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“Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat: we have normality. Anything you stil
“Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat: we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem” – politicalbetting.com
There has been much talk, since the advent of the vaccines, of a ‘return to normal’ in our lives with many organisations, not least Government, pressing for getting things back on track as soon as safely possible particularly in areas such as education. And whilst there is much debate about what is or is not ‘safely possible’ and at what point normality should return, no one seems to have asked whether we actually want to go back to normal or whether, specifically with regard to education, we might look upon the events of the last 14 months as an opportunity rather than a curse. Whether we should grasp this unique opportunity to make a fundamental change to some important aspects of our education system.
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You know some people actually plan to have children towards the end of September as it’s been shown that such children do better at school.
But a friend of mine - who’s daughter was born in September - did say that it costs you an extra year of child care.
Also I am not sure it is likely unless it becomes the policy of one of the main parties
Consistent but provide the evidence
Hospital admissions, vaccine status, age profile, and outbreak areas are essential information
Yesterday an argument was being put forward that as the NHS has such a backlog which they are starting to address, they cannot accept any rise in covid patients
Now that is turning the narrative on its head, and on that basis the Country will be locked down for months, even years, and it is just not acceptable
I was angry and a rebel yesterday, largely because the media and independent sage have taken over the narrative with their zero covid, eliminate covid strategy, which is just not feasible and in order to convince many millions of citizens, including myself, that we have to have further delays there has to be far more transparent figures on hospital admissions
Of course I would comply with restrictions if it is proven they are needed, but I am not persuaded by those who seem to have taken over the agenda
Let us not forget that there are many opponents of Boris driven by many who have not come to terms with Brexit, that to prevent the 21st June opening would see it as a political win to their cause, and it is not being driven by the actual clinical reality
I would include Independent Sage and large parts of the broadcast media in that category
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Since this post I have just listened to Richard Horton of the Lancet on Sky, largely endorsing my position on this and the opening on the 21st June
He said we can be optimistic about the 21st June, as the number of covid cases are not resulting in increasing admissions and it looks as if the link has been broken
The presenter then provided various percentage increases and he simply said quoting percentages was misleading and the absolute numbers are pertinent and necessary.
He said on the 12th January there were 4,500 plus admission to hospital and on the 25th May just 133, which is way down and though there may be a small rise in hospitalisation, at the moment there is reason for hope and urgent attention to providing second doses to the 1-9 group is correct.
Currently 48.1% of adults have received their second dose.
At last, the voice of sanity and not from a quarter that anybody could say is a fan of Boris or HMG.
Furthermore, it is good that the presenter was corrected on using percentages against absolute numbers.
We need a lot more of this in fairness to everyone.
Why is this being sold as a "ramping up" ?
It requires about 350k seconds a day
At the top end too we would see an extension of childhood into the mid Twenties, shortening the time in the world of work, at a time of increasing dependency ratios. Mare parents would have to stay at home and fewer workers would be supporting them, and the increasing burden of retired Boomers.
Some people will not bother to do that but its there if they want to.
The reporting of economic data, in particular, is skewed by the use of percentages rather than the use of absolute numbers and relies on widespread ignorance of numbers.
One example, if you assume the economy as a number is 100 - a fall of 20% takes you down to 80 but if the next figure is a rise of 20%, many will think that takes you back to 100 - no, it takes you back to 96 so you are still 4% behind where you were.
That won't be reported because big percentage increases look good and sound good and being the cynic I am, I imagine it's the message the Government will want to see repeated through the summer.
An alternative approach to your suggestion on a starting age might be, instead of starting school later, changing the focus until age seven to be more like reception. Games. Play. Enjoying themselves. That could start the learning later and at the same time get round the issues with childcare.
In fact, all this means is that 60 people died from Covid in the last seven days, compared with 42 the previous week. A collection of individual disasters, but statistical noise on the scale of the nation.
Meanwhile, hospital admissions are trending up only fractionally, the total number in hospital is still trending downwards at the moment, and it's becoming increasingly obvious as the days pass that the spread of the disease from the major loci of infection is glacial. This is not a repetition of the Kent Plague and there is no reason to suppose that it will become so.
As you say, the argument has been shifted from "the NHS will collapse and there'll be mountains of corpses if we don't lock down" to "Covid will clog up the hospitals and prevent them from clearing the backlog of everything else if we don't lock down." It's just an excuse from that fraction of public opinion that wants to keep locking down forever. Enough.
https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-extended-school-day-plan-hit-lack-cash
I am taking an increasingly jaded view of higher education in Britain. It seems an expensive way to run a finishing school for the middle classes.
I would suggest that no one is eligible for a Student Loan until they have worked for two years, proven by NI contributions. People would only go if they really wanted to do so, rather than drift into it.
