DOES NOT COMPUTE.

£800m and very little result, not great.

Regarding adverts, I’m sure you’ll understand that I can’t email you details of every vacancy we run. You should be able to garner a decent sample from generalist job boards and local newspapers.

If those adverts were available, it could be a good student project to analyse them! Happy to organize it.

I would also be interested in any hard data on drop out rates. This is a topic that interests me a lot.

There was a BBC 4 programme on this topic today, actually!

2007 was the first good year for graduate employment rates for a very long time, the highest since Labour took power. Which sounds great, until you dig deeper and find that nearly one in seven students drop out before completing their courses. Some Universities have drop out rates approaching 60-70%.

It is my opinion that our present government is less concerned with the quality of our childrens education, and more concerned with where this education takes place.

I think we agree that we should take young people’s time seriously. The 5 years they spend on university preparation and university is too valuable to waste!

I don’t have enough understanding of the current education system to qualify me to comment on the comparisons but I can comment on my own experiences. I had moderate exam success – the way that graduation from any academic institution is still measured. I wanted to study art – but was “persuaded” to focus on languages . Little wonder that I was disengaged. This added Russian to German in the early 1970s when visiting the then USSR was virtually impossible. Failed my Russian Higher. I loved history and would visit historic places of interest – got an A in my Higher. Simplistic explanation I know but I realised then – and have since – that if I can see the point and the potential for application of my learning I will engage in that learning.
Jump forward to today. I do a lot of work in schools – either coaching or teaching public speaking skills. The youngsters still sometimes tell me that they are taking part in my projects to get them out of “work” – but with some gentle questioning they realise that they have been working just as hard – just in a different way. And indeed all of them are challenged to catch up on the classwork they missed by being with me – so it is no easy option. One incident sticks in my mind. A young man who was in a group I was working with missed a meeting as he was on a work experience programme. Afterwards he came to tell me that he had approached it quite differently than he would have had he not experienced working with the project team and had learned a lot about himself.
I believe that by building in the ability to see how learning can be used – and the option of using that learning – into any system could make a difference.