Mr. Royale, there are some quirks to F1. It's more prone to randomness than other sports. When Nadal plays Federer, you can be pretty sure neither will spontaneously combust. It's also unlikely that Djokovic will run into one of them at 200mph.
What about moving away from inspections and 'grading' of schools?
Focus instead on quality control of key inputs - the curriculum, hiring, pay & conditions etc - and then trust the staff to do the job.
Exam results (year on year comparison) can be a benchmark. No need for an inspection regime on top of that. So dismantle it.
Do you think?
Oh good grief - Schools are not for the benefit of teachers or LEAs
Parents want results and evidence that the teaching is up to standard. And regularly.
Not to send them off to some voyage of lefty discovery hippy camp.
But if that's what you want, Ofsted is pretty illusory at giving it to you. Most schools get 1 day of inspection every three years or so, and all sorts of nasties (especially temporarily removing pupils from the school roll to massage the figures) went on for years, even under Wilshaw. Generating spreadsheets to impress inspectors is a huge drain of time and morality (cos they're Malcolm Tuckeresqe exercises in spin).
If you want reliable frequent inspection, it's going to cost a lot more than Ofsted currently does.
I look forward to seeing the policy proposals from Labour and the Liberal Democrats for more thorough and frequent inspections.
P27-8 of the document linked to on Layla Moran's tweet that I posted earlier, hardly "producer interests".
Incidentally, producers are generally quite interested in producing high quality outcomes, whether educational, health or rail infrastructure. It seems a particularly Tory vice to assume everyone is as venal and self serving as themselves.
Corbyn is so disappointing. I've always feared his alliance with the Unions and a desire t go back to the 70's but otherwise I never thought there was much wrong with him.
But he's behaving like a 70' union leader and if he subjects himself to many interviews during an election campaign I can't see it going down well.
The problem is that Junker's attitude and rhetoric is most likely to lead to what he says he doesn't want - no deal.
If his issue is with agricultural inspections, then let's agree that UK and RoI can station inspectors on the 'other' side of the border, checking shipments as they leave the originating farm.
The way the 'backstop' is designed, is to prevent the UK diverging in regulation *in anything* from the EU, preventing the UK signing trade deals with other countries and to allow the EU to have the upper hand in negotiations in the next stage, which they intend to drag on for as long as possible. Ireland, and the willing Varadkar, have been allowed to be used as pawns for the greater good of the EU Project, at considerable risk to their own economy. Junker is betting his life (and that of Varakdar) that the UK blinks first.
It's possible that it will result in No Deal short-term (we'll see), but No Deal is presumably (including in the plans of all the people advocating No Deal, who at least think there are going to be lots of "mini-deals") a short-term situation and happens before the UK's regulations have diverged much. This is bad for the EU but it's not as bad as long-term salami-slicing divergence.
The EU don't have cornflakes for brains, and they have a strong negotiating position elsewhere, so they're not going to give the British the salami. Ireland are on board with this because they don't want to be salami-sliced back into British fiefdom status either, however much the British might think this is the natural practical state of affairs.
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
Corbyn on Marr says he wants to abolish OFSTED as it is a very assertive form of investigation and also SATS due to the stress put on parents and teachers, introducing a new form of supportive form of investigation instead
Just in case Labour have not noticed, they are running (with the help of Kirsty Williams) the educational system in Wales.
They have been running it for 20 years. Enough time to make a real difference, one might think. An entire generation of school kids have been raised with Welsh Labour running their education.
Maybe if Labour had made an abundant success of Welsh education, I would be more optimistic about their plans for England.
In fact, Wales has always scored worse than England, Scotland & N Ireland in all PISA tests.
E.g., Science from Pisa in 2016:
13 England, 19 ROI, 23 NI, 24 Scotland, 34 Wales.
Of course these tables are not everything, but the picture is clear. England are ahead, RoI, Ni and Scotland bunched together behind England .... and then Wales last.
Yes but this was still true when Labour was also running England and Scotland which rather implies there are other factors responsible for the difference.
Seriously, how long does Labour need to improve education in Wales? By improve, let's just say get it as good as education in Scotland or Ireland.
Not to be able to answer whether he had spoken to Diane Abbott and Long Bailey about why they voted against Tom Watson makes you wonder how accurate claims of Corbyn's straight talking really are.
Not to be able to answer whether he had spoken to Diane Abbott and Long Bailey about why they voted against Tom Watson makes you wonder how accurate claims of Corbyn's straight talking really are.
Not to be able to answer whether he had spoken to Diane Abbott and Long Bailey about why they voted against Tom Watson makes you wonder how accurate claims of Corbyn's straight talking really are.
Raab on Marr confirms contingency plans in place in government for repatriation of holidaymakers if Thomas Cook collapses but hopes a deal can be done today to save it
Is there a particular question where he was sarcy or tetchy or various other descriptions I've seen?
It all seems fairly mellow skimming through it, so I'm wondering if seeing it through the eyes of a Sun journalist and then someone who thinks the opposite of the Sun just leaves you with different impressions.
I share Dan Hodges' view that Over the past week it has become increasingly hard to discern what strategy Boris is actually pursuing.
Not just the past week, come to that. And especially not the part that needed the EU not to read British newspapers where Boris had explained he was bluffing.
One thing that was clear was that Boris was desperate for a snap general election before Brexit, before its adverse consequences became apparent to voters.
Beyond that, who knows? I am not sure Boris, Dominic Cummings (and presumably Lynton Crosby) have the same hymn sheet.
Boris needs a Jeremy Corbyn-led, minority Labour government for a couple of weeks to revoke or extend Article 50, then call the election which Boris can then fight as the champion of the people against the Establishment because right now, the millionaire, Old Etonian, Oxford-educated prime minister is the Establishment, and worse, he'd have lied to the people.
