As Mrs M and I sat in the garden watching the younglings
engage in yet another deeply intense role playing game of inter species marriage,
adventure, war-come-musical, scientific innovation and epic screenplay between Draculaura, a couple of Moshies, about
28 Barbies, one Ken and several Trash Packs , all conducted with excellent
American accents, an occasional Scottish one (the release of Brave cannot come
quick enough for Ginger) and some really raw Essex vowel use, we thought, ‘Blimey,
we need to stop watching quite so much telly!’
But this thought was quickly replaced by concerns for their future and
the future of the current generation emerging from school.
| Ginger and good at fighting. Genius. |
We had it quite easy really. Work hard and you will get a
good job. That was pretty much it. There were friends who were going to be
academic, there were friends who were savvy but not hugely intelligent who were
destined to be go-getting successes and there were friends who were plain and
simply grafters. There was a set of rules we abided by; only spend what you
have, save up for something you want and don’t expect everything straight away.
Educationally, we were told that Universities were the places that quaternary
and high level tertiary occupations were forged, Polytechnics were the places
that secondary occupations were forged and jumping into the wide beyond straight
from school was the fast track to the primary sector. Important to note that of
my particular group, if you had aspirations of quinary you had to enter the
army as an officer or go to Oxbridge. I considered one of these – the other
didn’t consider me at all, what lofty ambitions the teen me had, the reality is
so far short of this the Hubble Telescope would have difficulty covering the
distance.
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| My career, as seen from space. |
So what is there for our kids? Let us start with the
nostalgic meddling of Professor Gove. What’s that? He isn’t actually a
Professor? He has no real professional understanding of the education system
other than he went to school once? You surprise me! He is on a path to turn
every school he comes across into a Free School. My basic understanding of this
is a school funded by the tax payer through the council? (but to a lesser
extent to that of a regular school – I could be wrong here) but without that
local education authority having any say at all in how the school operates. The
school then has to seek sponsors (see middle-class parents wishing to donate or
local and/or national companies that want to sponsor it). So what happens when
there are enough like-minded individual donors for a school that threaten to
withdraw their funding because they want their children taught in a specific
way? The school is held to ransom by parents who may know what is best for
their child but not what is best for all the other children. Or maybe we look
at the results driven perspective of the company that sponsors the school. Say,
for a reason of cycles, there are a few concurrent years where the kids
attending the school just aren’t high achievers for no fault of their own or
their parents, results take a bit of dip, the school doesn’t fly high on the
league table. Does the sponsors act responsibly and say – well let us look at
this long term, or do they just say, ‘We are sponsoring a failing school; we
should get out before Ofsted get involved.’ Are these unnecessary pressures
that are being forced on schools and on teachers who should just be
concentrating on the shaping of children’s lives? Shouldn’t the schools be
protected from the harshness of capitalism, this kind of exposure to a world of
cold statistical decision making surely at worst will only harm them and at
best distract them from what they do best?
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| A G(l)ove |
But Gove isn’t finished there either. Exams. Yuk! I had an
inability to revise, GCSEs helped me because it wasn’t all revision based. I
like GCSEs. Had you held a gun to my head, sure I would have revised, but in
most schools we try not to do that. Gove once again is reaching back into hazy halcyon
past, maybe one where he sat in field of long grass and recited Amo Amas Amat
just because he could. He wants us to have two tier examinations again. I buy
into his assertion that there should be one examining board and therefore one
benchmark for achievement; it seems nonsensical that there are so many
different boards asking so many different things of the examinees and as a
result raising doubts around the legitimacy of one child’s achievements over
another. But to force teachers to decide the future of student’s entire life at
14 by putting them on a path of qualifications that could become a barrier to
further training and/or learning in later life is daft. Gove has prattled on
about level playing fields in education for some time, yet every change he
makes is another contour in the ever increasingly hilly topography of UK
education.
So, our children have scraped together some qualifications,
probably in spite of the system they are in. What now? Well they are all now
expected to go to a University or straight into employment. A hangover from a
previous administration that means many spurious courses were created fulfil some
dodgy course quota to secure funding, resulting in thousands of students being
promised a life of security wealth and work, and every single one of them being
spat out of the system having wasted money and three years of their lives with
a meaningless qualification that only harms their employment chances. But the
main thing with this was the demonization of other centres of learning,
vocational learning, apprenticeships. The opportunity to go into further
education should be there for every child, but there should be a range of
realistic opportunities that suit the abilities and aspirations of the
individual. And that individual should be able to hold their head high while pursuing
their course in life. It is complicated,
GCSEs and the merger of into Universities happened at more or less at the same
time, one was a good move and the other could have been handled better, if we adopt a two tier education system (too
early in my view) and do not alter the University system at the same time to
allow for this we will have a huge, and I mean colossal, chunk of society that
is demeaned, and degraded because they are prevented from being able to enter
into further education and adulthood with any prospects or self-respect.
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| Nothing like a literal visual aid. |
On top of all of this, our children will pay for all of this,
and continue paying for it. Parents too will undoubtedly pay for it as well as
no parent with the means available will want to see their child burdened with
debt as they enter an employment market with so few job opportunities as we
have now. Our children will be competing with us for jobs as we will certainly
never be in the position where we can retire. Will our children inherit our
debts that have been built up over the decades in an attempt to cushion their
early lives from these traumas? Will they be able to get mortgages, or even
just credit? Will they even understand the value of money as it ceases to be a
tangible currency and becomes something that it only a password away spending
on an App?
And then it struck us. All the political posturing of day,
from all three main parties, that states that our generation is working hard to
give a secure world for future generations is nothing but guff. Our children
are going to pay a very very heavy default sum on our political apathy. We could have done something, we could have
held our government to account. Sadly I think we are all noticing this too
late. The ruling class has its feet under the table and are changing the menu
in such a fast and deep way that we will probably be 30 years away from any
hope of sensible non-profit orientated community minded change.
For now, our two are oblivious and happily marrying two
Barbies with an American master of ceremonies that is a rubberised thumbnail of
vomit – but soon to be blown away by some singing ninja Moshies from Arbroath.
| Trash Packs have released a Prime Minister series. |
