As one who works with children who are not in fulltime education, I read the Government’s ‘Modern Industrial Strategy‘, particularly the skills chapter, with keen and hopeful interest. Afterwards I felt like Mole in the Wind in the Willows saying: “It’s all very well to talk.”
What, for instance, does this mean?
We will simplify the skills system in England to provide easier access to jobs in the IS-8 [this refers to the eight sectors the Government are backing], benefitting all. Skills England will play a critical role in addressing systemic issues by bringing coherence, simplifying the landscape and co-designing solutions to skills shortages in collaboration with businesses.
The majority of the chapter about skills seemed to rely on upskilling in the spheres of AI, green jobs and construction, and a continued excitement about immigration plugging the gaps in our workforce.
Some of the strategy seems promising: the establishment of “Defence Technical Excellence Colleges, to provide funding for courses for defence related skills”, “Recruiting and retaining high quality teachers in Further Education” and the establishment of 10 “Technical Excellence Colleges specialising in construction”. I have a terrible sense of doom though that none of these initiatives will ever materialise, or at least not quickly enough to help the now one in eight young people (aged 16-24) who are not in work or training – some of whom I work with and on whose behalf I write.
I thought it would be helpful to share some other ideas about what could be done now to upskill young people:
1. Enforce education: A massive campaign is needed to remind the population that fulltime education between the ages of five and 16 is compulsory. Shockingly, 20% of children are persistently absent from school – it is impossible to teach skills or knowledge if 1.8 million children are not in school fulltime. Fines and prosecutions must follow.
2. Map GCSE qualifications to competence in that sphere. A GCSE in food technology must teach the children how to cook, a GCSE in a foreign language must teach the student how to speak, write and understand in a foreign language, a GCSE in English literature must include the reading and understanding of full-length novels – and lots of them. Consider all the courses that retired people take in their free time: pottery, flower arranging, jewellery making – all of these courses teach the students how to do things. The same must apply to school qualifications. Children are not stupid and see the disconnect between the so-called qualification and the uselessness of its content, and understandably zone out.
3. A huge campaign to get more men into teaching. Only 35% of teachers in secondary schools are male, and 14% in primary schools. This is clearly ridiculous and must change.
4. Stop telling young people they are mentally ill. The well-intentioned bid to support people with life’s challenges has now morphed to such an extent that more than half a million people are claiming PIP support payments for anxiety. As Lisa Nandy so wisely said on BBC Today recently, the benefits system forces people to become victims in order to get support. This attitude does not help young people, who become entangled in the benefits system at an ever younger age and convince themselves they are unable to attend school or work because of misnomer of ‘mental health’.
5. Use school facilities in the summer holidays to teach short courses. The facilities are ready and waiting and are perfect to be utilised by enterprising companies to upskill the population: basic plumbing, DIY, cookery, financial management could all be taught in two-week bursts.
6. Ban smartphones for the under 16s. Children are on their phones between six and nine hours a day. The highest daily screen time I’ve come across in a girl of 15 is 18 hours a day. What skills can possibly be learned if such massive swathes of the day are taken up with scrolling?
7. Establish the equivalent of Australia’s fly-in-fly-out jobs here in the UK. Young people are motivated by money and should not have to travel to Australia to spend a gap year working in open cast mines in order to earn a decent amount of money. What with all of Angela Rayner’s house building projects, HS2, Sizewell C and so on, surely there could be a scheme whereby young people could go and work intensively for a summer, or months at a time. A big “Your country needs you!” ad campaign would follow and the health and safety executive would be made to find ways of making this possible.
More ideas welcome!
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
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I’ve been out of medicine for 15 years, and was a GP rather than a hospital quack. But I fully endorse your assessment here. As in every profession, if you let doctors get on with doing what they’ve been trained to do (and more importantly, developed a personal nous for over the years), you can get away with underpaying them and produce only grumbles.
Treat them as jobsworths, and they become jobsworths, to nobody’s benefit. But as we all know, you can only run a world from the top down if everybody is a jobsworth.
They can go on strike, as long as they want.
If I can stop being taxed to keep the NHS on perma-lifesupport.
And as for missing out on some future treatment by Ranjit, Retard and Dizzy Blonde.
I’ll take my chances, thanks.
I’m sure that many people who dont come into contact with its world, see the BMA as a passive and moderate organisation furthering the care of patients. Thats a long way from the truth. Very interesting article again Doc.!
What a joke. £100K or more + a MASSIVE PENSION + 40 hrs a week in the communist death care system. SHUT IT ALL DOWN. START AGAIN.
I pay absurd amounts in taxes. I have private medical insurance paid by myself.
We need a system with competition, price points, quality and service.
Most importantly – these arselings loved Rona, they made record earnings, they danced in diapers in empty hospitals. They are criminals who stabbed poisons into people with ingredients they can’t spell or pronounce against a scamdemic. Cowards and criminals.
And the criminals want more of my tax money? F Off. You are fired.
….just over 151 million jags have been given out in total, in the UK…
4 million ‘spring boosters’ just this year..at (now) £15 per vax (up from £12.58) to the Doctor or pharmacist, or ‘paid volunteer’ (£20 on Sunday and Bank holidays…and £30 if it’s a home visit…….!!)
As Del Boy would have said ‘a nice little earner’…!!
“Jags”?🤔
A Scottish colloquialism, M’Lud.
Stabbinations is also good.
LOL! Picked it up on here…yes it is Scottish jab/jag…..a lot of people have used it in the past….I like a change from quacksines now and again!! LOL!!
