Gogwit's Blog

The Adult and Communities Green Paper at a glance

Birmingham City Council announced it’s Green Paper on Adult social care services this week. It’s intention is to pave the way to make further budget cuts to care services, additional to the cuts already budgeted for.

The Green paper is a prelude to the formal budget setting for 2014-15 which will start in the Autumn.

Current cuts are insufficient

These services are already committed to saving £46m between 2013/14 and 2016/17, before any further savings proposals identified by the Service Review are considered.

However, these savings don’t go nearly far enough to meet the financial challenge posed.

Future cuts proposed

We believe this can provide total savings of around £37m next year rising to over £75m per year by 2016-17.

The key objectives in redesigning services proposed are:

Reduce reliance on residential and nursing care.

Improve access to support services to enable people to live in their own homes in…

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EXCLUSIVE – leaked sample questions from Michael Gove’s new GCSE Mathematics examination

i-level? Eye-level? High-level? Split level? On-the-level?

Pride's Purge

(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…

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Gove unveils new GCSEs with emphasis on cold baths and six of the best from a well-oiled cane

Cold showers and regular beatings did me no harm.

Pride's Purge

(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…

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Three reasons why (a few) people still vote Lib Dem

Pride's Purge

(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…

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Sorry… I’m a Primary School teacher… and I don’t mind levels.

Ramblings of a Teacher

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…

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