"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
I will be astounded if the Reform/Brexit party manages to stand in as many seats as it did the last time. It's dead and has been for some time everywhere but in the polling figures. Some won't vote at all but I am expecting a small boost for the Tories from the detritus. It won't be enough though.
I did float the idea of Boris running for ReFUK. Decried as madness on here - and mad it would be.
But - and its a big but - the crank right enjoy madness. In 2019 they succeeded in gifting Labour retention of seats like Stockton North and Sunderland Central.
In 2024? A conservative party needs to be on the ballot somewhere, and that party is Reform UK. I can see donors putting up enough money for candidates and as we have seen post the Brexit referendum all kinds of names reappear in all kinds of unlikely places.
Boris wants to be relevant. Seems the Tory party have declared him persona non grata, despite so many actual Tory MPs and voters still thinking he is the man. He can't reinvent himself inside the party - a party he and so many describe as not conservative enough.
So why not? He will be running as BORIS primarily, the George Galloway of the right. Go get 'em Bozza.
No, Boris is more likely to run for Mayor of London again next year, given the approved Tory candidates aren't even known to most London Tories let alone Londoners overall and how unpopular Mayor Khan's ULEZ is.
Boris has no interest in RefUK under FPTP and Farage and Tice will not allow him to challenge their control of the party either
Who said anything about Boris controlling RefUK? I don't think he'd be able to take control of any vaguely serious political party. But he could, in theory, stand for them.
Could he run for mayor of London as an independent as Ken living standard?
A glitch in your dictation software? Chrome's voice (on video) to text function also fails with names.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Er... the 26th amendment was passed in 1971, no need for the Democrats to propose that one.
Mrs Capitano has been DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) at her last two schools and has mentored others on it. She was at the Oxfordshire safeguarding conference last week. I'd post the agenda but it would just make PB too depressing for a sunny Monday morning. Let's just say that an entire day on child sexual abuse is probably (hopefully) no-one's idea of fun.
A few points I've picked up from her, and from seeing our local primary get failed by Ofsted on safeguarding issues.
Safeguarding (at primary level at least) is almost entirely about home issues, not school issues. It is directly correlated with deprivation levels in the school catchment. It is basically teachers acting as social workers, because there aren't any/enough social workers. It is absolutely usual to have "team around the child" meetings for home problems which are nonetheless chaired by the head or the DSL because childrens' social care at county is under-resourced.
As such, a school's performance on safeguarding is probably not relevant to the majority of kids at the school or their parents. 99% of kids at her current school, and 90% at the previous one, have no cause to appear on the safeguarding radar at all.
So for that reason, I agree with those protesting about Ofsted's single-word judgements. For most parents/kids, it's misleading to add a single-word judgement where a failure on safeguarding masks excellent teaching. Just publish individual scores/levels without aggregating them into one single rating.
However...
Fulfilling your safeguarding responsibilities isn't really that hard. (Fixing the underlying social issues is, but Ofsted doesn't rate you on that!) If a school is neglecting its safeguarding responsibilities, the head is incompetent. And an incompetent head generally doesn't run a good school.
That was one of the reasons we chose not to send Capitano Junior to our local primary, and went out-of-catchment instead. It had just been failed by Ofsted on safeguarding. The school's line was that it was a "paperwork mistake". It turns out that the head had just told a close-to-retirement teacher to become DSL and hadn't checked at all whether she was doing her job. Surprise surprise, she wasn't. We looked a bit closer and this couldn't-care-less attitude permeated all the way through the school. Four years on, the school has got through two permanent heads, two temporaries, and might slowly be hauling itself back to an acceptable standard. Meanwhile, the school we did choose is not remotely "Ofsteddy" - it's a liberal little village primary where the kids are given space to develop - but the head is supremely competent and knows damn well that all her paperwork is in order, and that the troubled kids are being monitored and issues passed up to county.
That's an incredibly useful anecdote
Did you have to put down 'reasons' why you were deciding to send Cap Jr out the catchment area ?
I've only got one school - which was inadequate but has now been academised (And hasn't had an OFSTED in it's new form) in my catchment area but quite a few other schools would potentially be viable.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
There were some interesting discussion between the middle class people sending children to the local Free School and the parents from the estates.
The middle class people were a bit shocked by stern enforcement (detentions etc) of rules on uniforms, lateness, politeness to teachers and other pupils etc.
The parents from the estates uniformly stated that this was exactly what they wanted - they'd often moved across London to get their children into a school where they would have an ordered existence.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
More Spanish polls overnight give a clearer lead in seats for the PP/VOX combo.
Though there's a poll there where PSOE + Sumar > PP, so PP would need Vox actively supporting them rather than just not opposing them. There might be a couple of others that do that once you factor in nationalists.
If push comes to shove, I'm sure there's a deal to be done; PP want power and who else can Vox support? But in the medium term, the PP would prefer not to have the taint of pacting with the hard right and Vox would prefer not to make the compromises that go with being a junior partner.
I think a pact as such is unlikely. Vox are the ones with zero option apart from the PP. Otherwise Sanchez stays. PP have always the grand coalition option if Vox won't play. At the moment all polls would require PP as part of the mix, unless Vox want to join the left! An election which decides nothing is still a possibility.
If PP went into a grand coalition with PSOE, they would lose some of their more rightwing voters to Vox and PSOE would lose some of their more leftwing voters to Sumar
Maybe , but if there was therefore no immediate election, so what?
True but see also Germany where the CDU and SPD grand coalitions reduced their voteshares ultimately longer term and boosted the votes for the Greens and AfD in particular.
In 2005 the CDU/CSU got 35% and the SPD 34%, by 2021 the CDU/CSU got just 24% and the SPD just 25%
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Er... the 26th amendment was passed in 1971, no need for the Democrats to propose that one.
That was my point - Vivek Ramaswamy is
1) Ignorant of the constitution 2) triangulating 3) a combination of both
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Constitutional amendments require 2/3rds of states to agree to them.
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Mrs Capitano has been DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) at her last two schools and has mentored others on it. She was at the Oxfordshire safeguarding conference last week. I'd post the agenda but it would just make PB too depressing for a sunny Monday morning. Let's just say that an entire day on child sexual abuse is probably (hopefully) no-one's idea of fun.
