Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
There have been polls in Scotland hinting at a Labour recovery there - including an MRP survey suggesting 15 Labour seats.
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
Yes and polls aren't the same as votes in ballot boxes.
For those of us with longer memories, Wirral South was the night the 1997 landslide began to look not just probable but certain. The swing wasn't far off what was seen in some seats two months later (17%) and the direction of travel of votes from Conservative to Labour was absolutely clear.
The most likely Election date is probably mid-October 2024. If so, we are now as near to Polling Day as to the first week of 2021. That was the time of Lockdown 3 - and when talk of vaccines was in the air. Much has changed since those days.
Indeed and it's been an extraordinary journey since the last election less than three years ago.
So much has happened - so much of it unforeseeable. It has been a truly extraordinary time.
The ramifications of the events of 2020-22 will be with us for a considerable time..
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
If I were playing the happy europhile game c.2008-2011 I would point out that 'Europe' is at least 10th on this list under a generous interpretation, and probably lower, and therefore "no-one cares about Europe" - as dozens of thread headers argued at the time.
But, that would be churlish - so I won't.
I guess that’s before NHS buses. Would it be churlish to mention the NHS hasn’t seen the extra £350m a week it was promised?
I think the NHS has had more than a 350 million a week increase since the EU ref ?
Yep they have.
Not convinced by the causal link though. I argued at the time of the referendum it was a false figure to be quoting and never understood why they used it when the real figure of £280 million a week was bad enough. Just made a rod for their own backs.
I though the reason was well known. Cummings has gone on about the theory and practice enough.
Yes, the £350 million was false, but it could only be rebutted by talking about other large figures, making the point Vote Leave wanted made.
Appalling dishonesty, but excellent practical vote winning. We'll never know if that was what tipped the balance.
I know Cummings argument but I think that is just him justifying the lie after the event.
Well, that is his normal modus operandi and has been for years.
Is this the moment to talk about his - ummm - impact on education again ?
Only if you are willing to discuss why our education system has been failing compared to many others for decades (and long before Cummings came along).
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the incompetent and complacent meddling of civil servants arrogating more and more power to themselves and making a shambles of everything due to their stupidity, and the self-aggrandisement of failed teachers like say, Chris Woodhead have led over many decades via the accelerations brought about by Cummings, Friedman, Gove, Morgan, Gibb and Spielman, to the current clusterfuck.
And how about the self importance of some influential teacher's organisations who have, for decades, put ideology ahead of the best interests of the children. The anti-elitism that infects every corner of the teaching profession and which we as both former pupils and now parents still see rampant in our schools. Our whole state education sector has been based for the last 40 years on the principle of equality through lowest common denominator.
You choose to lay the blame on one side of the equation whilst conveniently forgetting the other side. I see the blame (more or less) equally on both sides.
As somebody who worked in 14-19 education throughout my career, I've two objections to your comment:
1. Anti-elitism doesn't "infect every corner of the teaching profession". Far from it. Most state school and college teachers, to give one example, are immensely proud when they get kids into Oxbridge and other 'elite' HE institutions. Many are, however, against privilege by accident of birth.
2. For 40 years, you say, our education sector has been based on "the principle of equality through lowest common denominator". That's also inaccurate. If you'd written "equality of opportunity" then you may have a point. But equality? That's for the birds; there's no notion of equality underpinning any of our education or examination system. Equality of opportunity, however, seems a noble cause.
And yet it is that 'for the birds' policy that the teaching organisations have pursued in defence of their ideology. Just go and look at the stated policy of the NEU right now - they are opposed to streaming and setting because "Setting and streaming can exacerbate inequalities and hold back disadvantaged pupils."
1. The NEU doesn't necessarily reflect what teachers do or think.
2. Actually, the NEU is right in saying that 'setting and streaming can ...... hold back disadvantaged pupils'. This was more commonplace some years ago, when the 'bottom' sets/streams were frequently allocated all the worst teachers, with predictable, self-fulfilling consequences.
1. I have consistently said teacher's organisations not teachers. And the NEU is the largest teacher's organisation out there.
2. The NEU opposes streaming as a matter of policy. It explicitly prioritises equality over excellence.
Elitism should not be a dirty word in teaching any more than it is in sport or the military. Equality should not be the overwhelming guiding principle of everything because, as you already said, it is unattainable and, as I have already said, these days the way it is pushed usually leads to a race to the bottom.
The point is setting and streaming doesn't necessarily promote excellence ahead of equality. It can do, if used at the right time and in the right way. But very often it's actually anti-elitist because it leaves you with the ablest children in very large classes where they get much less attention from the teacher. (There is a reason why the statisticians of the DfE insist you get better results from large classes, and that is it.)
Setting and not setting both have significant drawbacks, as well as benefits. It is true that the NEU does have a view on the subject that is dogmatic for no very good reason, but ultimately they are irrelevant. I've been a union activist, a timetabler and somebody who decided who went in what group. I can assure you my union's wishes never entered into my head when I was doing it.
Ultimately, as long as we see 30 as about the right size for a class, it is to a great degree irrelevant as to who we have in it. We will continue to have a state education system that underperforms.
Why do setting and streaming automatically lead to the brightest children being in "very large classes"? I can't see how that follows at all.
Because you put the ones who need more individual attention to pass the exams in the smaller groups where the teacher can spend more time working with them to scrape them up to a bare pass.
If our schools were not exam factories it wouldn't be such an issue.
Ah, so it's not an intrinsic fault of setting/streaming at all?
I was in a comprehensive that did setting and streaming. I joined it at 13 because I moved schools and was put in the lowest sets initially. Out performing the set got you a damn good beating in the playground so I learnt not to out perform
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
Cameron's Conservatives had a 24% lead over Brown's Labour with Mori in August 2008 and a 22% lead with Yougov. The 2010 general election however produced a hung parliament with the Tories just 7% ahead.
Sunak like Brown is an ex Chancellor who is PM over 10 years into his party in power taking over from a dominant and charismatic PM, ie Boris and Blair (if we forget Lady Jane Truss' brief pit stop at No 10).
Starmer, like Cameron, is Leader of a party which has lost multiple general elections and trying to move his party to the centre. Yet like Cameron while voters are now happy to make him PM they still have reservations about his party.
Sunak will hope like Brown to get a swing back to the incumbent government plus the debates in 2010 made a difference too, you could even have a Davey surge like Clegg did
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
There have been polls in Scotland hinting at a Labour recovery there - including an MRP survey suggesting 15 Labour seats.
I see that another institution is described as "institutionally misogynist and racist" with "decades of avoidance" of the issues.
"The level of prejudice against women is dangerous".
Nazis Azfal wrote the report about the London Fire Brigade. Interviewed on Channel 4, he said that other organisations need to do a similar review, that he thinks prejudice against women is like a "pandemic" within society.
Well, yes.
Perhaps if people in positions of power had listened to women for years, instead of dismissing their concerns .....
That would have meant admitting women are thinking creatures who might deserve to have their views listened to.
Hope your trip to America was fruitful.
We should also realise that 'women' are not a single block, and have a range of views on a range of issues. Their thinking is not limited to just one view on any single issue.
A problem PB does tend to suffer from, given the sparsity of (apparent) women on the site.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Thank you for putting this together! Golf Cart Rental
I'm trying to decide if this is a step up from Russian trolls or not.
Too easy to spot. Needs to build up to it. I recall a prank phone call on Frasier that was a guy getting free advertising by pretending to be depressed…
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Absolutely disgraceful treatment. I can kind of see why we have to treat asylum seekers/economic migrants who enter illegally hsrshly even though it pains. But this has no excuse and must be stopped.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
Two years ago, we did not have covid vaccines. They started being administered from the 8th December 2020.
So things could change dramatically.
But like you I just can't see what would change in two years that would make people see how voting Tory is a significantly better option than voting Labour, even if not enough of them do to give Starmer an outright majority.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
Yes, it’s depressing.
