August 20: Make or break day for GCSEs

It is important that every student has access to the very best careers advice – the decisions they take today will have a significant bearing on their future prospects. Choices need to be made which will enhance the future employment prospects of the individuals concerned so they can fulfil their potential.

This is borne out by claims, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, that Tony Blair’s desire for at least 50 per cent of young people to go to university, and study for a degree, has led to the labour market becoming saturated with graduates who cannot find jobs that are commensurate with their qualifications. It says just under 60 per cent of graduates in the UK now work in non-graduate jobs while the figure is just 10 per cent in countries like Germany which do place a much stronger emphasis on vocational training. Of course the economic downturn will have limited the number of opportunities available but these findings do serve to highlight the importance of on-the-job training – or college-based learning.

As such, this report is another reminder about the need for even closer links between schools and employers as manufacturers warn that there is a growing skills shortage because insufficient students have been specialising in those STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – that are increasingly integral to the national economy. Because of this, today’s GCSE recipients should regard their results as the end of the beginning of their education rather than the beginning of the end. That’s the most important lesson of all on this landmark day.

Race against time

Seb Coe’s greatest challenge

SEBASTIAN COE, a proud son of Sheffield, is no stranger to success – and winning those races that matter most of all. Britain’s greatest ever middle distance runner was the inspirational leader who masterminded the successful staging of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. Yet the peer’s latest role – he has been elected president of the International Association of Athletics Federations – is, possibly, his greatest challenge yet as he embarks upon a race against time to save his sport from being irrevocably tarnished by drug cheats.

It is a contest that the clean-cut Lord Coe cannot afford to lose. Once the purest of sports, epitomised by the film Chariots of Fire, athletics is now as tainted as the Tour de France cycle race during the Lance Armstrong era because it has allowed the cheats to prosper – a cloud of suspicion will hang over many medal contenders at the supposedly showpiece World Championships which begin in Beijing this weekend.

It was not helped by Lord Coe’s regrettable reaction to recent revelations about industrial-scale doping. He regarded this expose as a “declaration of war’ by the media. It was not. This was the final wake-up call to a sport in crisis that it needs to take decisive and immediate action to save its once cherished Corinthian values and ensure that competitors, like Sheffield’s golden girl Jessica Ennis-Hill, can compete on a level playing field. Now he is in the ultimate position of authority, Lord Coe needs to lead from the front and impose life bans on the cheats. Nothing less will suffice if athletics is to emerge from its greatest ever crisis of credibility.

Kicking the habit

More support is still needed

SMOKING can ruin lives. We have known this for decades now.

So the news that almost half of all pregnant women in Yorkshire who pledged to stop smoking last year either lost touch with the services helping them quit, or continued with a habit that is known to damage the health of their unborn children, is alarming.

In Barnsley, which ranks as the worst area in Yorkshire with regard to this, the figure is even higher. This has got to change.

Anti-smoking groups are right to call for steps to be taken to curb this worrying trend.

Attitudes towards smoking have changed dramatically in recent years and there has been a great deal of sterling work carried out to help people give up the habit. It is crucial that this continues.

Not only are smoking-related diseases an avoidable drain on hard-pressed NHS resources, but they can have a devastating effect on smokers and their families.