Vocational Education, Care Workers, Geneva Minimum Wage, Jargon, Getting Old
The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that unemployment could hit 13 per cent in the next few years from 4 per cent now. Millions of people may find themselves in need of retraining. And it is far from clear that the system is equipped to provide them with the skills to switch to new careers.
... Britain has been successful in driving up university attendance to above 50 per cent of school leavers from about 30 per cent a few years ago. But the reality is that too many graduates leave university loaded with debt and unable to find a graduate-level job. Meanwhile the number taking technical courses has been in freefall, despite clear evidence of strong demand for many technical skills.
... The result is that just 10 per cent of adults hold a higher technical qualification, compared with 20 per cent in Germany.
... Why Britain has so persistently failed to address this problem is a mystery.
... Others have noted a lack of funding as resources were diverted to universities, endlessly changing qualifications, a lack of clear division of responsibilities between central and local government, employers and unions that makes skills-based training so effective in many other countries, notably Germany. Nonetheless the biggest obstacle may be cultural, or what Mr Johnson referred to as the "pointless, snooty and frankly vacuous" attitude towards technical education. That will be harder to fix.
(Times Editorial, 2020)
Boosting the profile and the status of the electronic communications, engineering, construction and care sectors would be a start. If these sectors are recognised as "high worth" entities then their pay should reflect this. This would mean government intervention.
Germany has always been seen as a leader in vocational education so why have the politicians not copied some or all of their policies? Their degrees in technical education are seen as of similar value to "academic" ones. Their policy of "dual training" combines theory and training embedded in a real life-work environment.
How many secretaries of state for education have there been in the last 50 years and how many of them have served their full term at education? Chopping and changing does not create the necessary stability to see through much needed reform in vocational education.
*Tony Blair once joked that you could declare war in a speech about skills and no one would notice.
The lack of interest in vocational education has long been a cause of hand-wringing shame among the policy-minded political class.
Boris Johnson's end to the "snooty" distinction between the academic and the practical joins a long line of his predecessors making much the same appeal.
... Rishi Sunak's winter economic package, which replaced the furlough scheme with a less generous subsidy for short-hours working, was notably short on new skills policy.
... Mr Johnson suggested that the coronavirus crisis was an opportunity to speed a mass reallocation of labour that automation and other technological change was going to require anyway. That's a brave message to deliver to those expecting a P45. Unless it comes with meaningful help - and soon - it is unlikely to be kindly received.
(Francis Elliott, The Times, 2020)
*The technology institute founded by the inventor Sir James Dyson will soon have the power to award its own degrees - the first of a new wave of alternative providers.
The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, which opened in 2017 on the site of Dyson's design centre in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, has 150 engineering undergraduates who pay no tuition fees and receive a full-time wage during their four years studying and working alongside Dyson staff.
The Office for Students, the higher education regulator in England, has said the institute can award degrees in its own name from next year, the first to do so under legislation that created the route in 2017.
Dyson is estimated to have spent more than £30m on the institute and its campus, which includes study-bedroom pods. It claims to attract more applications from qualified school-leavers than many Oxbridge courses, with 14 applying for each place.
(Richard Adams, The Guardian, 2020)
Care Workers
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| Work Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) Photo Credit; Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] |
Paying care workers less than supermarket staff is failing to attract British workers and means that care homes will have to continue to rely on recruiting migrants after Brexit, government advisers said.
Senior care workers and nursing assistants should be added to the official list of sectors with a shortage of staff to "relieve pressure" when freedom of movement ends in January, according to the Migration Advisory Committee.
Its members called for such jobs to be made "more attractive to UK workers by increasing salaries rather than relying on migrants".
Other roles recommended for addition to the UK-wide "shortage occupation list" include butchers, bricklayers and welders, where there is clear evidence of staff and skills shortages which could be filled by overseas workers".
... Brian Bell, the chief migration advisor ... compared the £9.40-an-hour entry-level wage for working on the shop floor at Aldi and the £8.72-an-hour wage for carers for "extraordinary stressful and hard work". He said the carer wage should be "comfortably above £10", adding "You have to be well above that kind of level that Aldi's paying before you begin to attract workers."
(David Brown, The Times, 2020)
How extraordinary that care and supermarket workers, both 'key' employees during this pandemic should be earning such a paltry amount.
The government pays £1,000 a day for junior management consultant advice and £3,500 for the more senior partners. (See Consultants, Dec 18)
Geneva Minimum Wage
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| When Poverty Enters the Door unknown artist Photo Credit: Worthing Museum and Art Gallery [CC BY-ND] |
Geneva is to introduce a minimum wage of almost £3,500 a month, after reports of growing coronavirus-linked poverty in the Swiss city prompted residents to back the measure in a surprise vote result.
The canton's voters passed the proposal from local unions and leftwing parties after twice rejecting it in 2011 and 2014.
Reported to be the highest in the world, the minimum hourly wage will be set at just under £19.50 an hour, more than twice the rate in France, with a guaranteed minimum monthly salary of 4,086 Swiss francs (£3,457) based on a 41-hour working week, or 49,000 Swiss francs a year, in one of the world's most expensive cities.
France 3 television reported that the measure came after Geneva, whose economy depends on tourist and business visitors, had been hit particularly hard by Covid-19, with concern about growing queues outside food banks...
(Kim Willsher, The Guardian, 2020)
Perhaps we need to see on the news the grim pictures of the growing numbers of people using food banks, here in the UK?
Jargon.
Can you work out the meaning?
(A) Upright striding vertical bipedality on horizontal terrestrial substrates.
(B) Disintermediating existing physical retail channels.
(C) Elucidates the antecedents of consequences.
(D) The preceding dialectic provides a metacontextualisation of the academic linguistic gestalt.
Answers
(A) Walking on the ground
(B) Not selling in shops
(C) Talks about causes and effects
(D) Often, big words are a load of tosh.
(Tom Whipple, The Times, 2020)
*Sir, I am obliged to Tom Whipple and the Columbia Business School for easing my mind about the use of complex language in academic work.
In the early 1980's I submitted my PhD only to be told to rewrite it or I would only be eligible for a lower degree. After eight years of hard work, while holding down a full time job, this was a blow. I asked my supervisor the reason and was told "it's too readable." It was suggested that I obtain a thesaurus, pick every fifth word and find a more complicated version to substitute. After another six months I resubmitted my unreadable text and was duly awarded my degree. All was not lost, as the original, with very little tweaking, became a moderately successful text book from which I still receive a small royalty.
(Dr Michael A Fopp, Soulbury, Bucks, The Times, 2020)
Getting Old
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| The Young Dentist William Helmsley (1819-1906) Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] |
Here's a humiliating confession. Mock me as you will. This week I wrote a TV review of Prince William: A Planet for All of Us in which William met children at a Liverpool school and they asked him if he "flossed". He replied that though Charlotte "can already floss" at four and "Catherine can floss" it was "really horrible" to watch him doing likewise.
"Ew, too much information!" I thought because I assumed, and wrote, that they were talking about teeth.
Sound the old-fogey klaxon! Readers wrote to explain, gently, that in fact they were speaking of the dance popularised by the game Fortnite. Mortifying. For showing my age this is worse than when I asked the TV editor: "What side is it on?" I will lick my wounds while digging the hit parade on my transistor radio.
(Carol Midgley, The Times, 2020)
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