http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7211958.stm :cry: If I don't reach my uni offers I may have to take this up next year.
AWSOME! One of the biggest problems for the UK labor market today is that there is a section of the work force who are something of a proverbial ‘underclass’ when it comes to employment, these are the people who do not have qualifications like 5 GCSEs. Consequently not many jobs are open to the average person in this section of the labor market and they have comparatively fewer opportunities to climb the social ladder than someone with more education/qualifications. From the macroeconomic perspective they are not as productive as those with more qualifications. But vocational training like this gives people transferable skills that will not only make them more employable and therefore give the individual greater opportunities in the job market, but will make the UK labor market more flexible and productive (because of these individuals gaining transferable skills). But don’t worry Ljoll, there are certain university departments so desperate for students you can’t possibly be rejected . cough*politics at Bradford*cough
Call me and intellectual snob if you will but i find this process dubious. By all means train your workforce but is a corperate sponcered qualification like this going to be worthwhile? Some of the kids leaving school with less than 5 GCSE's at grade A* to C only have themselves to blame. With some kids in school there is an underculture in which it is 'not cool' to learn and they delight in ruining a lesson.
I think that's a bit of an erroneus view, to be honest. The problem with a lot of kids isn't that middle-aged-man-trying-to-sound-hip idea that 'skool isn't kool'; its more that the system isn't articularly stimulating to that cross section of society. Many lesson disrupters are seeking attention; not because they are arrogant or little vagabonds; they simply have trouble aplying themselves to an unstimulating syllabus. Now, of course, it is just as easy to blame the system as it is to blame the individual, whereas in reality it is a mix of the two. As a society we seem to have fallen into a trap of being very lazy, and if we can't do things, we make very little effort to apply ourselves. Equally, the goernment has spent so much tme trying to make education aproachable for the average joe student that it tends t work more off hypothetical models that actual people; a system which renders both the hgh flyer and the low achiever in worse positions than they started off at. If elitism has a certain ammount of positive effect, by al means follow it. But the government objected to this idea and replaced it with a system that is more suited towards an average student, in which the high flyers suffered, and very little was done to help the under achiever. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. Em
Yeah but their lack of skillz is gumming up our labor market . On the job training will hopefully provide a monetary incentive (ie raises and other benefits for training the employers often give) for them to train. But from a neo-socialist point of view even if this lot where horrors as children, the adult versions stuck in a rubbish job should have feasible opportunities to improve their lot, either for themselves or dependants or indeed be more productive for the nation. PS how are you getting on with teaching, from your posts I’m guessing the kids are little horrors .
If it becomes some sort of standard to judge future employers then it's worth it. Otherwise it's a motivation technique for employees, if it works then good for them. It's a pity the whole buisines is based on crap though.
I'm a teacher, i know that the sausage factory education system we have at the moment has it's flaws. But a teacher can't engage positively with a class if there are disruptive pupils for any reason. I can not work in realism and context whilst i'm chasing little johny back to his seat and dealing with all the other little dears that are disrupting lessons. In one of my lower ability groups there is one lad that is the low achiever that you talk about, and i would love to find a way to help him engage fully with what i'm teaching, however there's a nother pupil in the class that calls out and is a general pain and needs to be sat on constantly to be made to engage with the lesson. And in another of my teaching groups i have a lad that is arrogant and refuses to follow instructions and will mess around in the lesson, yes he is intelligent and could easily do the work. I'd happily do what i could to stretch him either in lessons or with other work. But until he learns to sit down, stop talking and follow instructions i can't teach him the basics so that he can take on the changing work. Can i ask what your experience of education is?
I've not problem with the idea of people getting trained up.....it's just the concept of them fiddling with the distinction between academic study and vocational training. I'm not saying that people can't do both in tandem but to have something that's a hybridisation of the two will devalue both in my opinion. And basic literacy and numeracy skils must be included in vocational training options as a fall back for those that it is appropriate to. Teaching is going interestingly.....i may possibly be looking at getting out of this school and finishing things off elsewhere.
