Civitas Blog

I remember calling the LibDem’s office in Brussels a couple of months ago, asking for their education spokesperson in the European Parliament (or even an MEP with a particular interest in education) and being told there was no-one because ‘education is not an EU competence and is still the exclusive domain of member states’. This is true in the sense that the EU Commission has no independent power to propose law in this area; EU related policy on education is instead based on voluntary cooperation between the ministers of member states meeting in the European Council. Member states retain the right to veto any initiative passed in this forum and such initiatives are, at least technically, non-binding.

Yet there can be little doubt the EU is carving out a role for itself in education, coveted in particular by constant reference to teaching the ‘European Dimension’. These anomalies are typically tagged onto documents relating to the Lisbon Agenda (with its focus on lifelong learning and the like as part of the drive to make the EU ‘the most competitive economy in the world’) and various other EU-funded exchange and youth programmes. The EU budget for Education and Culture is now somewhat incredibly 1 221 270 895 euros. And then we have the Bologna Process, which has been discreetly usurped by the Commission, and subject to a damning report by the Commons Education Select Committee released yesterday.

Acres of newsprint today are given over to reporting and commenting about yesterday’s guilty verdict of five young British Muslims for conspiracy to make and explode a 600kg bomb somewhere in the Home Counties, either a Kent shopping centre or a London nightclub.

... continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Last week, Alcohol Concern, ‘the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse’, managed to generate a significant amount of media coverage with its recommendation to ‘make it illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of 15.’ The reasoning behind this was that since unsupervised consumption of alcohol is spiralling, along with associated anti-social behaviour, among young people, the natural solution is to imprison parents who offer a thimble of wine to their child at the dinner table.

When faced with that as a consequence of their proposal on the BBC’s Today programme, Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson argued that the change in the law was still necessary in order to ‘send a message’. I am not sure what sort of message about this society would be sent out if Jewish Passover services (where every family member is encouraged to drink a traditional sweet red wine throughout the evening) were raided by the police, but I doubt the delinquents in town centres will see the relevance to them. The alternative 'message', that such laws won't be enforced to the letter so best to work out one's own interpretation of justice would be the likely unintended consequence.

Since 2000, the NHS has witnessed a huge, and unprecendented, increase in funding. Public spending on the NHS has risen from £46.0bn in 2000/1 to an estimated £84.4bn in 2006/7, representing an increase of 83.5% in cash terms and over 50% in real terms.

This has been accompanied by reforms that on the one hand point towards a more patient-centred and primary-care led 'internal-market' for healthcare. Primary Care Trusts and GP practices now purchase secondary care from NHS Trusts (or private providers) on behalf of patients, who can exercise some choice over where they are treated. NHS Trusts will be paid for the work they carry out; money should in theory follow the patient. But on the other hand, the government has created a whole raft of central bodies to provide 'the impetus for reform' and, more often than not, set targets that NHS bodies are expected to meet on anything from patient records to waiting times.

We learn today that despite a 5.9% rise in school fees, the independent sector is thriving. Annual figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) have garnered particular attention this year, with the chairman of the ISC, Nigel Richardson, suggesting that private schools are finding themselves especially in demand because they ‘are providing something that in less complicated times families might have been better able to provide for themselves’. What Mr Richardson refers to is the time parents spend with their children. But does the private sector’s appeal for parents not lie in something much simpler: a generally superior standard of education?

Once upon a time in a not so far-off kingdom, still somewhat anachronistically known as a united one, there lived two lads named Ed, although neither had been given that name at birth.

Continued on the Centre for SocialCohesion blog.

In its submission of written evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee on Global Security, so this week's Sunday Telegraph reports, the Church of England claims Britain’s recent foreign policy has been counterproductive in terms of fighting Islamist terror. Rather than helping to minimise the risks of suffering it, Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has only served to recruit British Muslims to the cause of jihad and increase the risk it faces of suffering terror attacks.

Continued on the Social Cohesion blog.

The Sunday Times reports that the new Thomas Deacon Academy has not found room for building a playground amongst its (mostly taxpayer) £46.4 million funding. Justifying this move is the claim that all the pupils of this school will be so enthused by the curriculum that they will not require playtime in which to let off steam (a situation that one teacher blogger considers to be without precedent). The project manager of the academy even makes the further claim that removing all unsupervised time from the school day will prevent bullying. True in the same way that stomach stapling can be pretty effective at tackling obesity.

