And one member of the Government has taken a hands-on approach to making sure this happens – deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam was pictured working at the vaccine clinic in Nottingham at the weekend.
I said that the idea that this was charged £30 for two weeks was going to be fake news and I said I was prepared to do a charity bet to a food bank or other charity of your choice if I was wrong, if you wanted to take the bet.
I also said that the parcels were poor quality, unacceptable and something should be done about it but we should get to the truth.
Well *drum roll* it turns out I was . . . 100% correct.
The parcel involved was poor and I am glad there's been an apology and they're fixing it for the future - but it was not a £30 parcel. Instead it was a £10.50 one.
Still poor value for £10.50 but poor value for £10.50 and poor value for £30 are an order of magnitude different.
So I don't know if you took up my offer of the bet. If you did, please feel free to donate to a food bank or other charity of your choice. Thank you.
You get a like for continuing to dig your pit down towards Java.
I'm not digging a pit, I was right. 100% unambiguously correct.
The schools were charged £10.50 not £30 which was my contention, that there wasn't a chance on earth that was a £30 box. It was a £10 box (£10.50 technically) not a £30 box.
Last I checked £10 does not equal £30. Nor does £10.50.
Still poor, still needs sorting, I said all that, but the idea it was "what £30 gets you"? Unadulterated bullshit. Of course.
Unless you think the truth does not matter I was correct, wasn't I?
In Derbyshire a £30 box costs £14.40 retail so well under a tenner for Compass at wholesale
Still got to pay £4.7m PA to the CEO somehow I suppose
I'm sorry, but this sort of stuff is utter, vindictive, childish crap. The company makes virtually no money whatsoever from this contract. It's not a large part of its business at all. It's an extremely well-run company - one of the best in the world at what it does - and we need more such companies in the UK and paying UK corporation tax.
I can't comment on the actual food boxes (except that a lot of the pictures were quite obviously nothing to do with any big supplier), but I can make the very obvious point that the cost of sourcing, packing, and delivering food boxes is not just the cost of the raw ingredients. I'd have thought that at the very least £5 per box for putting it together, taking into account dietary requirements per child, and delivering it, would be what you'd expect, maybe quite a bit more depending on the quantities and the location. (That's one reason why vouchers probably make more sense, but that's a different argument).
Look at the Morrison £20 boxes for comparison. They manage to do far more for much less, with better nutrition and variety.
To be honest that is probably sufficient but it still leaves £10 for delivery and some more items.
As for the existing suppliers:
Why are they using mostly overpriced branded stuff? Why are they giving bottled water? Why do they repeatedly get in trouble for poor quality and quantity?
At best they really dont care, so if they dont make any money from it either why dont they leave it to someone else?
Supermarkets are always going to be cheaper and better value for money than any alternative as they have the scale and buying power to dominate. Getting a middle company involved to box it up is never going to be cost efficient.
Which is another reason why vouchers are far superior. If you're going to offer help then let the free market decide, give a voucher they can spend anywhere and let the parents take responsibility for themselves. Free market economics.
Morrisons is a box! All anyone else would need to do is deliver it for under £10. Even Royal Mail could do that.
But yes it goes back to vouchers are best but the Tory party voted against continuing the national voucher scheme because they think it goes on crack and prostitutes.
I'm saying it should be vouchers, I have never said crack and prostitutes and I am against any such judgementalism. I believe in libertarianism and free market economics - if you need to give to someone then give to them and let them choose how to spend it.
But yes Morrisons is in a box - the cost to them largely is the box. They're a supermarket they have a ton of food on site. That is the point. They can bulk order and get massive deliveries that go into the shelves or into boxes. That is why supermarkets are such good value. Morrisons may have marginal overheads in packing the box, but they will be tiny compared to others businesses.
A company with overheads is never going to compete with Morrisons.
That rather points to a company like Morrisons being awarded the contract then doesn't it?
However, in fairness, the Morrisons box would need to be modified - it contains no fresh stuff, such as fruit, cheese, butter, or fresh milk. But it's an ok start.
I'm saying nobody should be awarded the contract.
The parents should get the voucher and let them decide in a free market environment where they want to spend it. If they want to spend it at Morrisons let them. If they want to spend it at ASDA that should be up to them. Ditto Aldi, or Waitrose, or M&S, or anywhere else.
How difficult would it for you to have dropped the rest of your guff and just say this? Instead of all these hungry child box outrages, just go back to vouchers? There is no need for you to defend Tory donor profiteering when you disagree with the policy to hand them public money.
Because I don't like lies and dishonesty even when they're making an argument I agree with, I would prefer the truth to win.
Yes voucher would be better than boxes. Yes the box was ridiculous. No the box clearly didn't cost £30 (it cost £10.50 we now know).
I don't see how any of that is unreasonable. If you're saying just because someone says something I agree with I should let dishonesty slide I'm not like that.
New cases now trending down - and given the number of tests, positivity rate too - admissions & deaths still a horror show:
Going to be that way for a long time to come. You can't have days and days of 60k cases and not end up with lots of deaths.
Deaths might get up to 2.5k per day at the peak.
And the worst of it is that there's so little to be done about those deaths. The infections have happened, and a percentage won't survive. For some people, we are past the point of no return.
All we can do is hope that hospitals aren't swamped and get the infection rate back down as quickly as we can.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
Your example is stupid. I don't care what A Level grades my surgeon got so long as they passed their medical exams. I wouldn't even care if they failed their medical exams first time of asking as long as they passed subsequently, or what university they went to, so long as they are good at their job.
Presumably HYUFD would also ban anyone who did not pass their driving test on the first attempt - they are clearly incorrigbly and inevitably bad drivers no matter how many decades they have been on the road now, even if they have been in less accidents than someone who passed first go.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
Johnson hit his limit at 18. Cameron is smart, but didn't have nuch of a career pre politics. Itv digital failure.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
Are you an Oxford alumnus? If so, it fits my theory that the place ruins people morally and intellectually.
I am. Though if your theory is correct, you must have been there for decades.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
I seem to recollect we did calculus for O level Maths. Maybe I am mis-remembering.
Calculus was reduced, not eliminated.