A few points I've picked up from her, and from seeing our local primary get failed by Ofsted on safeguarding issues.
Safeguarding (at primary level at least) is almost entirely about home issues, not school issues. It is directly correlated with deprivation levels in the school catchment. It is basically teachers acting as social workers, because there aren't any/enough social workers. It is absolutely usual to have "team around the child" meetings for home problems which are nonetheless chaired by the head or the DSL because childrens' social care at county is under-resourced.
As such, a school's performance on safeguarding is probably not relevant to the majority of kids at the school or their parents. 99% of kids at her current school, and 90% at the previous one, have no cause to appear on the safeguarding radar at all.
So for that reason, I agree with those protesting about Ofsted's single-word judgements. For most parents/kids, it's misleading to add a single-word judgement where a failure on safeguarding masks excellent teaching. Just publish individual scores/levels without aggregating them into one single rating.
However...
Fulfilling your safeguarding responsibilities isn't really that hard. (Fixing the underlying social issues is, but Ofsted doesn't rate you on that!) If a school is neglecting its safeguarding responsibilities, the head is incompetent. And an incompetent head generally doesn't run a good school.
That was one of the reasons we chose not to send Capitano Junior to our local primary, and went out-of-catchment instead. It had just been failed by Ofsted on safeguarding. The school's line was that it was a "paperwork mistake". It turns out that the head had just told a close-to-retirement teacher to become DSL and hadn't checked at all whether she was doing her job. Surprise surprise, she wasn't. We looked a bit closer and this couldn't-care-less attitude permeated all the way through the school. Four years on, the school has got through two permanent heads, two temporaries, and might slowly be hauling itself back to an acceptable standard. Meanwhile, the school we did choose is not remotely "Ofsteddy" - it's a liberal little village primary where the kids are given space to develop - but the head is supremely competent and knows damn well that all her paperwork is in order, and that the troubled kids are being monitored and issues passed up to county.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
I will be astounded if the Reform/Brexit party manages to stand in as many seats as it did the last time. It's dead and has been for some time everywhere but in the polling figures. Some won't vote at all but I am expecting a small boost for the Tories from the detritus. It won't be enough though.
I did float the idea of Boris running for ReFUK. Decried as madness on here - and mad it would be.
But - and its a big but - the crank right enjoy madness. In 2019 they succeeded in gifting Labour retention of seats like Stockton North and Sunderland Central.
In 2024? A conservative party needs to be on the ballot somewhere, and that party is Reform UK. I can see donors putting up enough money for candidates and as we have seen post the Brexit referendum all kinds of names reappear in all kinds of unlikely places.
Boris wants to be relevant. Seems the Tory party have declared him persona non grata, despite so many actual Tory MPs and voters still thinking he is the man. He can't reinvent himself inside the party - a party he and so many describe as not conservative enough.
So why not? He will be running as BORIS primarily, the George Galloway of the right. Go get 'em Bozza.
No, Boris is more likely to run for Mayor of London again next year, given the approved Tory candidates aren't even known to most London Tories let alone Londoners overall and how unpopular Mayor Khan's ULEZ is.
Boris has no interest in RefUK under FPTP and Farage and Tice will not allow him to challenge their control of the party either
Who said anything about Boris controlling RefUK? I don't think he'd be able to take control of any vaguely serious political party. But he could, in theory, stand for them.
Could he run for mayor of London as an independent as Ken living standard?
I remember Ken Living Standard. Had this obsession with Hitter. Ran against Boring Jonestown Massacre. As depicted in this entirely respected and independent historical document.
- The police investigation into the SNP finances starts in July 2021. This follows complaints about what has happened to £600,000 raised for another independence referendum.
- 19 months later in February 2023 the Head of Police Scotland announces his intention to retire 2 years early in summer 2023. It is reported that this because of a clash with the SNP government about the policing budget.
- Also in February 2023 after this announcement Nicola Sturgeon announces her intention to stand down.
- March 2023: Peter Murrell, SNP CEO, resigns.
- April 2023: Peter Murrell arrested and questioned. His and Sturgeon's home is searched.
- April 2023: campervan seized; Colin Beattie, SNP Treasurer, arrested and questioned; he resigns from his post.
- June 2023: Sturgeon arrested and questioned.
Now, investigating the whereabouts of £600,000 is not, on the face of it, the most complicated investigation ever. So what exactly were the police doing between July 2021 and February 2023? Is it just a coincidence that this all seems to come to a head in the wake of Police Scotland's Head's decision?
Do our Scottish posters have a view?
I don't see why us Scottish posters would have any more of an insight. In fact, given the partisan instincts of people on either side, Scottish posters are probably, on average, less able to give a balanced view due to strong feelings for and against independence.
I'm just grateful we live in a country where holding powerful people to account for possible crimes is possible. In all too many places rule of law does not extend to the connected.
The arrest of a former First Minister (again) demonstrates to a wider public that nobody is above the law. Which is more than we can say for Prime Ministers and senior cabinet ministers in Westminster...
The current and previous-but-one PMs were fined for breaking lockdown rules... and I think there was something about seatbelts recently too but I don't remember whether a fine was issued. Do you think there is some more serious crime that's gone uninvestigated or unpunished?
It's not like friends and family of MPs and donors were given unfettered access to multi- million pound public sector contracts without going through a formal tender process or anything genuinely scandalous like that? Or £63m of London ratepayers' money being spent on a garden bridge that is yet to see the first brick laid.
If either of those fictional scenarios were to be a reality and no one investigated the potential for criminality, now there would be a scandal of Sicilian proportions.
Oh that. Yeah ok.
Or a man (A) facilitates the underwriting of a substantial loan on behalf of another man (B) and without favour, man A becomes Chairman of the state broadcaster. It just wouldn't happen here. We are not some central African or American banana republic.
We are not, as you say, a republic
Banana constitutional monarchy is a bit of a mouthful, as the actress said etc.
