6 ms·

John Lewis slams UK education system and offers staff literacy lessons

55 points by genghizkhan 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago
This is a pretty consistent theme around the world. A lot of the gains in educational attainment seem to have come from reducing the standard required to obtain the credentials.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Are there any tests or exams with guaranteed unchanging requirements? For example, 100 years worth of exam papers could be written all at once, and questions shuffled so the exam paper each year has the same difficulty.
  - Foobar8568 5y ago
    Take an old book for primary school written in the 70s, then 50s and 20s, fairly large differences between the 3 eras already, now compare that to a typical textbook from our era. For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland)
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      > For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland) How so?
      - Foobar8568 5y ago
        (talking about France here, I can provide some websites with old manuals or student notebooks) Two examples : past simple is no longer required to be studied in primary school and dumb down kid books with much less vocabulary and grammar (actual incorrect grammar) being re-edited like the Enid Blyton (The Famous Five) ones. One needs to understand that kids are spending at least 2 less years in school from 6 to 18. We are lying to the kids, parents and ourselves.
        Foobar8568 5y ago
        https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/fr/museum/mne?typeDeDocument%5B0%5D=travail+d%27%C3%A9l%C3%A8ve&media=1 https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/fr/museum/mne... some examples of old notebooks.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Cultural changes would make that difficult. Nonetheless, here's a 100 year old exam that mostly still makes sense today and actually tests practical life knowledge, literacy and numeracy: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744... Not sure any kid today would understand the sentence "Decline I." though.
    - j605 5y ago
      For those curious to see the test, the link in huffpost has been moved to https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
whoooooo123 5y ago
Note that this is John Lewis the British department store, and not John Lewis the recently deceased American civil rights icon.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  Although this John Lewis also has a history of fighting for workers rights.
  - smackay 5y ago
    Easy enough to find, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership but very interesting. The essential detail being "The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees" which gives you some idea of the company's motivations.
    - dukeyukey 5y ago
      John Lewis is a great example of a socialism-inspired (employee owned , workplace democracy) that ironically mostly caters to the upper-middle class.
neilsense 5y ago
The British education system is too busy being involved in political movements to actually educate children. We have a huge issue with the degree-laden failures of society ending up as teachers as pay is terrible and the bar to entry is extremely low. These teachers couldn't function in the real world with their beliefs , and so they take it upon themselves to brainwash their young and captive audiences in lieu of actually educating them.
- johneth 5y ago
  Where did you read all that guff?
- sgt101 5y ago
  My experience of British teachers is entirely contrary to this. I would employ most of them if they came to work for me - almost all of them are "get job done people people" and they care about their work. - an acquaintance who is a teacher takes breakfast (at her own expense on a tight salary) into class for all her 8-9 year old students because she knows that some of them don't get fed at home - my daughters teacher started and runs an engineering class after school for the kids using donations of machinery and components from parents (I gave them a defunct hedge cutter which they stripped down and then rebuilt to show how the motor works) - the head of the other primary school in town goes to the traveler camps out in the country side and goes door to door to engage the families and persuade them to send their kids to school. He is physically frail, openly gay and anyone who has gone to those camps knows that this is a genuinely risky thing to do - but he does it, every summer, because he cares about the kids. Btw, the fact that he brings them into his school means that he has an extra cohort of really challenging problems every summer which slamdunks into the toilet his chance of further preferment and performance related pay. I think you should spend some time in schools, perhaps you could see if one of them near you needs a governor - you might learn something.
- ntoll 5y ago
  The only failure of education that I see around here relates to the schooling of HN users who don't have the wherewithal or self awareness to understand that they're pushing ignorant, prejudiced and unkind opinions.
Foobar8568 5y ago
Focus on social skills, have less requirements on actual skills to ensure social status quo, everyone applause until the kids reach 25 and look for a job. Relevant quote : “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said.
TamDenholm 5y ago
