Having a look at what is going to drop out of the calculation vs expectations on what's coming in based on current input prices we could be at ~6% CPI for September's numbers ~4.5-5% by the October data which we get in November.
I expect inflation to be 4.5 to 5% by year end with core inflation around 6%. The details of today's numbers were less reassuring than the headline, with underlying inflation in services if anything still rising. What has changed is that core goods inflation at last seems to be heading lower, having defied gravity for some time.
Groves (I think) commented that Oppenheimer wanted to be the penitent sinner and went great length to commit the sin.
He picked him precisely because he (Oppenheimer) was all in on building and using the bomb.
Personal anecdote - a friend of my fathers worked at Los Alamos. He got recruited by, as a student, accidentally working out what the lab he was guarding as part time Civil Defence volunteer was doing.
The way he told it, a number of the scientists, from Europe, didn't see the war with Japan as "their war". He recalled one argument between an officer and scientist. The officer pointed out that his brother was fighting in the Pacific and the bomb would end the war faster. The scientist literally said that he (the scientist) didn't care about that - he was only there to defeat Hitler.
My father's friend commented that if murder had been done, at that moment, he would have agreed with it.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Dienes blocks are great too.
But as with all of these things, you need to know how to use them.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
It'll be a while before I broach the Peano axioms with my daughter I feel.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
That tends to be the case. Whenever any of us discuss education, primary education tends to get the least thought. It's probably the sector where the last decade or so of 'reforms' have done the most damage.
Just to take one obvious example, few primaries are big enough to stand alone as academies, so in practice they join academy chains that are dominated by secondary schools and geared towards their needs.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Yep. There's not a great deal of good evidence underpinning the teaching methods (probably because for many it doesn't matter that much). Our eldest is just finishing reception and has done fine with phonics, but he's also naturally picked up a lot of just recognising whole words, which makes him a more fluent reader than some in his class - and is, of course, how we read as adults, only resorting to sounding out etc when we come across something completely unfamiliar. I think he - and many others in his class - would be at a similar point however taught. The main thing is exposure to lots of reading.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman <2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
My school (comp) was quite flexible in this regard. Set maths early on (early in year 7) but people moved around at the end of each year and sometimes within years and the structure changed - e.g. the number of distinct levels in the setting changed in response to assessed spread of abilities. English and science and French didn't set until later (maybe year 9) and other subjects didn't set at all as it was essentially the same learning for all (although there was still additional help for some and stretch learning for others).
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Unless kids are, for example, dyslexic, in which case phonics is downright damaging. Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
Its a decent fall but we are still falling behind a lot of other countries in the rate of fall. Inflation is once again the British disease and, once again, getting rid of it is going to be painful. My belief is that the current government, and very likely their replacement, will live with slightly higher inflation to avoid a recession which we really should have learned over the last 50 years, is short term thinking.
It's effectively passed responsibility to the Bank of England. I doubt anyone is minded to change the 2% target. The issue is why the Bank has kept expecting it to go away given the tight labour market and wage rises. Asking people to be modest in their pay demands is just daft.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Dienes blocks are great too.
But as with all of these things, you need to know how to use them.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
It'll be a while before I broach the Peano axioms with my daughter I feel.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
suggesting, as your son does, that the concept is fundamental. Mathematical zero is more complicated, it's like inventing a container whose only function is not to contain anything.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
I always found that with 2 year olds if you start with Frege's Grundlagen, and leave at least a week till introducing the first volume of Whitehead and Russell that the concept of '1' becomes increasingly clear. Intuitionism as a contested theory is best left to reception class.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Unless kids are, for example, dyslexic, in which case phonics is downright damaging. Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
Are languages with purely phonetic spelling a problem for dyslexics??
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
Ethos. In the school went to, the Headmaster considered his job as value adding - *all* children were to come out better than they went in.
The C streams weren't abandoned - they often had smaller class sizes, they got the same resources the other streams got, and the teachers were rewarded for helping the students. In Latin, I think, in one year they decided that all the previous years students were B stream material, now. So they ran 2 B stream Latin classes that year, with no C. This was seen as a big deal and the teachers involved were highly praised.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
Interesting about the less than problem, perhaps a sign that mathematics doesn't receive the prominence it deserves in our culture. Thanks for pointing it out. I think it's always easy to tell people that the "wrong" kind of people will be encouraged to breed by policies that help people have more children, but that is somewhat short sighted. All of us have ancestors who would have been considered the wrong kind of people at some point, and if they hadn't bred we wouldn't be here.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Heathite austerity in his case
Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full.
Knowing the geography, landscape and make up of Selby and Ainsty I still find it hard to believe that Labour could actually win.
9/2 if you want to put money on it. I've placed a crafty fiver.
5.7 on Smarkets, I've stuck a fiver on the Tories. OK They probably won't win but the probabilities are wrong. I'm in the market already so it improves my overall odds. The markets thought Labour were cooked in Batley right up until they won. Doom can be overdone for any party.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Unless kids are, for example, dyslexic, in which case phonics is downright damaging. Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
Yep. I was reassured, when viewing schools, that the school we chose emphasised that while they used phonics - and found it worked well for most - there were some for whom it did not work and they employed other methods as needed.
Our son took probably half a term to 'get' phonics, the idea of blending the sounds - he'd happily do the sounds and say the word, but wasn't good at blending them together in stages. But he was not behind on reading; he was just learning whole words. Whether that would have worked indefinitely, I don't know - he suddenly clicked with the blending concept.
"Whats you opinion on free schol meals for children?"
Austerity Reeves: "Its one of those things I just can't see where the moneys going to come from"
Obviously unlimited monies for wars
Good to see you joining in with the austerity by leaving out three apostrophes, an "o" and a couple of full stops. This should reduce wear and tear on your keyboard, saving £££s.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
Knowing the geography, landscape and make up of Selby and Ainsty I still find it hard to believe that Labour could actually win.
9/2 if you want to put money on it. I've placed a crafty fiver.
5.7 on Smarkets, I've stuck a fiver on the Tories. OK They probably won't win but the probabilities are wrong. I'm in the market already so it improves my overall odds. The markets thought Labour were cooked in Batley right up until they won. Doom can be overdone for any party.
Yeah, I've also had a small tickle. Traded out of my original Lab lay for a small profit early on - I've put some of that on Con (still green either way probably more likely to lose, but the odds look wrong).
Knowing the geography, landscape and make up of Selby and Ainsty I still find it hard to believe that Labour could actually win.
9/2 if you want to put money on it. I've placed a crafty fiver.
5.7 on Smarkets, I've stuck a fiver on the Tories. OK They probably won't win but the probabilities are wrong. I'm in the market already so it improves my overall odds. The markets thought Labour were cooked in Batley right up until they won. Doom can be overdone for any party.
I don't have a Smarkets account and CBA with the rigmarole of setting one up (I actually don't bet that much these days, following the 'only bet what you can afford to lose' axiom my gambling budget is tight to non-existent - but I had an unexpected fiver turn up from someone who owed for for a work leaving present thing from ages ago, so I thought - why not).
