Friday, March 06, 2009

Jeff Randall Gets It Wrong

If someone like Randall can't even get simple HE policy right, then what chance for other commentators.

In today's Telegraph, Randall has an entertaining knockabout pop at education policy, and comes out with the depressingly common fallacy:

Yet Labour clings to its ludicrous target of driving 50 per cent of British school-leavers into university


Setting aside whether an HE participation target is 'ludicrous' or not, as any fule kno, that's not the policy.

Once again with feeling,

The policy is not to 'drive 50% of school leavers into university'.

It's for 50% of 18 to 30 year olds to have had some experience of higher education.

Jeff Randall is an experienced and influential journalist, and here he is reciting a popular, simple factual error that any graduate could have researched in a couple of minutes.

Yes, the standard of critiques of education standards remains depressingly low.