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>> No. 51150 Anonymous
8th October 2013
Tuesday 9:23 pm
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Young adults in England have scored among the lowest results in the industrialised world in international literacy and numeracy tests.

A major study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows how England's 16 to 24-year-olds are falling behind their Asian and European counterparts. England is 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries.

Unlike other developed countries, the study also showed that young people in England are no better at these tests than older people, in the 55 to 65 age range. When this is weighted with other factors, such as the socio-economic background of people taking the test, it shows that England is the only country in the survey where results are going backwards - with the older cohort better than the younger.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24433320

Cue lots of finger pointing and nothing changing.
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>> No. 95496 Anonymous
14th March 2022
Monday 6:32 pm
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>>95494
I may have argued this before, but is it really so wrong to not give a damn about social mobility an the economic sense?
My own outlook, which may be based on the fact I'm both not well off and highly fatalistic, is that social mobility is irrelevant, if not outright harmful. Imagine a society where people are 50% wealthy and 50% destitute - is this a just society just because all the wealthy ones are in the top 50% of hard workers, and the destitute ones in the bottom 50%? (i.e. if you're 1% below the average worker, congratulations, you get nothing.)
Would it not be better, rather than having mobility between each side, to flatten things out so that you've got a society where nobody is wealthy and nobody is destitute? (In real life there might be practical trade-offs here: I'm not suggesting a policy, I'm suggesting a philosophy.) To raise the bottom up, presumably at the cost of the top, rather than ensuring that the best of the bottom can move up to the top while leaving a "less deserving" half of the population to step up or suffer.
To me, a 50/50 society where nobody can move strikes me as potentially preferable to one where people can move. If people can move, and think that's all because they're so great while the ones left behind deserve it for not trying hard enough (or sometimes, just for not being good enough!), the pressure to change the structure of society will be weaker with "fair" mobility than if everyone knows they live in a ridiculously unfair society. There are no tedious "Well I worked hard and found improbable success, so the non-outliers just need to try harder.", no people running around like they're living in The Rise of the Meritocracy.

Now I'm not saying this is what Guardian readers think. You can reframe it a little to say they obviously don't want their income redistributed so that the bottom of the distribution is better off, leaving society more materially equal but equally class-stratified, but it sticks with me that the public focus is on mobility. Our public outlook seems to be that if you're stupid, unable to plan ahead, and incapable of working hard then you deserve to be poor - the important thing is making sure that the precious smart, forward-thinking, hard working people can claw their way up to the top and then help the toffs put the boot into the other guy. The terrible shame is that the smart guy might feel uncomfortable with the posh crowd, not that the stupid bloke is doomed.
>> No. 95497 Anonymous
14th March 2022
Monday 7:29 pm
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>>95496

I think you would very much enjoy Frederik De Boer's book The Cult of Smart.

Blurb:

Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability.

Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place.


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seed-Soil-Confronting-Differences-Educational/dp/1250200377/
>> No. 95502 Anonymous
23rd March 2022
Wednesday 5:47 pm
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>>95496>>95497
Both of these points are true but equally ignore the fact that society as a whole is being held back because A)People with academic potential from poor backgrounds get held back by poor educational foundations at a young age combined with a culture that discourages them from reaching their potential. and B) less intelligent people from wealthy/well connected backgrounds who are parachuted into jobs beyond their competence.

Social mobility definitely shouldnt be about catapulting an arbitrary number of people into higher paying jobs as and when capitalism needs them, but the current situation is a load of shite, and this probably goes a long way towards explaining the piss poor productivity of the British.
>> No. 95579 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 4:53 pm
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>Interest rates on student loans are set to soar to as high as 12%, costing higher-earning graduates an extra £3,000 unless the government intervenes, according to the Institute for Fiscal Students.

>Interest rates on post-2012 student loans are based on the retail prices index (RPI), with the rise in the RPI in March meaning most recent graduates in England and Wales will be charged 9% from September, up from the current rate of 1.5%.

