Education

I posted a week or so ago about Universities and the expected rise in applications to Britain’s ‘New Universities’ caused by that cause-all, "The Credit Crunch". Since then I have been giving some more thought to the state of our education system and it isn’t too good I’m afraid.
This isn’t meant as a party political point but the Labour government has set itself a target of getting 50% of people into University, claiming that in the modern world economy we need an educated workforce. To some extent this is true since every day I study alongside students from China, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Greece, Russia and a whole host of other countries which shows that Brits need to get their smarts up as well. However, the problem lies with how we do this and I believe that we are taking totally the wrong approach.

Sure we need brighter young people but there is no point trying to achieve this by creating more University places since this is way too late. Chinese students doing Maths or Physics at A-Level stage are doing a syllabus which is on a par with our undergrad courses in the same subjects. We are churning out thousands upon thousands of GCSE and A-Level graduates who don’t have the knowledge to compete with their global peers but in the UK we send them to University, give them a degree and tell them that they are the equal of any country’s graduates.

If more money was invested at GCSE and A-Level stage and people were allowed to fail here, then students would have higher expectations and gradually improve rather than the usual cycle of grade inflation we face each year.
Maybe in 10-15 years we will have 50% of young people able to go to University because they have the requisite abilities and possess the logical and reasoning skills to study at this higher level but we are deluding ourselves if we think we have loads of brainy grads just because we farm more people through Universities.