Education decline exposed again

Back in 2005 I said this....

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.

Roll on to 2007 (had to dig a bit for this as obviously not a "top story" for the BBC (instead we have a small pilot scheme on dsylexia - news management from the New Labour PR aided by the BBC machine) but I did find it at last....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7115692.stm

We were 8th in Maths in 2000. We were 18th in the 2003 survey although the government denied the validity of that survey (see above). We are now 24th. In literacy down to 17th and so it goes on.

Of course, the New Labour ministers went into desperate spin overdrive, having presided over a near tripling of the educational budget - primarily over the 2000-2006 period in question. However, questioning the survey and claiming that the government will "intervene more when pupils are struggling" hardly fill one with confidence. The last thing I would want for my children is this government "intervening" more often.

Not only did we drop in relative terms, we dropped in absolute terms. Take Maths - down from a absolute score of 529 to 495. Then maybe someone from our educational establishment was on hand to explain the substantial increase in GCSE results over the same period? Nope, thought not. Maybe later.

www.oecd.org

With all this data available some interesting research is possible. If you get into the detail of the outcome, there is fascinating information on the factors statistically most important when looking at improvement in performance.

Top Factor - Headmaster perceives availability of high quality teaching staff
2nd Factor - Local competition between schools
3rd Factor - Schools autonomy when choosing spending

All of these have a clear link - more of these factors drives up performance of schools. All this seems straightforward - its about teacher quality, local freedoms and competition/choice.

Then we have the only 2 factors that when they occur, performance tends to go (slightly) down.

2nd Last - Additional public funding
Bottom - Headmaster perceives difficult to recruit good staff

And so, more funding from the center (as opposed to more funding privately), the results get marginally worse. And this certainly correlates with the UK findings where we have thrown public money at state schools only to find that, when objectively measured by a non-UK Department of Education body, results are getting worse.

Not just worse compared with other countries - just plain worse.

Our police and media leaders let us down again

In this country we have a proud tradition of avoiding extremism. In the 30's our fascist party was a joke, largely ridiculed and ignored by the people though somewhat indulged by elements of the wealthier classes.

The rise of the danegerous and unpleasant BNP as a sustainable and electorally succesful force is a relatively recent phenomenon. We are still able to be proud of our countries tolerance - we dont have Le Pen nor do we have a society that would put Le Pen in 2nd place in presedential elections. But we have seen the rise of the BNP in a British society that has never before given material support to such a fringe entity.

What we see below is an illustration of why this is happening.

The BBC Story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7092401.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7092711.stm

This was a real puzzle. Here we had 12-year old girls being assaulted in the most disgraceful manner and the police response was, to say the least, odd.

The real story.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/21/ngroom21.xml

When will the politically correct classes figure this out? The way to defeat racism in our country is to have laws that are absolutely blind to a persons enthnicity. When average people in this county discover - as they always do - that the forces of law and the powers in the media conspire to hide facts purely on race grounds, how can this not feed resentment and give legitimacy to the claims of the odious BNP?

Of course, if the ethnicity of the people involved in this case were reversed, I have no doubt that our leaders response would equally be reversed and the full weight of the media and law would bear down on any guilty parties. A response we would all applaud. It beggars belief that we have reached a stage where children are left with less protection for reasons of political correctness.

RJ

Shame on New Labour

When I first read the contents of the section below - many months ago - I actually thought it was probably wrong. To my great disgust and anger I now believe what is written below is factually accurate;

The story of Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, a British Paratrooper who lost both of his legs fighting on behalf of the British Government in Afghanistan. And you remember - Afghanistan is the war that the great John Reid announced with the statement "no bullets will be fired".


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What they found at Selly Oak hospital– which is part of the University Hospital Birmingham NHS foundation trust but also houses the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine – was profoundly shocking.

