This isn’t a particularly informative post, more of a spontaneous expression of an epiphany moment (although one without the elation).

The epiphany comes in the form of a question – Is there any worse way of getting teenagers to concentrate than sitting them in a room with 19 other teenagers and one adult for four and a half hours a day?

I mean I know the typical day at school or college, for most kids at least, will be broken up with more active lessons such as sport and music, but the standard model is 20 teenagers in a room with one adult.

This just seems ridiculous – Assuming an hour and half lesson, it’s too large a number for the teacher to engage with one on one in any meaningful way, it’s too many for everyone to have a meaningful input into a ‘whole class discussion’, so teachers are left reverting to either individual work where not everyone gets monitored, or pair/ group work where some students inevitably lose focus, and if you are going to go against ‘fairyland Ofsted’s’ advice, and do the dreaded lecture – well 20 is an equally pointless number, you may as well film it and stream it to 20 000.

The days of 20 teenagers sitting in a classroom must surely come to and end soon? Surely it’s possible for schools and especially colleges to be a little more creative with teaching arrangements – A combination of online lectures and independent learning combined with more intense, tailored, smaller group sessions and occasional one on one meetings with students where they spend less time sitting in class, but where they get more focused attention and thus more focused working when they are in lessons …. Maybe>?

A related question is where did the educational norm of ’20 teenagers sitting in a room’m actually come from anyway, and how did it evolve? Answers in comments please.

So if my Beacon ‘best 6th form college’ in the country doesn’t actually innovate like it’s supposed to, perhaps I’ll forge this path at the institutional level,  perhaps one day, a year or so before I quit in case it all goes pear shaped, I’ll break all the rules and just do this anyway.

-      Twitter as an educational tool in ten tweets –

I’m getting my students used to using twitter as an educational tool this week. I’ll be getting them work through the following questions. I’m doing this with my A2 Global Development other educators should be able to modify this for their own subjects…

Initial steps

• Set up a dedicated sociology twitter account if you haven’t already done so
• Follow all the other students who follow me – NB – check later who I follow too, as I will be following people as they join!

Twitter as an educational tool in ten tweets –

Work your way through these – these are ten ways you (we) can use twitter as an educational tool. This focuses on recent Development work (the SCLY3 module)

Tweet 1 – Define one of the following terms in 146 characters – #Patriarchy #Globalisation or #Urbanisation – start the tweet #concept – (then define it)

Tweet 2 – Retweet the versions of the definition you think are the best

• Now ‘Favourite’ the ones you like in order to note them down later.

Tweet 3 - Tweet one advantage of using #NGOAID over ODA aid – put #NGOAID at the beginning of the tweet.

Tweet 4 – Review other tweets that answer to 1 and 3 (NB there may still be some definitions coming in) and comment on one you think particularly good by replying to someone using @theirusername.

Tweet 5 – Tweet about the most obscure/ advanced thing you talked about in your essay on gender and development. Put #genderessay at the beginning of the tweet.

• Review the tweets on gender – add in any ideas you missed to your essay.

Tweet 6 – Use the @ function to reply to someone and ask how they used the concepts/ case studies they talked about – you will be getting a ‘twitter conversation going about essay planning – which can continue on the train ride home. (Obviously if you get an @question your next tweet may be replying)

Tweet 7 – Either find something on line relevant to global development or find a good revision site and tweet us the link – with a brief summary of what it’s about

Tweet 8 – Possibly the simplest usage – tweet a question about something you have found slightly obscure or difficult to understand – Use the #SCLY3 if the question is about that, or if you’re resitting use #SCLY4

Tweet 9 Find another sociology source on twitter to follow – recommend them to the rest of us using #FF

Tweet 10 – Tweet how useful you find this as a revision tool

Oh the comforts of revision – I finally get to really hand over to the students and spend my prep time creating these cartoons – becoming something of a yearly ritual now – In this one a Green devil like creature explains how cultural deprivation affects educational achievement.

Please note the cunning use of the PEEEL essay writing technique – In relation to the question ‘Assess the Extent to Which it’s Home Based Cultural Factors that Explain Social Class Based Differences in Educational Achievement’ (20)

Point

Explain

Elaborate

Evaluate (the baby bear does this)

Link – OK the link is sort of the next point – and so it may continue, if it weren’t for World of Warcraft (or Facebook, twitter, driving theory tests, the apprentice, fake tan disasters, boyfriends…. I mean I could go on….)

