Some fifteen per cent of long-term NEETS are dead within 10 years, one of England’s top civil servants has claimed.
A NEET is someone aged between 16 and 24 who is not in education, employment or training.
This is being touted as evidence that (formal) education is a matter of life & death. No figures, or sources, are given to back this up, nor is any comparison made with non-NEETS, though we do know that mortality is much higher among boys than among girls in this age group.
But it does not show that more ‘education’ beyond the age of 16 is the answer. Indeed it suggests that the formal education they have received before the age of 16 has somehow failed them. More of the same may only make matters worse, since it has so clearly failed to give them any sense of purpose in life.
The recently released SATS results for 11 year olds show achievements in English falling for the first time since the tests were introduced 15 years ago. A quarter of boys fail to each the expected level, but curiously there is a noticeable difference between reading & writing – writing is much the poorer.
There is some suspicion that this difference reflects a marking problem rather than anything real. I suspect that it may reflect the fact that SATS pays too much attention to ‘writing’ in a sense which is rapidly becoming irrelevant – to adults as well as to children.Mary Beard has written about how even Oxbridge students do not have to write by hand any more – except when it comes to exams: “After years of typing, how on earth do they write by hand for three hours? (Answer I fear is that some of them write dreadfully -- and they would be well advised to get some practice.)”
Children & others may increasingly take their tests on a computer, but this is not at all what I mean. Information now comes in many ways other than solid blocks of text, still less do people have to write it all out first by hand. There seems distressingly little in the way of teaching children about this – about how to provide & present information (or stories, or argument) which is going to be accessed via a computer screen.
Learning how to write for the web does not mean abandoning every old fashioned rule about grammar or style. It just takes into account that reading a screen is different from reading a page in a book or an A4 document & requires some different conventions.
And just as we learned there are different rules for business letters, stories, history essays … so there are different rules for different kinds of computer writing. Computers are not there just for producing well laid out & legible English compositions or academic essays.
Engage children’s – especially boys’ - interest in this way & their desire & ability to learn will follow.
Mind you, its not always easy to keep up. A group of boys – aged I guess around 12 – were using the library computers one afternoon. Obviously making an afternoon of it, they had been to the swimming pool first. As they came to the end of their sessions one came to talk to his friend just finishing up next to me.
How did you get on?
Oh – OK. Well no, not really. I’ve just been rubbish. Thing is, I’m no good with a mouse – I’m only used to the laptop