Mrs Capitano has been DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) at her last two schools and has mentored others on it. She was at the Oxfordshire safeguarding conference last week. I'd post the agenda but it would just make PB too depressing for a sunny Monday morning. Let's just say that an entire day on child sexual abuse is probably (hopefully) no-one's idea of fun.
A few points I've picked up from her, and from seeing our local primary get failed by Ofsted on safeguarding issues.
Safeguarding (at primary level at least) is almost entirely about home issues, not school issues. It is directly correlated with deprivation levels in the school catchment. It is basically teachers acting as social workers, because there aren't any/enough social workers. It is absolutely usual to have "team around the child" meetings for home problems which are nonetheless chaired by the head or the DSL because childrens' social care at county is under-resourced.
As such, a school's performance on safeguarding is probably not relevant to the majority of kids at the school or their parents. 99% of kids at her current school, and 90% at the previous one, have no cause to appear on the safeguarding radar at all.
So for that reason, I agree with those protesting about Ofsted's single-word judgements. For most parents/kids, it's misleading to add a single-word judgement where a failure on safeguarding masks excellent teaching. Just publish individual scores/levels without aggregating them into one single rating.
However...
Fulfilling your safeguarding responsibilities isn't really that hard. (Fixing the underlying social issues is, but Ofsted doesn't rate you on that!) If a school is neglecting its safeguarding responsibilities, the head is incompetent. And an incompetent head generally doesn't run a good school.
That was one of the reasons we chose not to send Capitano Junior to our local primary, and went out-of-catchment instead. It had just been failed by Ofsted on safeguarding. The school's line was that it was a "paperwork mistake". It turns out that the head had just told a close-to-retirement teacher to become DSL and hadn't checked at all whether she was doing her job. Surprise surprise, she wasn't. We looked a bit closer and this couldn't-care-less attitude permeated all the way through the school. Four years on, the school has got through two permanent heads, two temporaries, and might slowly be hauling itself back to an acceptable standard. Meanwhile, the school we did choose is not remotely "Ofsteddy" - it's a liberal little village primary where the kids are given space to develop - but the head is supremely competent and knows damn well that all her paperwork is in order, and that the troubled kids are being monitored and issues passed up to county.
Interesting. Your last sentence is critical. If competent leaders are doing the right thing in regard to looking after all their kids (for the kids' sake and not for Ofsted's), then they shouldn't have to worry about Ofsted at all.
I will be astounded if the Reform/Brexit party manages to stand in as many seats as it did the last time. It's dead and has been for some time everywhere but in the polling figures. Some won't vote at all but I am expecting a small boost for the Tories from the detritus. It won't be enough though.
I did float the idea of Boris running for ReFUK. Decried as madness on here - and mad it would be.
But - and its a big but - the crank right enjoy madness. In 2019 they succeeded in gifting Labour retention of seats like Stockton North and Sunderland Central.
In 2024? A conservative party needs to be on the ballot somewhere, and that party is Reform UK. I can see donors putting up enough money for candidates and as we have seen post the Brexit referendum all kinds of names reappear in all kinds of unlikely places.
Boris wants to be relevant. Seems the Tory party have declared him persona non grata, despite so many actual Tory MPs and voters still thinking he is the man. He can't reinvent himself inside the party - a party he and so many describe as not conservative enough.
So why not? He will be running as BORIS primarily, the George Galloway of the right. Go get 'em Bozza.
No, Boris is more likely to run for Mayor of London again next year, given the approved Tory candidates aren't even known to most London Tories let alone Londoners overall and how unpopular Mayor Khan's ULEZ is.
Boris has no interest in RefUK under FPTP and Farage and Tice will not allow him to challenge their control of the party either
Who said anything about Boris controlling RefUK? I don't think he'd be able to take control of any vaguely serious political party. But he could, in theory, stand for them.
Could he run for mayor of London as an independent as Ken living standard?
2031: On a popular political betting blog, the host writes a header opining that Labour PM Sadiq Khan was never truly popular - afterall his only electoral successes were against joke Tory opponents in London Mayoral elections, culminating in the 2024 London Mayoral election against the discredited Boris Johnson and then against electoral turn-off Suella Braverman, who led the Tories to their worst GE defeat since Major in the surprise election of 2026. Instead, he suggests that dull, charisma-free Tory leader Tom Pursglove has been underestimated by the betting public.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Constitutional amendments require 2/3rds of states to agree to them.
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Term limits for SCOTUS would be ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS. Even with an amendment.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
Correlation between voting Conservative and wanting to cane naughty young children. That's quite an odd one.
I would expect 90% of this can be explained by both being correlated with age - and with the default position for views on education to be 'it was like x for me and I turned out ok'.
(That said, my kids' primary school experience is light years better than mine was in the 80s, where the school was seemingly staffed almost entirely by idiots.)
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
I think privacy has proven bit broad from which to derive abortion (despite that, I agree fully with the reasoning behind earlier SCOTUS decisions). Not that it matters to opponents of abortion (or whatever else) what the constitution says, a well worded right to bodily autonomy would fit the bill better in my opinion.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings
This post is peak HYUFD. Bravo, sir. Bravo.
Not only does Singapore use canes, it also makes them. Manufacturing powerhouse.
Corporal punishment support is an example of the human psychology that goes: “bad things happened when I was young; they didn’t do me [much] harm; therefore those bad things are good things.”
See also lax health and safety rules, coal fired power stations, not being allowed to work from home, patting one’s Secretary on the bum, and golliwogs.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
I don't think our terminology differs all that much from the US and elsewhere. "Arrest" generally means to take someone into custody on suspicion of them having committed a crime.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Constitutional amendments require 2/3rds of states to agree to them.
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Term limits for SCOTUS would be ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS. Even with an amendment.
Does Congress have (in extremis) the power to unmake SCOTUS ?
I know parliament has this power over SCOTUK (Though it'd never be agreed to be used)
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check and it's very easy to solve a problem by forcing the next person down the chain to just follow what the previous person says (because you hide the awkward bits that made the decision dubious away)..
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Constitutional amendments require 2/3rds of states to agree to them.
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Term limits for SCOTUS would be ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS. Even with an amendment.
Does Congress have (in extremis) the power to unmake SCOTUS ?