Dan Hodges' personal journey has been quite extraordinary. He was a very active Blairite (his self-description) up to 2013, but now writes things like "some Eurocrats clearly have little concern for how many Spanish manchego producers must be sacrificed on the altar of a glorious EU super-state". I'm never critical of people for changing their views over time - we're all entitled to - but he's now apparently lining up with the hard Brexiteer wing of the Tories.
I taught on the Diploma in Legal Practice for about 10 years teaching advocacy skills. The years I taught varied enormously in quality and motivation depending on a number of factors outwith my control such as how many had jobs at the end of the course. I suspect teachers would have similar problems and exam results would be a very crude way to assess them. Are teachers coping with additional need kids with English a second or third language really going to be compared with those coasting along in a "better" area with highly motivated parents giving support?
This logic drives you down the path of trying to assess the value added by the teacher which in turn drives something like our current assessment regime. Given @ydoethur's reservations this seems not to work but exam results are not the answer either.
Take your point. But, no, I don't mean compare exam results between different schools. As you say, that could be highly misleading. I mean compare exam results over time for the SAME school. This will show whether it is improving, deteriorating, treading water.
Does the inspection regime deliver sufficient value over and above that to justify its size and bureaucracy and cost? If no, consider dismantling it.
Your suggestion would be equally misleading, since results are greatly cohort influenced, irrespective of teaching quality.
If you watch the video Tom Watson's great reception seems to mostly consist of about 6 people who seem to follow him around to cheer him.
I'm not sure if it is good PR or not but the fact he felt the need to try and show he has support is quite telling IMO.
Might just be local constituency members who travel with their MP? With all else going on, rather thin gruel.
Perhaps some of the 200 000 members who voted for him as Deputy Leader are at Conference.
Nah, they'll have gone home by now, Liberal Democrat conference was last week.
And the Conservative conference is next week, and clashes with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. You will have seen the angry complaints, oh, hold on, no, these clashes only matter when it's Labour. As you were. Stand easy.
What are on about?
Things often clash and, as individuals, Jewish members can decide whether to attend or not.
Not to be able to answer whether he had spoken to Diane Abbott and Long Bailey about why they voted against Tom Watson makes you wonder how accurate claims of Corbyn's straight talking really are.
Not accurate I'd say. Corbyns general manner is such that he can twist and turn like any other politician but it might take a bit longer to notice. In contract Boris' frenetic style is such even when he is direct you might wonder if hes been straight.
The problem with OFSTED is it isn't very good at school inspections. That's always been an issue depending on who was leading it. It was forensic under Wilshaw (which did not of course make him popular) while under Spielmann it's turned into a bunch of basic waffly sound bites that mean nothing, largely because she is incompetent and picks incompetent people to work for her. It's dropped almost as far as it did under Woodhead, who imposed vast workloads and unnecessary regulations and strictures to show he could, in revenge for having been driven out of the teaching professsion.
Where I have very strong reservations about this policy is that I think once you burrow down to the detail the implication is it will be reformed rather than abolished. Most of its functions would go to LEAs. Well, LEAs are pretty well gutted out right now, but even when they were strong they were so corrupt and incompetent that nothing ever got changed except the size of administrators' salaries. So that would not be a positive step. And then this 'back stop' inspection team is just another name for OFSTED.
Putting real reform in place would be tough because unfortunately there is no perfect way of inspecting schools. But this is Blairite style over substance - again. It would make matters worse, not better.
With the greatest of respect, you are being naive @ydoethur
This isn’t about better school inspections, this is about giving power to union and council dominated LEAs.
It’s about strengthening Labour’s friends and allies
Oh good grief - Schools are not for the benefit of teachers or LEAs
Parents want results and evidence that the teaching is up to standard. And regularly. Not to send them off to some voyage of lefty discovery hippy camp
You have a jaundiced view of teachers. With quality control on recruitment and training, then trusted to do the job they are paid to do, I doubt that they would systematically turn schools into happy clappy anarcho-syndicalist communes. And if at the occasional school they did, it would show up in exam results. Exam results (for the same school over time) give a measure of how a school is doing. Do we need a bulky inspection bureaucracy over and above that? Not sure we do.
Oh, Mr Kinabalu! You are quite right, of course. But Conservative policy is to increase the number of unproductive bureaucrats, even if they do not have much idea what they are doing. The really important thing is that they should be very highly paid. OFSTED is a very cosy niche for their friends and relations.
Great article; it should be added that when you bet on a proxy such as currency, you are also betting on a proxy for other partially-related and wholly unrelated phenomena. You might make the correct call on Brexit, but find that economic performance figures, large investments or bankruptices, the bursting of a stock market bubble, an unrelated and sudden political event, the election of a new government, natural disaster, terrorism, or some other black swan event can ruin your bet.
Raab says he does not support a NI only backstop in its entirety but would back an agri-food arrangement with the Republic with cross-party consent in NI
It's possible that it will result in No Deal short-term (we'll see), but No Deal is presumably (including in the plans of all the people advocating No Deal, who at least think there are going to be lots of "mini-deals") a short-term situation and happens before the UK's regulations have diverged much. This is bad for the EU but it's not as bad as long-term salami-slicing divergence.
The EU don't have cornflakes for brains, and they have a strong negotiating position elsewhere, so they're not going to give the British the salami. Ireland are on board with this because they don't want to be salami-sliced back into British fiefdom status either, however much the British might think this is the natural practical state of affairs.
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
In my mind, the giveaway was when Varadkar cancelled the work done by his predecessor on technological solutions. Now you and I both work with software, we know that this isn't a technical problem but a political problem.
The "Special Status for NI" amounts to a customs border between the UK and the UK, imposed by the EU - which as Mrs May rightly said no UK PM would ever agree to.
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
Labour’s school inspection policy seems to be to let local authorities run periodic “checks” and flag problems by exception to “trained” inspectors. Can’t see any conflicts of political interest there, no sirree...
