Foreign Perspectives

Archive for March, 2010

When the welfare state was set up in Britain back in the 1940s, it had the laudable aim of supporting those in time of need and the expectation that those in need would want to get out of a dependence on benefits as soon as they could.

The effect of that was that, over time, the amount paid out to people on benefits gradually increased. Initially the level of benefit was set very much at the subsistance level but the amounts involved have increased over the years with the aim being to have the payments at slightly less than the average wage. However, simultaneously with those increases has come a restructuring of the benefit system ostensibly to target those most in need and that’s where the problems are becoming apparent.

For example, take a typical family of two adults and two children which is what the original welfare state calculations would have been based on. Should the man become unemployed (another welfare state assumption was that the man was the wage earner) then they would be entitled to payments of approximately £60 for the adults and £55 each for the children (including the child benefit). That’s a total of  £170/week, £740/month or £9000 per year. Since the benefits are tax-free, that’s the equivalent to a salary of around £14,000. Not great, though there would be additional help in the form of housing benefit, free school meals and a few other things.

However, let’s take an example of two adults plus ten children. Too many children? Well, no, because families of that size are increasingly common in some areas for reasons which will become apparent shortly. Each child adds £55/week so the totals now come to £600/week, £2600/month or £32000 per year. Bearing in mind that the benefits are tax-free this equates to a salary of around £50,000 and, of course, there’s the housing benefit, free school meals, etc. Even though I’m quite highly qualified, I would find it difficult to get that level of salary.

Now, I accept that people with large families don’t necessarily have them to pick up massive benefit payments but even if they don’t, surely there should be some kind of limit in terms of a maximum benefit payment regardless of other circumstances? If not, it would appear that the best plan would be to pop out kids on a regular basis: it can’t be right that the benefit system seems to be actively encouraging that.

With doing February start courses for so long it’s come as something of a surprise just how close the exam for the human biology course is: June is seeming awfully close right now.

That meant that the tutorial last Saturday started to touch on aspects of the exam. Not that much just yet beyond saying that the general format is a series of compulsory short questions, a data analysis question and a choice of essays (1 from each of the four books). Coming soonish too is a letter from the course team which will say which chapter of the book each of the essay questions will be taken from. In theory that cuts down on the revision time but seeing as the eight short questions go over all four books it’s not much of a reduction in revision time.

Also coming up is the final TMA which I hope to get done over Easter as there’s an astronomy TMA due the same day as the biology one and it’s one of those practicals that always take far longer than expected to do and to write up.

Still, once those are out of the way, it’s the exam that’ll be concentrated on before the relatively clear summer.

I’m almost at the end of something of a marathon of assignments and will be back to just doing the normal course work in about 10 days time.

I’ve been accelerating my path through the degree this year in what seemed to be a really easy way to go about it. All I needed to do was to slot in two short courses a year and I’d be able to trim at least a year off the completion date. What I’d not allowed for was the logjam of assignments that can sometimes happen when you do multiple courses.

This year was originally going to be “just” two 30 point courses at this point but I thought that I’d slot in an interesting little course on cardiovascular diseases and then figured that as a sort-of insurance against my maths being that little bit too far in the past I added in the maths for science course. Unfortunately, the net effect of all that is that I’ve assignments from all four courses due over the next 10 days. Now, I’m not crazy enough to do all four in the one week so I’ve been spacing them out but even so that’s meant almost five weeks solid of assignment work which is kind of tiring to put it mildly.

Still, at least the cardiovascular course is now complete and the maths course will be finished in a couple of weeks. That leaves the only remaining conflicts being around the exam for the biology course, albeit that’s a big conflict!

We go to our local library twice a week for the kids Kumon class and it’s quite noticeable how different the mix of people in it are.

On Tuesday afternoons, the place is packed with school children. So packed, that it’s difficult to find a seat and indeed today we couldn’t find a seat at all. On Saturdays it’s more of a quiet library atmosphere. Fairly full alright, but there are always seats to be had.

The difference is down to it being used basically as a child minder service during the week. School age children use it basically as an after-school club and in a number of cases parents simply drop the children in and go off on errands or whatever. We’re talking down to fairly young primary school kids too.

Still, at least it hasn’t reached the extremes that Wendy experienced in one Australian library where the library had to bring in a rule that kids required an adult to accompany them. Somehow I can’t see it being long before that happens.

There’s only one in fact and he’s the caretaker so to make a start on balancing things up they’re having a Dad’s reading week at the moment.

It turns out that it’s not quite so easy to get the Dad’s to do this. Besides the reluctance of people to volunteer for anything, there’s the matter of getting out of work to do it. There’s also the little problem that the Dad’s very rarely go on the school outings and therefore don’t have the necessary criminal records check. Net effect is that there’s only three of us doing it for the entire school so I’m taking three sessions of the kids this week.

Choosing the books for that isn’t quite so simple as I thought it would have been. After all, we’ve our own small mountain of Ladybird and Usborne books to pick through. The snag is that our library was chosen with our own little guys in mind and in practice it doesn’t seem to fit the bill terribly well in a “reading for a group” context. For one thing, the Ladybird books are basically all aimed at P1 and earlier or at least the collection that we have are. The Usborne books would be great for James’ class but the stories in them are just too long for the time slot we’ve been allocated. Great if it was an ongoing thing but not so good for just one 45 minute session.

In many ways it does seem a shame that it’s only a one-off opportunity to do the reading. OK, it would probably end up being something of a chore if it was every week but it also doesn’t seem so good that the kids are all seeing schooling as an entirely female affair. That affects us in the homework too as they often prefer Wendy to do it with them which I imagine is at least partly down to the exclusively female teaching staff that they encounter.

Anyway, by the time you read this I should be well into my first reading session.