Looking at the school on Peterborough’s official website, the situation doesn’t appear quite as horrendous as the Times article implies. There is indeed no playground but a combination of grass and artificial pitches are there for structured sports activities (more than many schools can offer) and in the not unlikely event of this no-playtime policy falling flat on its face, these areas could probably be used to kick a football around.

Just a few more weeks remain under the leadership of the man whose realisation of ‘education, education, education’ we’ve been witnessing for the past ten years. With school improvement Tony Blair’s chief priority, the all-important question is, how has he done? The verdict? Better on effort than strategy.

Some time ago Tim Garton-Ash summed up Blair’s EU problems in two words ‘Rupert’ and ‘Murdoch’. Brown too will face these problems but with two additionally troublesome words, ‘Tony’ and ‘Blair’.

Much has been made in the media of the fact that Brown is essentially a domestic politician, has little inclination to engage himself unnecessarily with the politics of the Europe, and moreover that he enjoys running the UK economy too much to be willing to share it with the EU any further. This appears to be cause for optimism amongst EU-sceptics, but realistically Brown will be unable to just ‘dig in’ – the constitutional issue will not simply pass over-head and action WILL need to be taken, even if it not compelled by the actions of Blair at the EU summit on 22nd June.

In his comment piece in today’s Times, entitled ‘Don’t try and put the ration into immigration’, David Aaronvitch takes exception to all forms of governmental limit to foreign immigration into this country.

His stated reasons for opposing all such limits are lame indeed.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Anyone hoping for a change in attitude to schools at the next election will be sorely disappointed by the news that the Tories have cloned their new education policy from Labour. In a repentant tone, David Willetts casts aside grammar schools and embraces Comprehensive education. The disingenuous reasoning behind this move: ‘We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright, poor kids… This is a widespread belief but we just have to recognise that there is overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.’

Widespread it may be despite the sustained attack on selection, but it also happens to be true. Indeed, this ‘overwhelming evidence’ seems to point in the opposite direction to which David Willetts is now facing. As Alan Smithers has pointed out, Northern Ireland retains a grammar school system and has significantly superior exam results. In 2005, 31.2 per cent of A level results were A grades compared with the UK average of 22.8. Even the overall A level pass rate was higher suggesting that the selective system offers a boost for even the less academically able students. 71 per cent of GCSE results were A*-C grades compared with the UK average of 61.2. These results show fairly conclusively that one current system of selective education benefits all pupils far more than the current comprehensive system.

A study released yesterday by Cancer Research UK revealed that in the past 30 years, survival rates from cancer in the UK have almost doubled from 23.6% in 1971, to 46.2% in 2000/1. OECD statistics running up to 2003 show the trend continued. In terms of deaths from cancer before the age of 70 that were potentially preventable by good medical care, the UK witnessed a 3.29% improvement.

Many, including the government’s cancer tsar, Prof Mike Richards, expect Eurocare-4 statistics, to be published later this year, to show further progress. A large proportion of the extra funds the NHS has received since 2000 has been targeted at improving cancer care through the NHS Cancer Plan; 99.9% of suspected cancer patients urgently referred by their GP are now seen by a specialist within 2 weeks, compared with just 63% in 1997; the number of cancer specialists employed by the NHS has increased by 49%; and £520m has been invested in new specialist equipment.

But a more interesting point will be to see whether improvements in the UK (assuming there will be improvements), outstrip those in other countries.

The element which has worried me most about education reforms under New Labour, is the way that learning has been squeezed out in order to accommodate improvement. It sounds like an oxymoron of course, but the Government’s desire to be seen to be doing well, as educationalist Alan Smithers once so pithily put it, has often forfeited children the opportunity of genuinely doing well.

The weekend papers had a number of contributions focused on the EU and the increasingly resurgent issue of its proposed Constitution. Charles Moore spent his Saturday wrestling with the trials of recycling (in his Telegraph article at least), as imagined up by both the architects of the new Landfill Directive and those of that soon-to-be-recycled Constitution. He did a thorough job of detailing the various means by which it will further strip sovereignty from member states without even consulting their electorates. The article can be found here.

A day later it was the turn of Ed Balls, writing in the Sunday Times, to do his own piece on recycling - denouncing the ‘outdated and sterile’ arguments of ‘anti-Europeans’. While he may have called for a ‘reframing of the British debate’, it seems he was less keen on reframing than on grasping an opportunity to repaint the EU-sceptics as misguidedly, and dangerously, nationalist.

