The reality of the political drive to privatise education in England is becoming real.

Young people have traditionally had access to careers guidance and advice through a national careers service, although under the past Labour government this was reorganised into a series of private companies, generally called Connexions, that bid for contracts based on client services.  Now, despite some requirements for schools to provide careers advice, the central contracts for Connexions services have been withdrawn.

Nearly every carers organisation has announced major redundancies, a number have simply collapsed. Most of the remaining services have rebranded as CX instead of the clumsy Connexions name.

However new business models remain elusive. Whilst competition for remaining public funding is fierce, many of the companies have formed alliances to bid for resources. Most are trying to sell services but this is resulting in an over crowded market, especially as media and other organisations start moving in.

Many are also considering offering paid for services. One careers company in south east England is now targeting their web site at parents and carers, offering careers interviews for their child at £50 or a psychometric test for £90 with a follow up meeting to look at the results for a further £30.

It can be argued that the quality of careers provision has been variable in the past, not helped by frequent changes in policy and funding mechanisms. And I suppose the level of charges will certainly put pressure on the organisations to provide high quality services. Yet access to these services will now be dependent on income and it is likely that the clients who have gained most from careers services in the past – NEETs and those with low educational attainments – will be the very ones with parents unable to afford such services.

And I fear this will also be so for other sections of education as privatisation moves forward.

It is important to note that the changes described above only apply to England – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have maintained a public careers service.

RadioActive Europe project which will work with different groups of young people and adults to develop internet radio and set up a European Internet Radio hub kicks off in November. But we are already working on a RadioActive project in London, funded by the Nominet Trust and I am in contact with a number of projects and initiatives around Europe using using radio and video channels with young people and adults.

One of the biggest problems for these project is music. Well it isn’t music as such that is the problem. Access to music has never been easier. I am nostalgic  for those long hours I spent browsing in record shops, and taking hard choices as to which album to spend my hard earned pennies on. Now my phone has more music than was ever contained in my much loved collection of LPs.

The problem is the licensing of commercial music for streaming over the radio or for use in downloads of radio programmes. And of course many young people want to play their favourite music. It is a form of curation and self expression. From talking to many musicians, they too want their music to be played on internet radio. It is a way of reaching new audiences who might buy their music.

But the licensing, controlled essentially by the music industry (and certainly not the musicians) is a total mess. I ploughed through the UK licensing documents last week to try to make some sense out of what we can and can’t do through RadioActive. And this is what I came up with.

“1. For broadcasts that include non Creative Commons licensed material

a) requires a sign off by whoever owns the music – e.g. a friends band

OR

b) A PRS For Music licence and a PPL licence.

In the case of (b)

1. We cannot offer the download of programmes or files containing any part of any Sound Recordings. This includes Podcasting.

2. We cannot loop the (streamed) replay within a 3 hour time period.

3. No more than

– 3 Sound Recordings from a particular album

–  2 Sound Recordings from a particular album

– 4 Sound Recordings by one particular artist

– 3 Sound Recordings by one particular artist consecutively

Assuming – reasonably I think – that we do not go over 270000 performances per year the 2012 licence fee for PPL’s Small Webcaster Licence is £189.41 (plus VAT).

If we played say 8 recordings per hour this would provide us with 649 listener hours per week.

We would have to provide quarterly a Webcasting Report detailing the total number of Listener Hours (i.e. the aggregate duration that all users have streamed the service), and the average number of Sound Recordings played per hour for the quarter and (if they ask for it) –  a Programme Report detailing all of the Sound Recordings used during a given day’s programming.
We also need to know which countries listeners come  from (via web analytics).

The PRS license is far less restrictive costing £118  for 118000 streams. it also allows downloading.

How could that work? For instance cover versions of copyrighted music can be downloaded but commercial recordings cannot.

