Wednesday 16 May 2018

Qualifications, who needs them?



At this point, half way through the MA and half way through life, I have much experience (too much fucking experience) with education.

When my landlady said she wanted to retrain and do a 'Post Compulsory PGCE' , I looked up the fees. Nearly 10 grand.   No bursary (because it's 'post compulsory').  

You can get a job teaching without paying for a 10 GRAND, 12 MONTH PGCE. At least my MA is in something I love, not just to get a job.

 It seems to me actually immoral to charge this much for a vague-ish year long course, which is just about getting a job. Basically it is rinsing people for all they are worth who are trying to find work.

 (when I did my PGCE it was £6000 for the year and they gave you a bursary). 

You learn how to teach by teaching, so you can get qualified at the same time as doing the actual job.

Apart from clearly vocational jobs, like medicine or architecture, I don't think most degrees are worth the paper they're written on.  

I'm sitting in my current job surrounded by people who didn't go to college and get degrees, and that has been the case since I started working in the 1990s. 20 odd years of working in a million different jobs, none of which needed a qualification.

Even with teaching, I could have just got on a teaching programme to qualify in a school, rather than gone to college to pay for it.

Get the employer to pay for it, that's my motto.

I wonder if there's a time coming when people will start to bypass the education system altogether and just teach themselves what they need. It's clearly broken.

2 comments:

  1. You're right. But then you always are. x

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    1. Aw, thank you. Hope you are still enjoying yours xx

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