The National Health Service care was extremely good but the soldiers had no dedicated ward. Colleagues were not allowed to visit wearing uniform for fear of upsetting Muslim visitors and staff. Once their emergency treatment ended, even those as badly injured as Parkinson would have to join the NHS waiting list for the physiotherapy they needed, along with everyone else, despite having fought for their country.

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When I was in America, there is one thing that strikes you - the clear support for their troops. The American people are clearly able to distinguish between their support for the army and support for the political decisions behind the war.

However, in our country, it appears that the sensitivities of muslims are more important than support for our injured soldiers.

There is a great well spring of largely untapped support for our troops in the general population. It rises up spontaneously whenever it has the opportunity - and with no support at all from our political leaders. The anger that people feel about the way this government and its state agents treat our soldiers bubbles under the surface. This Labour Government is a disgrace.

A seminal period for British Politics

I believe we are at the beginning of a seminal period in British Politics.

For 15 years we have been living in good times - the fruits of the Thatcher reforms of the 80's and sensible macro-economic management post-ERM by the Tory administration of Clark and late 90's Brown. All of this combined with very benign worldwide conditions as the BRIC countries embraced market economics. In such happy times, the public are rarely responsive to "tough choices" and their support will happily provided to those political parties that tell them what they want to hear. And what people, quite reasonably, want to hear is that they can have fairness, equality, good health and education services and all with a strong economy based on higher (but not too high) taxes.

And so, slowly but surely, we have had 20st Century Welfarism taken to its logical conclusion. We have had the surge of "investment" in public services. We have had political correctness become the language of political discourse. And we have Brown vs. Cameron making a good impression of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.


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For those that can recall, in the mid-70's nobody in the public was asking for substantial free-market reforms, monetarism, employment legislation to tame the unions, privatisation, floating the currency and massive direct tax cuts. And yet, it was the intellectual debate on these very topics - taken into the public arena - that set the scene for the political success of these ideas when socialist economics collapsed and the public awoke to give the matter serious attention.

Today its not about economics. Its about the Welfare State. And in this sense Ray is absolutely right. Where is the debate on the failure of 20th Century Welfarism? Where are the radical alternatives being explored? And remember - in its day, nearly all of what Thatcher become known for was "radical". A metaphor of course for "people will not wear it - it won't happen".

To defend Mrs. Thatcher on her role in the 80's, it comes back to a leader for the challenge of the time. The challenge of the time was economic and what we got was 10 years of significant change on economic policy - change that moved the center of gravity of the debate to the right and change that has - by and large - been accepted. What she did not do was tackle the Welfare orthodoxy that has been in place certainly since the 60's and large parts of it since the War. To have tried to tackle this at the same time as economic reform would have broken her administration.


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Today I do see positive signs, but only signs. Most worrying is a distinct lack of courage in the conservative leadership. Perhaps they fear the relentless negative barrage that would arrive courtesy of the tax-funded BBC.

And yet here I have optimism.

I think in the coming crisis the left wing welfare orthodoxy, as championed by new Labour and its ideological allies in the BBC and the Guardian-reading classes, will be exposed as bankrupt. Those who studied the Labour Government of the late 70's will see the similarities - the intellectual exhaustion, confusion, lack of original thinking and over-riding sense of defeat - that a tide has changed. This is what we are seeing in the Brown Government. This is why when Brown talks about "sharing his vision" nothing actually comes out. When he talked about "the first 100-days" nothing actually happened. When he talks about new solutions for todays problems - they all look like the same old solutions but re-heated and re-packaged and quite often re-announced.

And I think the British people will see this, just as they are seeing through so much of the previous orthodoxy - such as multiculturalism and the benefits of immigration.

All that is now left is for the Conservative Party to get ahead of this sea change and not follow it. A good first step would be to work closely on new policy with Labour MP Frank Field and others on the left who are concerned about society. If Cameron fails to take advantage of the best opportunity in a generation to change the country to meet the real challenges of the 21st century, Cameron and his friends will not be forgiven.