So is that integral rather than differentiation or the other way around? Too long ago for me and, amazingly enough, not used since economics in second year at University.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
Your example is stupid. I don't care what A Level grades my surgeon got so long as they passed their medical exams. I wouldn't even care if they failed their medical exams first time of asking as long as they passed subsequently, or what university they went to, so long as they are good at their job.
Presumably HYUFD would also ban anyone who did not pass their driving test on the first attempt - they are clearly incorrigbly and inevitably bad drivers no matter how many decades they have been on the road now, even if they have been in less accidents than someone who passed first go.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
There's a minimum level, perhaps, but I'd bet that some of the A grade doctors the ones that ignore what people are telling them and end up making mistakes. They might also have a tremor and not be very coordinated.
Most jobs require more than pure academic ability.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Why don't you let the admissions people at Cambridge and Oxford decide whether there is a case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student?
You clearly are too proud and too arrogant to see beyond your own experience as a private school pupil, and lack the empathy to understand the challenges and endeavours others go through.
Just because you go to private school does not mean you are automatically Lord Fauntleroy.
Plenty of private school pupils come from very average families on bursaries and scholarships, plenty of state school pupils go to top performing state schools in expensive and leafy catchment areas and come from wealthy middle class homes
Of course. But a generalization does not have to be 100% accurate to have (macro rather than micro) utility.
Happily a lot of people have done just that - its called competition. Don't like Compass or Bidfood or the other big players? Plenty of smaller operators who don't have shareholders to enrich who operate on more realistic margins.
Wholesale is a bloody brilliant industry to work with. Enterprising, innovative, warm.
Yes, exactly. It's a very competitive business, the barriers to entry aren't enormous, and margins are thin.
Which is why I know that the accusations about 'rip-offs' and 'Tory donors' and CEO pay are garbage.
Surely the issue is - and it's one Richard you are missing, that Compass is a catering company - it is not a wholesale company and it is therefore trying to do a job which would be better done by someone else who has experience of that area.
Yes I can see why Compass has been tasked with doing it - it's they job to feed school children at Lunchtime but they have then decided to do a job which would have been better offloaded elsewhere.
That's a fair point, but I imagine that the reason is that they have spare capacity, but the normal wholesalers (and indeed supermarkets) don't, so the latter didn't bid for the contracts.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
I'd want the best surgeon.
Quite. Years down the line into your career how well you did in A levels or even degree won't be the best indicator of quality. Some people might well peak at A Level for a start, and on the job people might prove themselves better than someone who did better than them at University. The analogy having failed medical exams multiple times is not great, since you know the person operating on you will have passed all the necessary qualifications, so that element is fine.
My experience as an employer is that above a certain threshold, there is very little correlation between exam success and work performance. The skills required to pass exams are often very different to those required to be outstanding in a job.
Probably why so little attention is paid to precisely what people got at A level or degree once they are in a job, and then move to another job and so on.
Though I did a work qualification where no matter how many decades people had been on the job you had to prove GCSE or O level proficiency in English and Maths. Didn't matter if you had been working there for years, or had a masters degree in those subjects or whatever, you had to prove GCSE level. Some exam boards make you pay even to request copies, even if they find they do not hold them, whilst others will refund if it turns out your exam board was someone else.
My father commented on how busy everywhere was when he went for his jab. Now it might be that maybe ust hasn't been out that much for past year, but i do wonder about how well lockdown is going compared to last March....i think people have become desensitized to reports of 1000+ dying per day.
A quick guestimate is that about 40% of all UK deaths at the moment are due to COVID-19, so it must be by far the leading cause of death right now.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
shrugs, that's how the place works.
I would say I was always half-a-day behind where I wanted to be throughout my UG time there. Always another deadline, always something else to do.
But yeah, that anecdote holds precious little water.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
Are you an Oxford alumnus? If so, it fits my theory that the place ruins people morally and intellectually.
Gibbon would certainly agree with you. But not my experience.
I didn't go to Oxbridge but just about every other member of my family did and when I visited them I met precious few twats and a lot of intellectually voracious, smart people.
I'm sure the twats were elsewhere at the time and that they no doubt existed. But like all things there is good and bad in everything*.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
The institution is fine, even if many individuals there aren't always up to scratch.
I mean, on one hand we've got the Jenner institute making a vaccine, and on the other hand, Sunetra Gupta...
Yep, that's very fair. My point was more about as teaching institutions.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
One idea would be send a group of high performing students from "inner city comps" to a sixth-form style college for a year or 2 *after* 18. Give them some time and teaching to make lost ground before throwing them in the deep end....
Forcing them into catchup at university doesn't sound like the best way to equalise outcomes.
Did no one notice that the BBB story is entirely about Cambridge, and that it involves a fully funded foundation year ?
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
QAnon and ‘Stop the Steal’ rioters will be in a world of hurt as the law crashes down on them
"This is what you need to absorb: QAnon and “stop the steal” are forever associated with a violent attack against the United States. Maybe that’s not what it’s meant to you, maybe you think that’s a misread of last week’s events, but that’s how the real Deep State, a lot of elected officials, and much of the public sees it. If that isn’t what you signed up for, now would be a good time to get out."
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
One idea would be send a group of high performing students from "inner city comps" to a sixth-form style college for a year or 2 *after* 18. Give them some time and teaching to make lost ground before throwing them in the deep end....
Forcing them into catchup at university doesn't sound like the best way to equalise outcomes.
Isn't that literally what a foundation year is?
The two brightest mates I had at Ox were both state educated. One with me at a grammar (he came top in the year for Law) and another at a Somerset comprehensive.
Oxbridge intake is very small, and access has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. My experience was that there was more of a problem encouraging applications from state schools, than favouring of one school type over another. Frankly, from what I have seen the interviewers are brilliant at sniffing out talent once it is presented to them. Reintroduction of aptitude tests for many subjects has only improved this.
Out of the (say) 65 people I had any form of educational contact with at Ox, there was just one who I didn't think was cutting it.
Is there an entry advantage from private schools? Probably a small one, based on smaller class sizes.
Does it make much difference once there? Not in my experience. (The one I didn't think was cutting it, ex-MPS, got a Desmond).
