>>51150

dirty commies and their false equality... it's time for grammar schools and MORALITY

One in four graduates in England and Northern Ireland are working in jobs for which they are overqualified and do not require a degree, according to a major international education report.

The study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that while graduate unemployment rates in the UK are among the lowest in the world, students are more likely to end up in non-graduate jobs associated with lower incomes.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education and skills, said too many young people emerging from university were ending up in low-paid, non-graduate jobs in the UK because they lacked the basic numeracy and literacy skills that should be expected from a university education.

Schleicher said: “What we see is that a lot of people in the UK get a university degree but end up in a job that does not require that degree. When you test the skills of those people you actually see that those people don’t have the kind of skills that would be associated with a university degree.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/sep/11/quarter-of-england-and-n-ireland-graduates-in-school-leaver-jobs

>>84440

Totally unsurprising to anyone who has worked in academia or recruitment. Blair's goal of 50% participation in higher education led to a drastic lowering of standards in the lower recesses of the university league tables. A polytechnic or an FE college doesn't suddenly become an institute of higher education just because you call it that. A kid who got two Ds at A-level just isn't going to benefit from another three years of education, but there are plenty of "universities" who will happily take £27k in fees from them. It's cargo cult education for a cargo cult society.

Well if our graduate employment rates are among the highest in the world, is it really a surprise that many of them are in positions where they are overqualifed? I've met graduates before who would rather live off the dole for half a year than get a lousy job because they feel it's beneath them. If these people are swallowing their pride then that's fine with me. Also I'd agree with >>84441 since there are clearly a lot of graduates who not only didn't require their education but didn't get a very good one in the first place.

>>61563

WE'VE GONE ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE

Thousands of children with special educational needs and disabilities are waiting for a school place or are being educated at home, and many more are excluded, prompting fears that schools in England are becoming less inclusive.

According to Guardian analysis of Department for Education statistics, just under 4,500 pupils with statutory rights to special needs support were awaiting suitable provision or being home-schooled at the start of the year.

Campaigners say the real figure is far higher because the DfE data does not include Send pupils who don’t have a special needs statement or an education health and care plan, documents that guaranteetheir statutory rights to additional support. More than 1.2 million children, or about 15% or all students in England have some kind of special educational need, but only about 253,000 have special educational needs statements or education health and care plans.

There is also growing concern that children with special needs are particularly vulnerable to being taken off the rolls by schools that are under pressure, both financially because of budget cuts and academically to improve their exam results.

“We are not sure to what degree off-rolling takes place, but the target-driven education system we have means teachers and headteachers don’t want difficult children on their rolls,” said one local government analyst. Pupils get excluded on tenuous grounds, or teachers will tell parents at open days, ‘you shouldn’t send your child here – they will get a better education at a school down the road.’ It’s subtle, but we know it happens.”

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/oct/23/send-special-educational-needs-children-excluded-from-schools

>Staff at Leeds Trinity University, in Horsforth, have been told to avoid using capital letters in communication with students. In a memo sent to the university’s school of journalism department, it asks lecturers to not use uppercase letters in a letter which talks about causing anxiety.

>The letter asks lecturers to “generally, avoid using capital letters for emphasis” and to “avoid a tone that stresses the difficulty or the high-stakes nature of the task.” Other requests include overusing the words 'do' and 'don't' and to write in a 'helpful, warm tone, avoiding officious language and negative instructions.'

>A member of staff at the university, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Yorkshire Evening Post: “Nobody has banned it but there are guidelines advising us not to use capital letters which is absolutely ludicrous. I am yet to meet anyone who was traumatised by capital letters. We don’t need to do students any favours. They need to be prepared for the real world. If they fall and we keep catching them then once they graduate they’ll wonder why they’ve fallen on the floor.”

https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/education/leeds-trinity-university-responds-to-ban-on-capital-letters-1-9453332

>>84545
Does it not just mean THIS SORT OF THING? Which doesn't strike me as an especially controversial when suggestion when dealing with someone with anxiety. Whoever was writing these guidelines clearly reckons berating people with anxiety in emails doesn't do much good, something I'd broadly agree with. Wouldn't most people?

