Fascinating fact number one: The person most likely to go to university is a girl living in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who was born in the autumn. That’s because (here comes fascinating fact number two), autumn babies get better GCSEs than summer babies. Speaking as an autumn baby, this does not come as a surprise to me.
It’s startling the way the figures show a month-by-month decline from a mean grade achievement of 4.10 for September babies tailing down to 3.78 for those born in August.
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is new information, the psychologists who set the much-maligned 11-plus knew all about it. Which was why they made sure that 11-plus results were weighted according to birth date (higher pass mark for September babies) and gender (higher pass mark for girls).
Sadly the new educationalists threw this knowledge out with the bathwater - along with the male babies born in the summer. Of course one of the main reasons for autumn babies doing so much better is that they spend more time in school being educated.
Now, education is supposed to be a preparation for life and looking back on the 15,000 hours I spent in school, only something like 30 minutes ever dwelt on “now what do you want to do with the rest of your life, young man?”.
Sadly, careers guidance is as bad now as it was then, and having looked at the recent Education and Skills White Paper it seems little is going to change. The White Paper cherrypicked from the report by the Working Group on 14-19 Reform, although this contained little to link education with the real-life workplace.
Although the working party consulted employers, it produced a report which focussed on the interests and jargon of the education establishment. Indeed, in its 65,347 words, the phrase ‘careers guidance’ appears once, the word ‘career’ only 19 times and ‘work experience’ makes a mere 22 appearances.
A couple of years ago my then-16-year-old daughter came home with a form for work experience from her local Education Business Partnership. Happily there were 14 types of work to choose from, but upon reading through them, I realised they were a gross distortion of the world of work as you and I know it.
First choice was agriculture/gardening, followed by garage, warehouse, building and hairdressing. Hang on, these are kids who are going on to A-levels, and probably university, and they’re being offered hairdressing? Anything vaguely professional was apparently covered by an all-encompassing office option.
To read what type of work experience was on offer just served to reiterate the low expectations the education system has for our children. Clearly, whoever it is who is responsible for work experience in this particular EBP (it would be wrong to single out Buckinghamshire County Council) is ignorant of the world of work and is playing their part in ensuring pupils remain equally ignorant of it too.
But employers cannot escape blame either. Only a minority have any sort of commitment to work experience schemes - be they for 16-year-old GCSE students or summer intern programmes for undergraduates. Retailers reading this may point to the large number of young people who work part-time within their stores, but is that the same thing as filling them with enthusiasm about what a career in retailing has to offer?
Mind you, it’s hard to blame employers if they’ve got to deal with an inept local authority-run EBP in order to set up a genuinely inspiring work experience programme. The situation is not helped by confusion over who is responsible for organising and overseeing quality work experience programmes. Should businesses speak to business education partnerships (BEPs),the DTI, the DfES or the National Council for Work Experience? It seems, as with anything governmental, there’s plenty of bureaucracy, waste and overlapping roles.
The odd thing is, that with all these civil servant fingers in the pie, they did not think to put civil service on my daughter’s work experience list. Obviously they don’t see it as real work.
n Simon Howard is a founder of Work Communications and writes the Jobfile column for the Sunday Times.
It’s startling the way the figures show a month-by-month decline from a mean grade achievement of 4.10 for September babies tailing down to 3.78 for those born in August.
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is new information, the psychologists who set the much-maligned 11-plus knew all about it. Which was why they made sure that 11-plus results were weighted according to birth date (higher pass mark for September babies) and gender (higher pass mark for girls).
Sadly the new educationalists threw this knowledge out with the bathwater - along with the male babies born in the summer. Of course one of the main reasons for autumn babies doing so much better is that they spend more time in school being educated.
Now, education is supposed to be a preparation for life and looking back on the 15,000 hours I spent in school, only something like 30 minutes ever dwelt on “now what do you want to do with the rest of your life, young man?”.
Sadly, careers guidance is as bad now as it was then, and having looked at the recent Education and Skills White Paper it seems little is going to change. The White Paper cherrypicked from the report by the Working Group on 14-19 Reform, although this contained little to link education with the real-life workplace.
Although the working party consulted employers, it produced a report which focussed on the interests and jargon of the education establishment. Indeed, in its 65,347 words, the phrase ‘careers guidance’ appears once, the word ‘career’ only 19 times and ‘work experience’ makes a mere 22 appearances.
A couple of years ago my then-16-year-old daughter came home with a form for work experience from her local Education Business Partnership. Happily there were 14 types of work to choose from, but upon reading through them, I realised they were a gross distortion of the world of work as you and I know it.
First choice was agriculture/gardening, followed by garage, warehouse, building and hairdressing. Hang on, these are kids who are going on to A-levels, and probably university, and they’re being offered hairdressing? Anything vaguely professional was apparently covered by an all-encompassing office option.
To read what type of work experience was on offer just served to reiterate the low expectations the education system has for our children. Clearly, whoever it is who is responsible for work experience in this particular EBP (it would be wrong to single out Buckinghamshire County Council) is ignorant of the world of work and is playing their part in ensuring pupils remain equally ignorant of it too.
But employers cannot escape blame either. Only a minority have any sort of commitment to work experience schemes - be they for 16-year-old GCSE students or summer intern programmes for undergraduates. Retailers reading this may point to the large number of young people who work part-time within their stores, but is that the same thing as filling them with enthusiasm about what a career in retailing has to offer?
Mind you, it’s hard to blame employers if they’ve got to deal with an inept local authority-run EBP in order to set up a genuinely inspiring work experience programme. The situation is not helped by confusion over who is responsible for organising and overseeing quality work experience programmes. Should businesses speak to business education partnerships (BEPs),the DTI, the DfES or the National Council for Work Experience? It seems, as with anything governmental, there’s plenty of bureaucracy, waste and overlapping roles.
The odd thing is, that with all these civil servant fingers in the pie, they did not think to put civil service on my daughter’s work experience list. Obviously they don’t see it as real work.
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