So in summary (assuming we purchase both licenses) broadcasters have three options

a) To play friends original music with permissions (obtained on paper or by electronic media)

b) To play cover versions of versions by friends with permission

c) To play music covered by a creative commons license

In these three cases we can offer unlimited streaming and downloads

2. To include commercial music in which case we cannot offer for download but can offer on looped streaming subject to conditions detailed above

I think we should purchase the licenses and then explain conditions to broadcasters to make their decision.”

It is all a bit of a nightmare. Jamendo.com is an increasingly rich source of Creative Commons licensed music (although I am told even this is contested in Portugal). And I hope through the RadioActive projects that we can start recording original music. But themess of licensing is stigling creativity and preventing many musicians from getting their music held. All this in the name of an industry which has spectacularly failed to keep pace with changing technologies and changes in the social ways in which we listen to and share music.

Everyday I get invitations to conferences. Most can only be called academic spam. You know the ones. Conferences you are not remotely interested in. Conferences with about 30 or 40 strands spanning the knowledge of the world. Conferences with a so called academic committee with around 50 members. Indeed I have even ended up on one or tow of those without my knowledge!

And then just occasionally I get something which leaps out at me. So it was when I received an email from John Traxler entitled “Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response. the workshop is being held at the Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is ‘an established atypical scientific event’ focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations.

The call for proposals is as follows.

Background

The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.

Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/  & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including

• economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;.
• environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport
• the crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions
• socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture;  the increasing concentration and centralisation of internet discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and complexity of digital divides;  the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study, and knowledge transfer
• the dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts

and specifically, in relation to TEL;

• TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?

TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both.  Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement are all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the underlying malaise.

The Call

The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges for TEL in the coming years.

One of the outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal; other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are possible if there is a consensus.

Please submit an individual or collective two-page position paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall balance and coherence of the programme.

Proposals should be sent to John Traxler by 17 August.

The Guardian newspaper reports that in the UK figures released by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) reveal more than 20,000 students – around one in 10 – who left university last summer were out of work six months later. This figure has almost doubled in the past four years, as has the number of graduates in “elementary occupations.”

Half of university students are willing to work for free to kickstart their career, while 40% said they would take a minimum wage position, according to research carried out by studentbeans.com.

I have worked on a series of projects with colleagues at the University of Bremen looking at a  pedagogic approach to work placements or internships and at the added value to students, universities and companies.

However, our approach is very different to the neo-liberal idea of unpaid labour as a pre-requisite for finding employment. Firstly we have been trying to integrate internships in companies within the curriculum. Secondly we have been looking at better coodination between companies and universities and at teh design of ‘rich’ internships in terms of learning experiences. At the same time we have been examining how interns can undertake projects and work which brings extra value to the company especially in terms of innovation. Our assumption is that students are paid a living wage – either in the form of a student grant or through the company itself.

It strikes me the way the UK situation is evolving everyone is a loser. In terms of teaching and learning, work experience is not integrated into the curriculum – but rather comes as a somewhat random bolt on. Students – who already often have a substantial overdraft – are forced to work for free. Companies may be happy in that they are getting something for nothing – free skilled labour. But in terms of access to the best potential employees, the field in limited to those who can afford to work for free. Furthermore, it seems that they are using graduates for lower level tasks, rather than seeking to develop innovation and professional development through better integration in higher educations systems.

As the Guardian reports, Ben Lyons, from Intern Aware, has said the new phenomenon of unpaid work is a short-sighted business practice. “As well as pricing out smart, hardworking young people, it’s bad for businesses who lose out on talent, and risk the consequences of being in breach of employment law.”

One of the results of the recession in Europe has been spiralling youth unemployment. VETNET, the vocational education and training network of the European Research Association, is planning a debate around youth unemployment at its annual conference in Seville in September.

As a contribution to that debate, I will be looking at some of the data about youth unemployment.

The main comparative data available is the European Labour Force Survey. and fortunately Google provide access to this data through its excellent Public Data Explorer site. This interactive charts shows the changes in youth unemployment in the different European Member States since 1983.

This is a great time lapse video by Harru no’ stæsj (best viewed in the slowed down mode). It fast forwards from ca 1000 AD until 2003, showing Europe’s shifting borders, alliances, unions, territories, occupied land etc.

