This may not be the most exciting story of the day, but it caught my eye as an example of how, despite its fine words, the present government has allowed our education system to crumble:
Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the “unsupportable” decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.
Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, representing leading boys’ and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.
“Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed,” he said. “Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status.”
India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.
Superficially, it may be a smart move to make it easier for parents to send their children to private schools. My only problem is that if the current Labour government were to embark on such a course, it would demand, as part of such a deal, greater control over what is left of the non-state education system. (That remains a key drawback of education vouchers). Do we really want the half-educated dolts and knaves running this government to get their hands on Eton, Harrow or Winchester?
Update: a commenter disputes whether British state schools are so lousy. Perhaps he should study this OECD report, which contains damning data on illiteracy in Britain. I should also remind readers of the terrific work being done by Professor James Tooley to debunk the shibboleths of statist thinking on education.
Update 2: Here is another link to a site about literacy issues in Britain and other countries. If you scroll down there are dozens of stories, from as recently as September 2005, expressing employers’ concerns about the skills of the students they take on. A couple of commenters persist in claiming that our state education system is better than it has ever been. If so, why the company complaints? I presume that CEOs are not making this stuff up.
I am sorry, but if there were a demand for chemistry graduates then there would be –
1) Upward pressure on their wages
and consequently
2) A demand for more study places by school leavers.
Given that 1) isn’t happening I can only assume that British Industry has an adequate supply of chemists.
If they were needed they would be there (with a 5 year lag of course).
Although I still believe that the Grosse State should stick its effing nose out of education altogether though.
Hell, the Soviet Union had more engineers per head of population than any other developed country, and look where that got them.
Chris, maybe you are correct. But I suspect that even if salaries did rise a bit, that would not necessarily encourage your average 10-year-old living in Leeds or Surbiton to focus on maths and chemistry.
I’m all for private education but we’re then only more efficiently educating our children to meet the requirements of dumbed-down exams.
Better we introduce an additional pair of exams – the 16-plus and the 18-plus – as alternatives for those kids expected to breeze the GCSE and A-level exams. These new exams would be more exacting, much tougher and give teachers something better to aim for for their cleverer pupils. We then have exams that meet different levels of ability.
No. But a rise in social esteem might, and that often finds a proxy in pay.
British social and industrial structure in the last 50 years at least has ensured the top jobs among the professionally qualified go to accountants. If you want status and money as an engineer, have the sense to be born in Germany. The only route to personal success that works almost everywhere is salesman-entrepreneur, for which any academic qualification at all or none will do fine.
The idea of “national competitiveness” towards which a
national education system ought to be geared, ought to be anathema. But that particular economic idiocy is an engrained commonplace among policy-makers. (One can see why. The alternative leaves them with nothing to make policy about.)
I suspect Johnathan is right to suggest a voucher system would be subverted by any currently forseeable government to exert control over private education. Only if it is introduced with the explicit aim of freeing education from national planning objectives is it likely to do so.
In other wards, everything is on track as far as the government is concerned. It’s very touching, this belief that the government would actually like to see an improvement in educational standards in Great Britain. One day maybe even the likes of Jonathan Shephard will realise that standards have been driven down on purpose, that grammer schools were destroyed because they provided a robust education and that phonics works and for this reason will not be returning to the classroom. Schools exist now to indoctrinate your children to become pliant little citizens, not to supply a basic education.
Guy, I agree that is silly for the state to try to produce a given number of engineers, scientists, etc. That is folly. My point, however, is that a healthy and prosperous nation requires a large number of its citizens to be literate, numerate and able to understand some basic features of science and technology.
After all, this country, like the United States, is outsourcing a lot of work abroad because we are not turning out enough school-leavers with the requisite skills. That surely shows something is amiss.
There is also a cultural side to this: science is not praised and encouraged in the popular culture. Part of this may be a result of the Green movement, or because we lazily assume that there is nothing much further to discover out there.
More pertinently, do we realy want Eton, Harrow and Winchester? I think not.
For a proponent of free-market economics you have failed in understanding that if the demand for scientist and engineers was so great then wages for these professions would rise thereby enticing more graduates into these professions. As it is we can only assume that wages are too low and the jobs remain unattractive.
If we ran a more Keynsian economic model where wages differentials were less stark then perhaps more school leavers would choose to study a subject they enjoyed rather than one were they felt they had to take in order to earn a decent wage in an out-of-control free market.
Jonathan – I am going to pick nits with you again.
It makes not a jot of difference “that a healthy and prosperous nation requires a large number of its citizens to be …”. Haven’t you noticed? Za-NuLab is running down Britain. Education is the first to be killed off. Children who get 27% of answers right on an “exam” are getting passes. They’re getting an A if they can get 50% of answer correct. Education has intentionally been debased over the past 10 years as part of the destruction of Britain, but it has been cleverly managed to make it seductive for parents to believe standards are going up and their children are brilliant.
