re: BBC NEWS | Education | Professions ‘reserved for rich’
Top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families, a report into social mobility has said.
Potential translation:
The state of education in the UK has declined so dramatically that the majority of people who qualify to slice you open nowadays are those whose parents were wealthy enough to afford private education for their children
…perhaps?
If you’re bright, are stretched at school, and you work hard, you can succeed.
If you’re bright and get squelched, not so much.
I think the idea of a Labour government complaining about “closed-shop mentality” is hilarious.
I think the idea of a huge “projected growth in the number of managerial jobs” is terrifying.
Argh.
Milburn has also noticed that if you let them sell off all the playing fields, and take sport out of the curriculum, state schools don’t offer it – and that ‘the extra-curricular activities fee-paying schools offer give their pupils an infair advantage in a competitive jobs market’, by developing ‘soft skills which differentiate them where academic results alone cannot’. His conclusion: fee-paying schools should have to share their extra-curricular resources with state schools. Brilliant.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jul/19/private-schools-share-facilities
and let’s not forget the continuous changes that soak up money in the state system, as well as the education budget spent on ‘guidance’. Hmph.
Only a couple of months til I need to be applying to secondary schools for Qui. At least the local comprehensive does apparently allow pupils to do 3 sciences at GCSE as separate subjects, and the top maths set to take both GCSE maths and GCSE statistics…