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
Interesting about the less than problem, perhaps a sign that mathematics doesn't receive the prominence it deserves in our culture. Thanks for pointing it out. I think it's always easy to tell people that the "wrong" kind of people will be encouraged to breed by policies that help people have more children, but that is somewhat short sighted. All of us have ancestors who would have been considered the wrong kind of people at some point, and if they hadn't bred we wouldn't be here.
On Less Than.
Nope - just that HTML is an XML format. The comments here are setup to accept some HTML tags, so when you type a < the comment interpreter thinks you are starting to write HTML.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Unless kids are, for example, dyslexic, in which case phonics is downright damaging. Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
Are languages with purely phonetic spelling a problem for dyslexics??
An interesting question. I don't know, but I don't see why that need necessarily be the case - though it's quite likely that methods for teaching reading are, since they will naturally stress learning individual phonemes.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Yes, support for young children and their parents in terms of maternity care, medical care, financial stability and support is number one priority above all others. The entire of what we value in humanist terms rest on it.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Alternatively there is a significant chunk of the population who are being asked to pay taxes to support others in having three+ kids when they do not feel they are able to afford having three+ kids themselves. Unsurprisingly they are not in favour of that.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Heathite austerity in his case
Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The two key flaws of a misconceived campaign were:
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The actual problem is that reports of potential terrorism are often indistinguishable from reports of young men acting out, or mental health issues.
Should we arrest every idiot who thinks that wearing clothing with references to Osama and ISIS? Everyone who puts "Death To The West!" on Facebook? Everyone who supports Romanian Rape Guy on Twatter?
While looking at local election results in the Selby area I came across this East Riding referendum from 2014:
There are green open spaces separating Hull from the surrounding towns and villages in the East Riding which your council has sought for many years to protect from being built upon. This is now being opposed by Hull City Council which wants to develop land it owns in these areas. Do you think Hull City Council should be allowed to build upon the land it owns in the green open spaces separating Hull and the towns and villages?
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Heathite austerity in his case
Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Alternatively there is a significant chunk of the population who are being asked to pay taxes to support others in having three+ kids when they do not feel they are able to afford having three+ kids themselves. Unsurprisingly they are not in favour of that.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
An idea - remove the cap for 2 kids. Plus create a tax allowance per child. Which is what the French do.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
People were more sold on May as a person in the initial months of her premiership than they were on Tory policies at large. The problem then became that she crumbled under the harsh spotlight of a campaign, and went to ground in the closing stages (remember the fact she didn’t turn up to the debates).
It was a weird period, the back end of 2016 into early 2017. May was held up as some modern day Thatcher, a new decisive and strong female leader for the difficult days ahead. She did remarkably well at keeping up this narrative for as long as she did, but she got found out during the campaign.
I’m not having a go at primary teachers by the way. Most are hugely skilled generalists. I just think the real fundamentals of maths are hard to teach well, not least because almost by definition if you have got the qualifications to teach these fundamentals then you probably picked them up intuitively rather than needing things like cuisenaire rods or dienes blocks to make sense of them.
From the Wiki article
The teacher is not the person who teaches him what he does not know. He is the one who reveals the child to himself by making him more conscious of, and more creative with his own mind. The parents of a little girl of six who was using the Cuisenaire rods at school marveled at her knowledge and asked her: 'Tell us how the teacher teaches you all this', to which the little girl replied: 'The teacher teaches us nothing. We find everything out for ourselves.'[7]
I very strongly suspect that little girl was not one of the cohort of kids who would have struggled picking up maths with or without rods.
Yes, it is similar to the debate about whether to teach reading via synthetic phonics or real books. For most children it makes damn all difference because they will pick it up anyway, and certainly not for the adult graduates conducting the debate.
Unless kids are, for example, dyslexic, in which case phonics is downright damaging. Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
Yep. I was reassured, when viewing schools, that the school we chose emphasised that while they used phonics - and found it worked well for most - there were some for whom it did not work and they employed other methods as needed.
Our son took probably half a term to 'get' phonics, the idea of blending the sounds - he'd happily do the sounds and say the word, but wasn't good at blending them together in stages. But he was not behind on reading; he was just learning whole words. Whether that would have worked indefinitely, I don't know - he suddenly clicked with the blending concept.
I suspect sympathetic and patient teachers make as much difference as any formal policies. Stress when things don't work becomes self reinforcing. Class sizes are also a factor.
And, of course, dyslexia is a condition with a wide range of severity.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Alternatively there is a significant chunk of the population who are being asked to pay taxes to support others in having three+ kids when they do not feel they are able to afford having three+ kids themselves. Unsurprisingly they are not in favour of that.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
But part of the reason that those in the middle can't afford to have three children is because of the lack of government support. The reality is that most families would get the support and only the rich are net contributors. They're cutting off their nose to spite their face. Partly this is a result of Tory divide and rule messaging, which sets up middle England against a largely illusory underclass of feckless breeders to persuade those on middle incomes to vote against their own interests. But it is also the result of a defeatist mentality as a country, where we are all simply trying to hold on to what we have rather than making sacrifices for our future common prosperity. Same with private schools incidentally. We are setting ourselves up for national decline, and it is desperately sad.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Heathite austerity in his case
Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
Something of a meaningless slogan, though. Safe and legal is probably incompatible with rare - other than as an aspiration.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
But sadly, moderation is a hard thing to find on this.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
Ethos. In the school went to, the Headmaster considered his job as value adding - *all* children were to come out better than they went in.
The C streams weren't abandoned - they often had smaller class sizes, they got the same resources the other streams got, and the teachers were rewarded for helping the students. In Latin, I think, in one year they decided that all the previous years students were B stream material, now. So they ran 2 B stream Latin classes that year, with no C. This was seen as a big deal and the teachers involved were highly praised.
That’s how we structure maths in my school - it is flexible year on year. But unless I am interpreting your post incorrectly then in your scenario of separating out the top 80%, the bottom 20% would be in a different school and so such movement would not be possible.
It also creates recruitment problems. I am happy to take a year 7 class on into year 8 that has very high needs and takes up a disproportionate amount of my time because I also have two further maths a level classes on my timetable. For me, that intellectual variety is part of what lets me bring the necessary energy and resilience to each year 7 class.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
Ethos. In the school went to, the Headmaster considered his job as value adding - *all* children were to come out better than they went in.
The C streams weren't abandoned - they often had smaller class sizes, they got the same resources the other streams got, and the teachers were rewarded for helping the students. In Latin, I think, in one year they decided that all the previous years students were B stream material, now. So they ran 2 B stream Latin classes that year, with no C. This was seen as a big deal and the teachers involved were highly praised.
That’s how we structure maths in my school - it is flexible year on year. But unless I am interpreting your post incorrectly then in your scenario of separating out the top 80%, the bottom 20% would be in a different school and so such movement would not be possible.
It also creates recruitment problems. I am happy to take a year 7 class on into year 8 that has very high needs and takes up a disproportionate amount of my time because I also have two further maths a level classes on my timetable. For me, that intellectual variety is part of what lets me bring the necessary energy and resilience to each year 7 class.
Nope - all in one school. That's the point. Grammar schools are unfair because they demand children have their life goals and needs sorted at 11.
IIRC the teachers my school weren't streamed - the same people might teach a mix of A, B and C. Probably for the reason you give - satisfaction and a change of pace.