I know parliament has this power over SCOTUK (Though it'd never be agreed to be used)
That would be an interesting battle to watch. The answer is no - The SCOTUS is party of Constitution, which can only be changed by the amendment process. Anything that Congress tried to do on it's own would be ruled unconstitutional by... SCOTUS.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
I don't think our terminology differs all that much from the US and elsewhere. "Arrest" generally means to take someone into custody on suspicion of them having committed a crime.
There are I believe differences in arrest rules in England and Scotland, but I can't be arsed to dig out what they are.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
I think the Dems need to run on 3 constitutional amendments for the next 15 - 20 years and weave them into their general narrative of their view of freedom. The amendment you propose would be one. I'd also add a distinct right to privacy, including the right to abortion, family planning and to have consensual relationships with other adults and the ability to request the information held by private companies and the state that pertain to you. And finally I would add term limits to SCOTUS (20 years), the Senate (12 years), and the House (8 years). You could even make another amendment clarifying money is not speech and that corporations aren't people.
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Constitutional amendments require 2/3rds of states to agree to them.
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Term limits for SCOTUS would be ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS. Even with an amendment.
SCOTUS are providing a really bad advertisement for Constitutional law and make the statute law/supremacy of Parliament approach in the UK look a lot better.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
probably needs to be more nuanced that that though as being "good" at safeguarding can be a combination of empty virtue signalling and boxticking without solving anything serious
That's closer to the situation.
The current introspection has been driven by the tragedy that happened in Reading last year, where a head committed suicide.
I don't think anyone has claimed that the children at her school were anything but well educated and cared for and safe. But some of the paperwork wasn't complete.
Now, the paperwork is important. But not like this. The trouble is that Ofsted spends such a short time in a given school for a given inspection that the paperwork plays too great a role.
Ah interesting. So the issue is then not that people disagree with the principle that safeguarding should be the main determinant of the rating, but that Ofsted's measurement of safeguarding and the process around reporting it are flawed?
Take the total spending on schools - take 5-10% of that budget and that is what the paperwork Ofsted insists on costs.
Now a lot of the paperwork is required but not all of it but given how Ofsted work - given the choice of 1 floating teacher / TA or 2 admin staff any Headmaster wishing to have a stress free live will have the admin staff.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
I'm not saying Ofsted are perfect, far from it, no organisation ever will be.
But at least they are independent, unlike the Post Office who were a party to the issues (and responsible for them) but were handling matters in-house.
Of course things can and should be better, but that's true in all walks of life.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
I don't think our terminology differs all that much from the US and elsewhere. "Arrest" generally means to take someone into custody on suspicion of them having committed a crime.
There are I believe differences in arrest rules in England and Scotland, but I can't be arsed to dig out what they are.
Sure, there are legal differences in rights under arrest between jurisdictions, and the precise process, and always will be. But the point is that it doesn't require the invention of a whole new language. Arrest is taking into custody on suspicion of a crime.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
Is it just me, or does discussion of getting caned in school bring back memories of the very funny Ali G talking about the subject, to a rather bemused Rhodes Boyson?
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
I'm not saying Ofsted are perfect, far from it, no organisation ever will be.
But at least they are independent, unlike the Post Office who were a party to the issues (and responsible for them) but were handling matters in-house.
Of course things can and should be better, but that's true in all walks of life.
Ofsted aren't really independent. And the right of appeal should be independent of Ofsted but it isn't...
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
Could states constitutionally allow voters who are aged less than 18 to vote?
Mrs Capitano has been DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) at her last two schools and has mentored others on it. She was at the Oxfordshire safeguarding conference last week. I'd post the agenda but it would just make PB too depressing for a sunny Monday morning. Let's just say that an entire day on child sexual abuse is probably (hopefully) no-one's idea of fun.
A few points I've picked up from her, and from seeing our local primary get failed by Ofsted on safeguarding issues.
Safeguarding (at primary level at least) is almost entirely about home issues, not school issues. It is directly correlated with deprivation levels in the school catchment. It is basically teachers acting as social workers, because there aren't any/enough social workers. It is absolutely usual to have "team around the child" meetings for home problems which are nonetheless chaired by the head or the DSL because childrens' social care at county is under-resourced.
As such, a school's performance on safeguarding is probably not relevant to the majority of kids at the school or their parents. 99% of kids at her current school, and 90% at the previous one, have no cause to appear on the safeguarding radar at all.
So for that reason, I agree with those protesting about Ofsted's single-word judgements. For most parents/kids, it's misleading to add a single-word judgement where a failure on safeguarding masks excellent teaching. Just publish individual scores/levels without aggregating them into one single rating.
However...
Fulfilling your safeguarding responsibilities isn't really that hard. (Fixing the underlying social issues is, but Ofsted doesn't rate you on that!) If a school is neglecting its safeguarding responsibilities, the head is incompetent. And an incompetent head generally doesn't run a good school.
That was one of the reasons we chose not to send Capitano Junior to our local primary, and went out-of-catchment instead. It had just been failed by Ofsted on safeguarding. The school's line was that it was a "paperwork mistake". It turns out that the head had just told a close-to-retirement teacher to become DSL and hadn't checked at all whether she was doing her job. Surprise surprise, she wasn't. We looked a bit closer and this couldn't-care-less attitude permeated all the way through the school. Four years on, the school has got through two permanent heads, two temporaries, and might slowly be hauling itself back to an acceptable standard. Meanwhile, the school we did choose is not remotely "Ofsteddy" - it's a liberal little village primary where the kids are given space to develop - but the head is supremely competent and knows damn well that all her paperwork is in order, and that the troubled kids are being monitored and issues passed up to county.
That's an incredibly useful anecdote
Did you have to put down 'reasons' why you were deciding to send Cap Jr out the catchment area ?
I've only got one school - which was inadequate but has now been academised (And hasn't had an OFSTED in it's new form) in my catchment area but quite a few other schools would potentially be viable.
In our case, the out-of-catchment school wasn't full, and (as a non-academy school) their admissions policy was just the standard distance-based one. So we were reasonably confident that Junior would get in. We did put down a couple of reasons, but not with any expectation that they'd be taken into account - if there'd been an extra 10 kids who lived closer than they'd have got in and Junior wouldn't, no matter what pleading we put on the form!
