Cycling UK Forum

...to say nothing of the difficulty they have attracting and retaining good teachers, even at the current level of pay and benefits.

NUKe wrote:I thought you worked for the NHS?

That reminds me of the old joke. You do not work for but are employed by.

NUKe wrote:I thought you worked for the NHS?
These jobs are open to all applicants if this is such a brilliant deal why does the NHS have to import helath workers from abroad? Yes I know its a free market, but if these jobs are so lucrative then why are britsh people not Clammering to get the jobs ?

Young people looking for jobs are more interested in immediate rewards rather than some future promise that they all presume they'll not live long enough to see.

That's why the promise of 'future' wealth need getting rid of now before it gets out of hand and current wages jiggled until you can fill the jobs you've got.
Incidentally, the private sector has just as much of an issue filling qualified roles - I suspect that we simply have too many art degree courses and not enough science ones.

kwackers wrote:... the private sector has just as much of an issue filling qualified roles - I suspect that we simply have too many art degree courses and not enough science ones.

We get letters to the editor, signed by the head honchos of a couple of dozen footsy 100 companies bemoaning the lack of apprenticeships. How can that be? Why not just take somebody on and train them? What they are really lobbying for is more public money to be spent on training places. I must have mentioned before that my younger son was one of the last engineering apprentices trained in Leeds before the EITB was disbanded. It's twenty years this month since he started work and he has never been in a position to pass on his skills to an apprentice.

The entire higher education policy leaves me completely baffled. On the one hand, we want to prepare for the demands of the 21C by getting significantly more young people into university, but on the other we''ll burden them with debt.

Some parts of the private sector - medicine probably being a good example - there's never been any reluctance to poach people who have had extensive and expensive training in the public sector.

thirdcrank wrote:The entire higher education policy leaves me completely baffled. On the one hand, we want to prepare for the demands of the 21C by getting significantly more young people into university, but on the other we''ll burden them with debt.

I don't see why. I think the reason is fairly easy to see.

Britain is predominantly middle class. It's electorate have high expectations for their children and so push them into college.

Of course the average child is - well, average. They also want to do a degree in something that interests them rather than something useful. So as a country we churn out a lot of average folk with useless degrees which have no real benefit to the economy.
Obviously this has a cost so to cover it we ramp up fees.

In theory everyone is happy. Little Johnny has his degree in Media Studies and his job at Mc Donalds is temporary, and it didn't cost the tax payer too much either.

On the other hand, technology industries are crying out for engineers but engineering isn't seem as being sexy anymore - not when there's such jobs as 'Media Consultants' to be had...
And when we do train engineers we don't as a country make an effort to keep them. As an example when the last company I worked for was bought out by an American company for its IP's, bled dry and then everyone made redundant out of the 200 people who worked there over 60 moved to North America and particularly Canada whose governments are desperate to grow their technology industries and save on the cost of educating the required engineers to boot.

On a somewhat related note, last nights tv program "Made in Britain" had some very good points to make on our economy.

Vorpal wrote:...to say nothing of the difficulty they have attracting and retaining good teachers, even at the current level of pay and benefits.

I wasn't aware that retaining teachers was an issue. If it was then why can many trained teachers not get jobs?

http://www.timeplan.com/news-and-events ... -scotland/

Because you will find that any profession has a small core of "unattractive" fully qualified people that nobody wants to employ despite their qualifications.

Normally this is triggered by failing to find a job during the initial round of vacancies, leading to employers wondering "why didnt any body else want them?" and the spiral tightens.

On the other hand there are also a number of "unattractive" schools that nobody wants to work at.

I suppose one solution with school teaching would be to make all the teachers redundant and oblige all schools to engage staff through agencies, the idea being that teachers would then be on short term contracts and the insecurity would keep them all on their toes. It would probably mean that schoolchildren would have little idea from one week to the next who, if anybody, was going to be their teacher. (Something similar happens now, I think, in some of the unattractive schools meic refers to.)

thirdcrank wrote:I suppose one solution with school teaching would be to make all the teachers redundant and oblige all schools to engage staff through agencies, the idea being that teachers would then be on short term contracts and the insecurity would keep them all on their toes. It would probably mean that schoolchildren would have little idea from one week to the next who, if anybody, was going to be their teacher. (Something similar happens now, I think, in some of the unattractive schools meic refers to.)

