Conservatives Want Primary Schoolchildren to Be Taught To Work Not Live on Benefits

This is how desperate the Tories are to try to stop people claiming unemployment benefit. According to a couple of pieces in today’s I, the Tories want children in primary schools to be taught about work and careers in order to stop them claiming benefits. It says in the article on page two, Primary Children ‘to Attend Career Talks’ that

Ministers are considering proposals that would oblige children to attend careers talks before they finish primary school to help discourage them from claiming benefits in the future. The initiative will be particularly relevant in communities with high adult unemployment, but teaching unions feel careers talks at 11 could be “too much too soon”.

This was all outlined in a speech given by Sam Gyimah, the education and childcare minister, to the Westminster Employment Forum. The article, Children in Primary School ‘Should Learn about Work’, by Oliver Wright, gives further information, and begins

Primary school children are to be taught by the time they leave junior school at age 11 that “in the future they will work”, under new proposals being considered by ministers.

Information and talk about future careers will be included in the curriculum while at the same time teachers will be expected to act early make clear connections between reading, writing and arithmetic and decent jobs in the future. Ministers believe the new initiative will be particularly relevant in communities with high adult unemp0loyment as part of a wider effort to end the cycle of benefit dependency.

However, teaching unions have expressed some concern at the plan, qu4estioning whether careers talks at 11 are a case of “too much too soon”.

The newspaper also gives the criticisms of the proposal by Christine Blower, the general secretary of the NUT. The I states that she

said while she agreed that it was good for children to learn about work, she had concerns. “There is a danger of ‘too much too soon’ in what is proposed,” she said. “School should be a preparation for life, and there is no better means to achieve this than through a creative space in the curriculum for teachers to discuss issues about the outside world, including work.”

As if schoolchildren aren’t under enough pressure already to get good grades.

I also wonder where the Tories get their ideas from. Young children have always had some idea that they were going to work after leaving school, as well as generally idealistic dreams about the kind of jobs they want to do, like train drivers, scientists, police, firemen, hairdressers, pop stars, and, when the space programme was still glamorous, astronauts. I think some schools already do arrange for outsiders to come in to tell primary school children about the jobs they do. I do voluntary work at one of the local schools helping children with their reading. When I was going there the week before last, a number of children in the playground asked me if I was ‘the doctor’. I thought at first that they meant, The Doctor, and felt like saying that I might be ancient, but I’m not over a thousand years old, don’t come from a different planet, and, sadly, don’t have a TARDIS. It turns out that they meant an ordinary medical doctor. One was coming in that afternoon, along with other professionals, to tell them about the kind of work they did.

This isn’t just about preparing children for the world of work, though. It’s about getting them to internalise the Tory belief system that if you’re unemployed, then it’s all your fault. You should have studied harder at school. It also seems to be part of the belief that people are voluntarily unemployed, because they want to be scroungers. No matter how often that belief is attacked, how often it is refuted, it still doesn’t get through their thick, brutal heads. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still believe that the majority of people on the dole are there because they want to be there, because they’re lazy, or feckless.

Now it strikes me that the most powerful disincentive to trying anything at school is simply the lack of available jobs when you leave. To some children it may well seem that there is no point in working as hard as possible, if it will do them absolutely no good in the end. And the incessant testing schoolchildren are made to go through could also act as a disincentive. If you’re told you’re no good at reading, or mathematics, at a young age, it might stop some children trying to improve if they somehow get the impression that this will never happen. The school at which my mother taught also used to test children regularly, but this was intended to be diagnostic only, to show where the children needed more work in order to improve.

This latest proposal by Gyimah and other, unnamed ‘ministers’, is all about getting children to internalise Tory ideology. That the state will not provide jobs or welfare benefits, and unemployment is due purely to personal failure, not their disastrous handling of the economy based on an economic theory that deliberately sets an unemployment rate at 6 per cent. It should be thrown out, along with them.

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