I was talking to a doctor friend a while back who couldn't get his head around the difference between adding 50% and subtracting it not being the same.
I believe Nicola is considering moving Glasgow to tier 2
We cannot eliminate covid anymore than flu and we need to adjust and live with it
Whatever happened to the Early Years being the most important segment of “education”, without which full potential will never be attained?
Seems a horribly socially regressive policy.
If you want to delay the transition to adulthood and the workplace, personally I’d rather the delay is at the end not the beginning, with compulsory national service. It would do wonders for self discipline and national cohesion.
And get rid of some rubbish along the way. The Faculty of English at Cambridge is one we could well do without.
There was only one original aim and justification for restrictions, and that was to spare the hospitals from collapse. There is no evidence from the way that the Indian variant has spread thus far, and the very modest increases in total hospitalisations that it has caused even in an epicentre of infection like Bolton, to suggest that such a danger exists. So we should go on.
The alternative - masks and social distancing for the rest of time - isn't acceptable. Covid is never going away. We have to learn to live with it.
Ideally, we'd all have a much better understanding of numbers and be able to properly process statistics but as I suspect, rather like a 200-seat Lib Dem majority, that ain't happening any time soon, we need to see absolute data published.
What, for example, would be a more meaningful way of assessing the size of the UK economy? GDP per capita - the absolute size of the economy, I'm not sure but there must be something able to provide an accurate picture.
Nearly everyone at uni would have taken a double gap year working, rich or poor. It would add a lot of discernment to their decision to go to university.
One of the problems in the UK, as I found with my two kids, is that reception year is being used by schools to start kids on formal learning - perhaps to improve the school's overall performance although on that I am not sure. There was certainly lots of emphasis, with corresponding pressure on parents, to make sure children could read before they started in Year 1.
If, every time a politician spoke of “paying down the deficit”, or other such bollocks, they got called out on it, it would soon stop happening.
Expect to see much use of GDP/capita stats in the coming years, if the rumours of 1.5m fewer people in the UK than before the pandemic turn out to be true.
For example, I dimly recollect being taught to go from left to right, but apparently now there's something called BODMAS; 'brackets, orders, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction' for the older or uninitiated.
Nowadays most people get the puzzles 'right' most of the time, but at the beginning there could be a wild variety of answers, mine included.
Some organisations do this and recognise this in terms of professional development - you get a newly qualified surveyor for example, who comes to work for you for two or three years while he or she is getting more professional qualifications and then moves on but at least they've got some professional knowledge and are keen to impress and learn so they are valuable.
You would need some form of incentive to employers to employ these "pre-students".
Also remember the percentages given are after 3 weeks whereas the vaccine will be giving some protection after a shorter period of time. I was told at my first jab of AZ that it was 70% effective after 1 week (against what was then pre any variant). Although I have to say I haven't seen that figure anywhere else, but I assume (but don't know) it is a progression of protection and not a sudden jump.
I am 55. A decade ago I would, by now, have had 10 years left before I could take my pension. Now it is 12 years and will probably be 13 or 14 before I actually get there. I don't in any way object to this but it is undeniably the case that the official working life has increased by 2 or 3 years. If I were a woman I believe it has increased by 7 or 8 years. Under those circumstances I think it is reasonable to look at the start of our working lives - and particularly our educational provision - and see what could be done to make things better for our children.
I worked in a Wimpy bar for a summer in the early Eighties. The training took an hour.
You were half-right about finishing schools: what does it matter that our Prime Minister knows Latin? But the other half is trade-schools for engineers, lawyers and doctors. These should be returned to, well, trade schools. Apprenticeships, articles and evening classes!
Then the universities can get on with research and maybe we can catch up with China and America.
For many, three years living away racking up £50k of debt just isn’t economic value.
There’s room for both systems, but the starting point has to be employers not insisting on degrees as part of the recruitment process.
I am not convinced either that working at age 18 is a worse deal than university.
And yet there are still people trying to argue that there are plausible scenarios where we end up with national hospitalisations and deaths higher than second wave peaks!!! (albeit as has been noted - others are fine tuning their arguments to imply that pretty much any COVID linked hospitalisations cannot be coped with).
It is worth, I think, noting that the numbers currently recorded as being in hospital with COVID are identical to the numbers admitted within the last seven days. Suggests perhaps a large number of people presenting with a positive test and pretty minor/non serious symptoms, and therefore operating a high turnover rate?
He had to help me with this one:
Tasmin writes down three two-digit integers. One is square, one is prime and one is triangular. She uses the digits 3,4,5,6,7,8 exactly once each. Which prime does she write?
Durham introduced a similar scheme 3 or so years ago.
