The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
More likely the internet will simply become unusable and we'll go back to public libraries. Could the online world actually disappear a quickly as it arrived? I'm sure a few bits will remain - venerable news outlets and people using YouTube to hear old Beatles tracks - but everything else?
Ms Hyde no more impressed than Ms Cyclefree. Or Mr Malmesbury.
"Whether it will lead to anything you’d call justice is another matter. A chap I corresponded with not long ago thought the entire over-remunerated executive class covering the period in question should be chucked straight into prison and have to argue their way out; which is, in a way, what happened to so many of the poor people who were the lifeblood of their business. But perhaps Post Office bosses past and present know that while such a nightmarish thing could happen to a subpostmaster – or on this evidence, perhaps even one day to you or me – it couldn’t really happen to them. Then again, the surest way to foster that kind of outcome is indifference – so let’s all resolve to stay very, very angry about this one."
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Throughout my long teaching career all of those things were true for much of the time. Throughout what stood out for me is that good leadership and good teaching were way more important than money. No need for the abuse btw. We view the world differently, that's all.
I'm sorry to have been rude, but saying that anyone calling for more school funding is simply a socialist - as though that is some kind of slam-dunk argument - is absurd. If money isn't important, why do private school kids have twice as much spent on them? If schools are in danger of falling down, do you think they can be repaired without spending money? If schools can't retain teachers don't you imagine that low salaries might be a factor? It's insulting to make out that funding isn't an issue here. If wanting well funded schools makes me a socialist then fuck it, I'm a socialist.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
As everyone on PB will be slightly bored by, I usually share John Redwood's stuff here - I find his solutions populist and sensible. He's done a series of posts on what he wants in the King's Speech - I don't agree with them all (eg I don't see the point of selling off Channel 4) but in totality I would be extremely impressed if the Government launched a programme like this, and all of it is possible if not downright reasonable. If this were the programme, the next election might be in contention again.
Yet once again we're likely get a total pile of toss from the SKS seat warmers.
1. Stop all overseas aid to any country with a nuclear weapons programme or with a defence budget greater than 2.5% of GDP. We should not be grant aiding rearmament by the back door.
2. Allocate more of the Overseas Aid budget to meet first year set up costs of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
3. Renegotiate the Windsor Agreement so that the more important Good Friday Agreement can be restored, with Unionists returning to Stormont.
4. Tell the EU that if they put a tariff on our cars exported to the EU for insufficient local content we will place one on their exports of cars to us.
5. Strengthen the small boats legislation by adding a notwithstanding clause to exclude further legal challenges
6 Intensify actions to arrest and prosecute people smugglers.
7 Return more foreign prisoners to their own countries.
8. Decriminalise non payment of tv licence fee
9. Raise income thresholds for economic migrants
Part 2 - Boost economical growth
1. Postpone ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2040 from 2030 to allow investment and continued use of existing factories.
2. Postpone the ban on new gas boilers for home heating
3. Cut Corporation tax to 12.5%
4. Switch wilding and sustainable farming grants to grants and loans to grow more food with more labour saving machinery
5. Issue licences to produce more oil and gas from known North Sea fields and reserves
6. Keep all existing fossil fuel power stations to help meet demand in periods of low wind and sun
7. End grants for anti motorist schemes that cause more delay and congestion on main roads
8. Put in more bypasses and roundabouts in place of more traffic lights and road restrictions
9. Amend Housing Bill to avoid losing more landlords
10. Remove 2017 and 2021 changes to IR 35 to foster more self employment
11. Raise VAT threshold for small business to £ 250,000
12. Get regulator to allow more reservoir capacity by water companies
13. Suspend carbon tax and emissions trading to cut energy costs for high energy using industries like steel
14. Auction government run rail franchises to get better service for lower subsidy
15. Sell Channel 4
16. Work with private sector to complete roll out of fast broadband
Part 3 - Productivity in public services
1. Repeal the independent management of NHS England, as everyone still blames Ministers for management failings.
2. Reduce layers of management in NHS and strengthen powers of Trust CEOs and Boards
3. Strengthen rights to free speech in universities and Colleges
4. Amend public procurement rules to give proper recognition to the tax and job contributions to UK made by UK based suppliers
5. Require Ministers to hold annual meetings with quangos to 1. Set objectives for the year ahead and agree budgets; 2 to review annual report and accounts; 3 to review performance.
6. Grant NHS patients the right to free treatment in the private sector if the NHS fails to deliver in a stated time
7. Block loans to Councils wanting to make commercial investments given the big losses some of them are recording on past attempts at property and green ventures
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
9. Cut energy use in public sector
10. Charge foreign visitors for using public services
TV license fee is not foreign policy. Tax rates are for a budget, not a King's Speech. The only way NHS patients could get free treatment in the private sector is if we imported an extra half a million health care workers and raised taxes to pay the costs, which seems to be the exact opposite of his other putrid points.......
I'd like to say otherwise all good, but that is a step too far. All for cutting energy use in the public sector though, so well done John, better luck next year, eh?
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
"Instagram Threads’ launch has been an overnight success, topping 100 million users within days of its arrival. Now, new data indicates the app has already achieved one-fifth of the weekly active user base of Twitter worldwide and 86 times the weekly active user base of the largest Twitter rival in the U.S., Truth Social, which had a weekly active user base of 1 million as of last week."
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
Here’s another one that can’t be easily dismissed (unlike Baconism and QAnon etc)
Epstein. Suicide or not?
The @kinabalu school of witless middlebrow retired-accountant Radio 4 Brian of Britain skepticism will chortle and say Oh of course that’s a mad conspiracy theory
Really? There are, to say the least, quite a few jarring elements. The sleeping guards. The miraculously malfunctioning cameras. And so forth
The sleeping guards and broken cameras were notorious at that holding facility. The US specialities in having lot and lots of really badly maintained and run prisons.
And yet he was the one guy who should have been on Ultra Suicide watch and in Total Protection, given the significance of the allegations and names surrounding him
I don’t know if he topped himself or was offed. I know I can’t breezily dismiss the idea he was conveniently silenced by simply saying “oh American prisons are rubbish”
QED. Weak thinking
It's helpful to analyse these questions by asking, would I bet on them? And subdivide the no bets into just don't know, or have a view but wouldn't stake money on it. For me this is a just don't know. There were an unbelievable number of unbelievably rich and powerful men wanting him dead, but OTOH if he foresaw happening to him what's happened to Maxwell suicide looks a reasonable reaction.
See my later comment. A highly plausible explanation is that he was persuaded to top himself and given a specific time when he could do it, “unwatched” without anyone else getting into trouble
He was simultaneously offered far worse alternatives. A life of terror in jail and his loved ones assailed
That’s assuming he loved anyone other than himself, which seems unlikely. Murder is marginally more convincing than that scenario.
Is there a setting on Twitter allowing me automatically to block anyone using the phrase "just let that sink in"? That's a feature I'd be willing to pay Musk to roll out.
I’d be curious if there is any evidence to back up this apparently outlandish claim. Covid sparing East Asians and Jews?!
Seems unlikely. But is there a kernel of truth from which they’ve confected the walnut whip of nonsense?
If there is, that's a dramatic break from their usual modus operandi.
I disagree. Most conspiracy theories have a tiny seed of truth at the heart - from which vast orchards of bollocks are grown
And of course some conspiracy theories turn out to be true
I hasten to add that I exceedingly doubt that this one is true. The Covid death rate of East Asians in Hong Kong was horrific
The conspiracy theories I came across are Holocaust Denial, the Eleanor Butler pre-contract, the Christ Myth theory and Shakespeare authorship.
None of them have a 'tiny seed of truth' in them.
Or "Jews knew about 9/11 before it happened and didn't go to work that day."
Father of a friend of mine got into conspiracy theories via 9/11. It was his gateway drug
Was perfectly sane before that. No interest in crackpot theories. Then he started to read around 9/11, became convinced it was hoaxed, and is now so far down Lunatic Boulevard he’s beyond Flat Earth and he believes the entire universe is a Hoax and nothing existed before 1920
He laughs at QAnon-ers as “gullible dupes swallowing establishment lies”
All this is only going to get worse as AI makes objective truth redundant. It’s a serious problem (on top of deepfakes etc)
Does it not concern you that you are on a similar slippery slope? I would say you are quite vulnerable to such journey. You are not a scientist (clearly) so do not follow Scientific Method and generally stop at the hypothesis stage because the scrutiny and objective data analysis is too unexciting for your journalistic mind. You also spend a lot of time alone. This enables your creative mind to look at anything fanciful and hope that it might be true so much that eventually you convince yourself.
@kinabalu may well be an accountant (for which I have cruelly teased him - it s a professional peril that he must endure), but I suspect that while you might consider him boring and unimaginative, his analysis is more reliable, probably by a factor of several thousand.
The several thousand thing is a pisstake against yourself for being a "scientist", right?
Out of interest, do you know what century the term "scientist" was coined in? (Hint: the answer is not the 16th or 17th.)
