With annual student debt soaring to 5,000 pounds a year, young people face tough prospects, according to a new study by Push, an online resource for students.

New university students should expect to owe 23,500 pounds at graduation, the 2009 Push Student Debt Survey shows.

By contrast, students who started university in 2008 can expect to owe nearly 21,200 pounds at graduation.

Teenagers receiving A-level results on Thursday will be particularly concerned as some sources of income have been drying up while debt rises, Push suggests.

About 80 percent of students rely on part-time or holiday jobs to supplement their income by an average of 2,000 pounds a year, the study says.

With data from the Department for Children, Schools and Families published in the Guardian showing that one in six young people in England aged 18 to 24 are now classified as “neets” — not in education employment or training — the increase in costs for students raises new worries.

A total of 835,000 young people, 100,000 more than this time last year, are classified as neets.

Is it worth spending this kind of money and graduating in debt for a university education?

Professions such as law, medicine and journalism have a “closed shop mentality” and are increasingly open only to those from affluent backgrounds, a report into social mobility says.

Former Labour government minister Alan Milburn, who chaired the study on widening access to top professions, said that young people need better career advice to raise their aspirations and give them greater confidence. Mr Milburn told the BBC: “We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we have broken through it yet.

“What we have got to do is open up these opportunities so they are available for everybody.”

The Fair Access to the Professions report also recommended that universities take into account the social background of their intake, criticised internships and work placements as acting as an easy way in for affluent and well-connected young people and called for increased monitoring of the background of those entering certain professions.

What do you think? Are these measures likely to increase social mobility? Is it right to look at a person’s background when considering them for a university place or professional position?

Time was when a British education had a cachet, especially among Britain's far-flung colonial territories.

But could the prestige of even a Cambridge or Oxford degree be a little dulled in these parlous days for the British economy, now labouring under massive public debt and a decade-high unemployment rate?

That appears to be the case in the former British colony of Singapore, whose rapid economic development since independence in 1965 has seen it accumulate hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves and attain a GDP per capita on par with Italy.

The city-state's newest opposition politician Kenneth Jeyaretnam has complained that the Singapore press -- often accused giving more favorable coverage to the ruling party -- has been referring to him as a "British-trained economist".

Jeyaretnam, like many members of Singapore's political establishment -- including the country's first prime minister and current prime minister -- went to Cambridge.

"I wonder why I have never read in the Singapore press, British-trained mathematician prime minister Lee Hsien Loong or British trained-lawyer, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew," Jeyaretnam said in a speech to the Singapore Foreign Correspondents Association earlier this month.

"Naturally I suspect that the mainstream media want to light up a subliminal marker in the people’s minds that a) I’m a foreigner and b) that my economics is suspiciously left-wing because it’s from a country associated with economic failure and the welfare state."

Ouch.

How big a crime is lying to try and get your child into a good school?

Plenty of parents have tried it by falsely claiming they live in the school’s catchment area or by suddenly getting religion but the worst that happens up till now is that they get found out and their child is turned away.

Now Harrow Council in London wants to go further and prosecute them. It had to withdraw a test case for fraud against the mother of a five-year-old it accused of  lying about her address on the school application form but it wants new powers to enable it to take such parents to court.

“This is not a question of persecuting individuals,” said Council leader David Ashton. “We took the view we should prosecute, because we have to ensure there is a level playing field for all parents.”

Do you believe parents should be hauled before a court simply for wanting the best for their children?

As the recession closes one door for bankers, another quickly opens.

The government’s latest educational wheeze is to allow teachers to qualify in just six months, half the current one-year time period.

Schools Minister Jim Knight wants to attract “more outstanding people” to the profession and hopes the scheme could help those such as bankers, who were excellent mathematicians and had been made unemployed, switch careers.

Predictably the unions are less keen on the proposal, arguing the truncated training period is too short to prepare new recruits for such a demanding profession.

“I think it demeans the position of people who are teachers at the moment. It doesn’t seem to be a sensible idea at all,” said Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the NUT.

But before signing on the dotted line, ex-bankers interested in taking up the government’s offer might think about taking a trip to the cinema and watch the Palme d’Or winner “The Class”.

Laurent Cantet’s cinematic tour de force portrays a Parisian middle school teacher’s struggles to educate a fiesty group of inner-city kids. If you thought the trading floor was a bear pit…….