While looking at local election results in the Selby area I came across this East Riding referendum from 2014:
There are green open spaces separating Hull from the surrounding towns and villages in the East Riding which your council has sought for many years to protect from being built upon. This is now being opposed by Hull City Council which wants to develop land it owns in these areas. Do you think Hull City Council should be allowed to build upon the land it owns in the green open spaces separating Hull and the towns and villages?
People might support new housing when its 'people like us' who benefit but they're massively opposed when its 'people like them' who do so.
Not sure this is an exactly correct interpretation. I have often seen people happy with development when it means an increase in the size of their village or town but unhappy if it creates a link to a larger conurbation. People don't want their communities subsumed into larger adjacent towns and cities. Hence the reason so many local plans have 'green breaks' which have nothing to do with nature or coutryside and everything to do with keeping 'Little Snodding in the Mire' as a separate entity from 'Smogton'. I think whoever phrased this question clearly understood that and so they emphasise the "green open spaces separating Hull and the towns and villages".
If you want to effectively circumvent the NIMBY attitude it is often worth while trying to understand it a bit better.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
Something of a meaningless slogan, though. Safe and legal is probably incompatible with rare - other than as an aspiration.
Not quite. Let's ignore 'safe' for the moment; focus on 'legal and rare'. Safe is a given. Three things stand out: We live in an era, the first ever, in which conception is essentially voluntary, as our general birth rate clearly shows. Those who wish to avoid pregnancy can.
Unwanted (really unwanted - thankfully there are lots that are wanted once they have occurred!) pregnancy does not increase the sum of human happiness.
It is possible by action in the public sphere over time to massively reduce sub optimal practices which are none the less lawful. Smoking is an obvious one.
Avoiding unwanted pregnancy is simpler than giving up smoking.
For good social and medical reasons there should be a reduction policy.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
With the exception of very small schools, isn't that true if basically all secondary education today?
Most but not all. There are a lot of advocates for mixed ability teaching in secondary schools - high profile studies by research teams seem to indicate it can be better for attainment but I don't understand that personally.
I would guess that streaming is better for high ability kids and worse for low ability kids. In theory streaming lets the teachers focus on everyone's needs through teaching tailored to ability, but in practice a significant minority of the kids in the low ability class would act up and nobody would learn anything in those classes. With mixed ability classes those kids would be distributed more evenly, causing some disruption for everyone but not a huge amount for anyone. I believe that academic research does demonstrate that mixed ability classes deliver better results overall - this is what I have been told anyway. At my kids' secondary they stream for maths but not for other subjects. This is similar to my own school experience, where they streamed for maths and languages. I suspect there is some de facto streaming for languages at my kids' school actually - my son's German class seems to all be people who are good at it, but that might be a coincidence.
Pretty much. Though even if a school has behaviour utterly nailed, the psychology of "we're the bottom set, we can't do it" is really hard to break. Not impossible, but requiring time and effort that can be better used on other things. You even get it in super selective schools. ("We're just the Hufflepuff class" as I heard on the train one day.)
(At this point, you.may be thinking to yourself "Pah. I would want to show them how wrong they were and double my efforts just to show them. Perhaps, but in that case you are not normal. We shouldn't design the system for you.)
In most subjects, a teacher can talk to a class with an ability spread about something new- a new book, battle, or chemical reaction- and everyone will get something useful from it. Maths is different- nobody has worked out how to be interesting at the top and intelligible at the bottom at once. So you hardly ever get maths shows on TV. So for maths, you probably do have to set.
But otherwise, MA does seem to improve things at the bottom without doing measurable harm at the top. Which is probably what the English system needs. And probably saves money by making timetabling more flexible.
But changing things because evidence conflicts with common sense? Not the English way.
Which is one reason England is in a bit of a mess.
As usual, what you say makes a lot of sense and I would acknowledge that what I’m about to say fits squarely into your bracketed paragraph but…
I would argue that the only way to properly serve those who struggle with maths at secondary (often closely correlated with those with SEN or mental health needs which is where dixiedean started this discussion) is by setting, by reducing the size of the lowest set, and by putting teachers in charge of that set, for multiple years at a time, who are able to both manage behaviour and teach the underlying structures of primary maths sufficiently well that you undo some of the misconceptions these kids have in their heads from primary school...
It would be better - and possibly less costly - to address that problem in primary school.
V good point Nigel. I know much less about primary so this post will be even more pie in the sky than the last one (and apols for double posting).
If it were possible to put maths specialists (in combination with AI to reduce costs and to personalise) in front of every primary class to properly introduce the fundamentals at a pace that is suitable for each child, we’d solve many of the apparently intractable challenges in maths education in this country.
In the meantime, for anyone with primary age kids, I cannot recommend numberblocks on iPlayer highly enough. I can’t think of a better justification for the licence fee.
I learnt with Cuisenaire rods!
Just looked those up Just starting to introduce the concept of "one" to my little one !
How old are kids before they can start to count generally (One, two say) btw ?
Amazingly the concept of zero had to be discovered by the Babylonians afaict. Whereas our son at age one had the concept of "empty" - his first word.
Natural pessimist? Or brought up under Cameroonian austerity?
Heathite austerity in his case
Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Alternatively there is a significant chunk of the population who are being asked to pay taxes to support others in having three+ kids when they do not feel they are able to afford having three+ kids themselves. Unsurprisingly they are not in favour of that.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
But part of the reason that those in the middle can't afford to have three children is because of the lack of government support. The reality is that most families would get the support and only the rich are net contributors. They're cutting off their nose to spite their face. Partly this is a result of Tory divide and rule messaging, which sets up middle England against a largely illusory underclass of feckless breeders to persuade those on middle incomes to vote against their own interests. But it is also the result of a defeatist mentality as a country, where we are all simply trying to hold on to what we have rather than making sacrifices for our future common prosperity. Same with private schools incidentally. We are setting ourselves up for national decline, and it is desperately sad.
It is to do with tax and rational self interest, not defeatist mentalities or illusions. Most families would not get the support, that is just not true, it is 1 in 10 children that are impacted by the policy. The rich don't pay a significantly higher proportion of tax than middle earners either, indeed many of the rich pay much less through clever use of tax breaks (actual tax paid rates for millionaires vary significantly with big groups paying close to 10% and others 40%).
Completely open to radically changing the tax and benefit system, but until we do, the 2 child benefit cap is going to be here to stay as electorally the middle will not support abolishing it.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
Something of a meaningless slogan, though. Safe and legal is probably incompatible with rare - other than as an aspiration.
Not quite. Let's ignore 'safe' for the moment; focus on 'legal and rare'. Safe is a given. Three things stand out: We live in an era, the first ever, in which conception is essentially voluntary, as our general birth rate clearly shows. Those who wish to avoid pregnancy can.
Unwanted (really unwanted - thankfully there are lots that are wanted once they have occurred!) pregnancy does not increase the sum of human happiness.
It is possible by action in the public sphere over time to massively reduce sub optimal practices which are none the less lawful. Smoking is an obvious one.
Avoiding unwanted pregnancy is simpler than giving up smoking.
For good social and medical reasons there should be a reduction policy.
