Youth drop-out rate hits new high

Record numbers of young people are not in school, college or work in England,official figures show.

The ranks of 18-24-year-olds considered to be "Neets" - not in education, employment or training - has risen by more than 100,000 in the past year.

Chancellor Alistair Darling has insisted the government is doing all it can to avoid creating a "lost generation" of young people.

But the Tories accused ministers of making "empty promises".

The statistics show that in total, 835,000 18 to 24-year-olds are now Neets, up from 730,000 for the same quarter last year.

The figures, published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which are for the second quarter of 2009, also show a surge in the numbers of 16 to 18-year-olds considered Neets.

'Guarantee'

There are now 233,000 Neets in this age group, 13,000 more than the first quarter of 2009, when the figure stood at 220,000.

In the second quarter of 2008, 209,000 16 to 18-year-olds were Neets, 24,000 fewer than the same quarter this year.

Mr Darling, who is standing in for Gordon Brown during his holiday, said: "It's very important that we help young people get back into work or into training.

"At the end of last year we had record numbers of young people in education and training.

"We will, this September, be able to guarantee 16 and 17-year-olds education or training.

"And from the beginning of next year we will be able to guarantee people who have been out of work for a year either a job, training or further education.

"All of that is important so we don't repeat the mistakes that were made 20 years ago where a whole generation of people were lost.

"We are determined that will not happen again."

Mr Darling, who is visiting a job centre in Marylebone, central London, said he had predicted at the time of the Budget that unemployment would rise further this year.

He said: "It is important that we do everything we can, which is why we are spending over £5bn to get people back into work as quickly as possible."

Neets are likely to have low skills and poor experience so the training and ork on offer must be meaningful
Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary

For the Conservatives, shadow universities and skills secretary David Willetts aid: "It is very worrying that there is now a record number of 18 to 24-year-old Neets. More than one in six young people are now without a job or a place n education or training.

"Ministers have comprehensively failed to get a grip on this crisis. Young eople don't need more empty promises or celebrity gimmicks. They need more apprenticeship opportunities, more postgraduate places and better careers dvice."

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said Britain could not afford "to lose another generation of young people to unemployment and underachievement".

He urged more firms to take on apprentices and the government to "ensure its guarantee of training or work for young people out of work continues to be well funded, as demand will be high".

What is education in the world of today?
The bare essentials – words, math, some sense of where we are in time and space
– there is no ‘objectivity’ to be achieved.
The teachers do not know the power of words – except rarely. This is a world where someone who has the power to read Shakespeare as Gwynneth Paltrow does,
carefully lays those skills aside as not further profitable in the world she works in.
And Math is rarely loved.
And History is tied in knots by ideology and religion and the lack of philosophy in people.
The Democratic sense that there is a wisdom in the people is only occasionally true.
Mostly the lies are perpetuated.

And then the other skills of our time – not the street skills, which indeed are the wisdom of the people, nor the skills of fighting and sports which are taught and passed on outside of schools or in schools – but those skills which, like words, have to do with media – technological, visual and sound skills, and self-presentation – and how to relate to these and to oneself. Do we begin to know how to teach these without sacrificing what we know about the older skills of words and numbers and thinking, or how to combine them all?

Who can design a curriculum?
I watch a program by Christiane Amanpour,
– and who can ‘learn’ to become what she is: clear thinking, articulate, graceful, courageous, dedicated to communicating experience (even when she gets the questions wrong) -
– a program about young girls in Afghanistan risking their lives to go to school,
or as they put it, to get an education.
And what can a school possibly offer them in return for such risks?
They say it is a chance for a career-doctor, statesman, whatever those words mean to the girls. Certainly in that world what the school offers is not able to do that. What they learn is a little smattering, reading and writing, and some other bits.
But what, perhaps. they do get is the POSSIBILITY of being the person who can use these bits to go further. But where do these few learn the character and purpose and goals in all this to go further? We don’t know.