I can think a lot of local authorities would miraculously find that there aren’t any problems with their schools, and simply explain away any indicators such as poor exam results as consequences of low govt funding and/or the particular characteristics of their local areas.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I share Dan Hodges' view that Over the past week it has become increasingly hard to discern what strategy Boris is actually pursuing.
Not just the past week, come to that. And especially not the part that needed the EU not to read British newspapers where Boris had explained he was bluffing.
One thing that was clear was that Boris was desperate for a snap general election before Brexit, before its adverse consequences became apparent to voters.
Beyond that, who knows? I am not sure Boris, Dominic Cummings (and presumably Lynton Crosby) have the same hymn sheet.
Boris needs a Jeremy Corbyn-led, minority Labour government for a couple of weeks to revoke or extend Article 50, then call the election which Boris can then fight as the champion of the people against the Establishment because right now, the millionaire, Old Etonian, Oxford-educated prime minister is the Establishment, and worse, he'd have lied to the people.
Dan Hodges' personal journey has been quite extraordinary. He was a very active Blairite (his self-description) up to 2013, but now writes things like "some Eurocrats clearly have little concern for how many Spanish manchego producers must be sacrificed on the altar of a glorious EU super-state". I'm never critical of people for changing their views over time - we're all entitled to - but he's now apparently lining up with the hard Brexiteer wing of the Tories.
I can't know the reasons for his journey but it feels like he reacted negatively to the 'rejection' (as he might have seen it) which was Miliband and Corbyn becoming leader of the party, much more of a push than a pull to his current position.
They're talking about replacing it with something else. Details, I have none. Teaching unions don't like Ofsted; they think it measures the wrong things.
Listening to Marr Corbyn is a fool but Johnson is a knave. The Sunday Times are suggesting corruption when Mayor of London. Pumping public money (among other things) into his then concubine.
Just in case Labour have not noticed, they are running (with the help of Kirsty Williams) the educational system in Wales.
They have been running it for 20 years. Enough time to make a real difference, one might think. An entire generation of school kids have been raised with Welsh Labour running their education.
Maybe if Labour had made an abundant success of Welsh education, I would be more optimistic about their plans for England.
In fact, Wales has always scored worse than England, Scotland & N Ireland in all PISA tests.
E.g., Science from Pisa in 2016:
13 England, 19 ROI, 23 NI, 24 Scotland, 34 Wales.
Of course these tables are not everything, but the picture is clear. England are ahead, RoI, Ni and Scotland bunched together behind England .... and then Wales last.
Yes but this was still true when Labour was also running England and Scotland which rather implies there are other factors responsible for the difference.
Seriously, how long does Labour need to improve education in Wales? By improve, let's just say get it as good as education in Scotland or Ireland.
20 years has not been long enough.
Is it half a century? Is it a century?
Do tell.
Seriously, do tell, if Labour was running all three countries, why there was some specific Labour component involved in the better or worse relative performance? Whatever this thing is, it clearly is not Labour. Maybe it is poverty or funding or even the statutory requirement to spend time learning Welsh. I see since the Conservatives took over in England, performance has stabilised, whereas under Labour it was stagnating. What a difference Dominic Cummings made!
Whether PISA rankings are valid (in the technical sense) is a separate question. The United States, for instance, performs even worse than we do, yet has the world's leading economy.
On the Ofsted stuff I don't know what to think. With apologies to the honourable ydoethur, teachers are always complaining so i dont know what's a reasonable complaint or not.
If you watch the video Tom Watson's great reception seems to mostly consist of about 6 people who seem to follow him around to cheer him.
I'm not sure if it is good PR or not but the fact he felt the need to try and show he has support is quite telling IMO.
Might just be local constituency members who travel with their MP? With all else going on, rather thin gruel.
Perhaps some of the 200 000 members who voted for him as Deputy Leader are at Conference.
Nah, they'll have gone home by now, Liberal Democrat conference was last week.
And the Conservative conference is next week, and clashes with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. You will have seen the angry complaints, oh, hold on, no, these clashes only matter when it's Labour. As you were. Stand easy.
What are on about?
Things often clash and, as individuals, Jewish members can decide whether to attend or not.
It’s not anti-Semitic. It’s logistics
That is rather my point, together with media bias.
Raab on Marr confirms contingency plans in place in government for repatriation of holidaymakers if Thomas Cook collapses but hopes a deal can be done today to save it
The repatriation effort is ready to go, and a similar exercise was carried out only a couple of years ago when Monarch collapsed. That £2.50 everyone pays for ATOL insurance will cover most of the cost. If you booked a flight only, paid with your debit card and have no travel insurance then congratulations, the government will fly you home anyway!
Sadly I'd be surprised if TC made it past tonight, there's already stories of hoteliers abroad trying to extort customers for money.
If you watch the video Tom Watson's great reception seems to mostly consist of about 6 people who seem to follow him around to cheer him.
I'm not sure if it is good PR or not but the fact he felt the need to try and show he has support is quite telling IMO.
Might just be local constituency members who travel with their MP? With all else going on, rather thin gruel.
Perhaps some of the 200 000 members who voted for him as Deputy Leader are at Conference.
Nah, they'll have gone home by now, Liberal Democrat conference was last week.
And the Conservative conference is next week, and clashes with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. You will have seen the angry complaints, oh, hold on, no, these clashes only matter when it's Labour. As you were. Stand easy.
What are on about?
Things often clash and, as individuals, Jewish members can decide whether to attend or not.
Whilst on one hand the party should strive to make our policies as accessible as possible, I really don't think any party could afford to limit themselves to only policies Dan Hodges could understand.
TBH it* mostly rests on the idea revoking article 50 without a referendum is bad. I'm guessing that if you agree with Hodges then you would disagree with that?
*That isn't actually Labour policy but lets take things one step at a time.
