British Business Not Getting Graduates it Need? Must be The Teachers Fault

Schools 'letting down UK science'


Here we go again, we should all feel ashamed of ourselves because our schools are turning out students whose educational achievements are at crow magnon level - we're especially not turning out students trained in exactly the skills industry can't be arsed to train it's own workforce in. To digress (from what???) I hate this whiny thing the business sector has that it's the responsibility of society to produce exactly the workforce they want, when they want it, with the skills they want and, if the following year they want something else, it's the state's responsibility to travel back through time and change the curriculum. Fine, no problem, we'll do that but guess what, it costs money and where is that supposed to come from? Well taxation of course, but listen to them squeal if you suggest corporate tax should rise, watch them flee abroad to avoid paying the very taxes that fund the education they benefit from. Never, ever, ever forget that business is the recipient of more government aid than any other section of society and has created a whole industry out of corporate tax avoidance.

OK - got my breath back. All I want to do here is throw some statistics back. I'm not going to give them much, or any context because the news stories you have read never do either - fight half-baked misinformation with half-baked misinformation I say. Try this for size, it's a Unicef report from 2002 about levels of educational disadvantage in rich nations (Innocenti Report Card Issue No.4 November 2002) - lower numbers are better and the best is at the top of the list:

Korea - 1.4
Japan
Finland
Canada
Australia
Austria
UK - 9.4 <- Oh Wow - it's us, and look who's worse than us:
Ireland <- The European Tiger Economy
Sweden <- I thought they were better than us at EVERYTHING
Czech Republic <- OK, they had some issues to deal with
New Zealand <- Idyllic but clearly crap
France <- HA! Well, they do have an even more restrictive curriculum than us
Switzerland <- You're kidding me - we're better than them?
Belgium <- We guessed that
Iceland <- Don’t know, don’t care
Hungary <- I didn't know it still existed
Norway <- Yet they still rule the mobile world
USA - 16.2 <- HA! That's were junk food gets you
Germany <- Again, we're always being told how much more crap we are than them
Denmark <- Well, maybe spend too much time drawing cartoons
Spain <- It's sunny, so who cares?
Italy <- But they make great shoes
Greece <- Seat of democracy
Portugal - 23.6 <- Didn't they once own all of South America?

Funny, I don’t remember the headline 'UK Really Not That Bad After All'.

Here's another: Findings from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) of 2001 from the US Government. This is a goody coz we're always being told how we're pants at teaching reading and we need to be told how to do it. The average national score on this scale is 500 - it looks at reading ability in fourth graders - I'm guessing that's 8 year olds or so.

Sweden - 561
Netherlands
England - 553
Bulgaria
Latvia
Canada
Lithuania
Hungary
United States - 542
Italy
Germany
Czech Republic
New Zealand
Scotland
Singapore
Russian Federation
Hong Kong
France - 525
Greece
Slovak Republic
Iceland
Romania
Israel
Slovenia
Norway - 499
Cyprus
Moldova
Turkey
Macedonia
Colombia
Argentina
Iran
Kuwait
Morocco
Belize - 327

We're THIRD IN THE WHOLE WORLD forcrisake - yet we're being told reading levels are not good enough.


OK - let's end with science. This is from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 2003. It's a league table of fourth grade science:


International average 489
Singapore 565
Chinese Taipei 551
Japan 543
Hong Kong 542
England 540
United States 536
Latvia 532
Hungary 530
Russian Federation 526
Netherlands 525
Australia 521
New Zealand 520
Belgium-Flemish 518
New Zealand 520
Italy 516
Lithuania 512
Scotland 502
Moldova, Republic of 496
Slovenia 490
Cyprus 480
Norway 466
Armenia 437
Iran, Islamic Republic of 414
Philippines 332
Tunisia 314
Morocco 304



We're fifth, we're above the USA for crying out loud.

Now look, I'm not making a big deal about these figures, you could tear each set apart, but my point is that it took about 30 minutes to come up with them on Google and I didn't have to reject ANY figures because they didn't suit my point - I'm sure a serious hunt would come up much better ones.

It's maybe just possible that British businesses fail because they're a bit crap, that companies don’t relocate in China because they've got more scientists, but because labour is cheap. What business, and therefore the government, want is a graduate who pays for their own education to masters level in engineering, marketing, IT, physics plus one arts subject and is willing to work 80 hours a week on minimum wage in a factory with the fire exits painted on the wall where they design and build world beating products and thank their employers for the privilege. And why don’t they get this - because the bloody teachers are crap, obviously. Come on, we knew it would be our fault.

So next time some git tells you that the English education system is a disgrace and that teachers are at the root of all our economic problems either quote the above, or, better still, make them eat their copy of the Daily Mail.

Footnote: Someone seems to agree :o)
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/comment/story/0,,1864696,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=8

CyberBullying

To make this more ICT-looking I've added the obligatory additional CapitalLetter - jeez.

Today I saw three very similar headlines:

Government acts on cyber-bullies BBC

Schools to tackle web and phone bullies Guardian

Stamp out 'cyberbullying' urges schools minister TES

Damn, once again the internet + various other technologies feared-by-adults/the establishment are shown to be tools of the devil that should be monitored at all times.

As usual, the press hasn't been to bothered reading the actual research - they seem to have read it as carefully as the minister concerned. Let me sum it up with a less rabid approach.

The headline figure is that one in five pupils had experienced some form of cyberbullying. That is a truly worrying number - if we assume that it requires another one if five to be doing the bullying that means that 40% of school children are involved in cyberbullying: OHFORGODSAKE PULL THE PLUG!!!!!

Hmmmm, not quite the case when you read the report, which was funded by The Anti-Bullying Alliance, in case you were interested. And it did not, as the Guardian claims, 'discover' 7 types of cyberbullying, it defined 7 types to investigate.

So, 160 questionnaires were mailed to 20 schools with no direct control over which students filled them in except that they were split equally male/female and in years 7-10. 92 students returned questionaires. So we have a sample of 92 out of the total population of years 7-10. Further, we /might/ suspect that those who had experienced cyberbullying would be more likely to respond so the sample is generally pretty suspect.

Out of this deeply dodgy sample, where does the 20% figure appear??? Well, 5.5% bullied by e-mail, 1.1% in chatrooms and 14.3% via SMS (the little darlings). Now, the study if very clear on what constitutes bullying, it says it must be consistent, take place over a period of time and yet 15.6% (count them) said they'd only been cyberbullied 'once or twice over the last two months' - does that sound like consistent and over a period of time? It leaves about 6% being bullied more than once a month.

The problem, of course, is the way in which we open up the meaning of bullying so that it encompasses anything. This deeply unhelpful as it brackets texting 'U SMELL MOLESWORTH' once for a larf with a year's worth of dinner-money theft and beatings.

The question is, who benefits from such huge inflation of the situation? Certainly not the kid beaten up for a year as he has to get in the queue with everyone else upset because 'he looked at me in a funny way'. It's bad coz it minimises the pain of those truly bullied by diluting it - if everyone is a victim of bullying then no one is special.

The final insult of course is that the bloody government them comes out with guidelines - I kid you not: www.dfes.gov.uk/bullying/index.shtml

Hmmmmm, it's not easy to write a blog, is it :-/

Grumbs