Unit 1 School Life

Unit 01 School life

Clip 1 Healthy eating

Woman 1: The schools are doing it because they?ve got to promote healthy eating and I think it?s the right message. But I think really they should target the parents beforehand, because I think it?s quite sad for the children to have things in there and then to take them away.

Woman 2:I think it?s a good idea. I think children should eat healthy while they?re at school. Treats should be at weekends or after school.

Man 1: So what is allowed in children?s lunch bags? Well, here I have an array of food. Good and bad.

Man 2:Sandwiches, pasta, fruit and nuts are fine. Sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks and chocolate though are set to be taken away.

Clip 2 Grants for school buildings

Voice-over: The building work continues but for how much longer? They?re ready to start a second phase of refurbishment here, but the college may have to send the builders home. Woman 1: We?ve just come up onto the roof of the o ld building and as you can see there, that is the new building we?ve been working on for two years and we?re just about to move into the refurbishment of this great two-lifted building.

Voice-over: The principal of South Thames College told me what would h appen of she doesn?t get the money for the new building project.

Woman 1: I will have already committed six and a half to eight million pounds that will then be the College?s debt. And this building would no longer work because the services would be cut of f and this will have to be muffled.

Voice-over: From hair dressing to forensic science—over 20,000 students and adult learners come here. Some classes are in the old listed building. But the basement floods and the heating breaks down and that?s why they w anted to give it a refurb.

Clip 3 The increasing tuition fee

Voice-over: University fees paid by these students are capped at around 3.000 pounds a year. But the government is due to review the situation and the body representing the bosses of England?s universities has a suggestion, to increase fees to 5,000 or even 7,000 pounds a year.

Woman 1: We have a world-class reputation that needs to be maintained. Students, I think quite rightly, expect a very high-quality higher education. And that has to be paid for.

Woman 2:Today?s second-year students will leave university with debts of more than 17,000 pounds on average. Under one of the schemes being discussed today, that amount will increase to more than 26,000 pounds, a sum that could take quite a few years to pay off. The question is, would this increase actually put young people off from applying to university in the first place. Man 1: Potentially yes. Yes, I would have to assess my personal situation at that time. But I think it will put a lot of peop le off as it?s a huge amount of money.

Woman 3: I?m doing a history degree so I have about eight hours of contact a week. So as for my

money being wasted, whereas medical students have lots of labs and lots of money on them, so I think it would kind of cause me to think twice about going to university and which university I go to and where.

Man 2: Well I think it is breathtakingly arrogant of university vice chancellors to be talking about doubling the level of tuition fees and the level of graduate debt in the middle of a recession. I think they need to get out of their ivory tower to look at what is going on with the economy now. Students are in increasing hardship already and leaving tens of thousand of people graduating with even bigger amounts of debts is reckless and irresponsible.

Voice-over:Introducing tuition fees in the first place was controversial and difficult so the government is unlikely to rush to increase them now. Annabel Roberts. ITV News.

Clip 4 Graduates facing difficult time

Voice-over: Students setting out on life?s journey are feeling the economic strain before they?ve even secured their first job. For as the economy contracts, graduates vacancies have fallen for the first time in three years.

Woman 1: Most of the other people that I know in my degree, in my course, they?re still struggling to find jobs.

Voice-over: Diphian Serran is a final-year student hoping for a first-class degree and praying for a good job. So far, despite numerous interviews and an impressive CV, she?s had bad luck.

Woman 1: Very bad luck. Unfortunately. I?ve gone through the interview stage of many, so to the final stage. But once I reach there, I often get, either get rejected or it?s, you know, “we?ll let you know”.

Voice-over: The downturn in manufacturing and the meltdown in the financial services mean that nearly half of the employers expect to hire fewer graduates this year. That means the competition on campus has ever been tougher.

Woman 2: This is the generation of university students who were born and bred in the economic boom. But they are grad uating in the economic bust. Recruitment?s down, salaries are frozen. This is crunch time in every sense.

Man 1: These times are a lot tougher than they had been the last 10, 15, possibly even 20 years. But employers are still recruiting. The brains of today are the profits of tomorrow. The question is whether the graduates are able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the labor market.

V oice-over: For this final year engineering student, the reality is still great. Vacancies in the engineering and public sectors are on the rise. Will?s found a job in a bank. His starting salary is 42K.

Man 2: There are still opportunities down there for people being smart or, kind of risk savvy enough to get them so it?s just, you know, it?s more difficult but it?s not impossible.

V oice-over: The generation who never had it so good as children may find the economic realities harder as adults. Penny Marshall. News at Ten. Warwick University.

Clip 5 Value of a degree

Voice-over:…Tis the season when 400,000 brigh t young things write off hoping their dreams will come true. Not a letter to Santa, but a university application form. The government wants half of

all our young people to experience the wonderful world of the undergraduate. The joy of learning, of student life, the thrill of graduation, the invitation to high-powered, exciting careers.

The reality can be rather different. A few years ago these telesales staff would have been school leavers. Today this publishing firm employs only graduates. Same job, similar salary, different qualifications.