Outsourcing from the US and Britain (and from France, which is now outsourcing in its own former colonies; I don’t know what the poor Germans are doing) occurs not because of a lack of skills at home, but because workers in the West have, with their salaries and benefits, priced themselves out of the market.
You’re right Pete_London,
our government is more than happy to have us know nothing, just as long as it’s THE SAME nothing.
It makes their job real easy and it’s working well.
How else to explain New Labour being elected for a third time despite all we now know of them.
The main problem though is teachers.
I voiced my fears from over 30 years ago in another thread. Stated baldly the majority of teachers I have met are not competent to teach the subject they have chosen( geography teachers swearing black is blue that Sydney is the capital of Australia for instance) and have never been taught how to control a class, build interest or infuse a lust for knowledge in their pupils.
They are all counting the days till the pension and couldnt give a toss.
David, as I said before in the comments, even if wages rose substantially for scientists, for example, how would this entice a 10-year-old to pursue this subject? Kids are not, as even the most ardent free marketeer should understand, open to economic incentives until they start hitting their teens, as far as I know.
I find it incredible that it is controversial to be concerned about the crappy state of state schooling.
Verity, you claim it makes not a “jot of difference” that we are producing fewer and fewer students with good maths, science and languages.
That is plain silly. The impact on this country, its culture and its prosperity is bound to be real if a rising proportion of school-leavers lack the basics to succeed in a modern economy. You are being contrary for the sake of it.
Let’s get this straight.
The reason why students no longer want to do science and engineering subjects is that they’re hard, employment prospects are poor and insecure and wages are low. Engineering subjects have some of the highest rates of graduate unemployment.
You might say that this is fine, because market forces are prevailing. Nonsense. Students are going into law and medicine and the public sector because these are sheltered from market forces in the UK. Engineers and scientists have poor employment prospects because they are not sheltered from international market forces. This government has done so much to damage our international competitiveness (high regulation, high taxes, artificially inflated public sector salaries, relatively high interest rates needed to keep a cap on public sector-induced inflation, etc.) that much of our industry has gone or is contracting.
Our industrial performance has been the worst of any G7 nation since 1997. We have a record balance of payments deficit and huge public sector borrowing. This will indeed be economically disastrous, but this is not do with schools, it is to do with New Labour’s economic policy that makes science or engineering a poor career choice.
Many electronics engineers of my acquaintance have been forced to work in Germany over the last few years – there are few jobs here.
I did a combined science/engineering degree and I will positively dscourage my child from doing the same (and she goes to an independent school).
A lot of people seem to think the dumbing down of education is part of a master plan. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know, but I think that if this is the case such a scenario credits Nulabour with far more ability than they have. I would rather put the blame on all of the clueless educationalists infesting universities, town halls, and teacher training colleges. The government are just doing what they normally do. Tinkering, looking for easy votes, and covering up the disaster.
John East, I agree. I dislike conspiracy theories anyway. I cannot imagine that a group of Labour policy wonks sit around in secret locations trying to figure out how they cretinise the British public. It is worse than that: they sincerely think that they are creating a more egalitarian world by vandalising exams, etc.
Sorry to hog the thread!
Jonathan – Please! I did not say it “makes not a jot of difference that we are producing fewer and fewer students with good maths, science and languages.”
Comment on what I wrote instead of just reading the first six words and intuiting the rest. I said it makes no difference what, in your words (which I had the courtesy to read before commenting) “a healthy and prosperous nation requires” because ZaNuLab does not want a healthy and prosperous nation. They are running Britain down, deliberately and with malice. They want a nation of totally dependent drones – not people trained to think independently.
I would agree with John East that it is not ZaNu-Lab alone. The schools are infested with graduates of lefty university “social sciences” departments and they are useful tools. Otherwise, how do you explain the refusal to teach reading by phonetics in favour of arcane, pointlessly cumbersome and confusing methods which ensure that a large percentage of children will never be able to read a book or a complicated newspaper article. They will therefore depend on television for news and explanations of events. Hmmmmm.
From a survey of graduate starting salaries I found recently:
Medicine: £31,353
Social work; £19,177
Chemistry: £16,670
No wonder no-one wants to do chemistry.
Maths: £16,877
HJHJ – How depressing. How do these starting salaries compare with those in the US? Any idea?
HJHJ has a handle on it. Few are going to want to study a difficult subject like engineering, when the societal plums go to members of professions sheltered and protected by, err… members of those sheltered professions.
Johnathan Pearce believes that children are not influenced by such considerations. Perhaps not, but their parents and teachers are.
There is also, however, a great deal of truth in the ‘dumbing down’ argument – particularly that it is the result of Leftist thinking from within the teaching profession itself, rather than stemming from some sinister cabal of political plotters.
