Anonymous 1 needed this 'Off the Record'

Still on Life support
wrt GDP and GDP/head
You have made some interesting observation on Germany and China.
Can you advance any reasons why Switzerland and Norway are doing better than we are?

Prof Eman

Chazza
I entirely agree that parts of UK HE are world class and even the lesser luminaries succeed in attracting students from all over the world. Unfortunately the fees system encourages universities to take on more foreign students than they can easily deal with given the frequent need to provide remedial English. The foreign students are charged much more than their EU classmates for no better service.

Furthermore the Tory party and its gutter press reading reading supporters are conducting a campaign to actively make immigration difficult, expensive and time consuming for would be foreign students from outside the EU - be they at language colleges prior to university or applying for first degree or postgraduate degree studies. If they succeed in getting here and enrolling on a course, work experience and sandwich placements are made very difficult because employers are afraid of the bureaucracy, the fines and the prison sentences for getting it wrong.

The political obstacles to improving this country are far worse than the lack of raw materials and distance from the world's growth markets. Psychopaths, sociopaths and xenophobes are holding us back and dragging us down.

Jeremy

While agreeing with you about the excellence of parts of the UK HE system I do not think it is universal. There are a number of universities offering a poor education experience as scored by the students. (Sunday Times review of Universities not sure when last one was published) As usual there are good and bad. Also as pointed out by Chazza there are lots of graduates, in all disciplines, who cannot get jobs never mind get jobs relevant to their degree. The promise of degrees for all and jobs to follow was a false one. Having worked with some recent graduates they vary from excellent to illiterate which was not the case 30 years ago when at very worst they were at least literate. I feel a return to the HNC/D type education is a way forward but where are the employers who would support students through the years of day release? I did see a report, probably in that gutter press paper called the Mail, that some larger employers were now running schemes to take people without degrees and train them within the company.

The apparent crackdown on overseas students is due to the number of bogus schools and the number of students who use them to get into the UK illegally. While we should encourage students who want to pay UK HE for courses there have to be some checks to stop those who use it just as a way of getting into the UK so they can disappear. Once someone has been here for a few years it is very difficult to get them out especially if they have committed crimes while here. I am sure that the experience of our civil service is not always positive to the the genuine students but there are also reports of no checks being done at all in some countries.

Off topic but perhaps indicative of the problems we face: we have potential illegal immigrants queuing up at Calais and other ports risking all to get into the UK to take advantage of our benefits system and black economy. If they were genuine asylum seekers instead of economic migrants surely they would be claiming asylum in the first European country they get to. We have to maintain some degree of control over our borders to prevent a fee for all given our generous benefits system and human rights laws.

I heard part of a report on the BBC Radio 4 about why primary school children in Wales were lagging behind their contemporaries. Ignoring for the moment the general decline of the UK in wolrd education league tables. A spokesperson for the education authorities said that they were learning through play and there had been teething problems but as parents and teachers got used to the new system, where apparently children did what they wanted, there would be improvements and we had to continue with the experiment. I have not summarised it well but I was trying not to crash the car as I was listening. What chance do we stand?

Whatisname

"Lesser luminaries" was my tactful description of mediocre universities and really poor departments and courses in some places. They still attract overseas students with poorer qualifications and those who fall for marketing flim-flam.

I fully support HNDs and practical courses of that nature, we need them alongside apprenticeships and whatever else that actually works. The modern Foundation Degree is in some senses a substitute.

That there are good graduates in practical subjects with no jobs to go to is an indictment of our economic management and of employers inability to plan long term because of economic instability and shareholder short termism. Illiterate graduates and even postgraduates are nothing new. I helped to run a database of postgraduate STEM students looking for work back in the early nineties. Many of their applications were full of miss-spellings, poor grammar, illegible hand-writing (from those with no online access) and every kind of inanity you could imagine. For some reason the worst were all from my then speciality, computing.

Illegal immigrants are not entitled to benefits and asylum seekers are neither allowed to work nor to receive benefits but are allowed to starve if charities do not help.

Lots of companies including the big accountancy practices like PwC recruit A-Level students and train them for professional examinations. Even the Mail accidentally prints the truth from time to time.

What age were the children learning through play? It is very common in pre-school and infants classes. There is a difference between learning by doing and anarchy. Teachers usually know it.

I learned about wind power and an intuitive understanding of the balance of forces from sailing model yachts on a local lake. I learned about electricity through helping my dad build a model railway. I learned about materials and technical drawing through making track-side buildings and scenery from balsa wood, card, plywood, dowling, papier mache and so on. I learned about optics and astronomy through being bought a cheap plastic telescope and complaining to a neighbour when I could not see very much with it. As it happened, the neighbour was building a Newtonian Reflector and even grinding his own mirror. He became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Then I went to grammar school and had to leave my imagination behind. Thinking and especially creativity were frowned upon. We were there to pass examinations, not to learn.

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Ian Craig

Thanks for the corrected spelling.

Yes, we need to look after our own neighbourhoods and we need to look after the national interest. Reconciling the two and balancing aesthetics versus economics is one part of a politician's remit.

Prof

Norway is quite straightforward. Resource rich in oil, gas and timber. Relatively small population so benefits of these exports spread across fewer heads, plus limited debt overhang from WW2 reconstruction unlike us.

Switzerland is more complex. Perceived neutrality in WW2 helped to foster a reputation for safe custody of assets, leading to hundreds of billions on CHF being deposited. The tax revenues from a taking a small slice on these banking activities is considerable, as is the relatively punitive property, income and corporation tax regime for overseas firms and individuals, offset by very favourable conditions for swiss nationals and firms. Non membership of EU allows this explicit trade protectionism to continue. The swiss also have an interesting approach to areas like minor legal offences. For example, for speeding, the first offence incurs a modest fine, with the amount rising rapidly for each subsequent offence. They don't have points, and this provides both disciplined road users and significant revenue, including from foreign registered vehicles. None of this means that the swiss don't have their own problems. There is a significant low paid underclass that continues to cause upset at elections, mostly in cantons like Zurich, due in part to the lack of sufficient social security provision. Not providing free access to healthcare, statutory unemployment benefit etc saves the govt plenty of money to spend on education etc