Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Nope, I believe in comprehensive schools and selection by lottery (within council boundaries) rather than distance.
I am a conservative and believe in choice, I want more free schools, more grammar schools, more academies, not just one size fits all comprehensives and selection by lottery.
So you get more Grammar schools, sinking those who fail the exam on the day into a live of reduced advantages.
I take it you didn't go to a Grammar school and were privately educated?
PM confirms he has received Sue Gray’s inquiry into partygate this evening. Will make statement in House 3pm tomorrow and take Qs from MPs. Report will be published in entirety
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Rich (lol) coming from you. You literally admitted that your main political objective was to preserve the wealth of the rich.
Preserve the wealth of everyone not just the rich
That's the same thing. Wealth is relative and thus if you preserve the wealth of the rich, the poor stay poor.
No, most in the middle own property too, sale of council houses even gave many of the poor some real assets for the first time
So? What has that got to do with my point?
Everything, Conservatives try to get even the poor to have assets, socialists want to keep the poor poor and dependent on the state and voting Labour
If you earn £100k and the average salary is £20k, you're rich.
if you still earn £100k but the average salary is now £100k, you're no longer rich.
Not but if you earn £20k and have a council house you own worth £100k you are richer than you were when you lived in that council estate but rented it from the council and did not own it
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
I don't think Mr Ed is criticising Comprehensive schools. His argument is the same as mine, the best fix is random selection by lottery rather than distance from school. That removes any advantage gained from paying 20% extra to live next to the school.
Thank you, that is exactly my point. If you are poor, the chances are (still now) you live in an area where the local school is not great and expectations are not high. Anyone who has lived in a poor area knows that - and those that haven’t, don’t.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Sport should always be secondary to education. I professional sportsperson will have a career of maybe 20 years. A good education lasts for life.
Depends how good you are, if you are an outstanding footballer or cricketer or tennis player or rugby player then you will likely earn more from professional sport than you ever would in any other field.
If you are only average or crap at sport, education is obviously far more important as you have zero chance of a professional sports career but your education level will likely determine your future earnings. You can still play sport for fun or fitness but grades come first
As I noted down thread, "outstanding" tennis. It isn't true. I think most people would say 150th in the world is outstanding, after all your expenses you won't basically take any money at all. Tennis is one of the most top heavy sports going, Nadal, Novax, Federer makes £10 millions a year, Liam Broady (128th in the world) has to have a lodger to pay the rent on his flat.
Cricket, if you only make it to county cricket, again, no you will be on crap money. Minimum county cricket salary is £24k a year. Its only if you make it to international or IPL level that you can make real money.
This is true for most sports. Don’t forget sponsorship though. County cricketers etc get a car, free bats and kit etc. They will also expect to get a benefit season towards the end, useful for setting up the next stage of their lives. I note Brady has career earnings north of 1,000,000 dollars. Letting out the flat you don’t need while globe trotting is just sound business.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Rich (lol) coming from you. You literally admitted that your main political objective was to preserve the wealth of the rich.
Preserve the wealth of everyone not just the rich
That's the same thing. Wealth is relative and thus if you preserve the wealth of the rich, the poor stay poor.
No, most in the middle own property too, sale of council houses even gave many of the poor some real assets for the first time
So? What has that got to do with my point?
Everything, Conservatives try to get even the poor to have assets, socialists want to keep the poor poor and dependent on the state and voting Labour
If you earn £100k and the average salary is £20k, you're rich.
if you still earn £100k but the average salary is now £100k, you're no longer rich.
Not but if you earn £20k and have a council house you own worth £100k you are richer than you were when you lived in that council estate but rented it from the council and did not own it
Right, but there's hardly any council estates left, so why is that relevant?
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
So says someone who is obviously some middle class prick who flaunts how he went to the local ‘comp’ and how that makes him so cool. How pathetic.
I am cool for going to a comp, cheers mate
Course you are. Bet your parents are middle class professionals who work for the Council or in the public sector. Your lot are always the worst.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Nope, I believe in comprehensive schools and selection by lottery (within council boundaries) rather than distance.
I am a conservative and believe in choice, I want more free schools, more grammar schools, more academies, not just one size fits all comprehensives and selection by lottery.
So you get more Grammar schools, sinking those who fail the exam on the day into a live of reduced advantages.
I take it you didn't go to a Grammar school and were privately educated?