Haha, never heard that one. And given that I’m from Newcastle, and we get the dregs of Scottish lingo, it’s surprising. 🙂
I love your common sense “to the point” attitude, it rocks!
Well as there’s no News Round-Up today I’ll just dump this here. Looks like our Nigel isn’t the only one being targeted and bullied by the banking sector;
”An Anglican vicar has slammed Yorkshire Building Society for closing his account after he accused them of promoting gender ideology.
Rev Richard Fothergill, a longstanding customer with the building society, wrote to them in June to complain about their public messaging during Pride month.
The 62-year-old says within four days, he received a reply telling him his internet savings account would be closed, The Times reports.
Rev Fothergill, of Windermere, Cumbria, has since accused the banking giant of ‘bullying’ and said: ‘I wasn’t even aware that our relationship had a problem. They are a financial house – they are not there to do social engineering. I think they should concentrate their efforts on managing money, instead of promoting LGBT ideology.
‘I know cancel culture exists and this is my first first-hand experience of it. I wouldn’t want this bullying to happen to anyone else.’
The retired vicar insists his observations were a polite rebuttal of transgenderism, in response to material on YBS’s website.
But the building society wrote it has a ‘zero tolerance approach to discrimination’ and their relationship with the customer had ‘irrevocably broken down’.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12253081/Vicar-accuses-Yorkshire-Building-Society-bullying-closing-account-trans-protest.html
This is particularly interesting because unlike banks, Building Societies are (ostensibly) democratic associations of lenders and borrowers, who elect a board to manage their stash. Shareholders are entitled to vote, and so should be free to initiate an AGM motion against promoting Pride.
So to close the account of a shareholder expressing an opinion is to uncover that the democratic nature of the society is a sham.
Excellent clear account of exactly how consultant pay is calculated. GP pay is similarly based on very complex arrangements.
it was crystal clear to me when consultant and GP contracts were renegotiated by the government some years ago that the bureaucratic system introduced for the determination of pay was open to widespread manipulation to guarantee the very best possible remuneration for the least effort. It was also crystal clear that administering such a bureaucratic payment structure was itself very costly and open to counterproductive abuse.
The medical profession at a stroke was reduced to a trade and, as we all know, a workman is “worthy of his hire”!
At one time doctors were treated as professionals and regarded themselves as such. They outperformed because it was their professional obligation. All extra effort above and beyond their contractual obligations was provided for love. Now every effort not required by the contract of employment attracts additional payment.
A prostitute won’t wash your socks for free! There is no love and no obligation involved for the oldest profession!
The most junior doctors have great justification for their pay claims to compensate for years of relative decline. With student debts of around £100k they are effectively paying a graduate tax out of a salary that does not begin to compare with that achieved by the brightest and best students who chose the private sector rather than public service.
Loan forgiveness for all junior doctors would go a long way towards ameliorating their current situation and earning their goodwill in return for a period of commitment to NHS service. There would be no immediate huge cost to the government and it would help those in most need now who have paid most to train as doctors. Since 85% of student debt is never repaid it seems like a common sense approach which is probably the reason it will never happen!
beanie, I basically agree. except that when the new GP contract was negotiated, the government side worked on the assumption that GPs were all workshy and on the golf course all day, so needed to be incentivised to cover things like chronic disease and so on.
They were warned by the BMA negotiators that most GPs were doing this extra work already without remuneration, as it had been devolved from hospitals over many years, and that therefore the costings were completely out. Gordon Brown personally rubbished the warning, and so the contract did not alter.
As a result, as soon as the new contract came in average GP remuneration increased massively, because of work that was already being done, and a government disinformation campaign began to persuade the public that avaricious GPs were always intended to spend the money investing in extra services rather than taking a pay rise for work designated in the item-of-service fees. That denigration of my decades of hard work for my patients was one reason I left.
No doubt there were, and are, workshy GPs gaming the system, and the system encourages it. But it’s also true that for decades beforehand the system was gaming the GPs by adding new work and staff costs without paying for it, by repeatedly cutting pay review body recommendations under the guise of “affordability.”.
Great article, thank you DS. Every article by this author has been extremely insightful and well written.
Sadly that is not the case for articles written by Ian Rons about Ukraine, which completely ignore the endemic corruption etc in Ukraine that used to be widely reported by the MSM, plus Nato’s role in reneging on the agreements made in the Minsk agreement; plus of course the US government’s role in overthrowing a democratically elected government. In addition – also ignoring the now well documented involvement of Boris Johnson sabotaging the draft peace agreement that apparently Ukraine & Russia were on track to sign. Of course there have clearly been atrocities on both sides – this is an appalling war as all wars are, but the DS is doing itself no favours by supporting this continued doubling down & wilful ignorance of the well documented other aspects of this awful situation. If the DS ends up losing its well deserved reputation for questioning the mainstream narrative – I will stop funding it.
If I was still working I would not be striking. The current pay demand is absurd in the current national financial climate. In my last 10 working years pay rises were less than inflation, and often less than the supposedly independent review body recommended. Did consultants strike then? We just grumbled. But a practical point… you cannot increase productivity if your outpatient clinic is limited in length, as my managers at the time insisted upon. You cannot increase operating time if there are not enough theatres to operate in, not enough staff to staff them, restrictions on start/stop times and not enough beds to accommodate postoperative patients. And if in such a constrained system you increase the number of consultants then productivity decreases per individual. I know of a provincial surgeon who used to have two NHS operating sessions a week, but with the arrival of new colleagues is down to one a fortnight. I know of few doctors who want to sit around doing nothing, so it’s hardly surprising they take to the private sector where they can actually do something.