You sound like a spoilt teenaged Star Wars fan. You certainly don't show a desire in this post to put the Science religion and attitude in any kind of context, to get any kind of distance from them. You might as well replace "scientist" with "truther" and "Scientific" with "True". And you can't see that.
At least you don't use the phrase "scientific evidence", which I've long taken as a marker for idiocy. Science is a research method. It has a fair amount of applicability when asking certain limited kinds of questions. There can't be evidence that has the quality of "research method". There can be evidence that has or hasn't been officially stamped as truly found, though.
As everyone on PB will be slightly bored by, I usually share John Redwood's stuff here - I find his solutions populist and sensible. He's done a series of posts on what he wants in the King's Speech - I don't agree with them all (eg I don't see the point of selling off Channel 4) but in totality I would be extremely impressed if the Government launched a programme like this, and all of it is possible if not downright reasonable. If this were the programme, the next election might be in contention again.
Yet once again we're likely get a total pile of toss from the SKS seat warmers.
1. Stop all overseas aid to any country with a nuclear weapons programme or with a defence budget greater than 2.5% of GDP. We should not be grant aiding rearmament by the back door.
2. Allocate more of the Overseas Aid budget to meet first year set up costs of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
3. Renegotiate the Windsor Agreement so that the more important Good Friday Agreement can be restored, with Unionists returning to Stormont.
4. Tell the EU that if they put a tariff on our cars exported to the EU for insufficient local content we will place one on their exports of cars to us.
5. Strengthen the small boats legislation by adding a notwithstanding clause to exclude further legal challenges
6 Intensify actions to arrest and prosecute people smugglers.
7 Return more foreign prisoners to their own countries.
8. Decriminalise non payment of tv licence fee
9. Raise income thresholds for economic migrants
Part 2 - Boost economical growth
1. Postpone ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2040 from 2030 to allow investment and continued use of existing factories.
2. Postpone the ban on new gas boilers for home heating
3. Cut Corporation tax to 12.5%
4. Switch wilding and sustainable farming grants to grants and loans to grow more food with more labour saving machinery
5. Issue licences to produce more oil and gas from known North Sea fields and reserves
6. Keep all existing fossil fuel power stations to help meet demand in periods of low wind and sun
7. End grants for anti motorist schemes that cause more delay and congestion on main roads
8. Put in more bypasses and roundabouts in place of more traffic lights and road restrictions
9. Amend Housing Bill to avoid losing more landlords
10. Remove 2017 and 2021 changes to IR 35 to foster more self employment
11. Raise VAT threshold for small business to £ 250,000
12. Get regulator to allow more reservoir capacity by water companies
13. Suspend carbon tax and emissions trading to cut energy costs for high energy using industries like steel
14. Auction government run rail franchises to get better service for lower subsidy
15. Sell Channel 4
16. Work with private sector to complete roll out of fast broadband
Part 3 - Productivity in public services
1. Repeal the independent management of NHS England, as everyone still blames Ministers for management failings.
2. Reduce layers of management in NHS and strengthen powers of Trust CEOs and Boards
3. Strengthen rights to free speech in universities and Colleges
4. Amend public procurement rules to give proper recognition to the tax and job contributions to UK made by UK based suppliers
5. Require Ministers to hold annual meetings with quangos to 1. Set objectives for the year ahead and agree budgets; 2 to review annual report and accounts; 3 to review performance.
6. Grant NHS patients the right to free treatment in the private sector if the NHS fails to deliver in a stated time
7. Block loans to Councils wanting to make commercial investments given the big losses some of them are recording on past attempts at property and green ventures
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
9. Cut energy use in public sector
10. Charge foreign visitors for using public services
TV license fee is not foreign policy. Tax rates are for a budget, not a King's Speech. The only way NHS patients could get free treatment in the private sector is if we imported an extra half a million health care workers and raised taxes to pay the costs, which seems to be the exact opposite of his other putrid points.......
I'd like to say otherwise all good, but that is a step too far. All for cutting energy use in the public sector though, so well done John, better luck next year, eh?
I summarised it poorly. I am glad that you engaged with it enough to read it.
18% swing Conservative to Labour with Deltapoll which would be enough for Selby & Ainsty to be a Labour win.
As usual, John Redwood has no clue - this "idea":
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
It's been policy since 2010 and has achieved millions of pounds of savings from property disposals. The buildings have been re-purposed as hotels but as long as we have Westminster and Downing Street we'll need a Whitehall of some sort.
As for:
9. Cut energy use in public sector
That also has been going on for years via energy efficiency but there's a limit. Should we turn off all street lights at night? Clearly not - should we end adult education and reduce library opening hours? What about the NHS?
As usual, he peddles simplistic solutions to complex problems - it's no surprise he's never been seriously considered as a Prime Minister let alone senior member of the Government.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
As everyone on PB will be slightly bored by, I usually share John Redwood's stuff here - I find his solutions populist and sensible. He's done a series of posts on what he wants in the King's Speech - I don't agree with them all (eg I don't see the point of selling off Channel 4) but in totality I would be extremely impressed if the Government launched a programme like this, and all of it is possible if not downright reasonable. If this were the programme, the next election might be in contention again.
Yet once again we're likely get a total pile of toss from the SKS seat warmers.
1. Stop all overseas aid to any country with a nuclear weapons programme or with a defence budget greater than 2.5% of GDP. We should not be grant aiding rearmament by the back door.
2. Allocate more of the Overseas Aid budget to meet first year set up costs of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
3. Renegotiate the Windsor Agreement so that the more important Good Friday Agreement can be restored, with Unionists returning to Stormont.
4. Tell the EU that if they put a tariff on our cars exported to the EU for insufficient local content we will place one on their exports of cars to us.
5. Strengthen the small boats legislation by adding a notwithstanding clause to exclude further legal challenges
6 Intensify actions to arrest and prosecute people smugglers.
7 Return more foreign prisoners to their own countries.
8. Decriminalise non payment of tv licence fee
9. Raise income thresholds for economic migrants
Part 2 - Boost economical growth
1. Postpone ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2040 from 2030 to allow investment and continued use of existing factories.
2. Postpone the ban on new gas boilers for home heating
3. Cut Corporation tax to 12.5%
4. Switch wilding and sustainable farming grants to grants and loans to grow more food with more labour saving machinery
5. Issue licences to produce more oil and gas from known North Sea fields and reserves
6. Keep all existing fossil fuel power stations to help meet demand in periods of low wind and sun
7. End grants for anti motorist schemes that cause more delay and congestion on main roads
8. Put in more bypasses and roundabouts in place of more traffic lights and road restrictions
9. Amend Housing Bill to avoid losing more landlords
10. Remove 2017 and 2021 changes to IR 35 to foster more self employment
11. Raise VAT threshold for small business to £ 250,000
12. Get regulator to allow more reservoir capacity by water companies
13. Suspend carbon tax and emissions trading to cut energy costs for high energy using industries like steel
14. Auction government run rail franchises to get better service for lower subsidy
15. Sell Channel 4
16. Work with private sector to complete roll out of fast broadband
Part 3 - Productivity in public services
1. Repeal the independent management of NHS England, as everyone still blames Ministers for management failings.
2. Reduce layers of management in NHS and strengthen powers of Trust CEOs and Boards
3. Strengthen rights to free speech in universities and Colleges
4. Amend public procurement rules to give proper recognition to the tax and job contributions to UK made by UK based suppliers
5. Require Ministers to hold annual meetings with quangos to 1. Set objectives for the year ahead and agree budgets; 2 to review annual report and accounts; 3 to review performance.
6. Grant NHS patients the right to free treatment in the private sector if the NHS fails to deliver in a stated time
7. Block loans to Councils wanting to make commercial investments given the big losses some of them are recording on past attempts at property and green ventures
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
9. Cut energy use in public sector
10. Charge foreign visitors for using public services
This all looks like a very expensive pipe dream project from one of the cheerleaders of an earlier very expensive and now discredited pipe dream project (Brexit).
I will be fascinated to check once off the mobile app who gave O Lucky Man his likes. I am already formulating my guesses.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
From the genius who spammed PB about What.Three.Words
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
18% swing Conservative to Labour with Deltapoll which would be enough for Selby & Ainsty to be a Labour win.
As usual, John Redwood has no clue - this "idea":
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
It's been policy since 2010 and has achieved millions of pounds of savings from property disposals. The buildings have been re-purposed as hotels but as long as we have Westminster and Downing Street we'll need a Whitehall of some sort.
As for:
9. Cut energy use in public sector
That also has been going on for years via energy efficiency but there's a limit. Should we turn off all street lights at night? Clearly not - should we end adult education and reduce library opening hours? What about the NHS?
As usual, he peddles simplistic solutions to complex problems - it's no surprise he's never been seriously considered as a Prime Minister let alone senior member of the Government.
Redwood was talking s**te thirty years ago. Thirty years of consistency can I suppose be placed in the credit column.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
The problem with this is that every time I've seen an article in the press - any press - about a subject or incident of which I had personal knowledge it has been wrong in some respect. I have little doubt that this is universal.
