On the road to nowhere....

Yet again education is in the news - this time about the amount of holidays children should take in the summer (which incidentally, some have already changed). Next month , no doubt, Mr. Gove will have another thought about examinations, apprenticeships and the like and yet another group of children will find their work re-assessed by stressed out educationalists who do not know if they are standing on their head or their nether regions.

Last year I taught in a large college situated in an east midlands town which has one of the highest level of NEETS in the country (for those not in the know, this means Not in Employment, Education or Training in the 16-24 age bracket). The kids I took on the courses were , for the most part, a delight to teach and had all of that youthful optimism that you would expect from 17-18 year olds embarking on life. Some of them had more talent than the others;some of them might actually do something with their futures. The sad fact though is that the vast majority, without higher qualifications or abilities, are consigned to a series of disappointments with little or no employment and benefit handouts to look forward to.

This may sound a tad jaded, but when I think back to when I was their age in the 70's, people virtually fell out of school or college into jobs daily. A level students could get management training jobs and if you were a graduate (the top 2%), the world was your oyster. My generation (and more specifically, my fathers baby boomer generation), therefore find it difficult to fathom where it all went wrong.

As a parent of four children, three of whom are still in education, I wonder why we press them to do so well with qualifications. I see young adults who excelled at school, got into their chosen university, ending up with a good grade degree,  now taking menial jobs (when they can find them) and living back at home. some have written thousands of job applications with no luck. Universities are claiming lower numbers of students applying for courses this eyar. Why are they surprised? And if graduates can't get jobs, what hope for the others?

At the other end of the scale, I have been searching for an paid outlet for my talents. I have been a university lecturer, researcher, project manager and consultant. Thanks to the combined "talents" of our political masters I will have to find work until I am at least 65 - perhaps 70.  This I am more than willing to do - if I can find it. But with so many young people out of work, what price experience? If they can employ someone younger for a lower wage they will.

"Just call me Dave" and his chums do not seem to grasp the concept that if there are no jobs, how can people be 'encouraged' back to work. Every time a new company advertises a job, see how many so called these 'scroungers' apply. Thousands. Anyone therefore will a shred of intelligence would conclude that what we need are more jobs - not less funding or penalising those who cannot find it; and raised wages (not just for those poor hardworking MP's and their banker buddies).

Until then, the road ahead looks bleak. What's more, there's no signposts to tell us where it's heading.

The Do's and Don'ts of Social Media

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter et al have had a negative press over the past year and its difficult to sympathise with some of the perpetrators who have been caught. Yes, these type of groups are here to stay and they are a great forum for debate, a place to catch up with distant friends and relatives or simply to get something off your chest. However - they are also home to the banal and boring; the "look at me I'm great" brigade and sadly the homophobic, racist and profane riddled masses. So here's a few Do's and Don'ts:

Do:

• Inform people of momentous occasions in your life - and share photos of such
• Share your views on topical or current news/events and...
• ...start debates on such
• Place links to other sites you think your Friends would like to know about
• Join groups or causes dear to your heart or inform others of them

Don't:

• Fill your site with pictures of you getting rat-arsed with "friends"
• Place links to banal images that are 'funny' or 'cute'
• Make racist, homophobic or obnoxious comments about others
• Use bad language (particularly if you cannot spell them correctly)
• Go on and on (and on) with trivia about what you had for dinner/breakfast/lunch (delete as appropriate)
• Ditto how many times your kids have been sick in the night/peed in things they shouldn't have
• Ask Friends to play games with you that they will then never get rid of
• Lastly (Twitter uses take note) use the site to record every waking thought without THINKING FIRST!!!!!!! 

Remember folks, the first thing that people do these days when they meet you (including prospective employers, students etc) is to check you out . So, don't be a t****r (pancake or otherwise).

