IN BRIEF
The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and a better education than their parents are lower in Britain than in other western countries, according to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2010 Going for Growth report:
www.oecd.org.uk/ goingforgrowth.
Public sector staff are more likely than private sector colleagues to work when ill and less likely to throw a ‘sickie’, according to research from the TUC. More than one in five public sector workers said that, within the past month, they had been to work when they were really too ill to do so.
Wales has become the first nation in the UK to go digital. The switchover, which began in Wales in August, has been completed and the analogue television signal completely switched off.
The number of students coming to study in the UK from other parts of the world has hit record levels. There was a rise of nearly five per cent in students from mainland Europe studying at UK universities in 2008-9, while students from outside Europe grew in number by 9.4 per cent.
Ministers have accepted recommendations from the Low Pay Commission on new rates for the national minimum wage. The new rate for low-paid workers aged 21 and over is £5.93 per hour (a 2.2 per cent increase on the current £5.80 rate). The
Government also accepted a recommendation to introduce an apprentice minimum wage of £2.50 per hour.
Budget promises new university places HIGHER EDUCATION
Chancellor Alistair Darling has pledged to create 20,000 new university places on science, maths, engineering and technology degree courses, as part of a package of measures announced in the Budget. The one-off £270 million funding for 2010-2011 will fund 10,000 more full-time honours degree places, 5,000 part-time honours degree places and 5,000 foundation degree places. It includes £20 million for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to find ways to improve efficiency. ‘These extra places allow us to strengthen our offer for young people and ease parents’ concerns that their first child’s taste of life after school and college will be a prolonged spell on the dole queue,’
Darling said. ‘We have seen in past recessions what a potential waste this was and the long-term damage that it caused.’
National Union of Students’ President Wes Streeting said the funding would ‘help to ensure that many students with the ability and aspiration to benefit from higher education will not be left out in the cold this autumn’.
The University and College Union also welcomed the news of extra places but warned that, with jobs at risk, the places would mean bigger classes and an increased workload for staff. Alongside the one-off funding, universities would have to make ‘efficiency savings’ and focus on ‘quality teaching and research’, the Chancellor said. December’s pre-Budget report announced that university budgets would be cut by £600 million by 2010. The saving is on top of £180 million asked for in ‘efficiency savings’ by 2011, and a further £135 million requested for the same period. Darling warned that while immediate cuts to public spending could ‘derail the economy’, the next comprehensive spending review settlement after April 2011 was likely to be the ‘toughest for decades’. He also announced measures to tackle youth unemployment by extending until March 2012 a guarantee of a job or training for every 18 to 24 year-old after six months out of work.
‘Trust learners to make their own choices’
FURTHER EDUCATION Further education should be reformed to make it genuinely responsive to learners, says a new paper from the Learning and Skills Network’s Centre for Innovation in Learning.
How to shift power to learners, by Alison Wolf,
Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London, argues that all post-18 students should have access to subsidised loans and grants, finance mechanisms that are currently only available to full-time university undergraduates.
This should be combined with a system of learner accounts from which students can draw directly and freely in order to pay for their qualifications and into which they can personally deposit money, the report says. Wolf also calls for further education colleges to
be allowed to develop and accredit their own courses, like universities, and to make their own decisions about what to offer learners. She recommends a simplified system of accrediting providers and awarding bodies, to further limit central government control, and calls for better information on the outcomes for courses and institutions.
‘If we want the post-compulsory education sector to realise its potential, then the sooner we move to an equitable, learner-responsive system, the better. Central planning has failed over and over again,’ Wolf said.
‘It’s time to drop the rhetoric that government knows best and allow individual learners to make their own decisions about the training and qualifications that best suit them.’ Go to:
www.lsnlearning.org.uk.
More should be done to rehabilitate prisoners serving short sentences and reduce their risk of re- offending, according to a National Audit Office report. The National Offender Management Service (NOMS), responsible for managing such prisoners, has little information on the quality, cost or effectiveness of its rehabilitation activities, the report says. Only a small proportion of prison budgets is spent on activity intended to reduce re-offending by prisoners on short sentences, despite the fact that 60 per cent of such prisoners are reconvicted within a year of release, at an estimated economic cost of between £7 billion and £10 billion a year. Despite the cycle of reoffending, the National Audit Office found that one half of short-sentenced prisoners are not involved in work or courses and spend almost all day in their cells. The report argues that NOMS could achieve greater value for money by improving prisons’ work with these offenders.
4 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2010
Richard Olivier
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