Labour’s school inspection policy seems to be to let local authorities run periodic “checks” and flag problems by exception to “trained” inspectors. Can’t see any conflicts of political interest there, no sirree...
I can think a lot of local authorities would miraculously find that there aren’t any problems with their schools, and simply explain away any indicators such as poor exam results as consequences of low govt funding and/or the particular characteristics of their local areas.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
Singapore is now the best ranked PISA nation in the world and does plenty of testing, expects high standards and has private schools.
Singapore does though recruit its teachers from the top 5% of graduates unlike the UK and trains centrally at the National Institute of Education
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
By following his 2016 approach of never turning up...
Sure, but the party want the official position to be to back remain, if starner and thornberry et al are right. If that becomes policy then even if corbyn softballs it he is implicitly saying what Hodges suggests.
Giving people free rein then softballing it himself looks little different in practical terms since 95 out of a hundred labour members will campaign for remain, but it makes the negotiation by Corbyn slightly less ridiculous.
I think the party worries a bit much. They want to be as remainy as they can, but no one is really going to think they are leave supporting when so many will stand up and say they are for remain.
Your suggestion would be equally misleading, since results are greatly cohort influenced, irrespective of teaching quality.
As for OFSTED, it is not really fit for purpose.
Well, it is not possible to measure how well a school is doing with perfect accuracy and objectivity.
But I don't think that comparing results for the same school over time is quite as misleading as comparing (say) Holland Park Comp to one in Hackney.
The interesting question for me is - how and when to call the point where the effort of measuring something which is hard to measure exceeds the value derived from trying to measure it?
Raab on Marr confirms contingency plans in place in government for repatriation of holidaymakers if Thomas Cook collapses but hopes a deal can be done today to save it
The repatriation effort is ready to go, and a similar exercise was carried out only a couple of years ago when Monarch collapsed. That £2.50 everyone pays for ATOL insurance will cover most of the cost. If you booked a flight only, paid with your debit card and have no travel insurance then congratulations, the government will fly you home anyway!
Sadly I'd be surprised if TC made it past tonight, there's already stories of hoteliers abroad trying to extort customers for money.
I hope TC survives too but as you suggest ATOL will step in if it does not with the government helping others who do not have ATOL
It's possible that it will result in No Deal short-term (we'll see), but No Deal is presumably (including in the plans of all the people advocating No Deal, who at least think there are going to be lots of "mini-deals") a short-term situation and happens before the UK's regulations have diverged much. This is bad for the EU but it's not as bad as long-term salami-slicing divergence.
The EU don't have cornflakes for brains, and they have a strong negotiating position elsewhere, so they're not going to give the British the salami. Ireland are on board with this because they don't want to be salami-sliced back into British fiefdom status either, however much the British might think this is the natural practical state of affairs.
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
In my mind, the giveaway was when Varadkar cancelled the work done by his predecessor on technological solutions. Now you and I both work with software, we know that this isn't a technical problem but a political problem.
The "Special Status for NI" amounts to a customs border between the UK and the UK, imposed by the EU - which as Mrs May rightly said no UK PM would ever agree to.
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
The big practical problems with that approach are that after we leave the negotiations change from getting governments to sign off to parliaments to sign off. Getting 28 parliaments to agree (plus regional ones where applicable) will make the current negotiations look like the easiest in human history. The other problem, which is at least in our control, is its not just the PM who doesnt the balls for it, the country doesnt, we are not willing to put the hard yards into society, most of us have a nice enough life and want to get on with it, not spend years planning for no deal and pay additional taxes to fund it.
Raab on Marr confirms contingency plans in place in government for repatriation of holidaymakers if Thomas Cook collapses but hopes a deal can be done today to save it
The repatriation effort is ready to go, and a similar exercise was carried out only a couple of years ago when Monarch collapsed. That £2.50 everyone pays for ATOL insurance will cover most of the cost. If you booked a flight only, paid with your debit card and have no travel insurance then congratulations, the government will fly you home anyway!
Sadly I'd be surprised if TC made it past tonight, there's already stories of hoteliers abroad trying to extort customers for money.
Trying to recover costs in means legal within their country (I note that the countries where this is occurring are in Africa)
Labour’s school inspection policy seems to be to let local authorities run periodic “checks” and flag problems by exception to “trained” inspectors. Can’t see any conflicts of political interest there, no sirree...
I can think a lot of local authorities would miraculously find that there aren’t any problems with their schools, and simply explain away any indicators such as poor exam results as consequences of low govt funding and/or the particular characteristics of their local areas.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
Well it is certainly true that parental attitudes and parenting - or in a significant problem minority, a complete absence of parenting at all - do as much as any system or teacher to shape educational outcomes. Other under-appreciated factors are the scarcity of good management (a hard problem to solve at a systemic level), and the difficulty in recruiting good governors.
And I’d agree that much education policy is effectively displacement activity.
The only views that truly surprised a bit from the polling shown last night were the ones on borders and the IRA.
Not really as they run in tune with the rest of the polling, pro unrestricted immigration and hatred of the British state and Britain's history and no problem with terrorist organisations fighting Israel or Britain
Labour’s school inspection policy seems to be to let local authorities run periodic “checks” and flag problems by exception to “trained” inspectors. Can’t see any conflicts of political interest there, no sirree...
I can think a lot of local authorities would miraculously find that there aren’t any problems with their schools, and simply explain away any indicators such as poor exam results as consequences of low govt funding and/or the particular characteristics of their local areas.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
Good summary.
The inspectorate is a tremendous waste of money and does not really impact on school improvement, as evidence by the number of schools that have been in a category for long periods of time. This money could be better spent working intensively with schools which are struggling.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
It's possible that it will result in No Deal short-term (we'll see), but No Deal is presumably (including in the plans of all the people advocating No Deal, who at least think there are going to be lots of "mini-deals") a short-term situation and happens before the UK's regulations have diverged much. This is bad for the EU but it's not as bad as long-term salami-slicing ..
