Wasted lives

The much-trumpeted though somewhat misunderstood House of Lords Report on the effect immigration has had on the economic life of this country makes some very interesting and highly intelligent points as you would expect from a Select Committee in the Upper House, attacked and undermined though it has been. (Incidentally, I strongly recommend that people should read the whole report or at least the conclusions and recommendations and not rely on the Daily Mail for information.)

While there is evidence that some parts of British society have benefited from immigrants who have taken jobs here on various levels (there can be no doubt that immigrants who merely seek welfare cannot be of any real benefit to a country) others, often children of previous waves of immigrants, have lost out.

What comes across most clearly is that there is little basis for any definite statement to be made because there has been no study done on the subject. For various reasons, I imagine, it would be very difficult to do a thorough study of such a complex issue though their lordships strongly recommend that this should be done.

One particular point is that the influx of immigrants tends to hide certain structural problems in the host country. Thus, cheap labour may well prevent innovation. This is not a new problem. We are still paying for the choice made by those who ran London Transport in the early fifties to bring in cheap labour rather than invest in technical advance.

Moving on from there, the influx of a better qualified, better educated, willing labour force, much of which comes from other EU member states, so there is nothing the government can do about it, as the Report makes it clear, pushes the severe problems we have with our education and training system out of sight and, thus, out of mind.

The problems with a large proportion of the young people brought up and educated in our schools and colleges cannot be solved simply by easier hiring and firing rules. No business wants to keep hiring and firing and few have the capacity to deal with the semi-literate, anumerate, ill-disciplined youngsters so many of our educational establishments seem to produce by the thousand. As long as there are others to take the jobs these people cannot do, the problems can be ignored.

There is yet another problem that is rarely discussed, though it ties in with this blog’s perennial favourite – the regulatory structure. I have been providing a last editorial gloss to a forthcoming Bruges Group pamphlet (I do have a life, honest, it’s just that it seems to have gone AWOL) on the cost of regulation and how the EU makes it worse.

It will be a very interesting paper and I strongly recommend that our readers get hold of it when it is published. There are good examples and excellent arguments as to how the situation we are in has come about as well as the price we have to pay in our freedom disappearing and our economy contracting and becoming considerably less robust because of fear.

William Mason, the author goes through the concept of precautionary principle and how it has become a stumbling block to economic and social existence; he also explains how the European and British sides interact and posits that with many layers in politics there is a competition in regulations. Who will produce more and tighter ones?

Above all, he minces no words about the way the European Union needs regulations for its existence and purpose, that is the integration of the various and different economies of the member states. Regulations in whatever form is the lifeblood of the EU, which has little enough as a basis for its existence.

There is one argument missing, though, and it rarely crops up in any cost/benefit analysis – the wasted lives of people who have to service this Moloch. We all know, thanks to the Taxpayers’ Alliance about the amount various politicians and officials earn and receive in perks at different levels. We hear a great deal about the five-a-day-outreach-workers and the gender-equality-counsellors but this is really the icing on the cake.

The point about the overwhelming and suffocating regulatory structure we live under is that it needs people to administer and service it. Every year it sucks in thousands of young and not so young people, who could be working in the more useful, economically active sectors or professions but who spend their lives within the regulatory structure. The opportunity costs thus become much greater than anything assumed so far.

The need for them grows year by year and this has spread to the educational establishments. Of all the problems we have with our higher education degrees in Media Studies is the least of it. They are not useful but their only harm is in the time and many thousands of pounds wasted.

Bad enough, of course, but not as terrible as some other degrees. Think of the students who have degrees in Social Policy or Social Administration or numerous other subjects of that kind. These are not simply useless or expensive, they are actively harmful.

The point is that with those degrees only the least useful part of the public sector is open to you. You cannot be a teacher or a doctor or a nurse or a prison warder or even a gardener in a public park, let alone go into the wealth-crating private sector. All you can be is an administrator in the regulatory sector.