Maybe the time has come to call it quits on British car manufacturing?
The subsidies make it borderline uneconomic, anyway. And these days the industry doesn’t actually employ many people.
Maybe we should let the Chinese churn out perfectly decent £10k battery cars by their (hundreds of) millions, and just buy them, from now on?
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
If I were playing the happy europhile game c.2008-2011 I would point out that 'Europe' is at least 10th on this list under a generous interpretation, and probably lower, and therefore "no-one cares about Europe" - as dozens of thread headers argued at the time.
But, that would be churlish - so I won't.
I guess that’s before NHS buses. Would it be churlish to mention the NHS hasn’t seen the extra £350m a week it was promised?
I think the NHS has had more than a 350 million a week increase since the EU ref ?
Yep they have.
Not convinced by the causal link though. I argued at the time of the referendum it was a false figure to be quoting and never understood why they used it when the real figure of £280 million a week was bad enough. Just made a rod for their own backs.
I though the reason was well known. Cummings has gone on about the theory and practice enough.
Yes, the £350 million was false, but it could only be rebutted by talking about other large figures, making the point Vote Leave wanted made.
Appalling dishonesty, but excellent practical vote winning. We'll never know if that was what tipped the balance.
I know Cummings argument but I think that is just him justifying the lie after the event.
Well, that is his normal modus operandi and has been for years.
Is this the moment to talk about his - ummm - impact on education again ?
Only if you are willing to discuss why our education system has been failing compared to many others for decades (and long before Cummings came along).
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the incompetent and complacent meddling of civil servants arrogating more and more power to themselves and making a shambles of everything due to their stupidity, and the self-aggrandisement of failed teachers like say, Chris Woodhead have led over many decades via the accelerations brought about by Cummings, Friedman, Gove, Morgan, Gibb and Spielman, to the current clusterfuck.
And how about the self importance of some influential teacher's organisations who have, for decades, put ideology ahead of the best interests of the children. The anti-elitism that infects every corner of the teaching profession and which we as both former pupils and now parents still see rampant in our schools. Our whole state education sector has been based for the last 40 years on the principle of equality through lowest common denominator.
You choose to lay the blame on one side of the equation whilst conveniently forgetting the other side. I see the blame (more or less) equally on both sides.
As somebody who worked in 14-19 education throughout my career, I've two objections to your comment:
1. Anti-elitism doesn't "infect every corner of the teaching profession". Far from it. Most state school and college teachers, to give one example, are immensely proud when they get kids into Oxbridge and other 'elite' HE institutions. Many are, however, against privilege by accident of birth.
2. For 40 years, you say, our education sector has been based on "the principle of equality through lowest common denominator". That's also inaccurate. If you'd written "equality of opportunity" then you may have a point. But equality? That's for the birds; there's no notion of equality underpinning any of our education or examination system. Equality of opportunity, however, seems a noble cause.
And yet it is that 'for the birds' policy that the teaching organisations have pursued in defence of their ideology. Just go and look at the stated policy of the NEU right now - they are opposed to streaming and setting because "Setting and streaming can exacerbate inequalities and hold back disadvantaged pupils."
1. The NEU doesn't necessarily reflect what teachers do or think.
2. Actually, the NEU is right in saying that 'setting and streaming can ...... hold back disadvantaged pupils'. This was more commonplace some years ago, when the 'bottom' sets/streams were frequently allocated all the worst teachers, with predictable, self-fulfilling consequences.
1. I have consistently said teacher's organisations not teachers. And the NEU is the largest teacher's organisation out there.
2. The NEU opposes streaming as a matter of policy. It explicitly prioritises equality over excellence.
Elitism should not be a dirty word in teaching any more than it is in sport or the military. Equality should not be the overwhelming guiding principle of everything because, as you already said, it is unattainable and, as I have already said, these days the way it is pushed usually leads to a race to the bottom.
The point is setting and streaming doesn't necessarily promote excellence ahead of equality. It can do, if used at the right time and in the right way. But very often it's actually anti-elitist because it leaves you with the ablest children in very large classes where they get much less attention from the teacher. (There is a reason why the statisticians of the DfE insist you get better results from large classes, and that is it.)
Setting and not setting both have significant drawbacks, as well as benefits. It is true that the NEU does have a view on the subject that is dogmatic for no very good reason, but ultimately they are irrelevant. I've been a union activist, a timetabler and somebody who decided who went in what group. I can assure you my union's wishes never entered into my head when I was doing it.
Ultimately, as long as we see 30 as about the right size for a class, it is to a great degree irrelevant as to who we have in it. We will continue to have a state education system that underperforms.
Why do setting and streaming automatically lead to the brightest children being in "very large classes"? I can't see how that follows at all.
Because you put the ones who need more individual attention to pass the exams in the smaller groups where the teacher can spend more time working with them to scrape them up to a bare pass.
If our schools were not exam factories it wouldn't be such an issue.
Ah, so it's not an intrinsic fault of setting/streaming at all?
I was in a comprehensive that did setting and streaming. I joined it at 13 because I moved schools and was put in the lowest sets initially. Out performing the set got you a damn good beating in the playground so I learnt not to out perform
Really?
I moved schools on a couple of occasions, and after my first lesson in the bottom set, I'd take the teacher aside and say "in my last school I was in the top set for [x]"
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Wasnt a question of grades, had a uni place exceeded the grades needed.
My beef isnt I didnt go to uni it is that I went into a job that didnt need a degree and still doesnt and did well however if you apply for the same job now they wont look at you if you dont have a degree. What 50% uni educated has done is cut off a load of jobs for people that for various reasons and often not grade related dont go to uni and relegated them to the underclass even though they could perform perfectly adequately in a lot of those jobs where they are told no degree says fuck off
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Oxford used to often offer 2 Es to students they really wanted.
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
Yes, it’s depressing.
Maybe the time has come to call it quits on British car manufacturing?
The subsidies make it borderline uneconomic, anyway. And these days the industry doesn’t actually employ many people.
Maybe we should let the Chinese churn out perfectly decent £10k battery cars by their (hundreds of) millions, and just buy them, from now on?
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
Two years ago, we did not have covid vaccines. They started being administered from the 8th December 2020.
So things could change dramatically.
But like you I just can't see what would change in two years that would make people see how voting Tory is a significantly better option than voting Labour, even if not enough of them do to give Starmer an outright majority.
Winning a war against France.
Or a heroic near-death experience for Rishi.
Maybe both combined.
In the meantime, this trickle of retirement announcements looks set to continue for the next couple of weeks, thanks to the CCHQ deadline.
It isn't engineering an image of enthusiasm for the new management, is it?
If I were playing the happy europhile game c.2008-2011 I would point out that 'Europe' is at least 10th on this list under a generous interpretation, and probably lower, and therefore "no-one cares about Europe" - as dozens of thread headers argued at the time.
But, that would be churlish - so I won't.
I guess that’s before NHS buses. Would it be churlish to mention the NHS hasn’t seen the extra £350m a week it was promised?
I think the NHS has had more than a 350 million a week increase since the EU ref ?
Yep they have.
Not convinced by the causal link though. I argued at the time of the referendum it was a false figure to be quoting and never understood why they used it when the real figure of £280 million a week was bad enough. Just made a rod for their own backs.
I though the reason was well known. Cummings has gone on about the theory and practice enough.
Yes, the £350 million was false, but it could only be rebutted by talking about other large figures, making the point Vote Leave wanted made.
Appalling dishonesty, but excellent practical vote winning. We'll never know if that was what tipped the balance.
I know Cummings argument but I think that is just him justifying the lie after the event.
Well, that is his normal modus operandi and has been for years.
Is this the moment to talk about his - ummm - impact on education again ?
Only if you are willing to discuss why our education system has been failing compared to many others for decades (and long before Cummings came along).