Following Derren's Yellow Brick Road to Disaster

I and my family have just watched the first installment of Derren Brown's fantastic new venture "Apocolypse''. The experiment this time is to take a twenty-something layabout son with little responsibility in his life and even less interest in his family (who are obviously at their wits end) and plunge him into a  post apocolyptic world pursued , it would seem, by infected zombie like humans.
Sounds a bit kitsch, but our boy Steve truly and utterly believes everything he is seeing and experiencing - it's just like he's woken up in a real life version of Resident Evil.
Steve's ordeal is not yet over by a long chalk -and  the objective to find the poor guy "a heart, a brain and courage" is obviously built along the lines of Dorothy's adventures in Oz. However, Steve is no Judy Garland and instead of a dog, he has a girl named Leona and there was no whirlwind that brought him to this hell, only a bus heading for a (bogus) concert by The Killers (nice touch!).
As entertaining as all this is, I am not entirely sure how all this will end up. They have to finally reveal to him that this is all a set up at some point - hopefully before he has acquired SAS survival skills and takes them all out in revenge. It does, however, raise a lot of points about how we would all individually respond to such a scenario. Clearly in life there are natural survivors and those who would fall at the first hurdle. Sadly, I feel that Steve falls into the second group -  his face through the last hour has gone from mildly complacent, through mouth gaping shock to pure horror whilst standing like a five year old needing to pee. To top it all, its his birthday.
Maybe his parents couldn't find anything suitable to buy him this year. I have warned my children. Anything is possible

Badgering the NFU

So, at the eleventh hour, the government has decided that they are not as prepared as they thought to allow marksmen to attempt to shoot the badger population in Gloucestershire and Somerset. Well, surprise , surprise. Nothing to do with the national outcry then? In the last few days, BBC news in particular has traipsed a number of farmers across our screen with tales of woe about the number of dairy cows they have lost to TB and the monetary cost to both themselves and the national economy.
Err - hold on a weenie mo. When TB testing in cattle was at its height in the 60's, TB was almost entirely eradicated, but it was the farmers themselves who pushed for the relaxation of this compulsory measure - mostly due to costs! It has also been widely reported (after extensive and costly research) that by culling badgers, TB in cattle would at the most only be reduced by 16% - and might even be worse. Yet we still have many members of the NFU (it has to be said that not all farmers agree with these proposed measures) talking about badgers as though they are one of the great plagues .
Then , we have to remember that these guys are - farmers. They moan and whinge about anything and everything. The weather mostly. It's either too hot, too cold, too windy, too frosty, too wet, too dry . If there were no badgers, they would find other external reasons to blame for the loss of their herd from this disease, but apparently will not accept the simple solution of simply vaccinating either the cattle or the badgers - or both. I would also like to point out that if there is a way of avoiding even more suffering in dairy herds, farmers should be made to do so as responsible owners.
The government has announced a stay of execution , but the matter is not over yet. Therefore, it is up to everyone who cares for wildlife - whether you live in the country or not - to contact your local farmers and ask them, politely, to stop whingeing, pull their Hunters up by their bootstraps, and accept that there is another way around this without putting a lead pellet into the brain of Old Mr Brock!
Also, might I add, farming is no more difficult than many other occupations - and farmers do have the choice of continuing or retraining . No one is chaining them to their tractors . So please, "call me  Dave" Cameron, make TB vaccination in dairy cattle compulsory again and get farmers to put their hands in their pockets - after all , it must be a hell of a lot cheaper than the disposal of disease ridden cows or hiring marksmen and extra police to deal with the number of saboteurs , some dressed as badgers, lurking around the setts.

Screw your courage to the sticking post...and we shall not fail

Years ago when I was a postgrad, a Canadian friend of mine told me how common it was for people back home to have personal psychologists. No two weeks would be complete without a trip to the shrink to discuss personal 'issues'. I remember debating with her why the British  did not, but instead discussed things with friends over a drink or two or, perhaps more traditionally, kept a stiff upper lip and soldiered on stoically.
Now some two decades later we seem to be slipping into that same culture of needing counselling for anything life throws at us. Switch on the tv and if the particular programme you have been watching deals with anything mildly distressing a phone number appears alongside the credits for those who may wish to talk over the content with a professional. The news lately is full of groups and individuals howling and wringing their hankies about situations that happened decades ago and claiming compensation for their 'distress'. And as much as I admire and support members of the armed forces who have been severely injured and disabled in conflicts on this countries behalf, we now also have to listen to some of their colleagues complaining of the 'mental stress' of combat (as if they hadn't counted on this when they signed up) or in having to miss the birth of their child . In the famous words of one naval captain when assessing the request of a midshipman to be with his wife when she was admitted "I can understand why it was necessary for you to be present at the laying down of the keel, but not for the launch".
So, where is the British resolve we are all proud of? Why does the compensation for the loss of a loved one or the stress of being fired at in the field have to amount to a monetary return, instead of sympathy ,recognition and comaraderie.
You have to wonder what the reaction would have been had an actor walked across the stage of Shakespeare's Globe after a particularly gory rendition of Hamlet with the words "and if any of ye have been so affected by that which you have witnessed, then readily we will assist thee and listen to thy afflictions".
Well, it might have raised a laugh or two and perhaps a few objects thrown in his direction.
In short, we need to rediscover our national backbone, stop whingeing and start rediscovering the bulldog spirit that made us the great nation we once were.

