Brains working towards machine consciousness

 From time to time my mind wanders to thoughts about what the population is up to.  In this case, I was struck by a BBC report which happened to mention there are over 500,000 registered teachers in the UK (not all, of course, are necessarily actually in teaching - that figure is about 427,800).  A couple of sources tell me that the UK workforce is about 30,000,000.  About 1.3 million work in the NHS, and 28.86 million in employment, with 2.47 million unemployed (so a potential workforce of 31.33 million, which fits with about 30 million quite well).

There are also 489,800 staff in Higher Education Institutions, meaning there are nearly 1 million people involved in education (plus those in FE, presumably, but I don't have figures for them) - some in HE may also be registered teachers, of course (but probably a minority).  The thought which wandered across my mind was this: About 20% of the population are between 5 and 21 (12,584,900 of them) being educated by between 1 and 1.5 million staff (although that includes managers, cleaners etc. in HE as far as I know, but not in compulsory education).  Roughly 2 to 3% of the working population is involved in teaching the next generation of workers.  The state funding for HE amounts to 24% of educational spending in the UK (and that includes the spend on research, according to the Russell Group, if I read them correctly).  So given that the numbers employed in HE and compulsory education are broadly similar, but HE also has to do research and gets 1/3 as much money from the state, why is HE being hit but compulsory education being spared (at least to some extent) from the draconian budgetary cuts?  True, less than half the population take advantage of HE (not least because of the limits in place to prevent universities from recruiting more students), but surely the idea is that those with a higher education are worth more to industry.

Not that I think we should cut at the compulsory education sector either, of course.  We do have reducing numbers coming through schools at the moment (a trend which is just reversing for primary schools), so there is some room for economy - if we didn't already have class sizes which are too big.  With the current staffing levels, when the pupil population reaches its minimum, we will have about 18 pupils per class, which would be much better than the 26 or so at the moment.  The extra investment per pupil should be a significant benefit to the educational standards and permit the country to have a more diverse and flexible workforce in place for the next recession and banking crisis.

In the mean time, of course, we also have a rapidly ageing population, and due to the ongoing pensions situation individuals will have to work significantly longer than they used to.  This will mean that the size of the workforce will grow, but it doesn't look terribly likely that there will be a massive increase in jobs for them to do.  About 20% of the workforce work in the public sector at the moment, although that is set to decline dramatically over the next few years.  Companies are particularly keen to grow their bottom line through efficiencies rather than hiring lots of new staff - this is probably one of the reasons that graduate unemployment has risen by 25% (another reason, of course, is that we have more people becoming graduates than before).  There are some types of company which will buck this trend - Deloitte, for instance expect to recruit over 1,000 graduates over the next year.  This is unlikely to compensate for the expected decline in graduate recruitment as the public sector shrinks dramatically, however.

The one consolation, if one can view it that way, is that the public sector employs a disproportionately large number of graduates, so HE will not need to produce so many - and, indeed, given the fact that new graduates are more likely to be unemployed than non-graduates, one could argue the market was over supplied.  However, many HE institutions subsidise research effort with teaching income.  They have to, in fact, as research funding bodies do not provide 100% of the costs associated with research.  Consequently, the reduction in public sector spending, even without the direct impact planned on universities and research, means that research will be cut.  Universities will be impacted by a double whammy, in addition to the existing double whammy introduced by major cuts being announced by the outgoing administration being followed by new cuts by the new administration.

Research and education are two key areas for helping drag us back into a healthy economy.  Instead, we will have a reduction in both, and a large number of people unemployed.  Maybe the Conservative element of the Government is working on the basis that necessity is the mother of invention.  That certainly has an element of truth to it - and there will be many people who scrape through by starting small businesses.  Many others, I suspect, will find 'easier' ways to make a living, which won't involve paying taxes, but which will put increased demands on the police forces (which will also be having to cut budgets...)

If we get some more hot weather next year, when all this really starts to bite, I won't be terribly surprised if it triggers an early withdrawal of troops from foreign soil.  At least that might be one benefit, I suppose.