Small businesses have blamed the state of secondary school education for the inherent skills shortages that a quarter of them are now facing.
Despite the continuing year-on-year improvement in national GCSE results, small firms’ lobby group The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has today slammed the secondary education system, claiming that it does not prepare 16-year-old school leavers for the working world.
The FSB said that GCSE exam results are masking the deterioration in the level of basic skills that schools are providing pupils, and has called for a ‘major rethink’ of secondary education.
The current system is leading to reduced productivity in small firms, which have to spend the first several weeks of new starters’ careers filling in the gaps in their education, the FSB argued.
Colin Willman, FSB education chairman, said: “The secondary school system is not producing enough sixteen year-olds that can hit the ground running on their first day in the world of work.
“The skills that businesses need from school-leavers are literacy, numeracy, punctuality, communication skills and an ability to be well-presented. This allows them to contribute immediately as they start their new job.”
“Sadly, at the moment these skills are lacking in many sixteen year-olds and this explains why more firms are turning instead to new migrants from other EU nations to fill their job vacancies.”
The FSB also argued that the government’s ‘skills pledge’, which businesses are urged to sign to bring their staff to a level equivalent to 5 GCSEs at grade A*-C, will leave businesses ‘to pick up the pieces of a failing school system’, and is unfeasible for the average small business, which employs just four people.
© Crimson Business Ltd. 2007