An excellent podcast from BBC Radio 4′s Analysis on the above topic should be compulsory listening/ reading for anyone studying the Sociology of Education – you can get both the audio version and the transcript here

The programme centres on Harvey Goldstein’s statistical research – who points out that once you take into account children’s social and economic backgrounds (their home backgrounds if you like) schools only account for 10% of the difference in a child’s educational achievement.

Although she didn’t say it when Labour was in power, on reflection, New Labour’s Education Secretary in the late 1990s, Estelle Morris, now consents that although ‘schools are all we’ve got’ they ‘can never make up for the social disadvantage that children from poor backgrounds and from disinterested families’ – late on in the programme we are reminded that only 1% of children going to Oxbridge are Free School Meal students.

So why is it that government ministers put so much faith in the potential of schools to transform students’ lives?

The programme traces this back to one study conducted in 1979 by Peter Mortimore, one of the principle researches on the “15,000 hours” study – in which the researchers did observations of good and bad schools and identified all of the features that good schools had (good being defined as those which got students good results) – These features were –

• Good teacher support
• A clean environment
• Good behaviour
• Pupils felt like they were valued

This in turn lead into a new field of study centring around the question of ‘what works’ in education – which lead to researchers being dispatched to discover what successful schools were doing – and later this lead onto the question of how we could design these success features of ‘good schools’ into all schools. The programme draws on Pam Sammons Professor at Oxford University who seems to favour this approach.

Going back to Goldstein, he criticises the work of Sammons and the like by pointing out that the features found in good schools may just be coincidental to success – the schools may have good behaviour, the environment may be clean and money might be available for teacher support precisely because these schools have pupils who are from middle class backgrounds, and this may not be repeatable in all schools around the country.

This, however, is not the view Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief inspector of schools (Head of OFSTED), famed for his headship of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, one of the most deprived areas of London – this was Labour’s flagship academy which replaced the old failing Hackney Downs schools. Wilshaw claims that, through a combination of strict discipline, very long teacher and student hours and a ‘no excuses culture’ you can improve results in any school – he certainly did in Mossbourne – last year 8 students made it to Oxbridge, way above the national average.

What he forgets to mention of course is that he also had the help of a cool £25 million cash injection for a new building, and then there’s the little matter of his new Academy having almost half the population of FSM children attending as were at Hackney Downs.

As a final note – the programme does an excellent job of flagging up how successive governments selectively ignore research that doesn’t fit in with their own political agendas. The stats suggest social class and ethnic background matters and than schools only make 10% difference, and this is ignored, you then find some statistically dubious research from 1979 and one case study from recent history and use this to show that schools can make a difference…..

You may have noticed the latest headline figures on unemployment –  which, according to the ONS,  declined by 35,000 in the three months to March to 2.65 million.

The Guardian article above also points out that youth unemployment also declined slightly, by 9,000 in the three months to February, leaving a total of 1.03 million 16- to 24-year-olds looking for work. The unemployment rate for this age group was 22.2%, down from 22.3% three months earlier.

However, things may not be as rosy as you think, and if you delve, you notice that these headline figures mark a much bleaker picture of employment in the UK.

The government’s definition of unemployment, which comes from The International Labour Organisation (ILO) – an agency of the United Nations is broader than that of the ‘claimant count’ –  According to their definition 

Unemployed people are those

• Without a job, want a job, have actively sought work in the last 4 weeks and are available to  start work in the next 2 weeks, or 
• Out of work, have found a job and are waiting to start it in the next 2 weeks.

(This is the important bit) In general, anybody who carries out at least one hour’s paid work in a week, or who is temporarily away from a job (e.g. on holiday) is in employment. Also counted as in employment are people on government-supported training schemes and people who do unpaid work for their family’ business.

Technically, this means that, yes unemployment maybe falling, but we need to look at the quality of jobs that are being created – and the picture here is not so good – Consider the following two facts -

(1) – As Polly Toynbe  points out, Examine the ONS figures and you find full-time jobs did not increase: they fell by 27,000. All the increase was in part-time jobs for men. There are now 1.4 million part-timers desperately seeking but failing to find longer hours.  

This ties in with findings from the JRF foundation which suggest that Underemployment – people who are ‘unemployed, lacking but wanting work or working part-time because no full time job was available’ is now stands at 6 million, or 2 million higher than in 2004.

