Business leaders have reiterated concerns about the quality of UK graduates in a new survey.

Employers are concerned about the literacy, numeracy and employability of today’s students, according to the survey conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). It found that improving education standards tops the list in its annual survey of employers’ concerns, monitoring trends in employment and the workplace.

Almost a quarter of those questioned (23 per cent) said that graduates struggled with literacy, and 20 per cent complained about poor numeracy. A quarter said they were unhappy with graduates’ employability skills. Employers also perceive a growing demand for graduate-level skills - more than three quarters (78 per cent) said there would be increased demand for high-level leadership and management, and two thirds (66 per cent) said they needed graduates with technical skills.

A CBI task force is to look at ways to help graduates become more employable. “Business must play its part here by providing high-quality work experience,” the 2008 employment trends survey Pulling Through says. “(It) must be more relevant to help graduates develop their employability skills.”

“The labour market cannot thrive without an adequately skilled workforce,” said Richard Lambert, CBI director general. “The message from business is clear: ensuring that young people leave education with the functional skills to prosper is essential to everyone’s future prosperity.”

Philip Ternouth, associate director of research and development and knowledge transfer at the Council for Industry and Higher Education, said it should not be up to businesses to tell universities that basic skills should be possessed by graduates seeking employment.

“If we are allowing large numbers of people to graduate without basic skills there is something wrong with the messages we are communicating to schools about the expectation of the standards people should reach,” he said. “It should not be for universities to remedy this, but it is for universities to set standards.”

times higher education, UK
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403506&c=1

Make it easier for parents, taxpayers to gauge whether kids are prepared

The results are in for the Michigan Merit Exam, which includes the ACT — a national college entrance exam that’s considered a reliable predictor of college success. Rather than take a comprehensive look at the results, most high schools will spend the next month reassuring the public that they’re doing a splendid job.

Oftentimes it’s an illusion, inviting rebuttal and reinforcing the growing concern that schools are out of touch with reality.

Schools need support. But also they need to admit — to themselves and to parents — that there’s much to do.

This posturing does nothing to drive school improvement or help our children.

Consider the 299 schools that can boast that their average ACT composite score beats the state average of 18.9. Does that mean those schools are doing a good job of preparing students for college? Who knows? Beating the state average has little bearing — if any — on college admission or success.

Knowing how many students met the nationwide average ACT score for incoming college freshmen would be more meaningful. The average freshman score for many universities in Michigan is between 21 to 23 with the highly selective universities accepting freshmen with averages pushing 28 to 30.

Just 60 high schools in Michigan — out of 722 — saw their average student achieve a score of 21 or higher.

Another meaningful goal might focus on the ACT college readiness benchmarks. According to the College Board, they represent “the minimum ACT test scores required for students to have a high probability of success in … college courses,” such as math, science and English.” They are “empirically derived based on the actual performance of students in college.”

Mind you, a “high probability of success” means earning a “C” or better in an entry-level college class. Few schools find their average student meeting these benchmarks.

Unfortunately, the state doesn’t report the percentage of students meeting these benchmarks. Knowing that data — especially knowing how many students meet all four benchmarks in English composition, college algebra, biology and the social sciences — would help parents better evaluate their schools.

Consider that Rochester Community Schools ranks among the top in the state by many measures, and 95 percent of its graduates are college-bound. Yet less than half meet all four benchmarks.

That may mean remedial courses in some subjects — at the going college tuition rate — or disappointing outcomes for students who aren’t prepared for the rigor of college coursework even though they’re admitted.

Really, aside from being self-serving, there’s little value in trumpeting the fact that a school is “above the state average” or “top tier.”

The leadership needs to start with local school boards, which tend to set weak goals and have shallow communications. This is unlikely to change until parents and taxpayers demand candid assessments from these boards and hold them accountable for the results.

Mike Reno is a trustee on the board of the Rochester Community Schools. (…)

Source: DetNews.com, MI
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080910/OPINION01/809100321

Schools across the country will be opening their doors to students beginning next week. For thousands of children across Canada, this will be their first step inside our nation’s educational system and this is the week to prepare your child as well as the family.