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
In my mind, the giveaway was when Varadkar cancelled the work done by his predecessor on technological solutions. Now you and I both work with software, we know that this isn't a technical problem but a political problem.
The "Special Status for NI" amounts to a customs border between the UK and the UK, imposed by the EU - which as Mrs May rightly said no UK PM would ever agree to.
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
The big practical problems with that approach are that after we leave the negotiations change from getting governments to sign off to parliaments to sign off. Getting 28 parliaments to agree (plus regional ones where applicable) will make the current negotiations look like the easiest in human history. The other problem, which is at least in our control, is its not just the PM who doesnt the balls for it, the country doesnt, we are not willing to put the hard yards into society, most of us have a nice enough life and want to get on with it, not spend years planning for no deal and pay additional taxes to fund it.
Hardly a surprise given half the country doesn’t want to leave at all.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
His answer to that is that he’d wait to see what deal he managed to negotiate before deciding whether or not to campaign for or against it....
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years. I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
Great article; it should be added that when you bet on a proxy such as currency, you are also betting on a proxy for other partially-related and wholly unrelated phenomena. You might make the correct call on Brexit, but find that economic performance figures, large investments or bankruptices, the bursting of a stock market bubble, an unrelated and sudden political event, the election of a new government, natural disaster, terrorism, or some other black swan event can ruin your bet.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
You have to be serious about preferring one option to obtain the best terms for that option. Otherwise both sides will collude to make the other option as attractive as possible.
Why would anyone feel pride or shame about things a country did long before they were born?
It is a sweet and virtuous thing to be proud of Britain's role in ending the slave trade, otoh the Atlantic slave trade was something that happened a long time ago and what about them Arab slavers anyway?
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
In my mind, the giveaway was when Varadkar cancelled the work done by his predecessor on technological solutions. Now you and I both work with software, we know that this isn't a technical problem but a political problem.
The "Special Status for NI" amounts to a customs border between the UK and the UK, imposed by the EU - which as Mrs May rightly said no UK PM would ever agree to.
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
The big practical problems with that approach are that after we leave the negotiations change from getting governments to sign off to parliaments to sign off. Getting 28 parliaments to agree (plus regional ones where applicable) will make the current negotiations look like the easiest in human history. The other problem, which is at least in our control, is its not just the PM who doesnt the balls for it, the country doesnt, we are not willing to put the hard yards into society, most of us have a nice enough life and want to get on with it, not spend years planning for no deal and pay additional taxes to fund it.
Hardly a surprise given half the country doesn’t want to leave at all.
I think a highly skilled and persuasive leader could have followed Sandpit's strategy in 2016 and got traction with the population. We do not have any politicians, anywhere near that calibre though. Once May further divided the country into two fragile groupings it became way way harder.
For our long term relationship with the EU I think no deal leads to rejoin and revoke leads to eventual no deal, as either option is so hard to execute and our leaders across the board are led by opinion polls rather than planning and strategy.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
I'm really glad someone else has said this. A negotiation is about finding a common way forward, not a game of bluff and brinksmanship. Labour should be commended for not adopting a command-and-control attitude, instead offering the people the final say on what gets agreed.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
I suspect that abolishing private schools would have only a marginal effect on that. They would be invested in only very particular parts of the ‘mainstream’. Which is not wildly different from the position now.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
His answer to that is that he’d wait to see what deal he managed to negotiate before deciding whether or not to campaign for or against it....
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years. I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
Isnt Labours renegotiation just code for the May deal plus worker and environmental protection baked in so Labour can sell it as different? Id imagine that can be done in a week (if its not already pretty much sitting there in a draft somewhere already).
Great article; it should be added that when you bet on a proxy such as currency, you are also betting on a proxy for other partially-related and wholly unrelated phenomena. You might make the correct call on Brexit, but find that economic performance figures, large investments or bankruptices, the bursting of a stock market bubble, an unrelated and sudden political event, the election of a new government, natural disaster, terrorism, or some other black swan event can ruin your bet.
On the Ofsted stuff I don't know what to think. With apologies to the honourable ydoethur, teachers are always complaining so i dont know what's a reasonable complaint or not.
The good teachers get on with the job - the rest moan while doing a bad job, instead of leaving and doing something else. Twas ever thus.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
I suspect that abolishing private schools would have only a marginal effect on that. They would be invested in only very particular parts of the ‘mainstream’. Which is not wildly different from the position now.
That is certainly true, up to a point. They won't be using sink schools on council estates on the outskirts of depressed towns. But they will be advocating for increased spending and more effective policies for the system as a whole, which will benefit all schools.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
Nope. Society's "most affluent and influential people" will just send their kids to the best boarding schools abroad. What this would hit is the children of the middle classes, who currently attend day private schools that aren't Eton or Harrow - schools which would most likely take their staff and resources and set up in another country.
Those middle classes - the doctors, lawyers, pilots - would instead spend every penny they have available to continue and entrench the educational apartheid by house price that exists already in many parts of the country.
On the Ofsted stuff I don't know what to think. With apologies to the honourable ydoethur, teachers are always complaining so i dont know what's a reasonable complaint or not.
The good teachers get on with the job - the rest moan while doing a bad job, instead of leaving and doing something else. Twas ever thus.
In my experience the moaning is common to good and bad teachers alike.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
There are plenty of places in the world with virtually no private sector education - places like Russia and Cuba and probably Venezuela. Yup - truly transformational indeed....
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
His answer to that is that he’d wait to see what deal he managed to negotiate before deciding whether or not to campaign for or against it....
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years. I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
Isnt Labours renegotiation just code for the May deal plus worker and environmental protection baked in so Labour can sell it as different? Id imagine that can be done in a week (if its not already pretty much sitting there in a draft somewhere already).
Possibly, but I somehow don’t expect them to put it quite like that to the public....