Whilst you could argue that they are less wrong than the average bloke on Twitter, someone somewhere will have a better explanation of what happened.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
Just a relatively banal observation from me, but the official news sites are so full of reference to "experts" saying this or that that most of them are unreadable nowadays and might as well carry a stamp at the top saying "Wanna continue to be stupid and get even stupider? Read on!"
I gave up listening to the radio in early 2020 (pandemic) and although I've never had a TV set I wouldn't touch the BBC with a 10 foot toilet brush after I watched a BBC TV play on somebody else's set which depicted middle class characters whose son aged about 11 had announced that he wanted to become a girl reacting by practically punching the air and saying "Hey wow, that's brilliant, Mikey!" F*cking sick sh*t. Count me out of it, and out of any reform debate that shows respect for it too.
Needed: not just intuition but being in touch with it, and imagination. I suspect scientist types have no idea what we are talking about...
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
From the genius who spammed PB about What.Three.Words
Is there a setting on Twitter allowing me automatically to block anyone using the phrase "just let that sink in"? That's a feature I'd be willing to pay Musk to roll out.
I’d be curious if there is any evidence to back up this apparently outlandish claim. Covid sparing East Asians and Jews?!
Seems unlikely. But is there a kernel of truth from which they’ve confected the walnut whip of nonsense?
If there is, that's a dramatic break from their usual modus operandi.
I disagree. Most conspiracy theories have a tiny seed of truth at the heart - from which vast orchards of bollocks are grown
And of course some conspiracy theories turn out to be true
I hasten to add that I exceedingly doubt that this one is true. The Covid death rate of East Asians in Hong Kong was horrific
The conspiracy theories I came across are Holocaust Denial, the Eleanor Butler pre-contract, the Christ Myth theory and Shakespeare authorship.
None of them have a 'tiny seed of truth' in them.
But those are exceptionally silly conspiracy theories
How about
JFK Royal pedo island UFO Lab Leak
In order:
1. Probably true. There was likely some conspiracy beyond Lee Oswald
2. Sounds mad but - Prince andrew and Epstein??
3. The senate Democrat majority leader is demanding the pentagon release all its data on UFOS - or else
4. Probably true, and certainly not the “baseless conspiracy” alleged by the Lancet Letter
I'm going to make your day. Of those 4 there is just the one that has a decent chance of being true. Lab Leak!
Stephen Hunter - who does the bob Lee Swagger series and also a number of other excellent sniper-themed novels - wrote a novel cum investigation about the JFK shooting, His main points against the Warren Commission report, which he explains very well, is that (1) the damage claimed to have been caused by the bullet (passing through JFK, hitting Connolly) was almost impossible given the weak velocity of the 6,5mm round and (2) the ballistic testers could not repeat Oswald's aims without using a sight adjustment (or shiv) that has never been found.
It may not be a conspiracy theory but the ballistics evidence presented by Hunter - and he is not a crank - suggests that the official version re JFK is almost certainly untrue.
I read Case Closed years ago and found it compelling and definitive. Oswald acted alone. You'll never get 100% certainty on it but it's close enough for me.
You read one book. This guy read 200 and is “considerably smarter than you”
Lol. So insecure. Try the book when you have the time. Case Closed. It's best of breed.
I’m not claiming I’m smarter than you. We know this. I’m claiming I have a hunch that HE is smarter than you. Which he is
Without giving his identity away the fact he he a multi multi millionaire from an ongoing career in TV and movies and you are a retired accountant with a golf handicap gives me the sense my hunch might just be right
Are you also smarter than him and if so are you a multi, multi, multi millionaire?
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
18% swing Conservative to Labour with Deltapoll which would be enough for Selby & Ainsty to be a Labour win.
As usual, John Redwood has no clue - this "idea":
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
It's been policy since 2010 and has achieved millions of pounds of savings from property disposals. The buildings have been re-purposed as hotels but as long as we have Westminster and Downing Street we'll need a Whitehall of some sort.
As for:
9. Cut energy use in public sector
That also has been going on for years via energy efficiency but there's a limit. Should we turn off all street lights at night? Clearly not - should we end adult education and reduce library opening hours? What about the NHS?
As usual, he peddles simplistic solutions to complex problems - it's no surprise he's never been seriously considered as a Prime Minister let alone senior member of the Government.
Turn off the machines in the ICU at night. (or just for @Selebian the ICU unit)
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
I'm not 'emotionally invested'. Or financially invested.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
Just a relatively banal observation from me, but the official news sites are so full of reference to "experts" saying this or that that most of them are unreadable nowadays and might as well carry a stamp at the top saying "Wanna continue to be stupid and get even stupider? Read on!"
I gave up listening to the radio in early 2020 (pandemic) and although I've never had a TV set I wouldn't touch the BBC with a 10 foot toilet brush after I watched a BBC TV play on somebody else's set which depicted middle class characters whose son aged about 11 had announced that he wanted to become a girl reacting by practically punching the air and saying "Hey wow, that's brilliant, Mikey!" F*cking sick sh*t. Count me out of it, and out of any reform debate that shows respect for it too.
Needed: not just intuition but being in touch with it, and imagination. I suspect scientist types have no idea what we are talking about...
The idea that you are going to get a good wide balanced and informative view of the world, in the future, by relying on the “gatekeepers” of the “BBC, FT and Guardian” is charmingly quaint. Also infantile
I've followed today's education debate with interest, and can't help but observe that the amount of actual evidence used to point to the superiority of a private education has been absolutely minimal. The data is actually quite complex, but there's a strong argument to suggest that for most kids, especially the middle classes, the advantages of a private education are, by the age of 18, either minimal or non-existent. The snobbery on here is manifest, though - particularly the not infrequent, and manifestly absurd, references to 'stabbings' in comprehensives - an extremely rare event in any schools. Indeed, criminal activity, whether it be drug use or sexual abuse, is probably more widespread in the private school sector.
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
Is there a setting on Twitter allowing me automatically to block anyone using the phrase "just let that sink in"? That's a feature I'd be willing to pay Musk to roll out.
I’d be curious if there is any evidence to back up this apparently outlandish claim. Covid sparing East Asians and Jews?!
Seems unlikely. But is there a kernel of truth from which they’ve confected the walnut whip of nonsense?
If there is, that's a dramatic break from their usual modus operandi.
I disagree. Most conspiracy theories have a tiny seed of truth at the heart - from which vast orchards of bollocks are grown
And of course some conspiracy theories turn out to be true
I hasten to add that I exceedingly doubt that this one is true. The Covid death rate of East Asians in Hong Kong was horrific
The conspiracy theories I came across are Holocaust Denial, the Eleanor Butler pre-contract, the Christ Myth theory and Shakespeare authorship.
None of them have a 'tiny seed of truth' in them.
Or "Jews knew about 9/11 before it happened and didn't go to work that day."
Father of a friend of mine got into conspiracy theories via 9/11. It was his gateway drug
Was perfectly sane before that. No interest in crackpot theories. Then he started to read around 9/11, became convinced it was hoaxed, and is now so far down Lunatic Boulevard he’s beyond Flat Earth and he believes the entire universe is a Hoax and nothing existed before 1920
He laughs at QAnon-ers as “gullible dupes swallowing establishment lies”
All this is only going to get worse as AI makes objective truth redundant. It’s a serious problem (on top of deepfakes etc)
Does it not concern you that you are on a similar slippery slope? I would say you are quite vulnerable to such journey. You are not a scientist (clearly) so do not follow Scientific Method and generally stop at the hypothesis stage because the scrutiny and objective data analysis is too unexciting for your journalistic mind. You also spend a lot of time alone. This enables your creative mind to look at anything fanciful and hope that it might be true so much that eventually you convince yourself.
@kinabalu may well be an accountant (for which I have cruelly teased him - it s a professional peril that he must endure), but I suspect that while you might consider him boring and unimaginative, his analysis is more reliable, probably by a factor of several thousand.
The several thousand thing is a pisstake against yourself for being a "scientist", right?
Out of interest, do you know what century the term "scientist" was coined in? (Hint: the answer is not the 16th or 17th.)
You sound like a spoilt teenaged Star Wars fan. You certainly don't show a desire in this post to put the Science religion and attitude in any kind of context, to get any kind of distance from them. You might as well replace "scientist" with "truther" and "Scientific" with "True". And you can't see that.
At least you don't use the phrase "scientific evidence", which I've long taken as a marker for idiocy. Science is a research method. It has a fair amount of applicability when asking certain limited kinds of questions. There can't be evidence that has the quality of "research method". There can be evidence that has or hasn't been officially stamped as truly found, though.
Lol. Keep taking the tablets mate. Or perhaps not because they will have been designed and manufactured by adherents and followers of the the "science religion" 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Well done though, you have managed to make @Leon seem sane and rational.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
When you say new truths you mean truths not stamped by the holy objectivist dalek system.