>Highly paid graduates – those earning more than £49,130 – are charged an additional three percentage points (v low earners), so interest rates on their loans will rise from 4.5% to 12%. Those with student loans of £50,000 will accrue an extra £3,000 in debt until March 2023, when interest rates are next revised.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/apr/13/graduates-to-be-hit-with-brutal-student-loan-interest-rates-of-up-to-12
>> No. 95580 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 5:41 pm
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>>95579
>unless the government intervenes
Tehee.
>> No. 95582 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 6:17 pm
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>>95579
No! Not the highly-paid graduates on 50 grand a year! They've suffered enough as it is. I'm sure everyone on 20 grand a year would be happy to give up some of their personal abundance to the downtrodden victims who make two and a half times what they do, to help them through these difficult times.
>> No. 95583 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 6:41 pm
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>>95581
Thank God I'm plan one. I just got a new job at £56k and this discussion was starting to take the wind out of my sails.
>> No. 95584 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 6:45 pm
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>>95582

Indeed, except the graduates on 50 grand a year are the sons and daughters of the middle class home counties lot our government actually pays lip service to. The same people who get up in arms when the economy is on a downturn, because heaven forbid their kids end up stacking shelves for minimum wage.

If there's one thing we can do to help the majority of people in this country, it's doing something about the absolute cunting state of the bloody fucking housing market. Make people's rent and mortgages cheaper. Make it easier to get on the ladder. Sod anything else, just laser focus on this one thing.

The rising tide lifts all boats as they say; it's just they often try to present something to us as a rising tide that's nothing of the sort and only helps certain groups out. Help to Buy was a massive con that only helped out people who were already in relatively reasonable positions to buy something a bit more expensive, it didn't help anyone who was struggling to get a house they wouldn't otherwise have been able to.
>> No. 95585 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 7:07 pm
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>>95581
So is plan one going up to 1.75% in September?
>> No. 95586 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 10:41 pm
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>>95582
Right on, lad - you'll get out of that bucket eventually.
>> No. 95587 Anonymous
13th April 2022
Wednesday 11:04 pm
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>>95585
No. It'll likely go up this month and it'll increase again before September when the BoE hike rates further.
>> No. 95588 Anonymous
14th April 2022
Thursday 7:55 am
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>>95587
It can't go up before then. Until the end of August it's based off the lower of March 2021's RPI, which was 1.5%, and the base rate plus 1%.

Last September it was 1.1%, increasing to 1.25% in January when the base rate went up, but it's now capped at the 1.5% RPI figure.
>> No. 95615 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 8:41 am
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Students are advised to be “more relaxed” about the reputation of the universities they want to attend, after new research revealed they could be better off graduating with a good degree from a less prestigious university than with a lower-class degree from a selective institution.

The report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that graduates in England with first-class or upper second class (2.1) honours degrees had higher average earnings by the age of 30 than those who finished with lower second-class (2.2) awards, regardless of institution – meaning that degree class was often more important than institutional reputation. Figures in the report also suggested it was less difficult to obtain a higher-class degree outside selective universities with competitive entry requirements, despite those universities tending to award a larger proportion of 2.1s and firsts.


https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/apr/20/degree-grade-matters-more-than-university-reputation-report-finds
>> No. 95616 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 11:29 am
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>>95615
If you know the requirements to excel at one university and fail to meet them I don't see how it can be assumed you're more likely to succeed at a university with less demanding requirements (though I'm not sure they've measured that the requirements are indeed less demanding and this author providing commentary has just assumed it). I feel there's a strong likelihood you'd end up cruising to mediocrity there too, whether that's because of challenging circumstances or fecklessness.

Who has the thought "I know I can secure a place at the best uni, but I really doubt my ability to pass the degree"? The report cements the importance of institutional prestige for earnings provided you don't flunk your degree. Well, duh.

Also definitely don't study English, psychology or biosciences. Or even chemistry or physics. You're actually better off with sports science.
>> No. 95617 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 12:00 pm
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>>95616

Physics is incredibly valuable if you don't make the mistake of going into academia or teaching. If you're a half-decent physics graduate, I could get you a job today starting on at least £35k. The City has an insatiable need for people who are good at solving complex quantitative problems and there are loads of opportunities in engineering, software and the gambling industry.

