[Nurseries] feed the skills gap, Ctd

It seems the trend is embedded and endemic. A pernicious culture of short-sightedness. Ofsted's chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw said:

"More than two-thirds of our poorest children - and in some of our poorest communities that goes up to eight children out of 10 - go to school unprepared. That means they can't hold a pen, they have poor language and communication skills, they don't recognise simple numbers, they can't use the toilet independently and so on."

Sir Michael added:

"The corollary of not preparing children well for school is that they don't do well in reception and, if they don't do well in reception, they don't get on at key stage one, they find it difficult to read at seven, they fail at the end of primary school and that failure continues into secondary school."

The Cult of University, Ctd Val McDermid

Val McDermid (@valmcdermid) appeared on the Question Time of March 20 2014 held in Warrington and said (21 minutes):

"Young people who've been betrayed by the promises that have been made to them, who've gone off to university, got their degrees, run up a huge amount of debt and all they do is find themselves pushing a trolling up and down an inner-city train, because there aren't graduate jobs for them. These are actually the things that upset me, that I care about."

Yet university applications and entrants continues to increase. That is why I have said that 'University Is Now An ETHICAL Question.' And let's remember what Erica Buist said; she captured the betrayal of young people perfectly:

"The minute [young people] graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit... the 11-plus and the 12-plus... and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important."

Watch video here.

Cult of university, Ctd @ericabuist: "We've done what you asked,society! Release the jobs!"

Erica Buist (@ericabuist) is the founder of the How To Be Jobless blog and now works on the Guardian Digital Journalism Scheme. She wrote a fantastic blog 'Telling a young person to 'Just get a job' is like going to the Sahara and yelling 'Just rain!'.' She said:  

"Today's youth has spent years chasing qualifications no one ever asks us about. The notion that algebra would ever be useful seemed fishy, but the grownups insisted: education, no matter how apparently arbitrary, leads to jobs."

Money quote right here:

"The minute we graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit Sats and the 11-plus and the 12-plus and Sats again and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important."

Another great bit:

The cult of university, Ctd Short-changed

Rob Behrens, chief executive of The Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education

The Sunday Times (9.iii.2014) reported on a 2013 study of more than 17,000 undergraduates (commissioned by Which?) which found weekly contact time between students and staff had fallen from 14 hours and 48 minutes in 1963 to 13 hours 42 minutes in 2012. Some students shared their experiences:

Josh Vallance, a first-year history student at one university, said:

"I have seven hours’ contact time at the moment but that will drop to three in my final year. Some of the seminars are good, but there are just too few of them."

A first-year geography student who wished to remain anonymous, said she regretted going to university:

"As far as the university is concerned, I am non- existent. I could disappear for good and none of the academic staff would ever notice... When I’ve emailed my personal tutor about something, she just says she’s the wrong person to ask. I feel that I am wasting my time." 

This backs up my assertion that for many young people university is a giant holding pen. A student in her final year of an English literature degree at a Scottish university said:

"My last essay took two months to be marked, which may sound trivial but it’s impossible to know how you are getting on without feedback."

The cult of university, Ctd Michael Gove and Matthew Hancock speeches

Going into an #Apprenticeship or to University should become the new norm for young people when they leave school: both must be top options
— Matt Hancock (@matthancockmp) March 5, 2014

Two speeches to look at. Firstly, Michael Gove's speech at McLaren Technology Centre, Woking, Surrey about the future of vocational education. Secondly, Matthew Hancock's (@matthancockmp) speech at the BBC's 'You're Hired' conference, launching the National Apprenticeship Week 2014.

Michael Gove speech

Speaking at McLaren, where educational and technical innovation meet, his goal was to talk about the relationship between education and the world of work. He said:

"If young people are to be prepared for that radically changing world of work, we need a plan to change our education system - and to secure their future. In particular, we need to end the artificial and damaging division between the academic and the practical."

What Michael Gove called "the apartheid at the heart of our education system." More:

"And we need to ensure that practical, technical and vocational education is integrated with academic learning to make both more compelling for all students in our schools, and more valuable in the new labour market."

University feeds the skills gap, Ctd Northern Ireland

The skills gap has been described as one of the 'biggest' threats to the recovery and that careers education is palpably ‘failing young people’. Discussion has been healthy in America, growing in England in Wales, but silent in Northern Ireland.

That's changed. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in Northern Ireland has published a critical review of the outworking of relations between schools and employers. The Belfast Telegraph reports here:

"Too many young people are ill-prepared for the job market when they finish full-time education. Advice and guidance offered in the schools is sometimes not given sufficient priority in school activities."

And so:

"The CBI combines a series of critical comments on careers advice with a number of positive suggestions on the ways in which employers can, and should, be more supportive of the challenges faced by schools."

Closing the skills gap, Ctd

Kids to be taught to code from age 5 in Eng & Wales - we need this urgently for schools in NI http://t.co/ZFaAEFo9iM
— Jenni Porter (@jenporterhall) January 24, 2014

Eleanor Mills (@EleanorMills) wrote in The Sunday Times here, 'This mum says: Here’s looking at you, code.' She said: "As more IT jobs go unfilled, the government has put coding on the curriculum. Parents should get techy too: after only a day’s tuition I built my own app."

HOWEVER. Coding is not being put on the curriculum in Northern Ireland. Nor is it being put on the curriculum in Wales! AS Jenni Porter said, we all need this urgently now.

