Yet more trials for testing and tests this week. The General Teaching Council has called for the standard assessment tests (Sats) taken by pupils at ages 7, 11 and 14 years old, to be scrapped. The teaching standards watchdog argues that the tests are doing nothing for standards, simply stressing out pupils and teachers.
Improving patient safety was identified as a key goal for the NHS in the DoH report, Building a Safer NHS for Patients (2001). This built on the seminal report, An Organisation with a Memory (2000), which estimated that adverse events in which harm is caused to patients happen in an unnerving 10% of admissions to… [Read More]
Echoing many of the problems our latest report The Corruption of the Curriculum has examined, Wellington Grey writes in an open letter to AQA and the Department for Education: I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn… [Read More]
Despite all the appalling details to have emerged in today’s press about the truly dreadful ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, given yesterday’s guilty verdict of her father and uncle for arranging her murder, the true and horrendous significance of one aspect of her case, to my mind, has yet to have be adequately noted or… [Read More]
The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of… [Read More]
On Wednesday the Daily Mail ran a piece quoting Civitas, about the shortage of science and maths teacher which is leading to more mixed-ability classes in comprehensive schools. The concern is that this is not only diluting learning, but exacerbating poor pupil behaviour. A secondary science teacher from Brighton who read and agreed with the… [Read More]
We can all cheer! The NHS is in surplus. Unaudited accounts released yesterday by the DoH reveal an operating surplus of £510m, a miraculous £1.37bn turnaround from the £547m deficit reported last year. Most of the press have, typically, attacked this achievement by reporting the dire consequences – as many as 70,000 job cuts, cut-backs… [Read More]
Via Daniel J. Mitchell at Cato, we learn that the last seven years has seen a climb in total taxation the equivalent of ten pence in every pound: ‘What developed nation has taken the biggest steps in the wrong direction since the turn of the century? The answer is not France, Germany, or Sweden. The… [Read More]
Towards the end of last year, following separate exposes by John Ware and Martin Bright as to just how immoderate in view and policy are the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, until then the government’s preferred interlocutor when dealing with the country’s two million Muslims, it looked as though the government was finally… [Read More]
In the Sunday Times today David Cameron responds to critics of his grammar schools’ policy by presenting everyone who disagrees with him as a backwoodsman entertaining policy delusions. But the strongest critics of Mr Cameron’s education policy are not diehard defenders of grammar schools. They fully accept the need for policies to be modernised and… [Read More]