When I was at Uni, there was a ridiculous rate of unwanted pregnancies among the first years.
When I was helping run the union, we put a pile of money into an ad campaign in the union plus handing out free condoms. Which halved the rate in one year.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The two key flaws of a misconceived campaign were:
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
The problem for me with hindsight about May's 2017 campaign is that I live in a constituency you'd have thought was core Tory-safe because of its thousands of retired toffs. Yet at no stage in the 2017 campaign did this issue of adult social care come up on the doorstep - and when we referred to it, we were met with straightforward puzzlement.
Tories were more than iffy about Corbyn and beginning to move towards the "most Brits voted for Brexit, and the Labour and LD candidates are agin" stance, even though over 70% of them voted Remain in 2016. So here in a seat that had never voted a non-Tory to Westminster, adult social care just didn't emerge. The few who'd voted Tory in 2015 but not in 2017 simply thought May, and/or the Tory voted in to replace Cameron as our MP, weren't up to the job.
If someone's got hard evidence otherwise let's see it. But I'm convinced for now that social care as an explanation for 2017 is a Westminster Bubble myth.
I see that the Met has now banned its officers from paying for sex.
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
But sadly, moderation is a hard thing to find on this.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
I think medical practice has recognised that problem, and is starting to address it ?
For example, training of how to communicate the diagnosis of conditions like Down's syndrome during pregnancy now tries to ensure it's done without imposing expectations (explicit or otherwise) on the parent. @Foxy probably knows more about this.
Re. Education. A disproportionate amount of the debate is around kids who could go to University. They'll do OK whatever. SENMH sector is in a dire state of crisis. And there it can often be the difference between someone being able to hold down paid employment or not.
The biggest failings of our education system are at the lower end. Not just in lost economic opportunity and unfulfilled lives, but the costs of crime, mental health, addiction and social problems. We can never eliminate these things completely, but we could do a hell of a lot better.
From January:
As I said yesterday this country - including Scotland - has always had world class education at the top end. There’s a reason why British boarding schools are so popular with international parents. Grammar schools were a mid-twentieth century manifestation of that. And on their own terms they actually did some decent work although they were not without serious shortcomings.
But it’s always been pretty rubbish at doing the basics right for everyone else. My distinct impression is that’s due to a lack of understanding of what’s needed or effective at the centre of power (although comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all and the national curriculum were strongly supported by Callaghan, who hardly counted as elite in background or schooling). I could be completely wrong of course, but it fits with the facts as I have observed them.
We would really benefit as a country from sorting that out. But whatever solutions are proposed won’t be easy and certainly won’t be cheap. Moreover they won’t deal with the many legacy issues of the current system without a substantial commitment to lifelong learning as well. I see no sign of that from any party.
HY's notion of elite education for the few seems to have some traction in Government. I have no doubt that the ultimate goal for the current iteration of Conservatism is to make education for the few not the many. There is a desperate enthusiasm for extending Grammar schools. I believe Sunak let the cat out of the bag over University Courses yesterday (another pitch from the HY manifesto) and the aim in the next or next but one Parliament is to reduce university entry back to the top 10%. This is probably not as offensive policy as I would make it out to be, but I do feel that within the 10% we will have Sunak, Braverman, Dowden, Hunt and Jenrick's children, but not mine! Mine can get apprenticeships to stack shelves at Aldi!
My father (who finished his career as a Deputy Headmaster) used to crack a smile with all the Conservative and Ratepayer councillors on Wythall Parish Council who were advocates of the 11 plus until their children failed. Before you knew it they were great enthusiasts for comprehensive education.
Plenty of grammar schools took the top 25 per cent, not just the top 10 per cent
I wouldn't be against grammar schools if they took the top 100%.
The sane option would be to stream by subject, in all schools. In my old school you could move from C to B to A in any year - up to, then, O levels starting.
There's a not-unreasonable argument that grammar schools should take the top 80%. It strikes me that the needs of the middle 60% are more similar to the needs of the top 20% than to the needs of the bottom 20%. Note that I am certainly not arguing for letting the bottom 20% fend for themselves: more that the needs of the bottom 20% probably need more constructive thinking (and resources) than the needs of the top 20%.
On setting: I do remember in the 1980s there was quite a lot of ideological opposition to setting; some schools refused to do it because it was elitist, and at least one parent I knew of refused to send their children to a school were setting happened for the same reason. Said (very bright) children ended up at something of a sink school. Did ok, but was always going to. Don't think she enjoyed school very much though.
What I am suggesting is sometimes referred to as "A Grammar School in every school" - the children can switch forms at any point. Rather than the bizarre idea of your future being decided by a single exam at age 11.
In my school, the job of the teacher of the C stream for any subject was to get as many kids as possible into B for next year and so on. It was the reverse of abandonment.
The opposition to this is interesting and appears very ideological. It would interesting to hear the thoughts of the teachers here on this.
V much agree about the movement within streams. Not sure it would be possible to take the top 80% without abandoning the rest in practice.
Ethos. In the school went to, the Headmaster considered his job as value adding - *all* children were to come out better than they went in.
The C streams weren't abandoned - they often had smaller class sizes, they got the same resources the other streams got, and the teachers were rewarded for helping the students. In Latin, I think, in one year they decided that all the previous years students were B stream material, now. So they ran 2 B stream Latin classes that year, with no C. This was seen as a big deal and the teachers involved were highly praised.
That’s how we structure maths in my school - it is flexible year on year. But unless I am interpreting your post incorrectly then in your scenario of separating out the top 80%, the bottom 20% would be in a different school and so such movement would not be possible.
It also creates recruitment problems. I am happy to take a year 7 class on into year 8 that has very high needs and takes up a disproportionate amount of my time because I also have two further maths a level classes on my timetable. For me, that intellectual variety is part of what lets me bring the necessary energy and resilience to each year 7 class.
Nope - all in one school. That's the point. Grammar schools are unfair because they demand children have their life goals and needs sorted at 11.
IIRC the teachers my school weren't streamed - the same people might teach a mix of A, B and C. Probably for the reason you give - satisfaction and a change of pace.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The two key flaws of a misconceived campaign were:
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
The problem for me with hindsight about May's 2017 campaign is that I live in a constituency you'd have thought was core Tory-safe because of its thousands of retired toffs. Yet at no stage in the 2017 campaign did this issue of adult social care come up on the doorstep - and when we referred to it, we were met with straightforward puzzlement.
Tories were more than iffy about Corbyn and beginning to move towards the "most Brits voted for Brexit, and the Labour and LD candidates are agin" stance, even though over 70% of them voted Remain in 2016. So here in a seat that had never voted a non-Tory to Westminster, adult social care just didn't emerge. The few who'd voted Tory in 2015 but not in 2017 simply thought May, and/or the Tory voted in to replace Cameron as our MP, weren't up to the job.
If someone's got hard evidence otherwise let's see it. But I'm convinced for now that social care as an explanation for 2017 is a Westminster Bubble myth.
The dementia tax was mentioned regularly in Ilford North when I canvasses it in 2017 and Streeting massively increased his majority
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The actual problem is that reports of potential terrorism are often indistinguishable from reports of young men acting out, or mental health issues.