The other thing (and frankly, the only benefit I can see of selective schools) is that it's much easier for keen students to excel if they are surrounded by other keen students. If you get a critical mass in a class (and it only takes a handful if they have big enough personalities), it lifts everyone else.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
The GCSE syllabus no longer covers calculus, but it is dealt with in great depth in the basic A Level Maths syllabus, the main omission being the lack of any study of calculus from first principles. The need for additional courses for university freshers is more down to the fact that many chose to study maths at uni after taking only Mathematics at A Level, whereas university courses start from the premise that they have also studied Further Maths at A Level. So students start without any knowledge at all of many topics encountered only at Further Maths, imaginary numbers being but one example, and they need to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these very quickly in order to progress.
I don't believe calculus was ever part of GCSE. I did GCSE (1990, A) and A-Level (1992, maths, and calculus - from first principles - was literally the very first thing we studied in A Level.
It's unlikely that you studied it truly from first principles at school. Because a first-principles exposition needs to begin with a definition of the real numbers. A bit advanced for school, I'd say.
--AS
I only studied maths at school, not at uni (Traditional and Modern Maths at O, Maths and Further Maths at A).
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
Happily a lot of people have done just that - its called competition. Don't like Compass or Bidfood or the other big players? Plenty of smaller operators who don't have shareholders to enrich who operate on more realistic margins.
Wholesale is a bloody brilliant industry to work with. Enterprising, innovative, warm.
Yes, exactly. It's a very competitive business, the barriers to entry aren't enormous, and margins are thin.
Which is why I know that the accusations about 'rip-offs' and 'Tory donors' and CEO pay are garbage.
Surely the issue is - and it's one Richard you are missing, that Compass is a catering company - it is not a wholesale company and it is therefore trying to do a job which would be better done by someone else who has experience of that area.
Yes I can see why Compass has been tasked with doing it - it's they job to feed school children at Lunchtime but they have then decided to do a job which would have been better offloaded elsewhere.
That's a fair point, but I imagine that the reason is that they have spare capacity, but the normal wholesalers (and indeed supermarkets) don't, so the latter didn't bid for the contracts.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
Yes I hear that but she got a 1st. If she had *really* been struggling she would have got something else.
When I look at the calibre of the privately educated, former Oxford students in the House of Commons and, especially, on the government benches, I can't help thinking that maybe such institutions are not as brilliant as we have been led to believe.
I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs.
But Johnson was highly rated at Eton and Cameron got a First at Oxford. I don't think it's accurate to refer to them as the dregs. The problem is an excessive sense of entitlement, and it is widespread (but not universal) among this group.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
I'd want the best surgeon.
Quite. Years down the line into your career how well you did in A levels or even degree won't be the best indicator of quality. Some people might well peak at A Level for a start, and on the job people might prove themselves better than someone who did better than them at University. The analogy having failed medical exams multiple times is not great, since you know the person operating on you will have passed all the necessary qualifications, so that element is fine.
My experience as an employer is that above a certain threshold, there is very little correlation between exam success and work performance. The skills required to pass exams are often very different to those required to be outstanding in a job.
Probably why so little attention is paid to precisely what people got at A level or degree once they are in a job, and then move to another job and so on.
Though I did a work qualification where no matter how many decades people had been on the job you had to prove GCSE or O level proficiency in English and Maths. Didn't matter if you had been working there for years, or had a masters degree in those subjects or whatever, you had to prove GCSE level. Some exam boards make you pay even to request copies, even if they find they do not hold them, whilst others will refund if it turns out your exam board was someone else.
When I applied to business schools, Notre Dame had a requirement that I pass an English as a Foreign Language test. Needless to say, I told them to take a running jump.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
Just the basic optics of that chart make it look as though the R factor is coming down nicwly across the board the past 4-5 days? (Although Wales outside the south/Valleys looks less good, especially Gwynedd - and Orkney has gone horrible, but that just might be a family of four.)
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
Yes I hear that but she got a 1st. If she had *really* been struggling she would have got something else.
What's your point here? I'm just using the words she used.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
The GCSE syllabus no longer covers calculus, but it is dealt with in great depth in the basic A Level Maths syllabus, the main omission being the lack of any study of calculus from first principles. The need for additional courses for university freshers is more down to the fact that many chose to study maths at uni after taking only Mathematics at A Level, whereas university courses start from the premise that they have also studied Further Maths at A Level. So students start without any knowledge at all of many topics encountered only at Further Maths, imaginary numbers being but one example, and they need to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these very quickly in order to progress.
I don't believe calculus was ever part of GCSE. I did GCSE (1990, A) and A-Level (1992, maths, and calculus - from first principles - was literally the very first thing we studied in A Level.
It's unlikely that you studied it truly from first principles at school. Because a first-principles exposition needs to begin with a definition of the real numbers. A bit advanced for school, I'd say.
--AS
I only studied maths at school, not at uni (Traditional and Modern Maths at O, Maths and Further Maths at A).
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea, but we might be talking about different "first principles". Without a formal definition of limit, you really can't define derivative*, and this needs an axiomatization of the reals that is definitely beyond school ability. I would guess that your "first principles" definition of derivative used an informal definition of limit. That's what I did at school too and it's fine, but it's not first principles because the limit definition is fudged.
I'm impressed that you did topology at school, though. Metric spaces only, or point set topology? Did they have enough examples to illustrate the concepts? Topology imo only got interesting when applied to function spaces.
*yes okay pure maths nerds, you can define derivative through measure theory independent of the reals, good luck teaching it to schoolchildren!
New cases now trending down - and given the number of tests, positivity rate too - admissions & deaths still a horror show:
Going to be that way for a long time to come. You can't have days and days of 60k cases and not end up with lots of deaths.
Deaths might get up to 2.5k per day at the peak.
And the worst of it is that there's so little to be done about those deaths. The infections have happened, and a percentage won't survive. For some people, we are past the point of no return.
All we can do is hope that hospitals aren't swamped and get the infection rate back down as quickly as we can.
Looks quite likely that we will end up at perhaps 150k deaths directly attributable to Covid and God knows how many more indirectly caused by it (cancer patients whose treatment is delayed, people with other emergencies for whom there is no space in ITUs etc etc). So north of 200k all in all. That is a huge number - in little more than one year we will have lost almost half the number of casualties the UK suffered in the six years of WW2.