To help ease the transition into the classroom, The Learning Partnership (TLP), a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to championing a strong public education system in Canada, is providing strategies and resource ideas that will enable parents to help prepare their children for the start of kindergarten by introducing early literacy and numeric learning skills through play.

“Our children deserve every opportunity to succeed,” says Veronica Lacey, president and CEO of The Learning Partnership. “Starting school is a huge milestone for both the child and parents. More than ever before, it’s important that we reach out to parents and teachers — and help provide them with the necessary tools to make sure that children are given the opportunities to succeed at school.”

Recent research used by The Learning Partnership has shown that when parents are given the proper early learning resources for use at home, pre-school children are better prepared for school and learning. Furthermore, parents who establish a foundation in early learning for their children at home are better prepared to support school success.

Keeping this in mind and recognizing that preparing children for school can be a challenge, The Learning Partnership’s CEO Lacey recommends that parents and children use early learning materials and engage in play-based activities which will help their children with the transition to school.

Top tips for early learning and a successful transition into kindergarten include:

- Take every opportunity that comes along to talk to your child — ask questions and answer questions. This will not only develop the child’s language skills but also nurture curiosity.

- Read to your child and talk about books to help develop your child’s listening skills and an interest in stories and print.

- Talk to your child about letters and numbers and do fun activities with them to help your child develop number and letter awareness. For example, when at the grocery store make a game of looking for items with a letter that is the same as your child’s initials.

- If English is your second language (ESL), speak to your child in the language that is most comfortable for you. ESL parents should continue reading and talking in their first language to their children.

- Initiate activities with resources such as crayons, safety scissors, construction paper, glue and playdough to help your child develop the finger control and the co-ordination they need for writing as well as encourage their creative expression.

- Chant rhymes and sing songs to help your child play with language as well as hear and recognize sounds and learn new words.

- Encourage independence: help your child learn to get dressed; express feelings, thoughts and needs clearly to others (such as going to the washroom or getting a beverage).

- Help your child make choices, for example: which clothes to wear, what activities to do.

Calgary Herald, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/6xp3p3

Parents who teach their children at home could have twice the impact on raising their child’s performance at school compared to a good nursery education, a new study suggests.

There have been rising concerns about the relatively low numbers of children taking up science and mathematics at the secondary level and evidence is published today that parents could have a much bigger impact on raising standards later on than preschool education, by a Government backed project following more than 3000 children.

Ten-year-olds who have attended “high quality” preschool tend to score higher on mathematics tests than those who haven’t, reports Prof Edward Melhuish of Birkbeck, University of London, and colleagues from the Effective provision of Preschool and Primary Education (EPPE) project.

He said they were surprised by the degree to which early experience both in the preschool and home were so influential later in the child’s life.

“For the average child who went to a particularly effective or high quality preschool their maths scores would be boosted by around 27 per cent,” says Prof Melhuish.

However, the project revealed that the education of the parents - particularly the mother- still has the greatest influence, having twice the effect and thus boosting maths scores even more.

What parents did at home mattered too. “The effects of the early home learning environment were very strong, much stronger than people had anticipated.”

“An ideal home learning environment would be rich in stimulation and very responsive to the child’s communications and activities,” says Prof Melhuish.

“Parents would talk to their children frequently, read to them, maybe visit library to increase range of books for child, provide opportunities to draw, paint, learn songs and rhymes, dance and physical activities, play with numbers and shapes.

The important thing is that the home provides lots of learning opportunities, The fact that learning is taking place is more important than the actual content of the learning. This provides the child with the mental structures needed to learn new things.”

The team calls in the journal Science for countries such as America to adopt universal preschool, which might cost up to £5000 per child, of the kind adopted in Britain since 2004.

Whereas much of the previous research on preschool’s long-term effects focused on disadvantaged children, the researchers followed children from throughout England, from ages three and four through to age 10, and is still studying them at secondary school.

“This detailed data allows us to examine the effects of various factors while allowing for the differences in the other factors and backgrounds of children,” says Prof Melhuish.

“Our study is the first to show that preschool shows advantages across the whole population, while being able to allow for other confounding factors.”

The home environment is the most important; five years of “effective” primary school is next most important but is closely followed by 18 months of preschool experience in terms of relative size of effects.

