Sheryl and I at Christmas in New Zealand. Melanie took the photograph which perhaps explains why you can't see the tops of our heads. We brought her a camera for her 8th birthday this year so we are hoping for better things next time round.... 

Labour education policy.... the mess gets even worse....

Bright pupils let down by State Schools

Position;

Reseach commissioned by the Government shows that the brightest pupils at primary school go on to under-achieve in the comprehensive system. According to the research the most politically explosive finding was the direct relationship between the number of bright children in a school and individual achievement.

The abolition of grammar schools, the Labour Governments withdrawal of the assisted places scheme and the general disapproval of "streaming" within the education establishment has left bright primary school pupils to substantially under-achieve in secondary education.

OK, so get this;

• How is it that in 2005 the Government can be surprised at this finding when any bloody idiot knows this.
• How is it that it is "politically explosive"?
• Can it be that only the myopic education establishment, one of the first and last bastions of the left-wing "equality agenda", can possibly be challenged by this finding?
• Can it be that the education establishment, allowed only to flourish as a result of being in the government controlled, producer monopoly has allowed GENERATIONS of school kids to be let down.
• Can it be that this system, rotten to the core, has particularly let down the bright sons and daughters of poor families who would, in previous generations (like my father as it happens) have climbed out of poverty as a result of a search for academic excellence fostered by the meritocratic grammar schools? How likely is it that I would still be in a council estate in South Wales if my father had been born 20 years later?
• Did I do well also because I was in a comprehensive school that "streamed" its pupils. Was my school unique in largely abandoning "streaming" not long after I left (late 1970's).
• Can it be that this is a reason why the UK's social mobility ranking has collapsed over the past 25 years according to a recent survey? It is now far more likely that wealth of parents bring success as compared with our parents generation.
• Can it be that the governments response to this will be to continue to bully the Universities into accepting poorer results thereby creating a perverse incentive to have kids in bad schools in the latest part of their secondary schoolingl life?

While I can buy my daughter out of this disgraceful system, most people cannot. At the same time our schools are generating teenage girls whose under-age pregnancy figures are the worst in Europe. Is this the government who targeted a 50% reduction by 2010 and who saw yet another increase this year?

• Can this be the education system whose legions of "special advisors" send by the education establishment to combat this matter (another example of where our tax funded increases in education actually goes) has found that those areas with the greatest amount spent on special advisors had the greatest INCREASE in teenage pregnancy?
• Is this the year that three sisters aged 12, 14 and 16 all had babies?
• Did our "special advisor" who is paid for by our taxes say in response; "The age is not what is relevant, it's the quality of the parenting and the support given to enable them to be effective parents."

Are we Alice? Are we in Wonderland?

Can I have my taxes back please.

Melanie and I in New Zealand - Christmas 2005 

The BBC is biased

There has been some debate about whether the BBC bias is provable.

It is.

There is an excellent report from the Centre of Policy Studies from which I draw out several items starting with the introduction to Gordon Brown (Labour conference 2004) on Today. It was quick and punchy;

***

John Humphrys: When Gordon Brown rises to his feet here in Brighton, to make his big conference speech today, he will do so as the longest serving chancellor for nearly two centuries. And, as the most successful chancellor the Labour Party has ever had. You’d have trouble finding a delegate here or an economist anywhere who would argue with that.

****

Setting aside the extraordinary implication that every economist in the world links Gordon Brown with success this compares with the introduction to Oliver Letwin after the Tory conference (2004) on Today. It was a long ramble of which elements below....

.... you don’t get away with that any more. The media, think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies – they’ll expose unaffordable plans. So the first question for any party is – do the sums add up.... So on Friday, the Conservatives promised to quote to spend 2.7 billion pounds more than Labour on defence. This sounded implausible as the Conservatives are planning to restrain defence spending.... ....It brings to mind an old war joke – that Hitler asked his key scientists to find a way of making margarine out of manure. The scientists went away with this impossible task and after a long delay Hitler demanded to know what progress they had made.....

*****

And in the interviews themselves....

The longest that Oliver Letwin was allowed to speak for uninterrupted was 112 words, compared to 342 words for Gordon Brown. Michael Howard’s longest uninterrupted passage was 211 words and David Davis’ only 153.8 Yet Tony Blair was able to speak for 375 words unchecked, closely followed by Gordon Brown with 342 words and John Prescott 286.
It does make you think that even John Prescott can get away with 286 words uninterupted without falling over.

