More than a third of policing chiefs are urging Suella Braverman to ditch the blanket requirement for all officers to have degrees to stop forces missing out on veterans and older, experienced recruits.
Just drop the requirement.
Of course, next stop is nursing…….
College is where they catch leftism, so there’s an added bonus right there.
Blair started the nonsense about everyone having degrees, so it would be great if the copper arresting him for war crimes was a humble ex-soldier.
Leftism in the form of establishing permissible views about colour/race, sexuality, green energy and lifestyle, British history etc is being force fed to schoolchildren at least 10 years before they attend college.
A first step would be to add degree-free teachers to the list.
No doubt that’s why ‘they’ want them to have degrees in the first place John.
Degrees are generally useless. Some degrees are useful for specific careers, but for the vast majority of jobs a degree is a hindrance.
The two-thirds who aren’t urging her should just have made the list to be got rid of at the earliest opportunity…
No doubt true, SLMB. It’s being able to do what required that’s important. Not having a certificate issued by people who’ve never done what’s required themselves.
Unfortunately credentialism. The people now making the decisions got their positions on the back of their credentials*, so they have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. Someone succeeding without them would devalue what they did for three years of their lives
Can’t say I’ve ever needed credentials. I left school at 16 with a handful of O-levels. Not saying I ever went back to pick up the actual certificates. They must be still in a drawer in the school office. But I’d spent my final year working part time in the City doing a responsible job & just turning up at school occasionally. By the time my peers were leaving their universities I had a long successful track record, a flat in Central London with a two seater crumpet puller parked outside. Be impossible to do that now. I’d be forever stuck as the post boy. Every route up blocked by the lack of a piece of paper, no matter how good I was.
*Not saying they’re worth much. There’s times I’m astounded by the decisions these sort of people have come up with. FFS! Common sense.
I occasionally look at today’s degree courses, and they’re a lower level than the course I did in the ’80s. I was looking at a Master’s course the other day, and it covered stuff I was doing *before* university.
Some degrees are useful for specific careers, but for the vast majority of jobs a degree is a hindrance.
After the City, I spent 3 years working as a gold & silversmith. Girlfriend at the time’s brother was one & I just got interested in it. He taught me on the job. I did mostly repairs. Even some for the jewellery department of the V&A restoring very old pieces. But I can design & make.
I can remember going to an exhibition – I think it was at the ICA – which was off all the best work turned out by students of jewellery design at the various UK universities. A very bemusing experience. I should think of the hundreds of exhibits there were possibly only three or four even worth a glance. Mostly because they were unwearable designs. The level of craftsmanship was about what I’d achieved in my first month.
The thing about jewellery design ( like much other design) is it’s driven by both the materials you’re working with & the techniques to work with it. If you don’t understand the techniques, the craft side, you can’t design. Like trying to design a car without understanding how the drive chain & suspension functions.
But who’s teaching jewellery design at UK universities? I doubt if they’re craftsmen. I could make more money in a week than they’d earn in a month, actually doing it. Do they even have the tools required to practice the techniques? Occasionally I’ve wanted to make something & have signed up some jewellery evening class to get my hands on the tools. But they never have any beyond what I have hanging around anyway. Nor do the people running the classes seem to understand what is needed to make jewellery. They’re just bending bits of wire into curious shapes.
“Not saying I ever went back to pick up the actual certificates.” Dear Christ, you mean that the certificates were posted to the school not the candidate? Fuck me, England really is a foreign land.
@dearieme Maybe it was because they so rarely saw me. They missed my company. But I think that may have been the form in the 60s. Maybe there was a presentation or something?
Not saying I ever went back to pick up the actual certificates.
My school posted me my O level certificates.
A neighbour recently graduated from art school. Apparently they aren’t taught much about the theory and practice of craftmanship or the science of why some materials work and some don’t. The idea as a professional, is to create a draft of an object and get a craftsman to make it properly,it seems.
She made a large sculpture which is impressive and very admirable. Parts of it were made using a 3d printer but the ceramic parts were hand crafted. Even to my amateur eye, some of the engineering is a bit cack handed and where she neededa professional’ s help.
Unlike a lot of you public school boys I had no interest in school or anybody who went to it. It was just an inconvenience I was required to suffer 5 days a week. The final time I walked out he gate I forgot all about it like a bad memory.
However I did learn from the grapeline that four in my class had committed suicide by the end of the 90’s. Why? I think the education it provided didn’t produce the sort of people could adapt to the changes that happened over the next 35 years. They found themselves unemployed & on the beach in their middle years with no prospects.
If I’d have stayed in the City, I would have. None of what I was doing then exists now. But I change & adapt. I’ve had at least 5 careers since then. I’m always thinking about the next one before the current one peaks.