I'm not a teacher, parent or someone with any formal education at all, but when I was at school (UK) I thought (and was told my teachers) that I was dumb and wouldn't amount to much. I had no idea that I had intellect until I left school at 15 and my education finally began. Some people simply do not learn well in the factory worker style education system. I'd also say that I think schools in the UK (and I would imagine other countries) totally fail at teaching essential skills required for life. Financial literacy, basic cooking skills (I did home economics but it was the same course my mother did at school 30 years prior), how to actually learn things yourself (one of the most valuable skills in my opinion), how to plan and organise yourself for life, how to deal with problems that come up in life (bills, relationships, pets, whatever), how to fix things, drive/maintain a car, how credit ratings work, the value in travel and new experiences, etc. My comments are based on an experience from 20 years ago but it seems that not much has improved since then. I've no idea how to solve these problems and prepare future generations, but its something I'd love to help figure out. My current assessment is that youtube feels like it provides a more valuable education system than state run schools.
- msg3 5y ago
  I'm just not sure this is true. There are plenty of things wrong with the education system in the UK, and no doubt many individuals are completely failed by the system. But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well enough that they can get a job / engage in further training. Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    > But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.
LatteLazy 5y ago
We've cut the education budget every year for decade (edited down from decades). We've made people stay when they don't want to. We've poured money into the kids with the worst outcomes at everyone else's expense. So this is very predictable when you actually think about it. It's just that we've build a whole society around not paying for things, not investing long term, only paying attention to the loudest dumbest voices and no one thinking more than 1 election ahead. I think the same seems to be happening in a lot of English-speaking countries (USA, Aus etc)
- sgt101 5y ago
  actually the education budget (in real terms) peaked in 2011 and has been flat since then.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Yeah, new labour actually did well until 2011. Since then it's fallen in cash terms I believe? I should have said "a decade". https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369 https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369 This is without accounting for any of the other factors: closure of special needs schools, forcing more kids to stay longer and take all classes, banning expulsions, etc. We also spent a tonne of money on things like Academies and other political pet projects.
fergie 5y ago
There is a long and proud tradition in the UK of undermining the ability of the working classes, coupled with a fear/distain of the state education system. The idea that comprehensive schools are producing illiterate and innumerate school leavers plays neatly into the prejudices of journalists and business owners (the majority of whom have been privately educated), whilst simultaneously justifying the poor pay and conditions on offer to shop floor staff. Anybody who has spent any time around young people in the UK will know that they are, if anything, far more literate than previous generations, which should come as no surprise since they spend a greater amount of time reading and writing on electronic devices.
- msg3 5y ago
  We see this with Dyson claiming every few years that they can't find enough engineers -- translation -- we can't find enough engineers for the salary we want to pay them.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that. I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation. Just basic grammar illustrate that well. And it makes sense, if you can't rely on automatic systems to do part of your work, you will be trained by your daily tasks to be a more powerful thinker. If what the company do is hard, being ok will not cut it. You cannot google your way into innovation, you can't copy/paste architecture design, and your calculator won't save you from a logical mistake. I'm personnally very adapted to agile envs with margin of errors and a lot of feedback loops. But a waterfall is more challenging, because I'm not born in it. And you don't use scrum to build the path to moon landing. More than that, I arised in the "a good dev is lazy" period, where working smart, not hard was praised. But hitting 30, reality calls back: there are no shortcut to awesomeness, you will have to work hard. And not many engineers are ready to do so. The ones who do often create their company.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      > I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation. My experience has been the opposite - though as this is based on observation it's obviously subjective - and opportunities for selection-bias are also present (i.e. how many of the last-generation that didn't get promoted-out of being a technical contributor was because they were more valuable to the company that way?) Your remark about automated tooling is interesting - because I feel that modern tooling (TLA+, Z3, constraint-provers, and cutting-edge languages like Haskell, Idris, and so on) really do require almost a postgraduate-level of understanding of the CS theory involved - whereas if you look at _the SE scene_ in the 1970s and 1980s - or even the mid-1990s, the tooling certainly did require you to do more planning and reasoning ahead of time (VB6, lol) but I can't see the entire industry of the time doing their modelling and verification entirely by themselves: on the contrary (and based on the horror-inducing programming code I've seen) a lot of it was ad-hoc and trial-and-error - Visual Studio didn't get built-in support for unit-tests until 2008 (or 2005 if you had the expensive edition). Also consider that the old SE processes used back then (Waterfall, boxed software, slow-moving-and-big release cycles, etc) meant there was more room for less-rigorous folks in large software dev teams. > and your calculator won't save you from a logical listake. For that, you need a spell-checker! UPDATE: Ah, you edited your post, which ruins the joke :/
