Let poor pupils blow their own trumpet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/18/kevin-mckenna-further-education-music

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If Scotland ever had its own national intelligence service, we know now with what gadget our agents would infiltrate Special Branch. It's called a spy pen and it was made famous last week by a mildly bumptious and self-important academic from one of those FE colleges that are the educational equivalent of Poundland. The chap had used this device covertly to record the comments of Mike Russell, the education secretary, at a private meeting with assorted other college heads. Not surprisingly, Russell was somewhat peeved at this and summoned the miscreant to a meeting and gave him a dressing-down of Alex Ferguson proportions.

The poor fellow who, nevertheless looks like he could handle himself in a square-go, resigned and claimed that he had been intimidated and bullied by the first minister. Since then, he has been touring broadcasting stations to tell the nation how appallingly he's been treated. Such was the ubiquity of this tiresome man that by Thursday most of us were convinced that Russell had just waterboarded Scotland's answer to Mahatma Gandhi.

It got worse for the education secretary. For, on the debate on cash for Scotland's colleges, which predictably followed on Thursday, Alex Salmond erroneously declared that funding for this sector had increased, when, in fact, it had not. The first minister was also forced to reveal that Russell would be making an apology for telling a Labour MSP that there would be no reduction in funding. What the education secretary should be telling Holyrood is that Scotland has got far too many further education colleges and that many of them require to be pared down. He should also propose that colleges be annually rated on their usefulness to society and have their funding set accordingly. That means all those outfits that offer HNDs in tattoos and tarot cards or landscape herbology would have their funding cut until they started behaving themselves and began offering courses for human beings again.

It won't happen because, let's be frank about this, these colleges are a methadone substitute for the dole queue and help Scotland delude itself that it's great having 50% of its young people in further education. And we also have the pension pots, early retirement packages and sick payments to find for an entire regiment of chairmen and principals, their deputies and all their HR, legal and financial departments. It's a massive job creation scheme for Scotland's vast flotilla of career civil servants, a species, it seems, that must be constantly fed, topped up and employed at all costs.

Instead of shoehorning our young people into college courses to meet the fatuous 50% target, we should be encouraging the growth of Scotland's small to medium enterprises. The nation's SME sector holds the key to cutting down youth unemployment by developing their capacity to offer real modern apprenticeships to school-leavers, which may also involve some vocational training at properly funded and stringently inspected FE colleges.

Yet Scotland's SME community is being actively discouraged from establishing training and apprentice schemes because many of them simply cannot access the dripping roast of public sector contracts. They are penalised because they are deemed to be too small to handle most of the £1m plus contracts. These then get snapped up by overseas multinationals with no long-term commitment to the country and no training schemes. They will station a few engineers here and perhaps register their company here for legal purposes. Such confectionery allows the Scottish government to state that these are Scottish firms.

The entire public procurement process in Scotland is rotten to the core. It is driven by a culture of procedure designed purely to ensure that the senior civil servants who operate it can all safely reach retirement with their entitlements intact or move on to the next big public sector plum, often the headship of a dismal FE college.

Central and local government ought to insist that every one of their public contracts must be awarded exclusively to firms that possess a genuine and committed modern apprentice scheme. Then we can stop hoodwinking many of our young people, and ourselves, into thinking they can be academics when their skills lie in another direction. And we can then all stop the pretence that cutting funding is a big mortal sin.

Instead of wasting time appeasing the FE college principals and providing funding for their electronic spy pens, Mike Russell should be encouraged to press ahead with a wonderful educational initiative with real benefit to Scotland's young people. On Friday, it was announced that £1.3m has been granted to a charity that seeks to improve the lives of children in poorer neighbourhoods by establishing an orchestra in Glasgow's Govanhill district. This will provide generations of schoolchildren with the opportunity to become musicians and, at the same time, expose them and their families to the beauty of the world's greatest music.

The initiative was inspired by the El Sistema music education programme set up in Venezuela in 1975 and which in June saw the world-renowned Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra visit Stirling's Raploch area and play a symphony with local pupils.

The next target for the SNP government is to find a way of ensuring that local authorities are forbidden to deprive comprehensive school pupils of free music tuition. Such acts of cultural delinquency simply fuel the elitism entitlement that stops social mobility in Britain and which makes us still the most exclusive society in Europe. Already it's been revealed that millions of pounds of public money are spent buying privileged education packages at Scottish schools for dozens of British army blimpdom.

We also still allow these playgrounds of unearned privilege to claim charitable status when we should be taxing them more for the privilege of running their aristocratic freakshows. Yet in many local authorities the refusal to spend money on providing instruments for pupils simply means that such a gift will only be bestowed on children at private schools.

Another week and another couple of free and diamond suggestions for the white paper on independence.