2015
August 5
A present for the teacher
The ability to inspire young people to learn, to give them more knowledge about their world and to help them on the road to being an adult is, I think, a gift. Not everyone has it and sadly some that don’t are employed in a role where they need it. Employed. In other words that is there job.
How strange then that at the end of a school year we seem to have brought in an idea where pupils give their teachers a gift. Now I’m sure it doesn’t happen with every pupil in every school but let’s just think if it did.
Every pupil gives their teacher a gift worth, let’s say £2.50. Nothing too much, maybe just a box of Quality Street. That would mean, if your child is at school for 14 years, you, as a parent, have shelled out £35. Not a lot is it?
There isn’t, so I hear, always enough money in education budgets to pay the salary of all the teachers we require. If every pupil gives a £2.50 present to their teacher each year this would amount to about £20 million each year. Let’s say a junior teacher earns £20,000 and we have 1,000 more teachers immediately.
You all give these presents partly, it would seem, because everyone else does. Would you, therefore, complain if you were taxed an extra £2.50 a year and we could get those extra teachers. You could then stop giving a present to someone is only doing the job they are employed to do. Do you give the dentist a present after a course of treatment; do you give the train driver a present after a year commuting; do you wrap up a nice little something for your council tax officer? No, you don’t.
So why should we do it for teachers? Personally, my teacher’s gift was that he wouldn’t have to teach me next year. That was more than enough, believe me
August 14
And the “A” level results are factual and meaningless
I had waited with this week’s blog until after the A-level (for those from outside the UK, this is the end of school , 18 year old’s exams) results. Let me begin by saying anything that follows is in no way a criticism of the fantastic young people who have spent the last few years studying for these exams. If you spot a note of criticism (possibly a whole symphony of criticism) it is directed at our curriculum, our desire to produce tables and our whole concept of what education should be.
In my day it was very, very different; note not better but different. Firstly you didn’t go to school to collect your results. An envelope came through the letter box and if you were shrewd you hid it for a couple of days while you worked on your excuse speech. Of course this totally failed when you friend came round to tell you his results and your mother was listening. My point, though, is that your results were, essentially, private although it is possible the neighbours could hear the polite discussion between you and your parents.
The grading system was very different too. As I understand it, the top 10% of results got an A grade or in my case a 1. Then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 were passes and 7, 8, 9 were fails. This would mean each year top grades went to 10% of the examinees. There were also failures.
In the latest results I see that roughly 26% obtained an “A” grade and 98.1% was the pass rate. This is what worries me. If nearly everyone can pass an exam, it is surely no longer an exam but just an indicator of a person’s level and, in most cases, the ordinary man and woman, and employer, doesn’t know the syllabus or the curriculum to know how that level has been established.
I know, both from personal experience and comments in the media, that many employers are unhappy at the basic level of education our young people are being given. Unless you know what has been tested and what the marking guidelines were, then any graded result has very little merit.
But what has even less merit is the stupid league tables which we now produce. All statistics, I got an “A” level pass in this by the way, can be made to look good or bad. We certainly shouldn’t judge a school by how many students got an A grade because if, god forbid, that school has a policy of “teaching to the exam”, the quality of learning for their pupils will have been, in my opinion, pretty low. I would prefer a school where the pupils have been in charge of their own learning, have investigated, researched and thought about things rather than one whose pupils have been taught (i.e. brainwashed) into knowing the answers that might be in the exam.
So, in all this, what is my moan, aside from the ones set out in the above piece.It is, on the day the Royal family quite correctly complain about a gross invasion of privacy, that these results should be private; there should be no media hype because what they end up hyping is of no importance at all. The percentage who pass with an A grade means nothing apart from the fact that it is definitely, without any dispute, the number who passed, in that year, with an A grade; nothing more, nothing less. It has no significance on previous years at all. It neither means students are brighter nor that exams are easier. It is a fact and facts are not open to interpretation are they?
August 19
Too many graduates or too few jobs or a society change
Not the blog you were going to get this week but never mind. I awoke this morning, always a lucky moment in my life at this age, to discover the results of a CIPD report. For those, like me, who have no idea what CIPD stands for, it is the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
According to their website, by the way the menus don’t appear to work in Chrome, their purpose is to “champion better work and working lives by improving practices in people and organisation development for the benefit of individuals, businesses, economies and society”.
They go on to say, rather worryingly “In other words, we’re committed to finding the sweet spot between the construct of work itself and people’s experience at work (their working lives), to create a win-win situation for everyone. We believe that good people management and development is not only good for individuals, but it’s also crucial to the success of businesses and economies, which in turn can benefit people and society. Looking after the interests and wellbeing of employees is a good place to start. But to create maximum value for everyone concerned, we must also ensure that work itself is well defined and managed (in terms of what work is, where it’s done, how it’s done and who does it).
I say “rather worryingly”, because if you have just explained your purpose and your next paragraph says “in other words” you obviously didn’t explain it very well. On a personal note I don’t think the second explanation was any better and I think their website, even using Internet Explorer, is abysmally designed and far too complicated.
However, leaving all that aside, the CIPD, and you now know who they are, have produced this report which basically says 58.8% of UK university graduates are working in jobs that do not require a degree. It claimed the number of graduates had now outstripped high-skilled jobs.
The report also said that this issue had a further negative effect as some employers were now requesting degrees for traditional non degree jobs despite there being no change in the skills required.
“The assumption that we will transition to a more productive, higher-value, higher-skilled economy just by increasing the conveyor belt of graduates is proven to be flawed,” said Peter Cheese, chief executive of the CIPD. The CIPD, remember them, good, called for a national debate over how to generate more high-skilled jobs.