>>95615

This story might as well be "dossers earn less than people willing to put in a minimal level of effort". The ongoing march of grade inflation means that nearly 80% of graduates achieve a 2:1 or better. If you were bright enough to get on the course in the first place, you're bright enough to get a 2:1. Not achieving that grade either means you were very unlucky with life circumstances or you just didn't put in the effort.
>> No. 95618 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 12:43 pm
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>>95617
>The City has an insatiable need for people who are good at solving complex quantitative problems and there are loads of opportunities in engineering, software and the gambling industry.
Engineering, computing and maths degrees are more lucrative than physics degrees, yes.
>> No. 95619 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 2:06 pm
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>>95618

Physicists working outside research is often the result of necessity because there aren't enough jobs in the academic field to support all of them with a worthwhile salary.

What you're left with as a marketable skill in the commercial job world is often chiefly a meta-skill of being a sharp analyst of complex systems and that you're good with numbers. I've heard of physicists working in risk assessment at insurance companies, or even going into software design.

One of my friends at uni was dating a lass who was in the middle of an M.Sc. in maths, for which much of the same is true as for physics, and after temping for a while, she tried her hand at teaching secondary school for a year or two, but then found a very good job in traffic light management for the city of Birmingham. This was in the 90s when they were increasingly computerising traffic light networks of entire cities, and she helped implement Birmingham's system as a data analyst.
>> No. 95620 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 2:49 pm
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>>95619

It's a gross failure of career advice that maths/stats/physics/econ grads don't realise how employable they are. So many areas of business are desperate for people who can do basic analytics. A totally mediocre physicist looks like a genius if they're given a MicroStrategy account, a copy of SQL for Dummies and a two week head start.
>> No. 95622 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 3:11 pm
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>>95620
A 2:2 in econ is more valuable than a 2:1 in physics. Not my opinion, just what their data says. And a lower class econ degree gets close.
>> No. 95623 Anonymous
20th April 2022
Wednesday 3:27 pm
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>>95622

The average income of all graduates is absolutely not indicative of the earning potential of a particular graduate. As I've said before, the average income of physics graduates is totally distorted by the large proportion of them who go into academia or teaching. The poor life decisions of your classmates doesn't have any bearing on the laws of supply and demand. Anyone who can do modestly difficult maths can earn six figures within five years of graduation, they just need to make modestly sensible choices - the problem is that most people aren't being told that those choices are available to them.
>> No. 96068 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 10:57 am
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>English literature is being suspended as a degree at a university amid pressure from government to ensure graduates go straight into well-paid jobs. At least two other universities, Roehampton and Wolverhampton, have announced planned closures of arts and humanities programmes and UCU, the lecturers’ union, has said that jobs in those areas are at risk at De Montfort and Huddersfield universities.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/graduate-jobs-target-risks-killing-off-english-literature-degrees-vnhwkczrg

I feel bad for kids these days, what incentive do they even have to participate in society?
>> No. 96069 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 3:25 pm
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>>96068
The high-paying jobs are the incentive. You know, the jobs which don't pay very highly at all and you'll be pilloried as a traitor to society if you ask for them to be well-paying.

But I really can't understand why they'd be getting rid of English Literature degrees at a time when this country actually needs more Deliveroo drivers.
>> No. 96070 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 4:24 pm
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>>96069

We have massive skills shortages in high-paying fields, but classism gets in the way. Being a graduate carries some level of prestige even if you learned nothing useful and did nothing with the qualification, while having a vocational qualification carries some level of stigma even if it gives you immediate access to a well-paying career. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, a lot of people seem to think there's something innately shameful about being a lift engineer or a lorry mechanic, despite the high pay and excellent job security.
>> No. 96071 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 5:18 pm
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>>96070
I must admit that if they have high pay and excellent job security, I don't really give a fuck if my attitude towards them hurts their feelings.
>> No. 96072 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 5:49 pm
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>>96070

>For reasons I can't begin to fathom, a lot of people seem to think there's something innately shameful about being a lift engineer or a lorry mechanic, despite the high pay and excellent job security.

Well, you're almost there. It's not that people (i.e poor kids) are ashamed or anything like that. It's that their teachers, career advisers, and just in general most of the authority figures in their lives, are themselves university graduates who constantly reinforce the idea that university is the "proper" way to do things, and that the "hands on" NVQs and whatnot are last resorts for hooligans like Danny Ledgard who's always in detention for disrupting science and maths lessons, but somehow behaves in DT class.