Is the government scheme the right way to attract new recruits to the profession? Or does the fast-track plan indicate a short-term approach to developing teachers?

Teaching unions have long hated SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) for seven, 11 and 14 year-olds, saying they give children a narrower education than they need because of the widespread practice of “teaching to the tests” in order to gain ground in school league tables.

The publication of national results this week and last has brought renewed calls for their abolition, coming after controversy over delays in the marking of this year’s exams.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said this week’s Key Stage 3 results for 14-year-olds were an “irrelevance”.

“No one will be interested in the results when young people apply for a job,” it said.

The Commons Schools Select Committee in May found that teaching to the test was widespread.

“The drive to meet Government-set targets has too often become the goal rather than the means to the end of providing the best possible education for all children,” it said.

The government says the national tests — only conducted in England — and external examinations at 16 are an important aspect of accountability in education. Good schools can focus on literacy and numeracy and take the tests in their stride, it believes.

What do you think?

Should the brightest pupils be required to study extra science subjects?

The Confederation of British Industry wants the 250,000 pupils who get top marks in national science SAT exams at age 14 to be automatically opted in for a two-year “triple science” GCSE course covering physics, chemistry and biology.

The CBI says three-fifths of firms are having trouble recruiting science graduates and blame the problem on a long-term decline in science teaching at schools.

The number of specialist science teachers has halved over the past 20 years and only 7 percent of pupils currently take the triple science GCSE option — most take a double or single science course.

The CBI proposal would require a huge boost to science teaching — already promised by the government — but the industry body says its ambition could be reached by 2013.

Schools Minister Jim Knight maintains that increasing the number of science graduates is a top government priority but says opting-in the best pupils is not the answer.

What do you think should be done?

Professor Ken Smith is so fed up with endlessly correcting his students’ spelling that he’s throwing in the towel.

Why not just accept that you’re never going to iron out the most common spelling mistakes and simply accept them as “variants,” he suggests.

“Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such,” he says.

He’s thinking of words like argument, that often comes at him as “arguement,” or twelth (twelfth) and all those words that break the i-before-e rule like weird and seize.

What do you think? Is correct spelling just for pedants and crossword fiends nowadays?

(P.S. We promise not to put your replies through spellcheck)

“Come on!” the man yells through the megaphone. “Your children need to see you taking part. They need to see you running”.

That dreaded time has come. The School Sports Day season is upon us —  and with it comes the mother of all challanges — the Mums’ Race.

When I say challenge, it’s not so much the distance, or speed, but the ludicrous array of dilemmas it throws up.

Should you do it at all? Are you setting a bad example by racing against others, or does the lesson of taking part override any question about the morality of trying to beat fellow human beings to the finish line?

Or should you politely ignore Megaphone Man’s  invitation, despite having enjoyed watching your own and other people’s children gamefully and un-selfconsciously crawling through tunnels, racing around cones and leaping over obstacles for the past two hours.

Should you win, and embarrass yourself and your child? Or should you lose, and embarrass yourself and your child? 

Should you run in sandals, a strappy top and a floaty skirt, and risk what Janet Jackson once described as a “wardrobe malfunction”, or slip on the running spikes and lycra and shrug off the sneers of those less well-prepared?

Well, it’s summer, and the children are only young. So the best strategy is probably to go barefoot, in the middle of the pack, balancing a bean bag on your head and laughing all the way.

The Spelling Society (SSS), which celebrates its 100th birthday this year, says it’s time for the English language to drag itself into the modern world, leaving behind 15th century spelling rules that have no place in the 21st century.

After my son proudly produced his first hand-written book, delightfully entitled “Imfmashen about plarnts” and peppered with details about “leevs” and “roots ” and “barc”, my sympathy for children (and teachers) across the English-speaking world
deepened.

How is it possible that the spelling such words as “cough” and “although” and “through” should be so similar when they sound so different?

In some ways, it would seem a shame to reduce our often beautiful and eccentric language to a series of text-message-like phonetics, but when you consider the cost of
teaching spelling to our children –  the SSS estimates it at an eye-watering £18 million a year in Britain alone — the argument gains some weight.

In other languages, like Spanish, learning the alphabet gives you immediate access to be able to read, spell and pronounce every word — even those you have never come across and don’t understand.

And with Spanish competing with English as the world’s most dominant language, is it time for the English-speaking world to modernise or die.