PM Burnham tells schools to adapt teaching to local business needs
If this had been policy in the 70s (as it partly was), towns would have produced lots of mining engineers & metallurgists just before pits & steelworks closed. As the yanks say, you should skate to where the puck's going, not to where it is. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Flaming June17This is arseways round. Students may have their own ideas about their future lives. And if local businesses want particular skills, it’s they who should provide the training.
Celestial M Weasel15Ah yes, one of my colleagues did Metallurgy (late 70s/early 80s) at university. 2/3 of them were sponsored by British Steel. In their first year they were taken to "the most advanced steelworks in Europe". By the time he graduated it had shut
Pete Brown11Even the teachers at my school In Barnsley urged me to leave and go down the pit instead of doing my A levels. By the time I’d finished them the pits were all closed.
Terry Watkins5Also - good luck working out where the puck is going. As all those who took "learn to code" as an instruction have now found out.
Richard Jones5True, and I'd add that many economically struggling places are stuck in a bad equilibrium, where employers are content to staff their low productivity businesses with unskilled people, while people are (rationally) unwilling to invest in acquiring skills in the absence of good job opportunities...
johnstone123.bsky.social2Vocational training did fail in the 60s/70s for the same reason it will fail now, lack of career opportunities, students couldn't find jobs. Polytechnics became pseudo unis long before John Major.
Margot Finn25Good point about mining & hockey pucks, but can we predict the trajectory of future jobs in the same way that expert eyes can predict a puck's trajectory? And what's happened to 'transferable skills' in the new 'skills'-fixated discourse? The 'transferable' addressed the unknown trajectory issue.
Daniel19Didn't the last government just relentlessly focus on improving core skills and had pretty good success - I mean if you want engineers you do just need the kids to math real good
Beth Witham11Insisting kids stay where they are and learn only what's locally valued is how you end up with wicker men
Mark Wallace5Indeed - education should be for life which means equipping us to adapt to the unforeseen. We know exactly what happened when children were prepped for a lifelong job in the town’s major employer, then the shipyard, mine or steelworks closed down.
Duncan Money4I had a teacher who had first trained as a ship's navigator shortly before GPS was introduced and then re-trained as a colliery engineer and his working life was always a useful lesson in career expectations and planning.
Dr Nick3Future facing schools to introduce basic courses in eating billionaires
felix3Or even teach kids subjects that let them stand back and see where the game might go. Like humanities.
Dr Kiri Thornalley2@niekbuurmah2o.bsky.social apropos of what I said on LI yesterday.
Even if the government is right to be betting the house on AI (and I suspect the way things shake out will be different to what we expect), this is likely to have the problem Computing as a subject has always had in schools, ie it’s pretty much instantly out of date. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Dr Jo Kershaw55Teaching “manufacturing” in schools strikes me as definitely Manchesterism (deprecatory) but I wonder what on earth he envisages as the content of the lessons?
Sam Turner19There is literally zero chance that any narrow tech skill taught at 14 will still be relevant 4+ years later when they enter employment. We've known this since the 1980s. The only tech skill I learned that remained useful was touch typing. And machine sewing
Krittika11I’m not liking this one bit, this has “only one [set of people] can afford to learn art, philosophy, science, literature etc and the rest just need the three Rs” written all over it
Lorna10This certainly fits with my children’s experience: my eldest was interested in IT for GCSE until a tech savvy dad of one of his classmates pointed out that the course was absurdly old fashioned and he’d be much better off teaching himself (which he’s been doing)
Charlie Stross5Back in 1988 I started an A-level in Computer Science at night school. Bailed halfway through it—while there were BBC computers in the lab and programming them was part of the course, the syllabus mostly focussed on early 1970s mainframes. (I got onto a degree-level course the next year instead.)
Alicia5One of my nieces (in Australia) did part of her hairdressing apprenticeship through school - she was released a couple of afternoons a week to do the college components and had a Saturday job in a salon for the prac components, so by the time she'd finished year 12 she was almost qualified.
