Willetts’ promises on careers services bang on the money.
In an interview, David Willetts, the shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills, said: “The careers service has collapsed under Labour … and it helps explain the problems we’ve got with social mobility in this country. There is a massive information and advice problem here and it’s actually getting worse.”
The Tories plan to set up an all-age careers service that would advise teenagers at school and people throughout their working lives. It would replace the careers advice offered to teenagers by Connexions, the service run by local authorities, and complement both Jobcentre Plus for adults and teacher advice to pupils.
Poor or non-existent careers advice had allowed many people to take A-levels inappropriate to the university degrees to which they aspired or to choose degrees unsuitable for their ideal careers, Mr Willetts said.
The problem is when students don’t get suitable careers advice and end up not picking suitable A-Levels for their choice of university/career/life simply because no-one told them what the implications of their choice were, something. I’ve talked about before where poor students are ‘conned’ into doing degrees that are little value to them, and are let down by the poor career advice offered by Connexions- take note it was a Labour government that abolished the previous successful service.
In theory there should be cross party support for the policy as it’s previously been called for by James Frith on LabourList, but seeing as there’s been no announcement from the government for a measure such as this it’s vital for social mobility, as well as Britain’s competitiveness it gets implemented on way or the other – preferably by a Conservative government.
Labour’s innumerate teachers.
In a Government white paper for 2005 on schooling it was revealed those who fail to reach the expected levels of attainment at age 11 are far less likely to go on to get five or more good GCSEs leading them to claim they would devote intensive support for those who have fallen behind in literacy and numeracy, especially considering 76% of children who fall behind in English and 71% who fall behind in Maths when they are 11 fail to catch up by the age of 14.
Why then after this commitment have we seen an era of primary school teachers who can’t even complete the work they’re supposed to set to their pupils?
Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury, tells tomorrow’s edition of Dispatches: “Any system that only succeeds 80% of the time in terms of achieving its basic result needs changing. If we saw that in our business we would be working out how we close that gap.
Quite. The failure to hire good teachers at primary school level lets down the 15% of people who leave school at 16 to go straight into work, 40% of pupils failed to pass their maths GCSE in 2008 and it’s this let down by the education system that leaves massive inequalities, stunted economic growth, unemployment, and a lack of personal development for the children that need it most.
The Labour party’s response to the crisis in education isn’t to fix the root causes of a lack of achievement and inequality, it’s simply to extend the pain by raising the school leaving age in an attempt to delay the consequences of their failure to live up to expectations they set in 1997. As a way to improve educational standards, and to act as a cure for unemployment evidence shows this to be suspect. Is it any surprise that some speculate social mobility to have decreased under Labour?
The Conservative party have made the right commitments in education to narrow the inequality, and the reforms to drive educational standards up. All we will see from the Labour party are constant attempts to cover up their mistakes.
(For anyone who wants to see if they’re up to the challenge of doing Key Stage 1 and 2 Maths, the test the teachers were asked to complete is here.)
Are poor pupils conned into taking ’soft’ subjects?
There is a major problem in this country that the government advocates that all A-Levels are equal, despite the fact that numerous universities don’t consider this to be the case, and poor pupils are being conned by state schools so says the governor of Chelsea Academy which is a state school in London, at the front line of education, and he’s right. There have been studies of the relative difficulty of different A-Levels using a variety of different methodologies, and they all came to the same conclusion that some A-Levels are harder than others. Universities favour some A-Levels over others, many are very explicit in stating this.
The result of the current situation is a disproportionate impact on students from lower socio-economic groups who are much less likely to know any graduates other than their teachers, a significant proportion of these students come from families without university experience and are completely unfamiliar with university applications (i.e. aren’t aware of the existence of prospectuses, etc.) and take their primary guidance in choosing A-Levels from their teachers and college/sixth-form prospectuses which predominantly carry the official viewpoint about the equality of A-Levels.
This has a horrendous impact on students. Many will find themselves unable to do the courses they wish to apply for at university. Even if a small minority of students realize that their teachers might not be giving them an accurate picture they often have no better source of information. Try googling to find advice on which A-Levels to take, you’re not going to find any official government source giving you good advice.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “These are pretty cheap and insulting comments. It’s easy to make sweeping, rhetorical flourishes about so-called ‘hard’ and ’soft’ subjects – but it is wrong to ignore the hard work of tens of thousands of teachers and pupils and misrepresent the state of education in this country.”
It is easy to make cheap platitudinous statements defending the government’s abysmal record in education (remember its slogan Education, education, education) but it is wrong to ignore the sensible argument that schools and universities are incentivised into giving pupils poor advice and to provide meaningless courses. The hard work of the pupils and teachers is irrelevant if it is directed (by the government) toward qualifications that mean so little and give them and the country so little benefit.
The question is, will that course be worth the student debt that’s been racked up and the time that could have been spent in vocational training with an employer? The current government wants to sell the delusion that a degree, any degree, is worthwhile. In fact, many graduates are unable to obtain what is traditionally seen as a graduate level job upon completing the course, and merely end up in clerical or administrative jobs that can be performed perfectly well by people with A levels or decent GCSEs.
The universities are not aiming to turn out people suitable for these jobs and this government is rapidly heading down the road of needing massive immigration in order to fill those jobs – which are essential, of course, but are likely to lead to the nationalism we’ve seen of late, and leave our economy in stagnation. The people to fill those jobs are highly unlikely to come from those doing media and business studies .
Here’s a thought though for those who want to they they aren’t soft subjects. Allow at least a pseudo market to set prices, and solve the question of ‘What is a good degree?’