Secondly, many new jobs may well be New Apprenticeships – A staggering 450000  of which have started in the last year – and Many of these are not actually real jobs at all – In some cases they pay less than the minimum wage – This under-reported phenomenon is actually worthy of a separate blog post – shortly!)

So, yes, formally, the unemployment figures may be going down, but the types of ‘employment’ people are going into are temporary training positions and part-time temporary work – and in both cases wages tend to be low and positions insecure. Yes, unemployment is going down, but the quality of life for those going into employment is also decreasing.

Teaching this topic this week – thought I’d share a web – based lesson I put together… For A level, and general interest…

Results statistics

• 2012 Break down of stats by region, FSM and ethnicity – not very accessible
• 2010-11 Latest stats – PDF
• 2009 Results – A bit older but the easiest to follow!

Resources looking at Home Based/ Cultural Factors – Read/ Watch the items below and answer the questions in the boxes provided

Focussing on Chinese Achievement

• Britain’s Tiger Mums – (college stream link) – watch this and note down all of the reasons why British Chinese children might do so well in school. If your outside of college this was part of More 4s ‘Wonderland’ series (2011 or 2012)
• Read this article on Amy Chua – one of the world’s severest ‘Tiger Mums’ (She’s American) – ‘on the benefits of burning your child’s stuffed animals’ – Is her severe approach justified?
• NB – If you think Amy Chua is severe – check out this style of ‘Eagle Dad’ parenting (NB – not UK based!)
• Question – There are 300 000 Chinese families in the UK – how could you find out if the above case studies are generaliseable?

 Focussing on Gypsy and Roma Achievement

• Watch My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (college stream link – the first 10 mins and then roughly 53 to the end) – note down all of the factors that might explain why only 8% of Gypsy/ Roma children achieve good GCSEs (if you’re outside of college I’m sure you can find a link to this now classic show Channel 4 show somewhere online!)
• You may have seen this – horse outside video – Question – Is this racist?
• There is some good research here – from the Gypsy Roma Traveller site (Leeds based) – see if you can find any reasons why this group might underachieve…

 Focussing on Black-Caribbean Achievement

• Watch this video – discussing the UK riots of August 2011 – They don’t actually say it (in a shameless example of political correctness!) but they are really talking about ‘black parents’ – note down all of the things that might explain Caribbean underachievement
• Read this article which reinforces that above and demonstrates that the issue of ‘absent black fathers ’ is on the political agenda – Do you think Cameron is right to be worried about ‘absent black fathers’?
• Read this article by Tony Sewell – who argues that Caribbean boys underachieve because of out of school factors   – Summarise all of the factors he lists that explain Caribbean underachievement
• The fatherhood institute is also concerned about the absent black fathers – read this item and note down some of the reasons why Cameron might be wrong to just blame ‘absent dads’ for Caribbean underachievement

Believe it or not, I actually remember being 17 quite well – In between the bits where I generally revelled in my own wonderfulness, it mainly involved a lot of ‘misplaced youthful aspiration’ about my potential for doing great and wonderful things such as ‘travelling the world, astrally visiting other planets, joining Ashrams in India,  sticking it to the man, smashing the system and generally ushering in utopia through the sheer force of youthful enthusiasm.

Having achieved precisely none of these goals – ten years down the line I ended up with a job – teaching Sociology – part of which (the tutor bit) involves assisting today’s 17 year olds to get a job once they’ve finished with their ‘educational transition’ period.

This is somewhat ironic – firstly because the Sociology bit of my job involves telling 17 year olds how crap work actually is and how little chance they’ve got of getting a decent one, secondly because when I was 17, getting a job wasn’t exactly high on my aspiration list, and thirdly, given today’s job market, I think the average 17-18 year old might actually have more of a chance of achieving all of my original teen-dreams than gaining employment – at least if we’re talking about  formal, secure, and worthwhile employment that actually pays you enough to achieve a decent standard of living.