sgt101 5y ago
I think that this may have a lot to do with Sharon White looking to be a big beast in the Labour party in pretty short order. A stint at Ofcom followed by time at JL gives good credentials for a front bench position, possibly from the House of Lords.
- kqvamxurcagg 5y ago
  You’re probably correct. It will be interesting to see how long she remains in the John Lewis role.
ownagefool 5y ago
Counterpoint. Few people who the education system worked out for are going to be working on the department store shop floor. Not that I disagree, but the opinion is coming from a very specific view point. If the kids had strong educations, would they be okay getting paid £10 an hour / £16k a year.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >£10 an hour Is that terrible in the UK? That's like $14 an hour and large swaths of Americans are expected to live on that with much shittier welfare than the UK.
  - ck425 5y ago
    It is. These days most things are more expensive in the UK than USA. Particularly housing.
    - dukeyukey 5y ago
      Although overall the US is more expensive that the UK, albeit not by much. Sources: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=United+Kingdom https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu... https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/what-cost-living-difference-between-us-and-uk.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/what-cost-li...
      - hollerith 5y ago
        Maybe you are both right: maybe the US is more expensive if you plan to live off savings, but the UK is more expensive (in units of labor) for the average worker because the average pay is lower. In other words, almost all statistics on cost of living do not take into account differences between countries in the ease of getting money.
  - Wildgoose 5y ago
    It's a common wage for shop staff - most of the big supermarkets pay that amount. Smaller employers may only pay the "living wage" which is £8.91. The UK national minimum wage is £8.36.
Traster 5y ago
I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that young people going directly into retail jobs have poor functional numeracy or literacy. Firstly, those with academic skills or other skills will either be getting further education or going into a trade. So you’re left with quite a specific group of people. Then consider- is this specific to this group? I got a masters in engineering, when I turned up on day 1 was I a good engineer? No, I had very little practical experience and that matters. The idea that education makes you ready for a job is a slightly absurd standard unless we re-work our education system to have a far more practical set of courses. We can do that but that will equally have short comings.
jwmoz 5y ago
Maths geniuses are hardly going to be applying for John Lewis jobs.
- decodebytes 5y ago
  They are not asking for math geniuses?
exporectomy 5y ago
I used to be a teacher in a school system that emphasized against rote learning, knowledge memorization, and numerical calculations (for physics). Well, we did do that stuff but it could only get the student a grade D or E. The massive problem was that even the teachers didn't understand what the mysterious higher level skills we were supposed to be teaching were or how to teach or assess them. The students had no hope of fair treatment. The official assessment criteria were wholistic and wordy. Numerical grades were forbidden, as was averaging scores from multiple assessments into the final, so teachers made up some grades based on feelings, or secretly used a spreadsheet that added a little random factor to make it look non-formulaic. Anyway, point is, some modern education removes the old low-level skills (mainly memorization) but doesn't replace it with anything nor even keep the useful parts of it (eg. mental arithmetic).
nickdothutton 5y ago
The state run comprehensive education system in the UK has been a disaster.
ajdegol 5y ago
John Lewis Partnership chair Sharon White: “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said. Glass houses.
jimnotgym 5y ago
Here is some background for people not in the UK, or perhaps not familiar with how things have changed in post 16 education. I am not an expert but I am planning to employ some people under these new schemes so have been reviewing it. At 16 you can either enter more education or do an apprenticeship that includes training. Classically one might study A levels until 18 and apply for university, or go the vocational route and do an apprenticeship. Companies in the retail sector like John Lewis, created retail apprenticeships. This involves getting paid £4.30 (for reference minimum wage for an adult over 23 not on an apprenticeship is £8.91) an hour to stand at a till. The company is supposed to in return provide a qualification and allow the staff 20% of their time to study for it. The government pay for the training, although larger companies have to contribute. One might suggest that the people applying for retail apprenticeships are going to be at the lower end of academic attainment. Now I read this article, and I see John Lewis complaining that they are having to train there people they have contracted to train and are working for a pittance to get.