As for what parents should look for when chosing a preschool, he says: “A play-based curriculum that offers lots of learning opportunities that cover reading and play with numbers and shapes and some time in individual, one-to-one activities as well as small group work”.

Starting “between two and three can be very beneficial, particularly for children from disadvantaged homes.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/5jevbu

Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he’s elected president he’ll pump “billions of dollars into early childhood education.” Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list. Democratic governors across the country — including in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts and Virginia — have made a major push to fund universal preschool in their states.

But is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence.

“Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes,” says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. “But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations.”

Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use — and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.

In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16%. But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — the nation’s report card — have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now — two major organizations pushing universal preschool — refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia — both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago — paint an equally dismal picture.

A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia’s universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee’s preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.

What about Head Start, the 40-year-old, federal preschool program for low-income kids? Studies by the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly found that although Head Start kids post initial gains on IQ and other cognitive measures, in later years they become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids.

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent — not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents — the vast majority — might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.

Yet that is precisely what Mr. Obama would do. His “Zero-to-Five” plan would increase federal outlays for early education by $10 billion — about 50% of total government spending on preschool — and hand block grants to states to implement universal preschool. This will make the government the dominant source of funding in the early education marketplace, vastly outpacing private spending.

If Mr. Obama is serious about helping children, he should begin by fixing what is clearly broken: the K-12 system. The best way of doing that is by building on programs with a proven record of success. Many of these involve giving parents control over their own education dollars so that they have options other than dysfunctional public schools. The Obamas send their daughters to a private school whose annual fee in middle school runs around $20,000. Other parents deserve such choices too — not promises of subsidized preschool that they may not want and that may be bad for their kids.

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936615766562189.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Calculators are useful tools in elementary mathematics classes, if students already have some basic skills, new research has found. The findings shed light on the debate about whether and when calculators should be used in the classroom.

“These findings suggest that it is important children first learn how to calculate answers on their own, but after that initial phase, using calculators is a fine thing to do, even for basic multiplication facts,” Bethany Rittle-Johnson, assistant professor of psychology in Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development and co-author of the study, said.

The research is currently in press at the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and is available on the journal’s Web site: http://tinyurl.com/5f8tgd.

Rittle-Johnson and co-author Alexander Kmicikewycz, who completed the work as his undergraduate honors thesis at Peabody, found that the level of a student’s knowledge of mathematics facts was the determining factor in whether a calculator hindered his or her learning.

“The study indicates technology such as calculators can help kids who already have a strong foundation in basic skills,” Kmicikewycz, now a teacher in New York City public schools, said.

“For students who did not know many multiplication facts, generating the answers on their own, without a calculator, was important and helped their performance on subsequent tests,” Rittle-Johnson added. “But for students who already knew some multiplication facts, it didn’t matter — using a calculator to practice neither helped nor harmed them.”

The researchers compared third graders’ performance on multiplication problems after they had spent a class period working on other multiplication problems. Some of the students spent that class period generating answers on their own, while others simply read the answers from a calculator. All students used a calculator to check their answers.

The researchers found that the calculator’s effect on subsequent performance depended on how much the students knew to begin with. For those students who already had some multiplication skills, using the calculator before taking the test had no impact. But for those who were not good at multiplying, use of the calculator had a negative impact on their performance.

The researchers also found that the students using calculators were able to practice more problems and had fewer errors.

“Teachers struggle with how to give kids immediate feedback, which we know speeds the learning process. So, another use for calculators is allowing students to use them to check the answers they have come up with by themselves, giving them immediate feedback and more time for practice,” Rittle-Johnson said.

And, for many of the students, using calculators was simply fun.

“Kids enjoyed them. It’s one way to make memorizing your multiplication facts a more interesting thing to do,” Rittle-Johnson said.

“So much of how you teach depends on how you market the material — presentation is very important to kids,” Kmicikewycz added. “Many of these students had never used a calculator before, so it added a fun aspect to math class for them.”

“It’s a good tool that some teachers shy away from, because they are worried it’s going to have negative consequences,” Rittle-Johnson said. “I think that the evidence suggests there are good uses of calculators, even in elementary school.”

Source: PhysOrg.com, VA
http://www.physorg.com/news138373871.html

The man who addressed more than 2,000 teachers and administrators Wednesday has extraordinary credentials.