Italy seems to have had a decent start to its vaccination rollout, given when they started. As like us they among the worst death stats in Europe, that's good news.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
One idea would be send a group of high performing students from "inner city comps" to a sixth-form style college for a year or 2 *after* 18. Give them some time and teaching to make lost ground before throwing them in the deep end....
Forcing them into catchup at university doesn't sound like the best way to equalise outcomes.
Isn't that literally what a foundation year is?
The two brightest mates I had at Ox were both state educated. One with me at a grammar (he came top in the year for Law) and another at a Somerset comprehensive.
Oxbridge intake is very small, and access has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. My experience was that there was more of a problem encouraging applications from state schools, than favouring of one school type over another. Frankly, from what I have seen the interviewers are brilliant at sniffing out talent once it is presented to them. Reintroduction of aptitude tests for many subjects has only improved this.
Out of the (say) 65 people I had any form of educational contact with at Ox, there was just one who I didn't think was cutting it.
Is there an entry advantage from private schools? Probably a small one, based on smaller class sizes.
Does it make much difference once there? Not in my experience. (The one I didn't think was cutting it, ex-MPS, got a Desmond).
The other thing (and frankly, the only benefit I can see of selective schools) is that it's much easier for keen students to excel if they are surrounded by other keen students. If you get a critical mass in a class (and it only takes a handful if they have big enough personalities), it lifts everyone else.
Peer influence is profound. If your mates are working hard you're more likely to. If your mates are burning £50 notes in front of the homeless, you'll be more tempted to do so.
The superabundance of emotionally abused boarding school victims and trust-fund hellions means that the pressure to become a dreadful twat is unendurable for many.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
Are you an Oxford alumnus? If so, it fits my theory that the place ruins people morally and intellectually.
Gibbon would certainly agree with you. But not my experience.
I didn't go to Oxbridge but just about every other member of my family did and when I visited them I met precious few twats and a lot of intellectually voracious, smart people.
I'm sure the twats were elsewhere at the time and that they no doubt existed. But like all things there is good and bad in everything*.
*PB banal truism of the day.
Of course nowadays you are more likely to find toffs at Exeter or Durham or St Andrews apart from a few very posh colleges like Magdalen, Oxford and Trinity, Cambridge.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
Yes I hear that but she got a 1st. If she had *really* been struggling she would have got something else.
What's your point here? I'm just using the words she used.
Very intelligent and charmingly modest. Why didn't you marry her?
Just the basic optics of that chart make it look as though the R factor is coming down nicwly across the board the past 4-5 days? (Although Wales outside the south/Valleys looks less good, especially Gwynedd - and Orkney has gone horrible, but that just might be a family of four.)
Orkney - yes, the flaw in the local R approach is that tiny populations etc etc... read it conjunction with the cases and scaled cases one.
Yes, it is looking hopeful on cases. We shall see.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Though note the details. ...The university usually requires A*AA at A level to get on degree courses, but a new one-year foundation course has 50 places for students who achieve BBB. If successful on the course, students can then go on to study for degrees. Social mobility campaigners The Sutton Trust welcomed the "innovative steps"....
Seems a very good innovation.
Although I do wonder about rich parents of feckless kids moving house late in A-Levels to get their kids into the nearest failing school for eligibility
Well this is the killer argument always deployed to shoot down my plans to remove the private opt out and at the same time concentrate resource on schools in left behind areas. Even if - the argument goes - I manage to flip the board so all schools are state schools and the best ones are now in Goole, all that will happen is that the affluent denizens of Guildford who used to go private will deviously move up there, and it's back to square one.
We're currently considering moving and I'm finding myself, for the first time, having to have serious (at least, as far as my wife is concerned) conversations about which secondary school our three year old will go to! For some of the houses, Goole Academy might be the obvious option, but my wife - having grown up in North Yorkshire - is something of a snob about the good people of the East Riding. Maybe I should suggest we head south to Guildford...
Just imagine what the daily death figures would be if we didn't now have drug therapies that were not available in the spring. A lot of lives have been saved.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
If they just promised Mid March, be done by start of March....everybody could have got massive gold stars for doing it under time.
I fear they will get it done by start of March and get the media backlash of again over promise, under delivery, late, yadda yadda yadda.
PHE has shown that if you don't set targets nothing will happen.
Unfortunately that does seem to be the case. We would still be doing 50k tests a day if they had been left to organize testing....not possible you see to do any more.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
One idea would be send a group of high performing students from "inner city comps" to a sixth-form style college for a year or 2 *after* 18. Give them some time and teaching to make lost ground before throwing them in the deep end....
Forcing them into catchup at university doesn't sound like the best way to equalise outcomes.
Isn't that literally what a foundation year is?
The two brightest mates I had at Ox were both state educated. One with me at a grammar (he came top in the year for Law) and another at a Somerset comprehensive.
Oxbridge intake is very small, and access has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. My experience was that there was more of a problem encouraging applications from state schools, than favouring of one school type over another. Frankly, from what I have seen the interviewers are brilliant at sniffing out talent once it is presented to them. Reintroduction of aptitude tests for many subjects has only improved this.
Out of the (say) 65 people I had any form of educational contact with at Ox, there was just one who I didn't think was cutting it.
Is there an entry advantage from private schools? Probably a small one, based on smaller class sizes.
Does it make much difference once there? Not in my experience. (The one I didn't think was cutting it, ex-MPS, got a Desmond).
The other thing (and frankly, the only benefit I can see of selective schools) is that it's much easier for keen students to excel if they are surrounded by other keen students. If you get a critical mass in a class (and it only takes a handful if they have big enough personalities), it lifts everyone else.
Peer influence is profound. If your mates are working hard you're more likely to. If your mates are burning £50 notes in front of the homeless, you'll be more tempted to do so.
The superabundance of emotionally abused boarding school victims and trust-fund hellions means that the pressure to become a dreadful twat is unendurable for many.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Indeed. 'Grade snob' is also a rather bonkers term - as if high academic attainment were just a bit of inappropriate showing off best avoided in polite company.
No, @HYUFD is genuinely and objectively a grade snob in any case, regardless of today's discussion.
OK, I am a grade snob.
