The cruellest con of all

     

 

Patrick Ainley 

 

Times Higher Education Supplement  07/02/08

 

 

 

Widening participation is a cruel con but the people academics fool the most with it are themselves.  The government target of 50 per cent of 18-30 year-olds entering higher education by 2010 presents itself as a professionalisation of the proletariat but it disguises a proletarianisation of the professions.  Not only the academic profession but the professions which many graduates will enter – if they are lucky. 

 

                                                                                                          

Occupations of all sorts now calling themselves professional (not merely in the sense of doing a good job and being full-time as opposed to amateur, like footballers or criminals) have expanded with the decline of industrial labour and the expansion of service and office employment, especially for women.  These occupations have also professionalized themselves by their association with higher education.  Teachers were a case in point, moving from the teacher training colleges to Departments of Education in universities.  Now teacher education, as it briefly became, has once again reverted to teacher training in competences dictated by the central government Training and Development Agency, even though still nominally within higher education. 

 

                                                                                  

Widening participation on a reduced unit of resource was also a recipe for turning higher into further education.  Without the extra support necessary for ‘non-traditional’ students, ie. those without the top A-level grades guaranteeing their preparedness for traditional HE, it is impossible for them to reach the standards of academic literacy and numeracy demanded by the unchanged HE that lecturers persist in inflicting on the new mass of students. 

 

 

Meanwhile, the selecting elite have used widening participation to cream ‘bright working-class’ applicants in the way the grammars used to do.  As has been pointed out many times, this only makes the situation worse for the rest of us. Academics have only themselves to blame for this.  Partly we were arrogant in thinking that what we had to teach was what everyone else wanted and needed to know.  We did not recognise that knowledge is not power and that most of our students are not in the personal, social or economic situation to be empowered by it.  Partly we were stupid in not seeing that our eagerness to enlighten the masses entailed levels of support that are unavailable to us.  

 

 

Worse, since the polytechnics – as Tyrrell Burgess wittily said at the time – were allowed to become universities to disguise the fact many universities had become polytechnics, there is now no surviving alterative to academic HE.  Instead, all new and old universities compete on the uneven playing field of a traditional curriculum. 

 

 

When academics belatedly realise that ‘more means different’, our only option is to ‘dumb down’ towards competence-based programmes like many of the two-year Foundation ‘degrees’. 

 

 

This is the likely future for the vocational diplomas and apprenticeships government is conjuring up.  Since no schools want to run the dips and employers aren’t going to pay for them, they will predictably be picked up by desperate FE and then passed on as F‘d’s to what are becoming the training universities. 

 

 

 

Here comes the ‘Burgerluarette’ !

 

Martin Allen

 Campaign Teacher Spring 2008

 

News that McDonalds are offering  employees a  ‘training’ equivalent to A-levels  got its fair share of media attention at the end of January, particularly when it became known that QCA was recognising it – along with courses from two other major companies, the airline Flybe and Network Rail.

 

From January 2008, McDonald’s will pilot what it is calling a basic shift manager’s course. The course will cover everything the 7,000 managers of McDonald’s outlets across the country need to know about the day-to-day running of a restaurant. This ranges from basic operational requirements, to finances, marketing and human resources. Learning on this course will be divided up into credits. The standard of these credits will equate with GCSE grades, A-levels or a national Diploma. 

 

Though an employee will not be completing a full A-level equivalent, only part of one, when 17 year olds are legally required to participate in education and training from 2013, a ‘Mcqualification’ will probably suffice (the fast food giant could design a course which was equal to a whole A-level). Gordon Brown quickly gave support, while skills minister  John Denham said it was an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications.

 

Criticising McDonalds is not an example of ‘academic snobbery’ towards practical/vocation learning as some daily newspapers implied.  In  an increasingly uncertain labour market, most teachers would welcome government backing for good quality vocational training delivered by  reputable employers preferably in collaboration with FE colleges, but many will be bewildered if not appalled at why this has been extended to the fast food chain. 

 

 

McDonalds have been exploiting youngsters  from the earliest opportunity, not just with the ‘Mcfood’ they sell to thousands everyday, but also through  ‘Mcjobs’ fitted around school and college hours and which any self respecting teenager seeking to earn a bit of cash will tell you, are the lowest of the low. Promoting ’Mclearning’ is the latest attempt at extending  ‘McDonaldisation’ into the lives of kids and young people. 

 

 

QCA support  for McDonalds is particularly nauseating, considering the Government’s own vocational diplomas have been plagued with problems, not winning support from parents, headteachers or universities and when many Modern Apprenticeship schemes continue to flounder.