Stuart A Yeates commented on Facebook that it needs to have every entity linked to the appropriate page in wikipedia. I can think of lots of other ideas that could be built on top of this – be great if Harru no’ stæsj were to release the original photos somewhere. (Thanks to @rjnicolson  for the link).

This week Dave Boyle looked at co-ops in the world of professional football in an article in the Guardian. Thought it might be interesting to republish an article I wrote together with my Werder fan buddy Lars Heinemann some eight or so years ago for the Welsh socialist newspaper, Seren (sadly not longer in print).

“What’s wrong with the beautiful game

I am a football fan. I started out at the age of six as a Swindon Town Fan in the old third division At first I have a foldings tool to stand on and when I got bigger my father nailed two paint cans onto a plank of wood so I could see from the terraces. When I was a bit bigger still I used to go down to the County Ground three hours before kick off to secure myself one of the precious places on the railings at the front.

I  followed Swindon until I went to university at the age of 18. I was there in Wembley when we beat Arsenal in the League Cup Final – now famous as the formative point in Nick Hornby’s life. After a couple of years – it takes that long – I switched by loyalties to Swansea City – and followed the heady rise from the fourth division to top of the first – and then back down again. After brief – and unsatisfactory flirtations with Nottingham Forest and Manchester City – I moved to Pontypridd. It took a few years before I could switch my loyalties to rugby at the House of Pain. And then on to Bremen. Once more I had a passing curiosity in the local team – Werder – but it took a couple of years before I called myself a fan.

Why so long? If I just wanted to  see good football I would never have followed Swindon or Swansea. And I would have been down to the Weser Stadium like a shot to watch the top Bundesliga clubs in action.

Being a football fan is more than an appreciation for the aesthetics of the game or a leisure time activity. Being a fan is about identification – with the club, with the team, with the stadium and above all with the community. The community of players, of supporters and of the place where you live. Football fans are the lifeblood of football.
But something’s gone wrong. It stared in the 1980s. Ground capacities were reduced to allow the introduction of corporate boxes and posh seating. Prices have gone up and up. Football tried to change its image. It wishes to be no longer a working class game but family entertainment. TV money has meant the richer get richer whist small clubs rely on the scraps. Players wages have gone through the roof. It is hard for fans to identify any longer with player lifestyles. Football has fallen prey to the marketing experts. The big clubs have become global marketing enterprises – and the community no longer matters.

There have been some very good sociological studies of what it going on. For those interested look at the work of Taylor and of Giulianotti . Taylor talks of the commodification of the game whilst Giulianotti  identifies a new more recent phase he call hypercommodification.

What the researchers mean by this is that football is no longer a game for the fans but is a commodity to be bought and sold on the global market. Giulianotti says:

The broad trend in sports identification is away from the supporter model (with its hot traditional identification with local clubs) and toward the more detached, cool, consumer-orientated identification of the flâneur.

My translation of flaneur is poser – you know the people who like the idea of going to the match – not the real footy fan for which the  game is a matter of happiness or despair. The problem is that the flaneur will be very happy at Chelsea but certainly will never turn out to see Swindon or Swansea – or Wrexham for that matter – on a wet Tuesday night.

But our game is being taken away form us in another – and more literal – sense. the ownership of the game is changing. In the UK we never really owned the clubs. Post war capitalism sold us a con – local business people made up the (private) boards of the clubs with perhaps one seat for the supporters clubs. But at least they were local and we liked to think that the local community was in control. the picture is very different now. Clubs like Man U are stock market ventures. Football is traded like any other commodity. Other clubs like Chelsea are the play things of rich Mafiosi seeking to spirit their ill gotten loot gained from raiding the Russian peoples’ property.  The Champion’s League is increasingly a franchise of the few wealthy clubs able to afford a squad of elite galacticos.

Is there any hope? Ever the optimist, I think there is. firstly commodification hasn’t been a complete success. Look – as we all do with glee – at the mess its got Leeds into.

