Snobbish grandstanding about poor kids being second class dumbos who need to be patronised into Oxbridge is about as insulting and out of touch as it gets.
Yet it is useful in getting to the heart of the matter of why state education in the UK is now so very poor. Clegg and his colleagues have clearly given up on actually giving working class kids an education on parity with their wealthier counterparts and so positive discrimination must, he wrongly assumes, come into play to balance things out.
It is highly offensive for the Coalition to continue to pursue positive discrimination for kids based on their background or skin colour. At the end of the day, they should be focusing on giving every kid the chance to flourish on a level playing field. Instead sadly our politicians seem focused on lowering standards because they don’t have the answers as to how schooling for poor kids can be vastly improved as is required.
In addition we need less talk about lowering standards and much more focus on trying to give all of our kids disciplined, rigorous, top class education. The type of education the generation before mine got, in grammar schools and vocationally-focused schools.The answer of course is that firstly, we don’t necessarily need working class kids flooding into Universities, we need them getting taught the right skills to get to the top. Oxbridge isn’t for everyone; we need to stop acting as if the vocational route is the road to failure. It is not.
If we do that, maybe we can one day start raising standards for our poor youngsters instead of seeking to constantly lower their expectations and aspirations.
2 comments:
A great piece Michael. I am not a great fan of Grammar schools having seen what harmful things the 11+ does to kids at such a young age but your point that vocational courses should be encouraged on a par with the academic route is spot on. The snobbery amongst the liberal intelligentsia (which includes Cameron) on vocational subjects and courses is despicable.
I am disgusted with politicians who batter universities for not letting poorly qualified young people in. It is not the university's fault, it's not the young person's fault, it is the state education system at fault and therefore it is the politicians' fault!
Universities on the whole, and not just the Russell Group, provide a good higher education (shown by how every international student wants to study in the UK) but they can't be expected to teach primary and secondary level education on top.
As you say, university isn't for everyone. In the first place, something like 1 in 5 graduates are failing to find any sort of graduate job, even after several years.
This is not necessarily a reflection on their ability, but simply the vast competition for vacancies. The Reed Employment website tells you how many applications it has received for each graduate vacancy -- it can be literally hundreds, and the poor HR manager on the receiving end is probably only looking for half a dozen people to interview. As she contemplates the foot-high pile of CV's on her desk, she knows that, if she reads the first twenty, she will find half-a-dozen really good candidates to interview. The rest don't even get a chance.
So encouraging fewer less-promising students to save their money and find some path other than university is probably sensible. In a world where everybody has a degree, who is going to install electrical systems? plumb boilers and bathrooms? fix cars? cook in restaurants? make shoes? thatch roofs? blow glass? make jewellery? gold-leaf churches?
Not only are universities no longer "the passport to a higher income" that some mendaciously like to argue, you cannot run a society based entirely on people with degrees and those who simply have no education worth mentioning. There is a great social need for people somewhere in the middle -- for people who see their role as vocational rather than academic. There shouldn't be a stigma attached to not going to university, and Clegg should not be encouraging one to develop.
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