Training Toolkit
Story: BCS: UK tech industry faces skills crisis
The Best and Brightest?
This is a direct consequence of Labour deciding 50% of the population should have a degree, e.g most of the averagely intelligent members of the population who don't need it and won't use it. This Lowest Common Denominator comprehensive education policy simply drives the truly academically difficult courses and the culture of excellence out of the system as most of the undergraduate feedstock cannot pass the course.
What our industry needs is people who have a real degree which challenges intellectual creativity and reason, the top 10% or so of the population who can do the hard stuff. The population hasn't all become magically more intelligent under labour, just better taught and marked on coursework - easy.
What the labour PC approach to 'ology/media content based degrees for all does is make the truly intellectual degrees look too difficult and take away their funding, as Universities will present the soft courses that get the best results against Blair's targets.
To get what we really need takes a reversal of the move to meaningless degrees for all and a positive discrimination towards the bright, who should be fully state funded end to end through school system and the best Universities. Not just in hard science but also in creative arts, etc. But not average people, they don't need and don't want degrees, mostly they want to be trained to do a decent job at school. Keeping them at University for 3 more years just lowers the unemployment rate at their parents and their own expense. They are forced into this by being told they need an irrelevant degree to get a job - its so cynical and is diluting our academic excellence in the UK.
Maybe a special numerate degree fast track program recognised to be for top 10% and accessible from any point in the mass education system to those who mature and/or wake up late (like me)
If you focus on blanket academic success for the mediocre masses then you will get a mediocre workforce. We need to take and educate the best as well as we can, end to end in streamed sytems, not everyone to a single mediocre standard.
We don't want and can't support too many thinkers anyway. For those not academically gifted there are a whole range of often more needed and better paid craft based opportunities from plumbing to accountancy which can often pay more and create oportunities and jobs for the entrepreneurially gifted - who can then employ the academically able, this isn't about economic power, its horses for courses .
In my opinion.
Brian Catt
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