Dr. Ben Carson is the pediatric neurosurgery director at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. He is internationally-known for his work in separating conjoined twins. The author of three books, Carson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the nation’s highest civilian award - from President Bush earlier this year.

In an education summit sponsored by community businesses and organizations and coordinated through Public Education Partners (PEP), Carson spoke to educators from the Aiken School District, USC Aiken and Aiken Technical College.

In a real way, Carson credits his success to the poverty he experienced as a child, because it “put a fire in my belly” to move beyond it. His mother, one of 24 children, married at 13. She later divorced her husband, a bigamist. There was never any money for anything. When Sonya Carson took Carson and his brother into grocery stores in Detroit, the boys would ask to get a penny candy. But they saw such pain in their mom’s eyes that they stopped asking.

Teachers helped Carson in very real important ways when he was growing up. But his young, remarkable mother made the difference for him. Sonya Carson worked a number of domestic jobs to keep from going on welfare. In those homes, she noticed that education was valued, that the families spent time reading.

Carson’s mother proceeded to turn the television off and made her sons check out library books. They had to give her written reports, not realizing that their mom, with a third-grade education, couldn’t read.

“After a number of weeks, I started to enjoy reading,” Carson said. “We lived in a horrible environment, but I could go anyplace with books. I learned how Booker T. Washington was born a slave. It was illegal for him to read, but he taught himself and ended up as an advisor to presidents. Through reading, I could have complete control of my life.”

By then, no book was safe from Carson’s hands. He had thought he was dumb and his classmates thought so too. One day his fifth-grade science teacher asked the class to identify an obsidian rock. Carson not only did so, he began to describe its characteristics in detail. The teacher was delighted and said so, and Carson realized he was no dummy. He had gotten the answers from a book.

In his inner city junior high school where most kids weren’t interested in school, teachers were thrilled when Carson sought them out. He excelled in band and got a scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen summer arts camp; his music teacher urged not to go, fearful his prize student would forego his academic efforts. He joined the ROTC in high school and the instructor made it possible for Carson to attain the rank of colonel in record time and receive an appointment to West Point.

Carson turned down the appointment and enrolled at Yale University. Still another teacher helped him land a summer job at Ford Motor Company to have some spending money for college.

“Teachers are dream managers,” Carson said. “They can tell you why you can do something, not why you can’t.”

He frets that China is producing 392,000 engineers a year and the U.S. is providing just 60,000 annually, of which 40 percent are foreigners. America has to change this equation, has to build up the intellectual firepower needed to succeed. In the 21st century, Carson said, it’s hard for teachers to keep up with keep up with ever-changing information and technology so they can inspire their children to go into a variety of career paths.

“We have to start thinking of teachers as educational quarterbacks,” said Carson, “who can draw from other sectors and develop contacts to the guy who invented the catalytic converter and to provide the kind of tools that will get kids excited.”

But educating the next generation in a technological society is not a turf war, he said. It’s a job for business, industry, higher education. Everybody has to be involved with it.”

Following Carson’s speech, a short PEP video aired. Each time a scene from a county school hit the screen, teachers from that school cheered — much like a pep rally, as Aiken Superintendent Dr. Beth Everitt said.

“Isn’t it great to be here with everybody,” she said. “We’ve received an inspiring message of hope and determination. To our teachers, principals and staffs, this was all for you and shows how much (the business community) appreciates your hard work and what you do for children.”

Redcliffe Elementary School teacher Denise Broome called Carson’s speech “a great way to start the year, It was inspiring and showed me why I became a teacher,” she said. “I had stayed home with my children and volunteered in the schools, where I saw the impact the teachers were making on my children. I wanted the opportunity to make that kind of impact.”

Source: Aiken Standard, SC
http://www.aikenstandard.com/0814-ben-carson

Standards of reading among teenagers dipped this year, despite millions being spent to get pupils more interested in books.

Sats results reveal almost a third of 14-year-olds are unable to read to an acceptable level - three years after starting secondary school.

Just 69 per cent of pupils achieved the standards expected of their age, compared to 71 per cent last year.

Among boys, the drop was even more dramatic, prompting claims that high-profile attempts to boost reading skills had failed.