Which in a nutshell is their problem. Their leader isn’t really offering anything different from May, but wants to remain firmly the fence. If that were not the case, he’d have backed the ‘people’s vote’ from the off.
Isnt Labours renegotiation just code for the May deal plus worker and environmental protection baked in so Labour can sell it as different? Id imagine that can be done in a week (if its not already pretty much sitting there in a draft somewhere already).
I think in theory they're opposed to the backstop as well but in practice yup, just change the font on the WA and rewrite the PD to say "we're not doing the Libertarian Pirate Island thing, and we love workers rights and jobs".
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
His answer to that is that he’d wait to see what deal he managed to negotiate before deciding whether or not to campaign for or against it....
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years. I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
Isnt Labours renegotiation just code for the May deal plus worker and environmental protection baked in so Labour can sell it as different? Id imagine that can be done in a week (if its not already pretty much sitting there in a draft somewhere already).
There's at least a chance that Labour negotiate a leave deal that is almost indistinguishable from remain. Or they might negotiate something that is so awful that not even the most ardent leaver will vote for it.
Even if its not as extreme as this I can't see them negotiating anything worth having.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
I meant the Hodges tweet is infantile. PM Corbyn could stay neutral on Ref2. Why not?
As for the Deal, why would the EU not negotiate a closely aligned 'soft' Brexit with a Labour government? It will then be that or Remain, both of which outcomes are acceptable to them.
There IS a problem but it is something else entirely. Nothing to do with Labour policy being 'confused'. It is the fact that this Ref2 formulation - Soft Brexit vs Remain - steers heavily to Remain because it has no Hard Leave option. It is therefore open to the charge of 'Fix' and 'Undemocratic'.
But to pinch your mantra - there are no perfect solutions from here.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
I'm really glad someone else has said this. A negotiation is about finding a common way forward, not a game of bluff and brinksmanship. Labour should be commended for not adopting a command-and-control attitude, instead offering the people the final say on what gets agreed.
It’s transparently untrue. It implies that the EU holds all the cards and there are only alternate terms that the EU will offer on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It may have a considerably stronger position but the UK has cards of its own and how it plays them is relevant.
Of course, so far Britain has played its cards abysmally.
It's good to have some oversight of schools but I am really not convinced that OFSTED does a good job of this, as a parent of 3 children at state schools who also knows a few teachers. My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point). Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I agree - except for the point that curing our predilection for private schools would be a marginal benefit.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
Nope. Society's "most affluent and influential people" will just send their kids to the best boarding schools abroad. What this would hit is the children of the middle classes, who currently attend day private schools that aren't Eton or Harrow - schools which would most likely take their staff and resources and set up in another country.
Most middle class kids go to state schools. If they all did, state schools would be better. The super rich can look after themselves, it's what they're best at.
Seriously, do tell, if Labour was running all three countries, why there was some specific Labour component involved in the better or worse relative performance? Whatever this thing is, it clearly is not Labour. Maybe it is poverty or funding or even the statutory requirement to spend time learning Welsh. I see since the Conservatives took over in England, performance has stabilised, whereas under Labour it was stagnating. What a difference Dominic Cummings made!
Whether PISA rankings are valid (in the technical sense) is a separate question. The United States, for instance, performs even worse than we do, yet has the world's leading economy.
The difference is of course Labour has run Wales continuously. It has not run Scotland or England continuously, or N. Ireland at all.
The educational policy pursued in Wales is the creation of Labour alone.
Wales is as poor as Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland does better. Sure, there are very deprived parts of Wales, but the same is true of Scotland and N Ireland and the RoI.
Wales is the only country in the UK that is below the OECD average when PISA rankings are considered.
Welsh Labour have indeed rubbished PISA (as you do). They want to withdraw from PISA because it is not giving the right results.
The US has a poor educational system, but it has a leading economy because it imports the best students from everywhere. It has the best Universities in the worlds and grabs the best students in the world. That is why PISA rankings do not matter too much to the US.
Generally, politicians blame each other, and it is often hard to see who is to blame. Devolution has given us a unique instance of one party being in charge of an educational system for a generation. We can see -- before our eyes -- Welsh education is performing worse than comparable countries (Scotland, N. Ireland, RoI) after 20 years of Labour.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
I'm really glad someone else has said this. A negotiation is about finding a common way forward, not a game of bluff and brinksmanship. Labour should be commended for not adopting a command-and-control attitude, instead offering the people the final say on what gets agreed.
It’s transparently untrue. It implies that the EU holds all the cards and there are only alternate terms that the EU will offer on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It may have a considerably stronger position but the UK has cards of its own and how it plays them is relevant.
Of course, so far Britain has played its cards abysmally.
The strongest card the UK has now is "Give us a good deal or we'll stay".
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
His answer to that is that he’d wait to see what deal he managed to negotiate before deciding whether or not to campaign for or against it....
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years. I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
Isnt Labours renegotiation just code for the May deal plus worker and environmental protection baked in so Labour can sell it as different? Id imagine that can be done in a week (if its not already pretty much sitting there in a draft somewhere already).
Possibly, but I somehow don’t expect them to put it quite like that to the public....
Which in a nutshell is their problem. Their leader isn’t really offering anything different from May, but wants to remain firmly the fence. If that were not the case, he’d have backed the ‘people’s vote’ from the off.
He pretty much did in parliament, every time a second referendum motion was called he voted for it apart from the first one that the people's vote campaign didn't want them to vote for.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
I meant the Hodges tweet is infantile. PM Corbyn could stay neutral on Ref2. Why not?
As for the Deal, why would the EU not negotiate a closely aligned 'soft' Brexit with a Labour government? It will then be that or Remain, both of which outcomes are acceptable to them.
There IS a problem but it is something else entirely. Nothing to do with Labour policy being 'confused'. It is the fact that this Ref2 formulation - Soft Brexit vs Remain - steers heavily to Remain because it has no Hard Leave option. It is therefore open to the charge of 'Fix' and 'Undemocratic'.