55 points by genghizkhan 5y ago

This is a pretty consistent theme around the world. A lot of the gains in educational attainment seem to have come from reducing the standard required to obtain the credentials.

londons_explore 5y ago
Are there any tests or exams with guaranteed unchanging requirements? For example, 100 years worth of exam papers could be written all at once, and questions shuffled so the exam paper each year has the same difficulty.
- Foobar8568 5y ago
  Take an old book for primary school written in the 70s, then 50s and 20s, fairly large differences between the 3 eras already, now compare that to a typical textbook from our era. For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland)
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    > For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland) How so?
    - Foobar8568 5y ago
      (talking about France here, I can provide some websites with old manuals or student notebooks) Two examples : past simple is no longer required to be studied in primary school and dumb down kid books with much less vocabulary and grammar (actual incorrect grammar) being re-edited like the Enid Blyton (The Famous Five) ones. One needs to understand that kids are spending at least 2 less years in school from 6 to 18. We are lying to the kids, parents and ourselves.
      - Foobar8568 5y ago
        https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/fr/museum/mne?typeDeDocument%5B0%5D=travail+d%27%C3%A9l%C3%A8ve&media=1 https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/fr/museum/mne... some examples of old notebooks.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Cultural changes would make that difficult. Nonetheless, here's a 100 year old exam that mostly still makes sense today and actually tests practical life knowledge, literacy and numeracy: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744... Not sure any kid today would understand the sentence "Decline I." though.
  - j605 5y ago
    For those curious to see the test, the link in huffpost has been moved to https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...

whoooooo123 5y ago

Note that this is John Lewis the British department store, and not John Lewis the recently deceased American civil rights icon.

pharmakom 5y ago
Although this John Lewis also has a history of fighting for workers rights.
- smackay 5y ago
  Easy enough to find, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership but very interesting. The essential detail being "The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees" which gives you some idea of the company's motivations.
  - dukeyukey 5y ago
    John Lewis is a great example of a socialism-inspired (employee owned , workplace democracy) that ironically mostly caters to the upper-middle class.

neilsense 5y ago

The British education system is too busy being involved in political movements to actually educate children. We have a huge issue with the degree-laden failures of society ending up as teachers as pay is terrible and the bar to entry is extremely low. These teachers couldn't function in the real world with their beliefs , and so they take it upon themselves to brainwash their young and captive audiences in lieu of actually educating them.

johneth 5y ago
Where did you read all that guff?
sgt101 5y ago
My experience of British teachers is entirely contrary to this. I would employ most of them if they came to work for me - almost all of them are "get job done people people" and they care about their work. - an acquaintance who is a teacher takes breakfast (at her own expense on a tight salary) into class for all her 8-9 year old students because she knows that some of them don't get fed at home - my daughters teacher started and runs an engineering class after school for the kids using donations of machinery and components from parents (I gave them a defunct hedge cutter which they stripped down and then rebuilt to show how the motor works) - the head of the other primary school in town goes to the traveler camps out in the country side and goes door to door to engage the families and persuade them to send their kids to school. He is physically frail, openly gay and anyone who has gone to those camps knows that this is a genuinely risky thing to do - but he does it, every summer, because he cares about the kids. Btw, the fact that he brings them into his school means that he has an extra cohort of really challenging problems every summer which slamdunks into the toilet his chance of further preferment and performance related pay. I think you should spend some time in schools, perhaps you could see if one of them near you needs a governor - you might learn something.
ntoll 5y ago
The only failure of education that I see around here relates to the schooling of HN users who don't have the wherewithal or self awareness to understand that they're pushing ignorant, prejudiced and unkind opinions.

Foobar8568 5y ago

Focus on social skills, have less requirements on actual skills to ensure social status quo, everyone applause until the kids reach 25 and look for a job. Relevant quote : “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said.

