I don't always agree with Matt Chorley, who writes The Times' Red Box email (which is always worth reading and is free) but this is good, re Toby Young from this morning's mail:
The pressure on Toby Young continues. The PM put him on notice that he will be dismissed from his new job at the Office for Students if he makes further offensive comments.
The furore will roll on, but I can't help thinking the energy would be better directed at demanding an Office for Non-Students, for the 50 per cent of young people who, like me, did not go to university, and are badly served by teachers and careers advisers.
I agree: that would be a vastly better use of all the energy involved.
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Surely there’s enough energy for both. Does he suggest to let go of the Toby Young disaster?
He has a point about pupils being badly served, but the blame does not rest with teachers or advisers most of the time.
There is very little out there for non-academic students, and what there is is often poor quality, with little joined-up thinking between providers/employers. Blame the DfE by all means. Teachers cannot provide what does not exist.
We need a German-style approach to technical and vocational education. The French are just beginning to see that and put funding where it should go.
The DfE would do well to look to other countries.
It’s failing badly, and has been for years. Time to catch up.
I wonder how many non-graduate MPs we have? I would hazard a guess at… not very many. Chances are we have more non-graduates in the upper chamber.
Because we have a predominantly academically educated political class they assume that what they know is what there is that’s worth having. Because a degree was, and still is, seen as the entreé to a career and the good life ‘everybody’ has to have one. (or is supposed to aspire to one)
I was there at one if the ratchet points when Polytechnics, rather than make the case for the quality of the education they were able to offer caved in to the spurious demand to turn out degree courses rather than the various diploma courses. To what extent that demand was driven by students (or their parents) and to what extent by employers or politicians is not clear (at least not to me). But I have no doubt it was a fatal error. It simultaneously undermined the status of an academic education whilst doing little to raise the status of ‘real’ hands-on work.
(Which could explain why my flat was rendered and dashed, last year, by a team of Romanian plasterers.)
From there we have gradually (by degrees you might say – :-() drifted to the belief that all nurses have to have graduate qualifications, hairdressers need degrees, do we have degree courses in plumbing and electrical installation? It’s only a matter of time.
We’ve managed to bring a rigid piece of class division – players/gentlemen; trades/professions, dirty hands/clean hands down the social scale a bit. The Blairite credo was ‘we’re all middle class now’. (except the unemployed who must be congenitally stupid, and besides they don’t vote….. or something like that)
Senior educators failed to teach the nation, including its leaders, that there is a profound difference between education and training. They are not mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, and neither is inherently more valuable, but they are different.