Failing to gain a university place used to be a common disappointment among those who applied. But those who applied were a very small percentage of those leaving school. Then the Robbins report and its recommendations embodied the policies and pressures for more university places and almost anyone who chose could enter a degree course somewhere in the United Kingdom, either in a new university or in an upgraded institution. Disappointment centred on which university, even on which faculty had not been achieved.
The collapsing living standards that are being experienced now in the United Kingdom are delivering one of their most cruel lessons this year. School leavers qualified for university entrance are being refused any university place at all. This is a devastation of moves towards social equality that have been in place and nurtured by all administrations for the last half century. Do not be misled by the disregard into which a university education has fallen from its very ubiquity; the voices that argue going to university is not worth the debts incurred; that a degree is now just part of an all shall have prizes educational culture.
Our children, the children of the wage-earning classes, are being pushed out of life-essential provision. Excluded from even the opportunity to illuminate the rest of their days. Unlike the working people of the pre-university mass provision times who had networks of learning systems through out the country - often funded by the unions or linked with the co-operative movements or local providence and mutual funding organisations - a culture of formalised discussion groupings led and lectured to by distinguished academics committed to continuous adult learning and general education, and the whole resting on the provisions of interlinked free libraries, this exclusion goes hand in hand with steep decline in local provision of public libraries and museums. Our people now face cultural silence.
That silence in part was engendered by the role of educational self-help being taken over by mass university education. Now the universities are moving beyond reach, grossly underfunded, and further impoverished by the closures of crucial departments that yet do not conform to New Labour's resource allocation criteria. And for which the feeder education from the schools has been steadily withdrawn. Should you be too poor to pay for your schooling you won't even know what has been taken from you; and if by some miracle of determination you obtain the necessary preparation, qualifications, you will find the faculties gone and the enormous loan needed now quite possibly unavailable to you.
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4 comments:
Yes , its one of those things where a Milliband Toynbee or Balls might say we do not value manual craft enough but we shall say ...
"...and your children.. ?"
I am not sure New Labour can be entirely blamed for the disaster of Comprehensive education ,the housing market and its socially chromatographic effects would have been hard to foresee As far as funding fro University is concerned I am unconvinced . I am not aware of any good demonstration that elite learning establishments have any correlation with cash expended .
PS No my blog is done now I need all my energy for sordid trade
"by the closures of crucial departments that yet do not conform to New Labour's resource allocation criteria": the physics and chemistry departments have been closing because so few children from state schools are equipped and willing to do degrees in those subjects. There is a similar disparity between state and private schools in language teaching. State Schools: Skills Aren't Us. Makes you want to spit, doesn't it?
Just for us outsiders - Do you , in the UK, need to go to university to become a plumber or similar job.
Is a first degree a training for a job 6.40?
It's two years and six months of intensive training in being a grown up with a decently equipped mind, so it's a qualification for everything but not for a job.
It might be worth considering bringing school to an end sooner and first degree work beginning at 17; and far greater numbers studying in their home town university. The research institutions could be for Masters and beyond. The universities are being called on to do far more than learning and research and are being altered in unpleasant and undiscussed ways to meet undiscussed goals. All dressed up in the vocabulary of 'fairness' and 'access' of course.
There is university funding N, you're right, but it's highly politicised in its direction and purpose. You know your way through the system to the kind of education your children will enjoy, which is presumably why you're piling up resources and not writing your blog. But for families without a history of learning and now without the extramural, self organised networks either, the ladders are gone. The steep rise in socioeconomic inequality under New Labour is an outrage not just a curve on graph. Many families are now wholly disconnected from any upward movement.
But to have gained good qualifications to enter the university - and 3 Grade As are not lying about to be readily picked up despite sniffy remarks about retakes and subject matter - and then told No Room is the experience of collapsing living standards.
Self-feeding collapse too because no physics and chemistry degrees means no school teaching means poorer people won't even begin. Which they aren't. Do you think spitting will be effective Dearieme? N's solution, having lots of private resources and a map is one, but we're going to need a general response to general impoverishment. (Goes off to read up on the Victorian social reformers as we seem to be more or less in the same difficulties they were).
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