How to run education through bribery and coercion
Dear Jim Knight,
Very clever indeed. Most impartial observers might think nothing of it, but the fact that UCAS made a key announcement about the new school diplomas about an hour before the Lib Dem leadership announcement was as deliberate and cynical as it gets – a good day to bury disgraceful news.
So let’s cut to the chase. You think that your new diplomas (which over 60% of universities don’t recognise as good enough and the Russell Group are still deciding whether they are worth anything) are worth over 3 A-levels in terms of UCAS points for university admissions, do you? You are therefore saying that a diploma in Hair and Beauty is three times as valuable to the British economy than someone who achieves A-grades in Physics, Maths and Chemistry? Are you completely insane?!?! Let’s look at this carefully – Labour create the new diplomas, only for schools and universities to turn round and say that they are worthless compared to A-levels and they won’t recognise them. So what does Labour do? Talk to business leaders and improve the syllabuses? Engage in consultation with the universities and schools to see what they would prefer? Of course not. You just bribe them instead. £1,000 extra cash for schools for every student that takes a diploma, and make the diplomas worth so many UCAS points that someone can study a single stupid vocational qualification and end up with more points for a university application than someone with over 3 A-grades who is applying to do Medicine at Oxford or Cambridge.
To arrogantly announce that “pupils can now be confident they will study valuable, first-class qualifications when they take a diploma, and universities and colleges can be assured of their quality” is complete rubbish because you have just made diplomas appear more valuable to bribe schools into offering them and coerce universities into accepting them, instead of relying on the quality of the diplomas to convince them (which was of course never going to work).
It is absolutely sickening that you can interfere with the futures of schools and universities like this by sneaking through such a devastating blow to education in this country. You are condemning academic qualifications to the scrapheap without any justification other than Labour’s desperation to be seen as doing something, but yet again your efforts will waste tens of millions of pounds and achieve little.
Yours in complete disgust,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
But so long as univs can ignore this, how does it matter?
But Universities won’t be able to ignore it. If they turn away people with hairdressing diplomas the Government will threaten them with cuts on the grounds that they are discriminating against applicants from working class backgrounds.
Precisely. When you have the government in control of every educational institution in the country and in charge of who gets funding and what they receive funding for, coercion is rife – trust me. Universities in theory can completely ignore diplomas, but schools are being bribed and I have no doubt that the government will move the goalposts for universities if diplomas are ignored.
I think everybody here is missing the point
To cite your example of a ‘hairdressing diploma’
From a personal point of view: I get my hair cut and styled at least once every three months. In comparison I have never had to use my University gained biologically skills with anywhere near as much frequency or with as much visual impactof failure Even doctors can hide their mistakes. We should never underestimate the stressful career of a stylist.
My point being that there are enough ex-polyechnic, voctional style universities to provide Britain with a skilled labour force.
Better Hair for a Better Britain
Your critique of the announcement itself is excellent but Lib Dem leadership announcement as a way to bury bad news? Think you’re taking that a bit far – there are more newsworthy events than Clegg’s victory almost every day. And you are also clearly wrong because it was e-mailed out to all educaton correspondents which is why they all picked up on it (inc a full page in the Times).
I don’t think it’s as simple as you portray it. Everyone knew that Clegg was going to be the big story the following day, despite this announcement potentially changing the face of education (for the worse) in this country forever.
I’m sure it was emailed to all education correspondents, but on checking again the Independent website has no mention of it whatsoever, the Guardian gave it a minor article on the 19th and I remember that even the Torygraph had it a long way down their list of stories on that day. Although I didn’t get a screenshot, the BBC put the story on their website at about 1:30pm, around an hour before the Clegg announcement, thereby ensuring it got bounced off the top stories within minutes.
If this announcement had been made on a quieter day, there is no doubt that the public and many politicians would have been furious about the government proposals.
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