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the incompetent and complacent meddling of civil servants arrogating more and more power to themselves and making a shambles of everything due to their stupidity, and the self-aggrandisement of failed teachers like say, Chris Woodhead have led over many decades via the accelerations brought about by Cummings, Friedman, Gove, Morgan, Gibb and Spielman, to the current clusterfuck.
And how about the self importance of some influential teacher's organisations who have, for decades, put ideology ahead of the best interests of the children. The anti-elitism that infects every corner of the teaching profession and which we as both former pupils and now parents still see rampant in our schools. Our whole state education sector has been based for the last 40 years on the principle of equality through lowest common denominator.
You choose to lay the blame on one side of the equation whilst conveniently forgetting the other side. I see the blame (more or less) equally on both sides.
As somebody who worked in 14-19 education throughout my career, I've two objections to your comment:
1. Anti-elitism doesn't "infect every corner of the teaching profession". Far from it. Most state school and college teachers, to give one example, are immensely proud when they get kids into Oxbridge and other 'elite' HE institutions. Many are, however, against privilege by accident of birth.
2. For 40 years, you say, our education sector has been based on "the principle of equality through lowest common denominator". That's also inaccurate. If you'd written "equality of opportunity" then you may have a point. But equality? That's for the birds; there's no notion of equality underpinning any of our education or examination system. Equality of opportunity, however, seems a noble cause.
And yet it is that 'for the birds' policy that the teaching organisations have pursued in defence of their ideology. Just go and look at the stated policy of the NEU right now - they are opposed to streaming and setting because "Setting and streaming can exacerbate inequalities and hold back disadvantaged pupils."
1. The NEU doesn't necessarily reflect what teachers do or think.
2. Actually, the NEU is right in saying that 'setting and streaming can ...... hold back disadvantaged pupils'. This was more commonplace some years ago, when the 'bottom' sets/streams were frequently allocated all the worst teachers, with predictable, self-fulfilling consequences.
1. I have consistently said teacher's organisations not teachers. And the NEU is the largest teacher's organisation out there.
2. The NEU opposes streaming as a matter of policy. It explicitly prioritises equality over excellence.
Elitism should not be a dirty word in teaching any more than it is in sport or the military. Equality should not be the overwhelming guiding principle of everything because, as you already said, it is unattainable and, as I have already said, these days the way it is pushed usually leads to a race to the bottom.
The point is setting and streaming doesn't necessarily promote excellence ahead of equality. It can do, if used at the right time and in the right way. But very often it's actually anti-elitist because it leaves you with the ablest children in very large classes where they get much less attention from the teacher. (There is a reason why the statisticians of the DfE insist you get better results from large classes, and that is it.)
Setting and not setting both have significant drawbacks, as well as benefits. It is true that the NEU does have a view on the subject that is dogmatic for no very good reason, but ultimately they are irrelevant. I've been a union activist, a timetabler and somebody who decided who went in what group. I can assure you my union's wishes never entered into my head when I was doing it.
Ultimately, as long as we see 30 as about the right size for a class, it is to a great degree irrelevant as to who we have in it. We will continue to have a state education system that underperforms.
Why do setting and streaming automatically lead to the brightest children being in "very large classes"? I can't see how that follows at all.
Because you put the ones who need more individual attention to pass the exams in the smaller groups where the teacher can spend more time working with them to scrape them up to a bare pass.
If our schools were not exam factories it wouldn't be such an issue.
Ah, so it's not an intrinsic fault of setting/streaming at all?
I was in a comprehensive that did setting and streaming. I joined it at 13 because I moved schools and was put in the lowest sets initially. Out performing the set got you a damn good beating in the playground so I learnt not to out perform
Really?
I moved schools on a couple of occasions, and after my first lesson in the bottom set, I'd take the teacher aside and say "in my last school I was in the top set for [x]"
Kids moved sets all the time, both up and down.
I was at 8 schools due to my dad being moved around by the army. I tended to get put in the top sets because of the reports I brought with me. Were your schools not so complimentary?
Honestly expected Mexico to be better than this. Argentina still looking pretty ordinary despite 2 excellent goals. The WC looks France's to lose atm.
Ye. France @ 6/1, look great value, to me.
It’s times like this I miss @isam ’s footie tips. Sharp, that chap. Bit of a dick, but damn good with his football tips.
I think he rubbed Mike up the wrong way. In fairness, he rubbed me up the wrong way, too, at times. But I overlooked it cos he was a damn fine football tipster.
If I were playing the happy europhile game c.2008-2011 I would point out that 'Europe' is at least 10th on this list under a generous interpretation, and probably lower, and therefore "no-one cares about Europe" - as dozens of thread headers argued at the time.
But, that would be churlish - so I won't.
I guess that’s before NHS buses. Would it be churlish to mention the NHS hasn’t seen the extra £350m a week it was promised?
I think the NHS has had more than a 350 million a week increase since the EU ref ?
Yep they have.
Not convinced by the causal link though. I argued at the time of the referendum it was a false figure to be quoting and never understood why they used it when the real figure of £280 million a week was bad enough. Just made a rod for their own backs.
I though the reason was well known. Cummings has gone on about the theory and practice enough.
Yes, the £350 million was false, but it could only be rebutted by talking about other large figures, making the point Vote Leave wanted made.
Appalling dishonesty, but excellent practical vote winning. We'll never know if that was what tipped the balance.
I know Cummings argument but I think that is just him justifying the lie after the event.
Well, that is his normal modus operandi and has been for years.
Is this the moment to talk about his - ummm - impact on education again ?
Only if you are willing to discuss why our education system has been failing compared to many others for decades (and long before Cummings came along).
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the incompetent and complacent meddling of civil servants arrogating more and more power to themselves and making a shambles of everything due to their stupidity, and the self-aggrandisement of failed teachers like say, Chris Woodhead have led over many decades via the accelerations brought about by Cummings, Friedman, Gove, Morgan, Gibb and Spielman, to the current clusterfuck.
And how about the self importance of some influential teacher's organisations who have, for decades, put ideology ahead of the best interests of the children. The anti-elitism that infects every corner of the teaching profession and which we as both former pupils and now parents still see rampant in our schools. Our whole state education sector has been based for the last 40 years on the principle of equality through lowest common denominator.
You choose to lay the blame on one side of the equation whilst conveniently forgetting the other side. I see the blame (more or less) equally on both sides.
As somebody who worked in 14-19 education throughout my career, I've two objections to your comment:
1. Anti-elitism doesn't "infect every corner of the teaching profession". Far from it. Most state school and college teachers, to give one example, are immensely proud when they get kids into Oxbridge and other 'elite' HE institutions. Many are, however, against privilege by accident of birth.
2. For 40 years, you say, our education sector has been based on "the principle of equality through lowest common denominator". That's also inaccurate. If you'd written "equality of opportunity" then you may have a point. But equality? That's for the birds; there's no notion of equality underpinning any of our education or examination system. Equality of opportunity, however, seems a noble cause.
And yet it is that 'for the birds' policy that the teaching organisations have pursued in defence of their ideology. Just go and look at the stated policy of the NEU right now - they are opposed to streaming and setting because "Setting and streaming can exacerbate inequalities and hold back disadvantaged pupils."
1. The NEU doesn't necessarily reflect what teachers do or think.
2. Actually, the NEU is right in saying that 'setting and streaming can ...... hold back disadvantaged pupils'. This was more commonplace some years ago, when the 'bottom' sets/streams were frequently allocated all the worst teachers, with predictable, self-fulfilling consequences.
1. I have consistently said teacher's organisations not teachers. And the NEU is the largest teacher's organisation out there.
2. The NEU opposes streaming as a matter of policy. It explicitly prioritises equality over excellence.
Elitism should not be a dirty word in teaching any more than it is in sport or the military. Equality should not be the overwhelming guiding principle of everything because, as you already said, it is unattainable and, as I have already said, these days the way it is pushed usually leads to a race to the bottom.