The way that fast food outlets target schools is something that should be looked at.
I think there was a recording of an executive saying that, for them, getting children into the habit of going to their brand was a critical component of future sales.
"The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age."
Could states constitutionally allow voters who are aged less than 18 to vote?
That would require a US constitutional law expert to answer. The above Amendment *seems* to have no say in the matter.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
Is it just me, or does discussion of getting caned in school bring back memories of the very funny Ali G talking about the subject, to a rather bemused Rhodes Boyson?
Berlusconi has gone to the great bunga bunga party in the sky.
Al-Zawahiri and Berlusconi are dead, Boris Johnson is finished, Putin's army is on the run, Donald Trump is going to jail. Dark Brandon is just cleaning out the whole house.
I'd been assuming Biden would run again but what's he going to do in the next term if he's already vanquished all his enemies?
Quite some headline. Have they still not forgiven him for knifing Boris?
More accurate would be: 'Gove's Planning Inspectorate declines to overturn local council decision to block Papa John's store over obesity fears for local children'. They imply that Gove has personally stepped in to stop a development that would otherwise have been going ahead.
The way that fast food outlets target schools is something that should be looked at.
I think there was a recording of an executive saying that, for them, getting children into the habit of going to their brand was a critical component of future sales.
I thought it was common knowledge that there are policies saying no takeaways within x yards of a school.
Mrs Capitano has been DSL (Designated Safeguarding Lead) at her last two schools and has mentored others on it. She was at the Oxfordshire safeguarding conference last week. I'd post the agenda but it would just make PB too depressing for a sunny Monday morning. Let's just say that an entire day on child sexual abuse is probably (hopefully) no-one's idea of fun.
A few points I've picked up from her, and from seeing our local primary get failed by Ofsted on safeguarding issues.
Safeguarding (at primary level at least) is almost entirely about home issues, not school issues. It is directly correlated with deprivation levels in the school catchment. It is basically teachers acting as social workers, because there aren't any/enough social workers. It is absolutely usual to have "team around the child" meetings for home problems which are nonetheless chaired by the head or the DSL because childrens' social care at county is under-resourced.
As such, a school's performance on safeguarding is probably not relevant to the majority of kids at the school or their parents. 99% of kids at her current school, and 90% at the previous one, have no cause to appear on the safeguarding radar at all.
So for that reason, I agree with those protesting about Ofsted's single-word judgements. For most parents/kids, it's misleading to add a single-word judgement where a failure on safeguarding masks excellent teaching. Just publish individual scores/levels without aggregating them into one single rating.
However...
Fulfilling your safeguarding responsibilities isn't really that hard. (Fixing the underlying social issues is, but Ofsted doesn't rate you on that!) If a school is neglecting its safeguarding responsibilities, the head is incompetent. And an incompetent head generally doesn't run a good school.
That was one of the reasons we chose not to send Capitano Junior to our local primary, and went out-of-catchment instead. It had just been failed by Ofsted on safeguarding. The school's line was that it was a "paperwork mistake". It turns out that the head had just told a close-to-retirement teacher to become DSL and hadn't checked at all whether she was doing her job. Surprise surprise, she wasn't. We looked a bit closer and this couldn't-care-less attitude permeated all the way through the school. Four years on, the school has got through two permanent heads, two temporaries, and might slowly be hauling itself back to an acceptable standard. Meanwhile, the school we did choose is not remotely "Ofsteddy" - it's a liberal little village primary where the kids are given space to develop - but the head is supremely competent and knows damn well that all her paperwork is in order, and that the troubled kids are being monitored and issues passed up to county.
That's an incredibly useful anecdote
Did you have to put down 'reasons' why you were deciding to send Cap Jr out the catchment area ?
I've only got one school - which was inadequate but has now been academised (And hasn't had an OFSTED in it's new form) in my catchment area but quite a few other schools would potentially be viable.
IIRC from when we did something similar - there’s no requirement to have a reason to send your kids out of catchment, but you are not guaranteed a place. The school will only take your children if they have spaces left after taking those they are legally required to take. In catchment children & those in local authority care get priority IIRC. Methods by which the remaining spaces are apportioned vary by academy / school / LA: The school our children went to issued places in strict order of distance from the school.
Would that Michael Gove could as consistent in putting the boot in to Papa Johnson's wee boy. His rearguard defence of BJ's reputation this morning was a slippery masterclass.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Flight to Crete (and numerous other flights from Gatwick) cancelled "due to the hot weather". It was a bit hot (31) but still?? Trains back home disrupted by the hot weather - rails buckling, signals failing.
I wonder if we're so used to a temperate climate that the infrastructure isn't really up to it?
Trying again tomorrow...
My train was cancelled due to flooding, the first rain we've had for ages.
Sorry to hear that. However, also have an apt book suggestion for you too:
The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough
Believe it was the first of his many excellent books dealing with various aspects of American history.
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
It's impossible, which is why the Conservative Party will always cave to the interests of the already wealthy in the end. It's why the rumours of the abolition of IHT and revival of Help to Buy continue to swirl, and it also explains why they've already caved to their Southern Nimbies by junking housing targets for local authorities.
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
By then their children will have inherited of course (and even today by 39 most own property with a mortgage)
There aren't enough houses, therefore those that exist are too expensive. Inheritances will eventually bail some people out, but the numbers staggering under crippling rents into middle age will continue to increase. Eventually this will also undermine your party's support with the grey vote, as more of them end up having to work until they drop down dead to service rents.
No use bellyaching about the concreting of the countryside I'm afraid. If the Conservatives won't do it, eventually things will get so bad that voters will turn to somebody else who will.
There are if we cut immigration.
Most will have inherited by 60-65, so certainly wouldn't need to work beyond normal retirement age (having pensions already saved for too).
Voters across the South are already voting for NIMBY LDs and Greens and Independents because even the modest housebuilding proposed by former Tory controlled councils was too much. If Starmer tried to concrete all over the greenbelt there would be a revolution in the South
Cutting immigration will no more resolve the housing shortage than cutting inflation will see prices fall back down.
