Trainees no longer ready for workplace

It's a similar story in nursing.

A few recent students didn't haveabasic dsy to day skills. They arrive late, but still expect a full handover. They are unable to communicate on different levels with different people. University seem wash their hands of all responsibility in making sure their sare tudents are able to function.

We had one student who was constantly hours late, was rude, refused to perform sbu personal care and would loudly shout 'he's shit himself' or 'this one stinks of piss'. Despite multiple conversations gentle and harsh, when I contacted uni they said 'his directness was part of his learning disability and it would be wrong to chastise him for it'. I ended up getting a dressing down by them for being 'ableist' for insinuating that no matter the reason for his behaviour it was inappropriate for the ward environment.

“Young people have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think them- selves equal to great things.” - Aristotle

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters. - Socrates

🤣🤣🤣

I'm an accountant and I was saying yesterday that our trainees are very different from how they used to be.

The acting like they are doing us a favour rings a bell and expecting support and to qualify but not expecting to prove themselves.

Taking a leaf out if senior management book and setting their own timetable despite the fact that SMs work all hours so have earned flexibility. They want the flexibility to be late a leave early but won't come early or stay late.

Can be really disparaging about low salary which was always normal for trainees. What do they think the rest of us did. Working even harder on less! Apparently it was so easy for us because everything is expensive now and they are uniquely disadvantaged.

Oof this sounds bitter.

Whilst this is true, there has been a marked change in specific areas since the pandemic.

The increase in sick leave taken by people under 30 is statistically evidenced and (anecdotally) my experience is of a lot more "casual" sickness - a lot more time taken for a cold (a couple of days is fine but a trend to take two weeks).

I do think it's not everyone and those working full time seem as hard working as ever.

We've had placement students who have expected full time staff to drive out of their way to fetch them because they're not being paid - they are however voluntarily or as part of their course doing a placement. They seem not to understand that they are not doing a personal favour to the employee they are given to to supervise. I had a 20 year old tell me it was "the least I could do" to take and fetch her from the train station because she "shouldn't have to" wait in the cold for a bus. My own 16 year old would be left waiting at a different train station if I took the extra time to drive the student, and she was demanding and unhelpful generally so I had already said no, I've no idea why she thought telling me it was "the least I could do" would make me change my mind! However she was so entitled she complained about me not "helping her " to my boss - and my boss ended up doing it!

Despite my boss driving her she dropped out before the end of the placement.

I can't imagine having asked in the first place at 20, and I didn't have a car then either.

I have also experienced a lot more single days especially amongst younger people combining work with study who are open about being "exhausted" from a study deadline and therefore "needing" to ring in sick the following day - it seems the boundaries have shifted a bit because now this is actually regarded as legitimate enough to be open about in some people's minds - it obviously has always happened but people would have known it wasn't legitimate and kept quiet about it!

I do think however it might be a very specific "glitch" in the system caused by a very specific narrow cohort who have the pandemic mentality frozen in their minds. It's not even one whole age cohort but a subsection - just quite a large minority of one age cohort, perhaps the ones who's parents were very dramatic about the pandemic and have continued to style their offspring as victims during and since?

@Mummyoflittledragon I wasn't questioning your knowledge, I was interested in where the disparity with what I've been told before. Which seems to come from the fact that GCSEs have got much harder again since I took them in 2002 which makes sense.

I have multiple siblings who have been through the system recently and my mum is a teacher whose last kid did GCSEs not long ago at all. (Large family.) But maybe she just said it to get us to work harder.

I'm not a teacher or NHS but work in retail
About half are bright eyed,bushy tailed and keen to get stuck in
The other half-well,not
They show up late,if at all,lazy,rude,don't want the job and refuse to do any of the work
One time,I was heading out of the door to go home with a banging headache due to her moaning and wailing all shift,when she stopped me,handed me a cloth and told me that a customer wanted their table wiping
I handed it back and told her to do it-id finished and she threw the biggest shit fit I'd ever seen
It was her job-she knew this when she got it
Thankfully she quit but the next one was just as bad
It's like they are molly coddled and can't cope with real life

Secondary school here. Same problem with people in their 20s but the youngers ones who are 18 or 19 , and we get some as support staff are much better, I'm really hoping for the best when these new ones , I think they are called Generation Alpha, start teaching things will improve.
I did read in a scholarly work that if a person grows up in a very unequal society it affects that person negatively. I grew up when Britain was at its most equal before Thatcher ruined it. Or Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher as we used to chant. That's how old I am.

Last year one of my kids did a placement year as part of his degree. Before he started I said to him

you’ve a true once in a life time opportunity and make the most of it. Whoever you meet now will remember you and you may run into them in the future. They’ll know other people and those people will ask about you and what you’re like

i said to him. Whatever they ask you the answer is yes, no job is beneath you. Arrive a bit early and leave a bit later. Never complain and do everything in a positive way.

result? He got on brilliantly, they loved him, he got given more and more responsibility, he became a key part of the team and 2 weeks before he left the MD invited him for dinner at The Savoy, just the 2 of them. He put on his best suit even though it was a casual dress job, and the MD offered him a grad job.

I'm mid 30s and gone back to uni to change careers. The difference in this cohort to my first 15 years ago is astounding. There is so little engagement from them. The lecturer asks for an answer and crickets unless I speak or 2 or 3 others out of 60. This is a very person centred career so I have no idea how they'll manage!

I felt like this about our trainees 5 or so years ago but now we seem back on track (and these are the covid impacted intake). Very enthusiastic and personable.

