Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland if you want to go directly to University you have to be in Gymnasien (ok, you can do night school to get the Matura post 18), if you are in the other school (realschule?) you are on the path to an apprenitiship at about the age of 14, so everyone has a clear path - I think this probably helps the teachers overall, as they actually have a clear goal for what they are supposed to be achieving with the children they are teaching.
14 is a much more sensible time to seperate people than 11, because people do an awful lot of growing at changing as they go through puberty.
Plus at 11, the difference in age between a September and an August baby is massively greater. (The stats for the 11 plus were staggering - you were three or four times as likely to pass if you were a September baby than an August one.)
Month of birth effect in British education is staggeringly and depressingly huge.
Really makes me sad when I think about how badly it effects people's lives
My parents were great. They aimed to have me so that I'd be born around the 10th of September to maximise my chances of getting in grammar school, and Oxbridge.
As first babies are usually late, there was a 90+% chance I'd end up one of the oldest in the year.
Sadly I was born early and ended up one fo the youngest in the year.
Fortunately, I beat the odds. But I am the exception.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
The answer to your question is to stop parents reading to their kids. That's why it doesn't work. Social advantage, as you describe it, is just code for parents who give a shit about their kids. In wealthy families that means private school, in not so wealthy ones it means help with homework, being read to, help with reading and simple maths and general engagement. You can't stop the latter but it is an inherent advantage for a huge number of children from not very well of backgrounds.
I'm talking about school funding per pupil.
And by social advantage I don't mean parents who care about their kids. Most parents do that. I mean parental finances. Affluence.
So, our setup, the most advantaged kids are educated in a gated community and have the most school resource devoted to them. The best facilities. The smallest class sizes. The most extra curricular opportunities. The links and networks into prestige higher education and so on and so forth.
In other words we take the already advantaged and we advantage them a whole lot more.
We should do the opposite. This is the essence of what I bang about. If you have egalitarian beliefs our education landscape - in particular the tolerance of the private schools - is an abomination.
Mr. kinabalu, their financial sector is inferior, their handling of the migrant crisis was incredibly stupid, and they increased energy costs massively by Merkel's ridiculous reaction to the Fukushima[sp] meltdown and banning of nuclear power in a country not necessarily renowned for earthquakes and tsunamis.
You can point at any country and find good and bad aspects.
Still, those arguing Germany's magnificent will have fun making the case for banning the niqab and completely changing the way the NHS works.
You supply more supporting evidence -
Their financial sector is VASTLY more fit for purpose and value added. The welcoming of the refugees was an act of great vision and compassion. They got ahead of the curve on nuclear. It's not the future. Banning full face covering is a great example of tolerance without cultural cringe. Their healthcare system knocks the NHS into a cocked one.
And a few more for the pot -
Their education system is tons better. And no silly fetish for privates. The way that top level football is run. Exemplary c.f. our rich man's toy model. They devolve power so much better. They are a true democracy. They make quality things and look after the people who do the work. The approach to housing over there. So much more rational than ours.
One could go on. One has, really.
Deuba...Coba...DKW....WestLB....HVB.... sorry what were you saying about their financial sector...? Did I forget IKB? Or BerlinLB?
But compared to our bunch of desperadoes ...
We do ok. the Scottish banks were basket cases, as were some of the provincial mortgage banks.
Lloyds and Barclays did ok as did Abbey and MCHC.
Barclays were OK through the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by Fred for ABN.
Wasn't the Barclays bid an all-share deal? I wasn't in the sector then but I've read about it since and I'm pretty sure it was all share so wouldn't have resulted in a wiping out of the bank's capital as the majority cash deal that RBS won with did.
Yes, but ABN owned a business in Stanford, Conneticut (whose name escapes me) which owned ridiculous quantites of mortgage backed securities.
A lot of RBS's losses came from US residential mortgages via ABN, not British.
I thought it was the wholesale bank that had all of the dodgy mortgage backed securities. It's been a while since I read about it though. But yes, it was a disaster deal for more than one reason. Cash paid for what was worse than worthless. Deal of the century for ABN shareholders though.
I become quite furious thinking about the ABN deal.
Fred and chums literally boasted about failing to do due dilligence over the purchase.
Have we talked about the strategy of stoking armed insurrection against Democratic governors in swing states? Add that to the difficulty of trying to do an election in a pandemic and... whoa...
No. But I reckon that may be the plan. As the rest has failed.
I believe this has previously been discussed. The US Constitution would appear to be very inflexible on this point: if the general election doesn't take place then the current executive branch and most of Congress automatically leaves office next January anyway. The Presidency would then devolve upon the President pro tempore of the Senate, since it is only elected in thirds and so its longest serving member would still be available to succeed.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
It's post like this that make me want to ban private schools.
I really don't understand why such a frenzy is now being whipped up by the media other than their desperation to try & find a sensational story & if not to fabricate one..
I spent my entire career working for the US multinational that invented & patented the SMS (Spunbond Meltdown Spunbond) fabric that is now globally used for surgical gowns.There are other workable options.
For example industrial coveralls (boiler suits)which again due the barrier properties of SMS are widely used for protection purposes in a variety of industries. The main difference is the colour of the fabric, blue for surgical gowns & white, grey for coveralls. I alerted my MP to this option a couple of weeks ago as there must be literally hundreds of thousands of coveralls sitting in industrial companies warehouses & at their distributors.
The UK market is under developed in terms of single use surgical gowns (currently used as PPE gowns). With reusable linen gown still being widely used in Operating Theatres throughout the UK, they should be readily available for use with a plastic apron for additional protection.
We have a supply of industrial coveralls, but they are not very robust. Similarly we have used nearly all our disposable surgical gowns, and there are simply not enough reusable ones. This morning we had 600 long-sleeved gowns, so not likely to last the weekend unless resupply comes.
It is not just a media fuss, it is a real concern to the front line, even here in Leicester where we have half the average coronovirus rate of the country.
Find it surprising that the industrial coveralls designed for the wear & tear of arduous industrial applications are not very robust.
Also with the decrease in elective surgery that reusable gowns are not available, is it the turn around time at the laundries?
Not the only thing. We've re-employed a milkman. Costs a bit more but, in our dotage, it's strangely comforting.
It's funny how one's views change over time. 10 years ago I was all in favour of a world government run by technocrats, and wanted the UK to adopt the Euro even if most British people were against it. I can't remember why I thought these were good ideas.
I tuned out for a few days, but looking at stats today the UK is not doing at all well. What is going wrong?
We're in the plateau phase.
And if R stays around 1, the plateau could last a long time.
The decline in hospitalisations in London (with the Midlands also possibly past peak load) suggests that the overall rate of transmission in the community should have fallen below that level several weeks ago. It's simply the fact that deaths should be the last indicator to start falling, sadly.
I never see data for the number of new hospitalizations, just the total in hospital. Is there a source for the former?
I don't know myself, I'm just watching the total hospitalisations as presented in the Government daily briefing tracking downwards. The fall in Covid cases in London's hospitals has been both large enough and sustained enough to suggest that the capital is past peak, the Midlands might be going the same way, and no other region of the country appears to be getting significantly worse.
Presumably the total numbers in hospital would not be falling if the total numbers of people infected in the community hadn't already started falling, and so long as the latter continues to reduce so should the former.
If the numbers leaving hospital is increasing, since it takes several weeks for cases to be resolved, the number in hospital would fall even with a constant admission level.
There are two ways for patients to leave hospital
In Leicester we discharge 2 alive for every death.
That doesn't sound many. How do figures break down ICU/ non ICU? Are we getting better at treating CV19 patients? There is a lot of water to go under the bridge and I think we have to be very careful making judgments on what are half baked data - forgive mixed metaphors.
We have about 80 on ICU, including 10 ECMO at the moment, the rest on medical wards.
Do remember that Leicester is running about half the national average, about a quarter of Birmingham, just 45 miles away.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
And Trump is the first orange asshole to hold the office since WW2...
How come you're so familiar with his nether regions?
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
It isn't me calling for Hancock or anyone else to go. There will be a reckoning in time, but not now.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland if you want to go directly to University you have to be in Gymnasien (ok, you can do night school to get the Matura post 18), if you are in the other school (realschule?) you are on the path to an apprenitiship at about the age of 14, so everyone has a clear path - I think this probably helps the teachers overall, as they actually have a clear goal for what they are supposed to be achieving with the children they are teaching.
14 is a much more sensible time to seperate people than 11, because people do an awful lot of growing at changing as they go through puberty.
