Best Of

Overdiagnosis does not help either.

https://x.com/lbc/status/2039210662296006869?s=61

Overdiagnosis does not help either.

https://x.com/lbc/status/2039210662296006869?s=61

100% this.

We have as a Nation have to have very serious questions about the definition of SEND, the causes for the rise in more moderate conditions and to ensure those who VERY clearly need help and support get it, but that (as is increasingly the case across welfare) those who see it as a cash cow or easy life, cannot piggy back at great cost to the detriment of those most in need.

Personally, I think that Bridget Phillipsone with her background, is doing an excellent job overall and far better than some Education Secretaries. I would actually question IF this very topic though sits more within the NHS / Health remit rather than Education. I do understand that some conversations were had about that.

The big missing for me is PARENTING!

Parenting Skills are not taught in Schools. Parenting Skills didn't used to be needed to be taught in Schools as Parents would teach their children having been taught by their parents and grand-parents were always on hand to support their children and their grandchildren.

If society (not any political party or affilaition to any political party) is happy to allow 4 and 5 year olds to have to be to be blunt, shit and piss in a toilet as opposed to a nappy, what chance have we got. This issue is a fundamental part of parenting and also nusery education and Phillipsons valiant efforts to recreate a version of Sure Start (the criminal destruction of which by Cameron and Osborne in 2010 was a heinous act) is to be warmly applaued but parenting begins at home, and it is time to actually teach those skills to ALL as a curriculum subject at 13 or 14 onwards. One of many real life skills like ( home budgeting, basic home economics skills) that are far more relevant than Latin, Greek, some obscure language of some sciences.

If children can be assesed at 3 or 4 at the latest, as opposed to 5 and 6, we may better understand the issues , better channel the resources, better reduce the waste and cost and better help those who really need the most support, the most support.

The cross Party support for a significant reduction in screen time - especially for under 5-6 year old may also see a linked improvement. If they are shitting in a nappy at 4 or 5, they should surely be taught those skills before being taught how to log on!

There is one word in "parenting" that seems to have been completely lost.

NO
NO
NO

Too often the opt out is to allow kids to do what they want because it's easier than saying NO - back to parenting skills or the lack of them.

I 100% respect the knowledge of the author and the article but we have to go right back to basics I believe TOUGH LOVE as a way to identify real problems early and not allow bad parenting to lead to some who are on SEND and shouldn't be or needn't be to be pigeonholed before they ever start proper main stream education.

Try finding a state school that teaches Latin let alone Greek beyond a grammar otherwise good points

The point I'm making is some subjects need totally removing. Greek and Latin more obscure examples.

Home Economics
Parenting Skills
Home Financing
Behaviour and respect

Clearly need to be now taught at at school as parenting skills as parenting skills handed down generation to generation is clearly not happening.

I'd definitely be in favour of broad Home and Family management lessons. I was lucky enough to learn stuff like that at home when younger but had I not, i'd be buggered now.

It's pretty shocking what a lot of people don't know. Smart people with decent jobs.

My wife was astonished when she had a balance on her credit card and was charged interest as she thought she'd 'done the right thing' by making the specified minimum payments and didn't get why she was,as she saw it, being fined. She has a first class degree and PhD.

We could do with teaching people then basics of loans, inflation, mortgages etc and basic family finances.

Cooking and basic home maintenance, for sure.

Parenting we could probably cover too, but it's a lot less one size fits all. My mother in law's solution to all problems is a star chart - it has solved precisely no problems (first child it came into potty training, he soon learned to game the system with tactical wees; second child it did nothing to avert panic attack style pre-swimming-lesson meltdowns). In both cases, the real solutions differed and varied between the children. There probably are some basics though, but maybe could be covered as an extension of ante-natal classes - nearer to the time, more relevant, more remembered.

It is right though, that a lot of this should really come from parents, but where that's not happening, it probably makes sense to fill the gap.

Definitely agree on home mamagement front etc, get the basics drummed in.
Parenting i cant really offer any thought on as i've not had any offspring

Come on, when has a lack of experience ever stopped anyone on PB?

Overdiagnosis does not help either.

https://x.com/lbc/status/2039210662296006869?s=61

Overdiagnosis does not help either.

https://x.com/lbc/status/2039210662296006869?s=61

100% this.

We have as a Nation have to have very serious questions about the definition of SEND, the causes for the rise in more moderate conditions and to ensure those who VERY clearly need help and support get it, but that (as is increasingly the case across welfare) those who see it as a cash cow or easy life, cannot piggy back at great cost to the detriment of those most in need.

Personally, I think that Bridget Phillipsone with her background, is doing an excellent job overall and far better than some Education Secretaries. I would actually question IF this very topic though sits more within the NHS / Health remit rather than Education. I do understand that some conversations were had about that.

The big missing for me is PARENTING!

Parenting Skills are not taught in Schools. Parenting Skills didn't used to be needed to be taught in Schools as Parents would teach their children having been taught by their parents and grand-parents were always on hand to support their children and their grandchildren.

