Expectations by Neil Sambrook

What are our expectations as consumers? This is the question I have been mulling around in my skull for the past two weeks now. As a college or a training provider we sell our products to the general public, but in what way do we actually sell them? We don’t appear to sell a physical product like say perhaps Robert Dyas on the high street do; we sell an experience, the combination of the whole, a package if you will. So how do we compare this package to something else we know? A package holiday may be the obvious comparison. In one convenient cost, we purchase a flight, accommodation and tour rep to cater to our whims and expect a certain level of quality when doing so. If we pay £200 for a fortnight in Majorca, we expect the hotel to be average at best, the rep to turn up once in that two weeks and a crowded flight with no leg room, in fact, anything better than this is an unexpected and most welcome bonus. If we spend £2000 for a luxury week in the Maldives, we expect to be treated like royalty; we expect spacious aircraft legroom, the best food and top class accommodation with a rep that cannot do enough for you. It stands to reason that the more you pay, the greater the expectation of the end product. Our expectations as consumers when paying what we consider to be large sums of money are extremely high, indeed my own are no different.

Then I asked myself, what if I was to buy an LCD television. I have the choice several models but I narrow it down to two different models, one costing £400 and one costing £4000. What do I expect the difference in product to be for the actual difference in price? Well, I expect both of them to work in so much as I can watch Eastenders equally well on either television (perish the thought). I would also expect the more expensive one to have a much better quality picture, better sound, better build quality and more functions and features to justify spending the additional premium.

So thinking of the two parallels, I have tried to compare them to the expectations placed on us as tutors and assessors in an increasingly demanding industry. The thought process almost immediately got me thinking about my experience at college during my own apprenticeship…

My experiences and expectations at college

We had many different tutors during my stint at college each with their own eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses. I was there for three years in total, the City and Guilds 236 Part 1, Part 2 and finally the C Certificate, all done via block release. Over the three year span, we had eleven different tutors:

1. Mr A (Sergeant in the TA, not a great lecturer but extremely respected, strong disciplinarian!)
2. Mr B (young tutor, my inspiration to want to teach, very good, lots of personal respect for him despite being a Villa fan)
3. Mr G (sitting at the front reading the Regs is not conducive to learning I am sorry to say! People literally fell asleep and snored during the class. Four hours of being read the Regs by a guy with the worst monotonous Yorkshire drone you can imagine should have seen the guy fired out of a large gun into the nearest dole queue)
4. Mr R (great motivator and a really nice guy is unfortunately as much as I can say about him)
5. Mr Bob M (king of eccentrics, good solid tutor in later years though, despite having an old school approach, we did learn from him)
6. Mr H (absolutely no class discipline whatsoever, learnt nothing, lovely friendly guy though, I felt guilty that no one ever listened to him as I suspect we all did)
7. Mr B (not much to say, was alright I suppose, no lasting impact or memory)
8. Mr F (excellent sketch artist, very poor tutor unfortunately)
9. Mr H (mad professor, always way above our level and impatient too)
10. Mr M (sorry, learned nothing from you I am afraid)
11. Another tutor, forget his name, one lad tried to lift his wallet if I recall, wound him up something chronic all the time they did.

So out of the three years I attended college, there were two tutors out of eleven that were actually worth paying in my honest opinion. As a head of an electrical department and recently being involved in recruitment, I could happily say I would not employ the remaining nine tutors today were they to come to interview. In all honesty, they would never get past the microteach (a short ten minute presentation before the interview). They imparted next to no knowledge and only three of them actually maintained discipline in the classroom. In hindsight, I have no idea how I passed the majority of the course. I suspect that at least eight of the tutors are long retired by now which may or may not be an excuse for the overall poorness of my general tutoring at college.

