By Paul Moore
You will no doubt have heard this week of the college that has been investigated in relation to student numbers and payments for said students. I do not wish to comment on this case directly (it is legal stuff and I am a coward) but I will venture the opinion that if a government initiates a system that makes educational quality and value secondary to what is essentially a system of payment by results then such outcomes should not be found surprising.
What did interest me about the incident is the idea that an educational institution might be able to operate without actually having any students. Rather than castigating colleges for this slight oversight the Department of Education, Employment or whoever is paying for the results should take a lesson from those who have hit on the solution to many of our educational problems.
There would appear to be a range of problems with our educational system at the moment, particularly in relation to skills training, which the government is continually banging on about and claiming that young people cannot read, write or work although not necessarily in that order. In no particular order these problems, according to the newspaper I read, are lack of attendance, lack of classroom discipline, poor examination results, poor work skills, and teacher and lecturer stress. Under the new system of invisible students these can all be addressed.
The attendance issue takes care of itself. If colleges operate with invisible students then the lecturer merely marks them all as present and at the end of each year sends them out a good attendance certificate. Immediately one of an employer's key worries has been addressed since they can be sure that the newly employed worker will be there every day, if only virtually. This, I can assure you, is not a new phenomenon. Lecturers who know the system well have always had virtual students and many students who were absent were always present as insurance against having your small group amalgamated with an even smaller group hence increasing your workload and making a part time member of staff redundant. In this sense it was seen as a civic duty to maintain jobs and mark absentees present. It only became a problem when a parent came looking for the absent Johnny or Jane, if the student had an accident, or if the student decided to carry out an armed hold-up on a large local supermarket in the middle of the day. As you can imagine the last of those is not something that one could make up and the lecturer concerned is still attending therapy.
Discipline problems will become a thing of the past in the new order. Colleges will be a sea of calm, the silence broken only by the snoring of staff at the front of empty rooms or the occasional rustle as the pages of the Sun are flipped over. It will be necessary for staff to initiate regular corridor skirmishes so that the person with a promotion for discipline does not forfeit their allowance but this could easily be affected by hiding the Sun or replacing it with the Times Educational Supplement.
Examination results are a little trickier. I can offer two solutions. Since there is a feeling that teachers now do all the work for students anyway they could go the whole way and simply sit the exams for them as well. This is a risky strategy since to operate effectively the staff actually need to pass the exams. A safer plan would be to follow the attendance register model and simply allocate a range of passes to the students who are not attending. The Inspectorate may wish to do what they call triangulation (a fancy word that means asking people questions) but they too will have to accept that they will have to come up with their own answers since there is nobody to triangulate.
The work skills issue will be no more since all students will be at their part time jobs instead of college and as for teacher stress, the focus will turn from paperwork, ill-mannered children and a constantly changing curriculum to how to get the day in and still be on the golf course by four o'clock.
Even the school dinner debate will go away since none of the invisible students will be obese. And if you think all of this is unadulterated nonsense I would merely remind you of the recent scandal over expenses payments to politicians for attending a Northern Ireland parliament that does not exist. You see – we owe it to our children not to have them in colleges. It is our birthright and if it were not for the fact that no-one could turn up I would organise an invisible demonstration, complete with mispelt placards, to highlight that fact.