Rose Schmits198Labour keeps making it clear that to them we dont live in A Society, we live in An Economy
The Author, Séamas O'Reilly131I was a tech-savvy teen - my dad was a PC hobbyist who had us building servers and LANs from the age of 12 - and my GCSE classes in ICT (the term IT hadn't been adopted yet!) were hilariously outdated. In 2002, our textbooks still said "one day, five million people will be using electronic mail".
John Oxley89Again, very few of these aren't just a combination of maths, literacy and critical thinking and school is the best part to impart and hone those broad skills. And employers need to suck it up and actually care about proper training, with the incentives set right to encourage it.
Anna Orridge40Yes. And also employers have to train entry level staff. It's a cost, suck it up. You are not going to get somebody walking through the door who knows all your processes and quirks. You want more of those people? Well, put some effort into retention then.
Kittie 🖤🦝38in the early 2000s the jobcentre were always sending me on basic bitch IT courses, but job postings were always asking for people who could use Excel. I once asked if they could send me on an Excel course instead and he was like lol are you kidding, they cost a fortune
Elizabeth Taylor25I’m not an education policy expert so please be gentle with me and don’t jump down my throat. But I don’t like the sound of this announcement. School should be learning and intellectual enrichment, not a job factory.
Leftback15I'm agreeing with the good doctor here. This is little more than "Your next job can be in cyber" except with the magic pixie dust of AI.
Martin Nutbeem10I think you could arguable teach the fundamentals and then go to project based "student as creators" style learning which would fit the ever changing landscape. This would equip kids with a skillset to thrive with new tech. But obviously schools are not equipped for this so it won't happen.
legalized gamboling7the more i have engaged with technology as a creative pursuit the more i believe there is an evergreen curriculum that could be built around the fundamentals of physical computing, logic, and the basics of electricity through tinkering and experimentation link tech to its material reality!
Craig5I've seen a few takes like this today, I disagree with them though. Computing at school is foundational. Much of the stuff I was taught in my 1980s Computing O Grade is still as relevant today as it was then. You can never go wrong with a solid foundation in any subject.
Translation: Uni is not for the likes of you, and besides we've cut the places and we need people to pick the crops and wipe the arses. (The man delivering this message has an English degree from Cambridge)
Phil McDuff141My hot take is that the people picking the crops and wiping the arses should also be able to study greek literature and Japanese poetry, from their public housing.
On The Threshold16Burnham, a bloke with a Cambridge degree, pulling the ladder up behind him. Considering Burnham has talked about fighting neoliberalism it’s a bit weird how everything Burnham does is dripping with a neoliberal tinge. He is the arch neoliberal, a Blairite.
Sarah Viktoria 🇬🇧🏳️⚧️⚧️🦗4Why should the taxpayer pay for specific workplace training? Business should stop being so lazy and get off its arse and start investing - in people this time. #r4today
Kristian van der Vliet3Hang on: not every kid wants or needs to go to Uni and technical subjects are good, actually. Having a dual track academic & technical education would be good and sensible, but it would have to be done properly with equal weight given to each track, and this isn't it.
D J E2If our esteemed PM were just starting school in Sefton where he grew up he'd not be getting the chance to study English because the purpose of education is to provide workers for Shop Direct
Barry Parmegiana2This: "The government said the courses, which would be available from Year 10, would be linked to local industries and designed to give children a clearer pathway into work.* ...is moving into neo-Victorian territory.
I don’t have anything close to a knowledge base that would allow me to evaluate this from and education pov. BUT I am fascinated by one aspect. 1/n www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Ian Simmons37Hmm, as a former teacher I instinctively dislike this. It smacks of training rather than education, forcing pupils down a narrow functional path rather than providing them with adaptable knowledge and skills. Industry always wants schools to provide compliant drones, not creative thinkers...
Nick Harkaway37The notion of Liquid Modernity includes a perception that the axes of the social grid (family, religion, class, trade/profession, sexuality, gender etc) are dissolving and this leaves people feeling dislocated from their identity. 2/n
Dan Kaszeta FRHistS6Someone needs to work in the tweed mines or at the treacle wells.
Gav5The idea that education be somehow tied to business needs is so bad it is very hard to know where to start with it.