The point is setting and streaming doesn't necessarily promote excellence ahead of equality. It can do, if used at the right time and in the right way. But very often it's actually anti-elitist because it leaves you with the ablest children in very large classes where they get much less attention from the teacher. (There is a reason why the statisticians of the DfE insist you get better results from large classes, and that is it.)
Setting and not setting both have significant drawbacks, as well as benefits. It is true that the NEU does have a view on the subject that is dogmatic for no very good reason, but ultimately they are irrelevant. I've been a union activist, a timetabler and somebody who decided who went in what group. I can assure you my union's wishes never entered into my head when I was doing it.
Ultimately, as long as we see 30 as about the right size for a class, it is to a great degree irrelevant as to who we have in it. We will continue to have a state education system that underperforms.
Why do setting and streaming automatically lead to the brightest children being in "very large classes"? I can't see how that follows at all.
Because you put the ones who need more individual attention to pass the exams in the smaller groups where the teacher can spend more time working with them to scrape them up to a bare pass.
If our schools were not exam factories it wouldn't be such an issue.
Ah, so it's not an intrinsic fault of setting/streaming at all?
I was in a comprehensive that did setting and streaming. I joined it at 13 because I moved schools and was put in the lowest sets initially. Out performing the set got you a damn good beating in the playground so I learnt not to out perform
Really?
I moved schools on a couple of occasions, and after my first lesson in the bottom set, I'd take the teacher aside and say "in my last school I was in the top set for [x]"
Kids moved sets all the time, both up and down.
In my school you had to prove you needed to move up via tests, a test score that was better than your stream would move you up, wouldnt however stop you sharing the playground with them where they would regard you as a traitor at the same time as your new set would regard you as someone that lucked out and despise you as one from the lower sets
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Oxford used to often offer 2 Es to students they really wanted.
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
Sigh.
There are no C grade GCSE pupils.
I have actually lost count of the number of times this has been explained to you.
I suppose one thing it does prove is Gove was an idiot to come up with the new grading system.
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
Helped by the fact that Labour are sounding more conservative than the Tories on a lot of issues, such as migration.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
So 3, not 0 as per the original post then!
The original post said three.
And the new article makes it clear it's going down.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Oxford used to often offer 2 Es to students they really wanted.
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
Sigh.
There are no C grade GCSE pupils.
I have actually lost count of the number of times this has been explained to you.
I suppose one thing it does prove is Gove was an idiot to come up with the new grading system.
Grade 4 then if you want to be that pedantic but the trend was still there when we had C grades.
Gove's grading system has sod all to do with it other than breaking it down a bit more. The trend is still the average now going to university not just the intelligent
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
So 3, not 0 as per the original post then!
The original post said three.
And the new article makes it clear it's going down.
Nope, the statement was none of the new car battery industry was locating in Britain
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Two E offer was standard if the ‘lesser’ Uni thought you would get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge, in order that you might use the E’s as an insurance. Weirdly Warwick offered me three E’s, even though I already had an A in Maths (taken a year early).
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Plans to build the biggest lithium hydroxide refinery in Europe in Teesside have been given the go-ahead, paving the way for the creation of 1,000 jobs and a local supply of a key battery material.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Two E offer was standard if the ‘lesser’ Uni thought you would get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge, in order that you might use the E’s as an insurance. Weirdly Warwick offered me three E’s, even though I already had an A in Maths (taken a year early).
That wasn't quite how my friend got it, although it was linked. He had in fact been rejected by Cambridge, so Warwick offered him 2 Es on the understanding he would make them his firm choice.
Which, since he had preferred Warwick's Physics course to Cambridge's from the outset, was a fantastic deal for him.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
So 3, not 0 as per the original post then!
The original post said three.
And the new article makes it clear it's going down.
Nope, the statement was none of the new car battery industry was locating in Britain
Still means that all the Tory stuff about a battery renaissance was bluster dressed up in a hi-vis Johnson Jacket.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Two E offer was standard if the ‘lesser’ Uni thought you would get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge, in order that you might use the E’s as an insurance. Weirdly Warwick offered me three E’s, even though I already had an A in Maths (taken a year early).
That wasn't quite how my friend got it, although it was linked. He had in fact been rejected by Cambridge, so Warwick offered him 2 Es on the understanding he would make them his firm choice.
Which, since he had preferred Warwick's Physics course to Cambridge's from the outset, was a fantastic deal for him.
I failed to impress at the Cambridge interview and chose Warwick as firm needing two more Es to scrape home. Of course now we have a more insidious game being played. Unis offer the standard grades but tell the student if they go firm they will be accepted on lower grades. The uni keeps their offer grades high, grabs decent students with effective low offers that they don’t need. It’s a pretty shoddy practice, and supposedly has been stopped, but I’m not convinced.
Chris Skidmore MP has announced he will retire at the next election.
Went to my school and only mid-40s, although his seat is being abolished (part going into a safe Lab Bristol NE and part going in with a large chunk of Rees-Mogg's)
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Both sound very low offers for the time - given the considerable grade inflation that had already taken place since the late 1980s when A Level Relative marking was replaced by the Absolute marking system we still have today. Back in the mid-1970s an offer of BCC was quite a challenge in that only 10 % of A Level entrants were awarded an A with a further 15% receiving a B grade. Thus, 75% failed to achieve a grade as high as a B - indeed 30% did not reach the standard for the lowest pass grade - an E. The 30% who fell short were given an O Level pass or failed outright. Nowadays fewer than 2% of entrants fail to obtain at least an E grade pass.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Oxford used to often offer 2 Es to students they really wanted.
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
I believe that 2 Es was the offer given to those who had passed the Entrance Exam.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Oxford used to often offer 2 Es to students they really wanted.
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
Sigh.
There are no C grade GCSE pupils.
I have actually lost count of the number of times this has been explained to you.
I suppose one thing it does prove is Gove was an idiot to come up with the new grading system.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Both sound very low offers for the time - given the considerable grade inflation that had already taken place since the late 1980s when A Level Relative marking was replaced by the Absolute marking system we still have today. Back in the mid-1970s an offer of BCC was quite a challenge in that only 10 % of A Level entrants were awarded an A with a further 15% receiving a B grade. Thus, 75% failed to achieve a grade as high as a B - indeed 30% did not reach the standard for the lowest pass grade - an E. The 30% who fell short were given an O Level pass or failed outright. Nowadays fewer than 2% of entrants fail to obtain at least an E grade pass.
Whether they sound low or not to you, that's what they were.
Both were for joint honours Economics and History, if you were wondering.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Both sound very low offers for the time - given the considerable grade inflation that had already taken place since the late 1980s when A Level Relative marking was replaced by the Absolute marking system we still have today. Back in the mid-1970s an offer of BCC was quite a challenge in that only 10 % of A Level entrants were awarded an A with a further 15% receiving a B grade. Thus, 75% failed to achieve a grade as high as a B - indeed 30% did not reach the standard for the lowest pass grade - an E. The 30% who fell short were given an O Level pass or failed outright. Nowadays fewer than 2% of entrants fail to obtain at least an E grade pass.
And yet people will insist that there has been no grade inflation.
BTW, my offer from Brum in 1985 was BBC. I was worried that I might not get the C in Physics, but as it turned out I didn't get any Bs or Cs, so my place was secure.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Plans to build the biggest lithium hydroxide refinery in Europe in Teesside have been given the go-ahead, paving the way for the creation of 1,000 jobs and a local supply of a key battery material.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Both sound very low offers for the time - given the considerable grade inflation that had already taken place since the late 1980s when A Level Relative marking was replaced by the Absolute marking system we still have today. Back in the mid-1970s an offer of BCC was quite a challenge in that only 10 % of A Level entrants were awarded an A with a further 15% receiving a B grade. Thus, 75% failed to achieve a grade as high as a B - indeed 30% did not reach the standard for the lowest pass grade - an E. The 30% who fell short were given an O Level pass or failed outright. Nowadays fewer than 2% of entrants fail to obtain at least an E grade pass.