What is making the experience so painful is that we are being slowly skewered by both factors simultaneously.
Verity,
I’m a little out of touch, but slightly lower I expect. The strinking thing about the US (and the UK is going the same way) is that the native population goes for law and medicine (closed shops, no international competition) and many, if not most, of their engineers are imported.
A remarkable aspect is that the figure for nursing is £19,333. Let’s face it, nursing hardly attracts the highly academically able.
All the New Labour blather about needing more education because the low skill jobs are going abroad is rubbish. It’s the jobs which produce tradeable outputs that are going abroad – nothing to do with the skill level. So we are being left with medics, doctors, shop assistants and cleaners. Of course the trade deficit is ballooning….
GCooper, you have a decent point there. As and when my wife-to-be and I have children, of course I would encourage them to pursue a career that would give them a decent living. But I have not met many parents who have discouraged their offspring from studying physics or biology because the salaries are dire.
One thing that stuns me still is how many bright graduates go into journalism, even though the salaries are often crap. They either get the idea that journalism is terribly glamourous or end up going into PR.
I meant medics, lawyers, social workers, shop assistants and cleaners.
Johnathan Pearce writes:
“They either get the idea that journalism is terribly glamourous or end up going into PR. ”
I think you are quite right. People believe journalism is glamorous and, of course, top columnists and some broadcasters do earn good money.
Sadly, like football, where for every Manchester United star there are a 100 journeymen playing in the third division, the same is true of journalism.
Sorry to disagree with the Daily Mail rants here, but as someone with 3 kids in state junior education, the quality of teaching they get is far, far better than I had at a good private school in the 70s, and in particular the wonderfully structured coaching they get in maths, including mental arithmetic strategies that I only really worked out years later from playing darts and snooker.
Mr Shephard is talking self-serving nonsense. What specifically does he mean by “third world status” anyway?
As a languages graduate, I mourn the demise of those subjects, but if people now believe that they can have a rewarding career without speaking German, well, they’re probably right.
Verity, sorry if I misinterpreted you a bit earlier. On your argument that Labour deliberately wants to crush Britain into the dust, do you really believe that is the case? Come on, I hardly think Phoney and Gloomy Gordon sit around thinking, “Hey, let’s figure out how we screw Britain today”. Blair and Brown sincerely believe they are doing the right thing. That is why they are so bloody dangerous. They believe their on b.s.
Pete, you really believe that British state education is doing a fantastic job? Really? Can you try to explain why levels of illiteracy and innumeracy among the young remain at such scandalous levels? Care to enlighten us “Daily Mail” ranters about that?
I hope state schooling is not as bad as some state it is, because if so, we would be in serious trouble.
You dismiss Shepherd’s arguments as “self-serving”. Try to play the ball and not the man. How is it “self-serving” to point out that certain subjects, like foreign langugages and physics, are in decline?
HJHJ. Spot On.
Except that I haven’t met a UK cleaner or shop assistant (in London) for about 4 years.
I recruit for an IT company. A large majority of candidates sent on to me by agencies (about 95%) are from India.
So we have two problems – we are sending work and projects abroad (outsourcing), and the remaining jobs are increasingly being taken by insourced foreigners seeking work permits or stopping off here on their way to the USA. They of course are much cheaper than a UK national since they want naturalization and benefits and even on a low-ish salary can send money abroad which buys a fantastic standard of living when they eventually go back.
There is another angle too – the Labour government in-sources services and staff direct from India. cf. the Scottish Executive and Wipro.
On the subject of Eton Windsor and Harrow – I’ve never met an engineer from these places. I doubt if anyone who went there would ever need to be one !
Hmmm… so the head of a private education cartel is criticising the level of state education. Wonder what could be in it for him then….
We have highly rose-tinted views of how good education was in previous years.
When I was at school, we had
– no standardised curricula, which meant that when Mrs O’Sullivan decided to spend a whole term teaching me about Purgatory instead of long division, she was quite entitled to
– no exam standards, which meant that standards and grades between different examination boards were unpredictable and indeed exploited by cleverer teachers
– no external regulation of these exam boards
– no external inspections at all of schools, nor any way of comparing schools’ performance
– no on-the-job training of teachers, or teaching quality measurements at all
As a parent, I’m genuinely bowled over by the consistency of the teaching my kids receive, which means that even when one of them lands a weaker teacher, I can still be reasonably sure that they will nevertheless cover the right curriculum, and that someone is keeping an eye on their performance.
Teaching now is much better than it’s ever been, and your ranting about conspiracies and illiterate comments about outsourcing to India if anything prove my point.
Industry does not want people with degrees in chemistry,engineering etc,what it wants are those with post doctoral work,patents and knowhow gained in another firm.
