The kids are bad and

the grown ups are worse!
 
My fellow tutor and I work at four separate Alternative Education schemes. They’re all advertised as being the same programme, but they’re all different because of the staff members. The young people are the same from one scheme to the next and from one year to the next.
 
At the one today, it was damn hard work – because of one of the staff members. Her best friend (who was also her boss) left last year and she’s just not giving her new boss a chance at all. There’s no behind the scenes co-operation and the students pick up on this. It’s just frustrating on all sorts of levels.
 
Anyway, with the combination of young people who are obnoxious and staff members who act like young people, I really think there needs to be a rethink. The schemes are supposed to be one day per week formal education, two days of lifeskills informal education and two days work experience. Work experience is the least successful – there are just not many employers around who want to take these youngsters on extended work placements (and to be honest, who can blame them?).
 
So I think we should take the schemes away from the local authorities or colleges and forget about them being delivered from an educational establishment. Let’s get McDonald’s on board – they’re desperate to be taken seriously and have already been given awarding body status. McDonald’s can run an inhouse alternative education scheme for these Year 11 students (an age group they’ve not been involved with yet), with a similar structure to the existing one. Work experience is no problem – it’s ready made, formal education (literacy and numeracy) can be bought in or delivered internally and instead of the wishy washy lifeskills (yet another drug or alcohol awareness workshop), they can learn some customer service skills, health and safety, food hygiene, first aid, etc.
 
Maybe built into this could be a guaranteed paid Saturday or Sunday job if wanted.
 
Put it this way, McDonald’s can’t do worse than how it is now…
 
Just some rather random thoughts.