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Education

Ritchie says that Big Business should pay for universities

Yes, he does.

Lecturers’ union UCU will call on the government to abolish all university tuition fees – and force big business to pick up the tab. The demand is made in a new report highlighting Britain’s status as one of the cheapest countries for firms to do business.

Currently British businesses only pay 28 per cent combined corporate income tax rate, the lowest rate in the G7 with the exception of Italy. UCU is demanding that tax be raised to the G7 average of 32.87 per cent, with the billions this would raise each year ploughed into education.

It says its proposals for a business education tax are the \”first coherent attempt at making business pay its way for the numerous benefits it gets from UK higher education,\” after years of neglect and underinvestment. Research by the union and left Labour pressure group Compass has revealed that higher education contributes £59 billion to the economy every year. Graduates are also more likely to cost less to the economy through more secure employment and be healthier, more active individuals, the union states.

UCU general secretary Sally Hunt pointed out that the proposed increase in corporation tax would still be lower than when the Tories were last in power.

\”Our proposals are based on fairness,\” she said. \”The future for the UK is as a high-skilled knowledge economy and that requires business to pay its fair share towards something which benefits us all,\” she said.

One of the problems with this is of course that old one about pipers and tunes.If we\’re going to insist that business pays then business clearly should be able to decide what the education is. The logic seems difficult to escape. UCU says business benefits from having graduates, therefore business should pay for creating graduates. If this is so then business should obviously only be paying for those graduates which benefit business.

Which might not be quite what the UCU would like to hear:

In a report, billed as a pre-election manifesto, the AGR said: “The introduction of a target to get 50 per cent of all under-30s into higher education by 2010 has driven down standards, devalued the currency of a degree and damaged the quality of the student university experience.

“Growing numbers of students are studying degree courses which lack rigour in below-average institutions.

“This does not help young people’s life chances or represent a good financial investment. It also creates problems for graduate employers who can no longer be sure what the value of certain degree courses and institutions is.

“The focus must shift back to quality rather than quantity, while the offering must adapt to meet the needs of a wider range of backgrounds and abilities.”

Business wants fewer, better graduates. And if they\’re going to be paying for it why shouldn\’t their desires be taken account of? Equally, if they\’re not going to be the people paying for it then the UCU is entirely at liberty to tell \’em to go piss up a rope.

But not both: you pay and by the way, here\’s what we want to provide, not what you want to pay for.

There\’s an easy solution to this

Thousands of primary school children are being taught in supersized classes of more than 40 pupils, according to figures.

There are tens of thousands of qualified teachers (and I wouldn\’t be surprised at all if it were 100,000 or more) who already work for the education system but never actually do any educating.

They\’re sitting in the Local Education Authorities shuffling paper instead.

Abolish the LEAs and get the teachers we\’re already paying back in the classroom.

Simples.

Ritchie, academia and corporate taxes.

If anyone\’s at a loose end tonight would they fancy going along to the House of Commons? There\’s an interesting question that should be asked.

R. Murphy Esq will be speaking:

I am speaking at a meeting tonight in the House of Commons organised by the University and Colleges Union.

The aim is to abolish university fees and make big bad business pay for universities. The basis of the plan is here:

A report released today by UCU recommends raising the level of corporation tax in the UK to the G7 countries\’ average to raise enough money to abolish all university tuition fees.

It\’s going to be extraordinarily interesting to see Ritchie arguing for lower corporation tax, that\’s for sure.

For of course the level of corporation tax is not the same as the marginal rate of corporation tax. There\’s waaaay to much to be argued over allowances, depreciation, the tax base itself and so on. The best way of cutting through that Gordian knot is by measuring the corporation tax collected as a percentage of GDP. That\’s how we can measure the level taking account of all such things.

Here\’s the OECD report.

You will note that the UK collects more of GDP in corporate taxation than the OECD average, the EU 19 average and the EU 15 average.

In fact, if you do the simple average for the G 7 countries, it is 3.5% or thereabouts while the UK  is at 4%.

Thus if we are to get the level of corporate taxation to the G7 average then we should lighten it by 12.5%.

Hey, sounds good to me.

Added, of course, to the joy of seeing Ritchie argue for a reduction in tax levels there\’s a further point. The academics who have thought this up believe that such a lowering will increase revenue collected. Clearly they believe we\’re to the right of the maximum revenue point of the Laffer Curve then.

Girls are ready to have children at 14

So says Hilary Mantel.

The 57-year-old novelist said that society ran on a \”male timetable\” which dictated that women should have babies at an older age.

\”Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society\’s timetable,\” she said.