TamDenholm 5y ago

I'm not a teacher, parent or someone with any formal education at all, but when I was at school (UK) I thought (and was told my teachers) that I was dumb and wouldn't amount to much. I had no idea that I had intellect until I left school at 15 and my education finally began. Some people simply do not learn well in the factory worker style education system. I'd also say that I think schools in the UK (and I would imagine other countries) totally fail at teaching essential skills required for life. Financial literacy, basic cooking skills (I did home economics but it was the same course my mother did at school 30 years prior), how to actually learn things yourself (one of the most valuable skills in my opinion), how to plan and organise yourself for life, how to deal with problems that come up in life (bills, relationships, pets, whatever), how to fix things, drive/maintain a car, how credit ratings work, the value in travel and new experiences, etc. My comments are based on an experience from 20 years ago but it seems that not much has improved since then. I've no idea how to solve these problems and prepare future generations, but its something I'd love to help figure out. My current assessment is that youtube feels like it provides a more valuable education system than state run schools.

msg3 5y ago
I'm just not sure this is true. There are plenty of things wrong with the education system in the UK, and no doubt many individuals are completely failed by the system. But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well enough that they can get a job / engage in further training. Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  > But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.

LatteLazy 5y ago

We've cut the education budget every year for decade (edited down from decades). We've made people stay when they don't want to. We've poured money into the kids with the worst outcomes at everyone else's expense. So this is very predictable when you actually think about it. It's just that we've build a whole society around not paying for things, not investing long term, only paying attention to the loudest dumbest voices and no one thinking more than 1 election ahead. I think the same seems to be happening in a lot of English-speaking countries (USA, Aus etc)

sgt101 5y ago
actually the education budget (in real terms) peaked in 2011 and has been flat since then.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Yeah, new labour actually did well until 2011. Since then it's fallen in cash terms I believe? I should have said "a decade". https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369 https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369 This is without accounting for any of the other factors: closure of special needs schools, forcing more kids to stay longer and take all classes, banning expulsions, etc. We also spent a tonne of money on things like Academies and other political pet projects.

fergie 5y ago

There is a long and proud tradition in the UK of undermining the ability of the working classes, coupled with a fear/distain of the state education system. The idea that comprehensive schools are producing illiterate and innumerate school leavers plays neatly into the prejudices of journalists and business owners (the majority of whom have been privately educated), whilst simultaneously justifying the poor pay and conditions on offer to shop floor staff. Anybody who has spent any time around young people in the UK will know that they are, if anything, far more literate than previous generations, which should come as no surprise since they spend a greater amount of time reading and writing on electronic devices.

msg3 5y ago
We see this with Dyson claiming every few years that they can't find enough engineers -- translation -- we can't find enough engineers for the salary we want to pay them.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I'm not sure about that. I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation. Just basic grammar illustrate that well. And it makes sense, if you can't rely on automatic systems to do part of your work, you will be trained by your daily tasks to be a more powerful thinker. If what the company do is hard, being ok will not cut it. You cannot google your way into innovation, you can't copy/paste architecture design, and your calculator won't save you from a logical mistake. I'm personnally very adapted to agile envs with margin of errors and a lot of feedback loops. But a waterfall is more challenging, because I'm not born in it. And you don't use scrum to build the path to moon landing. More than that, I arised in the "a good dev is lazy" period, where working smart, not hard was praised. But hitting 30, reality calls back: there are no shortcut to awesomeness, you will have to work hard. And not many engineers are ready to do so. The ones who do often create their company.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation. My experience has been the opposite - though as this is based on observation it's obviously subjective - and opportunities for selection-bias are also present (i.e. how many of the last-generation that didn't get promoted-out of being a technical contributor was because they were more valuable to the company that way?) Your remark about automated tooling is interesting - because I feel that modern tooling (TLA+, Z3, constraint-provers, and cutting-edge languages like Haskell, Idris, and so on) really do require almost a postgraduate-level of understanding of the CS theory involved - whereas if you look at _the SE scene_ in the 1970s and 1980s - or even the mid-1990s, the tooling certainly did require you to do more planning and reasoning ahead of time (VB6, lol) but I can't see the entire industry of the time doing their modelling and verification entirely by themselves: on the contrary (and based on the horror-inducing programming code I've seen) a lot of it was ad-hoc and trial-and-error - Visual Studio didn't get built-in support for unit-tests until 2008 (or 2005 if you had the expensive edition). Also consider that the old SE processes used back then (Waterfall, boxed software, slow-moving-and-big release cycles, etc) meant there was more room for less-rigorous folks in large software dev teams. > and your calculator won't save you from a logical listake. For that, you need a spell-checker! UPDATE: Ah, you edited your post, which ruins the joke :/

sgt101 5y ago

I think that this may have a lot to do with Sharon White looking to be a big beast in the Labour party in pretty short order. A stint at Ofcom followed by time at JL gives good credentials for a front bench position, possibly from the House of Lords.

