The Sunday Times recently had a shock-horror story about medical graduates starting their careers burdened with £100,000 of student debt. The BMA wants to save young doctors from the anxiety of such crippling debt. But brief reflection reveals this to be not quite the problem it appears.
Firstly, a medical degree course is longer than your average BA, so it costs more. Secondly, term time for a medical student is normally 45 weeks instead of the usual 30, giving less time for vacation jobs. Thirdly, the average GP’s income of over £100,000 (September 2010 figures from the NHS Information Centre) would indicate that doctors are paying around a year’s salary for their degree.
Figures for an average graduate salary vary, but Barclays recently came up with £25,353 including those high-earning medics. So it appears that, pro rata, a medical student’s debt might possibly be a bit higher than average, or it might not.
My youngest son graduated three years ago; two years later, ‘Niner’, one of his friends, qualified as a doctor, owing around £45,000 in student loans. In his first job, as a very junior hospital doctor, he is already earning over three times as much as his non-medical student contemporaries, some of whom are still without permanent employment. Incidentally, he was called ‘Niner’ to reflect his regular consumption of pints of beer. So, with a guaranteed high salary for life, paying one year’s salary, or in Niner’s case about six months’ salary, for your degree, looks a pretty good deal.
There was a similar shock-horror story when several newspapers revealed the scandal of bogus special needs. The Daily Mail headline was a classic: ‘Up to 750,000 “special needs” pupils are just badly taught.’ This was from the paper that brought you last year’s sensation, ‘Record one in five pupils has special educational needs – but are schools “fiddling numbers”?’
In a changing world, the Daily Mail’s contempt for teachers is a reassuring constant. The Mail article quoted Janet Thompson, of Ofsted, saying, in grammar that demands an English teacher’s red pen, ‘We did find examples of young people identified as having behavioural, emotional and social difficulties who, if you unpicked the reasons for that, were actually around inability to read and write.’
Hmm. I’m clearly out of touch and too literal-minded, but ‘inability to read and write’ in a secondary school sounds to me as if it just might indicate a special educational need. There were lots of responses to the article such as, ‘My son has ADHD / Asperger’s Syndrome / Dyslexia etc.’ but the best was from David Cheshire of Dorset, who wrote, ‘I’d love [Ofsted] inspectors to step up, stand in front of a class, and show us how it should be done. While we are waiting for this, here is a literacy exercise: re-arrange “hold”, “don’t”, “breath” and “your”.’
The ‘record’ figure of one in five pupils with a special need comes not from teachers fiddling numbers to get more cash or show better results or even from over-anxious parents, but from the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, published in 1978. This stated that, ‘up to one child in five is likely to require some form of special educational help at some time during his school career’. The subsequent 1981 Education Act was ably steered through Parliament by the famously wishy-washy liberal Dr Rhodes Boyson, a former headteacher of a secondary modern school in Lancashire and a boys’ comprehensive in London. For his efforts to uphold schools’ right to use the cane, he was called the Minister for Flogging and The Wackford Squeers of the Conservative Party. He is justly remembered for such wisdom as, ‘crime has increased parallel with the number of social workers’ and ‘if we could wipe out homosexual practices, then Aids would die out’. Even Dr Boyson saw no scandal in the likelihood of one in five children with a special need.
Now we have the news that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is genetic, so next time you hand out yet another detention to your favourite loony, you can feel guilt and shame for punishing him for a genetic attribute, like his hair or his height. Except that, if you read the research behind the headline, you find that 57 out of 366 children with ADHD had the genetic variant allegedly linked to the illness (about 15.7%). So over 84% of ADHD children had no sign of any genetic variance from normal.
I’m writing this before the budget announcements, and I’m betting that current stories about fiddling SEN figures and inappropriate categorisations have more to do with budget cuts than with inappropriate teaching.