And yet people will insist that there has been no grade inflation.
BTW, my offer from Brum in 1985 was BBC. I was worried that I might not get the C in Physics, but as it turned out I didn't get any Bs or Cs, so my place was secure.
My offer in 1979 of BBC for Durham was just out of my reach, so Aberdeen had me instead.
Honestly expected Mexico to be better than this. Argentina still looking pretty ordinary despite 2 excellent goals. The WC looks France's to lose atm.
Mexico have, apparently, made the knockout stage in the past 8 WC. Which is a remarkable stat for a country which no one ever seems to suggest as even an outside bet to do well.
Honestly expected Mexico to be better than this. Argentina still looking pretty ordinary despite 2 excellent goals. The WC looks France's to lose atm.
Mexico have, apparently, made the knockout stage in the past 8 WC. Which is a remarkable stat for a country which no one ever seems to suggest as even an outside bet to do well.
And, IIRC, each time they have lost their first knockout game.
Honestly expected Mexico to be better than this. Argentina still looking pretty ordinary despite 2 excellent goals. The WC looks France's to lose atm.
Mexico have, apparently, made the knockout stage in the past 8 WC. Which is a remarkable stat for a country which no one ever seems to suggest as even an outside bet to do well.
And, IIRC, each time they have lost their first knockout game.
Couple of eyebrow raisers on the Russia-Ukraine front today.
Firstly the MoD assessment that Russia are likely stripping nuclear warheads out of specifically nuclear intended Cruise missiles, then using those missiles in conventional manner against Ukraine.
Second, the sudden, unexpected death of Belorussian foreign minister Makei just a day or so before a scheduled meeting with Lavrov.
If I were playing the happy europhile game c.2008-2011 I would point out that 'Europe' is at least 10th on this list under a generous interpretation, and probably lower, and therefore "no-one cares about Europe" - as dozens of thread headers argued at the time.
But, that would be churlish - so I won't.
I guess that’s before NHS buses. Would it be churlish to mention the NHS hasn’t seen the extra £350m a week it was promised?
I think the NHS has had more than a 350 million a week increase since the EU ref ?
Yep they have.
Not convinced by the causal link though. I argued at the time of the referendum it was a false figure to be quoting and never understood why they used it when the real figure of £280 million a week was bad enough. Just made a rod for their own backs.
I though the reason was well known. Cummings has gone on about the theory and practice enough.
Yes, the £350 million was false, but it could only be rebutted by talking about other large figures, making the point Vote Leave wanted made.
Appalling dishonesty, but excellent practical vote winning. We'll never know if that was what tipped the balance.
I know Cummings argument but I think that is just him justifying the lie after the event.
Well, that is his normal modus operandi and has been for years.
Is this the moment to talk about his - ummm - impact on education again ?
Only if you are willing to discuss why our education system has been failing compared to many others for decades (and long before Cummings came along).
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the incompetent and complacent meddling of civil servants arrogating more and more power to themselves and making a shambles of everything due to their stupidity, and the self-aggrandisement of failed teachers like say, Chris Woodhead have led over many decades via the accelerations brought about by Cummings, Friedman, Gove, Morgan, Gibb and Spielman, to the current clusterfuck.
And how about the self importance of some influential teacher's organisations who have, for decades, put ideology ahead of the best interests of the children. The anti-elitism that infects every corner of the teaching profession and which we as both former pupils and now parents still see rampant in our schools. Our whole state education sector has been based for the last 40 years on the principle of equality through lowest common denominator.
You choose to lay the blame on one side of the equation whilst conveniently forgetting the other side. I see the blame (more or less) equally on both sides.
As somebody who worked in 14-19 education throughout my career, I've two objections to your comment:
1. Anti-elitism doesn't "infect every corner of the teaching profession". Far from it. Most state school and college teachers, to give one example, are immensely proud when they get kids into Oxbridge and other 'elite' HE institutions. Many are, however, against privilege by accident of birth.
2. For 40 years, you say, our education sector has been based on "the principle of equality through lowest common denominator". That's also inaccurate. If you'd written "equality of opportunity" then you may have a point. But equality? That's for the birds; there's no notion of equality underpinning any of our education or examination system. Equality of opportunity, however, seems a noble cause.
And yet it is that 'for the birds' policy that the teaching organisations have pursued in defence of their ideology. Just go and look at the stated policy of the NEU right now - they are opposed to streaming and setting because "Setting and streaming can exacerbate inequalities and hold back disadvantaged pupils."
1. The NEU doesn't necessarily reflect what teachers do or think.
2. Actually, the NEU is right in saying that 'setting and streaming can ...... hold back disadvantaged pupils'. This was more commonplace some years ago, when the 'bottom' sets/streams were frequently allocated all the worst teachers, with predictable, self-fulfilling consequences.
1. I have consistently said teacher's organisations not teachers. And the NEU is the largest teacher's organisation out there.
2. The NEU opposes streaming as a matter of policy. It explicitly prioritises equality over excellence.
Elitism should not be a dirty word in teaching any more than it is in sport or the military. Equality should not be the overwhelming guiding principle of everything because, as you already said, it is unattainable and, as I have already said, these days the way it is pushed usually leads to a race to the bottom.
The point is setting and streaming doesn't necessarily promote excellence ahead of equality. It can do, if used at the right time and in the right way. But very often it's actually anti-elitist because it leaves you with the ablest children in very large classes where they get much less attention from the teacher. (There is a reason why the statisticians of the DfE insist you get better results from large classes, and that is it.)
Setting and not setting both have significant drawbacks, as well as benefits. It is true that the NEU does have a view on the subject that is dogmatic for no very good reason, but ultimately they are irrelevant. I've been a union activist, a timetabler and somebody who decided who went in what group. I can assure you my union's wishes never entered into my head when I was doing it.
Ultimately, as long as we see 30 as about the right size for a class, it is to a great degree irrelevant as to who we have in it. We will continue to have a state education system that underperforms.
Why do setting and streaming automatically lead to the brightest children being in "very large classes"? I can't see how that follows at all.
Because you put the ones who need more individual attention to pass the exams in the smaller groups where the teacher can spend more time working with them to scrape them up to a bare pass.
If our schools were not exam factories it wouldn't be such an issue.
Ah, so it's not an intrinsic fault of setting/streaming at all?
I was in a comprehensive that did setting and streaming. I joined it at 13 because I moved schools and was put in the lowest sets initially. Out performing the set got you a damn good beating in the playground so I learnt not to out perform
Really?
I moved schools on a couple of occasions, and after my first lesson in the bottom set, I'd take the teacher aside and say "in my last school I was in the top set for [x]"
Kids moved sets all the time, both up and down.
Yeah, mine too. Comprehensive all the way, streamed and setted. I cannot recall anyone being bullied for being in the top set either.
As I have often pointed out, our tertiary education rate is not out of line with other advanced economies. The problem in my eyes is not that too many go to Uni, but rather that many of the courses are not very good, with universities prioritising research and publication rather than educating undergraduates.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Plans to build the biggest lithium hydroxide refinery in Europe in Teesside have been given the go-ahead, paving the way for the creation of 1,000 jobs and a local supply of a key battery material.
Either the alleged link Brexit <> Decline of UK motor industry is 95% a fairy story, or the influence of Brexit is truly remarkable, as an almost identical decline has happened in Germany, France, and a little less in Spain, Italy. I'll post the charts if I have time. In reality it's Covid / Ukraine.
Given that it is doing the rounds as a meme at the more plank-like end of remainiac social media, I'm going with fairy story and the usual desperation to find mud to sling.
There are a couple more serious points.
If anyone is not following it, Simpy Shapps, when he was Business Secretary for about 3 weeks or so, pushed British Volt towards the edge by refusing to bring forward £30m of the promised funding.
An astonishing decision given that a project worth several billion is in play, which is supposed to be part of the foundation of the future of our motor industry.
