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The Daily Mail places all the nuances of life into two clearly defined categories: good or bad. The public sector falls into the bad category and is currently being subjected to consistent Mail vitriol; whilst small businesses are good and the Mail has therefore campaigned valiantly for government aid. Today small businesses have received (according to the Mail) a ‘£1bn tax u-turn’, so the Mail is naturally happy. Goody for them. I happen to be a public sector worker working for a large FE college in Wales and rather than celebrating a ‘A series of inflation busting pay rises… at a time when private firms are freezing wages and cutting jobs’ I instead spent this afternoon listening to a ‘sustainability plan’ for keeping the college open. You see across Wales colleges have received a funding cut of 7.43%, so rather than lavishing staff with pay rises and perks they are in fact proposing substantial staff losses.
Not that any of this would concern the Mail or its readers. Whilst they are perfectly happy to demonise the young, they do not seem to be even vaguely interested in the reasons why a certain section of society struggle to integrate or achieve – in fact the mere suggestion that young people could be helped with support, understanding or genuine prospects is no doubt the misguided product of ‘Guardianistas’ or ‘loony-liberals’. No, far easier to just criticise or laugh at those raised in extreme poverty, in families that have never worked, in towns that are crumbling around them - just as the industries that once helped them thrive did when Thatcher went to war against them in the 80s. No, the Mail is happy to criticise ‘dumbing-down’ and the poor state of education in the UK, but never stop to think that perhaps the root cause of this is the fact that education is chronically underfunded – the FE sector in particular. Perhaps the Mail would like to visit an FE college, meet the hourly-paid lecturers who are so grateful to the crumbs offered to them that they perform many unpaid roles in the college (with no pension ‘gold-plated’ public sector pension to look forward to either). Meet the many fractional members of staff who constantly have to move from one subject to another to try and make up an equivalent full time salary. Or perhaps they would rather just churn out the same shit each year homogenising the whole public sector as being a virtually unnecessary waste of their ‘hard-earned money’. If the Mail attempting to perform journalism they might have actually spent time reporting on funding settlements across the FE and HE sector in Wales, and actually raised the profile of the struggle Welsh Colleges and Universities face trying to provide young people with a decent chance in life. But they don’t. Instead they find time and space to print large photos of Nigella Lawson’s face because she looks –to them – to be a little tired. They could have questioned why the Welsh Assembly cost £75 million to run 1999-2000 but spiralled to £364 million in 2006-07, or why an obscure university in Wales received a budget increase of 47.5% whilst the majority faced budget cuts. They could have questioned how a Welsh Assembly that spent: £70 million on a meeting room and £300,000 on modern art to furnish it; that has spent another £11.7 million on a building in Merthyr Tydfil (not including the lease purchase of £1.254 million for 15 years); that has wasted an additional £40 million since 2003 'promoting' the Welsh language; is insisting that Colleges reduce their courses, cut their staff numbers and reduce student services because they are not efficient enough. The next time the Mail decides to run an article on the dumbing-down of education because X-student is taking X-course, perhaps they should look into what course options are actually available to that student. Thanks to these latest budgets cuts students in some of the poorest areas in Wales will have far fewer options than students had last year. The first courses to be cut in these situations are those that attract the fewest numbers, and in many colleges that means almost no provision of A-levels from September in some areas. The Mail may scoff at vocational courses, but thanks to the unique way FE is funded, bums on seats = funding. If 100 students turned up and wanted to do a course on how to chew chewing gum, you could be sure that the college would find a lecturer and run a course on it. If 10 students applied for A-level English the college wouldn’t run the course and the lecturer would be out of a job. Perhaps in many ways the Mail supports the education cuts because it raises the likelihood that the next generation of ignorant, uneducated and intellectually vacant Mail readers will be created. |