Should we arrest every idiot who thinks that wearing clothing with references to Osama and ISIS? Everyone who puts "Death To The West!" on Facebook? Everyone who supports Romanian Rape Guy on Twatter?
True, although we often hear after the event that the attacker was known to MI5. I don't have the answer although it seems to me reasonable to expect the security services to spot known zealots buying bomb precursors, even if they cannot tell which nutter will make a spur of the moment decision to pick up a kitchen knife or swerve his van into a bus queue.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
But sadly, moderation is a hard thing to find on this.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
I very much hope there are happy endings for all of this.
In terms of numbers, late abortions are not a massive issue. Overwhelmingly abortions are fairly early, and medically unrelated to the health of the unborn child.
There are always going to be complex and unhappy cases. But to maximise human happiness, minimising the number of truly unwanted pregnancies is a no brainer.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
Something of a meaningless slogan, though. Safe and legal is probably incompatible with rare - other than as an aspiration.
Not quite. Let's ignore 'safe' for the moment; focus on 'legal and rare'. Safe is a given. Three things stand out: We live in an era, the first ever, in which conception is essentially voluntary, as our general birth rate clearly shows. Those who wish to avoid pregnancy can.
Unwanted (really unwanted - thankfully there are lots that are wanted once they have occurred!) pregnancy does not increase the sum of human happiness.
It is possible by action in the public sphere over time to massively reduce sub optimal practices which are none the less lawful. Smoking is an obvious one.
Avoiding unwanted pregnancy is simpler than giving up smoking.
For good social and medical reasons there should be a reduction policy.
When I was at Uni, there was a ridiculous rate of unwanted pregnancies among the first years.
When I was helping run the union, we put a pile of money into an ad campaign in the union plus handing out free condoms. Which halved the rate in one year.
There was a 2 page spread in the freshers handbook with photos of various devices and a 50p piece for scale.
I see that the Met has now banned its officers from paying for sex.
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
Gosh
That takes some thinking about. Does any other employer do this? Is paying for sex a thing any protected characteristic subgroup does more than average, which would make the rule vulnerable?
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The two key flaws of a misconceived campaign were:
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
The problem for me with hindsight about May's 2017 campaign is that I live in a constituency you'd have thought was core Tory-safe because of its thousands of retired toffs. Yet at no stage in the 2017 campaign did this issue of adult social care come up on the doorstep - and when we referred to it, we were met with straightforward puzzlement.
Tories were more than iffy about Corbyn and beginning to move towards the "most Brits voted for Brexit, and the Labour and LD candidates are agin" stance, even though over 70% of them voted Remain in 2016. So here in a seat that had never voted a non-Tory to Westminster, adult social care just didn't emerge. The few who'd voted Tory in 2015 but not in 2017 simply thought May, and/or the Tory voted in to replace Cameron as our MP, weren't up to the job.
If someone's got hard evidence otherwise let's see it. But I'm convinced for now that social care as an explanation for 2017 is a Westminster Bubble myth.
My sense is totally different. The social care mess was a catastrophe for what began as an unlosable campaign. It had more than one element; first the announcement of the policy, secondly the U turn, thirdly the denial there had been a U turn. This was the lie direct.
If a moderate had been in charge of the Labour party May would have lost bigly. I voted Tory through gritted teeth to keep the hard left out. It was much less the policy, more the total incompetence and dishonesty that was the problem.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
The "never abortion" group may be small but parts of it are highly dedicated and quite happy to make nuisances of themselves, and doubtless able to call on unlimited funds from America and trolls from Russia if it looked like the matter was up for debate.
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The actual problem is that reports of potential terrorism are often indistinguishable from reports of young men acting out, or mental health issues.
Should we arrest every idiot who thinks that wearing clothing with references to Osama and ISIS? Everyone who puts "Death To The West!" on Facebook? Everyone who supports Romanian Rape Guy on Twatter?
True, although we often hear after the event that the attacker was known to MI5. I don't have the answer although it seems to me reasonable to expect the security services to spot known zealots buying bomb precursors, even if they cannot tell which nutter will make a spur of the moment decision to pick up a kitchen knife or swerve his van into a bus queue.
If we took the list of those on the Mi5 watch list, and watched them all with a rotating 24 surveillance, phone taps etc. a couple of things would happen.
1) The MI5 budget would be bigger than the NHS 2) The traffic jams from the surveliance vehicles would get out of hand. 3) The price of rusty old vans to do surveillance from would soar to the point of collapsing the handyman businesses.
Bomb precursors are not easy to notice - if you are a chemist, looking at the cleaning and chemicals section in a hardware store... it's either frightening or amusing. Depends on what you find funny.
My brother *accidentally* made explosives, during some home chemistry, when we were kids.
You'll note that the recent trend in these things is, as you say, knifes and vehicles. Which are impossible to distinguish from the background signal....
The problem is that, since radicalisation is a spiral, the early stages are the same for "edgy memes" and "bright eyed and willing to kill"
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
But sadly, moderation is a hard thing to find on this.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
I think medical practice has recognised that problem, and is starting to address it ?
For example, training of how to communicate the diagnosis of conditions like Down's syndrome during pregnancy now tries to ensure it's done without imposing expectations (explicit or otherwise) on the parent. @Foxy probably knows more about this.
In this case, I think the nurse believed that a child could not survive without massive intervention before 24 weeks. And shouldn't, otherwise abortion at that point would murder. So She was mentally (if I am right) trying to protect the right to abortion.
Not sure what you can do about political/religious beliefs. Humans gonna human.
I see that the Met has now banned its officers from paying for sex.
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
What is the Met's new slogan? "Abstain or rape" would have obvious drawbacks. Are there any other perfectly legal activities the Met should ban? Scrapping their old cars, for instance, as scrap metal was often a front for armed robbers, or having their hair cut, since barbers might be a front for money-laundering?
My guess is this policy will be welcomed only by those who want prostitution outlawed anyway.
I see that the Met has now banned its officers from paying for sex.
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
As payment for sex is legal, and sex is a protected characteristic could this be challenged since it will disproportionately affect men (indirect discrimination) and sex is a protected characteristic under the equalities act ?
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The two key flaws of a misconceived campaign were:
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
The problem for me with hindsight about May's 2017 campaign is that I live in a constituency you'd have thought was core Tory-safe because of its thousands of retired toffs. Yet at no stage in the 2017 campaign did this issue of adult social care come up on the doorstep - and when we referred to it, we were met with straightforward puzzlement.
Tories were more than iffy about Corbyn and beginning to move towards the "most Brits voted for Brexit, and the Labour and LD candidates are agin" stance, even though over 70% of them voted Remain in 2016. So here in a seat that had never voted a non-Tory to Westminster, adult social care just didn't emerge. The few who'd voted Tory in 2015 but not in 2017 simply thought May, and/or the Tory voted in to replace Cameron as our MP, weren't up to the job.
If someone's got hard evidence otherwise let's see it. But I'm convinced for now that social care as an explanation for 2017 is a Westminster Bubble myth.
I don't think it was *directly* social care, it was the fact that her campaign was 1. Hiding in a log cabin in Scotland and 2. Confecting a car crash out of a second order issue about which nobody, as you say, gave a toss. Social care itself is not the explanation, putting it front and centre at the expense of a general vision for Brexit and the country is.