I would prefer to be operated on by a surgeon with A Grades in Science and a first in Medicine than someone who got D Grades at A Level and failed his Medical exams multiple times.
As indeed would anyone sane not obsessed with equality of outcome
I'd want the best surgeon.
Quite. Years down the line into your career how well you did in A levels or even degree won't be the best indicator of quality. Some people might well peak at A Level for a start, and on the job people might prove themselves better than someone who did better than them at University. The analogy having failed medical exams multiple times is not great, since you know the person operating on you will have passed all the necessary qualifications, so that element is fine.
My experience as an employer is that above a certain threshold, there is very little correlation between exam success and work performance. The skills required to pass exams are often very different to those required to be outstanding in a job.
Probably why so little attention is paid to precisely what people got at A level or degree once they are in a job, and then move to another job and so on.
Though I did a work qualification where no matter how many decades people had been on the job you had to prove GCSE or O level proficiency in English and Maths. Didn't matter if you had been working there for years, or had a masters degree in those subjects or whatever, you had to prove GCSE level. Some exam boards make you pay even to request copies, even if they find they do not hold them, whilst others will refund if it turns out your exam board was someone else.
Reminds of the highly qualified teacher who went for a Headship at a Borough run Grammar School in a Northern town before WWII. He quoted his degree from Oxford and his further degree from somewhere else and had the interviewing board nodding wisely, only to have a long serving Alderman ask,"Aye, but hast thou thy Matric?"
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
Yes I hear that but she got a 1st. If she had *really* been struggling she would have got something else.
Nope. You can really struggle in the first year, and then prosper. It is almost impossible to keep up with the better educated students around you (in some subjects) ... until you've made up the deficit - and it's not unusual for students in that situation to drop out.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
One idea would be send a group of high performing students from "inner city comps" to a sixth-form style college for a year or 2 *after* 18. Give them some time and teaching to make lost ground before throwing them in the deep end....
Forcing them into catchup at university doesn't sound like the best way to equalise outcomes.
Isn't that literally what a foundation year is?
The two brightest mates I had at Ox were both state educated. One with me at a grammar (he came top in the year for Law) and another at a Somerset comprehensive.
Oxbridge intake is very small, and access has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. My experience was that there was more of a problem encouraging applications from state schools, than favouring of one school type over another. Frankly, from what I have seen the interviewers are brilliant at sniffing out talent once it is presented to them. Reintroduction of aptitude tests for many subjects has only improved this.
Out of the (say) 65 people I had any form of educational contact with at Ox, there was just one who I didn't think was cutting it.
Is there an entry advantage from private schools? Probably a small one, based on smaller class sizes.
Does it make much difference once there? Not in my experience. (The one I didn't think was cutting it, ex-MPS, got a Desmond).
The other thing (and frankly, the only benefit I can see of selective schools) is that it's much easier for keen students to excel if they are surrounded by other keen students. If you get a critical mass in a class (and it only takes a handful if they have big enough personalities), it lifts everyone else.
Peer influence is profound. If your mates are working hard you're more likely to. If your mates are burning £50 notes in front of the homeless, you'll be more tempted to do so.
The superabundance of emotionally abused boarding school victims and trust-fund hellions means that the pressure to become a dreadful twat is unendurable for many.
Just imagine what the daily death figures would be if we didn't now have drug therapies that were not available in the spring. A lot of lives have been saved.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
I'm pretty confident. By the end of the month we will be well beyond 330k and catching up fast.
I think its the supply side we have to worry about. They can always extend hours, and we know plans already in place for a lot more capacity in the next week or two.
It reminds me of an occasion when my old man was telling me he and my mum had been shopping in Oxford Street when a copper tried to turn them back because of a bomb warning. They laughed and said 'We survived the Blitz, mate. We're not turning back for the effing IRA.' And on they strolled.
I do think of this from time to time when contemplating our current inconveniences.
Happily a lot of people have done just that - its called competition. Don't like Compass or Bidfood or the other big players? Plenty of smaller operators who don't have shareholders to enrich who operate on more realistic margins.
Wholesale is a bloody brilliant industry to work with. Enterprising, innovative, warm.
Yes, exactly. It's a very competitive business, the barriers to entry aren't enormous, and margins are thin.
Which is why I know that the accusations about 'rip-offs' and 'Tory donors' and CEO pay are garbage.
Surely the issue is - and it's one Richard you are missing, that Compass is a catering company - it is not a wholesale company and it is therefore trying to do a job which would be better done by someone else who has experience of that area.
Yes I can see why Compass has been tasked with doing it - it's they job to feed school children at Lunchtime but they have then decided to do a job which would have been better offloaded elsewhere.
That's a fair point, but I imagine that the reason is that they have spare capacity, but the normal wholesalers (and indeed supermarkets) don't, so the latter didn't bid for the contracts.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
I'm pretty confident. By the end of the month we will be well beyond 330k and catching up fast.
I think its the supply side we have to worry about. They can always extend hours, and we know plans already in place for a lot more capacity in the next week or two.
The supply side is why we will be short for the next couple of weeks but provided the capacity is built up over that time I expect us to be flying in early February with a good chance of making the target by mid February. We should certainly be aspiring to no less.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
Though note the details. ...The university usually requires A*AA at A level to get on degree courses, but a new one-year foundation course has 50 places for students who achieve BBB. If successful on the course, students can then go on to study for degrees. Social mobility campaigners The Sutton Trust welcomed the "innovative steps"....
Seems a very good innovation.
Although I do wonder about rich parents of feckless kids moving house late in A-Levels to get their kids into the nearest failing school for eligibility
Well this is the killer argument always deployed to shoot down my plans to remove the private opt out and at the same time concentrate resource on schools in left behind areas. Even if - the argument goes - I manage to flip the board so all schools are state schools and the best ones are now in Goole, all that will happen is that the affluent denizens of Guildford who used to go private will deviously move up there, and it's back to square one.
We're currently considering moving and I'm finding myself, for the first time, having to have serious (at least, as far as my wife is concerned) conversations about which secondary school our three year old will go to! For some of the houses, Goole Academy might be the obvious option, but my wife - having grown up in North Yorkshire - is something of a snob about the good people of the East Riding. Maybe I should suggest we head south to Guildford...