@Ottokring
Painting’s a good example. Mixing paints. What pigment chemicals are incompatible. Brush techniques. Learned some of it for look-alike antique furniture when there was a market for it. Trompe l’oeil for interior design features. It’s the craft side of art. If I go to a gallery, I’m usually more interested in the techniques used than the subject of the painting. Some of the old masters are fascinating if you have some understanding of the how.
The idea as a professional, is to create a draft of an object and get a craftsman to make it properly,it seems.
I can’t see how that can possibly work. I have never done centrifugal casting. But I know how to make the wax model the mould is taken from. To do that you have to know how to cast or you’ll end up with something uncastable. It’s the same with 3D printing. One needs to know what is possible to print before you can design.
My best friend from school was one of the countries best stone masons and specialised in restoration work, especially on the big minsters and cathedrals.
He was teaching a very popular course in stone carving at the local glammed up FE college pretending to be a university on nothing but his original qualifications (effectively City & Guilds)
The college, in their infinite wisdom decided that only degree qualified staff would be employed after such-and-such a date, therefore job goes out the window, but no degree qualified stone masons will touch the job with a 10 foot barge pole, so fuck the students wanting to learn stone carving.
Nowadays he just does “invitation only” celebrity monuments, because why not.
jgh:
One of my last jobs at work was marking “degree level” work – I was drafted in to assess extended mini-theses which covered an entire module. I had, of course, to mark to the standards adopted by my colleagues and clumsily described in the grading criteria. There was one piece of work which was truly outstanding, far better than the rest, and I had to give it a first.
It was about the level of a good A level pass back in the mid 1970s. Retirement is beautiful, I love every bloody day of it.
My best friend from school was one of the countries best stone masons and specialised in restoration work, especially on the big minsters and cathedrals.
It was a stonemason taught me tuck-pointing. That’s the pointing you see on quality redbrick Victorians in parts of London. Coloured with a white line in the centre. It’s not just physically doing it. It’s learning how to mix the lime mortars & the pigments to the right constituencies. He was about 75 at the time. Must be dead for years. Apart from him I’m the only person I knew who could do it. I could probably make a packet doing it now, if I could be bothered. It was about £50m² then. Take about an hour. Less on a big panel.
Amusingly, there’s a house in France I tuckpointed for a laugh, when I was living there. Fun watching French builders looking at it & scratching their heads. Weatherstruck’s beyond them.
I can also do Lincrusta (authentic Anaglypta) ceilings & the plaster mouldings. Including copying them from existing/installing. Taught myself. The money one can earn in that game on restoration jobs is obscene. A thousand a day’s easy.
I recommend things like the above to Tim on another thread. Lot more remunerative than scribbling if you’re not adverse to getting your hands grubby once in a while.
BIS,
“Be impossible to do that now. I’d be forever stuck as the post boy. Every route up blocked by the lack of a piece of paper, no matter how good I was.”
This is something of a myth. If you get away from government and the sort of bloated corporations full of HR power skirts and either work in an SME or the sort of places that are kryptonite for HR power skirts (manufacturing, cheaper-end retail) anyone can succeed.
I sometimes work for very small companies, 10 or less staff. So, the guy you’re working for owns the place. He doesn’t not give a shit what pieces of paper you have. He only cares that you can do the job. Often he has learned through experience that the pieces of paper don’t count for much. Computer science graduates who are dull 9 to 5ers and get whipped by enthusiastic kids.
Degrees for nursing, police, social workers, child care, teaching…
The Blair regime’s move to have all jobs licensed as in EU, USA. Blairite tories have supported and expanded for 12 years
This is something of a myth.
Regrettably it isn’t. I started out on the London Stock Exchange working for a broker. Despite the upper echelons being infested with chums from the “right schools” the “right regiments” & lashings of nepotism* they were actually very good at exploiting the talents of the riff raff. Half the dealers I worked with had come up the post boy>general office route. The better half.
Sure the 80s produced the Big Bang & the barrow boys but from what I see of now a lad wouldn’t get into the post room without a degree. And if he did, he wouldn’t get out of it.
Why do you think all the expensive fuck-ups? They used to be rare because a lot of the people had come up through the firms & had experience of how all the nuts & bolts worked. So they could spot when something smelled wrong. You couldn’t trade yourself into a disastrous situation because there were far to many people watching & understanding what you were doing. The alarm bells would go off. I’ve even had a dealer the on other side say “Are you sure you want to do that?”
*Yep. Including me. Nephew of their biggest client.
I thought the City had always been ~50:50 Harrow boys and barrow boys. But perhaps the balance has changed today.