One English theorist of education, in a long English tradition, said the aim of education was to hold up models of excellence.
Another – American – said it was to learn the open-mindedness of a ’scientific’ approach to the world. Doubting and testing.
This is not often learnt – and many great people have got on without it.
But Science – which I have only touched on as mathematics and technology, is clearly the background which is all we have at the back of our minds – that comes to us in some understanding of those perspectives on the world – gravity, the solar system, the universe, the evolutionary process of life, as well as the most general facts about human life – what we can know about time in history, the changes in economy and society – into which we fit the framework of our beliefs.
The ‘religious’, the fundamentalists and some others of those religions that came out of the ‘middle’ east, want to put the writings of their ‘God’ back in the center of that education, rather than the beliefs and processes that guide our search for information about the world and ourselves that come by investigation and evidence.

Evidence – how can we teach that. We do, but only to a few. And our politics and the world do not follow the evidence. Should education teach us to value “evidence”?

Clearly our thinking needs to be shaped by some values, some excellence of spirit, or we are all whores and hypocrites – as so many are.
For some these values are felt to come from a book – a holy book, or some other books. But clearly values by rote and tradition are too narrow for real living in our complex and changing and pseudo-abstract world. We can’t even teach people to defend themselves from the lies and abstractions that are now flung from every corner.

So what can the school do? Should we risk our lives for it?
If we say ‘yes’, what is driving us to this conclusion? Are we deceiving ourselves? Or is some form of education the only hope?

And again, what is the curriculum and understanding and syllabus that will use the time well.
(Clearly also, the answer is not in the mechanical language of – what is that horrible educationist term – “behavioral objectives”.)
At the present in this country – education is presented as learning to think technologically and otherwise sufficiently well to out-compete the Chinese and Japanese and Koreans, and the Europeans.
Or have a pool of workers available with these kinds of skills – mathematics and words and languages – so companies can do their work efficiently here. This is a narrow vision – but in the present times it looks like the promised land.

tomfrom66

John Seddon's recent book "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector" is a devasting indictment of the mindset behind the problems within education which Susan Bassnett so ably summarizes.

It's clear that all the (once) public services are being degraded on several fronts: the inane targets culture; the itch to privatise/outsource "delivery", and the injection of competition into areas where it only does further damage; these are all part of a seamless attack on teachers, nurses, police officers, and fire fighters.

Seddon catalogues the vast army of apparatchiks who are employed to push targets, and the essential mindless triviality which results.

Only today (15 August) it's being reported that care for the elderly is skewed by the targets built into the doctors' contract of 2004. Treatment which the elderly might need is less likely to be given if it was not specified in that document.

In a recent issue of New Scientist - 06 August 2008 - AC Grayling argued the importance of critical thinking skills in education.

There are two problems with this argument in the current dystopia: first, measurement - by which I mean conversion into a target - would be difficult, for obvious reasons; but second, and much more problematic is this question: do the current global "movers and shakers" want people coming out schools applyig the "critical thinking skills" to the way government and economy are currently structured?

 

Pedagogy is destroying true learning. Face it, pedagogy demands that all children succeed, and, as a consequence, teachers are forced to dumb down the curriculum for the slowest student in the class. This damages the very bright, motivated students. Drawing pictures is wonderful for art, but to assess a high school student's understanding of a novel by drawing a six-framed storyboard is pure crap. The whole base in education is missing with students unable to read, write, add, and subtract when they are 16 years old. Lose the pedagogy, and students skills will improve. When you lose your culture, your sense of right and wrong, you lose everything. Know your friends well, keep them close; know your enemies better to defeat them.