Now I hate to be a kill-joy (actually I love it – the more miserable I can make people, the happier I am), but I’ve got some pretty bleak news for any 17 year old looking forwards to their life after college -

For starters, for any 17-18 year old keenly looking to transition from education to work- if you look at Statistics from the department of education you discover that being 18 years of age hardly signifies the end of your education. According to the latest stats, of all 18 year old in the UK -

• 30% were in Higher Education
• 22% were doing some form of course or training in Further Education (FE).
• 33% were in paid employment, with one third in jobs with training and two thirds in jobs without training 22%. 6% of training positions take the form of ‘modern apprenticeships’ and the most common area of employment for both males and female 18 year olds was ‘Wholesale and Retail Trade; Repair of Motor Vehicles and Motorcycles’
• 15% were NEET

This effectively means that 80% of 18 year olds are currently in a state of education or welfare dependency, and only 20% are in ‘straight-up jobs’. In fact, you’ve almost got as much chance of being NEET as you have of just getting a regular job without training.

Moreover, many of the 20% who are ‘independent earners’ earn so little that this wage-independence cannot effectively be translated into any other meaningful form of independence, with 2/3rds of workers aged 18 earning the £6.00 an hour or less. According to the Youth Cohort Study (2009) which looks at what young people were doing aged 18 –

‘A total of 56% of 18 year olds were earning a wage at the time of interview either through their main activity or through part-time work to accompany full-time studies’. Wages, however, are low, with 63% of 18 year olds in employment earning £6.00 an hour or less, rising to 77% for those on Apprenticeships’ – Suggesting that many employers take advantage of the opportunity to pay young people relatively lower wages where possible.

These figures are in line with government guidance – The Current minimum wage for someone aged between 16 -17 is just £3.68, unless you’re unfortunate enough to have ‘landed’ an apprenticeship, in which case you might be earning as little as £2.60 an hour. This compares to £4.98 – the 18-20 rate, or £6.08 for the over 21s)

To put it in stark terms – if you go straight to work from college – you can expect an immediate future of several years of low wages, with the prospect of yet more work-based training until you start earning anything like a decent salary.

Life at the bottom, is of course, generally worse – and the stats seem to suggest your chances of ending up NEET increase as you get older – At the end of 2010, only 2.3 per cent of 16-year-olds, were NEET, compared to 6.8 per cent of 17-year-olds and 12.4 per cent of 18-year-olds. For most young people, being NEET is a temporary outcome as they move between different education and training options – surveys estimate that only 1 per cent of young people are NEET at ages 16, 17 and 18.

However, as you get older and your ‘educational opportunities’ dry up, the NEET figures increase dramatically, with the latest ONS data revealing that a total of 22.2%, or 1.04 million 16 to 24-year-olds were out of work in the three months to December 2011.

This excellent blog post on the Stumbling and Mumbling blog outlines some of the long term costs of youth unemployment – the starkest of which is that those who have been unemployed for more than six months before the age of 23 earned an average of 7% less than others even at the age of 42; this controls for educational qualifications.

If you can stomach three further years of studying, relative poverty and £30 000 of debt – you are much better off going to university…. You stand to earn about £600 000 more over the course of a 45 year career compared to those who stick with just A levels, and have twice as much chance of being in employment by age 24 compared to those with just GCSEs – although don’t expect to get a job immediately after graduating, as the graduate unemployment rate in the months following graduation currently stands at 25%.

Incidentally, just to depress you further, it’s worth adding that many young people’s life chances are further reduced by high housing costs according to this research by Shelter – some of the main findings include

* At a time when young people are facing extreme difficulties in finding jobs, high housing costs are affecting the ability of one in four 18-34 year olds to move for work, hampering economic recovery.

* Twenty-two per cent of 18-34 year olds have been forced to move back in or continue living with their parents because they are unable to afford to rent or buy their own home.

*Twenty per cent of this age group are delaying having children until they can afford to buy or rent their own home.

* Almost a third (31 per cent) of 18-34 year olds have had to continue living with a partner because they could not afford to live apart, or know someone in the same situation

So to any 17 year olds out there anticipating dreams of independence and material success in the immediate future, dream on….. for most of you, that goal is years away yet.

Having said this, please note that your life-chances do vary considerably depending on your social class and ethnic background – but more of that later.

In comparison with students from other countries, British students are treading water. Despite the introduction of marketisation, despite the GCSE results getting better year on year, despite more money being spent on education under New Labour, looked at internationally, we are going nowhere… at least if you believe the latest analysis from PISA

PISA - the Programme for International Student Assessment – aims to compare and rank the mathematical, reading and science skills of 15 year olds in 65 different countries. It does this by subjecting a sample of children from a range of different backgrounds within these countries to do a two hour test (an overall sample of about 450 000!)

