Latest news suggests that without more degree level education based skills, the UK will experience an exodus of jobs overseas to emerging economies. But when we already have students doing degrees just for the sake of doing them and a basic education system which sees school-leavers failing to possess even basic literacy and numeracy skills, should we really be thinking about pushing more through a university education as the immediate priority?

Like it or not, many young people are neither cut out nor ready for an academic pathway from or even during secondary education. Simply creating more courses to include a wider selection of students is hardly the answer and is fast leading to the existence of meaningless degrees, which won’t help business, and don’t help the students themselves who these days will have had to sell their soul to get it.

One of the greater injustices of recent political times is the idea propagated by New Labour during the 1997-2010 period of Government that everyone could be the same and do the same things. Such socialist ideology permeates itself by changing – or rather levelling systems throughout society to treat everyone the same under the ideal that to do so is providing ‘equal opportunities’.  However, as we are all different – and often in ways that cannot be seen with the naked eye – this method is not only obtuse in the extreme, it has contributed to the creation of a society where younger generations are becoming lazy and without ambition. When you add to this the burden of taxation which is placed upon higher wage earners for daring to do well and the resentment they experience if they do so, neither do you leave in place any real motivation to be any different or encourage the social mobility that the same idealist meddlers suggest to be a milestone of progress.

The good behind many ideas, policies and concepts is often lost when change is enacted simply for the sake of change and this is no less so within education as elsewhere. Whilst the technology age has altered the requirements for skills throughout the industries, the historic format of leaving school at 14 and becoming ‘apprenticed’ was a much better way to foster learning in those who were more ‘hands than head’ at the time, and could as such provide lessons in forming the basis of a very radical and effective way to change the way that we develop our National skills base for business and industry.

Why not:

• Remove the burdens of red tape which govern the working environment for younger people.
• Develop an effective subsidy allocation and training scheme to assist participant businesses to replace unused school places, ‘young to work’ schemes and unemployment benefits.
• Give business a cost-effective motivation to support vocational or ‘on-the-job’ training for 14-21 year olds who in that time, may well have attained the equivalent of academic training in parallel skills and real-world experience, which may in fact have far more use to companies than ‘green’ graduates who refuse to stuff envelopes because they have a degree.

Business can only get the best from employees if they have been nurtured within a system which allows and encourages them to be their best – in whatever way that may be. Even the suggestion that you must have a degree level education to make an effective contribution is not only short sighted; it fails to recognise that a true acceptance of diversity goes way beyond embracing race, impairment, sexuality, location or social group and that each pathway to learning can be highly beneficial to society with real opportunities put in place to appreciate it.

Businesses are not established with the aim of creating jobs. Yet we hear and see an increasing amount of news about wages, employee benefits and employment Laws which would strongly suggest otherwise and leave many of us wondering exactly when the micromanaging hand of Government and European Legislation will actually be stopped in its tracks. SME’s in particular are burdened with rafts of Legislation which many owners are simply not able to afford to manage by hiring specialist management or consultancy input that would otherwise be unnecessary.

When you set up a small business on the back of a particular skills set which then begins to grow and requires staff, should a financially-strapped Government really be placing barriers in the way of entrepreneurial growth and survival by insisting that you understand and enact the many stages and steps that you have to chronologically take before you can remove a bad, perhaps livelihood-threatening employee?

I’m sure I was not alone in wondering if at last some sense were beginning to prevail following the announcement in March that the Government had began a Consultation on ‘No Fault Dismissals’ and that perhaps hard working business people and innovators would now be trusted not only to grow their enterprises, but to also look after the staff who ultimately look after them.

Like every situation in life, a workplace will have its share of good and not so good employees, but it is simply ridiculous to place the burden of proof upon an employer in order for them to expeditiously remove disruptive, troublesome and sometimes poisonous staff who can potentially destroy a business through their actions and continued presence. The bottom line is after all that it is only in extreme circumstances that any genuine SME employer realistically wants to have to take the trouble to remove any employee on an immediate and individual basis, unless they simply can’t afford to keep them anyway. Redundancy is and should always remain a different thing entirely.

At this point, the argument that simple staff under-performance would result in unfair summary dismissal as a result of changes is likely to be introduced. But for any of us who have employed and managed people within an SME setting where you don’t have the benefit of dedicated HR or Recruiter resources at your call, we know only too well how much time and expense it actually takes to recruit a replacement employee for any job and especially those roles which will be key to growth and continuance. It is hardly therefore likely that most of us would do anything other than make the maximum effort to bring staff up to the required standard if it is actually possible to do so.

It is sensible to accept that there will always be those employers who will abuse trust and operate in an unscrupulous manner towards their employees. Thankfully, I believe that they are now very few in number and with staff basically being the primary asset of any business, those leaders who treat them badly will soon reap the rewards of what they have sown without the interference of unnecessary legislation and the all-too-often misused threat of Employment Tribunals hanging over them.

Having seen all too many potentially great small businesses halted in their tracks, simply because the owner doesn’t want the problems associated with employing staff and also witnessed larger businesses brought to a standstill because of the self-serving militancy of charismatically influential individuals, it’s high time that Laws which have been created for the sake of having such laws were repealed and taken back to the point where most of us would accept they were actually doing some good.