It is extremely refreshing to read an article which addresses today's educational malaise. As someone who is a casualty of the educational system, having worked in FE/HE for many years, and forced to leave it for my own survival, I fully echo the majority of the concerns and malpractices discussed. In particular, the narrow focus on vocational education in FE has caused immense damage and its poisons have spread into almost all levels and areas of education. The lack of "joined up thinking"is especially telling. Apart from having a good education at a good university, I also have experience of the Danish education system, Like many linguists, I have worked in the world of private language schools, which in many ways has paralleled the development of FE and spent a short period in a special needs Steiner school. In addition, for many years as predominantly a business studies teacher, I tracked the business environment as one of my specialities. This breadth of experience and concentration of subject matter has led me to examine the pernicious trends decribed in the article. I have forgotten how many times I have noticed that colleagues from a whole range of educational institutions that I have met in meetings, conferences, training sessions, etc seem to be completely absorbed in the specifics of their academic worlds , unable or unwilling to make connections. The devil is in the detail but there is no God in the big picture, for the simple reason there is no longer any big picture. The lack of moral and social cohesion is also something highlighted in the article.There is no accepted set of values, other than the cult of the market system, and that runs much deeper than education into the nature of democracy itself. How have we arrived at this situation in which as the previous writer identified, knowledge, itself, has been subordinated to economic and utilitarian needs? There seem to be three main sources of this subversion of the purpose of education, if we define its purpose as a primary one of free enquiry, of stimulating the thirst for knowledge. The pervasiveness of management values, the counterblast of political correctness in its attempts to rectify social disadvantage,and less obviously, the stranglehold of the computer combine together in ways which reinforce the paralysis of education. Good management should create wealth,social policies should smooth out the excesses of the market system and ICT should open access to an almost limitless amount of knowledge. Indeed, they do all these things and in abundance. They have also given rise to a growing and nationwide authoritarianism in which the autonomy of the educator is the principal victim, and here I chime with the views of Susan Bassnett in emphasizing the failure of a critical faculty,to assess all of these three influences instead of blindly accepting their concepts and formats. Managers have infiltrated the education system (it is particularly self-evident in FE) at the expense of academics. In October 2005, for example,Radio 4 was tracking a group of students starting out at a particular university in order to see if the experiences of the students matched their expectations. The (managerial?) member of staff in charge of the student liason committee declared that the lecturers had got to get used to the students being able to dictate to members of staff. Dictate? What has happened to the knowledge, expertise, experience and judgement of the lecturer or tutor? Student feedback is important, but it is not overriding. The consumerist approach to education is the flipside of the "commodification" of learning, and we allow management jargon and the double-think of political correctness to distort and invert our organisational thinking (the way we perceive the educational institutions we work in) in ways that no self-respecting academic would allow in a specialism. The result is an acquiescence in the face of institutions which appear to subsume their individual employees in corporate plans and controlled interactions with the media. Image has become almost an absolute, presentation is preferred to substance, an apparent emotional empathy becomes a substitute for analysis and debate. The minds of students are not being developed at whatever level of the education system you look at ,since training and skills have become paramount. This is creating dependency in learning, not autonomy of thought and investigation. it leads to an obsession with targets which ensures that the lowest common multiple of learning is achieved not the highest common factor. These prejudices against the free spirit of enquiry have become embedded in the corporate roles of academic organisations, ossifying a managerial hierarchy into a false sense of status to the detriment of the educator. Despite the enormous advances of IT and its tremendous potential, of which this site is but one example, the hype has exceeded performance so far. The negative aspects of IT are such tendencies as the format dictating the content, the decontextualisation which can occur when disparate sources are drawn together without insight or understanding, rather like a patch essay. and the sense that one's PC is not under one's personal control, that one is the slave of its logical rules, from which genuine interaction and intuition have been deleted.These also feed into the loss of autonomy of the educator. It therefore needs great self-confidence for the teacher to act as provocateur, to establish and defend a position against which the students can develop their criteria and their minds. The assault against the educator is a war on three fronts, corporate, emotional and technological.