I can\’t say I\’m wholly convinced by her reasoning but the basic point seems sound. It is certainly possible to have children at 14 and in a physical sense that\’s pretty much it. Our own society hasn\’t, for a millenia or more, thought that quite so young was the right time. A year or two later perhaps for marriage (but then I seem to recall that English marriage ages have almost always been later than those of many other societies). There are plenty of others where physical ability to have children has been seen as the right time to have children.

\”But society isn\’t yet ordered with that kind of flexibility,\” she said in an interview in today\’s Stella magazine.

\”We were being educated well into our twenties, an age when part of us wanted to become mothers, probably little bits of all of us. Some were more driven than others.\”

That, however, does strike me as being true. I was talking to a friend who is a professor in the US and he was making the point that American academia seemed almost deliberate in the way that it made it difficult for women who wanted children to climb the greasy pole. High School, first degree: you\’re 22 when you finish. A PhD adds another 7 years (yes, really, 7 years over there now). 29….then there\’s a few years of post doc work, then another 4 or 5 before you find out whether you\’ve been granted tenure as an associate (or is it assistant?) professor. So you only find out whether you\’ve got a stable job (and pre-tenure jobs in American academia are very much not stable, it\’s up or out all the way) in your mid to late 30s. Just when fertility falls off a cliff.

This is an extreme case yes, but there\’s a point to it as well. No, I\’m not thinking that the solution is free full time child care for everyone either. Rather, that our near obsession with the formalities of qualifications needs to be changed. Instead of \”you must do x years here and y years there\” in order to be considered qualified for a job, how about \”take this test. Are you qualified\”?

That would go some way to reintroducing the flexibility that I think we rather need in the job market and society as a whole.

Put it another way around, on the male side, without bringing in the complicating factor of children. I wouldn\’t say that I was particularly qualified to teach economics at, say, A level standard. But I think I might make a decent fist of it all the same. Indeed, much as I hate those under about 25 I could imagine pottering off to do exactly that for a couple of years say. And if the thought of me teaching the little darlings is too much for you, consider that there are many others out there without formal qualifications who would be able to make a decent fist of teaching their own subjects of expertise.

Put that block in the way of having to have a teaching post graduate course under the belt though and I\’m most certainly not going to do it. As many others won\’t. As Shuggy has said (and he is a fully trained and qualified teacher) the only thing of value in that year was the 6 weeks or so classroom practice. The rest of it was drear and lightly warmed over bad sociology.

All a bit wandering this, sorry. But we do seem to have a near tyrany of qualifications rather than the more correct attempt to measure ability or capability. And I think we\’d be better off if we moved more to the latter than the former.

This does not tell us what Maddy thinks it tells us

It\’s year 10\’s English class in a ­London comprehensive. Forty kids are debating the purpose of a school. \”Teaching social skills,\” they suggest. Why do you need them? I ask, playing devil\’s advocate. \”To get a job.\” Is that the only point of having social skills? \”Yes, what else is there?\” One demurs, hesitant and not entirely sure how to ­express herself. \”No, there\’s more to life than a job. There\’s happiness. Social skills are needed to make you happy.\”

It was a fascinating illustration of how deeply the instrumentalist values of the market have penetrated our everyday thinking when kids talk in this way. \”Social skills\” is the type of phrase management experts dreamed up to put a market value on a set of human characteristics.

Well, yes, but….

These were bright and interested 14-year-olds, but if you ran this argument in any other school, you\’d probably get pretty similar responses. The gap that intrigued me was the absence of any notion of being a good person, or of the many values that might not be able to command a market price such as being challenging, courageous, truthful, honest, spontaneous, joyful or even kind, compassionate.

I started with this classroom anecdote because it seems a good way to make concrete an absence.

That absence being something that Maddy herself seems not to notice. Sure, schools are there to produce a certain set of social skills: I recall how hiding at the bottom of the ruck in the frost was supposed to build character for example. And there\’s also the simple basic idea of socialisation: teaching the little beggars that they are indeed part of a society, not just atomistic individuals.

But schools also have other things they\’re supposed to teach as well: like the basic tools to enable you to navigate the modern world. Readin\’n\’ritin\’ come to mind, sums, how to think, how to evaluate an argument, consider evidence, even, if you like, how the birds n\’ the bees thing applies to human beings.

Nary a mention of all of that: no, it\’s all Thatcherism, the triumph of the market makes schools so appalling according to Our Maddy. Absolutely no recognition at all of the things that schools used to at least attempt to teach and now seem not to.

Too much higher education

If prices are falling then we\’ve a sign that there\’s over-production relative to demand.