There are many "old" truths that don't bear such a stamp, couldn't possibly bear one, and are of a kind that the holy science system arose to try to extinguish.
Your concept of "new truth" suggests confusion over what's there and whether it's recognised. For example the existence of quanta of energy was "true" even in ancient Rome, time of the gladiators.
A future society in which there is a much better understanding of shit than there is now is achievable - admittedly probably after a cataclysm. But the belief that no such better understanding is possible is deranged.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
Just a relatively banal observation from me, but the official news sites are so full of reference to "experts" saying this or that that most of them are unreadable nowadays and might as well carry a stamp at the top saying "Wanna continue to be stupid and get even stupider? Read on!"
I gave up listening to the radio in early 2020 (pandemic) and although I've never had a TV set I wouldn't touch the BBC with a 10 foot toilet brush after I watched a BBC TV play on somebody else's set which depicted middle class characters whose son aged about 11 had announced that he wanted to become a girl reacting by practically punching the air and saying "Hey wow, that's brilliant, Mikey!" F*cking sick sh*t. Count me out of it, and out of any reform debate that shows respect for it too.
Needed: not just intuition but being in touch with it, and imagination. I suspect scientist types have no idea what we are talking about...
The idea that you are going to get a good wide balanced and informative view of the world, in the future, by relying on the “gatekeepers” of the “BBC, FT and Guardian” is charmingly quaint. Also infantile
“Gatekeepers”. Lol
He sees you as a kindred spirit @Leon . Be very afraid 😂😂
I've followed today's education debate with interest, and can't help but observe that the amount of actual evidence used to point to the superiority of a private education has been absolutely minimal. The data is actually quite complex, but there's a strong argument to suggest that for most kids, especially the middle classes, the advantages of a private education are, by the age of 18, either minimal or non-existent. The snobbery on here is manifest, though - particularly the not infrequent, and manifestly absurd, references to 'stabbings' in comprehensives - an extremely rare event in any schools. Indeed, criminal activity, whether it be drug use or sexual abuse, is probably more widespread in the private school sector.
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
On the whole they are better, which is why people like you get yourself in such a lather about them. If they were not it wouldn't worry your chippy shoulders one iota. And no, I didn't waste my money. But you keep trying to kid yourself.
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Throughout my long teaching career all of those things were true for much of the time. Throughout what stood out for me is that good leadership and good teaching were way more important than money. No need for the abuse btw. We view the world differently, that's all.
I'm sorry to have been rude, but saying that anyone calling for more school funding is simply a socialist - as though that is some kind of slam-dunk argument - is absurd. If money isn't important, why do private school kids have twice as much spent on them? If schools are in danger of falling down, do you think they can be repaired without spending money? If schools can't retain teachers don't you imagine that low salaries might be a factor? It's insulting to make out that funding isn't an issue here. If wanting well funded schools makes me a socialist then fuck it, I'm a socialist.
And school funding has grown throughout the decades so often with zero or worse pact on performance. You're heading for so much disappointment when that truth finally sinks in. Such is life.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
I'm not 'emotionally invested'. Or financially invested.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
I confess I do want to see Zuck fail. Badly. Who doesn’t? He’s a global control freak
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
I think my problem with this stance is twofold.
Firstly on almost every single thing I have personal knowledge and experience of the media coverage has, at best, been riddled with inconsistencies, false claims and simple lack of understanding. I am not talking about anything contentious or divisive. Just the most basic everyday news items and events. The media - both broadcast and print - are abslutely terrible at getting anything reported accurately. This is not in any way to do with any conspiracy. They are just shite at what they do. Always have been and always will be.
Secondly, there have been far too many examples in the past of the gatekeepers being misled, either purposefully by the vested interest or through what might be termed willful ignorance because they want something to be true - or false. Recent history is littered with examples of the media getting stuff wrong or being misleading in their reporting. Trusting the professionals and the gatekeepers at a superficial level is probably, on balance a non stupid way to proceed. A lot of the time they will be doing their best even if it is pretty rubbish. But history is littered with examples of people ending up being seriously damaged because they unquestioningly believed the professionals.
I am always in favour of cockup rather than conspiracy as an explanation but I trust no one as far as 'the truth' is concerned. I extend your 100% scepticism of randoms on the Internet to everyone else as well no matter where they are heard.
I will also add that I try to practice what I preach. The main reason I post under my own name is it keeps me absolutely on the straight and narrow. You may think my views are wrong or deluded or misinformed but what you can be sure of is that I never lie about anything - experiences, jobs, associations etc. Because it is easy for anyone to find me on the internet and see if I am lying. I actually like that. It is one of the reasons I trust Leon more than many others on here. I know him in the real world and whilst I may not agree with a lot of what he says and love taking the mickey out of him when he goes into shrapnel mode, I do know that he is honest in his opinions and claims.
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
There are 10mn state school pupils in the UK not 12mn. I don't want to double school funding - I was simply pointing out that if funding didn't matter it was odd that private schools spend twice as much as state schools. But I'd like to see it increase in real terms over time - not all at once because that would likely be wasteful. Let's say an extra £3k per pupil, achieved after 10 years. £30bn at today's prices. I think that would pay for itself over time because we'd have a more productive workforce. In the meantime pay for it by higher taxes on the better off - income tax and wealth taxes - and by rejoining the EU single market to boost the economy and tax revenue.
I've followed today's education debate with interest, and can't help but observe that the amount of actual evidence used to point to the superiority of a private education has been absolutely minimal. The data is actually quite complex, but there's a strong argument to suggest that for most kids, especially the middle classes, the advantages of a private education are, by the age of 18, either minimal or non-existent. The snobbery on here is manifest, though - particularly the not infrequent, and manifestly absurd, references to 'stabbings' in comprehensives - an extremely rare event in any schools. Indeed, criminal activity, whether it be drug use or sexual abuse, is probably more widespread in the private school sector.
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
On the whole they are better, which is why people like you get yourself in such a lather about them. If they were not it wouldn't worry your chippy shoulders one iota. And no, I didn't waste my money. But you keep trying to kid yourself.
Another assertion without evidence. Proving my point.
I've followed today's education debate with interest, and can't help but observe that the amount of actual evidence used to point to the superiority of a private education has been absolutely minimal. The data is actually quite complex, but there's a strong argument to suggest that for most kids, especially the middle classes, the advantages of a private education are, by the age of 18, either minimal or non-existent. The snobbery on here is manifest, though - particularly the not infrequent, and manifestly absurd, references to 'stabbings' in comprehensives - an extremely rare event in any schools. Indeed, criminal activity, whether it be drug use or sexual abuse, is probably more widespread in the private school sector.
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
Defunding the state sector does of course make the idea of investing in private education more credible
Sixty years ago we had selection on ability at aged 11 and the rest went to sink secondary moderns. Now we have selection at 11 based on parental wealth/ ambition and the rest go to sink secondary moderns.
Now I detest the notion of selection at 11, although perhaps the earlier method was more meritocratic than the current scheme.
Interesting timing with the Jaguar Land Rover announcement .
Is there a by election in Somerset !
Does that imply that you think international businesses would conspire to help the Tories?
The Tories are giving them huge sweeteners to build the plant . Do you really believe this is a coincidence that the announcement is one day before the by-election in the same county ?
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
I'm not 'emotionally invested'. Or financially invested.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
I confess I do want to see Zuck fail. Badly. Who doesn’t? He’s a global control freak
So is Musk. And he controls Twitter. It's just that you agree with the route he's - currently - taking Twitter. That may change.
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
I think my problem with this stance is twofold.
Firstly on almost every single thing I have personal knowledge and experience of the media coverage has, at best, been riddled with inconsistencies, false claims and simple lack of understanding. I am not talking about anything contentious or divisive. Just the most basic everyday news items and events. The media - both broadcast and print - are abslutely terrible at getting anything reported accurately. This is not in any way to do with any conspiracy. They are just shite at what they do. Always have been and always will be.
Secondly, there have been far too many examples in the past of the gatekeepers being misled, either purposefully by the vested interest or through what might be termed willful ignorance because they want something to be true - or false. Recent history is littered with examples of the media getting stuff wrong or being misleading in their reporting. Trusting the professionals and the gatekeepers at a superficial level is probably, on balance a non stupid way to proceed. A lot of the time they will be doing their best even if it is pretty rubbish. But history is littered with examples of people ending up being seriously damaged because they unquestioningly believed the professionals.
I am always in favour of cockup rather than conspiracy as an explanation but I trust no one as far as 'the truth' is concerned. I extend your 100% scepticism of randoms on the Internet to everyone else as well no matter where they are heard.
I will also add that I try to practice what I preach. The main reason I post under my own name is it keeps me absolutely on the straight and narrow. You may think my views are wrong or deluded or misinformed but what you can be sure of is that I never lie about anything - experiences, jobs, associations etc. Because it is easy for anyone to find me on the internet and see if I am lying. I actually like that. It is one of the reasons I trust Leon more than many others on here. I know him in the real world and whilst I may not agree with a lot of what he says and love taking the mickey out of him when he goes into shrapnel mode, I do know that he is honest in his opinions and claims.
