Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PwC) the global professional services firm has entered the debate about the effects of artificial intelligence and robotics on employment. Calculating that 30% of jobs (some 10 million) are at high risk, its predictions are about midway between those of Oxford academics Frey & Osborne’s 2013 prediction of 47% and OECD’s 2016 10%. […]
Latest figures from the ONS, show the employment rate (the proportion of people aged from 16 to 64 who were in work) at 74.6%, the joint highest since records began in 1971. The unemployment rate has also fallen to 4.7%, down from 5.1% for a year earlier. It has not been lower since June to […]
Chancellor Philip Hammond’s ‘Brexit budget’ has confirmed the UK government is to go ahead – and spend £500 million on the new ‘college based’ technical education pathway – now to be referred to as T-levels. Based on proposals in last summer’s Sainsbury Review and the Cameron government’s […]
Newspaper headlines have announced the ‘return of the grammars’ and newspaper letters pages will invariably continue to publish harrowing accounts of the effects of selection on student well being and self-esteem. But the 1944 tripartite model in which grammar schools occupied pride of place was a highly organised system, administered almost entirely through LEAs with […]
The Guardian (Editorial February 20th) has now joined the attack on University Technology Colleges* correctly arguing that directing ‘non-academic’ students’ onto a vocational curriculum at 14 – what it terms ‘backdoor selection’ – is wrong. Some five years after Alison Wolf’s review had slammed many qualifications for being ‘worthless’ in the labour market, the paper likens the […]