The pay premium earned by postgraduates and those who take masters degrees is in decline as the market becomes flooded, research suggests today.

The study, commissioned by the British Library and the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), found that the benefit of taking another qualification after graduating was decreasing.

Graduates taking a postgraduate course in 2003 earned, on average, 18 per cent more than peers who had obtained a first class degree and 31 per cent more than those who achieved a 2:1.

But by 2008 this had fallen to 15 per cent and 27 per cent respectively.

As prices are falling then we\’ve over-production relative to demand.

Thus we\’ve got too much higher education and should have less of it.

Getting excited about the Finnish school system

Yes, excellent, let\’s do it, eh?

Finnish schools are the inspiration behind some of the Conservatives’ planned education reforms to raise the qualifications and status of teaching in England, turning it in David Cameron’s words into a “noble profession”.

So, what are the distinctive bits of the Finnish school structure?

Education after primary school is divided into vocational and academic systems, according to the old German model. Traditionally, the systems do not interoperate, although some of the de jure restrictions have recently been lifted. In particular, an important difference compared other systems is that there is no common \”youth school\” — ages 15–19 are spent either in a trade school, or in an academic-oriented upper secondary school. Trade school graduates may enter the workforce directly after graduation. Upper secondary school graduates are taught no vocational skills and are expected to continue to tertiary education. A national speciality in contrast to some foreign systems is the academic matriculation diploma (Abitur) received after successful completion of upper secondary school, which holds a high prestige.

School leaving age is 15/16 and after that it works on roughly the grammar/secondary modern system.

Hey, works for me, let\’s get on with it then.

The state of education today

Fiona Millar says something that rather blows my mind. OK, she\’s talking about Boy Dave\’s silliness about teacher qualifications but this does still shock at tad:

With its explicit condemnation of non-academic courses taken in non-Russell Group universities,

What in buggery is any university, that epitome of academia, doing teaching non-academic subjects?

That\’s the whole point of a university: academic study. Non-academic study is indeed valuable, interesting, desirable and socially useful. It\’s just that it shouldn\’t be taking place in a university.

Just what we need, yes….

Peter Preston:

Why did schools take wildly different decisions about the snow? Because Ed Balls passed the buck

More centralisation in the British education system.

Oh yes.

The Minister in Whitehall really does have the knowledge to decide upon the weather conditions at each and every school in the country by 8 am each day.

Oh yes.

Willy Hutton on private schools

Yah, y\’know, it\’s all about class innit?

Private schools perpetuate privilege and thus we should….well, what?

How about sorting out the State schools so that those with any aspiration for their children don\’t flee them?

How about even demolishing the distinction? Get the State out of the provision of education and leave it to simply finance it? Then every school is a private school and we\’re done with the whole nonsense, aren\’t we?

But then that\’s reasonable, logical and liberal, three reasons why it won\’t happen in this country.

The state of education today

They could be plunged into \”special measures\” by Ofsted under new rules that place equality on a par with exam results and child safety for the first time.

Are we entirely sure that when a startling number leave 11 years of compulsory education without being able to read, write or do sums, that this is entirely the best allocation of limited resources?

Really?

So how\’s that State education system coming along then?

Almost one million Scots are unable to read and write properly, according to an influential group of educationalists who have called for an overhaul of the country’s approach to literacy.

According to the Literacy Commission — which also includes business leaders and the novelist Ian Rankin — about a fifth of adults do not have the literacy skills they need for their daily lives.

Not well then, eh? The State has them for 11 years and cannot even manage two of the three r\’s?

Quick question. What was the literacy rate before State schooling, back in the 1880s?

Horrors! Disaster!

Britain has plummeted to the foot of an international league table for the number of young people remaining in education beyond the age of 15, according to research. It has been overtaken by Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and New Zealand in major rankings showing the number of teenagers in college and university.

The University and College Union, which published the research, warned that drastic action was needed to stop the UK becoming a “first-world country with third-world” ambition.

OK, standard practice here. Producers union releases figures showing that said producers aren\’t getting enough money for being producers. We must immediately spend more on them in order to avoid complete and total disaster.

Nowhere is there an admission that we might actually have, erm, excessive education? For example, an arts degree for a male now reduces lifetime earnings, not increases them (which means that however enjoyable and desirable such a degree is for the individual, and of course education is such, it is not economically sensible either for said individual or the society as a whole.) which leads to the conclusion that we would be richer with fewer in higher education, not more.

Quelle Surprise

All children should be taught in mixed-ability classes to boost standards and self-esteem among all students, according to a report.

Uhn hunh……where does this come from?