Without getting into an embarrassing PB smoochathon, you are indeed admirably forthright and candid. You say what you believe, and it is generally after some serious and intelligent thought
Also you make an interesting point on internet anonymity and the discipline of identifying yourself. I note that the Times comment editors are now demanding that people correctly identify themselves Below The Line. They obviously think it will improve commentary and reduce random abuse, even if it drives some away
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
I'm not 'emotionally invested'. Or financially invested.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
I confess I do want to see Zuck fail. Badly. Who doesn’t? He’s a global control freak
So is Musk. And he controls Twitter. It's just that you agree with the route he's - currently - taking Twitter. That may change.
I agree with the route he's taking Twitter.
If he rows back on his plan to destroy it, I'll change my views.
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
There are 10mn state school pupils in the UK not 12mn. I don't want to double school funding - I was simply pointing out that if funding didn't matter it was odd that private schools spend twice as much as state schools. But I'd like to see it increase in real terms over time - not all at once because that would likely be wasteful. Let's say an extra £3k per pupil, achieved after 10 years. £30bn at today's prices. I think that would pay for itself over time because we'd have a more productive workforce. In the meantime pay for it by higher taxes on the better off - income tax and wealth taxes - and by rejoining the EU single market to boost the economy and tax revenue.
Still 30 billion extra when we are already borrowing 130 billlion I repeat the question what are you going to cut doing because really don't say more borrowing because that is just robbing our children and grandchildren to pay for what you want.
Frankly I think you are having pipe dreams if you think it would pay for itself in 10 years. Unless you can point to some evidence to support that. Mostly past history has shown us you increase the public sector budget for anything by a pound if you are lucky if you get 50p of value out
The ability to discern interesting if surprising/challenging new truths, as against conspiratorial nonsense, is going to be a prized skill in the future
Because obvious objective truth is coming to an end. You won’t be able to rely on photographs, videos, “your own eyes”; the voices of your own children will be faked, supposed experts will turn out to be deepfakes, and besides we now know experts lie, when it suits - lab leak
So where you will get the actual truth? It’s going to be incredibly hard. You will need intuition. It may even then be impossible
The reality is there are very few surprising new truths. 99.99% of the time it will be unadulterated nonsense. If you continue to get your news mostly from trusted sources staffed by experienced people with integrity and expertise (ie the BBC and the FT, and to a lesser extent the Guardian) and as long as these gatekeepers still exist then you won't go too far wrong. Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know. I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
I think my problem with this stance is twofold.
Firstly on almost every single thing I have personal knowledge and experience of the media coverage has, at best, been riddled with inconsistencies, false claims and simple lack of understanding. I am not talking about anything contentious or divisive. Just the most basic everyday news items and events. The media - both broadcast and print - are abslutely terrible at getting anything reported accurately. This is not in any way to do with any conspiracy. They are just shite at what they do. Always have been and always will be.
Secondly, there have been far too many examples in the past of the gatekeepers being misled, either purposefully by the vested interest or through what might be termed willful ignorance because they want something to be true - or false. Recent history is littered with examples of the media getting stuff wrong or being misleading in their reporting. Trusting the professionals and the gatekeepers at a superficial level is probably, on balance a non stupid way to proceed. A lot of the time they will be doing their best even if it is pretty rubbish. But history is littered with examples of people ending up being seriously damaged because they unquestioningly believed the professionals.
I am always in favour of cockup rather than conspiracy as an explanation but I trust no one as far as 'the truth' is concerned. I extend your 100% scepticism of randoms on the Internet to everyone else as well no matter where they are heard.
I will also add that I try to practice what I preach. The main reason I post under my own name is it keeps me absolutely on the straight and narrow. You may think my views are wrong or deluded or misinformed but what you can be sure of is that I never lie about anything - experiences, jobs, associations etc. Because it is easy for anyone to find me on the internet and see if I am lying. I actually like that. It is one of the reasons I trust Leon more than many others on here. I know him in the real world and whilst I may not agree with a lot of what he says and love taking the mickey out of him when he goes into shrapnel mode, I do know that he is honest in his opinions and claims.
But, and no disrespect intended to Leon here, he is the poster child for believing any old crap he picks up on the Internet. And while you might view his opinions as "honest" they are hardly unbiased. It's quite remarkable how many of them seem to relate to various conspiracies about Muslims and other immigrants, for instance. I don't think I have ever lied about anything on here either - what would be the point - but of course you have no way of knowing if that is true. I remain anonymous because it is possible that at some point I might have a more public-facing job. Once that possibility recedes I will happily adopt my actual name. Incidentally while I disagree with you on many things I think you are by far my favourite right of centre person on here, you always express your views clearly and succinctly and they are obviously deeply held and the product of much serious thought.
I've followed today's education debate with interest, and can't help but observe that the amount of actual evidence used to point to the superiority of a private education has been absolutely minimal. The data is actually quite complex, but there's a strong argument to suggest that for most kids, especially the middle classes, the advantages of a private education are, by the age of 18, either minimal or non-existent. The snobbery on here is manifest, though - particularly the not infrequent, and manifestly absurd, references to 'stabbings' in comprehensives - an extremely rare event in any schools. Indeed, criminal activity, whether it be drug use or sexual abuse, is probably more widespread in the private school sector.
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
On the whole they are better, which is why people like you get yourself in such a lather about them. If they were not it wouldn't worry your chippy shoulders one iota. And no, I didn't waste my money. But you keep trying to kid yourself.
But they didn't used to be.
In the early days of the comprehensive experiment money was thrown at secondary education by both Wilson and Heath Governments.
I went to an excellent comprehensive which had previously been a secondary modern school, it had fantastic results in the 70s and 80s. It is now a moderate to low achieving academy school which was in special measures a few years ago. The ambitious parents send their offspring to Alcester Grammar School in the next county now.
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
There are 10mn state school pupils in the UK not 12mn. I don't want to double school funding - I was simply pointing out that if funding didn't matter it was odd that private schools spend twice as much as state schools. But I'd like to see it increase in real terms over time - not all at once because that would likely be wasteful. Let's say an extra £3k per pupil, achieved after 10 years. £30bn at today's prices. I think that would pay for itself over time because we'd have a more productive workforce. In the meantime pay for it by higher taxes on the better off - income tax and wealth taxes - and by rejoining the EU single market to boost the economy and tax revenue.
Still 30 billion extra when we are already borrowing 130 billlion I repeat the question what are you going to cut doing because really don't say more borrowing because that is just robbing our children and grandchildren to pay for what you want.
Frankly I think you are having pipe dreams if you think it would pay for itself in 10 years. Unless you can point to some evidence to support that. Mostly past history has shown us you increase the public sector budget for anything by a pound if you are lucky if you get 50p of value out
I just said I would raise taxation and rejoin the EU SM to boost the economy and tax revenue, go back and read what I wrote please. I didn't say anything about borrowing.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
What Musk derangement Syndrome?
Lol
Are you're defending the board - controlled my Musk - overpaying themselves by $735 million?
I really couldn’t give an iota of a soupçon of a microfuck how they pay themselves. He’s a trillionaire. Who cares
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Ah, so that's it. Musk is turning Twitter into a right-wing cesspit, and you quite like right-wing cesspits.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
They’ve explicitly now said it’s not a place for news or politics. That’s a policy not a holding position
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
I'm not 'emotionally invested'. Or financially invested.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
I confess I do want to see Zuck fail. Badly. Who doesn’t? He’s a global control freak
So is Musk. And he controls Twitter. It's just that you agree with the route he's - currently - taking Twitter. That may change.
I prefer Musk because I think he’s a proper genius who has made incredible engineering advances that have made the world better. He’s weird. And very flawed. But he’s a force for good on the whole
Zuck, I sense, is a very bright guy who got lucky with that one idea at Harvard. I see no evidence that he’s done anything else or is likely to. He steals and buys - and controls
We probably all have our favourite villains in the tech Debrett’s
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
There are 10mn state school pupils in the UK not 12mn. I don't want to double school funding - I was simply pointing out that if funding didn't matter it was odd that private schools spend twice as much as state schools. But I'd like to see it increase in real terms over time - not all at once because that would likely be wasteful. Let's say an extra £3k per pupil, achieved after 10 years. £30bn at today's prices. I think that would pay for itself over time because we'd have a more productive workforce. In the meantime pay for it by higher taxes on the better off - income tax and wealth taxes - and by rejoining the EU single market to boost the economy and tax revenue.
Still 30 billion extra when we are already borrowing 130 billlion I repeat the question what are you going to cut doing because really don't say more borrowing because that is just robbing our children and grandchildren to pay for what you want.
Frankly I think you are having pipe dreams if you think it would pay for itself in 10 years. Unless you can point to some evidence to support that. Mostly past history has shown us you increase the public sector budget for anything by a pound if you are lucky if you get 50p of value out
I just said I would raise taxation and rejoin the EU SM to boost the economy and tax revenue, go back and read what I wrote please. I didn't say anything about borrowing.
