Tags: rant
Date: 19 January 2010 21:26:56
The news over the last couple of days that Tory leader David Cameron wants to make teaching an elite profession available only to the (allegedly) brightest and the best has already attracted comment on the wibsite thanks to an (as usual) astute post from Tractor Girl. The idea of a panel of "good universities" in the "low dozens" (see this press release from university think-tank million+) suggests to me a return to elitism and snobbery based on where you study rather than the million and one other things that should define a good teacher and the value of the time spent at university, explained much better in Tractor Girl's post than I could here (do read it if you haven't already clicked on the link).
I have to say that I also felt rather peeved, not to mention confused and angry, because last week the article about nurse education which wound me up so much (see last post) seems to be saying the opposite thing - ie that being elite and highly academic is a bad thing. Now, a disclaimer here: I realise that I am on the more academic side of things, and I responded well to much of the academic side of nurse training, whereas many absolutely brilliant nurses aren't so into the academic side of things but are still fantastic at what they do and shouldn't be discriminated against by a lack of academic aptitude (having said that I do think that a GCSE/O'level C grade in maths is essential for pretty obvious reasons - I don't want any doses of drugs being calculated by people who can't multiply or divide - but I digress).
My concerns are severalfold. Cameron's statement that there was "too much over-academicised training and not enough hands on training, not relevant to what they were doing on the ward" is far too simplistic. The issue of academic versus hands-on has been going on for ages, certainly while I was training in the mid-1990s it was a huge issue with "old hands" moaning that newly-qualified nurses didn't have the practical skills to do the job whilst many nurses really appreciated the chance to expand their knowledge and - and this is the important bit - apply it to how they practised nursing. What really bothers me about this statement though is in many ways much more basic. Hello Mr Cameron - I haven't worked on a ward for years. What is relevant to ward nurses is much less relevant to community and general practice nurses, who work in different ways and often are looking at health, illness and wellbeing in a totally different light (complementary I might add to the hospital system, not in opposition to it).
My biggest concern is that, when I look back at my nurse training, the biggest discovery for me and the thing that really sparked my interest in working in communities, looking at health inequalities and trying to work towards improving health at a community as well as individual level was sociology - in particular looking at the Black Report of 1980 which showed how social class affected health outcomes (the report was commissioned by the Labour government of the 1970s but published in August 1980, just after That Bloody Woman took power. It was published on a Bank Holiday with only a few hundred copies, and was basically hushed up, as the findings were so compelling that inequalities in health were inextricably linked to social class inequalities). And this is, I think, precisely the sort of "academic training" that Cameron has in mind when he talks about over-academic training. He's not going to slash lecturing posts in anatomy and physiology, it's the more political stuff he wants to get rid of. It's all very well having nurses with amazing practical hands-on skills - indeed it is vital, of course it is. But if we have a generation of nurses who are only trained to do practical things with individual patients, what is lost is the focus on inequality and injustice. I just think it would be awfully convenient for the Tories to have a nursing profession that is so focussed on being professionally and practically brilliant at what they do that they have so much less time or knowledge or understanding to challenge the real issues of inequality and exclusion on a wider level.