But to pinch your mantra - there are no perfect solutions from here.
But there is no such thing as a Hard Leave option - it's utterly insane and leaves us having annoyed the EU trying to renegotiate back into things that we discover we shouldn't have left.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
I meant the Hodges tweet is infantile. PM Corbyn could stay neutral on Ref2. Why not?
As for the Deal, why would the EU not negotiate a closely aligned 'soft' Brexit with a Labour government? It will then be that or Remain, both of which outcomes are acceptable to them.
There IS a problem but it is something else entirely. Nothing to do with Labour policy being 'confused'. It is the fact that this Ref2 formulation - Soft Brexit vs Remain - steers heavily to Remain because it has no Hard Leave option. It is therefore open to the charge of 'Fix' and 'Undemocratic'.
But to pinch your mantra - there are no perfect solutions from here.
What are Labour’s objectives going to be in any negotiation with the EU, how does it propose to secure concessions on sticking points and how tough is Labour willing to be with the EU when it gets to the crunchy bits? Anyone can have a nicey-nicey conversation but the idea of conducting a serious negotiation for an outcome you are going to campaign against is absurd.
I think a highly skilled and persuasive leader could have followed Sandpit's strategy in 2016 and got traction with the population. We do not have any politicians, anywhere near that calibre though. Once May further divided the country into two fragile groupings it became way way harder.
The thing that makes me so angry is that May was in the perfect position to achieve this. As a remainer before the referendum, she only needed to have one red line: we are leaving. Instead she bought a pack of scarlet sharpies and went totally mad.
She destroyed the middle ground and left people like me -- defeated remainers -- no choice but to follow her into the hard brexit we had always feared, or to regroup and start to resist. When I first heard "Brexit means Brexit" I actually had a little bit of hope. That could have been the the starting whistle on a new process of compromise: let's get leavers and remainers to cobble together a compromise brexit. Turned out I was wrong and it was the start of a coordinated and long running gaslighting campaign.
We all know that Boris has had a pretty terrible start to his premiership. But if it ends tomorrow, history will not judge him to be worse. It'll be judged the baffling, comedy conclusion of what I maintain is likely to be seen as the most catastrophically mismanaged period of modern British history. Even though her personal qualities are probably finer than those of her successor, as a prime minister Theresa May will never be forgiven.
It’s one of the two absurdities with Labour policy. The other is the idea of negotiating a deal with the EU that everyone knows you are going to campaign against. What are you going to look for in those negotiations? And why should your counterparts offer good terms?
Because Brexit is more of a choice than a negotiation. The idea that you need to be "serious" about leaving to get "good" terms is just a delusion.
I'm really glad someone else has said this. A negotiation is about finding a common way forward, not a game of bluff and brinksmanship. Labour should be commended for not adopting a command-and-control attitude, instead offering the people the final say on what gets agreed.
It’s transparently untrue. It implies that the EU holds all the cards and there are only alternate terms that the EU will offer on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It may have a considerably stronger position but the UK has cards of its own and how it plays them is relevant.
Of course, so far Britain has played its cards abysmally.
The strongest card the UK has now is "Give us a good deal or we'll stay".
Comments
Other bets to come later. Ricciardo will start from the back unless they need to change parts on the car.
Maybe a couple of others to come nearer the start at 13:10.
Incidentally, producers are generally quite interested in producing high quality outcomes, whether educational, health or rail infrastructure. It seems a particularly Tory vice to assume everyone is as venal and self serving as themselves.
Electorate - Stop laughing at the back .... and at the front .... Yes, all those in the middle too.
But he's behaving like a 70' union leader and if he subjects himself to many interviews during an election campaign I can't see it going down well.
https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1175691096908845058
The EU don't have cornflakes for brains, and they have a strong negotiating position elsewhere, so they're not going to give the British the salami. Ireland are on board with this because they don't want to be salami-sliced back into British fiefdom status either, however much the British might think this is the natural practical state of affairs.
This isn't at all the same as saying that the whole thing is designed as a negotiation trick for unrelated stuff in the next stage. This is obviously not the goal, because the EU have variously agreed, depending on what the UK was requesting at the time, to a special status for NI that would remove the impact (and therefore any of the negotiating leverage you're imagining) on the rest of the UK, and on far more market access with fewer strings than they'd like, which is just a monster pre-negotiation concession.
20 years has not been long enough.
Is it half a century? Is it a century?
Do tell.
Meanwhile, alliumentary my dear Johnson....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-49702929
Perhaps malcolm could do our PM in turnips ?
Corbyn was largely calm, measured and at times added a light touch and a few quips. The problem was that most of what he said was complete bollocks.
Just kidding. An interesting piece, things are more complex than I realized.
It all seems fairly mellow skimming through it, so I'm wondering if seeing it through the eyes of a Sun journalist and then someone who thinks the opposite of the Sun just leaves you with different impressions.
Hodges is an idiot
Put that light out!
As for OFSTED, it is not really fit for purpose.
Things often clash and, as individuals, Jewish members can decide whether to attend or not.
It’s not anti-Semitic. It’s logistics
This isn’t about better school inspections, this is about giving power to union and council dominated LEAs.
It’s about strengthening Labour’s friends and allies
it should be added that when you bet on a proxy such as currency, you are also betting on a proxy for other partially-related and wholly unrelated phenomena. You might make the correct call on Brexit, but find that economic performance figures, large investments or bankruptices, the bursting of a stock market bubble, an unrelated and sudden political event, the election of a new government, natural disaster, terrorism, or some other black swan event can ruin your bet.
The "Special Status for NI" amounts to a customs border between the UK and the UK, imposed by the EU - which as Mrs May rightly said no UK PM would ever agree to.