I'm sure you'll get it right. Just googled it. Goole Academy. Looks to be a powerhouse (!) of a school. Could make sense to move fast and snap up a house right next to it before they all go to hooray henrys.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
I'm pretty confident. By the end of the month we will be well beyond 330k and catching up fast.
I think its the supply side we have to worry about. They can always extend hours, and we know plans already in place for a lot more capacity in the next week or two.
The supply side is why we will be short for the next couple of weeks but provided the capacity is built up over that time I expect us to be flying in early February with a good chance of making the target by mid February. We should certainly be aspiring to no less.
One indication its going pretty well, the media are really struggling for stories on this. When todays "scandal" is a GP was asked to pause for a day or two, because he has done all the 80 year olds in his region and so they redirected supply, you know perhaps things aren't too bad.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
The GCSE syllabus no longer covers calculus, but it is dealt with in great depth in the basic A Level Maths syllabus, the main omission being the lack of any study of calculus from first principles. The need for additional courses for university freshers is more down to the fact that many chose to study maths at uni after taking only Mathematics at A Level, whereas university courses start from the premise that they have also studied Further Maths at A Level. So students start without any knowledge at all of many topics encountered only at Further Maths, imaginary numbers being but one example, and they need to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these very quickly in order to progress.
I don't believe calculus was ever part of GCSE. I did GCSE (1990, A) and A-Level (1992, maths, and calculus - from first principles - was literally the very first thing we studied in A Level.
It's unlikely that you studied it truly from first principles at school. Because a first-principles exposition needs to begin with a definition of the real numbers. A bit advanced for school, I'd say.
--AS
I only studied maths at school, not at uni (Traditional and Modern Maths at O, Maths and Further Maths at A).
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea, but we might be talking about different "first principles". Without a formal definition of limit, you really can't define derivative*, and this needs an axiomatization of the reals that is definitely beyond school ability. I would guess that your "first principles" definition of derivative used an informal definition of limit. That's what I did at school too and it's fine, but it's not first principles because the limit definition is fudged.
I'm impressed that you did topology at school, though. Metric spaces only, or point set topology? Did they have enough examples to illustrate the concepts? Topology imo only got interesting when applied to function spaces.
*yes okay pure maths nerds, you can define derivative through measure theory independent of the reals, good luck teaching it to schoolchildren!
--AS
Topology was pretty basic. Things like Mobius strips, the bridge problem. Basic stuff.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
I'm still positive about it, but I thought I'd calculate it this way because I know we have to get above 300,000 a day to hit the target and I want to keep track of this number.
I'd not be surprised if we needed to do more than 400,000 a day towards the end, and I'd hope we'll end up doing more than that.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
"almost impossible to keep up"...."got a 1st".
Shirley something wrong. My guess? She'd be not thrilled at it described as "almost impossible to keep up". Challenging I'm sure but sounds like she is a bright button not phased by such trivia as not knowing the original languages used in the course she was studying.
No, it's a very common experience for bright students not adequately educated at school to have great struggles in their first year at university. That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
Yes I hear that but she got a 1st. If she had *really* been struggling she would have got something else.
Nope. You can really struggle in the first year, and then prosper. It is almost impossible to keep up with the better educated students around you (in some subjects) ... until you've made up the deficit - and it's not unusual for students in that situation to drop out.
So like any other course at any other university, then.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
Happily a lot of people have done just that - its called competition. Don't like Compass or Bidfood or the other big players? Plenty of smaller operators who don't have shareholders to enrich who operate on more realistic margins.
Wholesale is a bloody brilliant industry to work with. Enterprising, innovative, warm.
Yes, exactly. It's a very competitive business, the barriers to entry aren't enormous, and margins are thin.
Which is why I know that the accusations about 'rip-offs' and 'Tory donors' and CEO pay are garbage.
Surely the issue is - and it's one Richard you are missing, that Compass is a catering company - it is not a wholesale company and it is therefore trying to do a job which would be better done by someone else who has experience of that area.
Yes I can see why Compass has been tasked with doing it - it's they job to feed school children at Lunchtime but they have then decided to do a job which would have been better offloaded elsewhere.
That's a fair point, but I imagine that the reason is that they have spare capacity, but the normal wholesalers (and indeed supermarkets) don't, so the latter didn't bid for the contracts.
Fair point, I hadn't considered that.
I don't think this is a capacity issue - it's a timing issue, the need for free school meals outside of school has appeared again because schools were closed with 4 hours notice..
The challenge for vaccinations comes after 12 weeks, when the 1st batch loop back around and there are still millions wanting their first dose.
Come April, fingers crossed we should also be starting to get some Moderna and perhaps even J&J. AZN by that stage should be making insane amounts of theirs.
With that supply available, no excuses to be going all guns blazing. So far it seems the ramp up when AZN came online has been pretty good, so much so it is supply that is stopping much more than 250k a day being done.
Just imagine what the daily death figures would be if we didn't now have drug therapies that were not available in the spring. A lot of lives have been saved.
Deep breath and here is a good time to look at the by 'Date of Death' figures.
It will get worse I'm sure as figures add in, but currently the worst confirmed day of this wave is 7/1, which is the 14th worst day overall. Perhaps the reporting date figures are bumpier this time round or perhaps the worsening of 'Date of Death' numbers is still in the pipeline.
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
And AAA from Gasworks St Comp is a better predictor of a first class degree in the end than from Eton, I suspect, from observations amongst my friends - all more or less equally bright in their wats but some of the ones from proivate schools had less staying power when the magisterial lash was removed and thet had to self-motivate much more once at Uni. Though all got goods and productive careers in their ways.
I think the point is that from some schools a BBB from Gasworks St Comp is a better indicator than AAA from Eton.
That assumes that knowledge imparted at school is not really important at university.
A mathematics professor of my acquaintance was, several years ago, having to run supplementary basic maths courses for his first years. Since a chunk of the incoming students couldn't differentiate or integrate with any faculty, or ease - for example.
That is an A-level maths quirk: some years back a lot of calculus was stripped out in favour of probability and sets. Social scientists and computer scientists were happy, physical scientists less so.
