Many university dropouts blame their schools for pushing them to enter university when they would have benefited from a year out of education to think about their choices more carefully. Schools are also criticized for failing to present more vocational methods of learning as viable alternatives to university. A survey of some 15,000 dropouts by the Institute for Educational Research found that a mistaken choice of course accounted for 24% of students leaving university. Financial and personal problems were given as the other main causes of dropping out.Although 1 in 4 dropouts were employed in non graduate jobs, such as catering, cleaning, or security work, three years after leaving university, compared to 1 in 10 who graduated, they found equal satisfaction in their jobs. The survey revealed that dropouts did not appear to suffer any financial penalty from failing to complete their courses. They do, however, experience feelings of personal failure and are conscious of the stigma attached to early withdrawal from higher education.
Older people find it difficult to get simple and comprehensive advice about the services available to them. They also find services such as adaptations, disjointed, hard to understand, and slow to be delivered. The solution is to join up the housing departments of local councils, social services, health services and voluntary organizations. The severity of the challenge of joining up services emerges from advice issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Department of Health and the Housing Corporation.The joining up process involves breaking down demarcation lines between groups of staff and disciplines. It also includes ensuring tasks are not duplicated by different staff and different parts of the service system for older people. It means making flexible use of staff. In addition to the difficulty of bringing together organizations with different cultures and different processes, social change, such as people living longer, is going on at the same time.
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By Paul Johnson The development of interactive websites, contact centers, one stop shops, information kiosks and digital TV will potentially bring many benefits to customers, but they also bring risk. The author maintains that many local councils have no formal risk management strategies in place. He outlines some of the issues that need to be addressed in devising a risk management strategy.