'Education', or rather the state of our schools and universities, is constantly in the news, but one word is consistently missing in the debates on what it is for: namely, 'knowledge'. We hear about qualifications, social equity, childcare, bullying, imaginative/critical thinking, socilal skills, entrepreneurial skills, IT skills, sports provision, even (very occasionally) about bringing out the best in the students. We hear about the education system's function in providing qualifications, or more usually the relative performance of schools in provision of same, assessed statistically (i.e. 'evaluated'); we might even hear scepticism on whether this is really preparing its patients for either their future use as workers (cue comments from industrial and other money-making organizations) or even their future lives (but there are no experts to ask about this, so we settle for politicians pontificating). Either way, the assessment of the system is seen in a profoundly utilitarian light: does it bear fruits which add (directly and quantifiably) to the utility of pupils, parents, university admissions officers, employers, the government, national prestige, or even UK plc? The thing is: none of this is central to education, even if some of it will follow if good education is achieved. Education itself is about giving people access to knowledge - a whole body of propositions believed to be true, or effective, which collectively make up our culture. It may be 'knowledge that' or 'knowledge how', but it is all quite independent of the characters and desires of the teachers, as it is of the students/pupils. Education is about being put in touch with an abstract 'other'; only by acquiring some of it can the pupils end up in a different (intellectual) place from where they started, i.e. actually 'have learnt something'. We need students to learn, and teachers to be (in the full sense) learned. So the only issue for parents choosing schools, teachers evaluating students, governments evaluating university departments, or whatever, is to ask: is knowledge being acquired or transmitted? All the other stuff, examination grade statistics, publication counting, value added assessments etc,, are just (rather poor) proxies or indicators for answers to the knowledge question. The knowledge question may seem vague, even open to subjective interpretation. It may be difficult to answer (though it is surprisingly easy to assess if people are really motivated by love of learning). But it is the only one which actually gets to the point, and hence will not (if systematically considered - e.g. by government policymakers, or funding formulae) lead to successive distortion of the education system. And it is equally applicable to any education, from the most abstract to the most apparently vocational. When everything else has been tried, I wonder if educationists will actually revert to this. A linguist

An interesting topic. I took a PGCE in ICT four years ago, and never wanted to be a teacher after that. Why? Because during training all I saw were teachers as disciplinarians. In my training, I saw little evidence of real teaching. I couldn't wait for the course to end, so I could get back to real life. Another aspect that bothered me tremendously was the insistence on the school system in turning out little sausages, all identially suited to their new roles in the workplace. Good for society yes, but for the pupil? I think not! Creativeness is not the buzz word in today's curriculum. Unfortunately, the teaching profession is in part becoming an ageing profession, so many teachers are there to see out their years, and really just want to be left alone. While this attitude may get them a good pension (really?), and a well deserved rest, it is hardly good for the pupils! Jules.

I agree with Susan. It is very rare to come across true education in these frantic times of training everyone to become relatively mindless cogs in the economic growth machine. In its original sense, education is all about bringing out the best and uniqueness in each one of us, even if that means we end up questioning prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. It is about helping us to realise our potential, including our potential to be highly conscious and intelligent. However, although we continue to use the word “education” to describe what happens in schools, colleges and universities, there is not much true education around these days. To a large extent, it has been replaced by its opposite, schooling – which is the process of shaping people to believe and follow prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. Although there is a lot of talk, by politicians and others, about the importance of education, one is left wondering whether they are talking about a preparation for life or a preparation for work. If “education” is mainly a preparation for work, then we have a serious problem because it means that our schools and universities are producing people with skills and knowledge for working in the global economy, but they are not producing people with wisdom and consciousness for living well in the world. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. The fact is that true education enhances and enables consciousness and intelligence. Schooling seems to restrict them. Insofar as schooling is the prevalent mode of “education” in the modern world, consciousness and intelligence are being restricted on a massive scale. That is a global tragedy. There is an urgent need to bring true education into the world.