Post Graduate Tension (or PGT)

PGT - not a euphemism for a brand of beverage, but symptomatic of what many graduates are undergoing now that they have the piece of paper they have worked so hard for three years for (and no, I'm not being sarcastic), placed themselves in a trailer load of debt for and now find that, in too many cases, it all means squat diddly in the workplace and they are now ekeing out their existence between applying for jobs and staring at a minus figure bank balance.
When you think of NEETS (that wonderful term for those aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training) it generally conjures up images of the large number of young people who have left school with virtually no qualifications and no hope - some of whom also have a family history of long term unemployment . However, their ranks are being swelled by well-educated young people leaving university who are also finding a Britain with no jobs depressing. Hardly what they worked for or what educationalists and government has been promising them throughout their school careers.
In many ways they are worse off than other NEETS (not a term I like, but convenient) as they are also drag around a large debt in their wake and wonder - and who can blame them - if it was all worth it? Well, yes and no.
Certainly, as a lecturer in higher education, I would say that all education is good, but I am appalled by the number of courses put on by institutions in order to gain more students to swell their coffers and , equally, the number of institutions who have started offering degrees as they see them as a lucrative business. Whether the subjects and contents of those they offer are what work place requires seems to matter little (how useful is Golf Science or the mastery of Klingon?) - yet still they are able to recruit and take large sums of money, in the main to finance post graduate research, senior management teams and other staff .
 Higher education is finally being shown as existing primarily as an employer of academics and business analysts than bastions of knowledge and students and this is core of the problem.In short , all young people should be encouraged to achieve the best of their abilities, but we must agree that not all can (and should) make it to university - and those that do must only be offered courses that have real educational  and potential worth (and yes, I would include Classics, English, Arts etc in this). Those who cannot, must be offered alternatives - good quality apprenticeships with vocational or industry qualifications at the end which companies have to accept over and above those without (at present companies take graduates even though many of them do not possess the skills necessary) as they do in countries such as Germany. Government and banks have to ensure that industry and commerce is encouraged in areas of the country where the level of NEETS is highest with real and not promised financial assistance.
Lastly, HE institutions need to be limited to a much smaller percentage of foreign students. This will, of course, reduce the number of courses (and staff) they can afford to run - but it will also hopefully stop the spiralling rise of dubious degree courses  and also force other institutions to concentrate on vocational courses for others instead of becoming "University Colleges". It will also stem the tide of foreign students who never quite make it home after university and melt into the population.
Maybe then, not only will those who graduate stand a better chance of employment, but we will also not be failing all the other young people who so desperately wish to find job satisfaction and self esteem by being accepted as major contributors to the nation - as equals to graduates and not as a generation of also-rans and failures.

Saville - saint to sinner

And so the allegations against Sir Jimmy Saville roll on, even more victims coming out of the woodwork several decades after the alleged assaults.
Don't get me wrong - I never particularly liked Sir Jim and most would account that there was something rather creepy about the guy , and as shocking as the public revelations are, I would bet a rather large amount of money that this hasn't come as anything like a shock to the vast majority of people who knew him or the world in which he moved. Comments by journalists, musicians, health workers etc who knew him attest to this - so you have to ask, why now?
I was a teenager in the 70's, a time when every pop group and music star attracted a hoarde of fans, or groupies, who thronged outside the stagedoor hoping to catch the eye of anyone vaguely connected with the acts. I , like many of my generation, also know of plenty of young fans who boasted openly at sexual encounters with the aforementioned - and no-one batted an eyelid. Yes, it was illegal - yes it was exploitation and perverted, but it happened and on a more regular basis than has been admitted. Saville was one of so very many who took advantage - with perhaps the exception that he continued abusing his position to continue for much longer.
And people knew it - but lets face it, the guy was making them huge sums of money, so they decided to ignore it and in doing so colluded in the crime.
What can be achieved so long after the events mentioned and particularly since the perpertrator is dead and buried? The victims who have, presumably, been living with these memories for up to 40 years no doubt feel aggrieved in light of the media spotlight - although there is a merest hint of jumping on the bandwagon, and how many are actually true? As for the media and society as a whole, we should ask why such young victims where available for him to abuse so easily - where were the carers and parents of these young girls? Why were they left alone with a man of dubious character? What is more - does it still happen? Forget the money-sapping enquiries into what happened decades ago by a dead pervert - learn the lessons, move on and ensure that it cannot happen again.