PISA is less interested in knowing whether children can repeat, like parrots, what they have learnt in class. It is more interested in knowing whether students can use their reading skills, for example to make sense of the information they find in newspapers and government documents etc. Fastforward to about 4 minutes in the video below to get examples of the kinds of questions asked.

According to the latest (2009) results the countries at the top in reading are…

1. China
2. Korea
3. Finland
4. Singapore and
5. Canada

The United Kingdom ranks only 25th. The really worrying thing is that although in Britain GCSE results may well be getting better year on year,  in international standings, Britain has stagnated.

PISA also allows to figure out what works in terms of education – and what works is as follows

1. Placing a high value on education
2. Countries with a high proportion of children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds tend to do worse – and within each country students who attend schools with a largely disadvantaged background tend to do worst than those from – partly related to the fact that the best teachers tend to drift to schools
3. Interestingly, spending on eductaion seems to matter much less than the above.Having universally high standards for all students – this basically means the absence of ‘early tracking’ where it is assumed that certain students will not be capable of an ‘academic’ education for example and so are pushed into vocational pathways early on.
4. Not allowing repetition of years – emphasising the importance of first time success.
5. Attracting the best minds into the teaching profession – which basically means paying teachers well.
6. Schools having a high degree of freedom – but designed with a strong system of accountability, so that the authorities can step in if a school is failing.

PISA also tells us that girls persistently do better than boys in reading in all countries, but in maths the opposite is the case, while in science there is no significant gender differnce.

So why are UK students going nowhere?

Obviously we have to consider the fact that other countries are improving, but we need to ask – why aren’t our students improving compared to those in other countries? The answer, I believe, must be due to five things – basically involving the fact that we are not doing the things that work listed above!

• Firstly, we have appalling levels of inequality – this is what really shows up in international perspective – a signficiant percenatage of our kids from poorer backgrounds are failing GCSEs and thus wouldn’t have a hope in the PISA test
• Secondly, we ‘early track’ to the hilt – through banding and tiering in GCSEs for example – and with ‘vocational pathways’ being a possibility this is only set to get worse.
• Thirdly, ever since marketisation, we teach to the test!
• Fourthly, schools don’t have that much autonomy – The National Curriculum and OFSTED and national testing constrain teachers considerably.
• And finally – this is true at A level at least, we allow resit after resit after resit

I feel it necessary to emphasise the extent to which Inequality seems to matter more than the amount spent on education in explaining PISA rankings…. look at these two graphs below -

 So what is the government doing about this?

1. Promote social policy that increases inequality
2. Promote more vocational education and encourage students to take up vocational type GCSE equivelents
3. Make students pay for Higher Education to further alienate children from disadvantaged backgrounds from the idea of going to university
4. Worsen the conditions of teachers by giving them a pay freeze and cutting pensions

In fairness there are some aspects of government policy I agree with (dare I say it Gove’s emphasis on ‘proper academic’ subjects for all kids) but unless we alter the fundamental basis of inequality and a marketised education system that favours the rich, then, overall, our students will never be competitive at a global level.

It’s National Stress Awareness Day - I was alerted to this fact by a blog post on ’10 ways to cope with stress’ from the equality and diversity blog.  I generally like this blog, and some of the ten suggestions for dealing with stress are perfectly legitimate, but, based on 10 years of working within education,  I had to take issue with the number one suggestion – ‘Learn to manage your time more effectively’ - in fairness, the blog author presents this as part of a ‘package of soultions’ to stress – but this isn’t how ‘time management’ as a solution is always presented to us at work.

This has to be my number one most despised solution to dealing with stress – while effective time management skills are obviously going to give you an easier life at work, they are in no way sufficient for dealing with the root causes of stress at work – one of which, in my profession (teaching) at least, is what I call ‘mission creep’ – or the gradual, drip-drip-drip increase of workload over the years. Nothing ever gets taken away, things only get added on – Just a few examples -

• Most obviously, we’ve seen an increase in teaching hours through changes to the timetable and tutorial system.
• Class sizes have expanded – although some subjects have it lighter than mine, which causes me massive stress internally whinging about the injustice of my ‘carrying’ other members of staff with perpetually lighter workloads
• The introduction and expanded use of Emailing has meant more contact with both students and parents
• Extra support for students has, ironically, meant more time spent liasing with study and support
• We’ve had an increase in evening duties – parents evening has expanded and one open evening added

To my mind instead of asking ‘how can I manage my time more effectively’ – we should (also?) be asking ‘what is it that’s putting us in a position of needing to manage our time more effectively’, in other words, ‘why do we have an ever increasing work-load year on year?