Plus at 11, the difference in age between a September and an August baby is massively greater. (The stats for the 11 plus were staggering - you were three or four times as likely to pass if you were a September baby than an August one.)
Month of birth effect in British education is staggeringly and depressingly huge.
Really makes me sad when I think about how badly it effects people's lives
There's no solution. You have to choose a cut-off somewhere.
Other European countries do not have as strong month of birth effect as we do.
We don't put enough effort into supporting the young children in a class.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
Mr. kinabalu, their financial sector is inferior, their handling of the migrant crisis was incredibly stupid, and they increased energy costs massively by Merkel's ridiculous reaction to the Fukushima[sp] meltdown and banning of nuclear power in a country not necessarily renowned for earthquakes and tsunamis.
You can point at any country and find good and bad aspects.
Still, those arguing Germany's magnificent will have fun making the case for banning the niqab and completely changing the way the NHS works.
You supply more supporting evidence -
Their financial sector is VASTLY more fit for purpose and value added. The welcoming of the refugees was an act of great vision and compassion. They got ahead of the curve on nuclear. It's not the future. Banning full face covering is a great example of tolerance without cultural cringe. Their healthcare system knocks the NHS into a cocked one.
And a few more for the pot -
Their education system is tons better. And no silly fetish for privates. The way that top level football is run. Exemplary c.f. our rich man's toy model. They devolve power so much better. They are a true democracy. They make quality things and look after the people who do the work. The approach to housing over there. So much more rational than ours.
One could go on. One has, really.
Deuba...Coba...DKW....WestLB....HVB.... sorry what were you saying about their financial sector...? Did I forget IKB? Or BerlinLB?
But compared to our bunch of desperadoes ...
We do ok. the Scottish banks were basket cases, as were some of the provincial mortgage banks.
Lloyds and Barclays did ok as did Abbey and MCHC.
Barclays were OK through the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by Fred for ABN.
Wasn't the Barclays bid an all-share deal? I wasn't in the sector then but I've read about it since and I'm pretty sure it was all share so wouldn't have resulted in a wiping out of the bank's capital as the majority cash deal that RBS won with did.
Yes, but ABN owned a business in Stanford, Conneticut (whose name escapes me) which owned ridiculous quantites of mortgage backed securities.
A lot of RBS's losses came from US residential mortgages via ABN, not British.
I thought it was the wholesale bank that had all of the dodgy mortgage backed securities. It's been a while since I read about it though. But yes, it was a disaster deal for more than one reason. Cash paid for what was worse than worthless. Deal of the century for ABN shareholders though.
I become quite furious thinking about the ABN deal.
Fred and chums literally boasted about failing to do due dilligence over the purchase.
Cnuts.
This was a time when front was more important in banking than on the high street. Times have changed for the high street too.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland if you want to go directly to University you have to be in Gymnasien (ok, you can do night school to get the Matura post 18), if you are in the other school (realschule?) you are on the path to an apprenitiship at about the age of 14, so everyone has a clear path - I think this probably helps the teachers overall, as they actually have a clear goal for what they are supposed to be achieving with the children they are teaching.
14 is a much more sensible time to seperate people than 11, because people do an awful lot of growing at changing as they go through puberty.
Plus at 11, the difference in age between a September and an August baby is massively greater. (The stats for the 11 plus were staggering - you were three or four times as likely to pass if you were a September baby than an August one.)
Month of birth effect in British education is staggeringly and depressingly huge.
Really makes me sad when I think about how badly it effects people's lives
There's no solution. You have to choose a cut-off somewhere.
That's not true.
There are many solutions.
You could segment the year into four groups, and people are educated and tested with their quartile.
In reality, you'd only need it up to about 13/14, but it would make a massive difference early on, where young kids are grouped with slow kids.
I really don't understand why such a frenzy is now being whipped up by the media other than their desperation to try & find a sensational story & if not to fabricate one..
I spent my entire career working for the US multinational that invented & patented the SMS (Spunbond Meltdown Spunbond) fabric that is now globally used for surgical gowns.There are other workable options.
For example industrial coveralls (boiler suits)which again due the barrier properties of SMS are widely used for protection purposes in a variety of industries. The main difference is the colour of the fabric, blue for surgical gowns & white, grey for coveralls. I alerted my MP to this option a couple of weeks ago as there must be literally hundreds of thousands of coveralls sitting in industrial companies warehouses & at their distributors.
The UK market is under developed in terms of single use surgical gowns (currently used as PPE gowns). With reusable linen gown still being widely used in Operating Theatres throughout the UK, they should be readily available for use with a plastic apron for additional protection.
We have a supply of industrial coveralls, but they are not very robust. Similarly we have used nearly all our disposable surgical gowns, and there are simply not enough reusable ones. This morning we had 600 long-sleeved gowns, so not likely to last the weekend unless resupply comes.
It is not just a media fuss, it is a real concern to the front line, even here in Leicester where we have half the average coronovirus rate of the country.
Find it surprising that the industrial coveralls designed for the wear & tear of arduous industrial applications are not very robust.
Also with the decrease in elective surgery that reusable gowns are not available, is it the turn around time at the laundries?
The ones we have are not up to much according to my ICU colleagues.
Laundry cannot keep up with demand. We are running out of theatre scrubs too.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
A source had told the Guardian: “The new guidance will say ‘this is what you do if you don’t have any gowns’. Wear an apron instead – that will be the new policy for the foreseeable future, though the medical organisations will go mad about that.”
Yeah the government's popularity is going to take a hit.
This is universal credit all over again. You think the government will take a hit, but most people won't notice.
No this is the dementia tax. It feels like that anyway.
The policy where the government were going to "steal your house"?
It's like sending soldiers into battle with a pocket knife. The first nurse to die because of the revised guidelines is going to be on the front page of The Sun and all over social media.
There is a shortage of PPE.
Would you rather they didn’t treat the patients?
That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it ? As Max and Foxy acknowledge, most medics will risk there own safety when push comes to shove. The question is whether government inadequacies are continuing to force them to do so.
On this general subject, it would be interesting to know how many countries which are struggling with the coronavirus are doing as badly or worse than the NHS with respect to PPE.
Take this recent report - from Japan, which is richer and has a very much smaller outbreak to contend with than the UK:
"The Japanese city of Osaka has issued an urgent plea for citizens to donate plastic raincoats to hospitals running short of protective gear for staff treating coronavirus patients, with some doctors resorting to wearing garbage bags.
...
"Desperately trying to bridge the gap in supplies of protective gowns for its hospitals, a notice on the Osaka city web site said any color and style of raincoat was acceptable, including ponchos, as long as they were meant for adults.
"Ichiro Matsui, Osaka’s mayor, told a gathering in the city on Tuesday that medical facilities were running dangerously short of all sorts of protective gear."
It doesn't help the workers in the hospitals who aren't getting the supplies they need in the quantities they need, of course - and after this is all over there will probably be considerable pressure to establish a domestic industry for making medical kit, and an agency to manage and stockpile the stuff - but perhaps the Government has a point when it protests that the whole world is after PPE at the moment and it's bound to be a bit of a challenge to get hold of enough of it?
We've had 8 weeks to get manufacturing in place. Why was there not a call to industry made in early Feb to get manufacturing lined up?
You are being hysterical.
Not really, we turned a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators into a success story in a similar amount of time or less. Where was the strategy on PPE (and testing)? Everywhere Hancock has been involved has been a disaster.
I hope it's not that Nightingales (definite success) and ventilators (good progress) are big shiny glamourous things and that PPE isn't.
I really hope it isn't that.
How many lives do the Nightingales and ventilators save? How many lives does the lack of PPE cost?
That equation might have influenced priorities, though I'd have thought it really ought not to have been an either/or.
As you say, it's not either/or. The government has enough bandwidth to do all of these things. Manufacturing of PPE doesn't have any crossover with manufacturing of ventilators or building temporary hospitals.
The cabinet office was in charge of the ventilator challenge and the hospitals. Gove delivered both projects. Hancock has been in charge of PPE and testing, both have been a disaster. Hancock isn't up to the task.
I sense you might be correct here. I've warmed to Hancock during this, albeit from a low base, and Gove has a horribly insincere manner as a frontman, but I do get the impression that the guy is very very competent.
Can just about risk this comment in the ostensible absence of @ydoethur and @malcolmg
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
America has become so partisan that people will vote for the psychopath anyway because of his party. The same goes here too of course.
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
It isn't me calling for Hancock or anyone else to go. There will be a reckoning in time, but not now.