Ministers have already called for the creation of boys-only bookshelves in schools - stocked with spy novels and thrillers - to defeat the myth that reading is for girls. And £14m has been spent this year alone on booster classes in secondary schools and a greater range of books for all pupils.

But today, Jim Knight, the schools minister, appeared to point the finger at parents, saying they should play a bigger part by reading with their children.

Opposition MPs said the claims smacked of desperation.

“It is essential to teenagers’ academic progress that they continue to read for pleasure outside school,” said Mr Knight. “Reading should be fun and something children choose to do in their free time – otherwise, they will struggle when they move on to tackling more technically demanding texts in secondary schools.

“Parents have a vital role to play - reading and talking about stories together as children move towards secondary school and encouraging them to read everything from novels to magazines as they get older.”

Teaching unions branded the results unreliable following the marking fiasco surrounding this year’s Sats. Delays to the marking process mean up to one-in-six papers are not counted in today’s figures.

Results are also not broken down by local authorities as up to half the results were missing in some areas, with critics suggesting results could be inaccurate.

Nevertheless, the Tories seized on the figures, which they said proved standards had levelled out under Labour.

Almost 600,000 pupils sat tests in English, mathematics and science this year. So-called Key Stage 3 exams are seen as a key indicator of performance in the run up to GCSEs.

According to today’s figures, fewer pupils reached the expected level in English, which combines reading and writing. Despite improved writing results, 73 per cent hit overall literacy targets compared to 74 per cent last year.

Some 62 per cent of boys can read to the appropriate level, against 76 per cent of girls, as the gender gap widened.

Standards also fell in science, with just 71 per cent of 14-year-olds achieving the standard expected of their age, a drop of two percentage points on last year.

It comes just days after business leaders warned of a shortage of specialist engineers and technicians in the UK because pupils lack enthusiasm for science at secondary school.

In maths, 77 per cent of pupils made the grade, a one point rise on last year, but the same as standards achieved in 2006.

Performance also dipped in the three subjects combined, as just 61 per cent of pupils reached the required standard in the tests - level 5 - compared to 64 per cent in 2007.

It means an estimated 234,000 pupils are failing in the core subjects half way through secondary education.

Nick Gibb, the Tory shadow schools minister, said: “Yet another year has passed in which the Government has failed to raise standards in the basics of reading, writing and maths. The drops in English and science are particularly worrying.

“The Government continues to miss its modest targets and we are left with the unacceptable position that two out of five fourteen year olds are failing to achieve the necessary grades in reading, writing and maths that they will need to be able to achieve at GCSE.”

The Lib Dems called for Sats to be scrapped.

Annette Brooke, the party’s children’s spokesman, said: “After three years of secondary education, thousands of pupils are not reaching the expected level in key subjects. It’s a disgrace that on the day the results have been published, many schools will still not yet have received their marked papers.”

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “The Key Stage 3 tests are an irrelevance. No one will be interested in the results when young people apply for a job. In a year when Sats have collapsed under their own weight, cutting the Key Stage 3 tests would be an excellent way to reduce the excessive amount of testing our students face.”

Up to 100,000 results were not included in English because of the marking delays.

Government statisticians also said that figures were likely to be skewed following a change in rules this year, which stopped markers bumping up results for “borderline” pupils. In the past, all marks just below official targets were re-checked, resulting in many being improved, but the same criteria was not applied to those going just over the expected level. So-called borderlining was scrapped this year. It resulted in small increases in passes in previous years.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/54qe8d

Glasgow schools have long had the poorest levels of academic attainment in Scotland. The gap has been particularly difficult to bridge because so many of the city’s school draw their pupils from some of the most deprived areas, while the leafy suburbs tend to be outside the city boundary. Yet it is all the more important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their full potential in school.

The news that children in both primary and secondary schools in Glasgow have reached the highest levels of attainment in the “three Rs” since the 5-14 assessment tests began is welcome, but a long overdue step towards closing the gap with other areas. There is a disturbingly long way to go: in the first two years of secondary school, 40% are still failing to reach the required standard in reading and maths and 50% are below the standard in writing. That is unacceptable, whatever hurdles have to be overcome. Other local authorities with their own problems of deprivation, such as Inverclyde, achieve a high pass rate in English and maths at Standard Grade and Higher, compared with similar areas.

