UK trails Poland and Bulgaria on adults educated to A-level standard

Lecturers’ union says European data shows Britain risks languishing in ‘mid-table obscurity’ due to rising cost of learning

We should therefore reduce the cost of learning by paying lecturers less and having fewer of them.

There, job done.

Not quite what I’d expect the lecturer’s union to suggest but…..

In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Dr Joy Schaverien identifies a set of symptoms common among early boarders that she calls boarding school syndrome. Her research suggests that the act of separation, regardless of what might follow it, “can cause profound developmental damage”, as “early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns”.

When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accommodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed.

It should be obvious that this system could also inflict wider damage. A repressed, traumatised elite, unable to connect emotionally with others, is a danger to society: look at the men who started the first world war.

A MONK who used to teach at one of England’s premier Roman Catholic boys’ schools has been jailed for five years after being found guilty of abusing pupils under his charge in the late 1980s.

Richard White, now 66, was a geography teacher at Downside School near Bath when he was identified as a possible risk to pupils, but no legal action was taken. Instead, Father Nicholas – as he was known at the school – was warned about his behaviour towards a 12-year-old and was switched to teaching older boys.

No, don’t know him at all, just after my time there.

But something really doesn’t ring true about this at all. A monk teaching geography? Surely not.

Every public school I’ve ever heard of reserves that subject for the games masters I thought.

You know, on the basis that it’s a simple enough subject that they should be able to work out which end of the book to start reading to the class from?

Certainly for years I thought that a geographer’s uniform was some variation of a tracksuit.

Parents will be stripped of the right to object to the expansion of grammar schools, under a new school admissions code laid before parliament.

Campaigners against academic selection say this could force some schools into a battle for survival as grammars expand to take on their neighbours’ best-performing pupils.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, is scrapping restrictions on the expansion of the most popular schools. The move means weaker schools will come under increased financial pressure as their pupil numbers dwindle.

For this is really what markets do well. No, not reward the excellent, but eliminate the shite.

And yes, I think we really rather would like to eliminate the shite schools which is why we should have a market in them.

It is claimed that giving profit-making companies access to state funding will create a system in which institutions pursue short-term financial gains at the expense of a decent education.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph today, professors say that proposals spelt out in a recent higher education White Paper will “condemn generations of students” to an experience similar to that in the US where many undergraduates fail to complete their degree and struggle to pay off loans.

One set of data shows children’s average vocabulary scores at the age of five – when pupils start compulsory education – and ranks them from one to 100.

Children with highly educated parents in Britain – those who had at least a degree – ranked 67 on average, while those whose mothers and fathers left school with few qualifications had an average rank of 29.

The 38 point gap was “significantly larger” in Britain than in all countries other than America, where it extended to 46 points.

The problem being that there’s more than one possible way of explaining it. A bit like that conundrum about the way prices move in a perfectly competitive and in oligopolistic markets. They’ll move in concert in both cases and purely observing the price changes doesn’t tell you which type of market you’re observing.

Here the way we’re encouraged to interpret the numbers is that highly educated parents educate their kids, teach them to read, talk to them with their larger vocabulareies, before the children go to school. And that the schooling for poor children in the UK is shit.

In a blow to Labour’s education legacy, the watchdog said schools serving the poorest 20 per cent of pupils were four times more likely to be “inadequate” than those for the wealthiest 20 per cent.

I certainly wouldn’t disagree with either point.

However, it is possible to look at the same statistics and come to a very different conclusion. Assume that intelligence is inheritable (which it is, it’s the extent to which it is which is scientifically disputed…..ignore the numpties further left who insist that each and every child is an equal blank slate upon which society draws).

We could then say, well, so what? The Anglo Saxon societies have got it right: the intelligent are getting the uni educations, excellent, the dim are not. And that carries on into the next generation as intelligence is inheritable. We would expect the children of the intelligent to be intelligent, the dim dim and that’s all we’re seeing.

No, I don’t believe it either, not as starkly as that, but it is a possible conclusion to draw from those bald statistics.

the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of whom recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course:

“I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and bothers me at my core,” freshman Amanda Bradley told National Public Radio.

There you have it, folks!  In today’s America, even some poor Americans – people who admit to living “below the poverty line” – are enrolled at Harvard University.

I should add something to this though. I have a colleague who is a Fellow at Harvard. He’s less than convinced that the place is recruiting students from the top end of the IQ spectrum these days.

Taxpayers are spending more than necessary on training new teachers because “out-of-date” heads avoid hiring mothers who want to return to work while still having time to care for their families, it was claimed.