I still think that the only way we end up with a mutually beneficial agreement (something like the Canada deal), is if we leave with no deal and negotiate immediately from there. My view on that hasn't changed since before the referendum. I'm still not sure the PM has the balls to deal with the short term disruption though, although there would also be plenty of disruption on the EU side, where they're already teetering on the brink of a recession.
My personal view is that most of the problems in education are caused by two factors: first, not enough money, especially for teachers' salaries, resulting in high workloads and poor retention. Second, a pervasive attitude in England that education is wasted on the working class, especially among the working class themselves. Why do schools in London outperform? They get more money (first point). And the English working class have largely exited London, leaving schools full of the children of the middle classes and aspiring immigrants (second point).
Until we achieve a change in English cultural attitudes to education and spend more money on it, creating OFSTED, abolishing OFSTED, creating academies, abolishing academies, or whatever, is simply displacement activity. Getting rid of private schools would in my view help with both points in the long run, but is also largely displacement activity.
I'm not against testing kids. You have to.
Whether PISA rankings are valid (in the technical sense) is a separate question. The United States, for instance, performs even worse than we do, yet has the world's leading economy.
Sadly I'd be surprised if TC made it past tonight, there's already stories of hoteliers abroad trying to extort customers for money.
TBH it* mostly rests on the idea revoking article 50 without a referendum is bad. I'm guessing that if you agree with Hodges then you would disagree with that?
*That isn't actually Labour policy but lets take things one step at a time.
Singapore does though recruit its teachers from the top 5% of graduates unlike the UK and trains centrally at the National Institute of Education
Giving people free rein then softballing it himself looks little different in practical terms since 95 out of a hundred labour members will campaign for remain, but it makes the negotiation by Corbyn slightly less ridiculous.
I think the party worries a bit much. They want to be as remainy as they can, but no one is really going to think they are leave supporting when so many will stand up and say they are for remain.
But I don't think that comparing results for the same school over time is quite as misleading as comparing (say) Holland Park Comp to one in Hackney.
The interesting question for me is - how and when to call the point where the effort of measuring something which is hard to measure exceeds the value derived from trying to measure it?
https://twitter.com/kateferguson4/status/1175691100083933185?s=21
https://twitter.com/marcherlord1/status/1175700997886435328?s=21
Other under-appreciated factors are the scarcity of good management (a hard problem to solve at a systemic level), and the difficulty in recruiting good governors.
And I’d agree that much education policy is effectively displacement activity.
The inspectorate is a tremendous waste of money and does not really impact on school improvement, as evidence by the number of schools that have been in a category for long periods of time. This money could be better spent working intensively with schools which are struggling.
Edit:
Umm, that 2nd poll has...
66% ashamed
23% proud
25% neither
1% DK
Can you be ashamed and proud?
I figured it was the sensible answer, there is stuff to be both ashamed and proud of...
Setting aside the possible absurdities of that position, it is also effectively offering to repeat the May negotiation and aftermath, but in a space of three months rather than years.
I’m sure the EU will be up for that.
I think if society's most affluent and influential people were invested in the mainstream sector rather than invested out of it, this would - over time - be transformational.
For our long term relationship with the EU I think no deal leads to rejoin and revoke leads to eventual no deal, as either option is so hard to execute and our leaders across the board are led by opinion polls rather than planning and strategy.
Labour should be commended for not adopting a command-and-control attitude, instead offering the people the final say on what gets agreed.
Those middle classes - the doctors, lawyers, pilots - would instead spend every penny they have available to continue and entrench the educational apartheid by house price that exists already in many parts of the country.
Which in a nutshell is their problem. Their leader isn’t really offering anything different from May, but wants to remain firmly the fence.
If that were not the case, he’d have backed the ‘people’s vote’ from the off.
Even if its not as extreme as this I can't see them negotiating anything worth having.
As for the Deal, why would the EU not negotiate a closely aligned 'soft' Brexit with a Labour government? It will then be that or Remain, both of which outcomes are acceptable to them.
There IS a problem but it is something else entirely. Nothing to do with Labour policy being 'confused'. It is the fact that this Ref2 formulation - Soft Brexit vs Remain - steers heavily to Remain because it has no Hard Leave option. It is therefore open to the charge of 'Fix' and 'Undemocratic'.
But to pinch your mantra - there are no perfect solutions from here.
Of course, so far Britain has played its cards abysmally.
The educational policy pursued in Wales is the creation of Labour alone.
Wales is as poor as Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland does better. Sure, there are very deprived parts of Wales, but the same is true of Scotland and N Ireland and the RoI.
Wales is the only country in the UK that is below the OECD average when PISA rankings are considered.
Welsh Labour have indeed rubbished PISA (as you do). They want to withdraw from PISA because it is not giving the right results.
The US has a poor educational system, but it has a leading economy because it imports the best students from everywhere. It has the best Universities in the worlds and grabs the best students in the world. That is why PISA rankings do not matter too much to the US.
Generally, politicians blame each other, and it is often hard to see who is to blame. Devolution has given us a unique instance of one party being in charge of an educational system for a generation. We can see -- before our eyes -- Welsh education is performing worse than comparable countries (Scotland, N. Ireland, RoI) after 20 years of Labour.
Labour are to blame.
She destroyed the middle ground and left people like me -- defeated remainers -- no choice but to follow her into the hard brexit we had always feared, or to regroup and start to resist. When I first heard "Brexit means Brexit" I actually had a little bit of hope. That could have been the the starting whistle on a new process of compromise: let's get leavers and remainers to cobble together a compromise brexit. Turned out I was wrong and it was the start of a coordinated and long running gaslighting campaign.
We all know that Boris has had a pretty terrible start to his premiership. But if it ends tomorrow, history will not judge him to be worse. It'll be judged the baffling, comedy conclusion of what I maintain is likely to be seen as the most catastrophically mismanaged period of modern British history. Even though her personal qualities are probably finer than those of her successor, as a prime minister Theresa May will never be forgiven.