Well no evidence the EU sm would improve the economy as we have grown faster than the eu since 2019. You can't raise taxation because there arent enough rich people to squeeze for another 30 billion so you would end up taxing basic rate tax payers most of whom are struggling to make ends meet....of course if you want them to go without food a couple of days a month to pay for it.....
I know averages can be deceptive but how many families who use private schools *don't* have a hol abroad?
In answer to the second question, a very large number. It was one of the things you noticed in the mid-level private schools I worked in and with, that many of the children talked about their camping holidays in Devon.
I don't take foreign holidays myself very often (I haven't left the country since Covid hit) so I don't know how much they cost these days. However, prep school fees often hover around the £5-6,000 mark which doesn't sound ridiculously out of line for a family holiday in a tourist hotspot in say Spain.
Keegan is an idiot but she isn't making a stupid point here. Far too much discourse about private schools is skewed towards the top end, not considering the cheaper end.
That has rather different problems of its own that need addressing but they never get talked about.
Are you sure about your figure of £5k-£6k? From what I can see that is the typical average PER TERM. In which case £15k would get you a good holiday in Europe.
£15k is now about average day school fees. Inflation in school fees has been running a lot higher than inflation in holidays for quite some time. Back in my day(!) three decades ago, a week in Majorca for a family was about the same as the year’s school fees.
Add me to the list of PBers who had one foreign holiday in seven years while attending a private secondary school. It’s a decision made by many, many parents in that boat.
Is there a list of PBers who never set foot outside the UK until they turned 20 and whose parents would never even have considered sending them to private school? (State grammar and a week camping in Wales for me)
It's a bit four Yorkshiremen on here this morning.
My parents starved to death to send me to private school. But it was worth it.
My parents kept me in a comp. Didn't even try to send me to a grammar school.
And they never took me abroad until I was 19.
Did it bother me? Not much. Didn't particularly want to go abroad. I suffer from heat migraines very easily so the idea of hot summers was not appealing.
Would I have done better academically at a private school? Almost certainly. There was a significant problem with disruption in my local school that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. And you do see some quite stupid people who went to private schools getting on well in exams and careers.
But would have I enjoyed it? Probably not very much. I don't like commuting and my local comp was literally at the end of my road whereas the nearest private school was a ten mile bus ride.
I think this is probably my main personal issue with private schools - the advancement of the mediocre. We see it most obviously in our current government, half of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of tea.
That I would agree with.
Which is one reason why I've always been adamant the way to get rid of them is to cut class sizes in the state sector dramatically. That would first, eliminate the edge private schools have and second, really improve education outcomes (much though I hate that cliche) for everyone.
The strange element in the debate about private and state education is the lack of interest in the actual issue.
Which is the better educational outcomes achieved by private schools.
At this point the debate generally devolves to Olympic swimming pools, thick poshos and my favourite - “Over education”.
Has anyone actually done a study on the effect of reducing class size without changing anything else?
Edit : The reason for the avoidance of the issue is obvious, to me.
Not in this country.
That would require you to reduce class sizes...
Once worked at a comprehensive that bust an absolute gut to get down to 24 maximum. Basically all the discrecionary spend in the budget went on that. That was probably not enough to really make a difference (you don't really change much by going from 30 to 24 in a well run school... Suspect the threshold is when 24 becomes 18). It ended up as more a selling point than anything else, and some of the consequent austerities (nothing printed full size, ever) were maddening.
Can't find the source, but I've seen it said that the key problem isn't so much staff as buildings. Cut the default class size from 30 to 20 and you need 50% more classrooms for the same number of children. And nobody has any intention of paying for that, especially in one go. Hence the use of TAs in primaries, to improve the adult:child ratio without changing the size of classes.
What are the ranges of class size in private schools? 15 early on, with slack handfuls for some A level subjects?
My eldest has ended up in a class of 2 for A level Spanish…
In my experience, there comes a point where class sizes are too small - 2 for A-level Spanish, for example. That's because the benefits of being in a group large enough to engender healthy debate and discussion are lost. I reckon anything less than 6 is too small for the cut and thrust of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil interactions and the sharing of different ideas to benefit learning.
My education take that will make everyone hate me is that schools should just get out of the business of teaching A Levels, and do that in sixth form colleges instead. Lots of schools run A Level groups that are too small to be economic and probably aren't ideal from an educational point of view.
Trouble is that teachers like their tiny sixth form class (I know I did) and parents are often up in arms at the very idea.
Totally agree. State sixth-form colleges are the crème de la crème of our education system. Sadly, their numbers have reduced from just under 100 to around 50 as some have had to merge with FE colleges, and others have been academised into federations. Scandalous. Another example of clueless Tory education policies.
We have sixth form colleges in our area (Surrey) and, whilst I agree that they are very good, my secondary school was very poor at advising me on what A Levels to pick. I was basically left to figure it out for myself. Sadly, by the time I realised what I should have picked, it was too late.
That's a management problem, not a general institutional problem. A good sixth form college ought to sort that before it's too late, and facilitate a subject change.
In my first Biology VI class back in the ‘50’s, the Headmaster suddenly appeared, saying to one of us “You’re not doing this F****; you can get a State Scholarship if you do Maths”. And led the lad out without a word to the teacher, who was Head of Biology! Mind you, the Head and the Biology master were known to hate each other!
Gaming the system via subject choice is not unknown, for instance Dudley Moore's organ scholarship from working class Dagenham to Oxford, or Boris's sisters comments on the advantages of Latin and Greek for Oxford entry.
Did Dudley 'game it'? I'd have thought getting awarded an Oxford organ scholarship was pretty darn difficult, and the man was hardly a shit musician.
Nowadays the trick is supposed to be to switch from public school to local authority sixth form college to benefit from the potential for positive discrim
I don't really understand the logic of this. A levels are the bit of your schooling that really matters, surely - it's what gets you into a good Uni. If you're willing to entrust your child to the state system for that, then why not the whole lot, save yourself a load of money (and, for some, guilt) and give your childten the enormous benefit of learning among a diverse cross section of their fellow citizens?
As said above, you tutor on the side to deliver the grades, and rely on the Oxbridge college wanting to maintain its decent 'not from public school' percentage to deliver the offer
Why not just encourage your child to work hard, trust their teachers and let them find their own level? Kids who are hot-housed and spoon fed to get into top Unis will typically underperform there. I never got any tuition and we've not got any for our children.
Ah yes, the "hot-housed and spoon fed" argument.
Jessica Ennis-Hill shouldn't have bothered with all that ghastly over training. Once round the track on a weekend does just fine.
If you want state schools to catch up with private school results, effort and money will be required.
Take a look at the educational rankings internationally. Then look at the what the state schools manage.
Money is up to the government. If you think that teachers at state schools aren't putting in any effort then I'm afraid you are showing your ignorance. Their dedication in the face of terrible pay and conditions is incredible. Private schools aren't training their kids to become great athletes, they are more like a combination of performance enhancing drugs and letting some competitors start the race half way round the track. That's why state school kids tend to do better at uni. I saw it when I was at university, some private school kids were very bright, but a lot had obviously been coached over the line and really shouldn't have been there.
It's not about individual effort by teachers. it's about numbers and resources.
What private schools are doing is attempting to create as much educational attainment as possible, with more resources.
If the same methodology was applied to the state school sector, then you would get similar results.
With the caveat of streaming the angry ones who are determined to disrupt others educations out of the way of the bright.
Without the private sector, educational attainment in this country would be held up for stark international comparison.
The private sector creams off an advantaged intake and then spends far more per pupil. Of course this leads to better results. If you adjust for these factors to get a fair comparison their results are not better. They are, in fact, worse.
And if you think that schools should have more resources, vote for that to happen for every child, don't simply secure it for your own child and vote for a real terms per pupil spending cut for everyone else.
But who is offering it?
Last time Labour was in power real spending per pupil went up. Under the Tories it has gone down. Draw your own conclusions.
My point is that although Labour did some steps in that direction, ultimately they still failed to make spending per pupil rise to the levels where the state sector would seriously rival private schools.
And money is now much tighter.
It would take a very bold vision to make the reforms needed to our system. I do not believe Starmer has it. Certainly Phillipson does not.
Yes you are probably right. Education isn't a priority especially as many of those for whom it is a priority have opted out of the regular school system and vote for parties that cut schools spending. But equally I am sure that education is much more of a priority for Labour than for the Tories and that is a major motivation for me to vote Labour, as it is for many people. Which party do people with school age children vote for?
Plenty of Labour MPs educate their children privately. And who can forget Harriet Harman who sent her child from Dulwich to St Olaves Grammar a super selective grammar. She had the gall to say she wanted every state school to be like St Olaves!😂
This kind of shit pisses me off too, believe me.
I do. I'm more comfortable being a cynical Conservative than any of the alternatives I've encountered on the political field.