Graduates know zip when they graduate,a degree is only a licence to go out and learn,it is the specialists in the enormous field of chemistry,for example who will be in demand.
Pete writes:
“Teaching now is much better than it’s ever been, and your ranting about conspiracies and illiterate comments about outsourcing to India if anything prove my point.”
This sounds ominously like the voice of Za-NuLabour.
I try to avoid making anecdotal points, but I feel one coming on.
In my profession I come into quite a lot of contact with young people and have done for the past 30 years.
During that time I have watched the standard of written and spoken English not just fall to the floor, but be trampled into the dust.
I see no evidence that my victims are any more able to handle basic mathematics than they are to construct a grammatical sentence.
I can, therefore, only conclude that what you are saying is complete and utter nonsense.
Conspiracy theories?
Did not the Labour minister Richard Crossland say:-
“I’ll shut down all the Grammar Schools if it’s the last thing I ever fucking do!!”
Straightforward statement of intent there I think.
Those very Grammar Schools delivered a far higher proportion of his holy working classes to university than Zanulab can ever dream of doing now.
Pete, I notice you have not directly challenged my point about low levels of literacy and numeracy that have been reported repeatedly in the media in recent years.
The education system of the past was not, of course, without its flaws. No such system ever is. Some of the reforms made in the last 20 years may even have been beneficial in certain respects. You have your own feedback via your children and I respect your judgement. But as GCooper points out, the wider evidence in the labour market proves that there is a problem and no amount of abusive remarks by you about “Daily Mail” rants is going to make that problem go away.
Consider this: why are so many parents willing to make big sacrifices to get to the better school catchment areas? If state schooling was of the level you claim, much of this would not be going on.
Pete,
I think there has been some improvement in standards in some areas. For example in numeracy and literacy in primary schools. There are also some improvements in certain areas in secondary schools.
However, the improvement has not been as great as the government’s figures would have you believe and neither has the government achieved good value for all its extra spending. There is no doubt that GCSE and (especially) A level grades have been inflated and the curriculum made less demanding – hence the preponderence of A grades. More students now get A levels (which is probably good) but there is no doubt that they stretch the more able less. You may consider this a good trade-off, as traditionally the problem in the UK has not been the top 10% – it was the students below this – but there is no doubt that top students have been less well educated.
In some respects, Ofsted has improved schools standards. Ofsted is better than the old system of state funding and no accountability by teachers for their performance (as there used not to be). But it’s not as good as teachers and schools being accountable to parents as they are in the independent sector.
As for exam standards. I recall differently from you. My school used to pick the most rigorous exam board in its opinion, not the easiest.The exam boards competed for business and were free from whitehall interference. And a GNVQ in IT was not worth 4 O levels (or 4 GCSEs) as it now is – a blatant attempt to distort the figures
Value for money. Do you remember a couple of years ago where schools faced staff cuts? The government protested that it had increased funding by 11% so it was not their fault. Well, the govt imposed a 3% wage increase for teachers on schools, plus 1% performance bonuses which nearly everybody got. It charged the employers an extra 1% NI and because teachers pensions were becoming more expensive (too many early retirements and greater longevity) the employers – not the teachers – were forced to pay 5% of salary extra into their pension scheme. Tot this lot up and you see that the money made no difference. This is what happens in a system where producer interest is so prevalent – the taxpayer gets next-to-nothing for the extra expenditure.
So yes, schools are better in some ways, but not in all. The question is: what did we get for all the extra money?
The answer: Because it’s a state and producer-dominated system, not nearly enough.
Incidentally, I had to laugh at Pete_London who can’t even spell “Grammar schools”. If he went to one, it’s hardly a good advert.
The biggest factor affecting general literacy rates is immigration. It’s the same in the US. The primary age state education my children had in the UK was quite good. Most of the problems arise at a later stage.
“As a parent, I’m genuinely bowled over by the consistency of the teaching my kids receive, which means that even when one of them lands a weaker teacher, I can still be reasonably sure that they will nevertheless cover the right curriculum,
I know for a fact that this is untrue,in many schools there is such a turn over in staff and high level of supply teachers there is absolutely no consistency whatsoever.
In many cases teachers are not teaching their subjects,no fault of their own,simply because there is a shortage of a particular speciality.
There is little help with disruptive elements,it only takes one to turn a class into a shambles.Class sizes are such that it is impossible to keep discipline and teach,
there is little help with “problem” children and virtually no sanctions that a teacher can use.
Offsted has erected such a thicket of rules and procedures that it is impossible to fulfill them all in the space of one lesson.
Why do you think so many teachers are leaving the profession,even with the long holiday entitlement,job security and pension scheme?
Pete,
Comments like, “…when Mrs O’Sullivan decided to spend a whole term teaching me about purgatory….”, and “Teaching is now much better than it’s ever been.” Suggest to me that you are an indoctrinated Catholic with a Nulabour grasp of reality.