My experience at college part two

At this point, and through the comments above, you must be thinking that I hated college. You’d be very wrong in that assumption, I absolutely loved college. I am not overly sure why I enjoyed the experience so much but suspect that it was for two reasons, the social aspect and the fact that despite the tutors, I succeeded and did quite well out of it dispelling my previous schooling mediocrity. Out of all the tutors, one really inspired me, a young tutor of approximately 27 years of age who was into modern music, football, girls and everything else a rampant teenager could associate with. He was the reason I entered teaching myself at a relatively young age, I believed I could teach and communicate with the students as well as him and do a much better job than nine out of eleven tutors I had during my apprenticeship.

So what’s the relevance?

Good point, I am getting there, please bear with me. My point is I had no expectation from college or my tutors. I cannot really tell you why not, I just didn’t. School for me didn’t hit anything like the proverbial nail on the head. I came away from school with nothing to speak of in terms of qualifications and maybe this is why my expectations were so low or to be honest, non-existent. The only thing I expected out of college was a certificate at the end, and even then, only if I could be bothered to do the revision and put the work in myself for it.

Ok, ok, so what’s your point?

I suppose what I am getting at is that 18 years later, the people we teach seem to have immense expectations. They don’t expect to have good lecturers teaching them, they expect to have brilliant lecturers teaching them. They expect to be entertained as if we were all as engaging as the latest music/television/film/consoles are to their individual social lives. They expect everything to be delivered to them on a plate in a format that keeps them interested for seven hours a day. They whinge when they have to write anything down, failing at all times to understand the importance of being able to write to complete their apprenticeships and even exist in post adolescent life. They moan about covering Health and Safety despite the fact that most of it is now delivered in innovative and consuming ways; there are an abundance of interactive games and teaching methods being produced. Some even complain when we do practical work, despite the fact that the quality of the practical exercises and the equipment used today is almost infinitely better than twenty years ago. Twenty years ago our consumer unit in the workshop consisted of a connector block to give you a comparison as to how far we have moved on. All this could be compared to teaching styles years ago when a tutor would simply dictate what you needed to know with the expectation on you to remember what you were writing. We were never going to learn from dictation, but it certainly kept the class quiet and occupied. Dreadful practise indeed by anybody’s standards today. But did we complain? Did we go back to our gaffer and say that the (and I quote from a recent comment) “teaching was shit”? We certainly did not, in fact, despite the bad teaching, our end of block tests were sent back to the gaffer and if we underperformed, we were actually called in from site to explain exactly why. One such phase test saw me get about 45%, which was only 2% lower than the next highest in the class (I wasn’t top of the class you know!) and saw me in front of the company director trying to explain that, although it was only 45%, it was actually a very high score compared to the rest in the class. That took an incredible amount of persuading and a promise that the next test would be much better before I could leave his office. In stark contrast, today’s students’ getting such a result would result in the company director ringing the college demanding why his student had such a low score and what we are going to do to improve it. If we don’t improve it, they will send the student to a rival educational provider, ergo taking his business and money elsewhere. That’s the difference between 2007 now and 1989 and my first point about expectation; it has reversed entirely.

I see the same with parents, if a full time student is underperforming then it has to be the lecturer’s fault. Parents’ will look for reasons why their child is underperforming and believe the child without question when they say that the ‘lecturer is crap’ and actually pursue the college to have this ‘malpractising fiend’ replaced by someone who knows what they are doing. The very last thing they will do is question the performance, commitment or desire of the child. Of the two years I have been managing a full time class I have been astounded at some of the parents’ responses, in fact, absolutely speechless as the parent of the most disruptive and badly behaved student on the course last year got his Mother to ring in and complain that we weren’t teaching him correctly after a bad report. It was our fault that the student was behaving badly (and apparently the two schools that he had previously attended and been removed from had extremely poor teachers too) and that we should do something about it or they would be complaining to the Principal. I had call from another parent saying that the student wasn’t learning anything in the class as it was such a disruptive environment to try to learn in. When I investigated, it turned out that the son she was ringing in about was the main cause of the disruption and had been chastised by the lecturer on several occasions.

