I come from Widnes, but not lived there for decades.

I think my easy going attitude to life has rubbed off on my girls because they'll come to me for advice (I'm taking the eldest to look over a car and a lease contract this afternoon) but go to their short tempered mother for an argument, they know that if they tried to pick an argument with me it would go no further than the first sentence so in that respect their upbringing has been a doddle to me.


On your issue I have nothing more to add than what has already been said by others really except for the fact that in my dealings with hundreds of clients businesses I'm finding that English people who speak a foreign language are held at a premium and you'd be surprised at the type of business that has foreign clients or owners, even very small enterprises.

Just to give a couple of examples one of my clients is a subsiduary of the Toyota Corp and so obviously Japanese would be invaluable there, quite a few of the senior staff are Japanese who speak English but prefer their English staff to have an understanding if not a fluency in Japanese, many of the office staff and even line operators have taken advantage of the company courses in Japanese and as you'd expect the company culture is based on everything they do at Head Office even to the extent of refering to everyone by name and the prefix "san" even if they are English, your daughter would probably love it there.

And just this week I was at a production plant where most of the 200+ line staff are Polish on fairly basic wages, in the office on the day I was there was a young lad who was talking to someone on the phone for a long time in a language that was eastern european, after he had left I was told that he'd been negotiating a contract on behalf of the company with a Russian client speaking fluent Russian, the lad was Polish but when he'd spoken in the office I thought he was English so perfect was his accent, he also had a Masters degree in Engineering and until then had been employed washing vegetables on the line until they'd asked if anyone could speak a little Russian - they won't be employing him on the line anymore.

I decided to go to uni a few weeks ago, rang hull uni, got onto mechanical engineering with a foundation year, start on monday. You're all terrifying me now!

Dally, could she not try and move accommodation rather than just leave? I helped move my girlfriend in this week and while there has been some partying she's got on well with the other people in her building.

Completely agree with this. My employer is currently recruiting for Japanese speakers and having a bloody nightmare. The amount of languages we work in now is crazy and makes me wonder why the teaching of foreign lanugages in schools is such a token effort.

I think we have a bit of a cultural attitude in this country that because English is so widely spoken, everyone can adapt to us and we have no/less need to reciprocate.

Perhaps so, but it is also a sick joke that university has been opened up to any Tom, Dick or Harry with 2 Es at A level and the desire to spend 3 years on the lash.

Which of course is the essence of the issue.

To be fair, two Es would have got you into a Higher Education college even 25 years ago or possibly a Polytechnic. Having worked with plenty people over the years with degrees from these places (mostly Engineers) the quality of their education isn't noticeably different from those who got Bs and As and went to University. The only difference seems to be the numbers taking part.

Mentioned before, but worth reiterating here. Huge increases in tertiary education are, for some reason, a plank of neo-liberalism, as explained by Ha-Joon Chang in [i23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[/i.

In the last couple of decades or so, even Switzerland, which had a very small tertiary system but obviously was a successful, advanced economy, has started vastly increasing tertiary education. So it's certainly not unique to the UK.

Possibly it's partly because, once you remove grants etc, it increases education as a business, both in terms of domestic and foreign students?

But it's also linked to or been helped by moves over the last 20-25 years by many employers to demand a graduate, irrespective of the degree subject, for jobs that do not really require a degree.

It fits the ideology of unburden the state and open it up to the markets.



For that I blame the rise of the HR department. In the late eighties, the factory where I worked employed three thousand people and had a personnel department of about five. I work in a similar sized establishment now and they have a whole floor of people who spend their days dreaming up Apprentice style tasks for potential recruits.

I also share a desk with an extremely bright recent graduate who recalled going to a recruiting day for a large organisation. She was told that they were looking for two recruits out of a couple of hundred people. She waited till the first break and then headed for the car park never to return!

I was offered two E's to go Leeds Poly in 1977. Most Poly's did that sort of offer back then. In contrast when my son applied to study Physics one of the places he applied to is what was Hatfield Poly which is now the University of Hertfordshire and this was one of the highest offers of the lot! Nottingham Trent wasn't far behind either.

So do I.
In my own recent experience of our own HR department, I have given them the requirements and experience that I want applicants to be able to demonstrate, to which HR then add their own, including degrees (any subject) and then, after I've interviewed them, make the applicants spend a day jumping through various stupid hoops to see how they would shape-up in future roles they haven't frickin' applied for and don't see as their future.