However, improved results in Glasgow primary schools as a result of the zero-tolerance approach to poor literacy and numeracy which has seen specialist teams of experienced staff training teachers and supporting parents as well as teaching pupils, suggest that teaching methods make a considerable difference. These include giving “booster” lessons to pupils struggling at primary school and extra lessons in reading, writing and maths at the expense of other subjects to pupils who are behind by the time they reach secondary school. That tried-and-tested reading method, synthetic phonics, has also been adopted with impressive results, following success in two other local authorities with previously low attainment levels. Pleasing as this is, it is hardly rocket science and will cause many a time-served teacher and weary employer to shake their greying heads over how a country which prided itself on pioneering mass education ever came to tolerate such low standards.

That improvements are evident so soon after the new blitz on literacy should spur further efforts. Resources are always scarce in education, but surely cannot be better spent than on achieving basic skills. The earlier such intervention is made the better, a child who is unable to decode the written word or understand basic arithmetic will become more and more frustrated, miserable and unable to learn. Education is the key to success, and people who reach adulthood without learning to read, write and count competently and confidently have their lives blighted.

Source: The Herald, UK
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/editorial/display.var.2422085.0.Three_Rs_are_the_key.php

Manufacturing companies in Wales are in danger of going to the wall because they cannot recruit suitable employees from a potential workforce being sent out into the world of work by schools and colleges without the range of basic skills they need.

As another academic year draws to an end, the Engineering Employers’ Federation says a radical overhaul is needed of schools’ and colleges’ approach to basic skills if they are to provide the employees with the skills that companies need to survive.

The EEF is an employers’ membership organisation which works with thousands of manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies providing advice on business issues, offering tailored training programmes and representing their views at all levels of government.

It says some of the companies it works with are warning that, by the end of this year, they will not have sufficient skilled people to deliver their trading objectives – which often include a desire to expand – and are not confident about being able to find people.

The EEF says the solution lies partly in increasing the number of apprenticeship places available. But it also contests that the problem is rooted much earlier in young people’s academic careers, and that the whole way in which schools are structured needs to be changed.

It believes young people should attend the same school up to the age of at least 14, and preferably 16, with no need to change schools, lose friends or change teachers at a vulnerable age until GCSE choices or the GCSEs themselves have been undertaken. Between the ages of 16 and 19, they would then move to an establishment that caters for those choices.

The Federation’s position reflects UK Government plans announced recently by Schools Minister Lord Adonis for children to stay at the same school from age five to 18 to stop their performance dropping when they move on to secondary school.

EEF Wales spokesperson Martin Bibey said contact with, and formal surveys of, the employers they dealt with showed that companies were seriously struggling to recruit the right people because of their lack of basic skills and because schools and colleges were turning out the wrong type of people.

He added: “Recent surveys carried out by the EEF show that 80% of companies said technical staff needed to improve skills, as did 50% of management and supervisors.

“Our research shows that 76% of companies say current skills will not meet future strategic priorities – and what’s worrying is that a high percentage of firms say they find it very hard to recruit skilled manual people, citing lack of knowledge, experience, qualifications and poor attitude to employment. Graduates are also singled out as being poor, showing the most marked gap between existing and required skills, with only 50% perceived to have the basic skill required.

“A frightening 96% of companies in one of our surveys said private training was better than that provided by colleges of further education, which they criticised for poor standards of teaching, inappropriate course content, and turning out students who lacked the basic skills for the workplace and commercial environment.”

Mr Bibey said the EEF in Wales was now calling for something radical to be done with the format of the school structure and curriculum in order to improve basic skills.

“We need to get education right from pre-school up to age 16 – trying to get basic skills drummed in after 16 is too late,” he said.

“We would expect public funding to have already equipped everyone with the basic skills necessary for employment and participation in community life.

“The fact that this approach has patently failed to deliver for many individuals and employers, and continues to fail, gives some cause for concern.

“It is our contention that a radical overhaul of the structure pre-16 is required.”

Source: WalesOnline, United Kingdom
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business-in-wales/business-news/2008/08/06/companies-want-radical-overhaul-of-school-system-91466-21472140/