They don't realise he did very well out of that last resort NVQ, far better in fact than the swotty kid they sent on an art history degree, because they never saw either of those kids again. But they know they did the right thing, and that's backed up by their OFSTED rankings. Because they're teachers. So despite never having so much as dipped their toes in the real world in their entire life, they obviously know best, and thus should have the biggest say over a child's future.

Frankly the entire euphemism (and I use the word euphemism deliberately) of "social mobility" relies on a very middle class conception of meritocracy and what it entails, which is completely divorced from reality. We can't blame kids for making shite decisions under the circumstances.
>> No. 96073 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 6:26 pm
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>>96072

I'm certainly not blaming the kids, but I think the problem is much wider than school.

I've been both white collar and blue collar and it's astonishing how differently people treat me based purely on my job title at the time. I've been treated with outright pity by people who I knew for a fact earned less than me and had worse prospects than me, simply because I wore PPE to work.

We talk about "different kinds of intelligence", but that's bollocks, we just confuse class signifiers with intelligence. You can be an absolute dunce in an office and get away with it if you spout the right buzzwords, but a dunce in a workshop should hope that they get sacked before they lose an arm. The world is full of thickos who seem clever because they can regurgitate some drivel out of the broadsheets and brilliantly clever people who get treated as if they're thick because they aren't interested in playing the status games of the self-appointed intelligentsia.

The impending tragedy is that all but the most elite white-collar jobs are being gobbled up by technology. If your job mostly involves sitting in front of a computer, then your job can probably be outsourced to India or replaced by an algorithm. Training an AI to perform routine clerical work is orders of magnitude easier than building a robot that can change a set of spark plugs or fit a radiator. There just isn't enough white collar work to employ all the graduates we're producing and the problem is only going to get worse. We could be building a resilient and forward-looking economy, but the reins of power have been seized by twats.
>> No. 96074 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 6:49 pm
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>>96073

I know what you're saying. I learned first hand what having a posh accent can do for you in my first proper job, when the higher ups promoted a lad who was a complete liability over me. In the end it turned out I had to quite literally save that lad's neck on more than one occasion, because his attitude and general manner just constantly rubbed people up the wrong way; and yet that's exactly what got him the job. He spoke proper Radio 4 English, and called people sir instead of mate, so they just assumed he was more clever and capable than me. I had my eyes opened to that at a very young age compared to most people.

In a broader sense though, what I'm saying is: Where do you think that classism comes from? It gets drilled into you from somewhere. Some of it is from background social osmosis, TV, films, the like, but in terms of straightforward career prospects, the majority of it is school. When you actually stop and think about the way our "education" system works, the main thing it actually teaches you is your place.

If there's one thing to take solace in, it's the fact nobody is safe from automation. Automation will be a great leveller, and where the working class had to endure the outsourcing of industry overseas, and the competition of unskilled migrants at home, the middle class and PMC will soon find themselves in the same predicament. There will be entire new-build estates left devastated when their livelihoods are rendered obsolete, up against what amounts to a glorified Excel macro.
>> No. 96075 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 7:26 pm
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Automation that suddenly and profoundly revolutionises the labour market in a way never seen before is like global warming: it will forever be an impending existential threat that never quite arrives.
>> No. 96076 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 7:53 pm
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I think people should study what they want to study so they learn and reach fruition as a person. People love to whinge about Blair but people getting an education is a fundamentally good thing and I don't think forcing the arty lad into a career he never wanted is the right idea. If anything it feels like a plaster on more fundamental problems with the education system.

>>96073
>Training an AI to perform routine clerical work

Truly reaching for the starts there aren't you.

>>96074
>In a broader sense though, what I'm saying is: Where do you think that classism comes from? It gets drilled into you from somewhere. Some of it is from background social osmosis, TV, films, the like, but in terms of straightforward career prospects, the majority of it is school. When you actually stop and think about the way our "education" system works, the main thing it actually teaches you is your place.

Having done both I think it's fair to say that a lot of people working 'hands on' jobs are cunts. People who have only ever been a corporate drone are also cunts but it's more of that bitchy aspect.
>> No. 96077 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 11:43 pm
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>>96076
Quite right that getting educated is a fundamentally good thing, but we do need to draw the distinction between that and getting an education, especially nowadays when any cunt can download a copy of Ashcroft and Mermin from libgen and teach themselves solid state physics at their own pace, probably to greater effect than most universities could. I'm saying this as a career academic, higher education is little more than a qualification-printing service and most of the genuinely smart people I've known in science and in life have been self-taught.
>> No. 96078 Anonymous
27th June 2022
Monday 11:55 pm
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>>96077
It's a good thing universities teach how to learn, think critically and research then.
>> No. 96079 Anonymous
28th June 2022
Tuesday 3:50 am
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>>96076

>Truly reaching for the starts there aren't you.

