One in Ten

“I am a one in ten

Even though I don’t exist

Nobody knows me

But I’m always there

A statistical reminder

Of a world that doesn’t care”

So went the song of the 80s to remind anyone who needed reminding that Thatcher didn’t have a soul, couldn’t care less how many people were unemployed and was resolutely committed to destroying the manufacturing industry of a nation that had very little in natural resources to fall back on.

Oh, and what natural resources we did have, she sold off, shut down and buggered up.

It was a very unpleasant time. It destroyed families, society and individuals as they fell into the hopelessness of redundancy, with an unhealthy dose of self-doubt and unworthiness.

Multiply that by three million and one can barely cope with imagining or indeed knowing just how many people were affected by this heartless policy of inconsideration.

Enter Mr. Cameron, always ready to make excuses and apportion blame to his immediate predecessors, glibly dismissing the matriarchal figure of his party and her role in the demise of all that was once valued and respected in life.

Who are these people who have such lack of concern for their fellow human being? How do they really sleep at night knowing how much suffering they are causing to other people with their ill-conceived and thoughtless policies? There’s a simple answer to that. They don’t consider the proletariat as their fellow human beings. The workers are a different species.

So our leader stood there in parliament today and happily dismissed Mr Miliband’s grave concerns about the growing unemployment figures. Cameron called them “disappointing”.

Disappointing? 80,000 more people out of work in the last financial quarter, and that does not count the people like my good self who are an unrecorded part of the statistics having lost their job but not signed up to any package of financial pittance that the government can offer.

Disappointing – that there are now more women looking for work, partly through redundancy and partly because their partners have lost their jobs thus forcing them to reconsider any care responsibilities for children or aging parents in the need for an input of money into the family coffers.

Disappointing Mr. Cameron.

Yes, it is disappointing. And a lot more besides.

But there is more.

There are now one million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are without a job; a statistic that was last at this horrific peak in 1992.

Now this is interesting.

The students who have recently left university were the first children who took the compulsory SATs in Key Stage One. At the age of seven, these children were tested in English, Maths, Science, Design and Technology, Geography and History. They were all graded as to whether they are working towards a level or whether they were accomplished enough to be given the label of being a “Level Two”.

Yes, I remember it well; how they had to study two dimensional black and white photos of irons through the ages instead of looking at the history of their own lives or being encouraged to talk to older family members about their experiences of childhood. I remember how they had to create an imaginary island rather than getting out to the local park to design a redevelopment of the play area that they could submit as a suggestion to the local authority. I remember how they had to make cards with flappy bits that fulfilled the marking criteria rather than being able to design something that reflected their interest and demonstrated their own sense of creativity and personality.

These children were given criteria, assessments, labels and targets, and swallowed them whole.

These children were told that if they worked hard and achieved Level 2, they could continue to progress to Level 4 or even Level 5 by the time that they left primary school.

These children were convinced that they should continue in their quest for attainment and collect a ludicrous amount of GCSEs.

These children were then indoctrinated into thinking that the only thing to do with these mass of qualifications was to study for A-Levels and then get themselves off to University.

These children were told that there really was no alternative. If they were ever going to get anywhere in life, they had to go and get themselves a degree. The job market was going to be competitive and without such a qualification they would be consigned to the scrapheap.

Enter the aforementioned scrapheap, where so many of these ex-students are sleeping, awaiting their chance to shine with their certificates of attainment.

Only there aren’t any jobs because someone didn’t do the homework. There are no jobs for these aspirational young people who were told that they could own the earth if they went onto higher education.

But, I hear you say, there are jobs. There are plenty of jobs if they actually want to work.

Well, this is not true in the main but there are certainly some jobs out there.

Today, on the radio, there was a factory owner talking about his inability to recruit. He owned a shoe and boot business where a certain amount of flair and creativity was required, according to him, to make these quality garments. He was offering training and a job for life, with potential career progression for those who showed a particular interest and loyalty to the organisation.

He had been on local radio to try and recruit and had had an open day session at the factory with fifteen ‘candidates’ coming to have a look around and see if this was a place where they would like to work. The pay was reasonable if not earth shattering. There was security. There was potential.

So how many did he recruit?

None.

Not one of these people wanted the job that this man was offering, and why? Because they all had degrees and felt that working on a factory floor was beneath them.

Somewhere along the line there was an implicit value judgment surreptitiously planted in their heads that this sort of work; manual, creative, manufacturing work was not something that a graduate ought to be even considering.

These young people had a degree and with that, according to them, brought an entitlement not to do menial jobs.

You cannot blame them. They had been sold the dream which turned into a nightmare because someone had not done the mathematics. There was never going to be enough jobs for every graduate - well not the type of jobs where their chosen degree was going to be an employable asset.

