h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>If you know what I mean.<<

Seldom if ever.

Shall we all just ignore the abusive old fart until he goes away?

France and Germany got a modern infrastructure and industrial base courtesy of the RAF redevelopment service.

Does Germany have more graduates than Britain then? What about France? (seriously, I don't know)

Then I shall say goodnight and hope your condition improves.

Actually..good point. I wonder what their relative R&D budgets are also.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6999182.stm

Looks like in 2007 Britain a higher rate of graduates than the OECD average, less than Poland and more than the US and Germany

Thank you so much for your contribution Whoisit.
Explain what I mean to Twonames.

So the question is 'What are we doing with them?' Are the best ones going into, say, banks instead of engineering? Or is this irrelevant?

swl. Didn't most of our plumbers came from Poland ?
It's not the number of graduates , it's the quality.

From the link - ""The UK has one of the highest entry rates for vocational higher education and since the higher education figures in the OECD report are from 2005 we expect to see continued increases over the coming years.

"I am pleased to see the figures showing the numbers of students gaining degrees in science have increased."

It looks (from that report) like rumours of uneducated Britain are a tad exaggerated.

Take it from me, vocational education in this country is a joke. I, and a huge majority of employers, would consider a person with just vocational qualifications to be uneducated.

One of the problems is that good vocational expensive and successive governments have been unwilling to pay for it.

>>Take it from me, vocational education in this country is a joke. I, and a huge majority of employers, would consider a person with just vocational qualifications to be uneducated.

I can think of an example. A few years ago the government stated that children should be allowed to give up foreign languages at fourteen in favour of a vocational subject...like tourism or hotel management - surely the very subjects in which foreign languages are useful.

How is it that I'm able to converse with teenagers serving in Scandiwegian burger restaurants?

(And how come the nineteen year old German Eurovision winner was able to gush in contemporary, idiomatic English?)

And how come Polish plumbers are able to do business in English?

Do you think Polish plumbers speak English in France? Or is it just that it's a good idea to learn the rudiments of the country you want to work in? I dare say the Polish plumbers who don't learn English don't get much work and pretty quickly become either ex-plumbers or ex-British residents.

And outside of France, everybody speaks English don't they? (even the French do when they think no-one is looking )

<>

And why should we take it from you exactly? Have you got a trade or a transferable skill of any sort?

Remember that there are people around this site who know what it means to work among and train engineering apprentices. I bet most are like me and consider it a privilege and an inspiration - a vocation in itself, in fact. Some of our charges are late starters, sure, but most of them push themselves as far as they can go in the classroom as well as the workshop. The skills they're given and that they're eager to learn are valuable and in genuinely high demand. They're making their contribution to a real economy and a real recovery.

The problem is not with them, nor with anyone who works hard and well to master a useful job, providing something the public needs. It's with the underachievers in all walks of life who fall into non-jobs. Some of them are in supposedly vocational roles, sure. But maybe a considerably larger number are in your line of work.

All power to Diane Abbott. Those other four are of the same desparate ilk who for the last ten years have been padding out the middle ranks of public sector administration as a means of keeping pointlessly over-educated people off the dole. The dismal tide of your opinion throughout this thread gives me the distinct suspicion that you're a prime example.

Maybe you ought to go get some proper training and stop dissing your betters.

This post has been removed.

>>And why should we take it from you exactly? Have you got a trade or a transferable skill of any sort?<<

I work in education and I know almost all universities and most employers don't consider BTECs/GNVQs to be worth the paper they're printed on.

I'm not saying that vocational skills or professions are worthless, but that the state is hopeless at giving them to kids. The system relies on excellent individuals and that leads to extremely patchy and inconsistent service for kids.

>>Maybe you ought to go get some proper training and stop dissing your betters<<

Since when has teacher training not been "proper training"? And I don't believe you heard me dissing individuals. I dissed a broken system which fails a lot of kids and I stand by that.

