London Briefing: Tony Blair continues to argue that education remains at the top of New Labour's priority list. And Gordon Brown continues to put money where Tony's mouth is, pouring extra cash into the education budget. Taxpayers seethe at the waste of money, and employers are left to wonder what this means for the quality of the British workforce.
Literacy problems are still being reported for far too many school-leavers, and stories about deteriorating standards throughout the university sector are legion. Even Oxford and Cambridge are said to be worried about declining performance: social engineering is back, with all universities being pressured into favouring students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds rather than ones who can read and write. There is real concern that our best universities are falling behind their US counterparts.
Evidence of a bureaucracy gone mad emerged this month with news that a professor of physics, who used to head up a department that contained several Nobel Prize winners, could not teach in the state sector because he doesn't have a GCSE in maths. (He is American.)
Similar stories followed, including one about an ex-headmaster of Westminster (one of the country's elite private schools), who was also refused permission to teach in a state school because he didn't have a post-graduate teaching certificate (but did go to Oxford). The poor man has taught maths for over 30 years in the private sector and, on his retirement, wanted to help out in a state school.
Near the Barbican in the City of London is Charterhouse School, another elite institution. The education that children receive there is, by all accounts, rigorous and academic.
But all this is too much for Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education), the government's school's inspectorate. That august body is actually threatening to close the (public) school down if it doesn't alter its approach to teaching which is "mostly instructional"; Ofsted demands that the school changes its excessive emphasis on numeracy and literacy in favour of encouraging pupil "creativity".
A researcher from Bath University recently found that 15 internet health sites run by charities and government bodies required the reading ability of an educated 11-to-18-year old to understand them. The same researcher also worked out that the average reading age of everyone in the UK is nine years old. Clearly, we need to dumb down our public information services.
In another study, this time from Cardiff University, we discover that another New Labour slogan - "lifelong learning" - has failed to translate into anything of substance. The Cardiff researchers found that take-up of e-learning is disappointing, particularly among working-class adults (just like going to university perhaps). Others describe government e-learning initiatives as electronic YTS (Youth Training Schemes) schemes for the low-skilled. Apparently, the government has wasted £62 million on something called an "e-university". Inevitably, the best headline of recent days was "People still thick despite the internet".
But Tony Blair is right: education is important. Trouble is, he doesn't know how important it is. Tom Friedman of the New York Times put it very well last week when he argued that, while we worry about the retirement problems looming for the "baby boom" generation in the US and UK, the next baby boom is about to swamp us: extremely well-educated young people from India, China and eastern Europe are queuing up to take the jobs - not just of our call centres, but all our jobs.
As Friedman says, "when was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he wanted to be an engineer? ... Throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny to work because there is a storm coming his way."
