Schools and low-performing, handy, techy kids.
Let them eat Jafa cakes!
The British government has studiously put poor, handy kids on the scrap heap of life
by not giving them apprenticeships for decades.
Those kids have also been without Technical institutes, because Thatcher
wanted to fool us into thinking that there was growth in tertiary education.
Now the current Con-Dems are set on closing many of those same post-92 'universities' through their generous £9000 fees.
Brilliant. Full-circle circle-jerk politics, for idiots
checkitout
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/13/schools-failing-teenagers-with-vocational-aspirations
Half of pupils are being consigned 'to the scrapheap' by schools
Secondary schools in England and Wales focus on brighter children and fail to help teenagers prepare for world of work, warns Demos
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* Tracy McVeigh
* The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011
Half of all teenagers in England and Wales are being failed by secondary schools that focus on brighter children destined to go on to higher education, according to a damning new report from the thinktank Demos.
The report, The Forgotten Half, claims that secondary schools routinely neglect pupils with vocational aspirations, offering minimal careers advice and little help in finding the type of jobs that would suit them. "Our schools are teaching just half of the population," said one of the report's authors, Jonathan Birdwell.
"The education system needs to be less focused on pushing young people through the hoops of assessment that lead on to higher education, and more on equipping them with the skills to enter and progress through the labour market," he added.
One of the key findings of the research is that many of the vocational qualifications that children are encouraged to aim for turn out to be worthless. "That was one thing that really shocked me," said Birdwell.
Work-related learning was found to be low quality and young people failed to benefit from compulsory work experience due to poor links with local businesses and a failure to relate work experience to lessons given in the classroom. Schools were also found to undervalue the importance of part-time work, after-school clubs and volunteering in building up young people's skills, experience and their CVs....