Indeed, and one would imagine that the primary focus in any future inquiry will be on the reasoning behind the delay in implementing social distancing policies.
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
It isn't me calling for Hancock or anyone else to go. There will be a reckoning in time, but not now.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
America has become so partisan that people will vote for the psychopath anyway because of his party. The same goes here too of course.
A source had told the Guardian: “The new guidance will say ‘this is what you do if you don’t have any gowns’. Wear an apron instead – that will be the new policy for the foreseeable future, though the medical organisations will go mad about that.”
Yeah the government's popularity is going to take a hit.
This is universal credit all over again. You think the government will take a hit, but most people won't notice.
No this is the dementia tax. It feels like that anyway.
The policy where the government were going to "steal your house"?
It's like sending soldiers into battle with a pocket knife. The first nurse to die because of the revised guidelines is going to be on the front page of The Sun and all over social media.
There is a shortage of PPE.
Would you rather they didn’t treat the patients?
That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it ? As Max and Foxy acknowledge, most medics will risk there own safety when push comes to shove. The question is whether government inadequacies are continuing to force them to do so.
On this general subject, it would be interesting to know how many countries which are struggling with the coronavirus are doing as badly or worse than the NHS with respect to PPE.
Take this recent report - from Japan, which is richer and has a very much smaller outbreak to contend with than the UK:
"The Japanese city of Osaka has issued an urgent plea for citizens to donate plastic raincoats to hospitals running short of protective gear for staff treating coronavirus patients, with some doctors resorting to wearing garbage bags.
...
"Desperately trying to bridge the gap in supplies of protective gowns for its hospitals, a notice on the Osaka city web site said any color and style of raincoat was acceptable, including ponchos, as long as they were meant for adults.
"Ichiro Matsui, Osaka’s mayor, told a gathering in the city on Tuesday that medical facilities were running dangerously short of all sorts of protective gear."
It doesn't help the workers in the hospitals who aren't getting the supplies they need in the quantities they need, of course - and after this is all over there will probably be considerable pressure to establish a domestic industry for making medical kit, and an agency to manage and stockpile the stuff - but perhaps the Government has a point when it protests that the whole world is after PPE at the moment and it's bound to be a bit of a challenge to get hold of enough of it?
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Are the used reusable gowns sent to the laundry & then autoclaved as per the procedure for gowns used in the operating theatre?
If that is the procedure the system could it speeded up by sending the gowns directly for autoclaving, it's not as if they are soaked in blood.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
America has become so partisan that people will vote for the psychopath anyway because of his party. The same goes here too of course.
I'm yet to be convinced that we are nearly so far down the culture wars rabbit hole as they are in the States. The crucial blockage in our system was created by the Far Left capture of the Labour Party; bring back an Opposition of which a sufficient proportion of current Tory voters isn't totally bloody terrified, and the problem of masses of voters always coming down on one side because they're frightened of the other lot should ease considerably.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
The more desperate he gets the more fights he is going to pick to deflect from his own failings. WHO yesterday, stirring up the loonies in lockdown states today. It's going to get very ugly between now and November.
A source had told the Guardian: “The new guidance will say ‘this is what you do if you don’t have any gowns’. Wear an apron instead – that will be the new policy for the foreseeable future, though the medical organisations will go mad about that.”
Yeah the government's popularity is going to take a hit.
This is universal credit all over again. You think the government will take a hit, but most people won't notice.
No this is the dementia tax. It feels like that anyway.
The policy where the government were going to "steal your house"?
It's like sending soldiers into battle with a pocket knife. The first nurse to die because of the revised guidelines is going to be on the front page of The Sun and all over social media.
There is a shortage of PPE.
Would you rather they didn’t treat the patients?
That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it ? As Max and Foxy acknowledge, most medics will risk there own safety when push comes to shove. The question is whether government inadequacies are continuing to force them to do so.
On this general subject, it would be interesting to know how many countries which are struggling with the coronavirus are doing as badly or worse than the NHS with respect to PPE.
Take this recent report - from Japan, which is richer and has a very much smaller outbreak to contend with than the UK:
"The Japanese city of Osaka has issued an urgent plea for citizens to donate plastic raincoats to hospitals running short of protective gear for staff treating coronavirus patients, with some doctors resorting to wearing garbage bags.
...
"Desperately trying to bridge the gap in supplies of protective gowns for its hospitals, a notice on the Osaka city web site said any color and style of raincoat was acceptable, including ponchos, as long as they were meant for adults.
"Ichiro Matsui, Osaka’s mayor, told a gathering in the city on Tuesday that medical facilities were running dangerously short of all sorts of protective gear."
It doesn't help the workers in the hospitals who aren't getting the supplies they need in the quantities they need, of course - and after this is all over there will probably be considerable pressure to establish a domestic industry for making medical kit, and an agency to manage and stockpile the stuff - but perhaps the Government has a point when it protests that the whole world is after PPE at the moment and it's bound to be a bit of a challenge to get hold of enough of it?
We've had 8 weeks to get manufacturing in place. Why was there not a call to industry made in early Feb to get manufacturing lined up?
You are being hysterical.
Not really, we turned a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators into a success story in a similar amount of time or less. Where was the strategy on PPE (and testing)? Everywhere Hancock has been involved has been a disaster.
I hope it's not that Nightingales (definite success) and ventilators (good progress) are big shiny glamourous things and that PPE isn't.
I really hope it isn't that.
How many lives do the Nightingales and ventilators save? How many lives does the lack of PPE cost?
That equation might have influenced priorities, though I'd have thought it really ought not to have been an either/or.
As you say, it's not either/or. The government has enough bandwidth to do all of these things. Manufacturing of PPE doesn't have any crossover with manufacturing of ventilators or building temporary hospitals.
The cabinet office was in charge of the ventilator challenge and the hospitals. Gove delivered both projects. Hancock has been in charge of PPE and testing, both have been a disaster. Hancock isn't up to the task.
I sense you might be correct here. I've warmed to Hancock during this, albeit from a low base, and Gove has a horribly insincere manner as a frontman, but I do get the impression that the guy is very very competent.
Can just about risk this comment in the ostensible absence of @ydoethur and @malcolmg
I agree with you about Gove. My son and his wife are both teachers and both hate him - I'm not sure whether that's a negative for me. Teachers being the driving factor not offspring.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
A lot of that private school money is wasted on flashy new buildings (needed to wow prospective parents) and generally higher salaries for not-necessarily-better teachers.
Some parents like these schools purely because they reduce the parenting effort with longer hours and dpirts etc clubs included. Its more of a one stop shop for hands off parenting.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
Whilst I applaud the Socraric method you surely know where this conversation goes.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
It isn't me calling for Hancock or anyone else to go. There will be a reckoning in time, but not now.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
The answer to your question is to stop parents reading to their kids. That's why it doesn't work. Social advantage, as you describe it, is just code for parents who give a shit about their kids. In wealthy families that means private school, in not so wealthy ones it means help with homework, being read to, help with reading and simple maths and general engagement. You can't stop the latter but it is an inherent advantage for a huge number of children from not very well of backgrounds.
I'm talking about school funding per pupil.
And by social advantage I don't mean parents who care about their kids. Most parents do that. I mean parental finances. Affluence.
So, our setup, the most advantaged kids are educated in a gated community and have the most school resource devoted to them. The best facilities. The smallest class sizes. The most extra curricular opportunities. The links and networks into prestige higher education and so on and so forth.
In other words we take the already advantaged and we advantage them a whole lot more.
We should do the opposite. This is the essence of what I bang about. If you have egalitarian beliefs our education landscape - in particular the tolerance of the private schools - is an abomination.
Plus affluence and an Eton education does not automatically equal high iq and A grade GCSEs and A levels, see Prince Harry
Well none of this is automatic - thankfully - and IQ is another topic. Related, but different.
Harry is pretty bright, though, isn't he? That California decision seemed to say so.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland if you want to go directly to University you have to be in Gymnasien (ok, you can do night school to get the Matura post 18), if you are in the other school (realschule?) you are on the path to an apprenitiship at about the age of 14, so everyone has a clear path - I think this probably helps the teachers overall, as they actually have a clear goal for what they are supposed to be achieving with the children they are teaching.
14 is a much more sensible time to seperate people than 11, because people do an awful lot of growing at changing as they go through puberty.
Plus at 11, the difference in age between a September and an August baby is massively greater. (The stats for the 11 plus were staggering - you were three or four times as likely to pass if you were a September baby than an August one.)
Month of birth effect in British education is staggeringly and depressingly huge.