So called "management through fear" . Joe Stalin ran the USSR like that . Can I ask why you think it a good idea? What job do/did you do and was that technique used in your job?

Sorry - don't think it's a good idea. I think it's appalling, perhaps I shoudn't have assumed that would be obvious. One of the points I've tried to make in this thread is that pensions have been used by employers to retain the workforce. I should have thought school teaching was one of the jobs where continuity was really important. I've no claim to be any sort of education expert but I have worked in a school in France and although that was a long time ago, the difference in status of teachers there and here is significant.

Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.

Retaining teachers--in most places--hasn't been an issue for the last few years. However, that is partly a result of actions taken (including pay increases) to address long-standing problems with recruiting and retention. The government and local authorities obviously didn't learn as much as they should have from the experience.

Whatever you think about the problem of public sector pension reform, if we don't provide adequate compensation to teachers, it cannot be anything but detrimental to the education system.

Education is investment for the future, and teachers are vital to education.

Vorpal wrote:if we don't provide adequate compensation to teachers, it cannot be anything but detrimental to the education system.

I hope teachers in general are a damn sight better than the ones I had when I was a school...

The old maxim, "those that can do, those that can't teach" was certainly true back then.

(Mind you they were better than the lecturers at college...)

Jonty wrote:My views on Fred Woodwin are about the same of yours. I would have had him hanged, drawn and quartered. What you may not be aware of is that following the banking crisis thousands of ordinary bank workers on modest salaries have lost their jobs. It wasn't their fault that the crisis occured: it was the fault of the Chief Executive and the board of Directors who made the decisions and the previous Government, particularly Gordon Brown, who encouraged the banks to lend, lend and lend and who made Fred Goodwin a peer.
Also I have not castigated others for getting a pension for which they have signed up to no matter how generous. If the pension is available they would be irrational not to contribute to it and take what's on offer. The best of luck to them.
What I have said is that the pensions made available to public sector employees by their employers, especially to the higher paid, are too generous, unfair, unsustainable and unaffordable and they should be changed along the lines the Government is suggesting.
I haven't said that public sector workers shouldn't take what's on offer.
Can I suggest you try and sharpen your analysis and critcism.
jonty

You, I think I'm right in saying are a retired civil servant drawing the pension you signed up for, of which I have no problem with,however you're now advocating that the people who have been paying into public sector pensions schemes should be prepared to take a drastic cut in they're pensions as all of a sudden they're not sustainable,if thats correct then I'd say my analysis and criticism is sharp enough!
As for pointing the finger at the previous PM (in this case Gordon Brown) are you saying that he advocated the banks lend to people who couldn't pay back what they'd borrowed?
If so more fool the bankers for following his advice or could it be a bit more sinister than that,in that we are a country living on borrowed time and money due to the unsustainable attitude of successive governments for believing their own spin and lies and somehow hoping no one would notice mound of dirt swept under the carpet by the previous government(s).
The unbelievable selfishness of capitalism has born fruit(fruit which is for the most part rotten) in the present situation we now find ourselves and it hasn't happened overnight either as Mrs Cameron/Clegg would have us believe it,it stems from a belief that captalism has somekind of conscience,which it clearly hasn't, it cares nought for people and all for profit,if don't believe that look at the Thatcher legacy,the rich got richer and the poor got robbed,was it ever thus for honest working people.

reohn2 wrote:,it stems from a belief that captalism has somekind of conscience,which it clearly hasn't, it cares nought for people and all for profit,if don't believe that look at the Thatcher legacy,the rich got richer and the poor got robbed,was it ever thus for honest working people.

But perhaps, to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst form of economics apart from all the others? Can you point to any country where they don't have capitalism where you would rather live or where the standard of living is higher than the UK?

irc wrote:

reohn2 wrote:,it stems from a belief that captalism has somekind of conscience,which it clearly hasn't, it cares nought for people and all for profit,if don't believe that look at the Thatcher legacy,the rich got richer and the poor got robbed,was it ever thus for honest working people.

But perhaps, to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst form of economics apart from all the others? Can you point to any country where they don't have capitalism where you would rather live or where the standard of living is higher than the UK?

I don't think there's a problem with capitalism per se. But I do think it's a system that need tight controls, left to its own devices its simply corrupted by human greed.