(The bed selling one is, of course, tragic)

They’re so specialised that they actually take away from the benefits of education; a flexible workforce. If someone has managerial experience at, say, a burger bar, they should have a fair bet of transferring to a tourist attraction or shop. But with the burger bar A-level, they get marked for life as a burger manager.

However, it does work both ways – for those zones where educated people have been lost, it is up to government intervention in the form of way better education or tax breaks for companies to set up there, etc.

Finally, of course, a good education is (pretty much) a necessary but not sufficient condition to get a high-powered job – you might grumble that 1st class degree holders end up working in Tesco, but the number of people with no A-levels at all in technical or managerial jobs in the UK is awfully, awfully small…

Just one example of how the system at the moment is failing to do that: one of my daughter’s class was marked as a failure from day one at secondary school. He didn’t want to be there and found difficulties in sitting still and concentrating, and he was certainly not in any way academic. He was, though, a very good runner. Now, any sensible system would have spotted that and concentrated on building on his ability, which would have given him more self-esteem and probably made him calmer in lessons. But it didn’t, so after five years of suspensions and mutual antagonism he leaves school with no qualifications and a hatred of education. He’s fundamentally a good person, but he will probably carry on disrupting society in one way or another, and he is typical of the problem we are discussing.

As someone who is generally supportive of immigration, I’m still aghast at Brown’s policy, which seems to be using immigration to hide mass unemployment because he can’t be arsed to help the unemployed into work. If we are ever going to compete in the global economy, we need to get out of the rut we’re in.

And I agree with Anax, computer illiteracy should be dealt with. Additionally, innumeracy and financial illiteracy are problems. They are seen as respectable, but they shouldn’t be because they drag people down and they drag this country down.

If we are ever going to get anywhere we have to overcome Thatcher and Brown’s myopia.

“I’m hopeless with computers.”

Nowadays, it might as well be “I’m hopeless with pens”. It sounds cute, but it closes the door on virtually all high-earning jobs and a majority of low-earning ones. Not to mention most education and training. We should consider I.T. illiteracy as a distinct problem to be tackled, rather than just lumped with other ‘skills’. A manifesto pledge to reduce I.T. illiteracy would make us look spiffy and modern, whilst at the same time addressing a cause of unemployment.

It’s ironic that Tony ‘hopeless with computers’ Blair could be prime minister, whilst an ordinary person who can’t use a computer would struggle to get a job in a shop.

This is probably not an exhaustive list of the groups we should be concerned about. There are no easy solutions to tackling the problems that these groups pose/suffer. The consequence of their situation is that they and their children are likely to suffer from low self-esteem and to have few expectations or aspirations. They will therefore be unlikely to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that they are presented with. The route out of poverty and deprivation most commonly (although not invariably) starts with education, but if you come from a background which is hostile to education, which all too many children do today, you are doomed to get nothing out of school and to end up even more alienated than you were to start with.

Anyway, the consequences of the “Right to Buy” is that many of the houses on the estate are privately owned and let out to people on housing benefit. So you have one house let out by the council to people in need, and next door let out privately to people in need with the rent paid by Housing Benefit. The privately let one has a rent three times that of the one which is still council owned, though it is otherwise identical. We the taxpayer are shelling out that extra rent to make pure profit for the private owner, while the tenant is trapped as s/he is never going to get a job which would pay that rent – it is pointless working as any extra income is taken away in reduction of housing benefit.

Of course not all of the poor can actually become rich (though we can hope to make everyone richer over time), and so of course equality of opportunity is not enough (and very difficult to attain nonetheless), but they must be given a fighting chance, otherwise we condemn that underclass of which you speak to the dustbin of history – forever – and that’s not right.

Yes, there are some people who will spend their lives in low-paid jobs and want no more. There should be a safety net, such as a national minimum wage. But yes, people should be discouraged from existing in this way. The main reason being that unskilled work simply isn’t there in the way it was in the 1960s. In those days, it was acceptable for people to leave school totally illiterate (and it did happen: the “things were better in my day” brigade are as totally wrong as usual, illiteracy was actually more common in the old times, it just wasn’t noticed) and go to work in a factory.

But it won’t do now.

I think we should have a market economy in a global world. But we’d better make damn sure we can handle themselves.

This and the environment are my most passionate beliefs

The ‘upper income tax disincentive’ made me laugh. What planet is she on? In my experience managers can take on as much extra responsibility as they want – they will get very little extra money for it.
currently doing 4 ‘redundant’peoples jobs.

If we really want people to be able to move from those sorts of jobs into the lower-middle classes, then we need to make sure that the people at the very bottom can get the education and training they need *whilst still managing to live* in order to climb a rung. If you look at the lower-middle class jobs, then the people in those don’t need extra qualifications so much as specialist training in things like Prince, SAP, accountancy, etc, to get into higher-paid roles. The middle class on up can figure it out for themselves.

So what we really need is an education system that is massively subsidized at the point of use for occupational courses (perhaps paid for by zero-interest loans that are dependent on course completion – lots of FE courses have enormous dropout rates) and a basic income that allows people to take time out of the workforce in order to develop their skills.

I have also thought that there is a lot of merit in Ackerman & Alstott’s proposed “Stakeholder grants” in which every adult on the age maturity receives a grant of ~£40,000 to do with as they please. This lump sum would make a huge difference to social mobility, since it would guarantee a University (or equivalent) degree for anyone who wanted one, or provide startup capital for a business, or put down a deposit on a house to reduce mortgage costs / money “lost” through rental.

You talk about incentivisng work through tax breaks but missing from your piece is the need to incentivise work by providing for a balance enviroment between the rights of employees and employers. Also, education has a role to play in this too by developing people in the direction they want to go.

A diverse education program would include a limited core of skills that were needed as a necessity but greater diversity of choice beyond that. Also, we have had a debate on faith schools on this side which do inherently provide blocks on mobility. Blocks like that need to be removed.

A creative partnership between the state and its people is what needed. However, we must never forget the need to provide that safety net for those who are in positions where the room for manouver is limited; that safety net is part of grouding people safely so they can become more mobile.