An (original) recipe for bucketloads of learning
First it was McDonald’s, which created for its “Hamburger University” a real foundation degree accredited by Manchester Metropolitan University. Now Colonel Sanders has gone one up on his rival by launching a KFC BA (Hons) in business administration, designed by De Montfort University in Leicester.
It’s a finger-lickin’ #163;600,000 investment intended to link with the company’s apprenticeships and in-house training, to provide a seamless path from deep-fat-fryer drudgery to the degree-level supervision of deep-fat-fryer drudgery.
Naturally, the investment in education of these two giants of fast food is to be welcomed, coinciding as it does with the gradual decline and disappearance of publicly funded education at degree level for adults.
FErret envisages a future when the universities have crumbled and the boat race is contested by crews from McDonald’s and KFC, spectators waiting hours before anyone can wheeze their way over the finish line. Still, more time for adverts that way. So good! I’m loving it!
And you are?
Lately, the words “embarrassment” and “Matthew Hancock” have been all-too-frequent neighbours, whether it’s sleeping in when he was due at a television interview or comparing himself to Disraeli, Churchill and Pitt a week into his ministerial job. So he will have been relieved it was someone else putting their foot in it last week: Channel 4‘s Jon Snow.
Mr Snow was out on Fleet Street testing the public mood before Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, only to run into a couple of young chaps in morning dress.
“Are you going in?” he asked. “How did you manage to get in?” And then realisation began to dawn as FE minister Mr Hancock and a fellow Tory MP stared back at him. “Oh, you’re probably someone incredibly important,” Mr Snow said.
“Well, since we’re both Tory MPs, and all Tory MPs are going,” said Mr Hancock, laughing and not showing any discomfort that you’re probably not that important if even professional politics-watchers don’t recognise you.
The gaffe wouldn’t have been so bad, except that Mr Hancock was in the Channel 4 news studio only last month.