Can you not fail them for their practical ability? I used to assess a different profession and I had to fail students a couple of times, they made it so difficult to do that, that it did put you off going down that route. In my previous area just because you passed the academic side ( and extensions were ridiculous) did not mean you qualified, you needed to pass both.

Blame the HE sector. It’s all about getting the numbers on courses.. plus the amount of Molly coddling students get from their universities makes many of them feel very entitled. They pay £9 grand so they feel YOU are providing a service to them.

I see it from all sides as I work for a provider and have a dd who is teaching (secondary).

From what's written on this thread I can understand why she seems so well thought of and has been told she'll be a member of SLT by the time she's 30.

Ha, I work with civil servants sometimes. I realise they are supposed to be generalists, but some of the questions/assumptions they put on me (a specialist) are hilarious. "So is x [established scientific principle, think increasing CO2 in atmosphere or similar,] actually real then?"

I had to take a very deep breath before replying. But then I find people's lack of curiosity generally baffling. So perhaps they'd not felt they could ask before!

You are right. I’ve had amazing students I’ve mentored. But the horror stories are crazy. Across all industries, it used to be something like 1 in 50 new recruits were duds, now it seems like it’s 1 in 5!!! I’ve made those statements up btw, but they’re probably very accurate 😜

I’m an ex teacher and not remotely surprised that the quality of trainers has dropped. It must be impossible to attract the right calibre of people when pay and working conditions are so awful.

There are fewer and fewer young people available to take up these positions. The best ones can pick and choose. Organisations who can attract the best have to be flexible to keep them.

Professions like teaching and nursing will continue to suffer.

I think both him and his dw have an empathy bypass and should be ashamed of themselves.

Imagine a health professional doing the same.
My friends dh had a similar job and often got called out to repair a boiler for a vulnerable client.

I think we’re heading towards a new era of schooling. Where anyone half responsible will be babysitting a class of students who’ll all be engaging in online learning. The system is broken. It’s producing broken people and sending them out into the workforce. Crappy candidates isn’t just reserved for teaching; it’s happening across nearly every profession.

I think you're being a bit unreasonable. Ime some graduates are keen, eager and ready to work hard and learn. Others are not. Some are entitled and lazy, others simply lack confidence and need the right encouragement.

Young people are all different, it's always been like that imo

I think it started before Covid and the lockdown/snowflake response to Covid was part of the whole reduction in resilience and expecting the world to be a perpetually ‘safe space’ . It pandered to anxiety and this now has knock on effects of those over-anxious people being validated and enabled.

Civil service too. The quality (and number of those applying) of fast streamers has dropped significantly in recent years. Some are still excellent but there’s a significant number who can’t get through the week without taking a mental health day, a duvet day (especially when there’s a deadline that they’re about to miss). Wanting to work from home, being uncontactable (“It was a lovely day so I went for a long walk.”), lack of work ethic.

I agree with you but the root of the problem, to me, is soft fluffy parenting who don’t discipline, parents who can’t be rsed to discipline and/or parent(s) who are working flat out and are too knckered to discipline effectively. Children who grow up without boundaries, rules and consequences become adults who have no idea how society functions so can’t slot into their place in the hierarchy. You can love your child to pieces and still have exp stations of how they will behave; it’s not rocket science; is it?
Our productivity as a nation is woefully low; if people made more effort in the workplace taxes could be lower (higher company profits) and there could be more jobs as those company profits improved, simple economics.

Well, the teachers are also a product of society and their own upbringing. I agree with the wider point though, that basic classroom discipline should be a nonnegotiable rather than something to be “strived for”.

For that though I’d put the blame on successive governments trying to micro manage lessons, the over emphasis of “my child is special and has XYZ rights” culture (with no mention of responsiblities) which has put parents and teachers at odds, the over emphasis on classes needing to be “fun” (often at the expense of focus and effectiveness it seems to me) and above all a macro culture of tolerating bad behaviour in the classroom.

I’d personally like an experiment in early secondary school of setting by (as necessary) primarily setting by student behaviour/willingness to learn and only secondarily by ability. After several years of that I’d expect to see drastic improvement in classroom focus.

The thing I have noticed is that trainees and new teachers just aren't quite ready to adult and they do need guiding through that. Recently had one who was nearly 30 but was floored by very simple adulting situations in their personal life like getting their car serviced. I think because they've relied heavily on someone else (parents, teachers lecturers) fixing everything they need more guidance on how to do things in the workplace. I know that in my A level classes there are lots of adjustments for 'suspected' SEND needs I have to provide such as printed powerpoints for multiple students, nothing that pushes the student out of their comfort zone like on the spot questions, lots of movement breaks to cope with the demands of being asked to do something like read a page of a textbook, constant deadline extenstions and the expectation I give up my lunchtimes to reteach them one to one for things they've missed due to anxiety. I don't believe in many (not all) cases these adjustments are necessary or even helpful. At that age students need to be able to push out of their comfort zone a bit and press through challenges, otherwise they won't have any resilience when they reach the workplace. I think from what I've read on here that this continues in University.

1970s education was massively dumbed down from the previous generations. I took mine in 1987 so went through a lax education system. GCSEs then reportedly got even easier than O levels. Idk if this is true. They have got a lot harder since the early 2000s. And the standard is higher than when I took O levels. The kids currently taking GCSEs and A levels went through a readjustment due to Michael Gove overhauling education. My dd went from year 2 to year 3 and effectively the teachers had to take dd up to what was previously year 4 work so missed a year.

See my post above for a little more info. And others on the thread saying the same thing. We know. We know kids, who have recently been or are going through it right now because we are parents or teachers.