The truth

In all honesty, I am probably venting some pent up half term frustration as I get another load of student surveys plonked on my desk as part of the tri-annual course review. I see comments on there that are utter rubbish, perhaps the fault of us giving some of these students a voice when some of them fail to understand basic English (and I am not talking immigrants and EU workers here). I get, as electrical co-ordinator, moans and groans about tutors under my leadership. I get questions about their competence, their commitment, their experience, their interest in the subject and everything else you can imagine. These lecturers they are complaining about are the same as all of us; they are electricians trying to put something back into the system and earn a wage. They may not know everything about electrical installation and science or be Superteacher™, but they are really trying hard to adopt new and interesting teaching methods to keep the students attention and increase the amount learning at the same time. They are trying exceptionally hard, with many working 60 to 70 hour weeks just to keep on top of information they themselves haven’t studied in 20 or 30 years. Most of all though, I get angry that no thought goes into the seemingly mindless ranting from many of today’s students. There is no thought about the fact they are destroying the morale of people that are trying so very hard to educate them. Their expectation level, despite the majority of them getting absolutely free training courtesy of the government and the remainder paying about one thirtieth of the average electrician’s salary a year, is extremely high. Too high in fact.

The conclusion

Well, I was going somewhere with this after all. Our expectations in life when talking about buying an LCD television simply cannot be linked to an educational experience. It is the sum of much more than the whole. A mature student expects that his £500 a year to gain a trade qualification is a lot of money and demands premium experiences because of the outlay. It seems that £500 a year to many people wanting to train is apparently extremely expensive. When compared to everyday life, I suspect that the same individual that thinks £500 is a lot of money for a course that will change their life forever, doesn’t think that paying £900 for a plasma television is a lot of money. They may think that the holiday to Majorca costing £500 is excellent value for money but they won’t think to compare this to an educational experience, an experience that really will have an impact on them and their families’ future.

In truth, that £500 a year is merely chicken feed, a token payment, it barely covers the wage demands of the people delivering, administering, registering and running the course they have enrolled on yet alone the amount of material used every year. One course alone, popular amongst private training providers’, costs £200 just to simply register the student with the awarding body. When you actually break down what you get for your money, you realise it is extremely good value for money.

So what do you expect for your money and how much does a quality education actually really cost? Well, when paying the sort of fees that colleges are charging for a course you should put your expectations somewhere amongst the cheap package holiday to Majorca level. You’ll ultimately get your qualification from the course but you need to put in a lot yourself to meet the required level of competence. If you get an excellent tutor, then you can compare this to getting additional legroom on a cheap flight, or an upgraded hotel room for free on arrival in Majorca. When paying some of the rather more exorbitant fees of private training providers, then you can start to expect the level of service that comes from a premium package, akin to that of the two weeks in the Maldives. You have a much greater right to expect a better service when spending £4500 on a course at a private provider compared to £500 at a college.

The real conclusion

Next time you complain that your lecturer didn’t quite get a particular point across, has a strict and disciplinarian approach to class management, wasn’t quite on the ball during today’s lesson or got something wrong in class, remember your expectations and manage them accordingly. The next time you get a survey to complete about your experience on a course, think before filling it out, don’t whinge and complain like so many of us in today’s society seem to want to do today. There are many students who do act and respond in an intelligent way, they may well have important concerns and as long as they approach it in the right way, we as tutors, course managers and department managers will listen and try to act accordingly. We only have the interests of the students at the end of the day.

An electrician willing to enter the teaching game is very hard to find, an experienced electrical lecturer is extremely difficult to persuade to work for you and an experienced and excellent electrical lecturer with a good reputation comes about as often as Halley’s Comet. If out of three lecturers over three years you have one average one, one good one and one excellent one, you are doing extremely well in the scheme of things. If you continue to complain about the trivialities then remember one thing, we may be teaching at the moment, but we are all really just humble electricians under that shirt, tie and name badge, we’ll simply get fed up and go back on the tools, leaving the chancers, the retirees and the downright crap lecturers behind to train the next generation of electricians. Then believe me, you will really have something to complain about.