Most people who work in an office are engaged in routine clerical work. They might not think that it's routine clerical work, but they're basically an algorithm in an easy-iron shirt. You have to go a long way up the org chart before you find people who actually have meaningful autonomy; practically everyone else just turns a predictable set of inputs into a predictable set of outputs.

>>96078

>It's a good thing universities teach how to learn, think critically and research then.

If they're actually trying to do that, then they're failing miserably. Everyone I know who uses scientific literature as a resource has a very poor opinion of academia due to the incredibly poor signal-to-noise ratio of supposedly prestigious journals. It's very rare to find a paper that is actually replicable. At best, no more than 5% of papers contain even a crumb of useful data - the rest are just concoctions of bad statistics, undocumented methodologies and outright fabrication that serve no purpose other than to produce an impressive-looking abstract and a line on someone's academic CV. The literature is drowning in bullshit, because the incentives to publish vastly outweigh the incentives to verify. Given how low the standards are in the hard sciences, I shudder to think of the absolute bollocks they must be churning out in the humanities.
>> No. 96080 Anonymous
28th June 2022
Tuesday 12:22 pm
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>>96079
I feel like you wind up with a problem where a bullshit humanities paper might always have a higher value than a bullshit scientific paper. If you bullshit a paper about chemistry or physics then your rocket isn't going to work. The use of the thing is tied directly to practical application. By contrast if you bullshit a paper about philosophy or even about politics or history, you might still have written something interesting and novel that can be built upon in some way.
It feels like the kind of thing that someone would usually say to attack the validity of the humanities as a whole, but I'm viewing it as an entirely neutral difference. I've nothing against paying people to write nonsense without any practical application if they're writing interesting nonsense. Nobody should have to write filler, though. Filler is boring.
>> No. 96870 Anonymous
30th September 2022
Friday 4:23 pm
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Fucking hell, have we made it onto a really shitty spamlist?
I mean, this is low quality shite, and there's more of a trickle than usual.
>> No. 97404 Anonymous
4th January 2023
Wednesday 12:14 pm
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>In his first speech of 2023, the Prime Minister will set out his priorities for the year ahead and ambition for a better future for Britain.

>The PM will commit to taking the necessary action to deliver for the long term on issues such as low numeracy rates. As part of this, he will set a new ambition of ensuring that all school pupils in England study some form of maths to the age of 18.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-ambition-of-maths-to-18-in-speech

It seems like a weird priority to be focusing on, given the state of the country his lack of response to that, especially as I thought kids had to study maths at sixth-form if they don't pass their GCSE for it.
>> No. 97405 Anonymous
4th January 2023
Wednesday 5:03 pm
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PROBLEM WI'T CUNTRY NARRERDAYS IS THI DUNT DO ENUF MAFFS AT SCHOOWEL, INNIT

It's like how people said New Labour's weakness was being run by focus groups, this government's weakness is being run by the sentiment it finds on the comment section of Telegraph articles on the MSN homepage.
>> No. 97406 Anonymous
4th January 2023
Wednesday 5:15 pm
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A-level maths is shit. I did maths, chemistry, biology, and physics at AS level (dropped maths for A2 level). The mechanics stuff, fair enough. But I doubt most people are going to use calculus or impossible numbers in day to day life, unless they go into higher education. And if they do go into HE, chances are there'll be maths modules more suited to them if maths is a major component of the field. Like when I did chemistry at uni, I did a module equivalent to AS/A2 level maths.

Compulsory A-level maths is going to turn a lot of people off STEM, and we'll see huge swathes of students with a shit grade for maths because they're forced to do something they don't gel with.
>> No. 97407 Anonymous
4th January 2023
Wednesday 5:38 pm
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>>97406

Physics is just practical maths, but it teaches you how to do it anyway. The other sciences require maths, but not the kind of maths an A-level in maths actually teaches. The sort of maths you'll use most as an actual science person is statistics, and everyone on planet earth hates it so they just use excel formulas and shit. But the point is, teaching A-level maths to everyone won't change much.

