Formerly, one of the joys of working in Further and Higher Education, as opposed to the school system was that, at least the students you were teaching actually wanted to be there. After all, they had chosen to do your course and were paying fees for the privilege of doing so.

All this changed - at least as far as Further Education [16-18 year olds] is concerned - with the introduction of EMA [or Education Maintenance Allowance], by the Labour government in 2004. On the face of it, EMA was a great - yeah, even noble idea; pay 16-18 year olds an allowance of between £30 and £40 a week whilst they stayed in full-time education. It would help kids from poorer families fulfill their potential and, as a by-product, the UK would leap up those all-important euro-league tables, which were at the time showing we had a disappointingly low number of college students, compared to our fellow Europeans.

As with most government schemes, EMA was based on false premises. Two in this case; firstly the supposition that the only people who would avail of EMA would be those who dearly wanted to go to college but had hitherto been unable to afford it - and secondly, that simply by shovelling more people through colleges and awarding them certificates and degrees, the collective IQ of the great British populace would magically increase as a consequence.

Needless to say, things didn’t work out that way. The ‘kids’ soon cottoned on to the fact that EMA money was easier to get hold of than Income Support. Unlike the case with Income Support, where a claimant has to prove eligibility by demonstrating they are actively seeking work, EMA money is paid out purely on attendance. As long as you turn up at college on the appointed days, you will receive your money. Whether you actually do anything whilst you are there is immaterial. A work colleague informs me that in political circles, this is known as ‘warehousing’ - purely designed for getting kids off the street and ‘stacked up’ somewhere warm and dry.

So it is with the two sessions I teach at an FE college during the week. I am presented with a class of around a dozen ‘students’. Of these, possibly two or three are genuinely interested in their subject, half a dozen occasionally make a half-arsed attempt to do something and the rest do little to conceal the fact that they have no interest in learning whatsoever and are only there for their EMA money.

The reality of EMA is that the government is pouring money down the drain, paying thousands upon thousands of kids across the country around £40 a week to sit in classrooms playing games on the internet all day. Even the notionally interested students spend more time pissing about on Facebook* than they do actually working. When challenged, they seem to think that the fact they do any work at all is in some way praiseworthy.

[*No - I’m not providing a link. I despise that site with a passion!]

Thus I come onto the aforementioned second false premise; namely, that by using the carrot of EMA to funnel more young people through colleges, you will automagically produce a more educated population. Here again, the reality is a million miles from the pipedream. Because FE classes now contain so few students with any interest in their chosen subject at all, the standard of work produced is absolutely risible. Rather than competing against other keen, talented individuals for the coveted ‘top of the class’ position, those one or two students who do actually ‘give a shit’ find themselves in a situation whereby, merely handing in a piece of work on time and which roughly follows the set brief, is enough to gain top marks. There is no motivation for them to try any harder than this absolute minimum required.

When marking this dross, I am having to award distinctions to bodies of work which, before the EMA influx, would have been lucky not to earn a referral. I can’t mark the work as it deserves to be marked because, if I did that, the college management would see that none of my students were passing any of my units and would inevitably conclude that I was a terrible lecturer and I’d lose those classes. So, along with my fellow FE lecturers, I play the game and massage the figures; awarding passes, merits and distinctions for work I’d have been ashamed for anyone to see, back when I was a student.

After these FE students leave our colleges, some will apply to universities, where they will be offered places on degree courses because, like the FE colleges, the universities are under strict instructions to get more ‘bums on seats’ and churn out more graduates. Like everything else in ‘post-Thatcher Britain’, education is a ‘profit & loss’ business enterprise nowadays. And so the whole charade goes on, right through to graduation. The government pats itself on the back, smiles smugly and says, “look how the percentage of our young people with degrees has risen over the past six or seven years. Aren’t we doing a magnificent job!”
Meanwhile industry is swamped with job applications from people brandishing degree certificates, who can barely string a coherent sentence together.

I’m all for giving everyone an equal chance to gain a good education, irrespective of their background. But surely this should be done by giving the ‘young gifted & skint’ the opportunity to reach the top, not by dragging everyone down to the level of the ‘too cool for school’ burger-flippers and shelf-stackers of tomorrow?

[Originally published Jan 2010 on Blogger]