A survey into journalism training by the Society of Editors (SoE) discovered that editors think there are too many courses. I'm not certain why they should consider that to be a problem.

It provides editors with plenty of candidates to choose from. Surely, it's more of a problem for the emerging students who are struggling to find jobs. According to an SoE report a year ago, UK staff journalist numbers had fallen in four years by 29%.

One worrying aspect about the training survey was the editors' continuing prejudice against higher education. To quote the website survey, "a remarkable 77% said an undergraduate degree was not essential to be a journalist."

To confuse matters, however, some 50% thought a post-grad degree was either essential or very helpful! Make of that paradox what you will.

The survey also found that 37% of editors who responded felt "the standard of entry level journalists has gone down in the last 10 years."

But hang on... you may well ask: how many editors did respond? The survey as it is currently presented on the SoE website is woefully short of information, such as the numbers of editors who took part. Without the overall figure, the percentages don't mean much at all.

Similarly, it is impossible to give any weight to the claim that "many" editors believe 100 wpm shorthand should be compulsory. How many of how many?

Then there appears to be no distinction between courses in journalism and courses in media studies. So we learn that "nearly a quarter of editors said aspiring journalists should actively avoid media studies courses." But we do not know what they think of journalism courses, which are very different.

The same problem arises in the surveys held among trainers and trainees. We are not told how many of each took part. It is heartening to learn that 92% of trainees thought their courses had been useful and effective in helping them get a job. But 92% of how many?

Note also that only half of the trainees who took part currently have jobs. Of the others, 29% were still applying, 21% were freelancing and 13% were doing unpaid journalistic work.

But we can only test the validity of this whole exercise if we know exactly how many people took part.

Butcher calls for ethics training

It was genuinely interesting to read the response to the survey by Joanne Butcher, chief executive of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) because she repeated her determination to put ethics at the heart of journalism teaching. She told the conference:

"Following recent research and much soul searching, we have concluded that far greater emphasis must be placed on ethics in the industry's journalism training and qualifications. There is agreement across the industry that journalistic ethics matter a lot so that readers and audiences trust the information they are being given by the media. There are commercial as well as moral reasons for taking ethics very seriously. But the current teaching of journalistic ethics has been too patchy, random and implicit."

No-one should argue with that, should they? And it was good also to see that Butcher, recognising the need for what we might call retrospective lessons in ethics, spoke of the need for a "culture of continuous training".

This underlines her evidence to the Leveson inquiry in July in which she promised that the NCTJ would offer ethics training to senior journalists.

The other part of her speech that caught my eye concerned the fact that too many young people are taking expensive journalism courses and being granted what she called "bogus qualifications."

She referred to this as "a disgrace." I agree. So, if she provides the details, I would be more than happy to name them. Over to you, Joanne.

Hat tips: HoldTheFrontPage/journalism.co.uk