I see that the Met has now banned its officers from paying for sex.
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
What is the Met's new slogan? "Abstain or rape" would have obvious drawbacks. Are there any other perfectly legal activities the Met should ban? Scrapping their old cars, for instance, as scrap metal was often a front for armed robbers, or having their hair cut, since barbers might be a front for money-laundering?
My guess is this policy will be welcomed only by those who want prostitution outlawed anyway.
There are a whole raft of legal things that police officers can't do. Because of potential conflicts of interest and hiding the police to a higher standard than the general public.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
This is the reality of today's polity. Years of right wing positioning via tabloid journalism has created a nation of people embittered and hardened. Bemoaning their lot whilst demanding policies which make their lot worse. Meanwhile the man waltzes away having taken ever more money.
BJO and his ilk demand that the opposition go All In on ending this depravity. Just tell people they will make the man pay and all will be good. Except that it won't - most voters are conditioned to favour the needs of the man having been told the man's needs are their needs (e.g. STOP THE BOATS).
The first step has to be to win power. Blair understood this, as did much of the Labour movement. The problem with Corbynism and post-Corbynism is that crankies swept in and radicalised so many in the movement (mea culpa) even if only briefly. Which is how we find ourselves here. The overton window is way over to the right, you only win by being electable within the window, hence the need to compromise a long way to move it back to the centre.
We have become a country that isn't generous to itself, where people are so conditioned to fear losing things themselves that they refuse to extend help to others. This is not the mindset of a country that will succeed. It is the mindset of a country in a death spiral. It's the same mindset that gave us Brexit, of course. Sad.
Alternatively there is a significant chunk of the population who are being asked to pay taxes to support others in having three+ kids when they do not feel they are able to afford having three+ kids themselves. Unsurprisingly they are not in favour of that.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
But part of the reason that those in the middle can't afford to have three children is because of the lack of government support. The reality is that most families would get the support and only the rich are net contributors. They're cutting off their nose to spite their face. Partly this is a result of Tory divide and rule messaging, which sets up middle England against a largely illusory underclass of feckless breeders to persuade those on middle incomes to vote against their own interests. But it is also the result of a defeatist mentality as a country, where we are all simply trying to hold on to what we have rather than making sacrifices for our future common prosperity. Same with private schools incidentally. We are setting ourselves up for national decline, and it is desperately sad.
It is to do with tax and rational self interest, not defeatist mentalities or illusions. Most families would not get the support, that is just not true, it is 1 in 10 children that are impacted by the policy. The rich don't pay a significantly higher proportion of tax than middle earners either, indeed many of the rich pay much less through clever use of tax breaks (actual tax paid rates for millionaires vary significantly with big groups paying close to 10% and others 40%).
Completely open to radically changing the tax and benefit system, but until we do, the 2 child benefit cap is going to be here to stay as electorally the middle will not support abolishing it.
Each individual part of the benefits system only benefits a minority of people, that is true, and that's why it is always easy to find support for cutting some part of it. But more than half of families get some help from the state. Of course among the top 1% there are various efforts made to avoid taxes, but overall the tax and benefit system significantly reduces incomes for the rich and increases it for the poor. For the poorest quintile taxes and benefits lead to a net increase of £14k per year. For the second quintile the net increase is £12k. For the middle quintile the net increase is £4k. For the fourth quintile it reduces their income by £5k and for the top quintile by £34k. (source: Ons Effects of taxes and benefits on UK household income: financial year ending 2022, figure 1).
Last time they tried a wanky rhyming couplet that had no legs was 'Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher'
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Dementia tax nearly saw off May. It's worth striving for these things even if successes are rare. Trump understands this - sleepy Joe etc.
I remain unconvinced May lost because of her social care policy. It was a terrible campaign for all sorts of reasons. Dementia tax successfully gave an alibi to Lynton Crosby.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
The actual problem is that reports of potential terrorism are often indistinguishable from reports of young men acting out, or mental health issues.
Should we arrest every idiot who thinks that wearing clothing with references to Osama and ISIS? Everyone who puts "Death To The West!" on Facebook? Everyone who supports Romanian Rape Guy on Twatter?
True, although we often hear after the event that the attacker was known to MI5. I don't have the answer although it seems to me reasonable to expect the security services to spot known zealots buying bomb precursors, even if they cannot tell which nutter will make a spur of the moment decision to pick up a kitchen knife or swerve his van into a bus queue.
If we took the list of those on the Mi5 watch list, and watched them all with a rotating 24 surveillance, phone taps etc. a couple of things would happen.
1) The MI5 budget would be bigger than the NHS 2) The traffic jams from the surveliance vehicles would get out of hand. 3) The price of rusty old vans to do surveillance from would soar to the point of collapsing the handyman businesses.
Bomb precursors are not easy to notice - if you are a chemist, looking at the cleaning and chemicals section in a hardware store... it's either frightening or amusing. Depends on what you find funny.
My brother *accidentally* made explosives, during some home chemistry, when we were kids.
You'll note that the recent trend in these things is, as you say, knifes and vehicles. Which are impossible to distinguish from the background signal....
The problem is that, since radicalisation is a spiral, the early stages are the same for "edgy memes" and "bright eyed and willing to kill"
That's right, 24-hour surveillance is impractical, so we shouldn't do that. Perhaps Leon's AI could help, with computers keeping an eye on suspects' spending to flag any sudden interest in cleaning products, fireworks or warehouses.
One thing that disturbs me about the Shemima Begum affair is apparently no-one thought to keep an eye out for small groups of children buying one-way tickets to war zones.
I reckon a bet on the Tories on all three is value at those odds. (Singles, not a treble!). I'd beg surprised if they lost all three.
I have done this, very modestly, except for Somerton - which I think is impossible. Uxbridge and Selby are in the realm of arguable. Though I expect probably to lose.
I think there’s a better-than-the-odds chance they’ll hold Selby.
The BBC and LBC have been bigging up the ULEZ issue today. If they and HY are right it is a game changer. Starmer has also had a shocking week whereas Rishi has had a good run out with his university pitch, he and Suella have had great media coverage for the boats and tomorrow he will get some great inflation results.
Harold Wilson was right. A week is a long time in politics. A week where Rishi has knocked it out of the park.
WIth no disrespect meant, I genuinely don't know how far into your cheek your tongue is with these posts.
By Friday morning we shall see.
You can't deny that the Conservatives have had some excellent copy this week whilst Starmer-Labour have tied themselves in knots. Kuennsberg set a trap and he fell into it. Sir Kid Starver is a fantastic slur that Rishi is going to beat him around the head with tomorrow at PMQs. It doesn't matter that the two child policy is Osborne's invention, Starmer now owns it and the nation hates him for it. ULEZ according to HY and the BBC is a real vote loser for Uxbridge. FWIW I don't believe it will feature in the GE.
The idea that the 2 child policy is now owned by Starmer and “the nation hates him for it” does not seem to accord with reality. Do you have any polling to support this view?
I don’t see any sign that it’s hurt Starmer.