Re the adult education, the problem with this country is we send too many to university. Decades ago, you could become a solicitor or an accountant by leaving school and being apprenticed. It would be good to see that restarted.
'O' Level Maths 1954.
For most other jobs you would probably be better off financially and skills and experience wise after university doing a higher level apprenticeship combined with vocational training than a university degree but it should be up to individual choice
I think the current financing of Higher Education is a growing crisis for students, universities and government alike. A good editorial in the Guardian on this today.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/the-guardian-view-on-funding-universities-the-market-model-isnt-working
I've been around long enough (unfortunately) to remember how every month's trade figures were seen as a barometer of economic health. I believe Roy Jenkins thought Labour lost the 1970 election because the purchase of two aircraft made the trade figures look very bad just before polling day (I'm not convinced).
In the 80s it was all about monetary supply indicators such as M4 and M0 and the like.
Then it was public borrowing numbers in the 2010s.
We've always had unemployment numbers and inflation numbers though these have waxed and waned in significance over the decades.
It's almost as though our knowledge of the economy may be expanding but we fall back into one single indicator to help us understand what's going on.
Areas like Marketing, PR, Events, Sales etc are awful for it.
I didn't.
The additional period of University education (with all the life lessons as well as the academic ones) can help to confirm future career paths.
I didn't know what triangular numbers are but my grandson did and rattled them off. 1,3,6, 10 ... They make triangles. Add two consecutive triangular numbers and you get squares. Imagine putting the two triangles together. Only relevant ones here are 36 and 78.
Unless she is a pedant as it be could 36 both triangular and square leaving more options for prime as the question didnt specify that the square and triangular are different numbers.
London incontestably hugely subsidises the rest of the country.
The allowable squares are 36 and 64
The allowable triangles are 36, 45, 78
The allowable primes are 37, 43, 47, 53, 67, 73, 83
64, 78, 53 is the only combination that fits.
Edit to remove spoiler tag, as loads of others got it too.
Equally, I do not see why a ten year old needs to do an exercise in logic as part of maths.
The squares can only be 36 or 64 (49 and 81 aren't options)
Triangular numbers are 36, 45,78 (55,66 use the same digits)
Primes are 37, 43, 47, 53, 67
but this has little to do with maths - it's a logic problem based on 3 datasets.
1) 5 O levels, then two years articles, during which one did the Intermediate professional exams at evening classes (remember them?), then two years F/t study to the professional exams.
2) 3/4 A levels, then the 2 year course, then one year articles.
3) 3 A levels, then a degree, plus the professional Law examination, then a year's articles.
Nowadays it's 3 A levels, followed by a four year Masters degree, then a years very carefully supervised and examined pre-registration year.
(Bank Holiday !)
In fact in all those areas (outside events) the only degree that would be relevant is human psychology and how to trigger appropriate reactions.
The challenge is as follows, I think. By the age of 4, quite a lot of kids are already behind their peers in respect of speech, reading, writing etc. For kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, they can begin to make up ground through formal schooling. For the kids of middle class or aspirational parents, that's not really an issue. So there is a risk that the entrenched gap begins widening if formal learning is delayed for those kids with poor speech/reading/writing etc. For the most disadvantaged kids, formal learning can't really come to soon if they are to prosper. Not sure how the French deal with this, as I'm sure it will be the same over there.
Really, if we could only educate the parents to educate their kids.....
The Bolton NHS Foundation Trust presently reports 41 Covid patients, including 8 on ventilation. The equivalent numbers from the January peak were 150 and 15.
Now, the trend in hospitalisations in Bolton is still heading gradually upwards, but we can also see from the case rate data that infections are now probably past their peak, so hospital admissions should also peak in the next couple of weeks, and then start declining again. There is nothing in the data to suggest that Bolton will end up back in the same pickle that it was during the November or the January peaks.
Moreover, because most of the country is barely affected by the Indian variant in the first place (because it isn't present in many areas, and is failing to spread significantly in others,) it means that there is no possibility of healthcare services being overwhelmed, even if a locality were theoretically to suffer a worse outbreak than Bolton at some point in the future. If 90% of the country has almost no Covid patients left - for example my big local hospital, Addenbrooke's in Cambridge, reports having precisely zero Covid patients at the moment - then, in extremis, excess patients can be loaded into a flotilla of ambulances and redistributed from an under pressure hospital to those with the resources to cope.
The situation appears eminently manageable, and as time passes and the effects of the vaccination project continue to spread through the population (to say nothing of the very important effect of warmer, dryer weather,) there's no particular reason to suppose that it won't remain so.
Don't try and impress them - just work out if they need our products and disqualify those that don't ASAP so you don't waste time selling to them
Can't make vacccines with a GCSE in drama...
EDIT: ...says a proud grandfather!