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.

The Video Ref wrote:This is a very sobering website; it basically calculates student loan repayments for anyone going to uni in 2012 or later: http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.c ... calculator Interesting that if you are a 'high earner' it says you will pay back around £50K over just under 14 years. If you are a low earner you will pay back £22K over 30 years and the rest of the loan will get written-off. Any 18 year old who goes to uni will be paying back their loans well into their 30s if not beyond, unless their parents can help them out. The governments own graph for this shows middle income earners will end up paying the most for their degrees. If you are a high earner you pay down the loan quicker so pay less interest and if you are a low earner you never pay it off but then I always consider the low earner argument rather false as who goes to Uni to earn £22K for the next 30 years? If you do have to pay the loan back the fact it is 9% of your pay over £21K means you are hit with a very high marginal tax rate for up to 30 years. It is in fact a marginal tax rate of 42% (20% tax, 13% N.I. and 9% loan payments). Who'd have thought it? A Tory government increasing the tax burden on future voters. When you sign up for one of these loans you have to agree that the terms can be varied. So for example the plan to index link the threshold of £21K could be ditched and you'd just have to accept it. It's also already been mooted that the terms be varied with the threshold down to £18K or fixed at £21K. Part of the reason for this is they want to sell off the student loan book and as it stands its not a very attractive proposition for a private company. The article I read about it even had the person proposing say if it was fixed at £21K this would be a good way of limiting the costs because people generally don't really understand the system and this could be sneaked under the radar. IIRC the terms used to describe parents understanding of the scheme was far less complimentary than that. The whole scheme is a sick joke.

The Video Ref wrote:This is a very sobering website; it basically calculates student loan repayments for anyone going to uni in 2012 or later: http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.c ... calculator Interesting that if you are a 'high earner' it says you will pay back around £50K over just under 14 years. If you are a low earner you will pay back £22K over 30 years and the rest of the loan will get written-off. Any 18 year old who goes to uni will be paying back their loans well into their 30s if not beyond, unless their parents can help them out. The governments own graph for this shows middle income earners will end up paying the most for their degrees. If you are a high earner you pay down the loan quicker so pay less interest and if you are a low earner you never pay it off but then I always consider the low earner argument rather false as who goes to Uni to earn £22K for the next 30 years? If you do have to pay the loan back the fact it is 9% of your pay over £21K means you are hit with a very high marginal tax rate for up to 30 years. It is in fact a marginal tax rate of 42% (20% tax, 13% N.I. and 9% loan payments). Who'd have thought it? A Tory government increasing the tax burden on future voters. When you sign up for one of these loans you have to agree that the terms can be varied. So for example the plan to index link the threshold of £21K could be ditched and you'd just have to accept it. It's also already been mooted that the terms be varied with the threshold down to £18K or fixed at £21K. Part of the reason for this is they want to sell off the student loan book and as it stands its not a very attractive proposition for a private company. The article I read about it even had the person proposing say if it was fixed at £21K this would be a good way of limiting the costs because people generally don't really understand the system and this could be sneaked under the radar. IIRC the terms used to describe parents understanding of the scheme was far less complimentary than that. The whole scheme is a sick joke.

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 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.

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.