The problem is that originally the idea was that people would obviously want to get back into work (and be able to) and wouldn’t want to remain dependent on benefits. That view clearly isn’t held by a number of people these days and these people can take advantage of the lack of limits on the help available. For example, take a typical family of two adults, two children who have become unemployed. Very roughly their entitlement would equate to £60 for the adults and £40 each for the children (neglecting, for the moment, any potential housing benefit etc.). That’s a total of £120 a week or around £6000 a year. Actually, it would be more as there’s child benefit of £35 a week so the total in basic income benefits is about £155 a week, £700 a month, £8000 a year (equivalent to a gross salary of around £12,000). Not a massive income for sure but, potentially, one that the family might live on as, of course, there would be assistance with housing costs, free school meals, and a few others.

However, consider instead a family with 10 children. Each child adds £55 a week so that’s £600/week, £2600/month or £32000 per year. Bearing in mind that the benefits are tax-free this equates to a salary of around £50,000. Even though I’m quite highly qualified, I would find it difficult to get that level of salary.

Now, I accept that people with large families don’t necessarily have them to pick up massive benefit payments but even if they don’t, surely there should be some kind of limit in terms of a maximum benefit payment regardless of other circumstances? If not, it would appear that the best plan would be to pop out kids on a regular basis: it can’t be right that the benefit system seems to be actively encouraging that.

One of the problems in doing that is that you really don’t want to be starting off on a major new qualification and then have to abandon it when you get that job you were hoping for. However, all is not lost as there are lots of accredited online degrees out there at the moment.

Don’t think that you need to limit yourself to also-ran universities either. Many of the big names offer a range of online courses these days in all sorts of fields and at various levels.

The good point about all of these is that should you manage to land that ideal job “too soon” you can continue on with your self-improvement programme.

Instead, what we have are the likes of LSAT prep courses which are designed to get you over the hurdles in the form of aptitude tests hat the specialist schools now place in front of us seemingly at every stage. Do they work though? Well, yes, to a point. What they will do beyond you looking at sample LSAT tests on your own is briefing as to what is being looked for in each type of question and that’s often far from obvious.

What they won’t do is to do anything like double your score. Thanks to the work that the schools put into developing these tests, it’s largely impossible to significantly increase your score. However, that’s not always necessary. Think about the simple case where, say, 50% is a pass, 49% is a fail and you’re consistently getting something like 46 or 47. You don’t need to double your score: you just need to add a few percentage points. That’s the case for a surprisingly large number of people sometimes.

The other reason why it’s worth looking into is simply because everyone else is doing it. The overall effect of that is that the schools adjust the pass mark upwards to take account of this which in turn means that we all need to up our game.

The problem, of course, is that discounting is rife thanks to the likes of Amazon and that really drops the price of second hand books. However, that’s not always the case and sometimes rarity lifts the price considerably even of something that you would think obsolete.

For instance, just a few nights ago I realised that I needed to refresh my memory of calculus for a course that I hope to start in the new year. As it happens I still have a copy of a mechanics textbook printed way back in 1970. It’s seriously dated and although the theory is fine the practical parts use outdated units. Anyway, I figured that since it was a textbook with origins back to the 1940s there would be an updated edition of it around. There isn’t unfortunately but that same book is available second hand for about twice what I paid for it new 30 years ago yet for half that amount you can get a brand new copy of a similar textbook.

Even more interesting is a course that I looked at as a child in the 1970s which is now on sale for several hundred poundswhereas newer versions of the course are available for maybe twenty or thirty pounds. So, often you’ll find that the value of your course texts will increase over time.

For many years the accepted standard test that colleges applied has been the GMAT and naturally that’s resulted in there being quite an industry built around GMAT prep training. Is it worth spending your money on any of it though?

Well, up to a point, yes. It’s essential to be familiar with the overall format of the GMAT itself, how the questions are presented, and even the relatively trivial organisation of the test centres. Even a very basic preparation is sure to raise your score by a few points and you can even find some programmes guaranteeing to raise your score by 50 points or perhaps a little more.

