Two depressing findings came out about schools this week. The first is that the number of children on free school meals has risen since last year. The second is that one in five children are now on the special educational needs (SEN) register.
The NHS is supposed to be a universal healthcare system. There is one group however – one of the most vulnerable in society – who get a particularly raw deal: the homeless. The NHS funds services, not individuals. With no fixed abode, the homeless far too often fall through the net. As a discussion hosted… [Read More]
YouTube (the online video forum owned by Google) and Euronews (an international news channel) have collaborated to launch ‘Questions for Europe’, a new online forum to encourage debate ahead of the European Parliament elections in June.
This week sees the fiftieth anniversary of C.P.Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’ lecture. To mark the occasion, but even more importantly to draw attention to how even more poorly science is now being taught in the country’s schools, Civitas this week publishes an anthology edited by its deputy director Robert Whelan, entitled From Two Cultures to… [Read More]
Ken Boston, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), may not be the man we look to for wisdom on running independent exam watchdogs. Boston famously resigned from his job of overseeing exam boards and qualifications, for the QCA’s lax role in the primary school Sats tests which came to a head last summer.
In all the talk about what the NHS is going to have to do with its tighter budgets one thing seems to be missing: the underlying culture of the organisation (or, more accurately the organisations that make it up). Discussion is focused on structures, processes and levers that the NHS has, or doesn’t have, at… [Read More]
Harriet Harman claims that women earn on average 22.6% less per hour than men and takes it for granted that this difference is the result of discrimination against women by men. And yet the Government’s own figures support no such conclusion. Read on at the Daily Telegraph Blog
According to a report in yesterday’s Times, among the recommendations in the about-to-be-published final report of the Rose review of primary education is one calling for primary schools to teach their pupils to ‘recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English’.
As target and league table pressures have increased, so has suspicion that examining boards are jostling amongst themselves to boost candidate numbers by producing the most ‘accessible’ courses. That is, offering the exams in which students can maximise their marks.
The US magazine, Time, wrote in October 1951 that morality in public service was probably higher in Britain than anywhere else in the world. The way that the moralistic Labour Party in Attlee’s day regarded even the suspicion of a Labour MP personally milking public life for his or her own benefit was illustrated by… [Read More]