NHS Employers that represent Trusts have announced they have twenty three thousand applications for training places from junior doctors. The public might feel quite pleased about this until they recall that not long ago there were serious concerns about the shortage of doctors in the NHS that was solved by filling the vacancies from overseas.
Consequently, these newly trained doctors will be competing for just nine thousand posts. It means that fourteen thousand of them will have no chance to go on to become a GP or hospital specialist.
So what will they do? Will they even be able to get a job that pays enough to settle the debt they incurred during the time they spent at College? What sort of society spends years educating some of its brightest youngsters to do a job knowing full well there will be no place for them after they graduate. Surely the country’s needs are monitored and the Universities kept fully aware of the likely future requirements of all our business’s and professions.
Did You Know? It is not only those students who choose medicine as a career that are treated this way. There seems to be graduates of all sorts of subjects caught up in the same trap. They are obliged to take employment where the training that has sometimes taken four or more years of their life is little or no good to them and they have to start all over again. Not doing what they had set their mind on but whatever is available.
Some of the most valuable years in the lives of our young citizens wasted. One student who graduated with a Master’s Degree in physics is working for a bank. Another who took a degree in law found when she finally graduated in her mid twenties, she was over qualified for a junior post and not eligible for a more senior one because she had no experience. She finally accepted a managerial situation in a supermarket! There must be thousands of such cases all over the country.
Whilst gaining these higher degrees, unless their parents are very well off, there is something else the students have to learn. That is how to live and manage with an ever increasing debt. Knowing full well it will be at the time they are struggling to get a mortgage and set up a home that they are obliged to make the repayments and keep them up in order to hold down the interest. With all this on their minds when they are studying it is hardly surprising that more and more of our young people suffer from anxiety and stress. What happened to the days when it was fun to be young?
The future of our Country will be in the hands of these students and we must have the best in every field if we are to compete in an ever changing world. How can we be confident we are not letting the most promising students slip through our fingers when, having fulfilled what they were told they had to do, they are informed their services are no longer required in that particular field.
One likely outcome is that these graduates will take up posts overseas and perhaps be gone forever. How does this effect the students graduating next year and the following years and those pupils who have their sights set on a career to become a doctor or lawyer.
What will situations like this do for their incentive and confidence? Many of them are already having their education upset by yet another change in our schooling system. Who dares to say it will last and be an improvement?
We are slowly getting back to the way it was in the 1930’s. At least in those days pupils were told three of the five subjects they had to take and pass for the School Certificate. If their parents were wealthy enough to let them stay on and go on to College, they knew at the outset which one it would be. At that time every Grammar School was allied to a particular University.
Once our young people have decided what they want to do, they have to make many sacrifices and give up a lot before they are able to sit for their degree. In return, as soon as they have applied and been accepted by a College, they must be given an assurance that there will be an opening for them in their particular field if and when they graduate.
When they reach their mid twenties with debts running into thousands and have never worked for a living it must be worrying even when their future is mapped out and they know exactly what they have to do.
To see all your plans crumble after so much hard work through no fault of your own, must be absolutely devastating! There is no satisfaction in having knowledge and skills unless you are allowed to use them. In fact, in this day and age, if they are not used consistently they might soon be out of date and become misleading and even dangerous.
When situations like this are reported with no account of any action being taken by anyone to put it right, it is easy to understand why many young people today lack that respect for society their forefathers held in such high esteem.
To have any credence at all, respect and loyalty have to run down as well as up in any line of seniority or management. Sadly, that is a fact that has too often been overlooked by those in authority during recent years.
valley lad – [THIRTY-EIGHT]