Really makes me sad when I think about how badly it effects people's lives
My parents were great. They aimed to have me so that I'd be born around the 10th of September to maximise my chances of getting in grammar school, and Oxbridge.
As first babies are usually late, there was a 90+% chance I'd end up one of the oldest in the year.
Sadly I was born early and ended up one fo the youngest in the year.
Fortunately, I beat the odds. But I am the exception.
I was THE youngest in my year. Explains a great deal.
One wonders what he might do if he loses the election . I doubt very much he’ll go quietly . Very dangerous times for the USA .
I wouldn't vote for Trump but I expect him to win again.
Indeed, the only candidates to have beaten an incumbent president since WW2 are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Biden is no Reagan or Bill Clinton and whatever else has happened to the Trump administration it has not yet had a Watergate which led to Carter's election
I think past history of POTUS is irrelevant given a) Trump is uniquely divisive and b) the plague.
Trump's current approval ratings are little different to Obama's or George W Bush's in the final year of their first term, above Carter and Bush Snr's but below Reagan and Clinton's
America has become so partisan that people will vote for the psychopath anyway because of his party. The same goes here too of course.
I'm yet to be convinced that we are nearly so far down the culture wars rabbit hole as they are in the States. The crucial blockage in our system was created by the Far Left capture of the Labour Party; bring back an Opposition of which a sufficient proportion of current Tory voters isn't totally bloody terrified, and the problem of masses of voters always coming down on one side because they're frightened of the other lot should ease considerably.
Indeed. However, the takeover of the Tory Party as the new Brexit Party didn't help. Fortunately this pandemic seems to have seen wiser heads prevail on both sides. There are more important battles than ideological purity. Trump is not a wiser head in any Universe.
I'm loving the Covid Data Wranglers seamless shift to "its just pure coincidence that peak deaths is two-to-three weeks after lock down started, virus infections had naturally peaked on the exact day of lockdown and Lockdown has had no effect".
They were so sure the peak had been on the 26/27th of March previously. I feel sad for them
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
I managed to tutor my son into a grammar and he did well, if he had gone to the comp I doubt he would have got the grades he got seeing as the local comp seems to be more a gang recruitment centre than a school. So I would say yes
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
The answer to your question is to stop parents reading to their kids. That's why it doesn't work. Social advantage, as you describe it, is just code for parents who give a shit about their kids. In wealthy families that means private school, in not so wealthy ones it means help with homework, being read to, help with reading and simple maths and general engagement. You can't stop the latter but it is an inherent advantage for a huge number of children from not very well of backgrounds.
I'm talking about school funding per pupil.
And by social advantage I don't mean parents who care about their kids. Most parents do that. I mean parental finances. Affluence.
So, our setup, the most advantaged kids are educated in a gated community and have the most school resource devoted to them. The best facilities. The smallest class sizes. The most extra curricular opportunities. The links and networks into prestige higher education and so on and so forth.
In other words we take the already advantaged and we advantage them a whole lot more.
We should do the opposite. This is the essence of what I bang about. If you have egalitarian beliefs our education landscape - in particular the tolerance of the private schools - is an abomination.
It might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, if what I have read so far (which admittedly isn't very much) is correct. I'm assuming that the Express headline refers to the team at Oxford? According to an article published in the i, this same group already has experience in producing a successful coronavirus vaccine (against MERS,) and is directly quoted as saying that they think the vaccine they're working on for Covid-19 has an 80% chance of success. Clinical trials are due to begin imminently, they've got manufacturers already lined up, and they think they can get the first million doses ready for September. These could then be released for use the following month, if the vaccine turns out to be safe and effective and once the regulatory hurdles have been cleared, with larger scale production to follow thereafter.
Reputable scientists are always very careful about probabilities; you'll certainly never find them assigning a zero or a one to any event unless they're completely sure of it! If a group with a proven track record in this area is giving themselves a 0.8 probability of success (to say nothing of committing resources to scaling up production before they are sure that it'll work) then one would assume that they have very good reason to feel confident of their chances.
That's not to say I interpret this as meaning that they will be successful, because there's still also a reasonable chance that the project will fall flat on its face (and it could also take considerably longer than the group is hoping for, even if it does ultimately work out,) but I still think that these reports represent grounds for cautious optimism. I certainly wouldn't write it off as hopeless.
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
We went through capacity problems with our face masks & respirators during SARS in 2002 & increased capacity afterwards..
However, you need to bear in mind the level of investment required for additional machinery is certainly not cheap & the last thing you need as a manufacturer is very expensive equipment working on a single shift waiting for an epidemic every 10 years or so.
The problem with PPE gown production is that it is basically manual. The first stage is automated when layers of fabric are cut to the design (marker as it's known in the business).. The backs, fronts, sleeves & cuffs then need to be either glued or stitched together manually. We did design our own gown machine, enormously expensive with running speeds lower than manual operations!
Due to the high manual content & pressure on in-market pricing production is in low labour cost countries primarily China, northern Mexico & now Vietnam.. I set up a plant in Saudi Arabia which basically sourced the Gulf region with massive support from the Saudi government that wanted to reduce its dependency on imports.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland if you want to go directly to University you have to be in Gymnasien (ok, you can do night school to get the Matura post 18), if you are in the other school (realschule?) you are on the path to an apprenitiship at about the age of 14, so everyone has a clear path - I think this probably helps the teachers overall, as they actually have a clear goal for what they are supposed to be achieving with the children they are teaching.
14 is a much more sensible time to seperate people than 11, because people do an awful lot of growing at changing as they go through puberty.
Plus at 11, the difference in age between a September and an August baby is massively greater. (The stats for the 11 plus were staggering - you were three or four times as likely to pass if you were a September baby than an August one.)
Month of birth effect in British education is staggeringly and depressingly huge.
Really makes me sad when I think about how badly it effects people's lives
My parents were great. They aimed to have me so that I'd be born around the 10th of September to maximise my chances of getting in grammar school, and Oxbridge.
As first babies are usually late, there was a 90+% chance I'd end up one of the oldest in the year.
Sadly I was born early and ended up one fo the youngest in the year.
Fortunately, I beat the odds. But I am the exception.
I was THE youngest in my year. Explains a great deal.
I was the youngest by a long shot, after I changed country and skipped a grade.
My first day at my new school I sat next to someone who coincidentally had the same birthday as me but was two years older than me.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
Well mine is only anecdotal but a grammar made the difference for my son, working in a lab didn't pay well and couldn't afford a house in a decent area for a comp or private school.
A source had told the Guardian: “The new guidance will say ‘this is what you do if you don’t have any gowns’. Wear an apron instead – that will be the new policy for the foreseeable future, though the medical organisations will go mad about that.”
Yeah the government's popularity is going to take a hit.
This is universal credit all over again. You think the government will take a hit, but most people won't notice.
No this is the dementia tax. It feels like that anyway.
The policy where the government were going to "steal your house"?
It's like sending soldiers into battle with a pocket knife. The first nurse to die because of the revised guidelines is going to be on the front page of The Sun and all over social media.
There is a shortage of PPE.
Would you rather they didn’t treat the patients?
That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it ? As Max and Foxy acknowledge, most medics will risk there own safety when push comes to shove. The question is whether government inadequacies are continuing to force them to do so.
On this general subject, it would be interesting to know how many countries which are struggling with the coronavirus are doing as badly or worse than the NHS with respect to PPE.
Take this recent report - from Japan, which is richer and has a very much smaller outbreak to contend with than the UK:
"The Japanese city of Osaka has issued an urgent plea for citizens to donate plastic raincoats to hospitals running short of protective gear for staff treating coronavirus patients, with some doctors resorting to wearing garbage bags.
...
"Desperately trying to bridge the gap in supplies of protective gowns for its hospitals, a notice on the Osaka city web site said any color and style of raincoat was acceptable, including ponchos, as long as they were meant for adults.
"Ichiro Matsui, Osaka’s mayor, told a gathering in the city on Tuesday that medical facilities were running dangerously short of all sorts of protective gear."
It doesn't help the workers in the hospitals who aren't getting the supplies they need in the quantities they need, of course - and after this is all over there will probably be considerable pressure to establish a domestic industry for making medical kit, and an agency to manage and stockpile the stuff - but perhaps the Government has a point when it protests that the whole world is after PPE at the moment and it's bound to be a bit of a challenge to get hold of enough of it?
We've had 8 weeks to get manufacturing in place. Why was there not a call to industry made in early Feb to get manufacturing lined up?
You are being hysterical.