Instead of making mountains out of molehills, why doesn't the Yorkshire Evening Post or literally any other journalistic publication, and I'm aware that's an increasingly meaningless word for some outlets, but even so, do some journalism into why everyone and their dog has anxiety these days? I find it hard to believe the entire British Isles has just "gotten soft" after hundreds of thousands of years of people living here. Or not, whatever, just keep perpetuating Twitter "outrage" and stupid stereotypes about students, week after week, forever and ever.

>>84546

I too assumed they meant to avoid BLOCK CAPITALS which is entirely reasonable, and makes sense as I'm looking at a letter from my GP right that has things like "YOU MUST" printed as such.

Either this has been poorly communicated by the person who wrote the memo, or has been deliberately misconstrued for the sake of an article.

>>84546
>Either this has been poorly communicated by the person who wrote the memo, or has been deliberately misconstrued for the sake of an article.

Given the guidance explicitly says "for emphasis" I know what my choice would be.

>>84546

>Does it not just mean THIS SORT OF THING? Which doesn't strike me as an especially controversial when suggestion when dealing with someone with anxiety.


As someone with ANXIETY I don't think changing the text of letters will have a significant impact. What IS anxiety inducing is not the phrasing of a letter but the message of a letter, and you have really no way to get around "we will kick you out if you don't start attending lectures and your grades don't improve" no amount of SUGAR COATING is going to stop that concept causing anxiety.


What I do consider innapropriate is fucking tv licence letters, they read like a fucking threat, and make me hate the BBC.

>>84549

>What I do consider innapropriate is fucking tv licence letters, they read like a fucking threat, and make me hate the BBC.

I outright refuse to pay the fees because of these letters. They really kick off the antiestablishment side of me.

I remember a website a while ago showing that the letters sent to lower income areas were far more threatening than those sent to more well off households. Fuck them.

>>84550
What TV Licensing do effectively amounts to psychological warfare. I'm pretty sure that if I were to do the things they do I'd be sent down for a long spell for harassment and coercive control. I can see why they do it, since any parent, Russian defector or White House journalist knows that threats only work if the victim believes they're credible, but ultimately this is a threat to exercise state power knowing it will not be followed through upon.

>>84551

And don't even get me started on TV detector vans, which are either an outright lie, or, by any definition, an example of covert government surveillance.

>>84552
They used to be real, but haven't actually functioned in decades as nobody uses B&W CRTs anymore. These days they're just blacked out minibuses with a blinkenlights setup in the back. You know, the sort of thing Trading Standards would want a word with you about if you tried selling them as "detector vans".

I had a good laugh last time I got a TV Licensing threat letter. They'd sent me one of those things to announce they'd started an investigation, which they can do as they please, but then I looked closer at the bit where it had been "signed" by the guy in charge of investigations and realised it wasn't even done over by some guy with a biro to look convincing, they'd printed a "signature" in a different colour to the main text, and if you looked closely at the paper it was obviously done by a printer.
They'll have to get up earlier than that if they think they're going to scare me, once they start actually signing their letters or sending people to the door, maybe then I'll consider registering to tell them I don't have a telly and they can save their ink for people who don't get any pleasure out of getting bullies to waste their money.

>>84553
>They used to be real

Lad.

>>84555

You can build a working TV detector with a £10 RTL-SDR stick and a suitably tuned antenna. A skilled electronics engineer could build one using 1950s components as a weekend project.

The vast majority of radio receivers (that includes anything wireless) operate on the superheterodyne principle. The received signal is mixed with a signal from a local oscillator, which shifts the desired signal down to a lower frequency that is more readily processed. Older analogue TV receivers were inefficient and poorly shielded, so the local oscillator frequency leaked out and could be detected from some distance, especially with a highly sensitive receiver and an antenna with significant gain. High-gain antennas are highly directional, so it's simple to work out the direction of a transmission by steering the antenna and find its location by triangulation.

