Month: Jun 2013

A previously unseen report, commissioned from the Rothschild Bank on behalf of the government, reveals plans to sell off student loans taken out since 1998 and retrospectively raise the interest rates paid by graduates to increase the attractiveness of the loan book to private buyers.  This could leave 3.6m graduates facing sharp rises in their student loans repayments, while the tax payer stands as guarantor in the event students default on the debt, paying up to ensure the private investors never lose a penny.

First Came the Fees

 

Previously, tuition fees were capped at £3,000 a year.  One of the first acts of the Coalition government was so introduce a new ceiling of £9,000 a year (despite Liberal Democrat pledge to scrap tuition fees altogether) – trebling the potential fees payable by students.

It’s hard to believe that a little over a decade ago, we viewed higher…

A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog following an email discussion with the DfE which outlined the nonsensical situation that the cohort completing Key Stage 2 in 2015 will – according to current plans – be taught under the new National Curriculum for the year 2014-15, and then assessed against the old on in May 2015. That blog has been viewed over 2000 times, and was today reported in the Guardian Education Education in Brief column.

I had, in fact, tried to get clarity on this matter from the department several times. One of my emails, originally via the TES DfE page, has only now received a response, stating:

“Really sorry this isn’t answered yet. Legal team are involved!”

And that’s it.

And I got to wondering: would such a situation even be legal? Is that perhaps what is holding up the response? Has somebody at the DfE…

On April 9th, the leader and deputy leader of the Council decided to cancel the initial attempts to find outside bidders to run the new Library of Birmingham. Yet there has been no categorical assurance that this public library, costing £188 of public funds to build, will remain public. There has been confusing talk from the leader of no immediate plans to privatise the library, combined with the information that they are ‘working with the development trust on further operating arrangements and responsibilities’. Given that everything else in the public sector is up for grabs, and given that the Labour Council is now talking openly of privatising leisure centres, why should the Library of Birmingham be any different? The campaigning needs to continue until its future as a public resource is assured.

For that reason, a “Friends of the Library of Birmingham” group is being set up. The founding meeting will…

(satire?)

1. Leroy wants to buy a TV for £400 plus VAT. VAT is presently at 17½%. How much money will Leroy save if he loots it during a riot instead?
Answer: £………………………………………………………… (3 marks)

2. A class in an inner-city comprehensive contains 13 boys and 17 girls. A female pupil is chosen at random. What is the probability that she is pregnant?
Answer: ……………………………………………………… (2 marks)

3. A mini-disc player is priced at £75. It is put in the sale at 15% off. To within the nearest thousand, how many disc players will be bought by asylum seekers on benefits?
Answer: ………………………………………………………… (2 marks)

4. This is the present exchange rate from a travel agent’s office.
GBP (£) 1 = Euro (€) 1.43
A French company is buying goods in the UK. They change 1000 Euros (€) into GB pounds (£). How much better off will the UK be if we left the EU…

(satire?)

Michael Gove has unveiled major reforms to the way GCSE examinations are conducted in England, saying that applications of six of the best to the nether regions from a well-oiled cane and character-building cold baths will be a central part of the new GCSE syllabus.

The Education Secretary also told MPs in the House of Commons that the new exam-only qualifications would have more emphasis on regular beatings on the bare buttocks with a finely stitched leather strap in order to equip the nation’s fallen Godless, Devil-spawned youth to perform better in the modern world.

In his report titled In Praise of Stout Educational Virtues and Avoidance of Unwholesome Excesses of Youth, Mr Gove also said that if schools are to avoid an excess of cads, ruffians, suffragettes and fallen women, then the experience of being made to stand in a freezing bath while reciting passages from the Bible while at the same time ensuring…

(It’s not satire – it’s the Lib Dems!)

Liberal Democrats and their supporters – the few that remain anyway – fascinate me.

After all, why would a supposedly moderate, liberal, centrist party support a clearly authoritarian Tory administration with the most right-wing policies since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s?

Well, I’ve been reading up a bit on political and social psychology and I’ve discovered three possible scientific theories which may help to explain this mystery.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias is a tendency for people to favour information that confirms their decisions, beliefs or hypotheses avoiding information which disproves them. Confirmation Bias leads to a selective collection of facts and evidence – favouring those which support a decision, belief or point of view but completely ignoring any evidence which refutes it, no matter how strong or convincing it may be.

Cognitive Dissonance

In modern psychology, Cognitive Dissonance is the strong need to avoid the discomfort…

I happen to think that National Curriculum levels are okay. There, I said it.

Not perfect, but not quite the work of the devil, either. It’s true that their use has too often become corrupted, that in too many schools they are too often a driver rather than a measure, and that they have their failings. But in among all the cheering and shouting about their demise, it strikes me that too little attention has been paid to the reasons for that.

The Attainment Target levels are broad and relatively vague. That was probably deliberate. When you’re only using them to judge progress over periods of two to four years, a best fit approach with broad bands makes perfect sense. The problem comes when you try to use them once a term, or worse, once a week or once a lesson!

But nobody required that. The National Curriculum did not…

The country’s 232,000 teaching assistants face the axe after ministers started talks to phase out the so-called ‘mums army’.

It  is  said that TAs  earn  in the  region  of £17,000! 

How  many  teaching  assistants do I know that would LIKE to earn  that!