Even if net immigration dropped to zero today our pre-existing shortage of houses will still exist. Just as if inflation dropped to zero today, then prices would remain higher than they were in the past.
If we cut net immigration to zero our population would decline as we have a birthrate now well below replacement level. On that basis even just controlled immigration and a fractional net increase each year would still see us have more than enough houses than we need
You're wrong as usual. In all but 2 of the past 50 years we've had more births than deaths in any given year.
"Replacement level" is a BS measure for measuring population change in any meaningful timespan,, birth rate versus death rate is the measure, and that has our births exceeding deaths every year but the height of the pandemic and one other year in the past half century.
The simple reality is that the housing crisis is already here. A typical healthy economy has 10% of houses empty which allows for churn as people move and for people to turn down houses that are unsuitable or priced unsuitably etc and we're running at 99% occupancy which is in any walk of life a failing system.
We don't need a few thousand extra homes, we need millions of extra houses in order to end the imbalance in the market. That will bring down inflation, bring down costs as people can afford their own home etc and at minimal cost to any 'green' space as we're not talking houses for a billion people, just the ones who live in this country and any net changes.
No, I'm right.
The birth rate in the UK is now just 1.61 per woman ie well below replacement level. So without high net immigration our population would decline longer term and deaths in due course exceed births and we would have more than enough houses than we need.
We are already millions short of what we need so even if population declined gradually it won't resolve the shortage.
And furthermore the birth rate is still exceeding the death rate. So population isn't even declining even without immigration. Births have exceeded deaths in every year in this country except for 2020 (due to the pandemic) and 1976. Even in 2020 deaths only narrowly exceeded births and that was purely due to the pandemic - 2021 had births in excess of deaths again even with the pandemic.
Births exceeded deaths by over 100k in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year stats exist for. There's been six-digit natural growth in the population of births over deaths every single year from 2004-2019, even without considering immigration.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
It’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
"True conservatives" like HYUFD have never been serious about being in/staying in government. Hence his penchant for sending the tanks into Spain/Scotland, caning, and 'brownfield'.
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
Far be it from me to provide actual evidence on Ofsted, but this is what the report on the school in Reading that led to the tragic suicide actually says on safeguarding:
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.
Now, one can argue against the inspection framework and the emphasis on safeguarding, but I suspect we'd all agree that not completing all the required employment checks is pretty poor.
However this is in the context of the school in Cambridge where Ofsted have actually apologized and withdrawn the report because it was total garbage (full disclosure: a friend of mine is on the Board of Governors at that school). Ofsted is sufficiently broken for the reports to be considered unreliable.
Of course Ofsted will make errors in the thousands of inspections it does, and I'm not particularly defending them. But in the case of the Reading School and the tragedy surrounding it, the report would have been pulled by now if it were not factually accurate. I pulled it off the Ofsted site this morning.
{The management of the Post Office have entered the chat}
Which highlights the problem - the Post Office were police force, prosecutor, judge and executioner
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check...
I don't think the two comparisons are remotely the same. Ofsted are the independent sanity check.
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
You've clearly not had to deal with an Ofsted report - I have and when I did the number of mistakes they made where they had to back down was significant. Now it didn't change the final score but it was rather annoying to see things that were factually impossible (review of a teacher who was off sick that day) being written down as fact...
It should be noted that schools aren't arguing against inspection, which is essential, but rather complaining about the fallibility OFSTED, and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
I think the complaint is that paperwork is seen as essential by Ofsted - yet paperwork would be the very first thing we binned if we were trying to solve x issues at the same time.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
Perhaps there should be a better term, such as interviewed under caution, rather than arrested (and presumably dearrested or unarrested or some such immediately afterwards).
They aren't the same thing. You can be interviewed under caution without being arrested (but can leave the interview at any time in such circumstances).
Yes, but an alternative term *like* that. One that does not imply the police know they've got you bang to rights and it is only those lefty lawyers saving you from being strung up in the town centre.
I don't think that would help in any way as the "no smoke without fire" people would read whatever term was chosen as implying guilt.
It might be helpful to avoid confusion in international contexts if our uses of the terms didn't drift too far from the common ones -- for instance IIRC the US asks on ESTA forms and the like "if you've ever been arrested" and implicitly assumes a similar use of the term to the US.
I don't think our terminology differs all that much from the US and elsewhere. "Arrest" generally means to take someone into custody on suspicion of them having committed a crime.
Right, but I thought this subthread started because the Scottish law changes meant the police could now arrest you when they didn't suspect you of having committed a crime but just wanted to get your witness evidence on video for potential later court cases? Maybe I misunderstood...
Given that we are talking about schools - are secondary school pupil numbers due to rise or fall over the next few years.
I can't remember where to look for accurate details.
Rise but not much further I believe.
After number of live births fell to a plateau at the turn of the century, it then started rising again in 2003 (so young adults who are now 20) reaching a peak in 2012 (so primary age kids who are now 10).
Numbers then drifted off and started falling post-2017.
So I believe senior schools are due a rise in pupils over next few years, primary schools would be due a fall in pupils in next few years though.
Immigration probably means that the numbers of both will rise though, secondary schools certainly should given a natural bump coming and record migration too.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
They probably mean that other people's children should be whacked. In any case, presumably the entire British cane-making industry closed down in the 1980s, not to mention we are still part of the ECHR. To be serious, what parents are saying is schools are not doing a very good job of preventing disruption, which brings us back to safeguarding, Ofsted and box-ticking.
Plenty of canes still made and used in Singapore and Singapore tops the PISA rankings.
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Given I earlier posted a poll with 53% of UK voters backing restoring the cane in schools (even if 10 years ago) yet another example of leftwingers like you underestimating support for rightwing policies
How was the polling question framed? Because if it was "should the cane be brought back to schools?" then I can imagine many people would potentially be "it did me no harm", or even "lol, who cares, this is a stupid question".
I think if the wording was "Imagine caning in school was legal, and one of the children in your family was caned for misbehaving at school. Would you consider that acceptable?" fewer people would support it. People are fine with the general idea of caning because that happens to other people's kids. Whereas saying it happens to your children is different.