If society (not any political party or affilaition to any political party) is happy to allow 4 and 5 year olds to have to be to be blunt, shit and piss in a toilet as opposed to a nappy, what chance have we got. This issue is a fundamental part of parenting and also nusery education and Phillipsons valiant efforts to recreate a version of Sure Start (the criminal destruction of which by Cameron and Osborne in 2010 was a heinous act) is to be warmly applaued but parenting begins at home, and it is time to actually teach those skills to ALL as a curriculum subject at 13 or 14 onwards. One of many real life skills like ( home budgeting, basic home economics skills) that are far more relevant than Latin, Greek, some obscure language of some sciences.

If children can be assesed at 3 or 4 at the latest, as opposed to 5 and 6, we may better understand the issues , better channel the resources, better reduce the waste and cost and better help those who really need the most support, the most support.

The cross Party support for a significant reduction in screen time - especially for under 5-6 year old may also see a linked improvement. If they are shitting in a nappy at 4 or 5, they should surely be taught those skills before being taught how to log on!

There is one word in "parenting" that seems to have been completely lost.

NO
NO
NO

Too often the opt out is to allow kids to do what they want because it's easier than saying NO - back to parenting skills or the lack of them.

I 100% respect the knowledge of the author and the article but we have to go right back to basics I believe TOUGH LOVE as a way to identify real problems early and not allow bad parenting to lead to some who are on SEND and shouldn't be or needn't be to be pigeonholed before they ever start proper main stream education.

So what you're saying is, you respect my knowledge but disagree entirely because you are firmly convinced that things were better in the old days? But then talk about Latin and Greek?

One thing we keep overlooking is that modern comprehensives are essentially designed to be grammar schools in terms of style and content. The problem is that grammar schools were designed, quite deliberately and often rather ineptly, for a very small cohort - no more than a third of children at most, originally much less. Most children with what we would now realise is a SEND condition wouldn't get in, either because they would struggle to read and write or because they couldn't concentrate for long enough to learn.

This has been seriously exacerbated by Gove's reforms, which essentially rested on the belief that making everyone pass very hard exams makes them cleverer. No, it doesn't. It just makes things much more complicated for everyone.

I see absolutely no sign Phillipson understands this. In fact in some ways her background is probably a hindrance, because her experience is just as narrow and dogmatically focussed as Gove's but from a different angle.

I know who I believe, and like on oil and gas , it is the person in the industry not someone who garbles on about how good labour ministers are

It's great having people in the know like ydoethur and Richard_Tyndall on PB - but that doesn't mean you should take what they say as gospel. That's not to accuse them of lying - just that we are all subject to our experiences and biases, and it's difficult for even the fairest minded people to step back sufficiently to give a balanced perspective.

This is particularly important for betting. In some ways I'm more interested in the views of PBers who don't live in Scotland on the Scottish elections; people like me are frankly in too deep to give a considered view even if we can provide the detail.

My personal anecdote on SEND is that I spent most of my standard grades being severely disrupted by those who needed it, and on my grad scheme the smartest person sitting the qualifications got 2x the time because his private school had obtained a diagnosis that I could and should have got too.

Great header and one that is close to home as we're a family gifted with autism. Our failings in education are barely believable - a system which is both fragmented and thus high cost *and* centrally dictated.

Worse are the parallel failings in health. A literal postcode lottery in diagnosis where the difference in reaction time from one street to the next across a boundary can be measured in years.

There is a political narrative that "all these extra SEND kids must be faking it / parents on the take / it's just woke". Or - radically - it was always there, we can now actively do something to help, and we have broken a whole generation of kids with lockdown.

That, at least so far as SEND is concerned, is something not borne out by my experience. Rather, what lockdown did was demonstrate to rather large numbers of children who don't fit into the DfE's little boxes that there was a better way to learn than being forced into a noisy, confused, badly heated environment. And when they were told they had to give this better way up, they decided, entirely logically, that they wouldn't.

I'm working with eight children right now who have refused to go back into school since lockdown (now five years in the past). All of them were doing appallingly badly in school and all of them in home schooling are now doing extremely well despite a variety of complex needs. As in, couldn't read or write before lockdown and now we're considering which unis they should go to.

So my question - I'm quite happy to work with these children and take the somewhat north of forty grand a year their LEAs are paying me, but wouldn't it be better to sort out the school environments so they could reintegrate and that money be shared among maybe 15 children rather than just spent on eight?

I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.

It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.

Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.

On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.

Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.

The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.

The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/

47% of GB owned by wealthiest 10%
8% of GB owned by poorest 50%

Your figure of 43% was close, but I've based the above on the latest ONS figures, plus Advani and Tarrant corrections adding a few percent to the top 1% and top 10% which was missed from close-companies and equity, and undersampling.

Even without the corrections, it remains hideous. And when you factor in income, one can see that the poorest are working to make the wealthiest richer. So the issue of the welfare state is really obscuring the real steal and even if the Greens don't have a fully-fledged plan, only they are identifying the issue on the national level. The concern about the welfare state pales even more when we consider impending AI+robotics impacts on working. The wealthiest don't even actually need to work - that is the real welfare state, it's torrent-up not trickle-down. I'm not sure those of us in the lowest decile should be thankful for being thrown crumbs.