The cathode ray tube in older TVs also produces considerable amounts of RF energy. The electron gun at the back of the tube can only produce a single dot, which is steered around the screen using a deflection coil to produce the image on the phosphor. This coil operates at high voltage and is a modestly efficient antenna. Using a technique called Van Eck phreaking, it's quite straightforward to reconstruct the image being displayed on the screen from a distance based solely on the RF emissions of the deflection coil; this was a sufficiently practical threat that NATO developed standards for shielding monitors used to display classified data.

Modern digital TVs generally use direct-conversion receivers and have much better shielding, rendering traditional TV detection techniques impractical at anything but point-blank range; a TV detector isn't much use if it only works in the same room.

More generally, nearly all electronic equipment has some sort of identifiable radio frequency signature. Using that £10 RTL-SDR stick, you can ascertain all sorts of things about your immediate environment. A switched-mode power supply like your phone charger produces a distinctive square-wave at about 400kHz. A light switch produces a very brief but very wideband emission due to the tiny spark of the contacts closing. If you're attuned to it, you can hear how many cylinders a car engine has and how hard it's revving based on the radio emissions from the ignition circuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodyne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cup of tea_(codename)
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

>>84556

I doubt the vans were sensitive enough to detect which flat in a building (or even which house out of say five in a row) actually had the TV. I could be entirely wrong but I feel like such a sensitive piece of kit would turn out to be negative investment even if > 50% of people failed to pay their TV license.

Fantastically interesting post though, I learned a lot. Thanks lad.

>>84557

Homing in on the precise location of a transmitter is remarkably simple thanks to the inverse square law. The strength of a signal changes with the square of the distance; if you move your receiver towards the transmitter, the received signal strength increases geometrically. Once you've picked up the signal, all you need is a handheld receiver with a signal strength indicator, an antenna that is somewhat directional and a pair of legs. You wave the antenna about until you've found the highest signal strength and walk in that direction. It's very much like using a metal detector. If you're just trying to confirm whether there's a TV in operation in a particular house, it's absolutely trivial. The equipment required is remarkably basic, even by the standards of the late 1960s.

Radio hunting is a modestly popular sport in some parts of the former Soviet Union, for depressingly KGB-related reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_direction_finding

I do agree that it probably wouldn't have been worth the hassle in most cases.

>>84556
Good luck detecting my Northrop-Grumman HD-2 stealth telly, electrofascists!

>>84556
What else is this SDR thingy good for?
I have a friend who'd been nagging me to get one but I didn't see much use for it.
Sage for /g/ bollocks.

>>84609

SDR stands for Software Defined Radio - the hardware just hoovers up radio waves, with your computer doing the work of decoding them. An SDR can receive essentially any radio transmission within the frequency range of the hardware, which in the case of the cheap RTL-SDR dongles is about 22MHz to 1GHz.

That's of very little interest to most people, but it's a cheap and versatile entry point into the radio hobby. They'll receive FM and DAB radio, the ADS-B navigation signals transmitted by aircraft and most kinds of two-way radio (although not the encrypted TETRA system used by the emergency services). You can pick up radiosonde transmissions from weather balloons, maritime radio and navigation beacons. With an upconverter, you can also receive shortwave transmissions.

There are other, more capable SDRs available, some of which (like the HackRF One) are also capable of transmitting. Bear in mind that there is a considerable difference between what is technically possible with an SDR and what is legal. You can listen in on a local minicab company's radio system and steal their customers, but I wouldn't advise you to do so.

Do minicabs still use PMR? I'd assumed it had all shifted to phones some time ago.

>>84611
I don't know the details, and I don't know how common it is, but a lot of minicabs I've been in recently have been running with the meter off, with a phone app doing all the work instead. The app runs up the charge, and can automatically bill the card. The driver can then pick his next job if one is waiting, or look at the board to see which part of town he might want to be in. Or, as seems to happen frequently in my case, get allocated the job and then go absolutely fucking nowhere for 15 minutes.