The GCSE syllabus no longer covers calculus, but it is dealt with in great depth in the basic A Level Maths syllabus, the main omission being the lack of any study of calculus from first principles. The need for additional courses for university freshers is more down to the fact that many chose to study maths at uni after taking only Mathematics at A Level, whereas university courses start from the premise that they have also studied Further Maths at A Level. So students start without any knowledge at all of many topics encountered only at Further Maths, imaginary numbers being but one example, and they need to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these very quickly in order to progress.
I don't believe calculus was ever part of GCSE. I did GCSE (1990, A) and A-Level (1992, maths, and calculus - from first principles - was literally the very first thing we studied in A Level.
It's unlikely that you studied it truly from first principles at school. Because a first-principles exposition needs to begin with a definition of the real numbers. A bit advanced for school, I'd say.
--AS
I only studied maths at school, not at uni (Traditional and Modern Maths at O, Maths and Further Maths at A).
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea, but we might be talking about different "first principles". Without a formal definition of limit, you really can't define derivative*, and this needs an axiomatization of the reals that is definitely beyond school ability. I would guess that your "first principles" definition of derivative used an informal definition of limit. That's what I did at school too and it's fine, but it's not first principles because the limit definition is fudged.
I'm impressed that you did topology at school, though. Metric spaces only, or point set topology? Did they have enough examples to illustrate the concepts? Topology imo only got interesting when applied to function spaces.
*yes okay pure maths nerds, you can define derivative through measure theory independent of the reals, good luck teaching it to schoolchildren!
--AS
Topology was pretty basic. Things like Mobius strips, the bridge problem. Basic stuff.
Nice. I was also lucky to have a teacher who took us well beyond A-level (though it's a shame he was an algebraist and geometer). Much of my career was made on the back of the enthusiasm he inspired.
1564 deaths today, the highest yet. The urgency of vaccination really cannot be overstated.
Do you think vaccination alone solves this? Or will it require more than just vaccination? Testing testing testing. Wack a mole. Public compliance on measures for years to come?
Is there now too much emphasis on vaccination as magic bullet, in the bigger picture we are losing our way?
"I think it is more the smart ones don't go into politics, just the dregs".
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
Looks tight but doable, given that we're at 207K yesterday and it's ramping up.
I'm pretty confident. By the end of the month we will be well beyond 330k and catching up fast.
I think its the supply side we have to worry about. They can always extend hours, and we know plans already in place for a lot more capacity in the next week or two.
The supply side is why we will be short for the next couple of weeks but provided the capacity is built up over that time I expect us to be flying in early February with a good chance of making the target by mid February. We should certainly be aspiring to no less.
One indication its going pretty well, the media are really struggling for stories on this. When todays "scandal" is a GP was asked to pause for a day or two, because he has done all the 80 year olds in his region and so they redirected supply, you know perhaps things aren't too bad.
Fortunately they can all go down to Dover and take pictures of all the lorries queued up. Although, funnily enough, they have not really been doing that since Christmas either. I wonder why not?
If that is his technique, I do not want to be jabbed by someone who sticks the needle in then leaves it swinging while he moves his hand to the plunger (if that is what they call it).
I really hope that, for once, Mr Ed's hunch is correct and Trump is not impeached.
The GOP are screwed if Trump is able to stand in 2024. They won't be able to win with him and they won't be able to win without him.
The moment he enters the primaries there will civil war in the GOP. Half the party have seen the light, the other half are doubling down and on their knees quivering in fear at the QAnon types.
The only way I see out of this for the GOP is for Trump to be disbarred from elective office. That way he can't even stand as an independent if he loses the GOP nomination. None of the mini-Trump wannabes would have anything like the same pulling power. I think that is why the saner wing will seriously
(For some reason I was unable to respond directly to Mr Ed. Kept getting a message saying my comment was "1 character too short")
As I once pointed out to the Head of a posh private school in Surrey, 3 AAA's from an inner city Hackney Comp is obviously more valuable than 3 AAA's from her school.
Nothing else needs to be said. What matters to Cambridge is not the qualification on entry but the qualification on exit and the years of learning to achieve that.
Maybe but 3 BBBs from a comprehensive should not be more valuable than 3 AAAs from a private school that is the point.
Of course when we had grammar schools many of the state schools even in Hackney were more than an equal for private schools academically, now with a few exceptions like Mossbourne Academy that is rarely the case for comprehensives
Actually 3 Bs from someone who's have to overcome a hell of a lot of difficult circumstances and self-motivate completely because there was no-one there to push them is a hell of a lot more valuable than 3 As from someone in a private school with pushy parents and private tutors.
No it isn't, it is still lower grades no matter personal circumstance.
However as a socialist your solution as usual is to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator and penalise the middle classes having already scrapped most grammars which were the best chance to get to Oxbridge the working class ever had
Yes it is, actually. "Socialism" has nothing to do with it. I'm not even a socialist.
We all know you're a grade snob so this is to be expected, but you're wrong.
Besides, I didn't say a BBB was better than an AAA. In fact of course in most cases the AAA will be valuable. However there may be circumstances where the BBB is in fact more valuable.
You are a leftwing Tory hater.
In most cases BBB would normally be barely enough to scrape into Southampton let alone Oxbridge and it would be ridiculous of Oxbridge to lower its grade total so far to admit more from comprehensives.
There may be a case to favour an AAA comp student over an AAA private school student, there is no case to favour a BBB comp student over an AAA private school student
It is entirely conceivable that the BBB pupil is more intelligent and harder working than the AAA one. In that case it is better for Oxford (dunno what this "Oxbridge" shit is) and by any sane standards more just and more desirable that the BBB pupil gets the place, subject to the very important proviso that the BBB pupil can make up the ground lost by worse schooling, in time to benefit from the Oxford course.
A friend of mine studied some Classics degree at Oxford, maybe the one Boris studied? In any case she was from a state school and found it almost impossible to keep up as most of her peers had studied greek and latin at their private schools, whilst she had not.
She got a 1st anyway.
In that case, your friend will almost certainly have scored very highly in the Classics Language Aptitude Test (CLAT) when she applied, and thus was admitted on merit, not as a charity case. Oxford has been doing this for years, and it's a much better solution than some crude handicapping system.
On the other hand, it's a great pity if she wasn't able to acquire the languages to a comfortable level, since that's one of the main pleasures and joys of the course.