If macdonalds wanted an educated workforce how about day release onto BTEC courses in buisness and/or food tech areas.
I’d argue that the only merit they are entitle to is that which they earn for what they do and what they are. I can’t see how introduction of a combo like McDonalds A-levels will diminish that. Thats very true IMO, there was a thread on map the other month about a surprisingly large proportion of the population not being able to deal with minus numbers.
That depends on the job. Some jobs require a high level of acedemic qualifications, some don't. Traditionally, the number of jobs requiring acedemic qualifications has been greatly outnumbered by those requiring practical skills. Plus there has always been a requirement for a large pool of unskilled labour, and that is something which our education systems have been built around.
In reality how much more employable is an A* in Macdonalds going to make you? Oh good, hopefully it won't come to that though.
What a thing to blow your one chance at a degree on (as far as I'm aware, once you've graduated you can't get another loan). Mind you, I'm doing fine art so I can't talk.
Schools are and probably always will be places that instill & reinforce social class divisions amongst other divisions. The jobs at McDonalds is great, but more jobs & on the job training needs to be provided for young lads/lasses who come from a working class background. We still have the white working class culture, where the parents still place little emphasis on education to their children, because that was what it was like with them when they grew up. The difference is today you cant leave school at 14-15 years with no qualifications and walk into a job which will pay you more than the bread line like you used to be able to do. When my parents were my age they tell me they could walk out of one job and get another the same day, with no qualifications. And im talking about decent jobs, engineers, car mechanics, electricians…they would be trained on the job. Now lots of parents still have that attitude to education for work passed on to their kids, but the thing is you can’t just get jobs like yesteryear plus there simply aren’t as many manual jobs. That’s just one side of it though, you also have the lazy buggers who make it so we have to import millions of people from abroad to do the jobs our own people could do. But the immigrants will do these jobs on minimum wage which doesn’t help, as most of the unemployed lay abouts will probably get near enough the same money on the dole.
It's not so much what the job requires but what will both allow a worker to be more efficient within their current job and most importantly what skills will mean a worker will not need as much retraining if they move jobs. re-training costs are a large source of inefficiency in the labor market. [/QUOTE] The requirement for unskilled labor is diminishing as the UK's comparative advantage in the global market is in the services, particularly skilled services. Our economy is restructuring gradually towards needing more skilled and less unskilled labor. we'll probably always need some unskilled labor but we are starting to need more skilled labor as unskilled jobs get outsourced to places where labor is cheaper.
It's quite an advantage. if a manager has a group of applicants they often pick the applicant that will be cheapest to retrain or they perceive to be likely to be most efficient at a given job. Having some qualification in skills like customer services that are applicable to lots of jobs will give an advantage to an applicant because the manager will take it as a sign that they will be able to do a given job better than someone without these qualifications and they may not need as much specific training as a complete noob. something like a McDonald's A level on a CV will be taken as a sign that that applicant is more skilled in areas like customer service than other applicants and has shown the willingness to learn and improve through on the job training.
True - but this has nothing to do with education, as you stated previously. If someone is over-educated for the job they are doing then they will probably get bored quickly and leave. I don't think that this is correct. It's mainly skilled and semi-skilled jobs such as IT development and call centres which get outsourced abroad. Service sector jobs by their very nature have to be located in this country, and a very large proportion of them are unskilled.
Education can also include the very board skills people learn in education such as IT skills – even word processing, basic maths ect. These thing do tend to make a worker more flexible with regards to employment and subsequent training and marginally more efficient on average. I was referring to the economy as a whole, which still has unskilled and semi- skilled positions open to future outsourcing.
That is true for most jobs, but not all. There will always be certain jobs which require no skill or education whatsoever, and for which the ideal employee has low intelligence, low ambition and a very low 'boredom threshold'. Sorry - when you said service sector jobs I jumped to the conclusion that you meant jobs in the service sector.