>>84549
>>84551
>>84550
I agree the letters are shite and could use a change in tone.

While they reiterate that watching without a licence is illegal, they should talk about the great BBC programming that your licence fee funds. Like public television does in the US when they do their pledge drives. Or maybe they could provide a breakdown of where your money goes, like the government does for your tax bill. God knows that is sorely needed so they can admit how much they are giving Jonathan Ross and the like.

>>84613
They could frame it as a way to vote for what you want to see on telly. British programming: it's locally sourced, supporting small businesses and not in the hands of EU or US political propaganda. That should appeal to everyone.

>>84614
Hmm. Up to a point, mind. I can't imagine anything worse than giving the British public full control over the broadcast schedule.

>>51150

our worthless utopian comprehensives are to blame, copied from the awful American high school model.

Is it time for the grammars to return?

>>84633

There's no evidence that grammar schools actually provide a better education once you correct for the effects of selection. Of course schools that only select the brightest students get better exam results.

White children are the least likely to achieve their potential between primary and secondary school, official data shows.

Official data released by the Department for Education (DfE) shows that white children are making less progress compared to their peers from all other ethnic groups by the time they are 16-years-old.

This year, the average Progress 8 score for white children in state schools was the lowest at -0.10, compared to -0.02 for mixed race, 0.45 for Asian, 0.12 for black and 1.03 for Chinese pupils. White children has the second lowest score for attainment, with an average of 46.1. Chinese pupils had the highest score of 64.2, followed by Asian children, while black children had the lowest. Both this year and last, children with English as a second language had a higher score for attainment and made better progress on average than native speakers.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2019/01/24/secondary-school-league-tables-white-children-least-likely-achieve/

The data, published yesterday by the Department for Education (DfE), adds weight to arguments that people with migrant heritage are more likely to drive themselves forward.

Some experts believe many ethnic minority families are more aspirational and have a better attitude to work than those in poor, white communities.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6629443/White-children-likely-make-good-progress-secondary-school.html

>>84866

Sounds about right. We've had this (tedious) discussion before, but poor white british kids are really struggling, not least because a lot of their parents don't give a shit.

>A teacher was sent to work in an ‘outstanding’ school despite struggling to read or write.

>Faisal Ahmed was placed in St Thomas More Catholic School in Wood Green, London, after completing his Teach First programme. But headmaster Mark Rowland suspended him after discovering he had ‘extreme difficulty with handwriting’, reading problems and issues understanding ‘written tests’.

>Mr Ahmed, in his 30s, has dyspraxia, a developmental disorder that affects movement and co-ordination. Teach First admitted they had not informed the school of his dyspraxia before he started in 2016. Mr Ahmed decided to leave his role and has since sued the school for constructive dismissal and disability discrimination.

https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/08/teacher-barely-read-write-suspended-top-school-9130992/

How the fuck do you qualify as a teacher if you're borderline illiterate? I know some right thickos who have gone into teaching, but they can at least read and write.

>>85563
>borderline illiterate
Says you. What do you think an organisation called Teach First might do?

>>85566

One would assume encourage people to become teachers. I fail to see what point if any you are trying to make.

>>85568
Teach first, before you qualify as a teacher.

>>85569
>Teach First is a social enterprise registered as a charity which aims to address educational disadvantage in England and Wales. Participants must undergo a two-year training programme in order to achieve Qualified Teacher Status.

He'd completed the programme. He had achieved Qualified Teacher Status despite being unable to read or write properly.

>>85571
Your quote doesn't support your assertion. The two-year training programme at Teach First entails being placed into a school. He was at the beginning of his placement. He had not achieved QTS.

>Just a few days into his role as a business studies teacher

He had a degree, but no PGDE.

>>85573
>Faisal Ahmed was placed in St Thomas More Catholic School in Wood Green, London, after completing his Teach First programme.

I'd agree, but then we'd both be wrong.

It is like Faisal Ahmed is amongst us and failing literacy once more!