When can we have an election, I'm tired of these useless fucking idiots. I at least want to see the other side cock up in new and more interesting ways for a change now.
>> No. 97408 Anonymous
4th January 2023
Wednesday 6:40 pm
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>>97407
The latest date for a general election is the 25th of January 2025. Thanks, Corbyn.
>> No. 97522 Anonymous
12th February 2023
Sunday 8:41 pm
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>Rishi Sunak has been warned that a target to boost the number of children entering secondary school with the expected standards of reading, writing and maths is “a far cry from reality”, amid new evidence that 275,000 pupils a year are leaving primary education without the right level of skills.

>Ministers have set a target of ensuring 90% of children achieve the national curriculum standard in reading, writing and maths at the end of primary education by 2030. However, after several years of slow progress, attainment has slipped back to levels only slightly above those of 2015-16. The slump means that in 2022, 41% of year 6 pupils in England left primary school without meeting the expected standards in literacy and maths – 275,000 11-year-olds, according to researchers at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) thinktank. That is 50,000 more than in 2019.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/feb/12/quarter-of-a-million-children-enter-secondary-school-without-basic-maths-and-english
>> No. 97734 Anonymous
7th June 2023
Wednesday 12:29 pm
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>A headteacher spurred on to introduce healthy school meals by one pupil's plight was spat on and branded a 'food Nazi' by angry parents. Julie Copley, from Radleys Primary, Rushall, Walsall, even saw her family threatened for introducing fruit, veg, soups and casseroles to lunch menus.

>Mrs Copley said problems with parents were prevalent during the two Covid lockdowns with healthy snacks and lunch boxes being rejected. She said: "We ended up with Walsall's fruit and veg mountain. Our parents would come and get their box and they would systematically go through it and pile up the fruit and veg in one pile and cereals in another. They'd take some of the tins and then ask, 'can I get a Maccies voucher instead?' We were drowning in fruit and veg. We made soups and casseroles and nobody wanted them. It was a real battle."

>After joining the Food For Life scheme, the school made some radical changes to its menu including having 'meat free' days as well as vastly increasing options for vegan and vegetarian children. They have a variety of menus and have linked up with Wintery Lane Allotments in Rushall to get the children connected with growing food and the school is seeing a change in attitudes. Vicky Hollender, family support worker and Food For Life lead at Radleys, said: "Children were not wanting to try the new menu, even though we took their opinions into account. Our children didn't know how to eat some of the food, didn't know what they were but we stuck with it - even though parents were not happy because they were saying 'I'm not sending my child to school meals because they're not eating them'.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/headteacher-spat-family-threatened-over-27065356

Imagine getting aggressive because someone wants to give your child a decent meal for once.
>> No. 97909 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 8:23 am
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Student loan ban call for low A-levels

Students who fail to pass GCSE maths or English or get three Es at A-level should be banned from taking out student loans, right-wing Conservatives have said.

The New Conservatives, a group of 30 Tory MPs, said young people are increasingly being “ripped off” by poor-quality university courses. They call for funding to be diverted into a “German-style” apprenticeship system. In Germany, they say, over half of young people complete an apprenticeship compared with 10 per cent in the UK. The authors of the report — Jonathan Gullis, a former schools minister in Liz Truss’s government, and Lia Nici, a Tory MP — say that university is no longer a “hallmark of success”.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, previously found that one in five students would be better off if they skipped higher education. The research found that while 80 per cent gained financially by going to universities, about 20 per cent earned less than those with similar school results who did not go to university.

The Office for Students, which regulates universities, last year found that 56,000 students are studying at 35 universities and colleges which have failed to meet a requirement for 80 per cent of students doing their first degree progressing into their second year of study. It also found that more than 11,000 students are registered at 62 universities and colleges which did not meet a 60 per cent threshold for students securing professional jobs or training 15 months after graduating.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/student-loan-ban-call-for-low-a-levels-wtttglnf2

Didn't even realise someone with three Es could go to uni.
>> No. 97910 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 10:24 am
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>>97909
>The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, previously found that one in five students would be better off if they skipped higher education. The research found that while 80 per cent gained financially by going to universities, about 20 per cent earned less than those with similar school results who did not go to university.
So it didn't find that at all. It found that it hypothetically could be the case, all other things being equal. It also only looked into pay, not any of the other shit that makes getting through the day without jumping off a motorway bridge feasible. Right-wing bullshit merchants, the lot of these people.