My colleagues assure me vocational education used to work and I believe them. The problem seems to be that governments of both flavours have completely undermined it.

He who says <>
or HonestIago - Sandalista known as 'whoisit' to his friends because of his nonentity.
You must realise just how many closely knit professional institutions you have condemned with your loose use of the term 'Vocational Education' and to use teacher training as your claim to fame shows a total lack of understanding.
As one < who in the real world is a teacher/6th form tutor/general dogsbody in Bradford who's main job is getting his charges into university and beyond > it is obvious that your 'vocation' is well past it's sell by date and you are in dire need of revitalisation.
Unfortunately your type are 'locked' into the system with 'a job for life attitude' and the sooner thought is given to short term contracts for public sector employment the better.
As for languages, how many of todays university students would gain entry if English, Maths and a Foreign language were a compulsory entrance requirement ?

PS -
Do you have short term memory loss ? Read post 501 at top of this page.

I'm always amazed and awed by the ability of some people to conclude that others aren't up to their job presented only with a handful of posts on the internet.

My sense is that one problem with vocational training (perhaps historically) is that odd claims of "equivalence" have been made in terms of an NVQ of a certain level being worth X many GCSEs or A Levels, when it's fairly obvious that that's not the case. Not necessarily because they're of different value, but because they're fundamentally different.

In a previous career I did a bit of NVQ assessment, and I was initially very sceptical. I found the whole thing very hard to get my head round, but that was partly because they were poorly explained, and partly because I wasn't really aware enough that what I was involved in was merely the practical assessment, not the other elements. In hindsight, I've got a lot more time for them than I had at the time. They're probably more difficult for those with an academic background to understand, but once I realised that it was all about assessing "doing", rather than "knowing", it started to fall into place.

Incidentally, my previous employer (not sure about current one) used to always include vocational equivalents in job ads where appropriate - e.g. "5 GCSEs A-C including English and Maths, NVQ Level 2 (I think) in Administration, or equivalent."

Otto - No problem assessing Whoisit. He speaks for himself.
You too seem to look upon vocational training as education based.
The first thing to understand is that it is only in the broader sense that training is linked to education. Training goes way beyond the attainment of academic qualifications. In the real world job training and educational study go hand in hand, this is true vocational training not some dilute form of vocational training dreamed up as a means of kidding students that they are being trained for work.
A modern, forward thinking, company that has an established vocational training scheme working directly with the universities and technical colleges to secure the form of education they want their trainees to study, often achieve the type of employee that they want far more affectively than recruiting the wandering university student with minimal work experience and a so called gap year.

>>They're probably more difficult for those with an academic background to understand, but once I realised that it was all about assessing "doing", rather than "knowing", it started to fall into place.<<

I'll hold my hands up and say that might well be the case with myself: my background is primarily academic, working with the high acheivers and perhaps I'm just not getting vocational education.

Problem is, I don't think many of my colleagues or peers do either. There is a fundamenal confusion and lack of understanding about how vocational education is supposed to work and that only gets worse the higher up you get. For example, when I worked for a university, I was considered an expert on vocational education in my department. This was a Top 50 university whose intake included a lot of vocational students.

In my career so far the standard bearer for vocational education has changed from (G)NVQs to BTECs and now supposedly to the vocational diplomas (really, don't get me started on them) and people genuinely don't know what each is worth or how they fit in to the grander scheme.

The AS/A2 system, for all its flaws, has been consistent for the last decade and people know what it's designed for.

>>PS -
Do you have short term memory loss ? Read post 501 at top of this page.<<

Perhaps I should have clarified that for the hard-of-thinking: I hadn't dissed individuals *within the vocational education system* as Pinniped seemed to imply I had.

An abusive and fairly pointless poster, however, is fair game for a good diss. If you can't take it, don't dish it.

This is the last time I shall be issuing such a clarification for the hard-of-thinking. If you can't keep up, drop out.