And in Germany Dortmund and Shalke have followed the same route and with the same results -teetering on the verge of bankruptcy as their stock market price falls and their team under-performs for yet another season. Wolfsburg is in the pocket of VW and Hertha Berlin receive massive payments from Bertelsmaan. But small clubs still can buck the trend – Werder Bremen did the double in Germany last year and it certainly wasn’t the TV moguls plan for Porto top win the Champions League or, that matter, for Greece to win the European Championship.

There are alternative forms of club ownership. Whilst some clubs like Dortmund have gone down the separate road in Germany, others, such as Werder Bremen, still preserve the traditional structure of the club being owned by its members with elected officials. For that matter even super clubs such as barcelona are owned by the members, as is the traditional model in Spain and Latin America.

In Werder’s case the club is more than just the Bundesliga team. Werder support a wide range of different sports – from handball to chess and well as over 30 football teams. And while Werder has undoubtedly gained a fair few flaneurs since its rise to success the majority of supporters are true fans.

Another side of the German game I find fascinating is the alternative league. Local football pundit Lars Heinemann explains: “The wild leagues are a child of the seventies, when members of anti nuclear, ecological or whatever groups decided they didn’t want to play in clubs any more. There were some attempts to create alternative clubs with the interesting effect that one could witness the German football association trying everything they could to avoid teams with weird names, normally involving the typical eastern block words like Dynamo, Torpedo or Locomotive, to become official clubs.

But first of all these teams played each other, and as numbers increased, they founded their own leagues at a local level. And these are still alive and kicking, the different local champions even playing out a German championship on a more or less regular basis. To give you an idea about the name thing: the multiple German champions from Bremen are called Vibrator Moscovskaja. Organisation goes as far as necessary – there are agreed football rules (passive offside almost everywhere excluded), although the teams are generally allowed to agree upon almost every change they want before the matches. Referees may be there if there is somebody wanting to take over the job and nobody objects – in case of disagreements and absence of such a person, the rules of the Bielefeld league in the Westfalen region e.g. state that ‘the team which in case of an argument first leaves the pitch, is declared loser’ – severe disagreements may be settled by the plenum of all teams. And it works. It’s a lot of fun and the quality of football sometimes is surprisingly high – perhaps due to another rule (again from the Bielefeld league): §16 Technically bad players wearing white or red shoes may be laughed at. “
Football can be saved. How? By that old working class adage of getting organised. Fans have to build their own organisations, fight against corporate ownership, take over the running of the clubs. OK – it won’t be easy. Is it important? Isn’t it just taking effort away from the things that really matter like stopping the US war crimes in Iraq. I think it is important. Cultural identity is central to working class and socialist politics. Football is one of our major outlets for cultural identity. Don’t let them take it away from us.

Thanks to Lars Heinemann for help with this article. He asked that the following biographical note be added. “Lars Heinemann lives in Bremen. Highlights of his football career were the eternal fights between Torpedo Todtenhausen and Mulo Minden and the Windlicht drinking afterwards.”

There have been a series of initiatives over the last year or so to kick off a new debate about education. In part these have been driven by the student protests in many countries  following the economic collapse and recession. But the debate has largely focused on academic education – at school and university level.
Sadly there has been little consideration of vocational education and training policies. Yet with youth unemployment soaring to over 50 per cent in some European countries, education and training policy needs a fresh focus. And education and training cannot be examined in isolations. Education and training is affected by and in turn affects economic and labour market policies.

Neo-liberal, market driven policies have resulted in the present high levels of youth unemployment. Yet the politicians’ answers to the crisis – austerity and cutbacks and further privatisation – will only make matters worse.

The recent elections in France, Greece and Germany have led to new talk of a strategy for European growth. Any such strategy needs to include measures to promote education and training and to reduce youth unemployment. This means we need an alternative to the present unimaginative and failed European policies on education and training. Such an alternative can only come from within the education and training community. Yet sadly, there is no natural forum for such a discussion to take place.

We welcome your ideas.