>Didn't even realise someone with three Es could go to uni. I suspect people with only three-Es aren't. There are more qualifications than A-levels that people can use to get into university, but I can't read the article because it's Times-shite so I can't dig into this claim much more than that.
>> No. 97911 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 10:48 am
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>>97909
I wonder how many civil servants who will be tasked to write and implement such a policy would not have been eligible under this system. And how their own pay would factor in if they'd never bothered with university and got a private sector job instead.

>They call for funding to be diverted into a “German-style” apprenticeship system

Sounds more like the very wurst of German education where kids are railroaded from a young age. And part of a reform agenda that has failed since the days of Cameron.
>> No. 97912 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 10:51 am
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>>97910
https://archive.ph/
>> No. 97913 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 10:56 am
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>>97910

An ex of mine was a peripatetic lecturer. There are some unbelievably shit degrees being taught in this country and I think it's entirely fair to call them a rip-off. Charging a barely literate teenager nine grand a year for four contact hours a week is a vulgar parody of higher education. The students don't benefit, the lecturers are on zero-hours contracts that barely meet the minimum wage, but the senior administrators are doing very nicely indeed.

IMO the government deserve a great deal of blame for systematically neglecting further education. They talk a good game when it comes to promoting vocational education, but there's no money behind it. FE colleges are effectively being forced to move away from teaching vocational subjects, because they just can't afford it - they get less funding and have much higher costs.
>> No. 97914 Anonymous
12th September 2023
Tuesday 1:26 pm
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>>97909
>Didn't even realise someone with three Es could go to uni.
Probably works out cheaper than buying when you get there.
>> No. 98237 Anonymous
29th December 2023
Friday 1:22 pm
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>James Daly has the smallest majority in Great Britain. The Conservative MP scraped to victory in Bury North in 2019 winning only 105 more votes than his Labour rival James Frith. He has a fair claim to being the most endangered Tory in the country. But today as he faces the fight of his political life, Mr Daly is not afraid to tell it as he sees it even if it means describing some of his own constituents as “crap”.

>“When you think about the family it’s about stability,” the MP said as he explained his political philosophy to i. “Most of the kids who struggle in Bury are the products of crap parents and so what do we do to try to address that issue? On the left it would just be we’ll throw money at this and hope something sticks, somebody like me thinks about this more fundamentally.”

>As a member of the New Conservatives, the right wing parliamentary group of about 20 Tory MPs, Mr Daly has his own brand of “common sense” politics and “social attitudes to life”. “New Conservatives get a bad rap,” he says. “I think New Conservatives represent very much working class conservatism. We’re not a strange right-wing sect. It’s just people who want to give people the best chance to succeed and thrive in life.

>Mr Daly says politicians need to be “brave enough” to articulate views like his opinion on “crap parents”. But he also implies there should be limits to such plain speaking. On Mr Savile, he says the “challenge for Jimmy” in becoming “a mainstream politician” would be to “come away from being this person who can say what he wants”. But the MP adds, “he’s great with people”. And that’s where he argues Labour and its leader fall short because “Keir Starmer ain’t gonna inspire people”.

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/crap-parents-why-children-struggle-tories-most-endangered-mp-2817474
>> No. 98238 Anonymous
29th December 2023
Friday 1:48 pm
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>>98237
So does he ever share the results of this fundamental thinking of his?
>> No. 98239 Anonymous
29th December 2023
Friday 1:51 pm
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>>98237

Fundamentally it's hard to disagree with the idea that bad kids are raised by crap parents. I mean, stands to reason. He's not making a groundbreaking insight there, he's just stating the bloody obvious. I suspect however, that he has thought very little about the rational follow up question of why crap parents are crap parents to begin with.

He makes what might be a valid point that Labour would just throw money at it, but you also notice he doesn't actually propose any solution at all himself. If he's so concerned about stability in families, I might point out that the way the system works under the Tories still encourages benny scrounger mums to boot out the dad and become single parents.

Anyway who cares what this numpty thinks, him and those like him likely never going to be an MP again.

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