>>85575
We need to call in the imageboard equivalent of Ofsted I'll get working on the letter to Angela Eagle to make sure standards aren't slipping.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says 31% of graduates are overeducated for the job they are doing. For those graduating before 1992, the number was only 22%, but this jumped to 34% for those graduating after 2007.

Graduates in arts and humanities were more likely to be under-using their education. The overeducation rate for all workers of about 16% for 2017 is largely unchanged since 2006.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48091971

>>85646

>Graduates in arts and humanities were more likely to be under-using their education

What a revelation. I'm truly shocked.

>>85647

Whereas some science graduates have been using their degree to produce this study.

>>85647
Not enough of a distinction is made between the calibre of the university and the subject studied in this country. I don't think this is fully understood by enough people who are planning to on applying to study. Even that BBC article talks about average graduate earnings in general, which gives people false hope over what they can achieve with a shitty degree from a shitty institution.

>Most families do not choose to send their children to their nearest school, shows the biggest ever study of state secondary school choices in England. More than 60% opt for a school that is further away - usually because it is higher achieving.

>"Contrary to a widely-held belief, only a minority of parents choose their local school as their first option," say researchers.

>It also debunks the idea that richer families are more engaged with choices. Despite any assumptions about the "sharp elbows" of middle-class families, there was no significant difference in behaviour between wealthier and more disadvantaged parents.

>Both were similarly engaged in using choices to seek more desirable school places for their children. Parents in poorer areas were more likely to opt for schools further away - with researchers suggesting this was because richer families were more likely to live close to high-performing schools.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-48365204

This is more a personal observation than anything, but a few months ago when I watched that 'They Will Not Grow Old' documentary by Peter Jackson, I couldn't help but notice just how articulate all the old WWI vets were. They certainly didn't sound as though they were upper-crust or anything, they just sounded like regular blokes from across England and Scotland; only one or two of them sounded like officers.

Now, these were old men, so they've had a lifetime of experience to become more nuanced in their speech, but for me, it put to bed this silly notion that we're 'more' educated nowadays than we used to be because of technology. You'd think with all the text people read on a daily basis because of their phones, they'd be more literate, but it's the opposite.

>>86300
There are a lot of things that could have effected why the Tommies in those interviews sounded the way they did though. It's possible the researchers at the time thought the working class ones with inpenetrable regional accents weren't telly material, or that all of them died at the age of 40 from being so poor and smelly. I haven't seen the film though I might be way off on both ideas.

I definitely think literacy is taking a hit though, or at least the levels of quality literacy. Undoubtably more people can read and write than ever before, but not everyone's secretly a *NAME OF FAMOUS AUTHOR*. Sorry, I don't know many books.

Oh, Sara Pascoe, she did a book.

>>86300

I think it's sort of more that the way people spoke back then was more polite and proper; or at least, it bloody well was if you were going to be on the film. That will have been a big deal for gentlemen of their generation, and I imagine they'd have asked for their Sunday best and treated it like a formal occasion.

I don't think it necessarily has to do with education in terms of intellect, but certainly education in terms of how to conduct and present oneself. We've almost entirely retired that concept these days. Nowadays people might read and write more than ever before, technically, but most of them don't spend their time on a board like this for anoraks and shed enthusiasts. The quality of their reading material counts for far more than the quantity, because 90% of online communication is utter dreck.

I will type more words now because I have just obtained a mechanical keyboard and I am enjoying the noises it makes. They are pleasant, but I feel the trend towards them recently is a bit overrated. If my old one hadn't have broken I don't think I would have consciously "upgraded" to a mechanical one at any point soon.

>>86302
>I don't think it necessarily has to do with education in terms of intellect, but certainly education in terms of how to conduct and present oneself.

This. Back then people seemed to have a greater sense of pride or, more accurately, a greater sense of shame. I'm not entirely sure when picking up your children from school wearing pyjamas, slippers and a dressing gown became a thing but I'd wager it coincided with an increase in people having no sense of shame.