Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Summer's Almost Gone

... and it hasn't even started yet, not properly.

It felt more like Autumn today when I left work, chilly and with a persistent, drizzly rain. The motorway was hellaciously slow - ridiculously slow compared to this morning - and it took me an hour and twenty minutes to get home. Not good.

I am cross. Again. One bit of bad news that has been buried by the hacking scandal is a squeeze on funding for the Open University, pushing up course fees almost to the stratospheric levels of the bricks and mortar institutions. The Open University is emphatically not about getting pimply faced teenagers into high flying graduate jobs so that they can pay back their debts. It was intended to make education available for all people, whatever their age or financial resources, and is as much about education for self improvement as it is about improving your career opportunities.

No doubt such ideas as being "financially competitive" sound good to a cabinet room full of public school boys who have benefited from a free education at a top university, but to me it stinks and I have had enough.

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