We don’t need no thought control
Clearly WEXO welcomes the recent Conservative Party initiatives that will pay independent organisations to get 18-21 year-olds ‘work experience’ as announced recently. It is hoped that such moves will “encourage them not to fall back on benefits or crime”. With the protracted debate over government stances on knife crime this can only be of benefit. As ever though, actions speak louder than words: The World of Learning 2007 Survey last November found that 86% of employers believe that a week’s work experience should be compulsory in the school curriculum for all pupils before they start work but little of substance has come from this. Furthermore, Gordon Brown’s own apprenticeship ideas have as yet proved half baked. We await the forthcoming Green Paper ‘Building Skills, Transforming Lives’ with anticipation.
Government plans to raise the compusory schooling age to 18 also seem way off the mark. As Matt Hackett wrote recently in his Telegraph blog: “Work experience schemes are a good way of giving school students a taste of working life early in their teens. Briefly divorced from the institutional, academic environment to which they are accustomed, they are able to form clearer ideas about their own ambitions and the skills that they will need to attain”.
Keeping children at school is not the answer. The way to bridge the skills gap in the UK is to offer exciting alternatives to traditional forms of education. And for once (I understand) my 17 year old cousin, Poppy, agrees – maybe it’s time she was introduced to Pink Floyd…
Feel free to disagree…