No, you get more grammar schools offering genuine choice based on IQ rather than catchment area or social engineering regardless of background.
My sister went to a grammar, I went to a private school and am ideologically absolutely committed to both and always will be
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
I don't think Mr Ed is criticising Comprehensive schools. His argument is the same as mine, the best fix is random selection by lottery rather than distance from school. That removes any advantage gained from paying 20% extra to live next to the school.
Works perhaps in cities, less good in the more rural locations where some of us live.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
I don't think Mr Ed is criticising Comprehensive schools. His argument is the same as mine, the best fix is random selection by lottery rather than distance from school. That removes any advantage gained from paying 20% extra to live next to the school.
Thank you, that is exactly my point. If you are poor, the chances are (still now) you live in an area where the local school is not great and expectations are not high. Anyone who has lived in a poor area knows that - and those that haven’t, don’t.
Oh I don't live in a particular poor area but I do know how the game worked and also had a great catholic school nearby who were very happy for me to help others game their system for appropriate children.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
So says someone who is obviously some middle class prick who flaunts how he went to the local ‘comp’ and how that makes him so cool. How pathetic.
I am cool for going to a comp, cheers mate
Course you are. Bet your parents are middle class professionals who work for the Council or in the public sector. Your lot are always the worst.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Sport should always be secondary to education. I professional sportsperson will have a career of maybe 20 years. A good education lasts for life.
The problem these days if you want to be an elite sports person in most sports you have to be insanely dedicated from a young age. There is the odd exception who manages to juggle being amazing at school / uni with this, but for most even to think about going pro they need to be training many day / nights a week most of their life.
There was that winger who won the World Cup with England - not Ben Cohen, the other one - played for Sale - who only took up the sport at 6th form college. Very much the exception though. In fact, back in my rugby playing days - which were very much in the lower middle range of the amateur game - I remember the surprise when meeting any amateurs who had taken up the game at any age older than eleven. Which I suppose illustrates why school sport is so important. If you don't get into the habit of sport at school, you're unlikely to as an adult.
One was ambushed by a cake. Another one walked oblivious into a cake trap. 😕
NEW: Rishi Sunak accidentally went to Boris Johnson's No 10 birthday event I'm told he was present when the birthday cake was served but was unaware it was going to happen as he'd gone to the room specifically for COVID strategy committee meeting.
Mother of God. Another one. How long was he there? Did he sing? Did he consume anything?
It sounds lethal. They couldn’t move safely round the building without dangers of coming across a party.
So Cummings has now sent friendly fire to his boy Sunak.
Poor Dom, aimed to bring down Boris but has now caught Rishi in the crossfire too
Is Rishi Dom's boy in all this?
As far as we can tell, Rishi wants Brexit because Rishi believes in freeports, small states and tax cuts. He can't really deliver a small state or tax cuts, but he believes in them.
Dom wants Brexit because he believes in a big state directed by clever people, or people who think they are clever (like Dom).
It's one of those contradictions that we are really going to have to sort out sometime.
Meanwhile, there is someone out there who has survived over a decade, by being ghastly but indispensable. What ever custard pies have felled Cameron, May, Johnson (please), he has always survived. You know who I mean...
And if they are not liars they they are literally saying that the Prime Minister was imposing the most extreme measures every taken outside of war time on the whole population and he had literally no fucking idea what these rules meant or entailed or required of individuals.
Talk about living in an elite, entitled, metropolitan bubble.
Or fucking Versailles.
Exactly. Since when was a household an office building.
Actually, we are expected to have the fastest growing G7 economy this year. Latest IMF forecasts, I believe - see today’s Guardian
This should not rescue Boris. The fact the government has done OK in the later stages of the pandemic cannot excuse this outrageous trolling of the nation. And I am the type that is minded to excuse Boris, on the whole
That’s a prediction, and of course the context (of the deepest trough, except maybe Italy) is critical.
It's actually a very fair point from Leon.
The two fastest growth predicted are UK and France, though France still has to go through most of it's Omicron wave, and the wine harvest is the lowest for a generation. OTOH they are selling arms everywhere at present (except for a pause in Russia! ). Whilst the UK has a certain amount of queues, and any impact from Boris the Uncontrolled.
UK and France both equalled their pre-Covid GDP (2019 Q4) in Nov 2021.