Good morning
I posted the polling on this yesterday which shows 60% support for the policy and majority across parties
Dismal figures, reflecting two dismal facts: pluralities generally support making life harder for those they don't know and care about; our birth rates are so awful that most people hardly know anyone with 3 or more children and are not wealthy.
It is incredible how two children has become the norm, and not just in this country. My wife's family is very large - her parents come from Sri Lanka and her dad was one of ten siblings and her mum one of six. So there are too many cousins for me to keep track of, living in Sri Lanka, the UK, Australia, the US and the Middle East. A real range of incomes too, from people living wealthy lives in the west to working class lives in Sri Lanka. Yet out of this huge extended family, my wife is one of only two, as far as I know, to have three children. The other is her cousin who lives a fairly comfortable middle class life in Sri Lanka. Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman [under] 2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s. Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
Firstly, until the 1960s there was not a great deal most people could do to control family size, other than abstain. Such contraceptives as were available were so unreliable as to fall to the laws of large numbers. Second, for some, it makes sense to have lots of children to use as free labour and to make up for the ones that die young. There may also have been religious imperatives (every sperm is sacred, etc).
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
On the whole prosperity is the most reliable contraception. Rates started falling before the pill.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
The problem with trying to reduce abortion, is that you then attract, like flies to rotting meat, the anti-abortion nutters.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I take your point. But the 'never abortion' group is small. The potential size of the 'safe, legal and rare' (the Bill Clinton aphorism) is large. It would maximally increase human happiness, as well as assisting the substantial group of people (both religious and not) who think the balance of rights as between the unborn and the rest of us has tipped too far, but don't want to be marked out as extremists.
But sadly, moderation is a hard thing to find on this.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
I think medical practice has recognised that problem, and is starting to address it ?
For example, training of how to communicate the diagnosis of conditions like Down's syndrome during pregnancy now tries to ensure it's done without imposing expectations (explicit or otherwise) on the parent. @Foxy probably knows more about this.
In this case, I think the nurse believed that a child could not survive without massive intervention before 24 weeks. And shouldn't, otherwise abortion at that point would murder. So She was mentally (if I am right) trying to protect the right to abortion.
Not sure what you can do about political/religious beliefs. Humans gonna human.
Training in how to communicate with patients. It ought not to be that difficult.
Comments
He picked him precisely because he (Oppenheimer) was all in on building and using the bomb.
Personal anecdote - a friend of my fathers worked at Los Alamos. He got recruited by, as a student, accidentally working out what the lab he was guarding as part time Civil Defence volunteer was doing.
The way he told it, a number of the scientists, from Europe, didn't see the war with Japan as "their war". He recalled one argument between an officer and scientist. The officer pointed out that his brother was fighting in the Pacific and the bomb would end the war faster. The scientist literally said that he (the scientist) didn't care about that - he was only there to defeat Hitler.
My father's friend commented that if murder had been done, at that moment, he would have agreed with it.
Of course this implies a declining population. I note that the UN data show Sri Lankan children/woman <2 now and the population declining from the mid 2030s.
Personally I like having 3 children - and while we are well off I grew up one of 3 in a family that wasn't so I don't think you need money to have more children although of course it helps. But most people seem to think otherwise. I think the government should nudge people to having more if they want, to arrest our population decline. The current policy is nuts.
"Whats you opinion on free schol meals for children?"
Austerity Reeves: "Its one of those things I just can't see where the moneys going to come from"
Obviously unlimited monies for wars
She outlived the rhyme by 13 years.
Edstone worked because it told a truth
Which shows how much politics and demographics can change that it now would be such a surprise.
Which is one very good reason for avoiding dogma.
But now, there are many struggling families who resent paying for those idle wasters on the corner with no job and 17 children, not to mention a better council house (or any council house).
And in future, there will doubtless be Coutts customers to point out racial discrepancies in child benefit receipts.
PLEASE do not use "less than" signs in your posts because it screws up formatting when they are wrongly interpreted as html tags.
https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/semantic/field/QN_EM
suggesting, as your son does, that the concept is fundamental. Mathematical zero is more complicated, it's like inventing a container whose only function is not to contain anything.
ETA: More of a 'Selby' seat, excluding some of the S&A donkey in a blue rosette rural areas to the north
The C streams weren't abandoned - they often had smaller class sizes, they got the same resources the other streams got, and the teachers were rewarded for helping the students. In Latin, I think, in one year they decided that all the previous years students were B stream material, now. So they ran 2 B stream Latin classes that year, with no C. This was seen as a big deal and the teachers involved were highly praised.
I think it's always easy to tell people that the "wrong" kind of people will be encouraged to breed by policies that help people have more children, but that is somewhat short sighted. All of us have ancestors who would have been considered the wrong kind of people at some point, and if they hadn't bred we wouldn't be here.
Kept: 60%
Abolished: 22%
By Party...
🌹 Kept 47%, Abolished 35%
🔶 Kept 56%, Abolished 27%
🌳 Kept 78%, Abolished 18%
Via
@YouGov
, 11 Jul.
Some say the glass is half full.
Both are wrong.
I say "Is it my round?"
The markets thought Labour were cooked in Batley right up until they won. Doom can be overdone for any party.
Our son took probably half a term to 'get' phonics, the idea of blending the sounds - he'd happily do the sounds and say the word, but wasn't good at blending them together in stages. But he was not behind on reading; he was just learning whole words. Whether that would have worked indefinitely, I don't know - he suddenly clicked with the blending concept.
The oft-forgotten factor was not one but two terrorist outrages during the 2017 election campaign, and Conservative denials that taking an axe to police numbers played any part. It was an insult to voters' intelligence, or at least their common sense.
Nope - just that HTML is an XML format. The comments here are setup to accept some HTML tags, so when you type a < the comment interpreter thinks you are starting to write HTML.
The number of idle wasters with a billion children is small. A good number of poorer households with +2 children do so because they prioritise family life more than a lot of middle class people do and have fewer pointless distractions. (I live in an area of adequate social housing and less expensive private ownership - essential to civilised existence).
An oddity which ought to be noticed more than it is is that abortion rates are so gigantic (a third to a quarter of all pregnancies), and little sign of reduction, in exactly that era of human history when the simplest application of common sense would render it rare as well as safe and legal. It is a massively ignored issue.
As a common feature of life which can't make anyone happy it deserves more attention.
In a sane world, a campaign to emphasise contraception, both parties being responsible etc would yield non-trivial benefits in reduced medical costs and complications. But with the gibbering loons around.
I don't know, but I don't see why that need necessarily be the case - though it's quite likely that methods for teaching reading are, since they will naturally stress learning individual phonemes.
More importantly I'd say has been the swing in the rural parts of the constituency, whether ex mining or commuter, albeit not in Selby itself.
Weirdly we now have the situation where Selby town is Labour and, over the border, Goole town is Conservative.
If the tax system was more like the French one, that supports low and middle income larger families as well as those on benefits, then the views may change. Until then, it is mostly those rich enough to be able to have three+ kids themselves and those on benefits in favour, and most of the middle against.
1. If you're going to run a campaign around the "strong and stable" merits of your PM, the PM does kind of have to come out swinging like a prize-fighter rather than hiding away giving prepared remarks to invited Conservative activists, and having a bit of a melt-down by all accounts. Her behaviour cut across the central message of the campaign.