The study, by Teach First, which recruits top graduates as trainee teachers in tough inner-city schools,

Hmm….and of course \”top graduates\” who go off and work in inner city schools are not going to be ideologically driven lefty gobshites, are they?

Oh no.

Guarantees on schools

An education Bill to be unveiled in the Queen\’s Speech on Wednesday will create a set of pupil and parent “guarantees” for the first time – outlining what families can expect from the state school system in England.

D\’ye know, looking through them, I can\’t actually see that they\’re promising to teach the to read, write and do sums.

Odd that.

How to eviscerate tertiary education

My Noble Lord Mandelson of Fop seems not to understand the very basics of what he is doing.

He said universities would have to engage more with business, and involve employers more in both course design and the funding of degrees. \”Universities are not islands, they are not ivory towers, they have to respond to the world around them,\” he said.

No, that\’s exactly what universities are and should be: ivory towers where knowledge is pursued for the sheer joy of pursuing knowledge.

Places which train people to do specific jobs can be called many things but not universities: polytechnics, technical schools, vocational colleges, but these are not universities.

Having started out on the wrong foot like this he is of course going to entirely screw up those good universities that we do have.

Twat.

Well, no, not quite

Any link between skin colour and brain power was long ago disproved by science.

Hesitant though I am to argue with a scientist of Steve Jones\’ standing, this isn\’t actually true.

We can see links between average brain power of this group as against that group very easily. And yes, many of those groups are delineated by skin colour.

What is true is that, having found those links between skin colour and brain power we find two further things. Firstly, that we can see links between skin colour and other factors known to influence brain power. Poverty, access to education, childhood nutrition, social pressures to develop innate intelligence (whatever that I in IQ might actually be) and so on.

Secondly, and much more importantly, that differences between group averages don\’t in fact matter: for variances around those averages within groups are vastly greater than the between group differences.

Say, arguendo, that the group average IQ for white Britons is 100 and that for black Britons is 105. The within group variance will still be from the roughly 60 at which someone can just about function in the world to the super-genius levels of 150, 160, 180. So while we may see this, on average, lower IQ of the whites, it doesn\’t tell us anything interesting at all about any random individual or small group placed in front of us. They will still be spread on that 60-180 span.

So it\’s irrelevant.

(There is an argument that looking at the very tails of the distributions might lead us to something: but that\’s an argument about greater variance within groups (standard deviations etc), nothing to do with the averages. For example, the preponderance of males amongst top tier university mathematics professors has nothing to do with average male or female ability at maths. It\’s to do with greater variance within males, more fools and more geniuses. At least, that\’s the argument put forward by the likes of Larry Summers.)

This however is simply straight wrong:

Girls do better than boys at exams nowadays, and the Y chromosome is a real handicap for many who bear it.

No, they don\’t. Girls do better now at the tests which we use to measure progress through the education system. But we have changed those tests from being the more boy friendly \”exams\” (here\’s three hours, get on with the questions) to the more girl friendly continuous assessment. And we\’ve quite deliberately made this change: you only have to go back a few decades and read the educationalists insisting that exams are boy friendly and that the system should be changed to the current one in order not to disadvantage girls.

Whether this is the right or the wrong thing to have done isn\’t the point: it\’s what we have done.

Class preference in education

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand was born into a Jewish family in the small southern Ukrainian town of Okny (now Krasniye Okny) in what was then the Russian Empire, on September 2 1913. Although he showed early brilliance in mathematics, he was expelled from school in his mid-teens and was unable to attend university as an undergraduate because his father, who operated a mill and had an assistant, was designated a capitalist.

That\’s the way to get rid of the privileged access to education that being middle class provides. Simply don\’t let them into university.

Wonder which Bennite sproglet will start proposing that here then?

OK Polly, OK, you win

Channel university savings into intensive one-to-one help for the youngest: once every seven-year-old can read, write and add up, the rest of education is easy.

The second part of that sentence actually makes sense. Congratulations.

So, let\’s look around the world and see if there are any other education systems that manage this, getting every 7 year old essentially literate and numerate.

Hmm. What\’s that? You say the Finnish system does this? Or the Swedish? Italian? Korean, Japanese?

I\’ve no idea whether they do or not but if we find one that does then we need to ask the next question. How do they manage this? Is it by spending more money per pupil? I know, for example, that the Finnish system does not.

Ah, thus we come back to our old favourite. It isn\’t how much money you spend, it is how you spend it that matters. I certainly think hte UK school system could be better: so let\’s go and copy the systems which are better shall we, rather than simply screaming that we must spend more money?