The more students emerge with these ghastly pseudo-degrees the more jobs are needed for them and the less likely they are to contribute anything useful to our society. They may not be completely illiterate and are, perhaps, tolerably numerate; they certainly know how to dress and behave themselves at work; but as far as employability is concerned they are no better than those youngsters who get turned out of our schools with no qualification or knowledge whatsoever to lead a life of frustration.

The annual loss of many thousands of people who should be doing something useful but are, instead, serving the great god regulation is another high price we are paying and it is one that we may not be able to afford for much longer.

More waffle

Exciting news on the education front as the BBC World Service announces:

Businesses are joining forces with governments and international groups to try to meet a pledge to provide education for all children by 2015.

The Partnerships for Education was announced in Brussels by the World Economic Forum and Unesco.

In theory this means more of our tax money going to transnational organizations to distribute as they see fit to schools in the developing world, as long, one presumes, as they teach what UNESCO approves of.

In Britain, school pupils are to work with the charity World Vision to help less fortunate children overseas.

Schools linked with the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) will take part in a year-long campaign to raise funds to build schools in India and Kenya and provide resources for schools in other places.

I have no wish to carp and I agree that children in all sorts of countries should have the opportunity (not the right) to have basic and more than basic education. But I do question whether the NAHT, which is presiding over a disintegrating education system in this country is quite the right organization to deal with this matter.

In fact, I have an idea. Given that we now have a situation where children and young adults who arrive from other countries (including India and Kenya) speak English better, know English grammar better, can do maths much better and probably know more history; given that science and engineering departments in this country face the choice of either recruiting students largely from other countries or lowering their entrance standards could the "Global Alliance to Educate All" not start in this country? What about our children? Should they not have the opportunity to receive basic education?

Furthermore, is the pattern of government provided "free" schooling, which, is presumably what is meant by all this waffle, with no apparent link between those who pay and those who receive, quite the right thing to offer and, possibly, foist on developing countries? There is, after all, reasonable evidence that when people pay, however little, when the schools are independent of bureaucracy and run for the benefit of the pupils rather than the educational establishment, in those cases education is valued considerably more.

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That elusive national identity

There is nothing terribly wrong with Sir Keith Ajegbo’s review of the teaching of “diversity and citizenship”. It is, presumably, not his fault that the remit was phrased in that unsatisfactory way.

Sir Keith has himself been a teacher and a headmaster in difficult parts of South London and knows that the problem extends a long way beyond disaffected Muslim youngsters. He also, it would seem, understands the phenomenon of Jade Goody and the chavs, who, as we have pointed out on this blog before, are seen as fair game to the great and the good as well as just articulate middle class (unlike pretty, weepy Indian wannabe stars).

In order for young people to explore how we live together in UK today and to debate the values we share, it is important they consider issues that have shaped the development of UK society – and to understand them through the lens of history.

Who can argue with the need to teach history to all our children – history of this country, history of other countries, history of the British Empire?

Curiously enough this is a subject some of us discussed yesterday with a remarkable man, Sheikh Musa Admani, the Imam at the London Metropolitan University. Sheikh Admani is concerned with many things that can all be summed up in one important question: how to create a British Muslim identity. These are his words.

There are various problems according to him. One is that the Muslims have not gone through the process of being outside main stream society and becoming part of it in the way Jews and Catholics had to.

Then there is a lack of knowledgeable Islamic teaching in this country, a gap that has been successfully exploited by various well-funded organizations with Wahhabi links. Added to that there is the government’s incomprehensible insistence on talking only to self-styled “community leaders”, which makes it impossible for any Muslim, such as the Sheikh himself, to get through different ideas and different experiences. Most Muslims in this country come from the Indian sub-continent, that is, from a cultural and historical tradition that is very different from the Arab one. Yet an alien, oppressive and anti-Western tradition is being imposed on them through ignorance and reluctance to understand.

Two points in our various discussions remain with me. One is the Sheikh saying that people from the East find the concept of liberalism difficult and that is something they have to deal with.

Secondly, he asked me how I saw the role of Muslims in the very necessary British narrative. Actually, that’s easy. Given the history of the British Empire, it is not hard to define a strong and honourable role for Muslims in the British narrative. As my colleague says, anyone who doubts it should visit some of the British war cemeteries.