Anecdotal experience: I went to a bog standard comp which was shit. Good fortune in my business career meant I was able to privately educate my kids. My view based on that limited experience (but also through speaking with others) that the gulf of difference between the sectors has a lot less to do with funding (though this obviously has influence) but more to do with attitude. Bog standard comps are happy with mediocrity. The school I went to revelled in it! Independent schools have higher expectations and this (together with more pushy parents) results in a cumulative advantage. I suspect if you experimented by giving a crap comp the same funds per pupil it would still remain a crap comp.
In the end, whether businesses or state sector institutions, it is all about ethos. I am sure there are plenty of state schools (I can think of at least one in my area) that get equal results to some independents even though they have lower funding. It is achieved by good leadership and ethos and teachers with high expectations.
Correct. The idea that more money is always the answer means you're asking the wrong questions, or you're a socialist... and probably both.
Or you've noticed that funding per pupil at private schools is double that at state schools, or that many state schools are in danger of actually falling down, or that teacher retention is at record lows, or... Life must be so easy when you can just harrumph "socialist" and not engage your brain in the slightest.
Each 1000 extra funding per pupil costs 12 billion approximately, you want to increase state funding by about double. So 7000 to 14000. Ok that costs the country 84 billion. What do you want to cut to pay for it?
There are 10mn state school pupils in the UK not 12mn. I don't want to double school funding - I was simply pointing out that if funding didn't matter it was odd that private schools spend twice as much as state schools. But I'd like to see it increase in real terms over time - not all at once because that would likely be wasteful. Let's say an extra £3k per pupil, achieved after 10 years. £30bn at today's prices. I think that would pay for itself over time because we'd have a more productive workforce. In the meantime pay for it by higher taxes on the better off - income tax and wealth taxes - and by rejoining the EU single market to boost the economy and tax revenue.
Still 30 billion extra when we are already borrowing 130 billlion I repeat the question what are you going to cut doing because really don't say more borrowing because that is just robbing our children and grandchildren to pay for what you want.
Frankly I think you are having pipe dreams if you think it would pay for itself in 10 years. Unless you can point to some evidence to support that. Mostly past history has shown us you increase the public sector budget for anything by a pound if you are lucky if you get 50p of value out
I just said I would raise taxation and rejoin the EU SM to boost the economy and tax revenue, go back and read what I wrote please. I didn't say anything about borrowing.
Well no evidence the EU sm would improve the economy as we have grown faster than the eu since 2019. You can't raise taxation because there arent enough rich people to squeeze for another 30 billion so you would end up taxing basic rate tax payers most of whom are struggling to make ends meet....of course if you want them to go without food a couple of days a month to pay for it.....
Since Q4 2019 the EU economy has grown by 2.9% while the UK economy has shrunk by 0.5%, so you are wrong. If the UK economy had grown by an additional 3.4% it would be around £85bn larger and given that tax revenues are around 40% of GDP that implies more than £30bn in additional revenue.
As everyone on PB will be slightly bored by, I usually share John Redwood's stuff here - I find his solutions populist and sensible. He's done a series of posts on what he wants in the King's Speech - I don't agree with them all (eg I don't see the point of selling off Channel 4) but in totality I would be extremely impressed if the Government launched a programme like this, and all of it is possible if not downright reasonable. If this were the programme, the next election might be in contention again.
Yet once again we're likely get a total pile of toss from the SKS seat warmers.
1. Stop all overseas aid to any country with a nuclear weapons programme or with a defence budget greater than 2.5% of GDP. We should not be grant aiding rearmament by the back door.
2. Allocate more of the Overseas Aid budget to meet first year set up costs of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
3. Renegotiate the Windsor Agreement so that the more important Good Friday Agreement can be restored, with Unionists returning to Stormont.
4. Tell the EU that if they put a tariff on our cars exported to the EU for insufficient local content we will place one on their exports of cars to us.
5. Strengthen the small boats legislation by adding a notwithstanding clause to exclude further legal challenges
6 Intensify actions to arrest and prosecute people smugglers.
7 Return more foreign prisoners to their own countries.
8. Decriminalise non payment of tv licence fee
9. Raise income thresholds for economic migrants
Part 2 - Boost economical growth
1. Postpone ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2040 from 2030 to allow investment and continued use of existing factories.
2. Postpone the ban on new gas boilers for home heating
3. Cut Corporation tax to 12.5%
4. Switch wilding and sustainable farming grants to grants and loans to grow more food with more labour saving machinery
5. Issue licences to produce more oil and gas from known North Sea fields and reserves
6. Keep all existing fossil fuel power stations to help meet demand in periods of low wind and sun
7. End grants for anti motorist schemes that cause more delay and congestion on main roads
8. Put in more bypasses and roundabouts in place of more traffic lights and road restrictions
9. Amend Housing Bill to avoid losing more landlords
10. Remove 2017 and 2021 changes to IR 35 to foster more self employment
11. Raise VAT threshold for small business to £ 250,000
12. Get regulator to allow more reservoir capacity by water companies
13. Suspend carbon tax and emissions trading to cut energy costs for high energy using industries like steel
14. Auction government run rail franchises to get better service for lower subsidy
15. Sell Channel 4
16. Work with private sector to complete roll out of fast broadband
Part 3 - Productivity in public services
1. Repeal the independent management of NHS England, as everyone still blames Ministers for management failings.
2. Reduce layers of management in NHS and strengthen powers of Trust CEOs and Boards
3. Strengthen rights to free speech in universities and Colleges
4. Amend public procurement rules to give proper recognition to the tax and job contributions to UK made by UK based suppliers
5. Require Ministers to hold annual meetings with quangos to 1. Set objectives for the year ahead and agree budgets; 2 to review annual report and accounts; 3 to review performance.
6. Grant NHS patients the right to free treatment in the private sector if the NHS fails to deliver in a stated time
7. Block loans to Councils wanting to make commercial investments given the big losses some of them are recording on past attempts at property and green ventures
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
9. Cut energy use in public sector
10. Charge foreign visitors for using public services
He's even more rubbisher than I gave him credit for. LeonGPT could have come up with a similar list at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayer.
I've just spent the last few days at work being lent to another town's sorting office. I found out today that they're currently at the very bottom of the more than fourteen hundred sorting offices in the UK for delivering tracked mail on time
Tracked mail is their focus at the moment; that's what I've been doing over there. I've had four days at work as an Amazon driver (one of them working Sunday in Marlborough - a few of us go in on Sunday to get all the parcels that we can pick up delivered, earn a few extra quid and keep Monday lighter for everyone), just driving around delivering parcels. It's my legs' first holiday for nearly a year
So with their focus on tracked mail, at the very bottom of the pile for it, their untracked mail is faring even worse
Every single route in their quite large office (I think they have twice as many routes as where I work in Marlborough) is at least week behind with its mail, many of them are two weeks or more behind. There are piles of unsorted trays of mail at each route's section and, I was told, rooms full of unsorted "yorks", the trolleys we use in the sorting office
I met an old lady on Saturday who hadn't yet had a single birthday card in the post for her birthday ten days before, and a guy today who was waiting on medical test results for his son. I've met so many people in between complaining about how little mail they've had lately
Tomorrow I'm back in Marlborough. I'll have double mail because only the parcels were done today. Then the mail will be totally up to date, some of it having been one day late because I was elsewhere. I'll have a long day tomorrow, but I'll get everything delivered
The disparity in service levels between us and such a nearby town has really shocked me
Comments
Ms Hyde no more impressed than Ms Cyclefree. Or Mr Malmesbury.
"Whether it will lead to anything you’d call justice is another matter. A chap I corresponded with not long ago thought the entire over-remunerated executive class covering the period in question should be chucked straight into prison and have to argue their way out; which is, in a way, what happened to so many of the poor people who were the lifeblood of their business. But perhaps Post Office bosses past and present know that while such a nightmarish thing could happen to a subpostmaster – or on this evidence, perhaps even one day to you or me – it couldn’t really happen to them. Then again, the surest way to foster that kind of outcome is indifference – so let’s all resolve to stay very, very angry about this one."
Twitter Rival Threads Usage Halves In Second Week
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.“
https://www.channelnews.com.au/twitter-rival-threads-usage-halves-in-second-week/
Threads is ALREADY finished. Halved in a week. It’s over. For the good reason that Threads is shite. Twitter goes on
Twitter works because everyone is there and it’s newsy, nasty and political
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/16/instagram-threads-now-has-one-fifth-the-weekly-active-user-base-of-twitter/
Choose your source, choose your view.
I do care that Twitter remains as a vital forum for energetic and open debate - with all its flaws. And if it is to be replaced I want to be sure the replacement is certainly equal if not superior
Threads was obviously shite from the get go. Tying you into Zuck’s dreadful “Fediverse”. No nasty comments allowed. No politics. Especially no right wing politics. Fuck off
RIP Threads. Next
Murder is marginally more convincing than that scenario.
Out of interest, do you know what century the term "scientist" was coined in? (Hint: the answer is not the 16th or 17th.)