Today's newspapers contain two different horticultural stories each with a bearing on social cohesion.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

This morning, Radio 4's Today programme aired a shocking report on the poor treatment of employees (mostly Polish immigrants) in a banana packing factory. Workers had to accept long hours or face being unemployed. Their breaks would be cancelled if the managers felt they had not packed enough boxes. In the most extreme example, a pregnant woman with a doctor's note was refused a less labour intensive job and, as a consequence, miscarried. Ironically, the bananas these workers park are marked 'fair trade' in many major supermarkets.

The first problem this highlights is the continuing difficulty of the fair trade brand. The complex journey that products embark on, from the raw resource to the processed goods on the shop shelves tend to involve a great many different types of workers in many different environments. Fair trade goods have frequently come under fire for having only one or two stages in the production process be conducted 'fairly' and yet still be officially sanctioned as fair trade. The other problem is that farmers and traders in the Third World become behoven to an unwieldy bureaucracy to ensure they receive a 'fair price' for their goods when, in fact, many of these workers could flourish with simple free trade under the right political conditions.

It seems that this issue has become even more fraught now that unfettered immigration is allowing working conditions to disintegrate in some sectors of the economy. The problem is a combination of newly arrived immigrants who are very willing to work intensively for long hours (an admirable quality in itself) and unscrupulous recruitment agencies whose tactics blur the line between 'robust' employment practices and defrauding workers who are not yet aware of their rights and duties in British society. This is the dark side of all those claims that immigrants are the main drive in growing British GDP (claims that remain highly disputable). No one can deny that immigrants can to contribute keeping down the price of 'fair trade' bananas to ease consumers' consciences that bit more cheaply. But at what cost to the wages and working condition of unskilled employment in the UK?

The Conservatives u-turn on grammar schools has dominated this week’s education news. That there was rebellion in the Tory ranks was not surprising, grammar schools being a pinnacle of previous Conservative education policy. What was surprising, however, was the fact that the rebellion struck only now. Cameron, Willets and Osborne have all said that grammar schools will not feature on the new Conservative agenda. Yes, this week Willets attempted to dismantle the entire pro-grammar schools case, arguing that grammars did the opposite of what many conservatives believe: arrest, rather than increase social mobility. Nevertheless, it has been quite clear from the day that Cameron slid into his commanding saddle – or rather since his bid for the saddle - that the new leaders of the Tory party are not interested in Conservative ideology. Nor are they pursuing a new ideology: the Conservatives’ route to power is a haphazard one, directed by polls rather than principles. A political strategy that might be dubbed the pursuit of All Ways in contrast to New Labour’s Third Way. The problem, and the cause of in-fighting, is that the Conservative backbenchers are torn. On most days, party members want to get into power no matter what; yet on the days that the pillars of their core beliefs are whipped out from under their feet…well, their feet get suddenly chilled.

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune provides its readers with some not entirely reassuring details about how young British Muslim students at their country's burgeoning madrassas are being taught citizenship in them.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

When the government fails to fulfill its minimal responsibilities, it is the poor that will suffer while the rich can usually find an alternative. In a typical case in the UK, for years, even as average fees have been rising, the number of families seeking out independent education has been growing steadily. There it is because a minimal amount of discipline and teaching has not been available in many areas of state education for some time.

Now, (via BOM), we learn that a far more basic government service, protection from crime, has fallen to such a level that the richer streets of North London, Primrose Hill in particular, are beginning to invest in independent security forces. Pity the other inhabitants of Camden who cannot afford to opt out of state police protection.

Having an independent NHS seems to be the big idea at the moment. Cameron is all for it, Brown is pondering it and Andy Burnham, the likely successor to the embattled Ms. Hewitt, is apparently sympathetic. As are a number of influential bodies. Steve Dewar, Director of Health Policy at the King’s Fund, re-ignited the debate in 2003 with his paper ‘Government & the new NHS – Time for a new relationship?’; Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ has been a long-term supporter; the Health Services Management Centre at Birmingham University, including Chris Ham, argued for it in their paper ‘Things can only get better?’ (April 2007); the BMA followed suit this month in ‘A Rational Way Forward for the NHS’; and today the Nuffield Trust released a pamphlet by Prof. Brian Edwards reviewing the various forms independence could take.