Not really, we turned a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators into a success story in a similar amount of time or less. Where was the strategy on PPE (and testing)? Everywhere Hancock has been involved has been a disaster.
I hope it's not that Nightingales (definite success) and ventilators (good progress) are big shiny glamourous things and that PPE isn't.
I really hope it isn't that.
How many lives do the Nightingales and ventilators save? How many lives does the lack of PPE cost?
That equation might have influenced priorities, though I'd have thought it really ought not to have been an either/or.
As you say, it's not either/or. The government has enough bandwidth to do all of these things. Manufacturing of PPE doesn't have any crossover with manufacturing of ventilators or building temporary hospitals.
The cabinet office was in charge of the ventilator challenge and the hospitals. Gove delivered both projects. Hancock has been in charge of PPE and testing, both have been a disaster. Hancock isn't up to the task.
I sense you might be correct here. I've warmed to Hancock during this, albeit from a low base, and Gove has a horribly insincere manner as a frontman, but I do get the impression that the guy is very very competent.
Can just about risk this comment in the ostensible absence of @ydoethur and @malcolmg
I agree with you about Gove. My son and his wife are both teachers and both hate him - I'm not sure whether that's a negative for me. Teachers being the driving factor not offspring.
All the (many) teachers in my family hate him too. At gatherings they will all slag him off and despite not really agreeing I will often join in. It's not too hard.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
Your maths are uncharacteristically flawed. You've not assigned a percentage chance of going to Oxbridge after being in the 9 in 10 chance of not going to a grammar school; it wouldn't be zero.
Can you imagine the uproar if this was a Labour fiasco
Given that the only alternative election universe available on this one is that Corbyn won in Dec 2019 and he is now PM, do you really really want to go there?
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
We went through capacity problems with our face masks & respirators during SARS in 2002 & increased capacity afterwards..
However, you need to bear in mind the level of investment required for additional machinery is certainly not cheap & the last thing you need as a manufacturer is very expensive equipment working on a single shift waiting for an epidemic every 10 years or so.
The problem with PPE gown production is that it is basically manual. The first stage is automated when layers of fabric are cut to the design (marker as it's known in the business).. The backs, fronts, sleeves & cuffs then need to be either glued or stitched together manually. We did design our own gown machine, enormously expensive with running speeds lower than manual operations!
Due to the high manual content & pressure on in-market pricing production is in low labour cost countries primarily China, northern Mexico & now Vietnam.. I set up a plant in Saudi Arabia which basically sourced the Gulf region with massive support from the Saudi government that wanted to reduce its dependency on imports.
Where this might end is with the Government doing something not entirely unlike what you described in Saudi and incentivizing the establishment of a domestic industry to manufacture these specialist garments. Once we've completed Brexit then, presumably, the Government will have a much freer hand to treat UK manufacturers of such kit preferentially, and keep them viable by giving them a continuous stream of orders to make it, at a price which guarantees them a profit?
Then we just order slightly more PPE than is needed, accumulate a stockpile in various warehouses around the country, and calculate the excess so that the first consignments in the warehouses are nearing their use-by dates and can be given away (perhaps as overseas aid to countries that are short of kit for immediate use) and replaced, just at the point where the warehouses become full?
Consequently, the NHS gets everything it needs, a strategic reserve is maintained to hedge against a recurrence of the present crisis, and the factories are kept working through being in receipt of an endless supply of regular orders.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
I managed to tutor my son into a grammar and he did well, if he had gone to the comp I doubt he would have got the grades he got seeing as the local comp seems to be more a gang recruitment centre than a school. So I would say yes
Point of order. If you have Grammar Schools you don't have Comprehensives. They are Secondary Moderns in effect.
There seems to be a story for almost every country.
The Netherlands receiving faulty P2 respirators from China, Spain & Finland receiving sub standard surgical masks which did not comply with European standards, Germany having to re-sterilise face masks & getting ripped off by a bogus manufacturer in Kenya!
As reported in L'Express, France commandeering Face mask orders for Italy & Spain produced by the Swedish manufacturer Molnlycke in France which took the intervention of the Swedish government to release the orders.
There is simply not the global capacity to cope with this level of demand.
I agree that it is an international issue, but that doesn't butter any parsnips.
By rationing PPE, we are rationing treatment, as PPE is a prerequisite. No PPE? no Intubation, no ventilation.
Absolutely true, but I believe that the issue under discussion was originally the culpability or otherwise of the Government for the lack of PPE, and that may not be an entirely clear-cut issue.
If there is simply insufficient manufacturing capacity in the whole world to produce the amount of PPE needed for dealing with this pandemic, then it could alternatively be described as a collective failure of humanity. Whether you regard that as being the result of wilful negligence or an unfortunate lack of foresight, it is nonetheless something that is not limited to any one country or group of countries.
We went through capacity problems with our face masks & respirators during SARS in 2002 & increased capacity afterwards..
However, you need to bear in mind the level of investment required for additional machinery is certainly not cheap & the last thing you need as a manufacturer is very expensive equipment working on a single shift waiting for an epidemic every 10 years or so.
The problem with PPE gown production is that it is basically manual. The first stage is automated when layers of fabric are cut to the design (marker as it's known in the business).. The backs, fronts, sleeves & cuffs then need to be either glued or stitched together manually. We did design our own gown machine, enormously expensive with running speeds lower than manual operations!
Due to the high manual content & pressure on in-market pricing production is in low labour cost countries primarily China, northern Mexico & now Vietnam.. I set up a plant in Saudi Arabia which basically sourced the Gulf region with massive support from the Saudi government that wanted to reduce its dependency on imports.
Where this might end is with the Government doing something not entirely unlike what you described in Saudi and incentivizing the establishment of a domestic industry to manufacture these specialist garments. Once we've completed Brexit then, presumably, the Government will have a much freer hand to treat UK manufacturers of such kit preferentially, and keep them viable by giving them a continuous stream of orders to make it, at a price which guarantees them a profit?
Then we just order slightly more PPE than is needed, accumulate a stockpile in various warehouses around the country, and calculate the excess so that the first consignments in the warehouses are nearing their use-by dates and can be given away (perhaps as overseas aid to countries that are short of kit for immediate use) and replaced, just at the point where the warehouses become full?
Consequently, the NHS gets everything it needs, a strategic reserve is maintained to hedge against a recurrence of the present crisis, and the factories are kept working through being in receipt of an endless supply of regular orders.
I think that could work for PPE gowns, head, & footwear.. Could also have contingency arrangements with clothing manufacturers for gowns. Certainly a country the size of the UK could support its own Face mask / respirator factory & be competitive.
That only leaves gloves which are basically produced in countries like Malaysia & Thailand, but there doesn't seem to have been problems with sourcing.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
This conversation (on education) has been going on for over seven hours! (Well, it's been going on since 2005, but going on continuously for seven hours without many of the participants seeming to need a break.) I salute your stamina.
In the time since my earlier forays into it around 5 o'clock I have discovered an Edward VIII pillar box (on Framingham Road, Sale), arranged an all-daughters sleepover in the living room, watched two old episodes of Taskmaster and gained a slot for a Tesco delivery.
This conversation (on education) has been going on for over seven hours! (Well, it's been going on since 2005, but going on continuously for seven hours without many of the participants seeming to need a break.) I salute your stamina.
In the time since my earlier forays into it around 5 o'clock I have discovered an Edward VIII pillar box (on Framingham Road, Sale), arranged an all-daughters sleepover in the living room, watched two old episodes of Taskmaster and gained a slot for a Tesco delivery.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
Oh yes it does, the study found 39% of all pupils in selective areas went to top universities compared to just 23% in non selective areas.
The Trump supporters protesting against the lockdown in Michigan today are not the sort of people to meekly allow Trump to be defeated at the ballot box. I expect there will be violence at polling stations in Democrat-voting areas in swing states in November.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
Oh yes it does, the study found 39% of all pupils in selective areas went to top universities compared to just 23% in non selective areas.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
In terms of getting them into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
I agree Buckinghamshire has better than average GCSE results, but it also has a very low proportion of kids with free school meals, so that's not a great surprise.#
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
Oh yes it does, the study found 39% of all pupils in selective areas went to top universities compared to just 23% in non selective areas.
You have obviously not read the article
Robert, stop butting in and let HYUFD finish ;-)
The problem is you cannot edit iPhone comments at the moment on here
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
The answer to your question is to stop parents reading to their kids. That's why it doesn't work. Social advantage, as you describe it, is just code for parents who give a shit about their kids. In wealthy families that means private school, in not so wealthy ones it means help with homework, being read to, help with reading and simple maths and general engagement. You can't stop the latter but it is an inherent advantage for a huge number of children from not very well of backgrounds.