They were sold a dud! And the heartless or the cynic might even suggest that the insistence in keeping these young people in education prevented the unemployment figures then of resembling the heady and heartless peak that they do today.

It is, however, even worse.

Values are important in any society and any functioning collection of people. Once all these children and young people were sold this story of degrees and qualifications and success and attainment they, like the prostitutes who sold them this myth, started to believe, by default, that certain things were of more value in and to society than others.

Having a degree was of higher value than having a practical qualification in building or plumbing or roofing. Having a degree was more important than being a shopkeeper or a road sweeper, when we all know that we need to have food from the shops and our roads maintained.

What we also need and what industry and businesses nationwide are also crying out for is young people who are confident, who have self-worth, who know how to communicate, who are capable of thinking on their own, who show leadership, creativity, inspiration, who are literate and numerate. Employers want young people to shine in a way that shows they are human; that they have qualities, personality, an ability to empathise, an ability to work together, collaborating. They want people who show initiative, who can think outside the box.

And some of these poor young people have nothing to offer other than a shiny certificate with a 2:1 emblazoned on its matt finish declaring their ability to pass exams on the Media Influences of the 21^st century.

I am not suggesting that all young graduates who are unemployed are devoid of some of the qualities mentioned above but what I am saying is that there has been a values statement in saying that their degree was indeed the ‘be all and end all’ and that none of these other vital skills and attributes were ever going to be as important as that shiny certificate. Furthermore, there was also the implicit suggestion that those who did not have that shiny certificate could not have those attributes either.

The trades were and are so belittled that it is allegedly incomprehensible to have an intelligent, confident, communicative plumber, for instance. Happily I know plenty, one of which has recently done some work for me; who left school at sixteen and has worked for the same organisation for the last ten years, one that is at least employed but struggling to get money together for monthly rental let alone the £30,000 he needs for a down payment for buying a house.

We have sold them all a dud. We have not supported them. We have led them to believe in the value of ‘education’ without ever enabling them to learn according to their needs and their desires. We have created a process of teaching rather than an avenue for learning, and in doing so we have disabled them and indoctrinated them into thinking that there was only one course to follow.

For those who could not or chose not to follow the higher education route, well they were dismissed as being thick or second class in some way, even if they had the ability and the wherewithal to follow an academic journey had they wanted to.

We have stuck labels on young people and now disregarded them whatever label they chose.

I was talking to my child yesterday about what he might want to study for A-Level. Philosophy was his response, and drama. He definitely wanted to do drama.

I paused. I started to say that perhaps he ought to keep his options open and do English too.

And then I stopped.

For the greatest accolade to my parenting would be for him to choose exactly what he wants to do, irrespective of the pressure that he might have to go for pure academic subjects as he is a candidate for top grades.

Whatever he chooses to do, will it really matter? At this rate a degree will be worthless whatever the subject matter. Therefore he should follow his dream and just do what amuses him and what enthuses him beyond all manner of supposed cogent planning.

And if he chose to be a builder or an electrician – would that make him less of the human being that he is? Apparently the answer to that is yes, and it bloody well shouldn’t be.

We have to enable young people to fulfil their human potential as the first ‘criteria’. If that happens to comply with the greater needs of society, then all for the better. However, if we create an environment where those with a mass of qualifications suffer from superiority complexes to the point that they cannot bring themselves to do any job, then we have created an unworkable and irresolvable situation. What we have done is place total value on work rather than living.

And I am not convinced, from the comfort of my redundancy, that this is the right way.

Another short anecdote – My son was asking my mother about what was the greatest punishment that her parents inflicted on her.

She told him the story of how she was caught out by her mother. She had been reading in bed by torchlight well beyond the hour when she was told to switch her lights out. The punishment for this disobedience was a fortnight without books. She could read books to do with her studies but no reading for pleasure. She said it was the longest fortnight of her childhood.

Ask a teenager how much time they get for reading these days and you will get a sorry response. Ask them what they have had time to read other than the ubiquitous “Of Mice and Men” and they will tell you that they are not encouraged to read for pleasure. They have to abide to the curriculum. Ask them if they have heard of any other Steinbeck books and they will look at you blankly. “It’s not on the list”.

My mother was right to be upset for that fortnight. The trouble today is that through the influence of those who aspire to see education as a factory of facts has ensured that my mother’s fortnight has stretched into a four year period or more.

And still we have these horrendous unemployment figures.

No jobs, no learning, no ability to be creative. Lots of misplaced values judgment.

I wonder what might have happened to these young people if we had thrown the 2D irons up in the air. I wonder what would have happened if we had spent days in the park learning about their lives instead of adhering to the curriculum.

I wonder what would have happened to these young people if they hadn’t been sold the wrong dream.