Peter Jackson column

Oct 21 2004 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Education, education, education - there's simply no getting away from it.

Targets have been set, examinations fine-tuned, money invested and the curriculum altered, but every year dissatisfaction seems to grow.

And, depending which side of the argument you favour, A-levels are being dumbed down or students are getting cleverer and cleverer.

In my experience, one thing is for sure, the business sector is not happy with the end result.

The Tomlinson report is intended to address these concerns, with GCSEs and A-levels being merged into a new diploma system, which will also cater for vocational qualifications, while still emphasising the basics in maths, English and IT.

The initial reaction from business, however, would indicate that it has been, at best, underwhelmed.

Certainly the status quo is not an option. I have remarked before on the embarrassing contrast between our own youngsters and those on much of the continent. There young people - outside France anyway - can speak English better than, say…the average contestant on Big Brother. They have an informed interest in art, literature, serious music, politics and still manage to enjoy football without getting violently drunk. In the long run - and, I suspect far sooner than that - we cannot hope to compete economically with these countries.

In all the arguments about immigration it seems to have gone unnoticed that the Government's case that we need an immigrant workforce to fill the skills gap implies that it has given up on our own large, uneducated underclass, which is, I suppose, hardly surprising.

And the stark truth is that unless we tackle the whole education system with far greater rigour and far higher expectations, all the reports, reforms and diplomas in the world won't make the slightest bit of difference.

We have to decide what we are educating for, what end result we hope to achieve. Are our universities, for instance, to be glorified finishing schools, training half the population as they once trained the gentry and clergy, or are they vocational, or are they there to maintain the academic tradition, or are they there to for a mixture of all these?

Equipping students with qualifications to get to university in the pious belief that a university education is a jolly good thing is not doing anybody any favours.

Until we can set ourselves generally agreed standards - for universities and for basic employability skills - which can be independently maintained and not devalued, then we are only in the business of rearranging deck chairs.