I didn't say she was a "charity case". She is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. My point was to highlight yet another advantage those who go to private school have and how she had to work much harder to achieve that 1st than they probably did.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely. Getting a First if you read for Course II (where you start the languages from scratch) is less common, and the people who manage it are indeed impressive. On the other hand, the scope of Course II is narrower relative to Course I, concentrating on one language rather than both, and the first year is largely dedicated to intensive catch-up work, so inevitably the average Course II candidate will simply have read and covered less by the end of the degree.
Still, it helps Classics to survive and be enjoyed by more people, so it's not all bad.
Latin was both my best and favourite subject at school. Touch of the Billy Elliots about it except unlike him I caved in and went STEM instead. Others spoke, authority figures, and I did it their way. Regrets, I have sixty two, and this is one of them.
I knew you were basically sound, kinabalu. Oddly enough, I started off school certain that I was going to become a scientist, and only did my volte-face to languages and humanities a little later, though not from any special pressure.
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
I wouldn't go that far. I think he is a very good example of somebody who found school very easy, got a way with words, which is perfect for the arts at A-Level, but then hit the reality of the required level of aptitude increasing and it was all of a sudden not a walk in the park...while others managed to continue to rise to the challenge.
Comments
Yes voucher would be better than boxes.
Yes the box was ridiculous.
No the box clearly didn't cost £30 (it cost £10.50 we now know).
I don't see how any of that is unreasonable. If you're saying just because someone says something I agree with I should let dishonesty slide I'm not like that.
All we can do is hope that hospitals aren't swamped and get the infection rate back down as quickly as we can.
Good on him, I say.
Though which side of the argument that reinforces, I'm not entirely sure.
--AS
Most jobs require more than pure academic ability.
Though I did a work qualification where no matter how many decades people had been on the job you had to prove GCSE or O level proficiency in English and Maths. Didn't matter if you had been working there for years, or had a masters degree in those subjects or whatever, you had to prove GCSE level. Some exam boards make you pay even to request copies, even if they find they do not hold them, whilst others will refund if it turns out your exam board was someone else.
I would say I was always half-a-day behind where I wanted to be throughout my UG time there. Always another deadline, always something else to do.
But yeah, that anecdote holds precious little water.
I didn't go to Oxbridge but just about every other member of my family did and when I visited them I met precious few twats and a lot of intellectually voracious, smart people.
I'm sure the twats were elsewhere at the time and that they no doubt existed. But like all things there is good and bad in everything*.
*PB banal truism of the day.
I posted the BBC link upthread, but here's the Guardian version.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/13/cambridge-university-to-offer-free-foundation-year-for-disadvantaged-pupils
"This is what you need to absorb: QAnon and “stop the steal” are forever associated with a violent attack against the United States. Maybe that’s not what it’s meant to you, maybe you think that’s a misread of last week’s events, but that’s how the real Deep State, a lot of elected officials, and much of the public sees it.
If that isn’t what you signed up for, now would be a good time to get out."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/qanon-and-stop-the-steal-rioters-will-be-in-a-world-of-hurt-as-the-law-crashes-down-on-them-11610475743?mod=home-page
I certainly covered real and imaginary numbers, calculus from first principles (proof was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exam), topology, and sets. Statistics was the one area that was notably absent.
From case data
From hospitalisation data
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
That is the essence of what's being argued about here.
https://twitter.com/Robert___Harris/status/1349379820141105153
I'm impressed that you did topology at school, though. Metric spaces only, or point set topology? Did they have enough examples to illustrate the concepts? Topology imo only got interesting when applied to function spaces.
*yes okay pure maths nerds, you can define derivative through measure theory independent of the reals, good luck teaching it to schoolchildren!
--AS
The superabundance of emotionally abused boarding school victims and trust-fund hellions means that the pressure to become a dreadful twat is unendurable for many.
Or did you?
I fear they will get it done by start of March and get the media backlash of again over promise, under delivery, late, yadda yadda yadda.
Yes, it is looking hopeful on cases. We shall see.
Didn't he get in via some special scheme for kids from poor attaining schools?
You can really struggle in the first year, and then prosper. It is almost impossible to keep up with the better educated students around you (in some subjects) ... until you've made up the deficit - and it's not unusual for students in that situation to drop out.
It reminds me of an occasion when my old man was telling me he and my mum had been shopping in Oxford Street when a copper tried to turn them back because of a bomb warning. They laughed and said 'We survived the Blitz, mate. We're not turning back for the effing IRA.' And on they strolled.
I do think of this from time to time when contemplating our current inconveniences.
I'd not be surprised if we needed to do more than 400,000 a day towards the end, and I'd hope we'll end up doing more than that.
The best people, of course, do both:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_James_Leggett
With that supply available, no excuses to be going all guns blazing. So far it seems the ramp up when AZN came online has been pretty good, so much so it is supply that is stopping much more than 250k a day being done.
It will get worse I'm sure as figures add in, but currently the worst confirmed day of this wave is 7/1, which is the 14th worst day overall. Perhaps the reporting date figures are bumpier this time round or perhaps the worsening of 'Date of Death' numbers is still in the pipeline.
--AS
Is there now too much emphasis on vaccination as magic bullet, in the bigger picture we are losing our way?
There is some truth in that. I went to a well-known public school - not Eton, thank god - and there are a couple of people I remember who've done well in academia, the arts, etc and elsewhere. One of the people who was considered hugely unremarkable and conventional has become an MP. As mentioned, politics just isn't appealing to many more well-rounded or particularly interesting people any more.
The point about entitlement raised below is also relevant, though. If you're unremarkable but entitled, both in terms of your opportunities, routes to power and attitude, it's more likely to be your own prejudices, rather than any particularly interesting or independent ideas you might have , that everyone else is having to live with.
Johnson got a 2.1.
It is worth recalling that there has been substantial inflation in degrees.
Roughly speaking, 30 per cent of students get a first. And ~ 50 per cent of students get a 2.1.
So, Boris Johnson's degree is pretty average.
In fact -- given his enormous educational advantages -- it is clear that Boris is a lazy fat fucker.
(Instead I did Maths, Further Maths, Music, and lots of dossing around... which served me very nicely in later life.)
--AS