Man 1: Fifteen years ago we would?ve probably said the basic requirements would be A-levels. Because that would be the benchmark we would?ve expected our new employees to have achieved. You know now we see the benchmark is being the degree. So I think the very fact that there are far more students leaving university looking for jobs, enables us to specify a degree today whereas we wouldn?t have done 15 years ago,

Voice-over: Thirty-five per cent of graduates enter the wo rld of work in a job that doesn?t need a degree. And many get stuck in careers they don?t like. Asked what they did want to do, 47% hoped for jobs in media, advertising or PR. Other popular careers include design—favored by 21% of women—and computing, picked by 23% of men. But over 10% of media studies graduates are currently unemployed. It?s the same for design studies. And even worse in computing. Unpopular careers include engineering. Only 9% of students mention that. And yet unemployment amongst civil engineering graduates is only 2.9%.

At today?s graduate recruitment fair, thousands of students were searching for jobs. But engineering stands were typically deserted. And those that did enquire often lacked relevant qualifications. The engineering industry believes in encouraging yet more school leavers to go to university may be an expensive indulgence.

Man 2: Universities argue that we are not training, we are educating. We are creating people who can think. Now, if we are just producing philosophers and thinkers, I don?t think we are going to resolve the economic needs of this country. I mean, that would be absolutely silly, quite frankly. Voice-over:There are now 60,000 different degree courses in Britain. The biggest increase in so-called cheap degree s, usually humanities or social sciences, which don?t require equipment or laboratories. Universities get money for how many students they have and extra cash if they can woo school leavers from poor and deprived backgrounds. Students are saddled with debts, justified by government on the basis that across a lifetime, a degree is worth an extra 400,000 pounds. But is it?

Man 3: There are two flaws in the government?s figures. Firstly they?re based on the percentage of graduates going through our education. Those figures were in a small per cent. In a couple of years? time one in every two people will go through higher education of that age group. The second big fundamental problem is they were based on an employment market where there was a job for life, Things have changed.

Voice-over: Here at this plumbing school in North London, about 20% of the class are graduates who?ve decided to retrain. Many come from just the kind of backgrounds government wants to encourage into higher education. But their experience is hardly an advert.

Man 4: By the time I graduated I would say there weren?t the jobs there. So in hindsight, it probably was a waste of time, yeah.

Man 5: So how much money do you reckon you can earn as a plumber?

Woman1: Well, they say between 50 to 75 thousand in about 10 years? time.

Man 5: 75 grand

Woman 1: Approximately, yes.

Clip 6 School disciplines (David Cameron’s speech, 31 July 2007)

So going back to my question, how do we translate our values into action? To reprise those values, families as the origin of society, the role of schools in backing up and adding to the lessons of home, the need for clear boundaries and for rules of behavior, the diversity and the differentness of children, the obligation to help the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Earlier this month I spoke about families. Most of all, we need to encourage stable parental relationships for example, as has been suggested, through removing the bias through against cohabitation in the benefits system and using the tax system to support married couples.

Yesterday I spoke about special educational needs. We need to radically reform the statementing process to give parents what they need, including a more sensitive and flexible system of categorising special needs. Parents need greater choice between specialist schools and mainstream schools. And until the system is properly balanced, we believe we need a moratorium on the closure of special schools.

Today I want to explain something of what we'll do to improve behaviour in the mainstream schools.

Sometimes people who discuss education give the impression that some sort of incredibly complex alchemy. It isn?t. We know what works because we see it, in our own country and oversees. The best schools, whether they are private schools, academies, grammar schools, comprehensives, have some simple things in common. Most of all, they have an independent ethos and clear rules on acceptable behaviour.

Schools should be places where teachers teach and children learn - not sort of holding centres for children irrespective of how badly they behave. Most of all, they should be places where the kids respect, and even fear, the teachers, and not the other way around. If we want our children to grow up in a loving environment, they need to know where the lines are and not to step over them.

Heads need to be able to impose real codes of behaviour and discipline and be backed up by parents.

Teachers often say to me that they set clear rules, they enforce them and then the parents come along and take the side of the child. This can completely undermine the authority of the school and contribute directly to bad behaviour.

Now many schools have home-school contracts, setting out in black and white what is expected of the school, of the parent and of the child. I'd like to take this idea further and make them enforceable, as requirements of admission and as grounds for exclusion.

Head teachers should be able to say to parents, if you don?t sign up to this code of conduct for yourselves and your children, your child cannot come to school as simple as that.

And I want to strengthen the position of teachers as well. More needs be done to protect teachers from the tiny minority who are bent on undermining authority in schools by making false allegations of abuse against the teacher. This is a growing problem. A recent survey in SecEd magazine indicated that 20 per cent of teachers had been falsely accused and 55 per cent of teachers knew a colleague in their school to whom this had happened.

The Teacher Support phone line is taking almost twice as many calls about pupil allegations as it did a year ago. Yet in the past ten years only three per cent of serious allegations have actually resulted in a conviction. And that?s why we believe that teac hers should have the full protection of anonymity until the case against them has actually been dealt with.

Given the elementary principle that a head teacher must have control over the standards of behaviour in his or her school, this must mean, as a last resort, the power to exclude pupils whose conduct badly disrupts the education of others.

Today, at the moment, if a head teacher excludes a pupil, the child has a right of appeal to an external panel run by the local authority. And currently a quarter of the exclusions which are reviewed by appeals panels are overturned. More than half of these pupils are then returned to the school from which they have been expelled.

Now just imagine what that does to the standing of the head teacher in the eyes of the students. To see a child, expelled for bad behaviour, swaggering back into the school. It sends completely the wrong message about the relative power of the child and of the school itself. The local authority should be there to serve the school, to help the school, to support the school, not the other way around.