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
It seems as if democracy is a bit annoying for some people because their vote is only worth the same as everyone else's, whereas with social media you can "get ahead" of other people in terms of influence if you're persistent enough. In that sense you could argue that people who complain that their vote isn't important enough are basically anti-democratic; they want their vote to be worth more than 1 in 45 million, or whatever it is in their country.
Berlusconi has gone to the great bunga bunga party in the sky.
I suspect bunga bunga parties are down below not in the sky...
All the best and most interesting people surely go down below.
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners have much more fun.
Unfortunately, some of those sinners' idea of fun will be sticking red hot pokers into parts of you where you really don't want red hot pokers.
No kinkshaming.
Not even if it involves Two Sisters, an Apeman, A Well Respected Man, Animals in the Zoo, the Death of a Clown, Lola, Mick Avory's Underpants and All of My Friends Were There?
When I was at school in the 90s it was a badly-kept secret that my English and Theory of Knowledge (Philosophy) teacher had done porn. Based on her age, I'd guess in the 70s or 80s.
Obviously @TSE needs to educate you on the various flavours of such entertainment on offer these days.
It would depend on the nature of the porn. If it’s Hot Teacher Seduces Teen Slut, there may be a safeguarding issue.
Would it be an issue for you if the teacher had, in a previous job as an actor, played child-killer Richard III at the RSC?
I'm slightly struggling to see the practical difference in safeguarding terms. They are rather different sorts of acting jobs, but they are acting jobs.
It seems that people are complaining that just because child safeguarding is no good the whole school gets an inadequate, or ineffective rating. So you can have a school which has cracking Maths and English Departments but is no good at safeguarding children and it seems people think it should receive a good or outstanding rating.
Reminds me of the NHS outperforming on all measures apart from health outcomes and saving lives.
The purpose of schools is to educate, especially in Maths and English, as saving lives is for hospitals, safeguarding is important too but not the purpose of school. Indeed 50 years ago most schools, state or private, didn't even do any safeguarding at all.
Indeed, back in the 1970s "safeguarding" involved beating a child with a cane.
And ten years ago a poll found 53% of voters would allow teachers to use the cane again in school with Conservative voters in particular pro caning
A lot of people (not just teenagers) don't rate the right to vote much - they correctly judge that they will probably never make an individual difference in their entire lives, plus they think politics is pretty seedy and uninteresting anyway. After all, a "good" turnout is 75%, and I don't believe the other 25% are all dead or incapacitated. Nor are all the 75% really that niterested - it's just something one does.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Interesting. I know this was specifically TikTok, but there are some serious points here. An engaged young person could well do more with social media to influence the state of the country than with a single vote - it could be quite sensible for e.g. a Greta Thunberg to choose keeping her social media accounts over her vote to effect change. That, of course, is as long as everyone else gets to vote!
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
If people feel their vote is unimportant there is a significant democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. With younger people especially, I do feel that there is a concern that the issues of the elderly are given more weight, culturally and politically, than the issues of the young. We need only look at the seriousness of discourse and policy around climate change, a big issue for younger voters, or "wokeness", an issue most younger people don't care about strongly, as well as the entire economic structure of this country to see that. It should also be concerning to people that the policy proposals favoured by younger voters, presented by Jeremy Corbyn, versus the policy proposals favoured by older voters, presented by May and Johnson, are almost diametrically opposed in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. A lot of young people (I wouldn't call myself young anymore, but I am in my early 30s with a sister in her early 20s) see many older voters as pulling up the ladder behind them - I can't afford the mortgage my parents got, let alone my grandparents. And the response from a lot of older voters / the press is the idea that "it was bad when I was young, it should always be bad, and it being bad is good for you" despite the fact that it was actually much better in many ways when those people were young.
So that baby boomlet (say 2008- 2015) is starting to leave primary schools and enter secondary schools.
So all those expanded primary schools we built over the last decade or so are about to become redundant (the final bulge class is leaving our local primary this summer; it's worse in Inner London because having children is now an unaffordable luxury). And secondary schools (where you really don't want to look at the recruitment and training numbers) are in much the same situation as the characters in those videos on those websites.
When those cohorts hit HE, it's going to be even worse.
Given that we are talking about schools - are secondary school pupil numbers due to rise or fall over the next few years.
I can't remember where to look for accurate details.
Rise but not much further I believe.
After number of live births fell to a plateau at the turn of the century, it then started rising again in 2003 (so young adults who are now 20) reaching a peak in 2012 (so primary age kids who are now 10).
Numbers then drifted off and started falling post-2017.
So I believe senior schools are due a rise in pupils over next few years, primary schools would be due a fall in pupils in next few years though.
Immigration probably means that the numbers of both will rise though, secondary schools certainly should given a natural bump coming and record migration too.
Comments
That would make the Democrats the party of freedom to vote and live a private life, the party against democratic interference from corporate money and the party for democratic reform of the representative democracy to make sure people don't get institutionalised.
I doubt they would run on these, though - they're quite radical and would break up some of the power that benefit the Democratic elites as well. But I imagine they would all have plurality support.
Did you have to put down 'reasons' why you were deciding to send Cap Jr out the catchment area ?
I've only got one school - which was inadequate but has now been academised (And hasn't had an OFSTED in it's new form) in my catchment area but quite a few other schools would potentially be viable.
The middle class people were a bit shocked by stern enforcement (detentions etc) of rules on uniforms, lateness, politeness to teachers and other pupils etc.
The parents from the estates uniformly stated that this was exactly what they wanted - they'd often moved across London to get their children into a school where they would have an ordered existence.
https://twitter.com/LondonEconomic/status/1667906479121129472?s=20
In 2005 the CDU/CSU got 35% and the SPD 34%, by 2021 the CDU/CSU got just 24% and the SPD just 25%
1) Ignorant of the constitution
2) triangulating
3) a combination of both
The last time Democrats got 2/3rds of states in their tally was... Lyndon Johnson - they also had 66 senate seats in 1964.
2/3rds of States is incredibly difficult for any party to do, particularly the Dems.