*****

Monitoring the output of the Today programme from that day until the end of the first week of formal campaigning (15 April) shows a remarkable disparity in the studio interview airtime allocated to Labour compared to the Conservatives: in these two weeks of the campaign, Labour spokesmen had a total of 37 minutes 49 seconds to make their economic case, compared to just 16 minutes 30 seconds for the Conservatives. This was patently unfair. The Labour spokesmen had far longer to make their case and more opportunities to attack the Conservatives. The following analysis suggests that the disparities in editorial approach and treatment were marked – and all in favour of Labour...... (cont.)

****

Similar discrepancies appear when examining the lead stories in the national press with those that the programme decided to run with. Of two front page stories in The Times over these two weeks that were directly critical of the Government, the Today programme pursued neither. On 11 April, the lead story, “Labour to halt postal vote fraud but only after election” did not feature anywhere in Today’s political or election coverage – despite the scandals in Labour constituencies in Birmingham and Blackburn. On 13 April, the day of the Labour Manifesto launch, the front page of The Times read, “Doctors who backed Blair desert Labour”. Today did not run this story. Nor was it raised in a long interview that day with the former Health Secretary, Alan Milburn. In contrast, at the start of the second week of the campaign, “Howard faces flak as Labour stretches poll lead” was the front page article in The Times. To this, Today reacted. It was the subject of the 6.32 am political two-way interview, of a stringent interview with Liam Fox, and of amused gossip by an election panel peopled by two left-of-centre journalists (Harold Evans and Piers Morgan), along with the once Labour Party card-carrying holder and now Liberal Democrat defector former Director-General of the BBC Greg Dyke.

Why I just don't yet buy Global Warming

"Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it. "

The writer is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Science Studies at the University of California.

******************* Now, you should read all of this article.

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

It summarises my own views brilliantly. One should read it all, but I have to paste this bit as it is just so spot on...... (and look back at the first paragraph at the top of this e-mail as you read this). At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now? Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…" I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Labour education policy.... the mess gets worse....

Things the BBC has not reported.....

Over a period when education spending has rocketed in an unprecedented fashion and where average spend per pupil now exceeds £5,000.....

THE number of secondary schools being failed by Ofsted is continuing to rise, according to new figures published by the inspection service yesterday. There were 96 on Ofsted’s “special measures” list at the end of the Easter term, up two compared with the end of December.
Record numbers of UK parents are putting their children into private school. And this in spite of the substantial additional sums thrown at the public sector. The failure of London schools is highlighted by the fact that in London around 20 per cent of parents send their children to private school, nearly three times the national average.

LIBERAL Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said in April that he hopes to avoid the grief of finding a state school in London by educating his son in Scotland. This is one of the few sensible things Kennedy said during the UK election campaign.

Tony Blairs children attend the London Oratory (a Catholic only school). Luckily for the Blair children. On the standard measure of five or more grade A-C GCSEs passes, the Oratory scores 93%. Superb results. However, no worries if they aren't Catholic. There are lots of other schools in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham...... only minor snag is that the remaining schools score between 21% and 28%. Imagine if you were a parent.
So what's wrong with state education in England? Here is an example. A recent Commons MPs' report attacked the standard of reading. At age 11, it said, far far too many children do not achieve the reading and writing expected of their age. The MPs called for investigation into the use of phonics - the sounding out of individual letters to blend into words. Any sensible parent - and surely teacher - knows this is how you teach reading. Not so, says the grand National Literacy Strategy, set up in 1997. It prescribes memorising words by their shape and guessing at words by their context or the pictures with them - along with an element of phonics.

What can parents do? Err.... not a lot. Except those of us who go private (and get taught using a method that works - in my case the delightfully titled "Jolly Phonics").

The most recent comparison of international achievement, called the ‘world education league’ by the press, was the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) [ http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/63/34002454.pdf ] which gives figures for 41 countries in 2000 and 2003. Between those years, the UK dropped from fourth in science to 11th, from seventh in reading to 11th and from eighth in maths to 18th. However.....

..... scandalously the UK did not send enough data for the study. It was THE ONLY OECD country to fail in this regard and the ONLY Country (out of 41) to do so. As a result of which the UK Government has been able to deny the drop has any validity. This is even when suspicion is clear that it was the best schools that sent in their results and so the UK performance in comparison to our international competitors is probably even worse. It is also suspicious that the government made no attempt to rectify this situation, odd when the report would have been published just before the election to no doubt inform the electorate of the Labour governments educational achievements.