Mark Tickner:


I talk a lot of parents who push their children to be Doctors or Lawyers, or similar high paying jobs.  To be honest, I can't blame them for this; as a parent I want the best for my little one too.  But as a culture we do still need musicians, writers and artists. 

Something to take into account is that the obsession with medicine and other professional careers amongst south Asians is a means of moving up the social ladder and escaping poverty. When the first generation of south Asians arrived from the Indian Subcontinent they were overwhelmingly employed in low paid and menial jobs - many of which have now vanished due to the decline in heavy and traditional industries. The tactic was generally successful and now a sizeable fraction of second and third generation south Asians have entered the middle and professional classes of society.


You make a valid point regarding musicians, writers, and artists but bear in mind that immigrant communities have their own art forms that are not always covered by the British education system and had the south Asians decided to study the arts rather than professional careers then it would probably not have benefitted them economically.  

We also need people who can do all the lower paying service jobs. 

How does this square with automation and the fact that there is also a glut of low skilled people fighting for low paid service jobs in Britain at the moment? In fact amongst the south Asians there's almost a culture of professional career or bust (end up working as a taxi driver or in a takeaway) with little in the way of a middle ground.

Howard Warren:

When I left school in the mid 80's, I seem to remember there was a "core" of Maths, English, one science, one foreign language and one craft. This was what most employers demanded back then, and you were expected to achieve decent pass marks in these five subjects. Anything over and above this was a bonus. These "extra" qualifications were the student's choice from the "options". In my case, the extra options were two further sciences, arithmetic, an additional language and art (yes, art - but only because I couldn't decide which "enrichment" option to take, they all seemed like a waste of time, so I left it blank and was slotted into the subject - and having absolutely zero artistic talent, and even less interest, I achieved a grade that was well towards the wrong end of the alphabet).

Foreign languages were not compulsory for O Level at my mother's school back in the 1980s. Arts subjects were only available to students who could demonstrate a reasonable degree of talent in them in Y9 in order to reduce the number of dossers.