You sound like a spoilt teenaged Star Wars fan. You certainly don't show a desire in this post to put the Science religion and attitude in any kind of context, to get any kind of distance from them. You might as well replace "scientist" with "truther" and "Scientific" with "True". And you can't see that.
At least you don't use the phrase "scientific evidence", which I've long taken as a marker for idiocy. Science is a research method. It has a fair amount of applicability when asking certain limited kinds of questions. There can't be evidence that has the quality of "research method". There can be evidence that has or hasn't been officially stamped as truly found, though.
PS Water companies use dowsing.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-firms-admit-using-divining-rods-to-find-leaks-and-pipes
18% swing Conservative to Labour with Deltapoll which would be enough for Selby & Ainsty to be a Labour win.
As usual, John Redwood has no clue - this "idea":
8. Review and consolidate government property holdings to cut costs and reduce dominance of expensive London
It's been policy since 2010 and has achieved millions of pounds of savings from property disposals. The buildings have been re-purposed as hotels but as long as we have Westminster and Downing Street we'll need a Whitehall of some sort.
As for:
9. Cut energy use in public sector
That also has been going on for years via energy efficiency but there's a limit. Should we turn off all street lights at night? Clearly not - should we end adult education and reduce library opening hours? What about the NHS?
As usual, he peddles simplistic solutions to complex problems - it's no surprise he's never been seriously considered as a Prime Minister let alone senior member of the Government.
Trust the professionals except when they have a clear incentive to lie. Be almost 100% sceptical of randoms on the Internet. Apply common sense to any claims. Accept that there are some things you will never actually know.
I think I have reasonably good judgement about things. I didn't believe the WMD stuff at all - it was self evidently BS. I am 50/50 on the lab leak - I doubt we will ever know. Aliens? Probably not.
I will be fascinated to check once off the mobile app who gave O Lucky Man his likes. I am already formulating my guesses.
One day you may be right about something.
A question for you: when Zuck and the Meta board decided to start Threads, what metrics do you think they would have used to judge it a 'success' or 'failure' after just a couple of weeks? How many users? How much engagement time? How many news stories? What other metrics?
Because they would not have been expecting it to take over from Twitter in a couple of weeks - that would have been insane. Yet that appears to be the 'metric' that you're using.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jul/18/jewish-group-criticises-gb-news-host-beverley-turner-over-dangerous-conspiracy-theory
https://twitter.com/anon_opin/status/1681286455300161536
Ergo, it cannot replace Twitter as the Town Square of the World
I predict it will become a chatty version of insta and wither away
Why are YOU so emotionally invested in Musk failing?
Whilst you could argue that they are less wrong than the average bloke on Twitter, someone somewhere will have a better explanation of what happened.
The hard part is finding that person.
I gave up listening to the radio in early 2020 (pandemic) and although I've never had a TV set I wouldn't touch the BBC with a 10 foot toilet brush after I watched a BBC TV play on somebody else's set which depicted middle class characters whose son aged about 11 had announced that he wanted to become a girl reacting by practically punching the air and saying "Hey wow, that's brilliant, Mikey!" F*cking sick sh*t. Count me out of it, and out of any reform debate that shows respect for it too.
Needed: not just intuition but being in touch with it, and imagination. I suspect scientist types have no idea what we are talking about...
Because they didn’t want to agree to abide by EU regulations on data privacy.
I don't like - or agree- with the directions Musk is taking Twitter - it would have been much better off independent-ish. But I also don't have a Threads account, and won't for as long as they require an Instagram acc login.
I posted an article that Musk and his board are having to pay back hundreds of millions they should not have got. You then turned it into an obscure anti-Threads rant. I'd suggest that means *you* are emotionally invested in Threads failing. Despite the fact, as you indicate above, that the apps might have different aims.
“Gatekeepers”. Lol
Nevertheless, I fully understand the desire of those who use private schools to assert that they are much better. They'd feel pretty stupid if they were wasting their money, after all.
Well done though, you have managed to make @Leon seem sane and rational.
Is there a by election in Somerset !
There are many "old" truths that don't bear such a stamp, couldn't possibly bear one, and are of a kind that the holy science system arose to try to extinguish.
Your concept of "new truth" suggests confusion over what's there and whether it's recognised. For example the existence of quanta of energy was "true" even in ancient Rome, time of the gladiators.
A future society in which there is a much better understanding of shit than there is now is achievable - admittedly probably after a cataclysm. But the belief that no such better understanding is possible is deranged.
Firstly on almost every single thing I have personal knowledge and experience of the media coverage has, at best, been riddled with inconsistencies, false claims and simple lack of understanding. I am not talking about anything contentious or divisive. Just the most basic everyday news items and events. The media - both broadcast and print - are abslutely terrible at getting anything reported accurately. This is not in any way to do with any conspiracy. They are just shite at what they do. Always have been and always will be.
Secondly, there have been far too many examples in the past of the gatekeepers being misled, either purposefully by the vested interest or through what might be termed willful ignorance because they want something to be true - or false. Recent history is littered with examples of the media getting stuff wrong or being misleading in their reporting. Trusting the professionals and the gatekeepers at a superficial level is probably, on balance a non stupid way to proceed. A lot of the time they will be doing their best even if it is pretty rubbish. But history is littered with examples of people ending up being seriously damaged because they unquestioningly believed the professionals.
I am always in favour of cockup rather than conspiracy as an explanation but I trust no one as far as 'the truth' is concerned. I extend your 100% scepticism of randoms on the Internet to everyone else as well no matter where they are heard.
I will also add that I try to practice what I preach. The main reason I post under my own name is it keeps me absolutely on the straight and narrow. You may think my views are wrong or deluded or misinformed but what you can be sure of is that I never lie about anything - experiences, jobs, associations etc. Because it is easy for anyone to find me on the internet and see if I am lying. I actually like that. It is one of the reasons I trust Leon more than many others on here. I know him in the real world and whilst I may not agree with a lot of what he says and love taking the mickey out of him when he goes into shrapnel mode, I do know that he is honest in his opinions and claims.
New thread, anyway.
Sixty years ago we had selection on ability at aged 11 and the rest went to sink secondary moderns. Now we have selection at 11 based on parental wealth/ ambition and the rest go to sink secondary moderns.
Now I detest the notion of selection at 11, although perhaps the earlier method was more meritocratic than the current scheme.
Also you make an interesting point on internet anonymity and the discipline of identifying yourself. I note that the Times comment editors are now demanding that people correctly identify themselves Below The Line. They obviously think it will improve commentary and reduce random abuse, even if it drives some away
If he rows back on his plan to destroy it, I'll change my views.
Frankly I think you are having pipe dreams if you think it would pay for itself in 10 years. Unless you can point to some evidence to support that. Mostly past history has shown us you increase the public sector budget for anything by a pound if you are lucky if you get 50p of value out
I don't think I have ever lied about anything on here either - what would be the point - but of course you have no way of knowing if that is true. I remain anonymous because it is possible that at some point I might have a more public-facing job. Once that possibility recedes I will happily adopt my actual name.
Incidentally while I disagree with you on many things I think you are by far my favourite right of centre person on here, you always express your views clearly and succinctly and they are obviously deeply held and the product of much serious thought.
In the early days of the comprehensive experiment money was thrown at secondary education by both Wilson and Heath Governments.
I went to an excellent comprehensive which had previously been a secondary modern school, it had fantastic results in the 70s and 80s. It is now a moderate to low achieving academy school which was in special measures a few years ago. The ambitious parents send their offspring to Alcester Grammar School in the next county now.
Zuck, I sense, is a very bright guy who got lucky with that one idea at Harvard. I see no evidence that he’s done anything else or is likely to. He steals and buys - and controls
We probably all have our favourite villains in the tech Debrett’s
joined the DfE
Tracked mail is their focus at the moment; that's what I've been doing over there. I've had four days at work as an Amazon driver (one of them working Sunday in Marlborough - a few of us go in on Sunday to get all the parcels that we can pick up delivered, earn a few extra quid and keep Monday lighter for everyone), just driving around delivering parcels. It's my legs' first holiday for nearly a year
So with their focus on tracked mail, at the very bottom of the pile for it, their untracked mail is faring even worse
Every single route in their quite large office (I think they have twice as many routes as where I work in Marlborough) is at least week behind with its mail, many of them are two weeks or more behind. There are piles of unsorted trays of mail at each route's section and, I was told, rooms full of unsorted "yorks", the trolleys we use in the sorting office
I met an old lady on Saturday who hadn't yet had a single birthday card in the post for her birthday ten days before, and a guy today who was waiting on medical test results for his son. I've met so many people in between complaining about how little mail they've had lately
Tomorrow I'm back in Marlborough. I'll have double mail because only the parcels were done today. Then the mail will be totally up to date, some of it having been one day late because I was elsewhere. I'll have a long day tomorrow, but I'll get everything delivered
The disparity in service levels between us and such a nearby town has really shocked me