The state of British education

A piece in the Telegraph by a Reader at Imperial suggests that Amazon's recent move of customer service jobs from Slough to Cork is a sign of how education is failing the British economy. The author states that Amazon "can't find workers here with the level of education required" and associates this with the slipping "standards" of even high-end university students in the care they take with writing.

I don't buy this. Amazon's issue wasn't this kind of standard. It was simply the availability of part-time staff with language skills. Now, if workers were clamouring at the gates for jobs at Amazon, and Amazon relocated for cost reasons, there would be a problem. But no-one wanted Amazon's jobs. If the people of Slough feel able to get through Christmas without taking shifts at Amazon, good luck to them. Maybe Amazon's efforts to recruit - let's face it - language students home from uni for the holiday would be more successful if they offered more pay and benefits. There's a massive irony too: Amazon wanted staff with yesterday's languages - French and German - when everybody knows that tomorrow's education system should be teaching kids Chinese!

And let's look at an angle not covered by the BBC: the cost of doing business in Ireland. The Irish government, famous for its 10% corporate tax rate, could be offering any amount of subsidy, training or tax breaks for these jobs. No-one has investigated this. Suddenly, educationalists and the BBC are trusting the word of Amazon executives. Update! The Register understands perfectly.

I predict a raft of letters from free-marketeers to the Telegraph saying the same thing :-)