That sounds like a useful amount to raise your score as it’s more than enough to move you up a band in the results. If you are currently sitting just a little below the score you require for your preferred college then clearly it’s going to be money well spent. Don’t expect to raise your game by 100 points or more quite so easily as there’s only so much that can be done. Remember that a large part of the GMAT score essentially equates to an IQ and you can’t do much to raise that.

Sure, there’s the running machine but is that one that has your legs and arms all going at once called a ski-ing machine? On the weights side of things I just assumed that there were “weights” full-stop until recently but it seems that the weird looking thing that I’ve seen the really serious people working with is called a Kettlebell which sounds obviousl now that I’ve heard the name but before that I’d never even of thought of it having a name!

Isn’t it strange just how much you can be “into” something but not know anything about the terminology that it uses?

First off, there’s the option of second hand books. This usually works really well with arts subjects as many of the main texts aren’t revised for years if not decades and, of course, you can get the works of the major authors for very little indeed these days. However, the downsides of that approach is that often you’ll find that the text have been marked or highlighted and not always in the most helpful of ways. Also, in, say, technology based subjects the texts can be revised quite often and you can’t always run with an out of date edition of the book.

Obviously online is the way to go in terms of purchasing and if you’re making a big order you should expect discounting to apply along with free delivery, of course.

Although it could easily have become just a place that handed out pretty pieces of paper to anyone who turned up but instead it forged its own path over the years and constantly improved the quality and range of courses on offer. It still maintains the “open to all” ethos though and because of that it’s a very popular university with many people who would have difficulty in getting to a normal university yet who feel that they would like to pick up some qualifications.

Whilst in the past the typical OU student would have been someone in their 40s doing the odd course out of interest or one of the many pensioners keeping their minds active the relatively low cost of the courses now attracts those just leaving school. In a recent tutorial I went to the mix was more or less an equal split between the older and the younger generation of students. Some schools even put their pupils in for a selection of OU courses these days rather than hitting the A-levels.

The courses on offer have changed massively over the years too. I can still remember watching some of the Saturday morning OU broadcasts as a teenager but even in the course of the seven years I spent on my modern languages degree with them the quality was noticeably better towards the end of that time than it was at the start. In fact, the languages degree was something that I’d not have thought it would have been possible to do via them which shows just how far they’ve moved on over those 40 years.

Added to the original selection of largely arts and science courses (if my memory of those Saturday morning courses is any indication!), they’ve branched out into management (with an impressive MBA programme), languages and even law. Not too far in the future it would seem that they’ll be turning out medical doctors as their range of medical courses seems to broaden with each passing year.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about them though is that they’re motoring up the research league table. One wonders just how long it will be before they’re nudging the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.

Anyway, happy birthday guys!

But, seeing as this is a psychology course, they’ve made a point of applying their knowledge of educational psychology with the course. Therefore, there are all the little reassuring texts to calm you down and naturally it starts off at a reasonable pace.

The problem with that is that there’s even more material to read right at the start than there would normally be, mostly reiterating things that are said in other parts of the initial course material.

What seems to be a little off is their estimate of how long it will take to do the course. If my reading of it is right it should take about 12 hours to go through each week of the course but I seem to be getting on for half way through the first week already and that’s going at a relatively sedate pace this morning.

What’s surprised me lately is some of the marking sheets for courses that I’d completed a few years back. One in particular I thought that I’d not done overly well at but reality seems a little different in that the marking sheet I came across this morning has a very pleasing 70% on it.

I have wondered what to do with the old course materials though. For sentimental reasons I’d quite like to take them with us but realistically I can’t see me ever looking at any of it. Well, we’ll put that in the “quite like to bring” pile for now I think in case it can be fitted in. What I am bringing though are the big French and Spanish dictionaries. I only used the French one to look up around a half dozen words in each of the three exams but I was using the Spanish one properly for a couple of years (ie outside the exam!).

What may also be on the way to me is the psychology course. It sort-of seems silly to have that posted to me here but seeing as it seems a heavy-hitter of a course it seems prudent to have it in my hands a few weeks earlier than I would get it were I to wait ’til we get back to the UK.