Guido had a provocative graph, with growth rates showing Germany to be 5% slower than UK and France over 3 years.
BUT Germany's point of recovery to pre-Covid is not shown and I cannot find when they hit their pre-Covid level.
I'm half thinking that it is another aspect of Merkel's Mess; Germany did fall back far less, but also their investment level suffered in 2021.
Does anyone know when Germany reached its pre-Covid level of GDP again?
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
To the off-topicker of this: As you don't see why it is a response to the question, you are too stupid to breathe, never mind contribute usefully to this website.
Also, pretty fucking obvious who you are. Tee.
Mini dick in off topic shock
Mate: nobody knows who you are, except I do, and every time you do this I revise my estimate of the size of your penis down 50%. The other people who do are the mods because they receive an unwelcome email every single time someone hits the off topic button. Which annoys them, understandably.
Whoever off topic’t prose Is a total bum! We’ll locate their heart and kidneys, And remove them through their tum.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Nope, I believe in comprehensive schools and selection by lottery (within council boundaries) rather than distance.
I am a conservative and believe in choice, I want more free schools, more grammar schools, more academies, not just one size fits all comprehensives and selection by lottery.
So you get more Grammar schools, sinking those who fail the exam on the day into a live of reduced advantages.
I take it you didn't go to a Grammar school and were privately educated?
Most of the pressure for extra grammar school places is in existing grammar areas, especially Kent.
That's fair enough, the secondary moderns (for that is what they are, even if they rebrand themselves) in 11+ areas have an insanely difficult task, which they struggle with massively. If there were a risk of my children ending up in them, that would be a big worry for me.
But by adding more GS places in selective areas, you end up making the grammar schools (a bit) more comprehensive. Ironic, really.
Meanwhile, in areas where there aren't secondary modern schools, there really isn't pressure to create grammar schools.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
I don't think Mr Ed is criticising Comprehensive schools. His argument is the same as mine, the best fix is random selection by lottery rather than distance from school. That removes any advantage gained from paying 20% extra to live next to the school.
No, it is just social engineering, not choice
Oh you will have fun when you have children and discover how school admissions really work..
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
Yes, the reality is that sending two kids through private school is going to be about £300k. Cheaper just to move somewhere like Winchester. Not too difficult to see straight through this. Anyone who is trying to claim some moral virtue from going to somewhere like Peter Symonds College on the basis that it is a state school is ridiculous. Its just a very good school, in the same way that some private schools are.
One was ambushed by a cake. Another one walked oblivious into a cake trap. 😕
NEW: Rishi Sunak accidentally went to Boris Johnson's No 10 birthday event I'm told he was present when the birthday cake was served but was unaware it was going to happen as he'd gone to the room specifically for COVID strategy committee meeting.
Mother of God. Another one. How long was he there? Did he sing? Did he consume anything?
It sounds lethal. They couldn’t move safely round the building without dangers of coming across a party.
So Cummings has now sent friendly fire to his boy Sunak.
Poor Dom, aimed to bring down Boris but has now caught Rishi in the crossfire too
Is Rishi Dom's boy in all this?
As far as we can tell, Rishi wants Brexit because Rishi believes in freeports, small states and tax cuts. He can't really deliver a small state or tax cuts, but he believes in them.
Dom wants Brexit because he believes in a big state directed by clever people, or people who think they are clever (like Dom).
It's one of those contradictions that we are really going to have to sort out sometime.
Meanwhile, there is someone out there who has survived over a decade, by being ghastly but indispensable. What ever custard pies have felled Cameron, May, Johnson (please), he has always survived. You know who I mean...
It’s conjecture, but, the geezer who resigned yesterday pointing at the Treadury for schoolboy errors is in league with both Truss, Gove and Cummings, with Truss as PM, Frost at Foreign Office and Gove number 11, your new triumvirate of power. In this scenario Boris is exiled to the US, Javid drives buses round ‘Manchester, and Sunak gets the Number 9 gig at Arsenal.
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
To the off-topicker of this: As you don't see why it is a response to the question, you are too stupid to breathe, never mind contribute usefully to this website.
Also, pretty fucking obvious who you are. Tee.
Mini dick in off topic shock
Mate: nobody knows who you are, except I do, and every time you do this I revise my estimate of the size of your penis down 50%. The other people who do are the mods because they receive an unwelcome email every single time someone hits the off topic button. Which annoys them, understandably.