CATASTROIKA – ENGLISH SUBTITLES von infowar
Do you want to understand what is happening in Greece. This is a must watch video. “On April 26, 2012 at 20:00” says the press release “let’s turn off the TV and turn to an alternative source of information. The creators of Debtocracy, a documentary viewed by millions of people around the world, present their new production, entitled CATASTROIKA, on the website www.catastroika.com.

The documentary uncovers the forthcoming results of the current sell-off of the Greek public assets, demanded in order to face the country’s enormous sovereign debt. Turning to the examples of London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Rome, CATASTROIKA predicts what will happen, if the model imposed in these areas is imported in a country under international financial tutelage.

Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Klein, Luis Sepulveda, Ken Loach and Greg Palast talk about the austerity measures, the Greek government as well as the attack against Democracy on Europe, after the general spreading of the financial crisis. Academics and specialists like Dani Rodrik, Alex Callinicos, Ben Fine, Costas Douzinas, Dean Baker and Aditya Chakrabortty present unknown aspects of the privatization programs in Greece and abroad.

Just like Debtocracy, CATASTROIKA is co-produced by the public, which contributed both financially and with ideas to its creation. The documentary will be available free of charge, under creative commons license. High-resolution files will be available for TV and cinema broadcasts in various languages”

Since I wrote my last article on ‘What is the answer to youth unemployment?‘, elections in Greece, France and Germany have seen a decisive rejection of European austerity politics. This is hardly surprising. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that ever deeper cuts and austerity, whilst ultimately cutting the real cost of labour and thus boosting corporate profits, are unlikely to boost growth, jobs or individual prosperity in any way.

The EU reaction has been to call for a new strategy for growth, although details of what that might entail are pretty hazy.

As I wrote in the previous article, one of the main results of the recession has been a massive increase in youth unemployment and, in particular, a substantial increase in graduate unemployment. At the same time companies are increasingly requiring work experience prior to employment resulting in increasing pressure for new graduates to undertake low paid of unpaid internships. Pretty clearly new policies are needed for education and training but there seems little public discussion of this, let alone of what such policies might be. The prevailing EU policy is more of the same and try harder.

To rethink policies for education and training requires looking back at how we got where we are now. And it requires looking at more than just education and training policy – we need to examine the relationship between education and training, labour market policy and economic policy. here I am going to look at just a few aspects of such policies and hope to develop this a little more in the next week or so.

For the last decade – or even longer – economic policy has been driven by a liberal free market approach. In turn labour market policy has similarly been based on deregulating labour markets and removing protection for workers (interestingly, Germany, the one country in Europe where the economy is growing, has probably one of the highest levels of labour market regulation). At a European level, education and training policy has been dominated by a drive to make qualifications more transparent and thus comparable in order to promote the mobility of labour. Employers have been given a greater role in determining the content and form of qualifications. Employability has become a key theme, with individuals being made responsible for keeping their knowledge and skills up to date, often as considerable personal expense. A number of countries have tried to liberalise education and training systems by reducing subsidies for public education and introducing individual voucher schemes.

At them same time the rather ridiculous EU Lisbon declaration, declared the aim to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”, by 2010. Obviously this failed. But in line with such thinking most countries in Europe saw the way forward as moving from old fashioned vocational training to mass university education to cater for the demand for the thousands of new knowledge jobs. These jobs never materialised (except in countries such as the UK in the deregulated financial services sector which ultimately triggered the economic meltdown). As Wikipedia notes:

Much of the initial theorizing about the advent of a fundamentally new era in which economic activity is increasingly ‘abstract’, i.e., disconnected from land, labour, and physical capital (machines and industrial infrastructure) was associated with the ‘business management’ literature of the ‘new economy’ NASDAQ bubble, which collapsed in 2001 (but slowly recovered, albeit, in a leaner format, throughout the 2000s). This literature was initially known more for its hyperbole and faddishness than for its academic/empirical integrity.

