School leaving age set to be 18

[russdev]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6254833.stm

 

Russ

[Jake]

They have enough trouble making kids actually attend schools til 16, let alone 18

 

Still, on the plus side, that means more users, thus more work, so more budget !!!

 

What do you mean no????

[beeswax]

that'll lower the unemployment figures at a stroke

[CyberNerd]

wonder if military service will be exempt.

[alan-d]

wonder if military service will be exempt.

 

Would be classed as a workplace placement

 

sign em all up

[Lee_K_81]

Thankfully we dont have a sixth form although i feel sorry for those who do, or work in a college. There's enough problems with kids turning up, not doing any work and creating a distraction for those who do want to work, all so they can get their £30 pw drug... i mean booze..... i mean... whatever money! I can see where it's going. 10 years time they'll be saying it's 21 and everyone has to go to uni, but hey, there's not student loans or grants, just a defered payment when you get a job at McD's with your BA in mickey mouse studies.

[StewartKnight]

since the cirriculum struggles to keep the kids interested at the moment, how are they going to cope with another 2 years???

[ChrisC]

They can go botch cars up aprenticeship style for those 2 years.....

 

Chris

[Friez]

I think its a badly thought out idea. I mean sure, other countries have a leaving age at 18, but here its a bad idea.

 

Why do I think it's a bad idea?

 

The curriculum taught in the schools currently is absolutely appauling. I originally wanted to be an IT teacher, but then I discovered that IT teachers must effectively parrot what the government tell them to.

 

And what do the government tell them to teach? Clicking hyperlinks, writing pointless stuff into excel sheets, exporting it into CSV (with no explanation to the CSV file format), reimporting it into ACCESS (*WHY*).

 

I'd be surprised if kids let alone teachers actually know the difference between access and excel, afterall they 'look' the same.

 

So another TWO years of this utter tripe?

 

We would be giving the kids an utter disservice to force them to sit through another two years of bullcrap, perhaps if they IMPROVED THE CURRICULUM or perhaps even forced them to go to something better (e.g. college -- only slightly better, or university -- even better) it could work out much better.

 

In IT when I was at school I learned nothing. Nada. Zilch. Same goes for when I was at Sixth Form. I learned everything off my own back, if you ask me most of the kids in the class are more computer literate than the teachers.

 

When I made it to university the playing board got a little more even, with about half the lecturers actually being VERY clued up, and the other half being typical clueless teachers.

 

Forcing the kids into another two years of crap would not help improve the quality of education at all, it'll just keep kids off the dole for a bit longer.

 

I'd love to see kids ACTUALLY being taught stuff. Like HTML (i.e. not a word document exported to .htm), or SQL (proper sql queries, not auto generated stuff in access).

 

Heck, teach them PHP and C++, also teach them things relevant to PC's. How to count in hex?

 

I was once talking to an A-Level maths student who didn't know what hex was. This is the quality of education in the UK.

 

There are so many things that are relevant and infact important in industry depending on the job that you go for in the field of IT, yet all these kids are taught are how to fire up a random office app and type. Some education.

 

If they plan to force kids for another 2 years of schooling then they better buck up their ideas about the curriculum too.

 

I feel sorry for the kids.

[MkII]

I thought all kids stayed on in education 'till 18 anyway. To me this is just admitting that.

[Sylv3r]

Thats going to mean bigger schools needed, more teachers etc. Its going to be great expense to the government for any real benefits????

[FreeWill]

Removing people's choices... not a good idea.

 

If kids are forced to stay on til 18, they will kick up a stink about it. At my school the approx. 15 (10%) of the year group that didn't come back for the 6th form were the ones who were the most disruptive. Telling them they have to stay, or forcing them to go into training would not go down at all well.

 

At 16 people are old enough to make choices about their future. Just give them the knowledge of what they have to do to get somewhere and allow them to make their own choices.

[beeswax]

I don't actually think that they'll be staying on at school until they're 18, but going on to do something, I don't know, I'm grasping for words here... I know, I'll call it an "apprenticeship", where they get to learn a trade.

[GrumbleDook]

We have been looking at this for some time now and all I can really say at the moment is that to say the "school leaving age" does not always mean when they leave school ... but when they leave 'education' ...

 

Students that cannot follow courses that your school offers will have to take up courses elsewhere ... and the course can also be vocational course or a level 2 based course (courses based on GCSE equivalent qualifications for those students that didn't get 5 A*-C including English and Maths).

 

It is going to be a difficult proccess to get started but that is what senior manglers get paid for.