qualifications galore

At the moment there are new national curiculums being brought into high schools. This all started about twelve months ago when the government demanded more cross-curricular lessons, relevant to life for today's children. They wanted to be able to show why school is necessary up until the age of 16 (and over the last few months have been pushing for it to be made up to 18). This has involved bringing in a whole range of vocational courses brought in as GCE's instead of the standard GCSE's. We've got a handful of kids at school at the moment who are in school part time and out on building sites etc. the rest of the week. Next year, St Mary's will be home to a hair and beauty salon on site, and the idea is that the different high schools in the borough will support the different needs of the students to be able to go out to train. It's a good idea, not everyone is academic. My year 11's- I adore, but none of them are going to go on and be the next world class academics. So my attention was drawn yesterday to an article about some businesses getting involved in creating courses at levels 3 and 4 so that students are able to take A levels and even degrees in training for their businesses. The three businesses in question are Flybe, Network Rail and McDonalds. Yes you read that right....The biggest mistake this country made was it's insistance that everyone had a degree. You can do degrees in David Beckham studies should you really want to (yawn) but, now a degree gets you nowhere. You can't get a job without a degree because you've no experience and you can't get a decent enough job without forking out the thousands to get the degree. I think we need to step back and accept that we are all different, and all unique, and while some people want to spend their lives researching the latest findings on some 3,000 year old texts, others don't. And while some may quite enjoy learning about David Beckham for a large proportion of their life other's want to be spending our taxes on things that actually improve the education, and therefore welfare of the country (not that I'm bitter!!!) Bottom line is, I think A levels in McDonalds is a waste of time...but feel free to argue back!!