Many young people find it almost impossible to find stable work, thanks to a massive increase in the flexible nature of the labour market, something that has been pushed by governments of both the left and right in the 1990s and 2000s.

Dear Lord……the increase in flexibility was to overcome the previous inflexible structure which left everyone trying to fill dead men’s shoes.

Getting something entirely, 100%, the wrong way around really isn’t all that good coming from a Professor at UCL.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

Dear God these people are stupid.

Here’s an outline of Econ 10 at Harvard:

N. Gregory Mankiw, and members of the Economics Department
Full course. M., W., F., at 12. Sections also meet at 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, or 2. EXAM GROUP: 5
Introduction to economic issues and basic principles and methods of economics. Fall term focuses on microeconomics: how markets work, market efficiency and market failure, firm and consumer behavior, and policy issues such as taxation, international trade, the environment, and the distribution of income. Spring term focuses on macroeconomics: economic growth, inflation, unemployment, the business cycle, the financial system, international capital flows and trade imbalances, and the impact of monetary and fiscal policy.
Note: Microeconomics (taught in the fall term) is a prerequisite for macroeconomics (taught in the spring term). Students may elect to take only the fall microeconomics course and receive a half-course credit. Taught in a mixture of lectures and small sections. No calculus is used, and there is no mathematics background requirement. Designed for both potential Economics concentrators and those who plan no further work in the field. The Department of Economics strongly encourages students considering concentration to take the full-year course in their freshman year. This is a required course for all economics concentrators and a prerequisite for higher level courses in economics.

For those who don’t get it, Keynes is studied in macroeconomics, not microeconomics. That is, Keynes is studied next semester, not this semester.

I think we’re getting our proof that Harvard is for the rich thickos, aren’t we?

However, he’s missed the great point about the American education system.

It is a local education system. It’s bugger all to do with the Federal Government. ocal school boards decide what should and will be taught locally.

Sure, you may not like the results but that was the way the system was set up.

Government is keen to emphasise that the studio and technical schools will not limit general learning. But a good education is about more than functional literacy and numeracy or a smattering of science and languages. Young people need not just efficient instruction but the opportunity for exploration – of ideas, history, literature, poetry, music, art, film, politics. These are the things that make and keep us human, and if we don’t learn how to begin to think about these things when young, we may never return to them as adults.

Most telling of all it is those countries that postpone specialisation which top the international league tables so beloved of Michael Gove. “Dual education” Austria was one of the worst-performing countries in the 2009 Pisa tests while informal, inventive Alberta (in Canada) and Finland, in which vocational and academic learning are mixed until later in adolescence, remain at the top.

OK, lovely dear. Finland divides the academic goats from the vocational sheep at 16. So we’re all agreed then that this is what produces the best education system in the world?

Lovely, so we’ll proceed on that basis then shall we?

GCSEs for all, A levels and university for a minority,  BTecs and apprenticeships for the majority after that.

Good, excellent, we’re done then, aren’t we?

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation, and endorsed by Willetts, shows that the importance of having a degree has increased over time, in defiance of the assumption that the more highly educated people there are, the less valuable their qualifications. In the noughties, the fewer qualifications you had, the harder it was to maintain good earnings. Higher education improves your chances of finding a remunerative, enjoyable line of work.

There are two entirely different concepts being discussed here.

1) Does tertiary education likely lead to higher incomes for those with tertiary education?

2) Does having more people with tertiary education lead to lower wage premiums for those with tertiary education?

It’s entirely possible that both are true: that there is a premium to having a university degree but that premium is declining.

Which is, pretty much, what you’d expect to be happening actually. As the supply of something increases the market clearing price of that things fall, unless we’ve got something really very strange going on (Giffen Goods and all that sort of stuff). Equally, if something confers a privilege and more people have that something we’d expect the number gaining that privilege to rise.

Now, what actually seems to have been happening is that 2) is very definitely true. So much so that 1) is only partially true. Various people have been saying that an arts degree for a male (subject to the usual caveats, an arts degree for a male from Cambridge might not do this yet but English Lit. from a fourth tier place probably does) has a negative net present value…..in purely economic terms that is. The cost of the course, the years out of the workforce and not earning, are greater than the extra (if any) wages earned over the working life.

Admittedly, these potential saviours are not unruly British adolescents but the 283 million girls aged between 10 and 20 who live in poverty in the countryside of the developing world. Study after study has shown that when they are given a better chance – above all, a decent education – something miraculous happens: the number of births in the area falls, while income and food production increase. Yet these same teenagers have long been neglected by their families and aid agencies alike, with the result that their adolescence usually sees their horizons not widening, but shrinking.