Jeff3A bit late in the day to engineer local jobs for local people I fear. 🙄
Doire3Oh I remember that. 2003 ish, I think—in the reaction to education, education, education and life long learning. Suddenly all our courses had to have demonstrated "buy in" from local employers to qualify for funding. And with my local employer hat on I spoilt polls saying I wanted gumption not NVQs
Mallory Moore121Seeing this story and the govt are slashing science funding and advanced engineering apprenticeships while in my city (Manchester) Sci/Eng is one of our big things. We've got a statue of Alan Turing, we've got the Jodrell Bank telescope nearby (that the govt are also shutting down).
elia ayoub75I’m worried that more and more of an already struggling education sector is being pushed to cater to a business-first approach instead of one which actually values education as an end goal in itself
dr. thrasher also believes netanyahu is a war criminal51the modern labour party has done so much damage to the people of england and the world (esp to migrants, trans ppl, students, medical patients, medical providers and workers). they have effectively undone more of the post-wwii welfare state than thatcherite tories & will kill it all if allowed to
So Mayer22I don't either, but given that the only large-scale businesses opening anywhere in the UK are Amaz*n warehouses and data centres, the unspoken point here seems extremely obvious, which is that they are donating to (bribing) the govt to produce company town workers.
Maria W. Norris13This is a brilliant thread, and I wanted to chime in with my 2 cents, from both a pedagogical and a human rights perspective. TLDR: The whole thing smacks of 'the children are yearning for the mines". 1/
Steven Perkins4“Tie the curriculum into the local jobs market, a thing which is fixed and unchanging. Also, nobody ever moves to a different area after they finish school.”
Chris Farnell4What I want to know is is this going to be rolled out across wealthier catchment areas? Or are we just inventing secondary mods again?
Aaron Helton2Because the same forces are at work in so many places, mass urbanization has been a trend in all those places for a reason. I'm one of the people who looked around the many (US) places I grew up and saw no opportunity to do anything that interested me.
How about we make education about the fundamentals of being able to navigate the world and democratic citizenship, and leave workplace training until the actual workplace. Local business needs aren't one thing, and they change quickly (and even more quickly). www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Lesley A Hall6Back in the Upper Palaeolithic when I first graduated and went out into the workforce, one was not only trained in the workplace for the job one was doing but sent on courses to obtain relevant/necessary qualifications.
Naomi Waltham-Smith6Education is also for expanding the mind and deepening understanding of the world, for widening the scope of the possible and fostering curiosity. Tell businesses to pay for job training. Their employees will be empowered to do better at theirs if education is allowed to do its job.
🇪🇺 #AgainstLies 🦋2Spot on. Time for politicians to stop trying to train kids for jobs in the 1970s. Educate kids - don’t train them.
"Linked to local industries." Maybe if the govt keeps Jodrell Bank open , children can learn about science, electronics, maths, space and astrophysics? 👀👀https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4k2djd5qpo
Ms AB2Yet another example, should they be needed, of a lack of joined-up thinking at the top of Govt. Meanwhile, won't AI be taking all the jobs these kids will supposedly be better prepared for? So confusing.
Steven Beaumont1My only question is when did they stop teaching children. I did electronics at school in the 1980s , Computer Programming in assembly language, Miroprocessor ladder logic. We made our own circuits
ghostoftomjoad78.bsky.social1Not that I disagree with the idea.
ghostoftomjoad78.bsky.social1No good saying this without funding. Most schools couldn't do this now.
‘It would, Burnham said, mean the country could “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”.’ www.theguardian.com/politics/202... this felt pretty sad to read. Another nail in the coffin for the idea that education is not merely about access to employment…
Mad (Social) Scientist 🇨🇦2Given what I've been reading about the state of higher education, my immediate thought is 'so, not at all, then?'.
Rouleur1Back to 'Pit or Railway' 'cept neither exist in my home town anymore.
Paul Watson 🌍1Says the guy who joined the Labour Party at 15 and is a career politician. Though St Lewis Catholic and St Aelred's Roman Catholic aren’t exactly local to Westminster…
