Wednesday, 1 June 2016

National Curriculum SATs, French labour relations


Given my proclivity to criticise standards of spoken English and to reminisce about the Universities’ Test of English taken by students applying for a university place in the 1960s, I thought I’d look at what was being tested in the SATs tests in England and Wales. I did a short sample paper entitled: “KS2 English Tests - Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation - level 3-5, Short”, which happened to be the grammatical section. This test is the Standard Assessment Test used in the National Curriculum. It covers the period from age 7 to 11 in junior school.

I must say that I found the questions far more taxing than I anticipated. This is, in my opinion, a very good standard indeed to face at age 11. I hope English teaching maintains the same high standards throughout secondary education. Here are the questions:

.What does the word others refer to in the passage below?
.Tick one box to show how the modal verb affects the meaning of the sentence.
.Find the adverb in the sentence below.
.In this sentence, is the word after being used as a subordinating conjunction or as a preposition?
.Which sentence uses the past progressive?
.Tick the option that shows how the underlined words are used in the sentence. (My baby brother was born in the hospital where my father works.)
.Tick all the sentences that contain a preposition.
.Tick all the determiners in the sentence below.

The UEFA Euro 2016 football championship begins in France on June 10th. At the moment, France is still in turmoil owing to the continuing labour disputes between unions and the government about changes to employment law which have recently been forced through the National Assembly without a vote. Will the Euro have to be cancelled? Good question. In an editorial in Le Figaro on 27th May, a number of points were made. Public sector workers work fewer hours than the private sector. A good percentage work less than the official 35 hours. This has been shown in numerous official reports over the years and nothing has ever been done. The government has just voted an increase in public sector pay. How can the national budget ever be balanced? Whose interests are best served by the current social upheaval, by trying to stop all reform of employment law? Answer: those who work less than the others, have a job for life and generous pensions. These people fight tooth and nail for the status quo. The irony is that these people are not in the least affected by the recent changes in employment law. It affects the private sector.

The union which is leading the fight is the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). It is a left-wing union which goes back a long way (1895). It’s something of a union dinosaur whose preferred method of negotiation is conflict. In the current stand-off, union representatives can be heard claiming legitimacy by saying that the majority of the French people support their stance. According to the Le Monde newspaper, the CGT represents as at April 2016 less than 3% of French employees. Another major union, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), founded in 1919, is the largest in membership terms. Nowadays, it is less conflictual than the CGT and is beginning to view labour relations more in the British or German way, change through debate, discussion and by offering alternative solutions to the resolving of disputes.

Membership of unions is nowadays very low, which leads to the question of how they are financed. Union finances in France are opaque, not to say a bit of a mystery. More on this next time.


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