I wonder, is “Pete” a pseudonym for Ruth Kelly?
What G Cooper, RAB and HJHJ said.
Jonathan, I disagree that Blair and Brown think they’re doing the right thing – although neither one has confided in me that they don’t. But the evidence of 10 years is against them.
I think they both have mediocre intelligences, as does Her Cherieness. And look at the intelligence of the rest of the cabinet. Blair could have found clever people, even with a NuLab outlook, for the cabinet, but he doesn’t want them. Although I don’t like her, I think that Diane Abbott probably has more intellectual wattage than anyone in the cabinet but she has never, so far as we know, been offered a job. I wonder why.
Unlike George Bush, Blair and Brown avoid associating with their intellectual superiors. So Brown poses as a dour Scot because he’s afraid to open his mouth, and Blair twitters round the world playing David Niven. What they need for “the project” are drones, not challenges. As long as every child in Britain is getting distinctions in A-level Media Studies, Macramé Design for The 21st Century and Outreach Counselling, they can count on the parents continuing to vote for the Za-NuLab project until they’ve steamrollered the Opposition into becoming collaborators.
Verity, I cannot really debate with you whether Brown and Blair are smart or not. You hate them both with a passion that makes my computer screen melt! I think both men are pretty bright, but being bright is not the same as being wise. They totally lack wisdom, particularly Brown, who wants to micromanage the British economy and thinks the public sector – such as the education system – can be improved by hosing it with taxpayers’ money.
Both men suffer from what Hayek nicely called the “fatal conceit” of socialism: the nostrum that given enough power, utopia is never far behind.
HJHJ
1. It’s called being in a hurry and not checking the spelling before posting.
2. If your understanding of simple English is any guide, it’s no wonder science/engineering undergraduates suffer high rates of unemployment; nowhere did I say I went to a grammAr school.
3. in your 7.03pm post you typed the following sentence in the fourth paragraph: “As for exam standards.” This is not a complete sentence.
4. Twit.
Verity: Diane Abbott – no!
Her answer to any question starts with “Well, I mean, y’know”, etc. This tells you much of what you need t know about the clarity of her thought.
Blair and Brown are reasonably intelligent, although not wise as Johnathon observes. The problem is that they’ve never been exposed to the type of real life (private sector) experience that would enlighten them. It’s really worrying that people like this get to make such big decisions in government and even more so that they think they are competent to do so.
Jonathan, you are correct that I loathe Blair and Brown, but one of the reasons I loathe them is their intellectual mediocrity coupled with their – that’s a great phrase – “fatal conceit” – the sheer malevolence that causes them to take tax breaks away from families living with two parents, thus encouraging the break-up of the family (it’s much easier to manipulate single women living with children and no man in the household), elevate primitive immigrants to special status and stealing freedom of speech (and thought) by giving an alien religion a specially protected position, dumbing down exams taken by innocent young people who pass with flying distinctions and think they are set for life, when their qualifications are viewed with dismay by employers. But it pleases the parents who will continue to think the Za-NuLab government is fulfilling its election pledges and vote to keep them in power. It is nothing to do with the future of Britain and everything to do with raw manipulation.
Pete_London,
Are you a professional prat or just a good amateur?
“My point, however, is that a healthy and prosperous nation requires a large number of its citizens to be literate, numerate and able to understand some basic features of science and technology.”
Yes – all of which you can get even in the current dumbed down A levels. What we don’t need is loads of degree educated chemists – or indeed degree educated anyone. Wages and academic ability have never correlated much. For years, almost decades we have been churning out people with degrees who can’t find work that requires one. That should be a sign that we should educate fewer people to degree level, and stop this bizarre notion that without a degree you are ‘thick’ or some kind of second-rate person.
If Corporate bosses are so desperate for graduate chemists, then they can fund some university places for them – I’m sure students will be keen to have ICI pay off their loans in return for them going to chemistry, rather than history lectures in between drinking sessions.
Of Bliar and Brown, HJHJ writes: “The problem is that they’ve never been exposed to the type of real life (private sector) experience that would enlighten them.”
An observation which has been made about the Labour Party for many, many years, drawing, as it has, so extensively from the ranks of teachers, lawyers polytechnic lecturers, actors and sundry pseudo-intellectuals.
That said, the history of businessmen and women in politics hasn’t been especially grand, either. Geoffrey Robinson springs to mind, though one could equally mention Michael Hesseltine as an example of a successful businessman whose political career delivered almost nothing of value.
On balance, while I’m inclined to agree that having a background in ‘the real world’ is of use, I think a greater benefit would come from the prohibition of lawyers running for any form of office in the law factory.