No, it’s not empowering women that creates economic growth. It’s that economic growth allows the education and empowerment of women.

Going out and teaching them to read and write is all very well, indeed, damn good idea. But it isn’t that which leads to higher crops, fewer children and all the rest. It’s that there is a surplus, which allows for the time to become educated.

Every graduate in England and Wales will pay 9% of their income above £21,000, for up to 30 years, just as they would a graduate tax; below that, they will pay nothing. Irrationally from the government’s point of view these income-contingent loans are much less efficient than a proper graduate tax; at best, 70% of the money lent will be recouped, at worst, 50%. But 100% of the cash will go straight to the universities, reinforcing their crucial constitutional autonomy, rather than through the conduit of the Treasury, always ready to raid the proceeds of any tax for anything other than education.

Right, so charging fees means unis are independent of the money grubbers in the Treasury.

Excellent, this defends their Enlightenment freedoms.

Teaching is a public good – it should be paid for in part by public grants.

Therefore, in order to defend the Enlightenment freedoms of universities we must make sure that universities are not free of the money grubbers in the Treasury.

I bet that sort of logic is just wowing them at Hertford College.

Free schools and academies enjoy a range of greater freedoms that will help them to pull ahead in the new competitive schools market.

Yes my dear, you’ve just conceded the entire point. You’ve just stated, right there, that the current system, the current lack of freedoms, holds schools back. Thus we wish to abolish those restrictions so that schools can advance.

There is another way for us to frame this entire argument.

We’re ignorant. We really don’t know what is the best way to educate children. We’ve got a few clues, try to keep the drunks and paedophiles out of the classrooms for example. We have a changing world outside the schools as well: technology is changing, society is. We face, in short, uncertainty, and the correct solution to uncertainty is experimentation.

So let’s try this. And that. Over there, now, what an interesting idea! Yes, those hippies over at Summerhill are a bit odd but chacun a son gout n’all that.

So, if we want to have this experimentation what’s the best system we know of to encourage both the experimentation itself and also the picking up, the spreading, of those ideas that work. And of course the closing down, the into the dustbin of historing, of those ideas that don’t work?

Well, that would be a market system, wouldn’t it? That’s what markets actually do. In pursuit of profit entrepreneurs will attempt various different new combinations of available resources in pursuit of some goal which they believe some segment of the population would like. Thus a market based system will provide our experimentation. And more, because entrepreneurs do in fact look at what others are doing (it is very mch a Red Queen sort of thing, a market, running ever faster to stand still) they have the incentive to pick up from elsewhere those forms of resource combination that work.

And basically, that’s it. We are uncertain about what is the best way to do this educating the anklebiters thing therefore we must experiment. The way that we create experimentation and spread the results of successful such is through a market. Thus we must have a market in schools.

Now all we have to do is kill off Clegg’s idea that schools must not be allowed to make a profit and we can sit back and watch it all take place.

Which is of course Ms. Benn’s problem with it all. If others are going to be doing the experimenting, if others are going to be selecting the ideas that do work, spreading those and killing off those that don’t, if others are doing all of these things then who will there be left for Ms. Benn to tell what to do?

Remember, there is still an aristocracy in the UK. The right people still do insist that the right people should be telling the proles how to live their lives. It’s just that this aristocracy is now within the State, in the committees, not in the grand Ducal houses.

Anyway, they’re claiming they’ve won and that this is wonderful for all. One of the things they claim to have proven is:

From day one, our occupation sought to be more than just a protest. Through free lectures, debates and daily meals cooked in the building’s kitchens, we attempted to demonstrate that there was an alternative model of education – and an alternative model on which to base society – at the heart of a university descending into a neoliberal nightmare.

How excellent, now given that we now know that a university can be run for free, on this alternative, very much not neoliberal, model, that’s the Scottish Universities budget for the chop then.

Amazing what you can find out from students really, isn’t it?

The value of holding a degree has been eroded as the share of the population with a university education has more than doubled over two decades, a study shows.

Glory be, that straight old supply and demand thing. Increase supply and price paid will fall so as to match up demand for that greater supply.

What troubles me though is that their education editor seems to have a greater command of economics than either their economics leader writer (Mr. Chakrabortty) or any of their columnists.

The number of degree students ending up in low to lower-skilled jobs has grown from 9pc to 17pc over the past 18 years, a fresh analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed.

The increase is largely due to the number of people with a degree rising at a faster rate than the number of high-skill jobs available in the UK since 1993, the earliest comparable data, according to the report.