Evaluation, statistics and OR

Bad Timing!

After the lively debate on understanding and assessing risk, I am going to return today to another favourite theme of mine - migrant workers.  Or more precisely, the research undertaken into the migrant worker phenomenon in the UK.  This is sparked by two stories in the press yesterday - one on research undertaken for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and one on the needs of strawberry farmers.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation story was about the publication of a study taking a longitudinal view of migrant workers and their desire to settle permanently in the UK.  The key finding being that after some time in the country and (with the final phase of field work being done in May 2004) with the Accession states joining the EU, workers were more likely to want to settle in Great Britain.

In a different story, the National Farmers' Union warned that the UK strawberry crop was under threat as there was a shortage of migrant workers in the sector.  This was blamed on rising standards of living in Poland and other Eastern European nations.

The juxtaposition of these two stories was fascinating to me - the research story trying to highlight the difficulty of integration and learning the language and getting information on immigration status faced by the migrant workers.  While the BBC also tried to introduce a little controversy into the story by questioning whether migrant workers weren't making life more difficult for UK marginal workers.  At the same time, there are 2,400 jobs picking strawberries going begging - jobs which the British seem unwilling to take on, and now the "cheap labour" of migrant workers are also staying away from.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation Research was excellent, but took too long to come to light - the researchers from Oxford and Sussex Universities did their last field work (according to the story) in 2004, but other studies by companies such as Mercia Research have done work more recently and reported more quickly.  The findings are not new enough to advance the debate adequately, although the aspects that they highlight of limited use of English language learning, integration into British society and the emergence of enclaves are incredibly important.  Hence my view that there is bad timing going on here.

Another bit of bad timing was that this story was picked up at the same time as the plight of seasonal food producers, but no one tried to link the two.  Well apart from me and in a very small way.

A final  thought - it seems to me there will always be the jobs that people don't want to do - fruit picking, shallot planting, waiting tables, cleaning and sweeping, working in food processing factories.  In the UK, we have managed to help everyone aspire to not doing these jobs (even if we haven't succeeded in giving them the skills to do other jobs), so once again we need to look to other countries to supply the labour to undertake these roles.  However the NFU is finding that the sources of uncomplaining labour in Eastern Europe are now also setting their sights higher - where do we look for the next wave?  Or do we accept that sometimes people need to have jobs not careers?

Acceptable Risk Revisited

Last month, in a previous post called Acceptable Risk? I commented on a story from the BBC website looking at teaching union fears of the health risks of wi-fi.  I hadn't realised it was a puff piece, giving a lead into a Panorama programme to be broadcast today on "Wi-fi: a warning signal".  Licence payers' money was spent on this investigation which found (suitable pause for effect here) that wi-fi radiation levels at one school were three times the level of mobile phone mast radiation - they were also 600 times below government safety limits.

A number of experts from British institutions are quoted as saying that there is no risk and that this is a non-story.  The intensity of wi-fi radiation is 100,000 times less than that of a domestic microwave (where is the Panorama programme on let's ban the microwave oven?).  My favourite part of the report is a section from Professor Sperrin, an expert in the field of medical physics, who points out that it is impossible to prove a negative or to prove that something has absolutely no effect.  The implication is that Panorama, Jeremy Vine and other innumerate institutions will keep pushing this one until someone takes them seriously.

Other forms of electromagnetic radiation have been found to be harmful - the example quoted is of someone sitting in a wi-fi hot spot in full sun on a beach.  The significant danger here is of sunstroke and sun burn - get into the shade being the health and safety advice.  Other worries about wireless laptop computers come from the dangers of heat sources (the battery in particular) and the effect that prolonged exposure could have to the "soft parts of the body", where you might place a laptop.  Think about it chaps!!

On the same day, a survey for the NSPCC found that violence is a day to day problem for young people aged 11 to 16.  Of those questioned, 42% had been hit, punched or kicked at secondary school - a pretty tangible health risk.  A good three quarters had faced some form of bullying in school, but less than half felt there was adequate support to help them cope with it.

Jeremy Vine - here surely is something that is worth picking up on!  It would be a cheaper programme to fund by the BBC and a whole lot more relevant to the majority of young people than some non-existent risk that Panorama had to go to Sweden and to the USA to find some nebulous possible evidence for.  It would highlight something that needs action and a bit of government spend - but perhaps the public school boys among the powers that be think that it is a good part of the school tradition and never did them any harm.

So for the numerate amongst us, let us act to stop or reduce the actual threat, and leave the fantasy threat to the science fiction writers!  Or is there mileage in a study on the stupidity of the media - the chances (or risk) of getting funding for that are probably too low to be worth the effort of applying.

The Workforce of 2020 and Leitch

The pages of the BBC's education news on the web include a small and overlooked debate between Chris Humphries - Skills guru and Director General of City and Guilds - and the spokespeople of the DfES on the ultimate meaning of the Leitch report.

Chris is concerned that the new demographic time bomb (low birth rates in the 1990s) and the economically inactive will combine to create a "workforce black hole" in 2020.  He feels the demographic issue was missed by Leitch, giving a fundamental flaw.  DfES are naturally defending Leitch and the money and time that work took, but also point out that forecasting the size of the workforce of the future is difficult, while asserting that Leitch felt the inflow of young people would not be enough to meet future skills needs.

Both sides have good points to make and neither is essentially wrong.  Chris is right to say that we need to be engaging with the economically inactive - while unemployment has gone down significantly in the past 10 years, the numbers employed and economically inactive have both gone up.  It is the inactive group that are hard to engage with, that don't want to improve their skills, that don't seem to want to put themselves out for their own good or for that of society.  Don't get me started on what they might be doing with their time instead!!

Chris also has a slightly vested interest in highlighting the changes in the numbers of young people - City and Guilds provide an awful lot of qualifications to an awful lot of young people, and as the BBC has also pointed out recently, a substantial part of a college budget can be eaten up in examination fees to the likes of City and Guilds.

Leitch in many ways started from the premise that a lot of attention was being paid to the skills and education of young people, but what about the rest of the population?  A core part of his fundamental argument was that the majority of the working age population of 2020 (and excluding for the moment issues of changes in pensionable age) were ALREADY in the working age bracket, hence the need to focus on their skills, rather than that of youth.  This is not contrary to what Chris Humphries is saying.

Of course the whole argument could be a way of bringing the issue back to centre stage and developing media, academic and policy debate about how to engage with the economically inactive.  If that is the case, to this interested observer, I think they have missed out with the timings as Scottish election results, the Northern Ireland government and the climax of the northern hemisphere football season (not to mention the Lord's Test next week) are all rather more fascinating currently.