Your story “80 vacancies filled from abroad”
(Gazette, September 25) referring to the 80 nurses being recruited from the Philippines for Colchester General Hospital is an indictment of the massive failure of our national educational system.
It shows that creating artificial targets for students to go to university is irrelevant to the needs of our society. Skills are not acquired at universities but at vocational colleges and institutes.
We should judge our schools not by the number of their students who get A grades and places at university, but by the number of students they prepare to serve the needs of our communities.
Recruiting nurses from a developing and impoverished country like the Philippines, which needs all the nurses it can train, is no worthy solution for Colchester General Hospital or any British hospital.
Chris Ryecart
Fronks Road
Dovercourt
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