Week 27 2012 3rd July 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Education, Education, Education’

            The above three words were an indication of the important priorities of one of Tony Blair’s governments.  I remember that, on an official visit to Moscow, he even managed to introduce this slogan into a Russian tv programme.  However the educational standard of a great many school leavers of recent years suggest that not many people took those three words very seriously.

            A regular blog reader who is founder and managing director of a small but flourishing business (the kind of business man that David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues hold up to us as a shining example) is unimpressed with the educational ‘progress’ of the past forty years.   Commenting on my recent blog about the Education Secretary’s suggestions for the future direction of primary education, and his more recent proposal that the GCSE school leaving exams should be abolished and the more-demanding ‘O’ Level GCE exams restored, he says that although he isn’t an admirer of Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, he does think that it would be a good thing if all the ‘advances in education’ that have been made since the 1960s (when he was at school!) could be reversed.

            He had recently seen an ‘O’ level examination maths exam paper from the 1960s and had had an opportunity to compare it with a GCSE paper set last year.  The 1960s questions were as challenging (simultaneous equations and the like) as he remembered them but those set last year were trivial in the extreme.   Here are a couple of them ‘Write this number in words – 1,234’ and ‘A worker was paid £5.20 per hour, he did four hours work. What should he be paid?’

            And that was for an exam at the end of five years of secondary education.  One would really expect an intelligent eleven year old to answer them correctly!  If I had found those maths questions on my maths school leaving examination in 1937 I’d have been quite sure that they were ‘trick questions’ and would have wasted valuable exam time trying to work out the catch!

            No wonder, says my correspondent, that a 40 percent pass rate has risen to 60 percent (I’m only surprised that it isn’t even higher!) and that bright children regularly get as many as ten Grade 1 passes and make a mockery of the whole system!

            Nor, he says, is it only in maths that children are unchallenged. He is an IT consultant and creator and supplier of specialised software. He says, ‘I have had enormous pressure to include a spell checker in our database system. This is because young people today make no effort to spell correctly.  They just type any old thing and expect to see red lines under the errors!  We have also been asked to ‘convert’ automatically names and addresses entered to capitalised first letters because staff aren’t used to doing that any more (well, you wouldn’t when you text, would you?). I notice that whenever they enter a new address they do it all in lower case!

            Nowadays, so my correspondent claims, it is possible to get right through University without ever even learning to speak properly!  Such young people are at a huge disadvantage in the world of business and are left totally without self-confidence in any professional or representational situation.

Hitting the Target

          When I was a little boy of eight or nine I joined what we then called ‘the Wolf Cubs’.   They were the junior branch of the Scout Movement and are nowadays, I think, called Cub Scouts.  The ‘Wolf Cubs’ were based on Kipling’s Jungle Book, passages from which were often read at our Meetings.  Each group was called ‘a pack’ (I was in the 11^th Ipswich, St. Thomas’ Church pack) and it was led by Akela, in our case a very earnest and enthusiastic lady called Miss Eva Hack, in her early thirties, wearing a scout uniform with a khaki skirt.  Ladies didn’t wear slacks, and were even less likely to wear shorts, in those days.

            At the beginning of each meeting Akela would call out ‘Pack! Pack! Pack! To which we would shout ‘Pack!’ and gather in a circle, with her in the middle, for a ‘grand howl’.   We would then, as I remember it, recite the Cub Promise:  ‘I promise to do my best; to do my duty to God and the King, and to try to do someone a good turn every day’. Akela would then solemnly say ‘Dyb, Dyb, Dyb’. We would reply ‘We’ll Dob, Dob, Dob, Akela!’ and leap into the air.  The grand howl was over and the meeting could begin!

            Akela’s thrice repeated Dyb was an acronym of Do Your Best and our, also thrice repeated, reply was assuring her that we would Do Our Best!

Ernest Hall the Wolf Cub. Circa  1929/’30  

It really was good advice and it is advice that, throughout my life, I have tried hard to follow.  I haven’t always succeeded and my best hasn’t always been a very good best but, on the whole, if I have thought that something was worth doing, then I’ve really put my heart and soul into it.  This blog, for instance, I usually complete several days before publication on the web.  Then I read it through again and again, altering a word here and a phrase there until I feel that the grammar and syntax are as good as I can get them.

            Similarly when I was Tendring Council’s PRO or, earlier, Clacton’s Housing Manager I really put everything I had into the job.  I rarely took my full holiday entitlement, and certainly never watched the clock or took the odd day off with an imaginary malady.

            Joy and satisfaction in one’s job isn’t required these days.  It’s no good getting too interested in it and attached to it anyway.  We’re constantly being told that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’.  The work force has to be flexible.  You may be made redundant tomorrow and have to train for some quite different occupation to meet the demands of ‘the Market’.

