Swings and roundabouts in education
I'm shocked at what is happening to Adult Education. The existence of tuition fees in universities is bad enough, without partial privatisation of further education colleges, a necessity for adult social mobility. Currently colleges only receive the full cost of tuition for people aged 16-19, or those on benefits, most of which are forced to take classes against their will by job centres hence are unlikely to profit from them. Everyone else has to fork out extortionate fees, often without even the option of paying a concessionary rate. Consequently the classes are so undersubscribed they are often cut, partially cancelled or made more expensive. I have already paid £375 for my A level Biology class, only to be told that due to an (unsurprising) shortage of students taking the class they would have to cut two thirds of the lessons, meaning there would not be enough time to cover the syllabus, and instead a "drop in tutorial" would run every three weeks. This is not only a scandalous rip-off but also a complete let-down, especially as people were only told about these arrangements after they had spent several hours enrolling. The fact that they even run courses that are "Full Cost Recovery" with no discount regardless of income strikes me as deeply unfair and also inherently agist: if you haven't got all the qualifications you need by the time you're 19, then tough luck, there are no more educational opportunities available to you.
On the bright side, year 9 SATs have been scrapped with immediate effect, taking some of the brutal exam pressure off 14 year olds. Whilst the teachers at my school were cheering about this the perhaps more perceptive year 9s were skeptical: "it's all the same really, we've been threatened with end-of-year assessments instead" said one, "and they'll probably make us do more church services 'just for fun' ". Obviously the "creative opportunities" we were promised was another staff room euphemism.
Working in a school is quite disorientating sometimes.
(It's exactly like everything you've ever seen on Teachers as well, by the way.)
7 Comments:
Higher education has to be paid for by someone. That stuff ain't cheap and the system was never designed to cope with the increasingly large volume of school leavers entering university these days.
Btw, you misspelled 'receive'.
Btw you misspelled "your mum".
Btw, your mum misspelled 'your face'.
Misspellings aside, why not just do something at the Open University? The degree will get you four or five rungs higher than, what appears to be at least, a rather pointless Biology course and means that you have something more impressive to whack on the CV.
Blame the government for encouraging so many people to go to University - pretty much everyone wants to do engineering or some sort of business management, the latter of which they could learn on the job anyway, because they think that's where the money is. So they'll pay for that knowing that in the long run it'll cover itself, even after the mortgage.
Mike xxx
"rather pointless"?
1. When is any kind of education pointless?
2. Since when are A Levels pointless?
3. Actually I think you'll find A Levels have much better academic status than an OU degree.
4. Rungs? On the boring ladder of career-centred bullshit?
As you can see, I really care about this course. Otherwise I wouldn't be taking it.
And at least it's me that's paying for it, and not Gordon Brown/your mum.
P.S. Heard that you, Joao (!) and Tim (!!!) went to a Socialist meeting last week. This was naturally a source of great entertainment to me. In fact Tim even lent me a copy of International Socialism!
Now that is the power of the credit crunch.
Pub quiz on Thursday? x
most of whom
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