I'm talking about school funding per pupil.
And by social advantage I don't mean parents who care about their kids. Most parents do that. I mean parental finances. Affluence.
So, our setup, the most advantaged kids are educated in a gated community and have the most school resource devoted to them. The best facilities. The smallest class sizes. The most extra curricular opportunities. The links and networks into prestige higher education and so on and so forth.
In other words we take the already advantaged and we advantage them a whole lot more.
We should do the opposite. This is the essence of what I bang about. If you have egalitarian beliefs our education landscape - in particular the tolerance of the private schools - is an abomination.
The school funding per point may not be terribly relevant - bear in mind that paying for private school is buying a whole package of stuff, including control over who your kids are mixing with, a lot of extra-curricular activities (particularly sport and music), in some cases some niche stuff about special needs or facilities, and as you're well aware in many cases a useful contact network for the future. The main educational aspect is the reduced class size. In the absence of private schools, richer parents would still have plenty of opportunities to replicate those private school advantages even if it's a bit of a hassle. They still control little Johnny's playmates, they can send him off to cricket and rugby or whatever, Esmerelda can meet all the daughters of the "in" crowd at ballet. In educational terms their kids have a big head-start because they have literate, numerate, cultured parents with very strong academic and professional aspirations for their offspring. The kids will enjoy plenty of experience learning through play, get read to, have a wider vocabulary than their peers before they start school, will get extra music and academic tuition, access to educational/cultural resources, even little things like more time abroad can help with mastering their foreign languages. You're never going to be able to take these advantages away from them. You can, at best, inconvenience them. And to what end?
Now, every practising teacher I've met will tell you smaller class sizes are great (I've taught in a variety of education settings so that's a lot of teachers) but I do wonder how much of this is just because it "feels" nicer, you know your students better, you get the impression you're delivering more personal learning, you're not so rushed off your feet. But the academic studies, particularly from the OECD, are less clear, with some evidence that bigger class sizes might be better if anything. I used to teach some Chinese sixth formers who were paying silly amounts of money for a UK education and whose parents were fairly senior industrialists/CCP members. Those kids had been to some of the more prestigious schools in China; their honest feeling was that they got a better education there with 40 to a class and quite old-fashioned teaching (unlike popular British perception it wasn't just rote learning though and people underestimate how much groupwork, problem-solving, getting kids to stand up and explain etc goes on in Chinese schools), compared to the small-group-size, more individualised teaching they got over here. So if anyone has a very strong preconceived idea about the class size effect, based on "common sense" or even your own personal experience, I'd suggest it's worth applying Cromwell's rule here. For me the jury's still out on this - if you asked me how it felt I'd lean one way, but if I look at the objective evidence I lean the other - and if there is an effect, it might be smaller than you imagine.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely g one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
The logic of your position is everyone should send their kids to the worst, most inadequate rated schools so nobody is disadvantaged, that just means everyone ends up with a terrible education
The Trump supporters protesting against the lockdown in Michigan today are not the sort of people to meekly allow Trump to be defeated at the ballot box. I expect there will be violence at polling stations in Democrat-voting areas in swing states in November.
Lòks like quite a few are determined to be dead or incapacitated by then.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
There are hospitals rated outstanding, requires improvement and inadequate by the CQC just as there are schools given those ratings by OFSTED
This conversation (on education) has been going on for over seven hours! (Well, it's been going on since 2005, but going on continuously for seven hours without many of the participants seeming to need a break.) I salute your stamina.
In the time since my earlier forays into it around 5 o'clock I have discovered an Edward VIII pillar box (on Framingham Road, Sale), arranged an all-daughters sleepover in the living room, watched two old episodes of Taskmaster and gained a slot for a Tesco delivery.
Yes, well you've got your priorities all wrong. OTOH maybe I have. I'm seeing double now.
And STILL nobody will submit and agree that private schools need to go. I'm going to try a different tack next time. Something more subtle.
I reckon it would be a good idea for you to have a long, hard think about why you want to achieve the objectives you do, and whether there's something else underlying it. Because if there is, it's possible you're barking up completely the wrong tree. Would abolition or limitation of private education genuinely further your aims? Not your proximate aim of hindering the upper classes in their efforts to keep their kids educationally outperforming the UK average which is a rather negative ambition, but whatever your ultimate, more positive aim is?
(As an aside, a contrarian thought: every society since the dawn of history, and goodness knows how much of pre-history too, has had elites. To what extent that elite were hereditary in nature has ebbed and flowed over time and geography, but there's always been a component of it. Yes, everyone who argues private schools don't foster social inequality has their head in the sands, and if they raise the issue of scholarships that doesn't nearly begin to cover it. And yet ... if we are going to have an elite, is it such a bad thing for it to be an educated one? Is it preferable that the wealthy spend the cash on mansions or holidays or flashy cars? Don't we, as a society, "value" education? Is it so bad if, of all the things they direct their money towards, they choose education?)
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
There are hospitals rated outstanding, requires improvement and inadequate by the CQC just as there are schools given those ratings by OFSTED
Sure. But we don't accept it as being fine and dandy.
Everyone seems to accept it's just inevitable that the children of the affluent will go to better schools than the rest.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
I explained why it matters already and now will do so for the last time. If you ban private schools all that will happen is those parents will crowd out poor people from the areas with good schools by buying up all the properties whereas currently those areas usually still have some room for the poor.
All you will do in effect is reserve the good state schools for those with wealth when and extra 7% or so of pupils get crammed into those good state schools.
The poor will be left with just the sink schools full of kids who don't want to learn because they have been taught education is pointless.
Moreover I refuse to give people like you an inch because when you try your experiment and it doesn't work then you will insist on going further. No doubt you will start trying to insist on allocating only 20% of places in good schools for well off parent's kids or something equally daft and make those good state schools take in the feckless offspring of feckless parents. Thus turning those good schools into the same sink schools....but hey it will be great because now everyone gets an equal education.
You have certainly advocated more spending on health, public sector salaries etc.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely g one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
The logic of your position is everyone should send their kids to the worst, most inadequate rated schools so nobody is disadvantaged, that just means everyone ends up with a terrible education
That is a caricature of my position not the logic of it.
Abolish the Department for Education, close every state school in the country, and give every parent the money in school vouchers.
The free market will sort it out, and we'll finally have a truly world class school education system.
Every child will be educated brilliantly.
Abolish the target of 50% of school kids going to university, remove university status from most of the former polys.
Abolish fees for those that study degrees in the most important subjects, such as STEM, medicine, engineering, computing based degrees, history, and law degrees.
I am quite happy to serve as Education Secretary.
Happier than the rest of us, perhaps.
A bit like Michael Gove.
I'd make sure every child was educated. The best teachers would command salaries that would be at the top end of society.
I realise I was lucky that my uni fees were paid for, I want to go back to that.
TSE for EdSec 7 years ago.
(So my extremely high pay under that system would also be reflected in my pension.)
To my surprise, I'm with TSE here. Pay teachers much more. And thereby make it more competitive to get into. Some teachers - like my daughter's young, enthusiastic year 3 teacher - are worth much more. Some - like my daughter's occasionally adequate year 4 teacher - aren't. I can't see any way of getting more of the former and fewer od the latter without paying them more.
While pay matters, I don't think it the decisive reason that so many teachers do not stick to the profession*. Other elements might well matter more, particularly a supportive culture of respect for teachers from parents and from the hierarchy of education and government. That is not so easy to address.
* I am sure that we all agree that poor teachers who are not improving should move on, I suspect that the good ones are as likely to quit. That sort of reflective self doubt in a professional is both a key to being an inspiring teacher, but also to that crisis of faith.
All the best doctors that I know came close to dropping out. Indeed one of my colleagues is quite a competent roofer, having done that for a year before his mates on the site persuaded him back into medicine.
I have friends in the UK who are teachers, friends in the UK who gave up teaching, and friends in Germany who are teachers, including my girlfriend.
All of the UK teachers I know who gave up, did so because of the crazy out of hours workload not because of the pay. Comparing the working conditions between the two countries I see two differences. Thie biggest difference is that homework is not marked by the teachers in Germany. Exams are marked by teachers, but not the standard homework.
The other difference is the teachers in Germany are there to help the pupils learn as much as possible. They are not there to maximise the exam results. The difference might seem subtle to some outside of education, but the effect this has on job satisfaction is considerable. Once the job satisfaction gets wringed out of you that's when you leave the profession.