You are a pain in the arse, but do keep posting Auden and Exorcism references. They are very enjoyable.
And if they are not liars they they are literally saying that the Prime Minister was imposing the most extreme measures every taken outside of war time on the whole population and he had literally no fucking idea what these rules meant or entailed or required of individuals.
Talk about living in an elite, entitled, metropolitan bubble.
Or fucking Versailles.
Exactly. Since when was a household an office building.
If they are exonerated, then people will conclude that the whole system is corrupt.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
I had to do some research once and it showed in an area like Coventry (this was back in 2007) that the ‘school premium’ for house prices was something like 10%. As you said, the wealthier liberals get on their high horse about sending their kids to state schools whilst being able to pay a housing premium plus tutors where appropriate.
If you want to see the scale of the hypocrisy, suggest bussing in of kids from poorer areas into the well performing schools in nice areas to redress equality. The mask quickly slips.
What point are you actually making here?
A fairly simple one to understand. Middle class parents benefit from the current system by being able to game it, whether it by being able to pay for houses in areas with good schools or afford private tutors.
My parents were unemployed. I went to a private school through the Assisted Places Scheme, then Oxbridge and then onwards. If I hadn’t had gone to that school, I would have gone to what was one of the worst comprehensives in Manchester simply based on where we lived.
So yet another private school boy criticising comprehensive schools.
I don't think Mr Ed is criticising Comprehensive schools. His argument is the same as mine, the best fix is random selection by lottery rather than distance from school. That removes any advantage gained from paying 20% extra to live next to the school.
No, it is just social engineering, not choice
Oh you will have fun when you have children and discover how school admissions really work..
I attend church every week and have an outstanding church school nearby and a grammar in Chelmsford.
We will have no problem on that front, I believe in parental choice not lotteries
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
To the off-topicker of this: As you don't see why it is a response to the question, you are too stupid to breathe, never mind contribute usefully to this website.
Also, pretty fucking obvious who you are. Tee.
Mini dick in off topic shock
Mate: nobody knows who you are, except I do, and every time you do this I revise my estimate of the size of your penis down 50%. The other people who do are the mods because they receive an unwelcome email every single time someone hits the off topic button. Which annoys them, understandably.
You are a pain in the arse, but do keep posting Auden and Exorcism references. They are very enjoyable.
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
To the off-topicker of this: As you don't see why it is a response to the question, you are too stupid to breathe, never mind contribute usefully to this website.
Also, pretty fucking obvious who you are. Tee.
Mini dick in off topic shock
Mate: nobody knows who you are, except I do, and every time you do this I revise my estimate of the size of your penis down 50%. The other people who do are the mods because they receive an unwelcome email every single time someone hits the off topic button. Which annoys them, understandably.
You are a pain in the arse, but do keep posting Auden and Exorcism references. They are very enjoyable.
One was ambushed by a cake. Another one walked oblivious into a cake trap. 😕
NEW: Rishi Sunak accidentally went to Boris Johnson's No 10 birthday event I'm told he was present when the birthday cake was served but was unaware it was going to happen as he'd gone to the room specifically for COVID strategy committee meeting.
Mother of God. Another one. How long was he there? Did he sing? Did he consume anything?
It sounds lethal. They couldn’t move safely round the building without dangers of coming across a party.
To be fair, it's ridiculous to criticise Sunak for this, although no doubt factions within the party will. He thought he was coming down to attend a Covid meeting, which of course was entirely proper, It's hardly his fault that the room had been hijacked for cakeism.
Hardly Boris' fault Carrie ambushed him with that cake either.
Carrie can hardly resign as FirstSecond Third Wife can she?
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
To the off-topicker of this: As you don't see why it is a response to the question, you are too stupid to breathe, never mind contribute usefully to this website.
Also, pretty fucking obvious who you are. Tee.
Mini dick in off topic shock
Mate: nobody knows who you are, except I do, and every time you do this I revise my estimate of the size of your penis down 50%. The other people who do are the mods because they receive an unwelcome email every single time someone hits the off topic button. Which annoys them, understandably.
You are a pain in the arse, but do keep posting Auden and Exorcism references. They are very enjoyable.
Was it you who upset Z? 😠
Who is Z?
In the ancient pits they would hang them from their tits.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
Utter rubbish.