GCooper,
What is more alarming is the fact that a great deal of ill thought out legislation emanates from an institution chock full of lawyers.
GCooper,
I agree that businessmen have not generally made good politicians. But many highly successful businessmen have become successful by being singlemindedly focused on a single objective – perhaps not a good training for seeing the bigger picture. There are plenty of people with real life private sector experience who don’t fall into this category, however. But how often do we see them get into politics?
Chris Gent (formerly of Vodafone) may be an exception. He has given some very thoughtful input at the ‘Reform’ think tank.
HJHJ
You have some front, sunshine. You have the cheek to note one misspelled word of mine, hold it up as evidence of the ineffectiveness of a type of school I did not attend and then suggest that I’m a prat when you get it back? Next to you I’m just an amateur.
How’s Bollo?
“Conspiracy theories?
Did not the Labour minister Richard Crossland say:-
“I’ll shut down all the Grammar Schools if it’s the last thing I ever do!!”
Straightforward statement of intent there I think.”
Er, no. The Wykehamist Richard CrossMAN (Housing Minister, not Education) never said that. You are thinking of Anthony CrosLAND, who went to a public school, Highgate. Interestingly, his policy of converting grammar schools into comps was continued by the grammar school girl Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s cabinet.
You don’t use vouchers, you use tax deductions. This changes the dynamic from the government’s “we’ll give you this money, but since we’re giving it to you we’re entitled to say how it’s spent” to the citizen’s “I’m saving you this direct cost plus the admistrative fees and whatever innefficencies exist in your public system as well as probable incarceration costs, so I’m deducting it from your pay”.
Jonathan’s attempt in the update to his post to prove how lousy Britain’s schools are is particularly lame.
It relies on a report of adult literacy from six years ago – how exactly is this meant to show that “the present government has allowed our education system to crumble”?
A much better metric would be recent data on the performance of children in schools. And according to the most recent data (2001) from the Performance in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 10 year olds in England come third (behind only the Netherlands and Sweden) out of 35 countries in reading achievement.
Interesting. My batch of chemistry graduates from the university consisted of about 400 graduates, matriculated in 2000, from a population of about 3.5 million. Of course, a significant number were foreigners, but they were mostly Malaysian chinese, with most of the graduates local. Out of the 400, 50 of us went on to honours.
According to my friends, the intake of chemistry, and science graduates in particular, has increased yet further, as the government pushes for Singapore to be a research hub. Even if those graduates come out qualified only to wash test tubes, and can’t do some of the more esoteric obscure stuff.
So what if the levels are dropping? No big deal. Like other posters have said, there would be more chemistry majors if the demand is there. Right now, the demand just isn’t there in Britain, and that’s the problem, more than any overt educational policy.
TWG
Well hush my puppies Luniversal!
I obviously made a right spoonerism of the August Labour patricians name.
I must still be in mourning for Ronnie Barker.
However my quote was right, was it not?
And the less said about the Traitor Heath period the better.Well no! let’s talk about the old tretcherous mysogonistic cretin for a moment.
Where the hell did his money come from!
I heard either a Chinese slush fund or from drug smuggling on his yachts from Morrocco.
Any retired police chiefs out there in the know?
Oh and by the way Luniversal you left out the “Fucking”
How wearyingly indicative.
Pete_London,
I see you have fallen back on your weary old tactic of accusing me of being ‘bollo’. Wrong before, wrong now. Liar before, liar now. You were a prat and still are a prat. You are consistently stupid, if nothing else.
“grammer’ indeed.
I never said you went to such a school – I only posed the question. But then perhaps reading is another of your weak points?
HJHJ
If you have a point pertinent to the topic then make it, if you want to drop your pants, say ‘yah boo, someone spelled a word wrong’ then go away and grow up.
Jim, what is “lame” about the OECD report, exactly? Do you dismiss evidence that does not support your statist case? In case you wonder, this is not just about the present Labour government, but about a state system that has been drenched in egalitarian ideology for the past 30 or so years, regardless of the political party at the helm in Downing Street.
Some other tests may suggest things are improving, but reports from employers, for example, suggest continuing problems exist.
Oh and Jim, do you also dismiss the opinions of the headmaster I quoted, or are you going to play the same ad hominem game as Pete and dismiss him for being a private school teacher?
Well, what a great argument that was, eh?
I maintain that my kids’ education is much better than a generation ago, and that this is specifically down to teacher training, league tables and national curricula.
I haven’t seen anyone argue to the contrary, other than general impressions, and the usual anecdotal stuff about harrassed lecturers despairing at low quality of undergraduates. Well, given that 20 years ago those undergraduates simply wouldn’t have been in tertiary education at all, that’s not a very strong case. I’d add that as a recruiter of top-notch graduates myself, the standard of those has significantly increased in the last 10 years, and I suspect that’s not just due to my HR department.
