School Leavers not good enough for stacking shelves says head of Tesco

[sweetandsour]

Well, almost:

Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy attacks 'woefully low' education standards

Government response : "La, la, la. We're not listening."

Well, almost:

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families defended the UK's education system.

"Standards have never been higher in our secondary schools.

Haven't people been saying this type of thing for many years? It all went downhill when O'levels and CSEs were replaced by GCSEs in my opinion.

[gingerjedi]

Feck me, they pay NMW and then have the cheek to complain about attracting only the the bottom end of the talent pool.

£30k for stacking shelves would sort out their problem quick smart.

[Mich the Tester]

Well, almost:

Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy attacks 'woefully low' education standards

Government response : "La, la, la. We're not listening."

Well, almost:



Haven't people been saying this type of thing for many years? It all went downhill when O'levels and CSEs were replaced by GCSEs in my opinion.

I did the first year of GCSEs; the exam questions were mostly recycled O level questions so the standards didn't fall immediately, but seem to have gone downhill since.

[sweetandsour]

flip me, they pay NMW and then have the cheek to complain about attracting only the the bottom end of the talent pool.

£30k for stacking shelves would sort out their problem quick smart.

I am not sure that you would like the price of your groceries if they did that.

There was a time when people who were not academic left school and settled down into honest work. Being lowly paid was not an excuse to be useless.

How much education does one need to be able to operate one of those checkouts in any case?

[conned tractor]

Its not just that, its the attitude of them also.

I was out with my famly a few weeks ago and we all stopped for an icecream at a stall in a shopping centre. The attendant who reluctantly took only one ear plug out of her head, leaving the other one in (grrr), gave lttle more than a kevin & perry'esque grunt in response to my request. She then got the order wrong (3 fooking ice creams) and couldn't multiply £1.60 by 3. I had to help her out with this simple calculation, either that or she was using this method to suppliment her wages.

I wouldn't employ the majority of them either. Although to be fair there are some decent ones - its just these lazy arsed ignorant little tulips that give the rest a bad name.

[BrilloPad]

"One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.

"At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and – above all – we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, 'less is more'," he said.

He should be prime minister........

[MrMark]

There was a time when people who were not academic left school and settled down into honest work. Being lowly paid was not an excuse to be useless.

The big companies discovered Eastern European accession workers a few years ago. Now this supply is drying up (possibly because the weak pound makes the work less attractive, or maybe they've found better opportunities) they're looking around for new sources of cheap labour.

[shaunbhoy]

It would be interesting to get "Sir Terry" to elaborate on just what constitutes, on the part of Tesco, them "picking up the pieces".
It all boils down to the old "Pay Peanuts Get Monkeys" adage IMHO.

[Spacecadet]

How much education does one need to be able to operate one of those checkouts in any case?

Not much, you can use them yourself in most supermarkets now with no training at all.

[VectraMan]

I did the first year of GCSEs; the exam questions were mostly recycled O level questions so the standards didn't fall immediately, but seem to have gone downhill since.

I did the last year of O-levels. In my second year of sixth form (i.e. when the first batch of GCSE students were starting A-levels), the teachers were all complaining that the new batch of students were so much further behind than we were. Especially in maths; the GCSE'ers hadn't even learned Calculus. I remember my maths teacher complaining that he was going to have to spend the first 6 months teaching them what they should have already known before he could even start on the A-level syllabus.

Of course then they made A-levels much easier to compensate.