As a teacher I am constantly sick and tired of the rubbish that comes out of some politicians, but mostly business leaders (most notably the CBI) who moan and complain about the standards children are achieving and never seem to give any credit for the rising standards.
So it is very welcome to see a report today which recognises the improvements English children have made in Maths and Science (placing us well ahead of all other European nations except from Hungary).
The problem that business faces these days with school leavers is that they are employing a different kind of pupil from those who left school 20 years ago, but they fail to recognise the difference.
20 years ago pupils with 8 GCSEs were more likely to go straight in to work or just go on to A levels rather than going in to employment. Today, those with similar qualifications as 16 year olds 20 years ago will almost certainly go on to university meaning that employers now take on those people who 20 years ago might not even have got an office job and may well have been employed in some form of manual labour which is the type of job that is less prevalent in the UK these days.
But rather than recognising these facts, the CBI whinges about school leavers not being able to spell or them not knowing their grammar. It seems that all some people ever want to do in this country is talk our young people down.
2 comments:
International comparisons of literacy and numeracy are fraught with difficulty. Even the reviews themselves have huge sections on the reliability and validity problems that they face, and the mere notion that one could create a perfectly fair test is ridiculous.
There is also considerable evidence (see Durham University's work) that we perform ok in these comparisons because we teach in a way that the test tests, but that doesn't mean that we are doing things right (which we're not).
Ideally the CBI are looking for employees with an IQ of 150 who never get sick and will work for peanuts.
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