In the case of education – it’s ultimately because our funding is linked to the amount of pupils we attract, and the amount of pupils we attract is in turn linked to our results (no one wants to go to a failing college) – This is what leads to management forcing more and more work onto staff, and then providing those staff with ‘advice’ and ‘support’ to help them ‘manage’ the increasing workload.

The real problem with all of this is that there is no end to this ‘continual improvement’- there is never going to be a time when ‘enough is enough’ – because colleges’ exam results are judged relative to each other (and displayed in league tables) and exam grades are also scaled relative to each other in one year rather than relative to previous years – thus we will never have a situation where everyone is getting straight As at A level. There will never be a time when we will say ‘let’s relax for a year, that’s good enough.

For example, since we became a ‘Beacon College’ – with ‘outstanding results’ we are now motivated by ‘fear of falling from grace’ (rather than the ‘desire to become great’)  through slipping down the league tables  – and slip we might because most other colleges and schools in the area are trying to improve their results, which leads to all of these institutions trying to get more and more work out of their staff.

Of course this was the whole idea of the 1988 education act – marketisation to drive up standards, but there are also unintended negative consequences for students of this urge to drive up standards – such as ‘teaching the test’ and ‘narrowing the curriculum’ – but most insidious of all is that students also end up getting stressed – as teachers push more work on them – even more so because what’s increasingly occurring in our college is an ‘internal market’ – where each department tries to get as much work as possible out of their students – ‘exams are just around the corner’…

This system is one in which atomized individual colleges, departments and students compete against each-other – it is thoroughly indivdualised – which maybe explains why we – staff and students alike – accept ‘better time management’ skills (an individualized solution – how can I manage my time more effectively) as a solution to the ever increasing pressures of work and study.

But better time management is not going to stop the systemic-inducement towards an ever increasing workload caused by competing in a marketised education system is it? – Eventually we’ll all be better at managing our time – and still competitive pressures will induce us to work harder to beat the competition.

So this is why I’m not a fan of individualized solutions to solving increasing stress levels at work – the only solutions to increasing stress are ultimately social – and this may well necessitate a long term ‘demarketisation’ of the education system and a reimaging education so it isn’t so obsessed with competition, exams and results, but instead is more creative, critical and flexible. In other words – If we want to beat stress at work – we need to maybe get back to the work of Ivan Illach and Rudolph Steiner!

You may call be an idealist – but what the hell – We need some optimism for a sustainable working education system rather than one in which we just put in place strategies to cope in one that’s suffering from perpetual stress.

Related posts

Capitalism and Stress

In the sense that University places are being replaced with apprenticeships under current government policy

Two recent sources suggest an significant drop in UK students intending to go to unviersity – recent UCAS stats show a 12% drop in applications – 52 000 applicants so far this year, compared to 59 000 last year in that while a recent survey suggests that 1/10 students are being put of going to University.

What I find extremely interesting here is that 2/3rds of students currently doing A levels are considering doing apprenticeships instead of degrees. The rate at which these apprenticeships are growing in modern Britain recently took me my surprise – the number available for 16-19 year olds in now around the 400 000 mark – and  number of ‘higher apprenticeships’ for 18-21 year olds ( or older) are growing – The government has recently found £25 million to support them, enough to fund 10 000 positions

So err, hang on, that’s roughly 10 000 fewer people going to university to learn critical thought – and an additional 10 000 people going straight into training with businesses, paid for by the government. Isn’t this an example of the government just cutting critical, academic education, and using the cash to pay for cut-price youth-labour for businesses?

So fastforward a decade – and what we’ll have are thousands of more 18-20 years olds working for large corporations doing ‘apprenticeships’ either earning nothing or paying for the privilege, and tends of thousands more 20 somethings who have gone through apprenticeships having missed out on the broader, more critical and academic education that they would have got had they gone to unversity.

And Ok I know there are arguements for more vocational education and then theres the fact that many graduates are underemployed but what I’m talking about here is the decline of education for the sake of education, and its replacement with education for the sake of supporting business (note, I don’t say industry – because I’s sure many of these apprenticeships are not actually that productive.