Festive Debt and Job Applications

There are two reports out today, which in my mind are linked if not in their cause then in a way to resolve the problems they highlight.

The first is from accountants Grant Thornton, predicting that 30,000 people will declare bankruptcy in the first quarter of this year. They estimate that 10,000 of these people will need to do so because of excessive spending in the lead up to Christmas. You can read the full report here.

The second is from the Recruitment and Employment Federation for the BBC, which found that 47% of job applications contained spelling or grammatical errors. You can see the details of the survey here.

The issue in both these cases to my mind is education. Our curriculum should be focussing on the basics of good English, both spelling and grammar.

Similarly, the curriculum should be looking at basic life skills, not least personal economics. I wasn’t taught any basic money management skills in school, I learnt about handling a budget largely through my parents, I was lucky, they were in business and therefore basic finance and economics was part of my upbringing.

There are now two generations who have been educated since the freeing of credit controls. Very many people of my and successive generations have no education in how to handle money, it’s a matter of learning from experience.

Freeing credit was a Conservative policy and its effects have been to invigorate our economy and provide enormous personal freedom. With that freedom comes the need for responsibility and the danger of living beyond your means. Teaching the basics of money management and how credit works would in my opinion go some considerable way to tackling the problem of personal debt.

The Conservative Party have made a good start with the ‘Sort it’ campaign. That’s just the kind of initiative that should be transferred to our schools.

School Sports - bad for you?

Sandra Gidley, the Liberal Democrat MP for Romsey, has spoken in Parliament about her opposition to competitive sport in school. Apparently her preference is for activities which focused on "personal improvement" like skipping, dance and games.

Now I can speak with some considerable experience of this issue. You see, I was always one of the tubby kids who was last to be picked for the teams on either side.

Only once did I ever succeed in playing well at something, in the final of the inter house cricket competition and, in a Hollywood style 9th wicket stand, I managed to somehow scrape the winning runs for my house that won us the house cup. (This I have to admit was an additionally impressive feat as I have always hated cricket with a passion).

I therefore consider myself to have been one of those disadvantaged and traumatised children Ms Gidley is talking about. Did competitive sports in school do me any harm? Of course they didn’t.

They taught me two lessons, sometimes hardly learnt, but well learnt none the less:

You can’t be good at everything, but there are always opportunities to play to your strengths and that life is essentially competitive and therefore you’d better get used to losing as well as winning.

We should be encouraging more competitive sport amongst our children in my opinion. For these very reasons, let alone the need to encourage exercise in our young people who are lured to sit in front of the TV far more than my generation ever was.