Shapps should be sitting at home sewing shirts (or skirts, or skorts) for soldiers.
I hope that the current lot will reverse it when push comes to shove.
But the big one for me is that the Govt are going too neo-Thatcherite and believe that industrial policy is tactics not strategy, which will not work post-Brexit. To be fair to Mrs Thatcher's ghost, she herself had a pretty good sense of long-term strategy in some respects.
Couple of eyebrow raisers on the Russia-Ukraine front today.
Firstly the MoD assessment that Russia are likely stripping nuclear warheads out of specifically nuclear intended Cruise missiles, then using those missiles in conventional manner against Ukraine.
Second, the sudden, unexpected death of Belorussian foreign minister Makei just a day or so before a scheduled meeting with Lavrov.
I didn't know about Makei. Well to be fair I didn't know who he is. However that's big news.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Two E offer was standard if the ‘lesser’ Uni thought you would get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge, in order that you might use the E’s as an insurance. Weirdly Warwick offered me three E’s, even though I already had an A in Maths (taken a year early).
That wasn't quite how my friend got it, although it was linked. He had in fact been rejected by Cambridge, so Warwick offered him 2 Es on the understanding he would make them his firm choice.
Which, since he had preferred Warwick's Physics course to Cambridge's from the outset, was a fantastic deal for him.
I failed to impress at the Cambridge interview and chose Warwick as firm needing two more Es to scrape home. Of course now we have a more insidious game being played. Unis offer the standard grades but tell the student if they go firm they will be accepted on lower grades. The uni keeps their offer grades high, grabs decent students with effective low offers that they don’t need. It’s a pretty shoddy practice, and supposedly has been stopped, but I’m not convinced.
Warwick offered to take my son with an A and a B ( he actually got 4A*) to try and tempt him into making them his second choice. Was defo a low ball offer out of line with the others he got.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Two E offer was standard if the ‘lesser’ Uni thought you would get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge, in order that you might use the E’s as an insurance. Weirdly Warwick offered me three E’s, even though I already had an A in Maths (taken a year early).
That wasn't quite how my friend got it, although it was linked. He had in fact been rejected by Cambridge, so Warwick offered him 2 Es on the understanding he would make them his firm choice.
Which, since he had preferred Warwick's Physics course to Cambridge's from the outset, was a fantastic deal for him.
I failed to impress at the Cambridge interview and chose Warwick as firm needing two more Es to scrape home. Of course now we have a more insidious game being played. Unis offer the standard grades but tell the student if they go firm they will be accepted on lower grades. The uni keeps their offer grades high, grabs decent students with effective low offers that they don’t need. It’s a pretty shoddy practice, and supposedly has been stopped, but I’m not convinced.
Warwick offered to take my son with an A and a B ( he actually got 4A*) to try and tempt him into making them his second choice. Was defo a low ball offer out of line with the others he got.
I have no issue with low offers, it’s the fake offers that I think are wrong.
‘Let’s be frank here, the reason unionists are afraid of the Scottish independence referendum is because there is a serious chance they might lose’ Prof John Curtice.
Maybe but it is pretty funny that he is beating all the po-faced moralists who looked down on him at the start. ( not that I have ever watched an episode of this show).
Japan car production figures. Nothing do with the chip crisis, covid, or world economic downturn. Brexit, innit?
I think there's another thing happening too, and not just in Japan.
Cars tend to last longer, and there has been a steady decline in mileage driven over decades (at least in the UK), so I am not convinced that car sales will recover in the medium term.
‘Let’s be frank here, the reason unionists are afraid of the Scottish independence referendum is because there is a serious chance they might lose’ Prof John Curtice.
Any referendum can be lost, we have had far too many of them. We are a parliamentary democracy not a direct democracy based on Westminster sovereignty as the Supreme Court confirmed
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Plans to build the biggest lithium hydroxide refinery in Europe in Teesside have been given the go-ahead, paving the way for the creation of 1,000 jobs and a local supply of a key battery material.
Either the alleged link Brexit <> Decline of UK motor industry is 95% a fairy story, or the influence of Brexit is truly remarkable, as an almost identical decline has happened in Germany, France, and a little less in Spain, Italy. I'll post the charts if I have time. In reality it's Covid / Ukraine.
Given that it is doing the rounds as a meme at the more plank-like end of remainiac social media, I'm going with fairy story and the usual desperation to find mud to sling.
There are a couple more serious points.
If anyone is not following it, Simpy Shapps, when he was Business Secretary for about 3 weeks or so, pushed British Volt towards the edge by refusing to bring forward £30m of the promised funding.
An astonishing decision given that a project worth several billion is in play, which is supposed to be part of the foundation of the future of our motor industry.
Shapps should be sitting at home sewing shirts (or skirts, or skorts) for soldiers.
I hope that the current lot will reverse it when push comes to shove.
But the big one for me is that the Govt are going too neo-Thatcherite and believe that industrial policy is tactics not strategy, which will not work post-Brexit. To be fair to Mrs Thatcher's ghost, she herself had a pretty good sense of long-term strategy in some respects.
I think though that volume matters, so smaller production lines are less likely to revive, and integrated international supply chains matter too. I don't expect to see British automotive manufacture extinct, but it is on the endangered list.
Couple of eyebrow raisers on the Russia-Ukraine front today.
Firstly the MoD assessment that Russia are likely stripping nuclear warheads out of specifically nuclear intended Cruise missiles, then using those missiles in conventional manner against Ukraine.
Second, the sudden, unexpected death of Belorussian foreign minister Makei just a day or so before a scheduled meeting with Lavrov.
I didn't know about Makei. Well to be fair I didn't know who he is. However that's big news.
Looks like he may have had the last laugh after all after being ostracised and condemned for going on the show and snubbed by Rishi his gamble has paid off in getting this far
Writing's on the wall which is why tory MPs are getting out. 15 years in the wilderness isn't where these bright young things are at.
It doesn't matter how long the tories try to procrastinate, the cull will be the same. Indeed, if they're seen to run too long into 2024 that in itself will generate a further tawdry meme: that they're clinging on in desperation against the wishes of the people. Major tried it in 1997 with an absurdly long election campaign.
The only question is how big the Labour majority will go.
I get the feeling you are teeing up an I Predicted This In November 2022 And Everybody Laughed At Me campaign for 2024/5. For the record, everyone agrees the tories are in serious trouble, you are not alone in remembering the mid to late 90s, and there are similarities. And differences.
Good evening
There at least three dangers for labour in complacency, arrogance, and hubris which we see in @Heathener posts
It looks odds on Starmer will be be the next PM but I expect he would warn against these three
And of course there are 'events' that come along
2 years is a long time, I don't quite see how the Tories recover from here, but Starmer has a mountain to climb to get a majority of one, unless Labour make big inroads in Scotland. I think its a very brave call to say Labour will win by 100 + seats, at this stage I still think no overall majority is the bet, but if the polls refuse to budge in a years time, only then would I contemplate Labour winning big
There have been polls in Scotland hinting at a Labour recovery there - including an MRP survey suggesting 15 Labour seats.
You’re cherry-picking.
Baxter, who bases his predictions on a large number of polls, predicts 3 (yes, three) Labour seats in Scotland under the new boundaries.
All going swimmingly in auto manufacture, which tends to be concentrated in areas that need “levelling up”.
Pretty much the entire existing car manufacturing industry is dying and being replaced by a new battery electric car industry. But none of the new industry is locating in Britain yet. Time is running out.
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
Plans to build the biggest lithium hydroxide refinery in Europe in Teesside have been given the go-ahead, paving the way for the creation of 1,000 jobs and a local supply of a key battery material.
Either the alleged link Brexit <> Decline of UK motor industry is 95% a fairy story, or the influence of Brexit is truly remarkable, as an almost identical decline has happened in Germany, France, and a little less in Spain, Italy. I'll post the charts if I have time. In reality it's Covid / Ukraine.