If you live in a poor seaside town or ex industrial area or deprived part of an inner city and had poor parents who were not graduates getting into a grammar school was probably your only chance of getting into a top university and professional career.
Now we don't have selection by IQ, in the state sector we have selection by catchment area and house price and church attendance instead
Thank you for your kind words.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about.
Your love of Grammar Schools is simply down to your ideology. The 11 plus is not the best way to educate a nation.
I don't know what is the best way, but I know a pup when I see one.
Of course there is also entry at 13 and 16 to grammars, not just 11.
A universal return to grammars is not likely but there should certainly at least be ballots allowed to open new grammars, not just close them.
Especially in poorer and more deprived areas where they are most needed. As a Tory I believe in choice, that includes private schools, free schools, academies and grammar schools too
You believe in selective schools and sink schools. I'm alright Jack, I'm on the bus, Conductor ring the bell.
You believe in selection by house price and vicar's reference in the state sector and selection by parents wallet to get into private schools only.
I'm alright jack if you have middle class parents, no chance of getting on if you have poor parents and live in a poor area and your parents don't go to church. You could have gone to a grammar in the past if bright enough, now your only choice is likely an inadequate or requires improvement comprehensive or academy
Rich (lol) coming from you. You literally admitted that your main political objective was to preserve the wealth of the rich.
Preserve the wealth of everyone not just the rich
That's the same thing. Wealth is relative and thus if you preserve the wealth of the rich, the poor stay poor.
Comments
I take it you didn't go to a Grammar school and were privately educated?
no longer on topic
PM confirms he has received Sue Gray’s inquiry into partygate this evening. Will make statement in House 3pm tomorrow and take Qs from MPs. Report will be published in entirety
I note Brady has career earnings north of 1,000,000 dollars. Letting out the flat you don’t need while globe trotting is just sound business.
We are a long way from Thatcher's Britain.
My sister went to a grammar, I went to a private school and am ideologically absolutely committed to both and always will be
Very much the exception though. In fact, back in my rugby playing days - which were very much in the lower middle range of the amateur game - I remember the surprise when meeting any amateurs who had taken up the game at any age older than eleven.
Which I suppose illustrates why school sport is so important. If you don't get into the habit of sport at school, you're unlikely to as an adult.
As far as we can tell, Rishi wants Brexit because Rishi believes in freeports, small states and tax cuts. He can't really deliver a small state or tax cuts, but he believes in them.
Dom wants Brexit because he believes in a big state directed by clever people, or people who think they are clever (like Dom).
It's one of those contradictions that we are really going to have to sort out sometime.
Meanwhile, there is someone out there who has survived over a decade, by being ghastly but indispensable. What ever custard pies have felled Cameron, May, Johnson (please), he has always survived. You know who I mean...
The two fastest growth predicted are UK and France, though France still has to go through most of it's Omicron wave, and the wine harvest is the lowest for a generation. OTOH they are selling arms everywhere at present (except for a pause in Russia! ). Whilst the UK has a certain amount of queues, and any impact from Boris the Uncontrolled.
UK and France both equalled their pre-Covid GDP (2019 Q4) in Nov 2021.
Guido had a provocative graph, with growth rates showing Germany to be 5% slower than UK and France over 3 years.
BUT Germany's point of recovery to pre-Covid is not shown and I cannot find when they hit their pre-Covid level.
I'm half thinking that it is another aspect of Merkel's Mess; Germany did fall back far less, but also their investment level suffered in 2021.
Does anyone know when Germany reached its pre-Covid level of GDP again?
Is a total bum!
We’ll locate their heart and kidneys,
And remove them through their tum.
Or best moment to get Rishi in before economy tanks and his errors creep in paper.
Or Boris Conference and CBI speeches made the sane ones thing, enough is enough.
That's fair enough, the secondary moderns (for that is what they are, even if they rebrand themselves) in 11+ areas have an insanely difficult task, which they struggle with massively. If there were a risk of my children ending up in them, that would be a big worry for me.
But by adding more GS places in selective areas, you end up making the grammar schools (a bit) more comprehensive. Ironic, really.
Meanwhile, in areas where there aren't secondary modern schools, there really isn't pressure to create grammar schools.
La Thatch knew what she was doing.
This thread has just been ambushed by cake!
We will have no problem on that front, I believe in parental choice not lotteries