I really fail to see why these points make me an indoctrinated Catholic nulabour moron and I’m frankly a little disappointed at the lack of courtesy in those responses.
Pete, you are a bit disappointed at the lack of courtesy in your responses. Well, if you accuse people of making “Daily Mail” rants, you cannot be surprised if we don’t take kindly to it. Civility is a two-way street.
I came across a study done by Durham University, cited in James Bartholomew’s “The Welfare State We’re In” in which the education department carried out its own literacy tests of youngsters in 2002. The results showed that there had been barely any improvement since 1997 and 2002. Here is a link to the book(Link)
You say you are a recruiter of top-notch graduates and see the quality improving. Well, as you say, the size of the tertiary sector has expanded greatly over the past 20 years so comparisons are a bit tricky. At the firm I work at, we have a lot of very bright graduates coming through the door but I know for a fact that there problems with basic things like written English. You can dismiss this as “anecdotal” but frankly most of us have only our personal experience, and some reports, to go on.
And I continue to smell a big, big rat about the relentless rise in the number of kids leaving school with A-grade A-levels. It stinks of grade inflation.
Doh, I left out a couple of words in my last post. I guess my own written English let me down!
Hmmm – good point. Apologies.
Just playing devil’s advocate a little. I wonder how many of the above have kids in school now? Having taught in the US and Austria, where high school success is almost impossible to avoid, I don’t think those students really suffered long-term from not going through harshly marked exams at the age of 15 or 16, and I don’t think it’s made it any harder for universities and employers to pick out the talented ones.
Pete, forget about it sir. We are a rough lot here sometimes.
I actually do not have children of my own but my brother has two nieces (one four, the other is 7). Both are bright as buttons (I would say that!) and their home is stuffed with books, therby offering a good background for encouraging reading. Their literary levels seem to be okay, from my dealings with them. Their schools are pretty good.
I think, as HJHJ said in his excellent comment higher up, that some aspects of primary and possibly secondary education have improved in recent years. I honestly cannot test that with 100 pct certainty. These things are very difficult because it is hard to make a controlled experiment.
What bothers me, and what motivated me to write my article, is that I very much doubt that even a guy like Shephard would express such worries if they did not have a partial basis in fact. Whether it is something to be terribly worried about is another matter. I guess we will continue to see bright immigrants coming here to fill the gaps.
As HJHJ said, a key question to ask is whether we have got a sufficient return from all the additional moneys sprayed on the education system under Labour and for that matter the previous Tory government.
Pete writes:
“Just playing devil’s advocate a little. I wonder how many of the above have kids in school now? Having taught in the US and…..”
You’re a teacher?
Not a teacher, but I was once (languages) and would like to do it again one day, maybe.
I always struggle to hold back envious thoughts that it’s simply not fair that we all had to do really quite challenging O levels at the age of 15 while kids these days just seem to mess about having a good time. My French O level had a literature component, for heaven’s sake – they don’t have that even in A level now.
But in the US I knew kids who at school age were nowhere near A-level standard, who messed around having a much better time than I did at the same age, and who went on to be fearsomely clever nuclear physicists and doctors, so I challenge the need for improving top-level high school standards, rather than the basic changes to much lower level basic standards that have been made.
Pete,
I think you have a point. It’s not the brightest where the problem lies primarily – a point forgotten by those who bang on about grammar (or even ‘grammer’) schools (conveniently forgetting secondary moderns).
Personally I’m against both grammar/sec. modern and comprehensive school systems. They’re both systems imposed on all from above by the state sector. Choose your own type of school, I say, and let competing suppliers provide. Let no-one have the power to impose any type of ‘system’.
Incidentally (this is my pet hate), can we avoid referring to children as ‘kids’? It’s very Tony Blair.
As for the CEO comments on illiteracy, seeing as you’ve taken the argument onto updating your article – well, their recruiting systems are screwed up then, aren’t they? I don’t have trouble finding literate graduates, but I know that you have to do more than trust their academic records.
That to me reflects a rather pathetic reliance on the state by employers (and indeed universities) to assess skills. Universities in the US look at a student’s entire academic record, not exam results, and set their own essay questions, interviews and tests; universities here go off three exam grades and, more importantly, where they came in your list of preferences behind Oxford. That’s a lamentable state of affairs which is their own fault.
Pete :
Pull up the bottom levels by all means, but not at the cost of making it impossible to distinguish who are the very top levels.
Without an objective way of determining who are the best – like difficult exams – there is no basis for universities and emplyers to distinguish between their applicants. For universities, this leads to the absurdity of offering places on the basis of interviews and whatever passes for judgement among admissions dons.
Hmmm … Pete, who says he has three “kids” of his own, and who works in an HR department, says he has no problem finding literate graduates. Then why are employers, through their official bodies, complaining that graduates cannot read or write English?