In reality, many of the new degree courses were vocational in orientation – such as in the new Universities in the UK or in the Fachshule in Germany. These courses were either for new occupations – for instance in computing or simply replaced traditional vocational qualifications. It is arguable whether such a policy was financially sustainable or even desirable. It is certainly arguable whether an academic programme of learning is more effective for such subjects than traditional forms of work related learning.

To further policies associated with the obsession with the knowledge economy were the raising of the school leaving age and the so called lifelong learning policy. Longer schooling was needed, it was argued, to cope with the needs for higher levels of knowledge and skills for the knowledge rich jobs of the future. And lifelong learning was needed for the learning economies in which knowledge is the crucial resource and learning is the most important process.

At them same time the EU and national governments identified a number of key sectors which were felt to be crucial and which were then promoted through he education systems. In the late 1990s, there were dire predications of a massive shortage of computer programmers which never came to pass. And in the last five years or so EU and national governments have promoted the importance of STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths as key to the future of employment and economies. Such priorities were based on a business driven policy of skills-matching promoting the “involvement of businesses in forecasting skills needs, through an employers’ survey tool and qualitative studies on the skills needs of business” (EU New Skills, New Jobs policy).

It is clear such policies have failed  and exhorting governments and agencies to try harder will go nowhere. What is needed is a fundamental rethink. As Professor Phillip Brown points out, the Lisbon Strategy was based on the idea that the technological lead then enjoyed by advanced industrial economies would be maintained with an increasing polarisation between highly skilled and well paid jobs in those countries and low paid low skilled manufacturing jobs being undertaken in developing countries. For a variety of reasons, including rapid technology transfer and a massive expansion of public education systems in countries like China and India, this hasn’t happened.

Indeed it may be the very manufacturing sector which was downgraded by EU policy which is the future for jobs in Europe especially in Small and Medium enterprises. For all the talk of high tech, knowledge based jobs. The construction industry is the biggest industrial employer in Europe with 13,9 million operatives making up 6,6% of the total employment in EU27. In addition it has a substantial influence on other industries represented by a multiplier effect. According to a study by the European Commission, 1 person working in the construction industry is responsible for 2 further persons working in other sectors. Therefore, it is estimated that 41,7 million workers in the EU depend, directly or indirectly, on the construction sector. Out of the 3,1 million enterprises 95% are SMEs with fewer than 20 and 93% with fewer than 10 operatives (pdf file). And manufacturing makes up almost 25 percent of the German economy, as opposed to only 11 percent in the United States. German mittelstands – small, family-owned and mid-size manufacturing companies – are key to the manufacturing sector. Rather than relying on university graduates for skills and knowledge, the mittelsands tend to employ graduates from the Dual apprenticeship system.

Indeed, many countries are promoting apprenticeships as one way out of the present mess. The present English coalition government boasts of the increase in the number of apprenticeship places. But in truth most of these places are apprenticeships only in name. The supermarket chain, Morrisons is the largest apprenticeship provider in the UK with many apprenticeship consisting of short induction training courses. To deliver the skills and knowledge for workers in a manufacturing economy through apprenticeship requires high quality training and the active involvement of employers and train unions alike. Moreover it requires social (and financial) recognition fo the value of apprenticeships. that seems a long way away.

To overcome the present crisis of youth unemployment requires a series of radical and interlinked policy initiative involving economic and labour market policies rather than just tinkering with education and training curricula. At a macro econ0omic level it means developing manufacturing industry rather than merely relying on financial services and the high tech knowledge industry sector. It means making sure companies provide high quality training, rather than forcing individuals to be responsible for their own employability. It means making sure that those who have gained vocational qualifications have opportunities to use those skills and knowledge and are properly rewarded for their learning. It means freeing up capital for starting small companies. It means proper financing for vocational schools and providing alternatives to young people rather than just more school and expensive university courses. It means abandoning skills matching and planning for future societal skills needs.

In other words we have to abandon liberalisation and free market ideologies and to recognise that economies and employment are a social function. As such society has to plan for the future of employment and the provision of jobs for young people. Is this too much to ask?