Extremely well put.
Indeed, 'The Ministry of Education encourages schools to punish boys by caning for serious offences such as fighting, smoking, cheating, gang-related offences, vandalism, defiance and truancy. Students may also be caned for repeated cases of more minor offences, such as being late repeatedly in a term.'
https://singaporeschools.fandom.com/wiki/Schools'_caning#:~:text=The Ministry of Education encourages,late repeatedly in a term.
(That said, my kids' primary school experience is light years better than mine was in the 80s, where the school was seemingly staffed almost entirely by idiots.)
While superficially frivolous, it’s clear evidence, to me, that even the true conservatives have given up.
They’re no longer serious about being in/staying in government.
I stick by my odds;
Evens, the tories never again win a majority.
4/1 they cease to be a meaningful electoral force within a decade.
Corporal punishment support is an example of the human psychology that goes: “bad things happened when I was young; they didn’t do me [much] harm; therefore those bad things
are good things.”
See also lax health and safety rules, coal fired power stations, not being allowed to work from home, patting one’s Secretary on the bum, and golliwogs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65877241
The problem with the Conservative Party is when "true conservatives" come to represent party policy rather than be eccentric oddballs.
I know parliament has this power over SCOTUK (Though it'd never be agreed to be used)
And Ofsted are the same - there is no independent sanity check and it's very easy to solve a problem by forcing the next person down the chain to just follow what the previous person says (because you hide the awkward bits that made the decision dubious away)..
They probably need to do more of that going forward.
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1658839136315273216?s=20
The Post Office were not just the above but they were also a party to the issues. Their own software was at fault, but they were marking their own homework so refused to see it.
Ofsted aren't a party in the same way as the Post Office is. Its not like schools are running flawed Ofsted software that is causing the problems Ofsted are then marking them down on.
He made the momentous and correct decision to support the liberation of Iraq.
That gets you into heaven.
Now a lot of the paperwork is required but not all of it but given how Ofsted work - given the choice of 1 floating teacher / TA or 2 admin staff any Headmaster wishing to have a stress free live will have the admin staff.
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners have much more fun.
But at least they are independent, unlike the Post Office who were a party to the issues (and responsible for them) but were handling matters in-house.
Of course things can and should be better, but that's true in all walks of life.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OV1fq75aWtY
Planning inspectorate rejects appeal after local council blocked pizza takeaway
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/11/michael-gove-stops-papa-johns-store-opening-obesity-fears/ (£££)
I think there was a recording of an executive saying that, for them, getting children into the habit of going to their brand was a critical component of future sales.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/11/boris-johnson-honours-list-eight-picks-blocked-holac/ (£££)
Basically, Number 10 says Rishi's (and James Forsythe's) hands are clean; they did not block Boris's peers; Holac did.
https://youtu.be/OV1fq75aWtY?t=147
I'd been assuming Biden would run again but what's he going to do in the next term if he's already vanquished all his enemies?
More accurate would be: 'Gove's Planning Inspectorate declines to overturn local council decision to block Papa John's store over obesity fears for local children'. They imply that Gove has personally stepped in to stop a development that would otherwise have been going ahead.
Not endorsing any of that, of course, but it's sadly reality. Fits with the polls showing large minorities would welcome a Strong Man sorting things out.
Oh, I now see it's already been mentioned.
We are already millions short of what we need so even if population declined gradually it won't resolve the shortage.
And furthermore the birth rate is still exceeding the death rate. So population isn't even declining even without immigration. Births have exceeded deaths in every year in this country except for 2020 (due to the pandemic) and 1976. Even in 2020 deaths only narrowly exceeded births and that was purely due to the pandemic - 2021 had births in excess of deaths again even with the pandemic.
Births exceeded deaths by over 100k in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year stats exist for. There's been six-digit natural growth in the population of births over deaths every single year from 2004-2019, even without considering immigration.
I can't remember where to look for accurate details.
OTOH, you might get stuck with folks like Fred West and Oskar Dirlewanger.
I understand that in reality it's much more likely that people wish to lol over the latest TikTok sensation than have a vote they likely won't bother to use anyway.
Paperwork allows issues to be both hidden away (we documented it but didn't do anything to actively fixed it) or the exact opposite - paperwork is incomplete because I spent the 3 hours the form takes to actually raise the issue with social services by finding someone to speak to.
After number of live births fell to a plateau at the turn of the century, it then started rising again in 2003 (so young adults who are now 20) reaching a peak in 2012 (so primary age kids who are now 10).
Numbers then drifted off and started falling post-2017.
So I believe senior schools are due a rise in pupils over next few years, primary schools would be due a fall in pupils in next few years though.
Immigration probably means that the numbers of both will rise though, secondary schools certainly should given a natural bump coming and record migration too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#Vital_statistics_(1900–2022)
I think if the wording was "Imagine caning in school was legal, and one of the children in your family was caned for misbehaving at school. Would you consider that acceptable?" fewer people would support it. People are fine with the general idea of caning because that happens to other people's kids. Whereas saying it happens to your children is different.
Especially given the opportunity of such low hanging fruit about starting fires etc.
Today the charts need no commentary, they speak for themselves.
This is the Atlantic.
https://twitter.com/DrTELS/status/1667651296310992902
"...Just the top few metres of our oceans store as much energy as the entirety of our atmosphere..."
Some interesting weather is in prospect.
I'm slightly struggling to see the practical difference in safeguarding terms. They are rather different sorts of acting jobs, but they are acting jobs.
That is a remarkably similar number to those who voted Brexit. Perhaps we need a Venn diagram to determine the inclusivity of the two groups.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020
So that baby boomlet (say 2008- 2015) is starting to leave primary schools and enter secondary schools.
So all those expanded primary schools we built over the last decade or so are about to become redundant (the final bulge class is leaving our local primary this summer; it's worse in Inner London because having children is now an unaffordable luxury). And secondary schools (where you really don't want to look at the recruitment and training numbers) are in much the same situation as the characters in those videos on those websites.
When those cohorts hit HE, it's going to be even worse.
Thanks - I have a reason why I wanted the answer sadly I can't say why but you should be able to guess.