kqvamxurcagg 5y ago
You’re probably correct. It will be interesting to see how long she remains in the John Lewis role.

ownagefool 5y ago

Counterpoint. Few people who the education system worked out for are going to be working on the department store shop floor. Not that I disagree, but the opinion is coming from a very specific view point. If the kids had strong educations, would they be okay getting paid £10 an hour / £16k a year.

Hamuko 5y ago
>£10 an hour Is that terrible in the UK? That's like $14 an hour and large swaths of Americans are expected to live on that with much shittier welfare than the UK.
- ck425 5y ago
  It is. These days most things are more expensive in the UK than USA. Particularly housing.
  - dukeyukey 5y ago
    Although overall the US is more expensive that the UK, albeit not by much. Sources: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=United+Kingdom https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu... https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/what-cost-living-difference-between-us-and-uk.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/what-cost-li...
    - hollerith 5y ago
      Maybe you are both right: maybe the US is more expensive if you plan to live off savings, but the UK is more expensive (in units of labor) for the average worker because the average pay is lower. In other words, almost all statistics on cost of living do not take into account differences between countries in the ease of getting money.
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  It's a common wage for shop staff - most of the big supermarkets pay that amount. Smaller employers may only pay the "living wage" which is £8.91. The UK national minimum wage is £8.36.

Traster 5y ago

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that young people going directly into retail jobs have poor functional numeracy or literacy. Firstly, those with academic skills or other skills will either be getting further education or going into a trade. So you’re left with quite a specific group of people. Then consider- is this specific to this group? I got a masters in engineering, when I turned up on day 1 was I a good engineer? No, I had very little practical experience and that matters. The idea that education makes you ready for a job is a slightly absurd standard unless we re-work our education system to have a far more practical set of courses. We can do that but that will equally have short comings.

jwmoz 5y ago

Maths geniuses are hardly going to be applying for John Lewis jobs.

decodebytes 5y ago
They are not asking for math geniuses?

exporectomy 5y ago

I used to be a teacher in a school system that emphasized against rote learning, knowledge memorization, and numerical calculations (for physics). Well, we did do that stuff but it could only get the student a grade D or E. The massive problem was that even the teachers didn't understand what the mysterious higher level skills we were supposed to be teaching were or how to teach or assess them. The students had no hope of fair treatment. The official assessment criteria were wholistic and wordy. Numerical grades were forbidden, as was averaging scores from multiple assessments into the final, so teachers made up some grades based on feelings, or secretly used a spreadsheet that added a little random factor to make it look non-formulaic. Anyway, point is, some modern education removes the old low-level skills (mainly memorization) but doesn't replace it with anything nor even keep the useful parts of it (eg. mental arithmetic).

nickdothutton 5y ago

The state run comprehensive education system in the UK has been a disaster.

ajdegol 5y ago

John Lewis Partnership chair Sharon White: “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said. Glass houses.

jimnotgym 5y ago

Here is some background for people not in the UK, or perhaps not familiar with how things have changed in post 16 education. I am not an expert but I am planning to employ some people under these new schemes so have been reviewing it. At 16 you can either enter more education or do an apprenticeship that includes training. Classically one might study A levels until 18 and apply for university, or go the vocational route and do an apprenticeship. Companies in the retail sector like John Lewis, created retail apprenticeships. This involves getting paid £4.30 (for reference minimum wage for an adult over 23 not on an apprenticeship is £8.91) an hour to stand at a till. The company is supposed to in return provide a qualification and allow the staff 20% of their time to study for it. The government pay for the training, although larger companies have to contribute. One might suggest that the people applying for retail apprenticeships are going to be at the lower end of academic attainment. Now I read this article, and I see John Lewis complaining that they are having to train there people they have contracted to train and are working for a pittance to get.