Given that it is doing the rounds as a meme at the more plank-like end of remainiac social media, I'm going with fairy story and the usual desperation to find mud to sling.
There are a couple more serious points.
If anyone is not following it, Simpy Shapps, when he was Business Secretary for about 3 weeks or so, pushed British Volt towards the edge by refusing to bring forward £30m of the promised funding.
An astonishing decision given that a project worth several billion is in play, which is supposed to be part of the foundation of the future of our motor industry.
Shapps should be sitting at home sewing shirts (or skirts, or skorts) for soldiers.
I hope that the current lot will reverse it when push comes to shove.
But the big one for me is that the Govt are going too neo-Thatcherite and believe that industrial policy is tactics not strategy, which will not work post-Brexit. To be fair to Mrs Thatcher's ghost, she herself had a pretty good sense of long-term strategy in some respects.
British Volt is a scandal. And a shining example of the fact that the Tory Party don't understand business to be anything other than selling imaginary products to imaginary entities. They need kicking out now. But we've got two more years while the rest of the world gets a head start.
I'm not really convinced we give a shit about kids in this country, except our annoyance at them when they become feral.
We care far more about animals.
Labour have an opportunity to become the party for families, 35h free childcare from age 1, huge investment in schools and bring uni fees back down to £1k per year. For once tell the nation that ensuring kids are educated is more important than ensuring some 89 year old can live for another 2 years at huge expense to the NHS.
They'd hoover up votes if they did that.
The subsidised nursery care for 3-4 year olds (which was a LD policy, to be fair) is hugely popular with parents, and certainly makes our lives easier.
If they guaranteed class sizes of not more than 20 in the state sector they would kill private education stone dead anyway, apart from a handful of real snob schools.
Not necessarily it is the intake which boosts private and grammar schools most not the class size
At last, you concede that Grammar schools are not better schools.
Not better than all private schools, better than almost all comprehensives and academies however
How can they be better if, as you say, it is their intake which boosts them, not their teaching and learning…
As they get better results and more pupils percentage wise into top universities.
You can have a better value added school which still gets worse results than most private and grammar schools overall
So which is the better school, the one where students progress much better than their peers or the one where they do just about as well as their peers?
The latter overall if they get better exam results and higher percentage into top universities.
A school might have better value added but still be worse overall in terms of exam results than the latter.
Just because an Olympic athlete improves from going out in the first round to a silver medallist, an athlete who won the gold on both occasions is still better
But as a parent you definitely want to send your kid to the better value added school, because they will get better grades there. That's the definition of value added.
No they won't, a child entering the school with D grades who ends up with B grades has had better value added input than a child entering a school with A grades and leaving with A grades.
The school producing the latter is still better than the former
How on earth is it better. If they had gone to the other school with 'added value' they would have done even better because, well 'added value'. That is what 'added value' means. The children do better.
No it doesn't, just they have more D grade pupils to add value to unlike Eton or a top grammar
Why do you assume it is easier to add value to a D grade student and not an A grade student. Any evidence for that. Personally I assume it is easier to teach A grade students and therefore easier to add value to them.
My only concern regarding exceptionally gifted students would be whether the school had the expertise available to teach them.
Does lifting a d grade student to a c grade student make a difference? Yes genuine question. I suspect the answer is no they still wont be one of the 50 percent uni intake and so written off.
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
Yes but now even C grade pupils go to university, just ex polytechnic ones like East London or Man Met.
I had a friend with an offer of 2 Es at A-level to study at Warwick.
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
Both sound very low offers for the time - given the considerable grade inflation that had already taken place since the late 1980s when A Level Relative marking was replaced by the Absolute marking system we still have today. Back in the mid-1970s an offer of BCC was quite a challenge in that only 10 % of A Level entrants were awarded an A with a further 15% receiving a B grade. Thus, 75% failed to achieve a grade as high as a B - indeed 30% did not reach the standard for the lowest pass grade - an E. The 30% who fell short were given an O Level pass or failed outright. Nowadays fewer than 2% of entrants fail to obtain at least an E grade pass.
And yet people will insist that there has been no grade inflation.
BTW, my offer from Brum in 1985 was BBC. I was worried that I might not get the C in Physics, but as it turned out I didn't get any Bs or Cs, so my place was secure.
My offer in 1979 of BBC for Durham was just out of my reach, so Aberdeen had me instead.
Back in 1990 I was offered 1 E in physics to do theoretical physics at York, a C in French (!) to do Physics at Imperial, or a bunch of As to do NatSci at Cambridge.
‘Let’s be frank here, the reason unionists are afraid of the Scottish independence referendum is because there is a serious chance they might lose’ Prof John Curtice.
Any referendum can be lost, we have had far too many of them. We are a parliamentary democracy not a direct democracy based on Westminster sovereignty as the Supreme Court confirmed
Couple of eyebrow raisers on the Russia-Ukraine front today.
Firstly the MoD assessment that Russia are likely stripping nuclear warheads out of specifically nuclear intended Cruise missiles, then using those missiles in conventional manner against Ukraine.
Second, the sudden, unexpected death of Belorussian foreign minister Makei just a day or so before a scheduled meeting with Lavrov.
I didn't know about Makei. Well to be fair I didn't know who he is. However that's big news.
In post for 10 years.
Never even got his cup of tea from Lavrov.
According to the Independent's report, he was at the Russia led international security conference in Armenia earlier in the week. So, maybe he did.
Maybe but it is pretty funny that he is beating all the po-faced moralists who looked down on him at the start. ( not that I have ever watched an episode of this show).
Matt Hancock has made the final three. Aiui the winner will be decided tomorrow. Hancock is second favourite in the betting but someone called Jill is long odds-on to win.
Just met a recruiter who places agency/contract staff in London Hospitals. He said, "It's insane, the government is paying nurses £30-55 an hour & making me rich rather than use the money to just pay proper wages in the NHS." I said "why do you think? Him "They want to break it".
Maybe but it is pretty funny that he is beating all the po-faced moralists who looked down on him at the start. ( not that I have ever watched an episode of this show).
Matt Hancock has made the final three. Aiui the winner will be decided tomorrow. Hancock is second favourite in the betting but someone called Jill is long odds-on to win.
Owen also has a shot, I expect it will be him or Jill. However Hancock would judge even 3rd a great result for him in and could open doors as a minor celebrity
‘Let’s be frank here, the reason unionists are afraid of the Scottish independence referendum is because there is a serious chance they might lose’ Prof John Curtice.
Any referendum can be lost, we have had far too many of them. We are a parliamentary democracy not a direct democracy based on Westminster sovereignty as the Supreme Court confirmed
England has democracy. Scotland doesn’t.
What utter rubbish.
If Scotland had no democracy it would have no Holyrood and no MPs either
Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce (Cream), Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience), Jim Capaldi (Traffic), Christine McVie (soon to join Fleetwood Mac), Brian Auger, and Paul Kossoff (Free)
‘Let’s be frank here, the reason unionists are afraid of the Scottish independence referendum is because there is a serious chance they might lose’ Prof John Curtice.
Any referendum can be lost, we have had far too many of them. We are a parliamentary democracy not a direct democracy based on Westminster sovereignty as the Supreme Court confirmed
England has democracy. Scotland doesn’t.
Nope. Last I saw Scottish people had thesame democracy as English, if not more. Elect MPs and MSPs.
Just met a recruiter who places agency/contract staff in London Hospitals. He said, "It's insane, the government is paying nurses £30-55 an hour & making me rich rather than use the money to just pay proper wages in the NHS." I said "why do you think? Him "They want to break it".
So, this recruiter either does not exist, or has magicked up a profitable business out of thin air in instantaneous response to the government's sudden "break the nhs" initiative, or realises that the NHS always has and always will rely on a mix of employed and agency staff and is merely giving it large to a credulous wanker with a twitter account.
