Evaluation, statistics and OR

Construction Skills and the Olympics

The 2012 Olympics and the bespoke buildings and resources required for them will mean a need for more skilled construction workers - about 182,000 of them according to the Construction Skills Network.

It is good to see this sort of statement from the industry, although all sorts of other projects at both local and national level will also drive needs like this.  I have been involved in trying to forecast the extra numbers needed for a variety of construction projects in the Coventry and Warwickshire sub-region as well as for the major regeneration of Hastings.  Organisations in the South East have had similar headaches over projects such as Terminal 5 and the Thames Gateway.

What makes this one a bit different?  The world's eyes are on us for the 2012 Olympics - can we do what we said we would do in our bid?  Elements of the media are already talking down the Olympics, in much the same way as they talked down the Millennium Dome after a few editors were inconvenienced when it opened.  It is right or trendy or clever to start saying the whole thing will be a fiasco now, before we have got to the opening ceremony?  That shows very little faith in our construction industry, the people who will take part in the opening ceremony and the business growth that should come from the Games, assuming it isn't sabotaged by the Whittering Classes (Chattering seems far too kind a terminology).

So, why not help the Olympic dream by encouraging young people to learn to be skilled craftspeople, with abilities that will ensure they are employable beyond 2012?  If you are mobile and flexible and skilled, there will always be jobs, as our need for major projects to be undertaken never seems to end.

Pass a language, don't speak it!

Today's rumour on the BBC education website that GCSE languages could be assessed without an oral exam goes beyond dumbing down, and if true, would turn language teaching in England into a bad joke.

It appears that the oral examination may be dropped and some form of continuous assessment brought in as the oral examination is a bit stressful, and that stress might stop people taking up languages.  Now I might be a bit of a freak, but the best memories I have of my O-levels (French, German, Spoken English), A-level (AS and A2 French), Degree German and PhD were the oral examinations, where you got a chance to show off to someone outside your circle of teachers and could demonstrate that you could do it!  I remember in my O-level French oral, rather patronisingly explaining to the examiner that many of my class mates might be having trouble, as we had all only recently returned from our German exchange trip - I got an A for the oral.

Setting aside my rather perverse view on the fun of oral examinations, the real test of learning a language is being able to have some sort of spoken interaction with a native speaker of that language (probably why Latin orals never really got fashionable).  That other person shouldn't really be the person who taught you the language in the first place as they will have preconceptions about your ability and also are already prepared for your accent and way of expressing yourself.  They may not be able to be wholly objective therefore.

If you find yourself using a foreign language in anger that you have had to learn in school, it is also likely that your experience will be stressful - be it that first attempt at buying a croissant or a beer or a coffee, trying to find a loo, trying to find your way round the Paris metro or how to pay for 200 miles on the Autoroute.  Even more stressfully, you could be trying to work out what that nice policeman with the speed camera is trying to say about your ability to stick to the speed limit, and respond to that politely.

Stress is an inevitable part of our lives and learning to cope with stressful situations is also part of the education process, so stopping a testing process at age 15 or 16 because it is a bit stressful can really be nothing more than dumbing down and certainly not in the interests of a young person.  It would be nice if someone saw sense on this, but I really doubt that will happen.

Today's rumour on the BBC education website that GCSE languages could be assessed without an oral exam goes beyond dumbing down, and if true, would turn language teaching in England into a bad joke.

It appears that the oral examination may be dropped and some form of continuous assessment brought in as the oral examination is a bit stressful, and that stress might stop people taking up languages.  Now I might be a bit of a freak, but the best memories I have of my O-levels (French, German, Spoken English), A-level (AS and A2 French), Degree German and PhD were the oral examinations, where you got a chance to show off to someone outside your circle of teachers and could demonstrate that you could do it!  I remember in my O-level French oral, rather patronisingly explaining to the examiner that many of my class mates might be having trouble, as we had all only recently returned from our German exchange trip - I got an A for the oral.

Setting aside my rather perverse view on the fun of oral examinations, the real test of learning a language is being able to have some sort of spoken interaction with a native speaker of that language (probably why Latin orals never really got fashionable).  That other person shouldn't really be the person who taught you the language in the first place as they will have preconceptions about your ability and also are already prepared for your accent and way of expressing yourself.  They may not be able to be wholly objective therefore.

If you find yourself using a foreign language in anger that you have had to learn in school, it is also likely that your experience will be stressful - be it that first attempt at buying a croissant or a beer or a coffee, trying to find a loo, trying to find your way round the Paris metro or how to pay for 200 miles on the Autoroute.  Even more stressfully, you could be trying to work out what that nice policeman with the speed camera is trying to say about your ability to stick to the speed limit, and respond to that politely.

Stress is an inevitable part of our lives and learning to cope with stressful situations is also part of the education process, so stopping a testing process at age 15 or 16 because it is a bit stressful can really be nothing more than dumbing down and certainly not in the interests of a young person.  It would be nice if someone saw sense on this, but I really doubt that will happen.

Business Survival Rates

On Monday I went with my husband to the local Chambre de Commerces for a half day introductory course on setting up in business in France.  Having done a similar thing in the UK a number of year's ago with enterprise agencies, we were pretty familiar with a lot of what was presented.  We were slightly shocked at the confusion as to which Chambre you need to register with, which depends on what you intend to do, and the fact that you could need to dual register, but that is a totally different story.

The session started with some statistics from INSEE on business survival rates - with the usual scare of perhaps half making it through to 3 years trading and only about 40% surviving to 5 years.  The lady running the course did comment that it was widely recognised that survival rates were favourably influenced by start ups receiving help from their adviser at the relevant Chambre.  Given that fact, another member of the course asked whether age affected survival rates, but that was not available.

Now that set me thinking - as you would expect.  There must be information collected on the age and gender of business start ups, not least through HMRC and Companies House, but how to look at the factors that make a successful start up?  If it is a one person business, that is relatively easy, provided the data is captured.  If that person takes on an employee, then it is also possible to allocate success to the manager (it may not be fair, but it is possible).

The difficulty is where you start up with some one or some many.  Can you allocate equal shares of someone's personal characteristics?  How do you measure influence?  This is what gets me to a certain extent about women's business support as you lose eligibility as soon as you work with a man, and yet men make up about half the population.

So, an interesting question, and one to which I don't have an answer, but if anyone has a nice big data set and a bit of money, I am more than happy to spend some time working up a few statistical models to see if I can sort out some determinants of business success based on age and on gender.