In reply the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills replied, presumably over the phone as they no longer cable messages, that: “We are providing the right mix of university places and apprenticeships to ensure more people have the opportunity to advance their careers and businesses to get the skills they need to grow.”, which to me seemed a bloody arrogant response.
The problem though may not be that we don’t have enough high-skilled jobs but that we don’t need any more high-skilled jobs and, therefore, we have too many over-qualified people because we, as a nation, are convinced that having a qualification is the route to success and this is something with which I totally disagree.
We strive to make sure everyone has equal opportunities to be the same as everyone else. If ever Pete Seeger and his little boxes have taken over, it is now. If everyone is equal, in this instance if everyone has a degree then jobs must be filled by graduates. But there are jobs out there that don’t need graduate skills. These jobs are of no less importance and the people who do of no lesser quality but they do require 3 or 4 years of University study to do them.
We cannot all be equal and hope that society will then function. Society will only function in a pyramidical state, whoops Maslow is back again. If we instil in our young people that they should ALL strive for a degree then we have a situation, should they all obtain one, where every job must, by necessity, be filled by a graduate even if the ability to do that does not require the need for a degree. Some sort of weird horizontal integration style of living will no more work in society that it did in industry and if you don’t believe that, check out British Leyland.
Let’s then go back to those nice CIPD people. They claim, on current figures, that of the 500,000 or so undergraduates entering Uni this year, 300,000 will come out and enter into a job for which they don’t need the qualification they have just worked so hard to achieve. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying these people have wasted their time as any learning, any advancement, is a good thing. However, if we have more graduates than there are jobs needed to be filled by graduates, we are certainly wasting someone’s money. Eventually, of course, it is possibly that graduate who has to pay back part or all of his loan, grant or tuition fee.
As I understand it, this could be about £12,000 a year if you add tuition fee and maintenance allowance. 300,000 students will, temporally its true, be using government money for, usually, 3 years. This amounts to government spending of, wait for it, nearly £11 billion pounds. George, I’ve solved it. Increase benefits for the poor, you have your £11 billion back and those 300,000 students should still find work only 3 years earlier and without having to pay money back from their new salaries. Wow, economic genius.
And if my word is not good enough, those nice CIPD chaps and chapesses told the government that “for young people, choosing an apprenticeship instead of university could be a “much better choice”. What a surprise.
Ah well, now you will now have to wait a week to discover why I feel that freedom being a dusty road leading to a highway has now become a highway leading to a sewage farm.
August 26
Freedom of speech no longer exists – we now have a freedom to abuse etc
“Freedom is a dusty road heading to a highway”, so sang Peter Shelley way back in the 1970’s. Freedom. The word that seems to describe everything we all want. Modern technology has, indeed, given us all a lot of freedom. Freedom to communicate instantly, freedom to pass our opinions on to the world and, it would seem, freedom to abuse the right to free speech.
You see free speech does not mean that you can openly abuse and/or insult anyone you want and yet that is what seems to happen far too often. Then, when someone complains about an article, a post or a blog that insults, abuses, bullies or just simply defames them, “free speech” is thrown up as a defence.
Free speech does not give anyone the right to publicly state something about another human being that is false. Personally, I believe, that there are also instances when even something that is true about someone’s personal life, providing no law is being broken, should not be broadcast as it should be seen as, and I mean should be seen as, a gross invasion of privacy.
We all have as much right to privacy in our private lives as these bloggers, journalists or whatever have a right to freedom of speech. There have almost certainly been instances where our new technology has resulted in a person taking their own life because of something that has been broadcast about them.
The people who joined the Ashley Madison site may well have been immoral in their behaviour but they were not behaving illegally. If they feel the need to be unfaithful to their partner, that is their choice. The people who hacked their personal information and released it were behaving illegally and there is no excuse, apart from that they obviously have a cruel, vicious, vindictive streak in their make-up. Indeed it may not be a streak; it may be their whole make-up. Perhaps they were the playground bullies; perhaps they sneaked on a colleague at work who left a couple of minutes early. Regardless of why this hacking took place, if, as I have read, people have committed suicide because of the revelations, these hackers are guilty of murder or perhaps, with charity, manslaughter. They should be found and brought to justice on that basis.
But let’s return to the more normal world, to the people who blog or post something nasty about others using the wonderful technology we now have. Some of these people are very clever and can create a picture through innuendo. They include a piece of fact and then hint at a worse scenario.
I understand that the suspect in this latest shooting in the United States posted some footage on his social media. Was this premeditated and had social media not been there would he still have carried out this heinous crime? No one can honestly say but twitter is there and he did use it.
So there we have it. Freedom is a dusty road heading to a highway, the information highway which, instead of leading to a Californian skyway, seems more likely to plunge into the depths of a cesspit of modern human behaviour. The 1970’s wasn’t such a bad place after all. I think what we didn’t have in the way of new inventions meant that we also didn’t have the opportunity to denigrate our fellow humans with such ease nor the “fame” that some think they have achieved by doing that.
To handle this new technology properly requires far greater moral behaviour than we, as humans, in the majority, appear to possess. In my view much of this is being led by so-called journalists at so-called newspaper. Remember that word; newspaper. It’s made up of two words, news and paper. What a celebrity does, thinks or needs to publicise, is not news. It is gossip. If there is public interest then I go back to my sentence at the beginning of this paragraph.
And, taking a few liberties with Peter Shelley’s lyrics, “if you can’t understand, then I guess I’ll have to move out of this land”.