Germany is still largely selective, with gymnasiums in most states the equivalent of our grammar schools
For a start none of the teachers I know in Germany are in Gymnasien, but secondly what has this at all got to do with what I wrote?
Good for you, that does not change my point at all.
It is a big difference as Germany is full of academically selective state schools as we used to have 50 years ago
I disagree with you.
Fifty years ago we had a tier of usually great grammar school, and then a tier of pretty awful secondary moderns that offered little to no sensible vocational training. Secondary moderns were starved of money, and did a terrible job of producing the people the economy needed.
The very fact that today the discussions are all about the grammar element demonstrates how f*cked up this is. We don't fail the top 10% of kids. They go to University and do very well. We fail the next 90%.
If we want to return to selective education, I sincerely hope that the effort will be spent on making the schools for the 90% as good as possible, not on saving middle class parents from having to spend on school fees.
Agreed. But I’d add that such a simple bifurcated structure (the technical schools barely got started) is way too rigid. As in politics, pluralism is a desirable thing.
The way we have things arranged is that the most socially advantaged pupils have the most school resource invested in them. It ought to be the opposite.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but this to me is the heart of the matter.
Since the introduction of pupil premium, that’s not entirely true - and grammar schools are generally not better funded than the rest of the state sector (though the Kent system, which contains most of the UK’s grammars is pretty awful).
And one of the biggest educational differentiators is preschool parental attention and engagement.
Yes, the PP was an excellent policy.
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
Who gives a damn how high it is, it is not tax payer money and each that goes private leaves state school pupils with a bigger slice of funding. Once again parents make a damn sight more difference if you have scummy parents who don't give a toss then it will affect you far more than which school you go to.
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
On the contrary. I favour raising funding per pupil very significantly and all children being educated to a similar and high standard.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
There are definitely good hospitals and bad hospitals. I know a few nurses at my local one and they all say the same. If you are ill try and get into a different hospital.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
But we don't routinely talk about "good hospitals" as if it's an expected and accepted part of life that some are much better than others. Because it isn't expected and accepted. This is my point.
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
There are hospitals rated outstanding, requires improvement and inadequate by the CQC just as there are schools given those ratings by OFSTED
Sure. But we don't accept it as being fine and dandy.
Everyone seems to accept it's just inevitable that the children of the affluent will go to better schools than the rest.
I don't.
Don't be daft no one accepts it I certainly don't however my solution is pull those schools up whereas yours is get rid of the better schools. The only way to do that however is to address the parenting of those kids, something you outright refuse to do or so you said yesterday.
What is wrong with focusing on the top 10%? That is where most of the lawyers, doctors, business leaders and top politicians and civil servants will come from and we want to make entry into those jobs as meritocratic as possible with top state schools to challenge top private schools.
We do. I agree 100%.
Now, fifty years ago, more people at the top of industry and the civil service and the like came from state schools.
So, more meritocratic, right?
Well. Hopefully. But not necessarily. According to the Independent Schools Council, in the late 1960s, before the abolition of grammar schools there were around 148,000 students at private schools. That number rose dramatically as the grammar schools were abolished (with a large number of direct grant schools becoming genuinely indepent). Today something like 600,000 kids are in private schools.
So, you've dramatically increased the percentage of kids in private schools.
As grammar schools have been abolished, many of those who could afford selective education have typically taken their kids out of the state sector and put them in private schools.
Are grammar schools, then, an opportunity for parents like me to save on school fees (whoopee!), or do they increase social mobility? If most of the kids who end up in grammar schools would have been privately educated anyway, then it's by no means clear that they do.
Some pupils who end up in private schools would certainly have gone to grammars 50 years ago.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
OK.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
According to the Sutton Trust study (which is admittedly a few years old now) Grammar schools have a slightly elevated average pass mark for GCSEs and A levels but without the surrounding non-Grammar schools having a perceptible lowered mark. So overall Grammar schools improve the educational achievement without penalising those who do not attend Grammars.
The Trump supporters protesting against the lockdown in Michigan today are not the sort of people to meekly allow Trump to be defeated at the ballot box. I expect there will be violence at polling stations in Democrat-voting areas in swing states in November.
In 2001 I read a provocative piece by Roy Hattersley in the Guardian, decrying Blair's notions of "meritocracy" and "social mobility" as fundamentally at odds with Hattersley's preferred ideal of equality. Not all PBers have value systems aligned with his (!), but I reckon most would concede his case has a compelling internal logic. I meet many progressive types - often high-flying graduates from middle-class but non-"posh" stock - who are firm believers that your life course should be set by how well you do in exams you take at 21. Excellent grades at uni, especially a "world-class" one (yes, the kind of person awfully keen to say how their alma mater fared on the latest meaningless set of "global rankings") prove you're one of the "talented" few, so should get onto a top graduate career programme and be running the country (or at least a significant component of its public services or commercial economy) in a few decades. I'm not sure why that's massively preferable to selecting life courses by virtue of an exam taken at 11. There's still a lot of maturing to do at 21 and performing well at exams or coursework in an educational institution is not the same thing as managing complex organisational changes.
Scrapping private schools seems mostly about changing who gets the spoils, and trying to ensure a greater proportion of wealth and power head to a particular group of "successful" people based on their "raw ability" (quotation marks advisedly, as even its proponents prefer to leave it largely undefined, and whether it be luckily inherited genes or parental attitude or socio-economic conditions, one's educational achievements never reflect solely upon the individual - but I digress), essentially their good fortune to have talent/skill that's highly valued at this time, and to decorrelate from their parents' wealth. I can see why it might be attractive but if that's your game it seems a superficial one. You just end up replacing one lot of people lording it over us, with another.
If your fundamental issue is disgruntlement at Britain's deep inequalities and strongly hierarchical society, then changing who ascends the pinnacle is attacking the wrong problem. You need to challenge much more. How do we flatten social structures? Why should "high flyers" who went to a "top university" clamber so much smoother up the greasy pole? Why is there a greasy pole at all, or even the notion that the "higher" the "better"? (And even tougher questions, reflecting biological and economic realities: how do we do this while recognising some people genuinely do have different skills to others, including scare skills which certain organisations might find highly value-adding? How do we reward "effort" and its close but not identical cousin entrepreneurship? I enjoyed A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes - great lockdown reading! - as a glimpse of how hard it is even in a radical, revolutionary environment to enact a rethinking of social and economic structures.)
Comments
As first babies are usually late, there was a 90+% chance I'd end up one of the oldest in the year.
Sadly I was born early and ended up one fo the youngest in the year.
Fortunately, I beat the odds. But I am the exception.
Fred and chums literally boasted about failing to do due dilligence over the purchase.
Cnuts.
Do remember that Leicester is running about half the national average, about a quarter of Birmingham, just 45 miles away.
However for a pupil from a council estate who goes to a grammar rather than an average comp it could make the difference that gets them to Oxbridge or another top university and a professional career
But the funding per pupil in private schools is triple that in state schools and half of everyone who can afford the fees choose that route. Therefore the school resource devoted to the most affluent and advantaged is disproportionately high.
And I know that's right, what you say about the early years, before ANY school is relevant. This is correlated to class and money, I would venture, but is far from determined by those things.
We don't put enough effort into supporting the young children in a class.
There are many solutions.
You could segment the year into four groups, and people are educated and tested with their quartile.
In reality, you'd only need it up to about 13/14, but it would make a massive difference early on, where young kids are grouped with slow kids.
Laundry cannot keep up with demand. We are running out of theatre scrubs too.
Do counties that have grammar schools have better educational achievement for poorer pupils or worse?
Can just about risk this comment in the ostensible absence of @ydoethur and @malcolmg
No.
Some like Buckinghamshire also have better than average GCSE results overall
Are the used reusable gowns sent to the laundry & then autoclaved as per the procedure for gowns used in the operating theatre?
If that is the procedure the system could it speeded up by sending the gowns directly for autoclaving, it's not as if they are soaked in blood.
Itd be nice though.
What is your source for poorer kids "getting ... into Oxbridge and Russell Group universities certainly better."
I'd like it to be true. But is it?
Some parents like these schools purely because they reduce the parenting effort with longer hours and dpirts etc clubs included. Its more of a one stop shop for hands off parenting.
Harry is pretty bright, though, isn't he? That California decision seemed to say so.
Looks like no resupply until the 27th. That may be a problem in this "peak week".
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/17/trump-states-stay-at-home-orders-192386
Trump is not a wiser head in any Universe.