Comments
The UK would become richer because people would stop doing unproductive things like making cars and all become City lawyers instead?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/26/treated-like-a-criminal-nepali-student-wrongly-detained-at-uk-border-loses-uni-place
For those of us with longer memories, Wirral South was the night the 1997 landslide began to look not just probable but certain. The swing wasn't far off what was seen in some seats two months later (17%) and the direction of travel of votes from Conservative to Labour was absolutely clear.
Sunak like Brown is an ex Chancellor who is PM over 10 years into his party in power taking over from a dominant and charismatic PM, ie Boris and Blair (if we forget Lady Jane Truss' brief pit stop at No 10).
Starmer, like Cameron, is Leader of a party which has lost multiple general elections and trying to move his party to the centre. Yet like Cameron while voters are now happy to make him PM they still have reservations about his party.
Sunak will hope like Brown to get a swing back to the incumbent government plus the debates in 2010 made a difference too, you could even have a Davey surge like Clegg did
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
A problem PB does tend to suffer from, given the sparsity of (apparent) women on the site.
Possibly one Brexit promise that is coming true.
Apart from the focus on services bit.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/04/uk-government-car-battery-industry-gigafactories
'Yet the UK’s place in that future appears far from certain. Only three of those projects are in the UK. The Envision plants account for two. The third is Britishvolt, a startup that has been strongly supported by the government, but which is now foundering.'
I abosolutely hate the 50% uni target for this reason....roles that didnt require degrees when I grew up in the 10% days now require a degree despite the fact they really dont. The 50% degree target has done more to keep people down than most things.
For info I grew up in the 10% era, no I didnt go to uni even though offered a place or two for personal reasons. However I went into a job I was perfectly capable of doing without a degree and did it well enough to get several promotions. These days my cv wouldnt get past hr because no degree.
https://news.sky.com/story/tory-mp-chris-skidmore-to-step-down-at-next-general-election-12756199
Japan car production figures. Nothing do with the chip crisis, covid, or world economic downturn. Brexit, innit?
So things could change dramatically.
But like you I just can't see what would change in two years that would make people see how voting Tory is a significantly better option than voting Labour, even if not enough of them do to give Starmer an outright majority.
Maybe the time has come to call it quits on British car manufacturing?
The subsidies make it borderline uneconomic, anyway. And these days the industry doesn’t actually employ many people.
Maybe we should let the Chinese churn out perfectly decent £10k battery cars by their (hundreds of) millions, and just buy them, from now on?
Treat cars as white goods?
When I went to Uni, the requirement for Liverpool was 3 Cs. Leeds wanted BCC.
That was in 2001.
I moved schools on a couple of occasions, and after my first lesson in the bottom set, I'd take the teacher aside and say "in my last school I was in the top set for [x]"
Kids moved sets all the time, both up and down.
Fuck. German car production also nobbled by brexit.
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-brexit-silence-is-breaking.html?m=1
Tl:dr - Britain regrets Brexit, the Brexiters fucked it, Labour need to grow some bollocks.
My beef isnt I didnt go to uni it is that I went into a job that didnt need a degree and still doesnt and did well however if you apply for the same job now they wont look at you if you dont have a degree. What 50% uni educated has done is cut off a load of jobs for people that for various reasons and often not grade related dont go to uni and relegated them to the underclass even though they could perform perfectly adequately in a lot of those jobs where they are told no degree says fuck off
The average Oxford student still gets straight As and A*.
I was in any case talking C grade GCSEs, not even C grade A levels, that is why approaching 50% now go to university
Or a heroic near-death experience for Rishi.
Maybe both combined.
In the meantime, this trickle of retirement announcements looks set to continue for the next couple of weeks, thanks to the CCHQ deadline.
It isn't engineering an image of enthusiasm for the new management, is it?
It’s times like this I miss @isam ’s footie tips. Sharp, that chap. Bit of a dick, but damn good with his football tips.
I think he rubbed Mike up the wrong way. In fairness, he rubbed me up the wrong way, too, at times. But I overlooked it cos he was a damn fine football tipster.
Shame.
There are no C grade GCSE pupils.
I have actually lost count of the number of times this has been explained to you.
I suppose one thing it does prove is Gove was an idiot to come up with the new grading system.
And the new article makes it clear it's going down.
Gove's grading system has sod all to do with it other than breaking it down a bit more. The trend is still the average now going to university not just the intelligent
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/25/europes-largest-electric-car-battery-refinery-given-go-ahead/
Which, since he had preferred Warwick's Physics course to Cambridge's from the outset, was a fantastic deal for him.
https://twitter.com/JonnElledge/status/1596610099153436675
https://twitter.com/CSkidmoreUK/status/1596596584883843072
Of course now we have a more insidious game being played. Unis offer the standard grades but tell the student if they go firm they will be accepted on lower grades. The uni keeps their offer grades high, grabs decent students with effective low offers that they don’t need. It’s a pretty shoddy practice, and supposedly has been stopped, but I’m not convinced.
Both were for joint honours Economics and History, if you were wondering.
BTW, my offer from Brum in 1985 was BBC. I was worried that I might not get the C in Physics, but as it turned out I didn't get any Bs or Cs, so my place was secure.
Which is a remarkable stat for a country which no one ever seems to suggest as even an outside bet to do well.
Firstly the MoD assessment that Russia are likely stripping nuclear warheads out of specifically nuclear intended Cruise missiles, then using those missiles in conventional manner against Ukraine.
Second, the sudden, unexpected death of Belorussian foreign minister Makei just a day or so before a scheduled meeting with Lavrov.
As I have often pointed out, our tertiary education rate is not out of line with other advanced economies. The problem in my eyes is not that too many go to Uni, but rather that many of the courses are not very good, with universities prioritising research and publication rather than educating undergraduates.
Given that it is doing the rounds as a meme at the more plank-like end of remainiac social media, I'm going with fairy story and the usual desperation to find mud to sling.
There are a couple more serious points.
If anyone is not following it, Simpy Shapps, when he was Business Secretary for about 3 weeks or so, pushed British Volt towards the edge by refusing to bring forward £30m of the promised funding.
An astonishing decision given that a project worth several billion is in play, which is supposed to be part of the foundation of the future of our motor industry.
Shapps should be sitting at home sewing shirts (or skirts, or skorts) for soldiers.
I hope that the current lot will reverse it when push comes to shove.
But the big one for me is that the Govt are going too neo-Thatcherite and believe that industrial policy is tactics not strategy, which will not work post-Brexit. To be fair to Mrs Thatcher's ghost, she herself had a pretty good sense of long-term strategy in some respects.
In post for 10 years.
Is anyone else cool enough to know the Martha Veléz album from 1969, Fiends And Angels?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4LRW4PG5CQ&list=PLvxWibFr0wiJlNwT2zeEMca2WBXAu2NhB
https://twitter.com/phantompower14/status/1596614632952647681?s=46&t=cvUn00cPOlle94yU0mzFtA
Cars tend to last longer, and there has been a steady decline in mileage driven over decades (at least in the UK), so I am not convinced that car sales will recover in the medium term.
Baxter, who bases his predictions on a large number of polls, predicts 3 (yes, three) Labour seats in Scotland under the new boundaries.
They need kicking out now.
But we've got two more years while the rest of the world gets a head start.
Confirms my instincts are on point.
https://twitter.com/london_discuss/status/1596093804184244225?s=46&t=cvUn00cPOlle94yU0mzFtA
him in and could open doors as a minor celebrity
Germaine Greer
“The worst sin towards our fellows is not to hate them. It is to be indifferent to them. For that is the essence of inhumanity.”
George Bernard Shaw
If Scotland had no democracy it would have no Holyrood and no MPs either
Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce (Cream), Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience), Jim Capaldi (Traffic), Christine McVie (soon to join Fleetwood Mac), Brian Auger, and Paul Kossoff (Free)
I wonder which it is.
https://twitter.com/gbnews/status/1596626522906906625