 

@brianjohnspencr England only at present cc @DrTomCrick @Lottiedexter @BBCRadio4
— Miles Berry (@mberry) February 6, 2014

@brianjohnspencr Scotland has 'computing education' already, which includes programming from c age 7, I think. Wales set to improve soon.
— Miles Berry (@mberry) February 10, 2014

Jenni Russell - Young people spent 13 years listening to a Labour government telling them that university is the key to a better life. The exhortations have shaped reality.

In 2011 Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) wrote in The Guardian here:

"[Young people have] spent 13 of the past 14 years listening to a Labour government telling them that university is the key to a better life. The exhortations have shaped reality. With almost half the age group going on to higher education, anyone who doesn't do so risks being labelled as below average, however unjust that might be. A degree might not be worth what it used to be now that so many people have them. For anyone who is ambitious, though, not having one has become a handicap that needs to be explained away."

She finished by saying:

"We have spent the past 10 days agonising about how to give the most desperate young people hope in their futures and a stake in society. This week we are turning around to those who have worked diligently and telling them: sorry, we know it's tough out there, and the good jobs don't exist in any quantity, but we're not prepared to develop you any further – you're on your own. It's a foolish, short-sighted, rotten way to be running either the country or the education system."

On a side but related note, the skills minister Matthew Hancock recently said in an article, 'Parents must drop 'sniffy' attitude to apprenticeships, leading headmistress says':

"Concentrating only on academic training to the exclusion of technical training was a big mistake."

Jenni Russell in full here. In a blog post here I wrote that a Sunday Times poll found that in many universities are more interested in research than their students. My previous post on Jenni Russell here and here. Previous posts in The Cult of University series here, here university here, here, here, on the University Neurosis here, on The Legally Blonde complex here and also a piece here. Also on the Huffington Post here. My blog post on YouGov who found that employers have found graduates non-work-ready, here. My blog posthere where a Sunday Times poll found that students are critical of university teaching standard and that universities are more interested in research than teaching students.

Christopher Hitchens - "I feel very envious of someone who is young and active and starting out" (2011)

In the video above and here and here, Christopher Hitchens made his last public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention (October 30 2011) and made a petition and entreaty for the new and emerging generation of writers, thinkers and creators:

"At this present moment I have to say I feel very envious of someone who is young and active and starting out on this argument. Just think of the extraordinary things that are happening to us. Go, for example, to the Smithsonian Museum, to the new hall of Human Origins, a magnificently curated new exhibition... What a wonderful thing to be starting out in this tremendous new field of endeavour. How fabulous it would be if you had a gift for physics, to get a job as an intern with Laurence Krauss, for example, who is just beginning to unravel... the idea of the parallel universe. With each horizon that we reach we see more bending beautifully towards and away from us. The knowledge we have, say not just of the sentience and the cognition of animals, all of it is incredibly recent. A matter of decades and enormously rich and yet again very much challenging our claim to primary or supremacy in the biosphere and rich in every possible kind of discovery. I so envy those who [can glimpse those things]... I hope that each of you forms just such an ambition this evening and carries it forward."

There's no business like the Law School business

Sian Griffiths (@SianGriffiths6) recently did wonderful some work in The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) here, reporting on the "1000s of law students who will never practice law." The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) is now complicit in this economic madness, offering to add yet more aspiring, but credulous, law students to the "glut" of jobless or desk-monkey law students - see advertisement above! Above that advertisement The Sunday Times included a lengthy encomium, via Sian Griffiths, on a racing driver turned law student. 

Nigel Savage, chief executive of the University of Law was featured on that encomium. He passed wise words on employer-led practice learning, as opposed to the "traditional liberal education" (euphemism for "bums on seats, don't teach education" (as per the Jenni Russell article here)). Apart from that it was cheap salesmanship, PR passed as journalism. Journalism's ignoble and shameful capitulation.

Yet here's what people don't know. The University of Law was sold to a private equity fund for £200 million. With that, you have to ask: If someone was prepared to pay £200 million for the University of Law, there must be big money to be made from teaching law students?

Yes, there's no business like the Law School business. So here's my question for the Sunday Times: Why not offer scholarships for a degree in languages? In technology and engineering? For this is where the growth and economic opportunity lies. 

As a post-script. Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) has written feverishly on his ad-free blog The Dish about "the surrender of journalism to PR and advertising." It seems that it's infected even The Sunday Times. 

Jenni Russell - 'Some universities teach and some do not'

Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) wrote in The Times:

"We must throw a spotlight on those institutions where students can get away with little work... [the] mass of words and numbers avoids the hidden truth about university courses; that a few offer a terrific, demanding education while many others are content to allow students to drift through — in a three-year haze. 

Occasionally that is obvious. Everyone expects medicine at Oxford to be more gruelling than event management at a new university. For a majority of courses, though, it is impossible to understand from descriptions just how much study is involved. Hundreds of thousands of students are miserably ill-served as a result. 

A tiny think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute, collaborated with Which? magazine last summer to research the student experience. In a survey that consulted almost 40,000 students over two years, it discovered that, on average, they work only three-quarters of the hours that ministers assumed they did. The number of hours per week that law students put in varied from 21 at some universities to 47 at others. Medicine, which one might assume was tough everywhere, varied from 32 to 50. Maths and computer courses required an average of 23 hours a week at the least demanding universities and 44 at the toughest."

The economy has changed, education hasn't

In response to an article in The Spectator magazine by John Armitt, I wrote a piece in The Huffington Post here, 'Remaking Education to make young people work ready' and said:

"The economy has changed beyond all description in recent years. Unfortunately schools & university curricula haven't."

 http://t.co/w16HkJsaGM

The Economist (@TheEconomist) included an article, 'The effect of today's technology on tomorrow's jobs will be immense'

 http://t.co/4pIrnAmxW3 http://t.co/v934fhY6Nl