The Big Mac degrees will count for nothing
IN THE latest in a long series of largely unsuccessful initiatives to provide skills to Britain’s workforce McDonald’s will award its own qualifications equal to GCSEs, A-levels and even degrees in studies such as fast-food restaurant management.
Network Rail will award the equivalent of PhDs in health and safety and technical issues.
In other words ministers are so desperate that you will soon be able to get a doctorate in furnishing a dolls’ house.
Everyone must have certificates even if it means that all you have to do is order the right number of burgers. Yet half the people who work in fast-food outlets cannot add up a bill without resorting to a calculator or converse with customers in intelligible English – or at least so it seems on the occasions when I fancy a quick snack.
Academic and vocational qualifications are different and always have been and there can only occasionally be sense in offering equivalence between the two. Yet for decades successive governments have believed that the answer to encouraging young Brits to train is “parity of esteem” which is jargon for “the plumber is as clever as the maths teacher”, when the reality is that there are huge shortages of labour in both plumbing and maths teaching.
The Conservatives turned first-class polytechnics into third-class universities. Labour has introduced the ludicrous target of 50 per cent of all school leavers going to university with the result that grade inflation is rampant and young people are leaving university with Mickey Mouse degrees, few prospects and much debt.
There are and have always been three types of school leaver. The first group is the academic who deserve the most demanding education available with no prisoners taken when it comes to passing or failing.
The second group is the vocational who prefer wiring a plug to reading Tacitus. They do not want to stay in full-time study but they are still serious about making the most of their abilities and they deserve apprenticeships and skills training to world class standards. They do not need a degree: they need a well-respected qualification and want to earn while getting it.
Finally there are those who merely want to earn. They do not want to study, just get paid. Inevitably they will earn less than the maths teacher or plumber but that will not matter to them as long as they can have some ready money now.
In the years to come there will be some shifting about between groups. The 16-year-old who opted for McDonald’s and immediate money may be the 25-year-old who does a management course. The biochemist becomes a builder.
The plumber sets up his own business and gradually does less plumbing and more accountancy and administration.
On the whole, however, people stick roughly within their grouping not because anyone says so but because it is what they have voluntarily chosen and what they still prefer. No amount of pseudo degrees will make any difference.
Nor is there anything new in being trained on the job. You can enter Marks & Spencer as a counter assistant and finish as a senior manager. Bosses tend to select the able and willing and move them up.
The employees do not need bits of paper to prove their worth let alone bits of paper purporting to prove equivalence to academic qualifications.
Nothing is a substitute for a proper education, for being taught to read and write fluently, for grasping basic maths, for learning early what you are and are not good at.
Yet today standards of literacy and numeracy are appalling while grade inflation, inappropriate praise and silly courses at university give youngsters an exaggerated view of their own abilities.
Instead of worrying about fast-food management certificates, government should worry about putting the education back into schools.