            Nowadays it is assumed that nobody works for job satisfaction – money is everybody’s principal, if not sole, motivation.   To spur us on and make sure that we keep our noses to the grindstone we are given, usually by ‘human resources management’ experts, ‘targets’ that we are expected to meet. Salesmen have a fixed target of successful sales.  A receptionist at a busy office might be expected to deal efficiently with a certain number of visitors per hour; Casualties brought into a hospital accident and emergencies department shouldn’t have to wait more than, say an hour, for attention and should be discharged or passed on to another hospital department within three hours.  Social Workers are expected to deal with a fixed number of cases every week.  Schools are expected to get a given number of good GCSE passes.

            The target can be used as a threat.  ‘The government is making it easier to sack unprofitable workers and if you can’t reach the target I’ll have to look for others who can’.  It can also discourage staff from working beyond the target.  ‘If we do that they’ll simply raise the target – and then we’ll be in dead trouble when we’re really busy’.

            At the other end of the income scale, managers regularly reach and pass targets that they themselves may have set, thereby ‘earning’ enormous bonuses on top of their already inflated salaries;  bribes to persuade them to ‘do their best’, something that was once taken for granted.

            Hit that target!   That’s today’s message – and never mind how many corners you have to cut, how many dodgy deals you may need to strike and how much human tragedy you may cause (that’s just ‘collateral damage’) on the way.

            I reckon that if there were wolfcub packs today as there were in the 1930s Akela would no longer urge her flock to DYB! DYB! DYB! and expect to be answered, ‘We’ll DOB! DOB! DOB!’ but RYT! RYT! RYT! (reach your target, reach your target, reach your target) and be answered,  ‘We’ll ROT, ROT, ROT’ ( We’ll Reach our target, Reach our target, Reach our target).

            How very appropriate!

 Integrity in 'the City'? - Don't Bank on it!

          Last week I commented on the revelation of incompetence that inconvenienced – at the very least – thousands of bank customers.

           

This week there have been much more serious revelations;  of banking dishonesty, directly affecting Barclays (I reckon that the bank’s 17^th century Quaker founders must be turning in their graves!) but suspected of involving other national banks as well.   There are demands for a public enquiry on the lines of the Leveson Enquiry into press misconduct, and demands for criminal prosecution.  The response, so far, of Barclays Chief Executive that he won’t be accepting his usual few-million pounds bonus demonstrates how little he understands the scale of public anger*.

            What we are seeing is evidence of widespread dishonesty and corruption in  ‘the City’, a field of commercial activity that has been regarded, by politicians at least, with awe and respect.  This is where self-made billionaires are engaged in activities that ordinary mortals can’t hope to understand but upon which, so we have been told, the UK’s prosperity depends.  Its most favoured denizens aren’t just ‘millionaires’ in the sense that their assets are worth in excess of a million pounds. Their annual incomes are in excess of a million – and, of course, that’s before they collect their annual million-pounds-plus bonuses!

  Because ‘it might harm the city’ David Cameron has distanced us from our mainland European partners and vetoed legislation that might narrow the gap between rich and poor.  The denizens of ‘the City’ were among the principal beneficiaries of George Osborne’s ill-fated Budget.  One provision in that Budget that has remained unscathed is the iniquitous reduction in the upper rate of income tax, affecting only those with an income in excess of £150,000 pounds a year!

One thinks of the Conservative Party as being the natural champions of ‘The City’ and, of course, its finances are as reliant on ‘City’ donations as the Labour Party is dependent on those of Trade Unions.  However, as Conservative spokesmen have not been slow to point out, New Labour was no less blind to the machinations of high finance.  A New Labour Government helped to free the Financial Sector from some of the tiresome regulations that were hampering its activities.

I have remarked before in this blog that, just as Ramsey MacDonald betrayed Labour’s principles because he allowed himself to become dazzled by Duchesses Tony Blair and his colleagues were blinded by billionaires!

Not everyone was blind though.  The supporters of the Occupy Movement who protested on the steps of St Paul’s (remember the Mail’s scathing comments about them) – and in Wall Street, New York; the Red Square, Moscow and a score of other world-wide venues, may not have known quite what it was that they wanted. They did know exactly what they didn’t want though – an immoral and unfair economic system manipulated by a handful of self-serving greedy and powerful people, which penalises the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, and pours wealth into the laps of the already wealthy.  May the Occupy Movement’s cause prosper!

*Late News (2nd July 2012)  Yesterday Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, informed his colleagues that he would be leading the Bank's reconstruction, made necessary by the current scandal.    Today - under pressure - he has resigned his post.  Those worried in case he'll become another of those 'benefit scroungers' the rest of us have to support, can be reassured.  I have just heard on Radio 4 that he'll probably get a golden handshake of between £20 and £30 million!  That'll be a relief to Daily Mail readers.