The main problem is the huge expansion of universities and the growth of numbers attending university.Courses have to be filled or die,it is common for the first year to be remedial to bring students up to university level.Many of the students have low marks on their chosen subject,some have even failed the requisite A level.Frequently school leavers shop around until they can find a degree course which will accept their qualifications irrespective of suitability.
All the above are the causes of the high dropout numbers at degree level.
If these people were not motivated to pass exams at school to qualify for university, why is it assumed they will put the energy into doing all the catch-up work plus have the tenacity to stick out a three year course? And why do they want to go to university in the first place, given that they are not going to get a job on the strength of a toy degree? (Of course, they may get a toy job advertised in al Ghardayeen.)
I wonder how many Media Studies graduates there are each year in Britain.
I believe that it is generally accepted that the most definitive studies on school educational standards in the UK in recent years have been produced by Durham university (fine university, b.t.w.).
These have shown a rise (now flattened) in recent years in basic literacy and numeracy, exam grade inflation and lower achievement at the top level (i.e. A levels). [Note: most A level students used only to do 3 – nowadays they do 4 or 5, so overall they may achieve as much but at a lower level in individual subjects]
I think that these conclusions have been generally accepted by everyone without a vested interest in maintaining otherwise.
Does anyone know if these can be found online?
Pete, I updated my main post so that the argument does not get buried.
You dismiss the arguments made by CEOs. That is a bit of a bait-and-switch. Of course companies – if allowed to do so by our meddlesome regulatory state – should be able to devise tests of their own to find the people they want and of course many firms, including my own, do so. Exams are not the be-all and end-all of what it takes to get a good job or start a business and thank God for that.
If lots of CEOs and others are voicing worries about the calibre of people going into job interviews, that may be a problem for them but also a problem for the education system on which so much of our money has been lavished. The system is seriously flawed and I heartily agree with HJHJ that the one-size-fits-all model endorsed by this government is not working as well as it could.
I found the link to the Durham University Curriculum Education and Management Centre:
http://www.cemcentre.org/
Lots of information here.
“Jim, what is “lame” about the OECD report, exactly?”
What’s lame is your belief that it is proof of how rotten the British state school system is. That’s because it is (a) out of date, and (b) based on adult literacy, which is obviously a result of how good/bad the school system was anything up to several decades ago. A better measure of school quality today is the PIRLS study I linked to, according to which England is well above average.
“Do you dismiss evidence that does not support your statist case?”
Not without good reasons, which I clearly stated. I suggest that you’re the one with ideoogical blinkers if you’re forced to rely on out-of-date evidence and react with hostility when this is pointed out.
“In case you wonder, this is not just about the present Labour government, but about a state system that has been drenched in egalitarian ideology for the past 30 or so years, regardless of the political party at the helm in Downing Street.”
And now it seems to be getting better. Sorry if this causes problems for your world-view.
“Some other tests may suggest things are improving, but reports from employers, for example, suggest continuing problems exist.”
Firstly, I’m certainly not saying there are no problems, just that they aren’t as huge or intractable as you suggest. Secondly, in my experience employers organisations always complain about the standard of education. Thirdly, that remains anecdotal evidence, which is always fairly unconvincing.
“Oh and Jim, do you also dismiss the opinions of the headmaster I quoted, or are you going to play the same ad hominem game as Pete and dismiss him for being a private school teacher?”
No, I don’t “dimiss his opinion”, I just consider it (again) anecdotal evidence from someone with a vested interest in disparaging state schools. It would have helped his case if he could have backed it up somewhat.
Jim writes:
” Thirdly, that remains anecdotal evidence, which is always fairly unconvincing.”
As opposed to studies and reports concocted by academics, politicians and civil servants?
These can hardly be considered unbiased testimony.
There is no need to cite statistics and anecdotes.
The point is simple. The State can no better improve on the market when it comes to the supply of education, than it can improve on the market when it comes to the supply of food or anything else, for that matter.
The solution to our present mess is simple. Get rid of the cause of the mess – viz the 130 year old and utterly disastrous involvement of the State in education in Britain.
Media studies graduates Verity? Thousands!
Those currently employed in the Media?
Zip, Nil, Nada.
Try turning up to a Newspaper office in GB clutching an Media Studies degree and test what your tipping point is for derision and humiliation.
Tesco’s however employ quite a lot of them.
Jim, check out the Durham University study I cited, which is based on data taken in 2002. Or indeed the other reports done in 2005, about children.
The OECD report is indeed about adult literacy. I know that (I can actually read, by the way). But surely that shows that state run education has been doing a crap job for many years. And the other reports I and other commenters cited suggest that the primary and secondary systems are still not doing a sufficiently good job. They may have improved a bit, but given the dubious calibre of current examinations, this remains an open question.