2. She simply shouldn't have had a manifesto beyond "Get Brexit done the May Way". You can understand why she wanted a wider mandate for a May agenda... but it was a huge gamble and quite clearly backfired, particularly on social care. The policy itself was indicative of May's wider problem - she didn't really try to build support for what she was doing and preferred to work in a silo without others butting in, which might have worked with a majority of 100 not in the situation she was in.
Should we arrest every idiot who thinks that wearing clothing with references to Osama and ISIS? Everyone who puts "Death To The West!" on Facebook? Everyone who supports Romanian Rape Guy on Twatter?
There are green open spaces separating Hull from the surrounding towns and villages in the East Riding which your council has sought for many years to protect from being built upon. This is now being opposed by Hull City Council which wants to develop land it owns in these areas. Do you think Hull City Council should be allowed to build upon the land it owns in the green open spaces separating Hull and the towns and villages?
https://www.eastriding.gov.uk/council/elections-and-voting/east-riding-boundary-referendum/
The result was 96% against housing development.
People might support new housing when its 'people like us' who benefit but they're massively opposed when its 'people like them' who do so.
UBI design often includes a UBI for children.
It was a weird period, the back end of 2016 into early 2017. May was held up as some modern day Thatcher, a new decisive and strong female leader for the difficult days ahead. She did remarkably well at keeping up this narrative for as long as she did, but she got found out during the campaign.
Class sizes are also a factor.
And, of course, dyslexia is a condition with a wide range of severity.
Safe and legal is probably incompatible with rare - other than as an aspiration.
A relative had a premature child. Under the abortion limit (24 weeks). I was in the hospital visiting.
A nurse came in and looked at the clipboard. She said "This child shouldn't have been resuscitated". The father was gobsmacked. I pointed out that the child wasn't resuscitated. The nurse became quite agitated and repeated the statement as if it was a mantra.
Talking about it later the father and I agreed that it was almost certainly that she saw the child as a Bad Fact. Something which she saw as contradicting her world view.
I read Harry Potter with the child in question, these days, and she has a soft spot for Hufflepuff. Since the never seem to get anything good.
And yet, given the above, I support the 24 week limit.
It also creates recruitment problems. I am happy to take a year 7 class on into year 8 that has very high needs and takes up a disproportionate amount of my time because I also have two further maths a level classes on my timetable. For me, that intellectual variety is part of what lets me bring the necessary energy and resilience to each year 7 class.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/83a5e4e4-2584-11ee-9959-3da1f328ac3c?shareToken=81ff5822f5f0a3a7301324aa5cf52d31
IIRC the teachers my school weren't streamed - the same people might teach a mix of A, B and C. Probably for the reason you give - satisfaction and a change of pace.
If you want to effectively circumvent the NIMBY attitude it is often worth while trying to understand it a bit better.
Unwanted (really unwanted - thankfully there are lots that are wanted once they have occurred!) pregnancy does not increase the sum of human happiness.
It is possible by action in the public sphere over time to massively reduce sub optimal practices which are none the less lawful. Smoking is an obvious one.
Avoiding unwanted pregnancy is simpler than giving up smoking.
For good social and medical reasons there should be a reduction policy.
Completely open to radically changing the tax and benefit system, but until we do, the 2 child benefit cap is going to be here to stay as electorally the middle will not support abolishing it.
When I was helping run the union, we put a pile of money into an ad campaign in the union plus handing out free condoms. Which halved the rate in one year.
Tories were more than iffy about Corbyn and beginning to move towards the "most Brits voted for Brexit, and the Labour and LD candidates are agin" stance, even though over 70% of them voted Remain in 2016. So here in a seat that had never voted a non-Tory to Westminster, adult social care just didn't emerge. The few who'd voted Tory in 2015 but not in 2017 simply thought May, and/or the Tory voted in to replace Cameron as our MP, weren't up to the job.
If someone's got hard evidence otherwise let's see it. But I'm convinced for now that social care as an explanation for 2017 is a Westminster Bubble myth.
"Manchin's New Hampshire trip will leave Democrats shivering | CNN Politics" https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/07/17/politics/joe-manchin-new-hampshire-third-party/index.html
We might pause and ponder why the Met ever thought that permitting this was a good idea, given the number of criminal offences associated with prostitution and the conflicts of interest that would inevitably arise if police officers were also punters.
Still, we must be grateful that somewhere in the Met there is someone with a working brain.
For example, training of how to communicate the diagnosis of conditions like Down's syndrome during pregnancy now tries to ensure it's done without imposing expectations (explicit or otherwise) on the parent.
@Foxy probably knows more about this.
In terms of numbers, late abortions are not a massive issue. Overwhelmingly abortions are fairly early, and medically unrelated to the health of the unborn child.
There are always going to be complex and unhappy cases. But to maximise human happiness, minimising the number of truly unwanted pregnancies is a no brainer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/macron-rebuke-forces-big-tech-adviser-to-quit-eu-economist-job
That takes some thinking about. Does any other employer do this? Is paying for sex a thing any protected characteristic subgroup does more than average, which would make the rule vulnerable?
If a moderate had been in charge of the Labour party May would have lost bigly. I voted Tory through gritted teeth to keep the hard left out. It was much less the policy, more the total incompetence and dishonesty that was the problem.
For anyone recommended to go to Hell in the near future, please note that there's currently a rail replacement bus service in operation.
And be reassured, it's not even the end of the line!
1) The MI5 budget would be bigger than the NHS
2) The traffic jams from the surveliance vehicles would get out of hand.
3) The price of rusty old vans to do surveillance from would soar to the point of collapsing the handyman businesses.
Bomb precursors are not easy to notice - if you are a chemist, looking at the cleaning and chemicals section in a hardware store... it's either frightening or amusing. Depends on what you find funny.
My brother *accidentally* made explosives, during some home chemistry, when we were kids.
You'll note that the recent trend in these things is, as you say, knifes and vehicles. Which are impossible to distinguish from the background signal....
The problem is that, since radicalisation is a spiral, the early stages are the same for "edgy memes" and "bright eyed and willing to kill"
Jimmy from the Anderson end...
Not sure what you can do about political/religious beliefs. Humans gonna human.
My guess is this policy will be welcomed only by those who want prostitution outlawed anyway.
Just a question
BJO and his ilk demand that the opposition go All In on ending this depravity. Just tell people they will make the man pay and all will be good. Except that it won't - most voters are conditioned to favour the needs of the man having been told the man's needs are their needs (e.g. STOP THE BOATS).
The first step has to be to win power. Blair understood this, as did much of the Labour movement. The problem with Corbynism and post-Corbynism is that crankies swept in and radicalised so many in the movement (mea culpa) even if only briefly. Which is how we find ourselves here. The overton window is way over to the right, you only win by being electable within the window, hence the need to compromise a long way to move it back to the centre.
(source: Ons Effects of taxes and benefits on UK household income: financial year ending 2022, figure 1).
One thing that disturbs me about the Shemima Begum affair is apparently no-one thought to keep an eye out for small groups of children buying one-way tickets to war zones.
Thus, the road to Hell is made of good iron stanchions.
It ought not to be that difficult.