They were so sure the peak had been on the 26/27th of March previously. I feel sad for them
Stop trying to force everyone to level down to sink schools which is where your theories lead.
https://twitter.com/Lauthfee/status/1250827412583088129?s=19
Infantile twat.
Reputable scientists are always very careful about probabilities; you'll certainly never find them assigning a zero or a one to any event unless they're completely sure of it! If a group with a proven track record in this area is giving themselves a 0.8 probability of success (to say nothing of committing resources to scaling up production before they are sure that it'll work) then one would assume that they have very good reason to feel confident of their chances.
That's not to say I interpret this as meaning that they will be successful, because there's still also a reasonable chance that the project will fall flat on its face (and it could also take considerably longer than the group is hoping for, even if it does ultimately work out,) but I still think that these reports represent grounds for cautious optimism. I certainly wouldn't write it off as hopeless.
Has Hancock resigned yet?
Can you imagine the uproar if this was a Labour fiasco
We went through capacity problems with our face masks & respirators during SARS in 2002 & increased capacity afterwards..
However, you need to bear in mind the level of investment required for additional machinery is certainly not cheap & the last thing you need as a manufacturer is very expensive equipment working on a single shift waiting for an epidemic every 10 years or so.
The problem with PPE gown production is that it is basically manual.
The first stage is automated when layers of fabric are cut to the design (marker as it's known in the business).. The backs, fronts, sleeves & cuffs then need to be either glued or stitched together manually. We did design our own gown machine, enormously expensive with running speeds lower than manual operations!
Due to the high manual content & pressure on in-market pricing production is in low labour cost countries primarily China, northern Mexico & now Vietnam.. I set up a plant in Saudi Arabia which basically sourced the Gulf region with massive support from the Saudi government that wanted to reduce its dependency on imports.
My first day at my new school I sat next to someone who coincidentally had the same birthday as me but was two years older than me.
If a poor child has a 1 in 10 chance of going to grammar school and, and a 1-in-10 chance of going to Oxbridge, then they'd have 1-in-100 chance in the grammar system.
If they had a 1 in 50 chance at a comprehensive, then they'd have a lower overall chance in the grammar system.
He is so gone...
Then we just order slightly more PPE than is needed, accumulate a stockpile in various warehouses around the country, and calculate the excess so that the first consignments in the warehouses are nearing their use-by dates and can be given away (perhaps as overseas aid to countries that are short of kit for immediate use) and replaced, just at the point where the warehouses become full?
Consequently, the NHS gets everything it needs, a strategic reserve is maintained to hedge against a recurrence of the present crisis, and the factories are kept working through being in receipt of an endless supply of regular orders.
I wish to get away from the whole concept of Good Schools. The very ubiquity of the term implies that we must have Bad ones.
Do we talk relentlessly about Good Hospitals? About Good Police Stations? No.
Your point about parents is a great one but it does not mean that schools are unimportant. They are important. Very.
I think that could work for PPE gowns, head, & footwear..
Could also have contingency arrangements with clothing manufacturers for gowns.
Certainly a country the size of the UK could support its own Face mask / respirator factory & be competitive.
That only leaves gloves which are basically produced in countries like Malaysia & Thailand, but there doesn't seem to have been problems with sourcing.
Is there nothing you don't want to throw more money at? What tax rate are you planning on charging? 100%? Actually that probably wouldn't be enough for all the things you are wanting cash spent on.
State schools that are failing are not failing because they have bad teachers or less funding than other better schools. They are failing because of the type of pupil they are full of. I know I went to one.
In the time since my earlier forays into it around 5 o'clock I have discovered an Edward VIII pillar box (on Framingham Road, Sale), arranged an all-daughters sleepover in the living room, watched two old episodes of Taskmaster and gained a slot for a Tesco delivery.
You have obviously not read the article
I don't recall proposing any big spending other than this - more on schools. And I believe in sound money so it must come from taxation or from cuts elsewhere. There is scope. If there isn't, it will have to wait.
OK, so some schools struggle because their intake is full of kids who don't want to be there. I know this. So what? Why does it follow from this that we should take the most advantaged kids and advantage them some more through our schools system? I do not see the logic there.
Now, every practising teacher I've met will tell you smaller class sizes are great (I've taught in a variety of education settings so that's a lot of teachers) but I do wonder how much of this is just because it "feels" nicer, you know your students better, you get the impression you're delivering more personal learning, you're not so rushed off your feet. But the academic studies, particularly from the OECD, are less clear, with some evidence that bigger class sizes might be better if anything. I used to teach some Chinese sixth formers who were paying silly amounts of money for a UK education and whose parents were fairly senior industrialists/CCP members. Those kids had been to some of the more prestigious schools in China; their honest feeling was that they got a better education there with 40 to a class and quite old-fashioned teaching (unlike popular British perception it wasn't just rote learning though and people underestimate how much groupwork, problem-solving, getting kids to stand up and explain etc goes on in Chinese schools), compared to the small-group-size, more individualised teaching they got over here. So if anyone has a very strong preconceived idea about the class size effect, based on "common sense" or even your own personal experience, I'd suggest it's worth applying Cromwell's rule here. For me the jury's still out on this - if you asked me how it felt I'd lean one way, but if I look at the objective evidence I lean the other - and if there is an effect, it might be smaller than you imagine.
And STILL nobody will submit and agree that private schools need to go. I'm going to try a different tack next time. Something more subtle.
I reckon it would be a good idea for you to have a long, hard think about why you want to achieve the objectives you do, and whether there's something else underlying it. Because if there is, it's possible you're barking up completely the wrong tree. Would abolition or limitation of private education genuinely further your aims? Not your proximate aim of hindering the upper classes in their efforts to keep their kids educationally outperforming the UK average which is a rather negative ambition, but whatever your ultimate, more positive aim is?
(As an aside, a contrarian thought: every society since the dawn of history, and goodness knows how much of pre-history too, has had elites. To what extent that elite were hereditary in nature has ebbed and flowed over time and geography, but there's always been a component of it. Yes, everyone who argues private schools don't foster social inequality has their head in the sands, and if they raise the issue of scholarships that doesn't nearly begin to cover it. And yet ... if we are going to have an elite, is it such a bad thing for it to be an educated one? Is it preferable that the wealthy spend the cash on mansions or holidays or flashy cars? Don't we, as a society, "value" education? Is it so bad if, of all the things they direct their money towards, they choose education?)
Everyone seems to accept it's just inevitable that the children of the affluent will go to better schools than the rest.
I don't.
All you will do in effect is reserve the good state schools for those with wealth when and extra 7% or so of pupils get crammed into those good state schools.
The poor will be left with just the sink schools full of kids who don't want to learn because they have been taught education is pointless.
Moreover I refuse to give people like you an inch because when you try your experiment and it doesn't work then you will insist on going further. No doubt you will start trying to insist on allocating only 20% of places in good schools for well off parent's kids or something equally daft and make those good state schools take in the feckless offspring of feckless parents. Thus turning those good schools into the same sink schools....but hey it will be great because now everyone gets an equal education.
You have certainly advocated more spending on health, public sector salaries etc.
OK, thanks. So reading those two posts, they merit a reply better than I can do right now.
But not better than I can do tomorrow.
It's a promise.
Scrapping private schools seems mostly about changing who gets the spoils, and trying to ensure a greater proportion of wealth and power head to a particular group of "successful" people based on their "raw ability" (quotation marks advisedly, as even its proponents prefer to leave it largely undefined, and whether it be luckily inherited genes or parental attitude or socio-economic conditions, one's educational achievements never reflect solely upon the individual - but I digress), essentially their good fortune to have talent/skill that's highly valued at this time, and to decorrelate from their parents' wealth. I can see why it might be attractive but if that's your game it seems a superficial one. You just end up replacing one lot of people lording it over us, with another.
If your fundamental issue is disgruntlement at Britain's deep inequalities and strongly hierarchical society, then changing who ascends the pinnacle is attacking the wrong problem. You need to challenge much more. How do we flatten social structures? Why should "high flyers" who went to a "top university" clamber so much smoother up the greasy pole? Why is there a greasy pole at all, or even the notion that the "higher" the "better"? (And even tougher questions, reflecting biological and economic realities: how do we do this while recognising some people genuinely do have different skills to others, including scare skills which certain organisations might find highly value-adding? How do we reward "effort" and its close but not identical cousin entrepreneurship? I enjoyed A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes - great lockdown reading! - as a glimpse of how hard it is even in a radical, revolutionary environment to enact a rethinking of social and economic structures.)