Foreign Perspectives

In case you haven’t notices, the post-war baby boom began to hit retirement age about five years ago and the retirees will continue to rise in numbers for another ten to fifteen years.

This group has been one of the largest target markets since the 1960s and drives much of the marketing and product development spend that you’ll have seen over the last fifty years or so. Thus today we see things like face wrinkle cream hitting the shelves in quantities that would have been unheard of only ten years ago and all because this group are getting to the point where they need such things.

What’ll happen over the next twenty years as they retire will be a shift in marketing towards a much older age group than hitherto we’ve been used to. The cosmetic industry will have a field day naturally but then so will all kinds of medical aids companies and, of course, the financial services people will move to produce products aimed at a more mature market. No more will the example customer be a 30 year old: think 60 year old these days.

All being well this massive shift will let me buy that immortality pill at some point 🙂

One of the most unexpected pieces of news that we received was that John was behind target with his reading and that therefore he’s been recommended for the Special Educational Needs section.

I say unexpected because John has gone from a standing start last September to reading quite well books that are notionally in the P2 age range when he’s actually one of the youngest in the P1 class. Not only that but reading homework that was supposed to take anything up to 20 minutes was gone through pretty much as fast as he could turn the pages.

What’s actually happened is that he’s one of the few kids in the class who hadn’t gone to nursery school so couldn’t read before he started school. We did have a go at teaching him to read but found out that we were totally rubbish at it but in practice he was starting to teach himself to read by way of his little computer before he started school. That he was able to make a start on teaching himself to read shows that he shouldn’t be falling into the special needs category as it’s obviously much harder to begin to teach yourself to read than it is to be taught to read.

Now you might think that this shows the advantage of going to nursery school but all it shows is that it’s more school than nursery. Thanks to the extra couple of years of being full-time with me and Wendy he’s way ahead of the other kids in just about every other area you could name.

The other thing to note is that the target in school is markedly different from that in the books as it assumes that the kids have been in nursery school for a couple of years. In reality the target shouldn’t be changed: there’s an appropriate level of achievement to be reached at the end of P1 and it shouldn’t be trying to account for differences in the starting point.

Anyway, as a consequence of this we’re getting him going on the Kumon reading programme over the summer which seems quite likely to have him ahead of the target by the end of the summer. As it is, his maths level is somewhere in the P3 level.

Quite how the infant school that our little guys go to have managed these over the last couple of weeks is a mystery.

Whilst the French school DVD production of two years back was seriously impressive (three first prizes at the Strasbourg international film festival no less!), that allowed the teachers lots of retakes. The productions of last week and this were live which is always harder on everyone.

To be fair they weren’t 100% flawless but considering that they’d only 5 and 7 year olds to work with they were darned impressive nonetheless.

Last week it was James and Billy no buzz, this week it was the P1 extravaganza which had an exotic animal theme. Naturally just about all concerned have photos and/or videos to blackmail their youngsters with in years to come.

Prosperity for all is the aim but it’s going to be a long time before we get to that point as this budget is all about repairing the foundations of the economy that were so badly damaged by the previous Labour administration.

There’s a sensible capping of benefits almost across the board with probably the largest headlines to come from the cap on housing benefit. One suspects that the largest headlines to come will be from some of those in the million pound housing benefit mansions.

What it also cut was a whole raft of seemingly minor benefits which were introduced piecemeal over the course of the previous Labour administration. What all those different benefits largely did was to create a whole bureaucracy to administer them with little benefit for those who probably needed them most who never even knew they existed.

Increasing VAT to 20% after next Christmas is the single measure that paid for much of the changes. Notably this is a simple measure rather than the complex mix of additional tarifs that some recommended in terms of eliminating exemptions to childrens’ clothing or books.

With the announced substantial cuts in government spending there’s going to be something of a forced move from the public to the private sector for many. That’s going to need equally substantial retraining in many instances.

What this is intended to do overall is to get rid of what has become a crippling level of public debt in a remarkably short period of time. That rapid reduction meant a fairly harsh budget but one that should get us back on an even keel within the forseeable future.

With massive cuts all around us it’s interesting that the BBC has picked up on a study by the Sutton Trust to the effect that were current student charges (ie for non-OU people) raised from the current £3k to £7k there’d be potentially an 80% drop in students studying.

That would be fine were those universities the only kids on the block but the existence of the OU raises an interesting option. Right now, you can study full-time at the OU for around £1200 to £2000 for most courses and even for law it’s only £4000-odd. Thus even now it’s cheaper than normal universities (for comparable or better quality education too).

Now, although the OU is the biggest university in the UK with around 200,000 students, there are more like 2 million students in the UK at the moment. Somehow, I just can’t see the OU being able to cope with what could potentially be close to ten times the number of students. Oh, over a period of years I’m sure it could manage but not in one fell swoop.

For other universities, “too many” students wouldn’t be a problem as they could simply turn down students once “enough” had been reached. However, the OU lets students sign up for courses online up to a month or two before courses start with, apparently, no student limits being applied. Existing students can even sign up right up to the course start date.

I suspect that it might be prudent to sign up for courses a little earlier than normal this year as any increase in student fees seems likely to result in a swing towards the OU which is going to have to put out the “no vacancies” sign at some point.