, it doesn’t matter that we produce 50% of the population as graduates if there are no jobs to use their talents on.

It is of no import where we are in the league table as long as we produce and develop the kind of talents that the country needs and can use. Keeping up the the Polands and the Slovakias on numbers alone is futile.

When will we learn that league tables are the devil’s work?

Getting Britain Back to Work. Is Iain Duncan Smith the Man for the Job?

Iain Duncan Smith has been handed the poison chalice that is the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). He seems a reasonable choice for the job. Although being something of a catastrophe as leader of the party and, despite touted as being more right wing than Norman Tebbit, he seems to be a man with both a heart and a head.

He will need both.

The objective is to get people back to work. A hard task. Unemployment is rising, and will continue to do so as the results of the recession long after recovery starts. There are fewer jobs at lower salaries, with fewer hours, and ever more people are being thrown on to the dole by the government’s own plans to cut costs.

It will seem to IDS that just as he gets a few hundred back to work, some government department will pay off 4,000 and he’ll be even worse off than before.

Welfare to work is important: for everyone. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to maintain any more people than necessary, and the jobless must work for a living. It’s how life is. You work, you eat!

But at the same we have to be cautious. There are many reasons why people are not working, besides the fact that currently there are few jobs.

Much is made of the Eastern European influx to do work that Brits won’t do, as there was in the 50s and 60s (in England) of Windrush Caribbeans. People from ex-communist countries are imbued with the culture that you worked or you were thrown into prison. Good, some say, let’s do that here... but you need to remember that there, the state provided jobs for everyone. We can’t do that here.

One of our problems is a mismatch between what is needed and what people can do. We live in an increasingly technological age. Of the few jobs that are available, most require trained and skilled workers. We don’t have them. Until recently we have always had heavy factory work for guys, and we don’t any more. The failure in the DWP and its predecessors’ management is that they have failed to understand that. You just can’t take a lad who wants, and is equipped to spend his days lifting, digging, sweating over a heavy load, and put him in a callcentre.

Much is made of people’s apparent unwillingness to work, but many I’ve worked with would do anything to get a decent job. Employers though don’t want telesalesmen with heavy local accents, and no natural inclination for keyboard work. Within a generation typing has gone from being something girls do, to a job for everyone.

We need to look very carefully at what successive governments have done to help create this situation.

The closure of most of our manufacturing industry; the stopping of assistance for apprenticeships; the competition between privatized exam boards selling the easiest exams to schools so that they will be able to get the best results in the league tables; the league tables themselves resulting in those who will not shine in exams being discarded; the ‘university for all’ at any cost, producing graduates for whom there are no jobs, and who end up taking the callcentre/pub jobs that might have gone to the less educated.

This subject is far too large for a single post. I will return to some of the many reasons I have found why people can’t get work, even when there is work.

I’d appreciate hearing other people’s views on surely one of the most contentious of all government problems.