Ladies and gentlemen. Tonight is a night to celebrate. Tonight, we honour the commitment and hard work that your sons and daughters have put in over the past two weeks. We've had nothing but praise for them, and I like them all to come up to the stage one by one to collect their awards. Without further or do, I'd like to present all of these wonderful boys and girls, their Level 2 BTEC in working at McDonalds.
In my head, this is roughly how I'd think an award ceremony would go at a particularly shit school where kids are awarded for not setting the teacher alight every term. Well, now these miscreants have the chance to leave with maybe the odd-qualification, as ol' Ronald McDonald has stepped into the British education system armed with a hamburger and a shit-load of easy qualifications.
You see, in exchange for working for 10 days at a McDonalds restaraunt, teenagers can now get a level 2 BTEC qualification in 'Work Skills'. Essentially, it's the equivalent of a B or C at GCSE, or what I used to call 'hard work'.
According to Edexcel (the exam board who run the qualification), the experience will help to build 'team working skills' and improve teenagers communication. N0w I don't know another generation who can chat quite as much as ours. The last thing a teenager who spends all day on their phone, Facebook and MSN is to be taught how to communicate at work. And what team working skills can you possibly hope to achieve from working behind the counter at McDonalds? The only thing I can possibly think of is which nationality of employee is on fries duty and which is on adding human fluids to the burgers.
I am not at all impressed by this. I worked bloody hard for my GCSEs and for exam boards to be handing them out like fucking Happy Meal toys is taking the piss. What happened to a bit of social elitism i.e. the people that work the hardest get the rewards. Lets face it, the kids who are going to be taking this qualification are going to be the ones flipping burgers anyway, so essentially these 2 weeks are just practice. I'm waiting for the day when AQA start giving out A-Levels to people who busk...
:D haha this made me laugh. I thought Journos were meant to be impartial.. obviously not in this case. You're completely right though, working at McDonalds is hardly an aspiration and how two weeks of flipping burgers deserves a credible qualification is beyond me. Their reason for this innovation being 'because it improves communication skills' is frankly bollox.. most students get told off for talking too much to their colleagues in the workplace. Anyway, isn't the point of McDonalds to provide FAST food? I can't ever recall being served in a MaccyD restuarant and having a nice little conversation with the till operator. A friend of mine who worked for the company said policy states customers must be served within 3 minutes or the employee could suffer their wages being docked... hardly what I would call time to 'communicate.' Jade x
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