It is, indeed, appalling to think that in two world wars people of all religions volunteered to fight for a country they had never seen but was present to them as an idea. The picture shows Indian lancers in Palestine while their descendants who actually live here, are turning to a completely alien Islamist (I stress that word) tradition because they see nothing for themselves here.

The problem is wider. What do non-Muslim children see for themselves in Britain? And that brings us back to the point Sir Keith has made: it is essential for all our children to learn history, to understand how this country came to be, to grasp the ideas that have shaped and continue to shape its descendants, the Anglospheric countries. (Our newspapers and media could do its bit by trying to understand the United States instead of producing endless ignorant calumny.)

As always, if you pose a question and leave the answer to the government, you end up with a most appalling mess. Ideally, of course, the whole system of education would be taken away from it. As this is unlikely to happen for a little while (until the Conservative Party manages to pull itself out of the morass it is in at the moment), at the very least, there should be some requirement that history be taught in schools beyond the age of 14 and in a recognizably historical fashion. That, of course, is almost impossible to define.

Instead, the government with the approval of Sir Keith Ajegbo, I am sorry to say, is going for yet another version of the discredited “citizenship lessons”. These, if you please, would focus on “core British values”. As nobody knows what those core values are and anyone can pretend what they like on the subject, this is going to be an exercise in futility.

Allow me to reminisce a little about some of my chequered educational career. In the last two years of my schooling all of us, A-level students, had twice weekly compulsory Civics lessons. To this day I am grateful for them. These were most emphatically not citizenship classes or lessons in British values (it did not occur to anyone that we needed them). The lessons were in political structures.

Thanks to the headmistress of my school who took these lessons, we all found out how Parliament works, how the British Constitution works (oh yes, we do have one), how the United States Constitution works, how NATO and the United Nations are structured and so on. Some of it I have forgotten but whatever knowledge of these subjects I possess is rooted in what I was taught by Mrs Alison Munro, now Dame Alison.

Such lessons could be called hard-core knowledge-based ones and might be essential counterparts to those compulsory history lessons. Of course, teachers would have to tell the truth that is no longer convenient. They would have to tell that Parliament legislates in only a small proportion of cases in this country; they would have to tell that the House of Lords is no longer the highest appeal court in this country; they would have to explain that our democracy is something of a joke and not because President Bush is such a nasty man.

On the other hand, the teaching of English in its full and manifold glory (that includes American English, Strang and Indian English among others), the teaching of history together with a serious and truthful course in civics should open many eyes what being British should be about and what it is about these days.

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Education, education, education

I hope readers of this blog will forgive me for writing about something that may not seem to be part of its remit. Except that it is. The future of this country in Europe and the world, its future within itself, depends on education as much as on what kind of toys our servicemen and servicewomen get to play with. (No, I don't decry the importance of toys, though I do think the question of whether this country is still and can be in the future a military power is very much wider.)

Most of us recall Tony Blair's comment in 1997 that the most important aspect of political life he was going to concentrate on was going to be "education, education, education". Not that many might know that Lenin said it before him. Every schoolroom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had a poster on its back wall on which it was written in the appropriate language: "Education, education, education. V. I. Lenin"

Ten years on, education in this country has plummeted to a historically unheard of low. We have a couple of generations of semi-literate and anumerate children, the study of history, foreign languages, sciences and engineering lags so far behind most countries as to have become a joke; our universities are no longer world class and survive anywhere near that by dint of recruiting lots of foreign post-graduate students; there are fewer children from working class or poor families getting anywhere near reasonable education and, therefore, reasonable career than in most other developed countries and certainly fewer than there were under the old system of grammar schools.

The Conservatives had introduced a tiny improvement by their system of assisted places but these were abolished by the Labour government as soon as it came to power, no doubt in the spirit of "education, education, education" (well, for their own children, anyway).

The new Conservative leadership has abandoned any pretence of wanting to change the situation and allow more children to go to schools where they might receive appropriate education. First the Boy-King, in his previous reincarnation as Education spokesman, announced that the last remaining grammar schools will be abolished if (a big if) the party ever comes to power, adding arrogantly and fatuously that people did not want choice in education but wanted the government and officialdom to sort it all out. Presumably, as well as it had been sorted out all these decades.

