This year, Cambridge University is to email exam results to students before displaying them in public outside the university’s senate house. On receipt of the email, students will have the opportunity to remove themselves from the public list, if they can prove ‘exceptional circumstances’ such as mental health problems. The move comes after lengthy debate with the student union, centring on the premise that public failure is humiliating and ‘stressful’.
The Economist carries an article this week that the NHS – and not least the new Competition and Cooperation Panel – would do well to look at. ‘Innovation through regulation’, ‘America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation’ punches a strange headline.
When ballots are cast in tomorrow’s European Parliament (EP) elections, most voters will be sending a message to one destination: Westminster, and not Brussels, writes Luke Clark. A month ago, Labour’s concerns centred upon voters’ unhappiness with the government leading to abstention and gains for UKIP, the Greens and BNP in a sort of apathetic… [Read More]
More women today are opting for some form of higher education than are men: 49 per cent of women as against 37 per cent of men. Furthermore, when at university, women tend to outperform men: 64 per cent of female undergraduates obtain upper-seconds or firsts as against 60 per cent of male ones. Yet despite… [Read More]
The Department of Health issued guidance for PCTs and provider organisations last week on how to effectively collect and learn from patient feedback. ‘Understanding What Matters: A guide to using patient feedback to transform services’ aims to advise NHS organisations on how to make changes as a result of information obtained through patient feedback activity.
This week the Conservatives have uncovered statistics showing that the richest 10% of young people in England are almost twice as likely to go to university as the poorest 10%, despite the annual £2.3bn spent in publicly-funded measures to widen access to higher education.
Perhaps this blog is a bit of a cop-out. Yes, it’s not really a blog at all, suffice to refer you to this brilliant article by Nigel Hawkes, former health editor of The Times, in this week’s BMJ. An eloquent exposition of what this blog has argued time and time again when it comes to… [Read More]
Motivated by the undeniable failure of the existing EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), EU member states’ fishing Ministers have agreed to “radically decentralise” a new CFP, due to come into force in 2012.
Every day for the past several weeks has brought fresh disclosures about the scale of free-loading in which our law-makers at Westminster have seemingly been happy to indulge or at least to condone. At this late stage of the unfolding saga, I have no wish to add my own voice to the many who have… [Read More]
Increasing amounts of ‘screen time’ are leaving children ill prepared for real life, a leading headmaster has argued. The Chairman of the Independent Schools Association (ISA), John Gibson, aired grave concerns about the implications of children’s rejection of outdoor play for Internet games and ‘virtual lives’ through social networking sites.