There is no evidence that he has changed his attitude since becoming leader. This alone will prevent me from voting Conservative in the next election.

Now, we are told that there was

a decision by the Tories last month to drop plans for a full-blown voucher, in which parents would get £5,000 a year to spend at the school of their choice — state or private.

Presumably, at least one reason for that decision is a weak-kneed reluctance on the part of the Conservative leadership to fight with the educational establishment and the teachers' union. But one cannot help feeling that another reason is the overriding fear of letting people make decisions for themselves on important matters. And what could be more important than education?

I would not like to suggest that there might be a strong lack of desire to see competition from bright children from poorer families against the undoubtedly rich scions of the Tory leadership.

It is curious to see how frightened our rulers are of the very thought of vouchers. It is something like fifty years since the idea of universal vouchers as a way of countering state control of education and reversing falling standards was propounded by Milton and Rose Friedman. Yet it remains the great bogey of politics.

We have another initiative from the Government, one that has already been lambasted by the unions as being "elitist", the worst epithet they can think of.

Lord Adonis, who, we are told, himself benefited from a grant to Kingham Hill school, is trying to push through a scheme that will help "gifted" children who would not, otherwise, have access to good education. I assume that the noble peer understands that this scheme is completely inadequate but is trying to get round the problem of his colleagues who will never agree to selection or vouchers (such as Diane Abbott who sends her son to the excellent private City of London School) as well as hoping not to antagonize the teaching unions too much. He has failed in the latter but one could argue that anything the teaching unions bitterly oppose must be good for their pupils.

So what is this scheme that is getting everyone so worked up? Vouchers for education it ain't.

The brightest 800,000 pupils in England are to have vouchers to spend on extra lessons as part of a national talent search that starts next week.

Every secondary and primary school will be told to supply the names of 10 per cent of their pupils who best meet the new criteria for the gifted and talented programme when they fill in the January schools census.

Each pupil on the scheme will be given "credits" to buy a range of additional courses designed to push them further. This includes weekend or summer schools at universities, in which academics are paid to provide master-classes in particular subjects.

As was immediately noted by educational psychologists, the criterion of "gifted" can be defined only according to a few, highly professional tests and the chances are that many will be left out.

Then there is the problem that these are vouchers to be spent by pupils and their parents in the children's free time. In other words, they will get strenuous training in the week-end, only to go back to their useless, ill-disciplined, sub-educational classrooms during the week. There are a few problems with that scheme.

Should they not be in better run classrooms all the time? We the taxpayers are already ploughing billions of pounds into the educational system. Now we are told that more money has to be added in order to provide certain children with extra lessons. Why not provide as many children as possible with appropriate lessons? Ah, but that would mean handing those vouchers over to the parents and let individual children apply to individual schools with decisions to be taken at that level. Can't have that. The gentleman (and lady) in Whitehall (and town hall) knows best.

What makes this scheme completely unworkable as was its predecessor, the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, is that it leaves the decision in the hands of the educational establishment. The Centre for British Teachers (CfBT) may be a non-profit education company but I can foresee layers and layers of bureaucracy and quangocracy being created in order to run the scheme.

Then there are the schools themselves. Many of them proved to be recalcitrant in the matter of that National Academy. When I recall the difficulties primary school heads used to raise whenever any parent wanted to know about assisted places, I fail to be surprised. They will not supply names of likely children, unless the parents create mayhem, getting round those instructions somehow.

The whole scheme smacks of socialist planning. Every school will have to provide names of "gifted" children that will make up ten per cent of its pupil numbers. What if there are no ten per cent? What if there are more? What if there are numerous children who are not classified as "gifted" according to those tightly drawn criteria but are bright and able, who would benefit from a rigorous education? And so on, and so on.

In the end, there is only one question: why not accept that centralized, state run (either on national or local level) education has failed in this country? Let the government take on the teaching unions and the festering educational establishment and introduce a full voucher system. Then we shall have education, education, education.

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