Civitas Blog

It’s been a week of tussles for education. As the grammar school row within the Conservative Party rumbles on – Graham Brady quits but then the Tories appear to ‘climb-down’, as education secretary Alan Johnson put it – the only thing about Tory policy which is clear is that the party is in disarray. Alan Johnson’s contribution to this week’s education debates has however not been limited to commentary. The education secretary’s attentions have been on the other set of schools some regard as ‘elitist’ - private ones. Johnson wants independent schools to do more to justify their charitable status. In what comes across as a bit of an own-goal in light of New Labour’s tireless emphasis on education, Johnson has proposed that one way to do so would be for private schools to ‘lend’ their teachers to the state sector. The implication is that private school teachers are better. This is something which would doubtless be hotly contested by the many who argue that it’s the conditions in private schools which are better, rather than the staff. Talk of private vs. state sector conditions brings us on to today’s education controversy: the Department for Education and Skills’ warnings over the dangers of getting children to put up their hands in class.

In the Sunday Times today David Cameron responds to critics of his grammar schools’ policy by presenting everyone who disagrees with him as a backwoodsman entertaining policy delusions. But the strongest critics of Mr Cameron’s education policy are not diehard defenders of grammar schools. They fully accept the need for policies to be modernised and presented in the most persuasive language, but argue that Mr Cameron is not going about modernisation in the most effective way.

Towards the end of last year, following separate exposes by John Ware and Martin Bright as to
just how immoderate in view and policy are the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, until then the government’s preferred interlocutor when dealing with the country’s two million Muslims, it looked as though the government was finally about to get serious in henceforth only dealing with and supporting genuinely moderate Muslim organisations and their leadership.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog

Via Daniel J. Mitchell at Cato, we learn that the last seven years has seen a climb in total taxation the equivalent of ten pence in every pound:

‘What developed nation has taken the biggest steps in the wrong direction since the turn of the century? The answer is not France, Germany, or Sweden. The United Kingdom has that dubious honor. Government spending has jumped from less than 38 percent of GDP in 2000 to more than 45 percent of economic output today. That is the largest increase among OECD nations, and the United Kingdom now has a bigger burden of government than Germany.’

We can all cheer! The NHS is in surplus. Unaudited accounts released yesterday by the DoH reveal an operating surplus of £510m, a miraculous £1.37bn turnaround from the £547m deficit reported last year. Most of the press have, typically, attacked this achievement by reporting the dire consequences – as many as 70,000 job cuts, cut-backs back on elective surgery, cuts to the NHS training budget etc. But the fact is the problem of NHS deficits had to be addressed. The NHS, so long as it has finite resources by virtue of the fact is funded through general taxation, must also have a centrally agreed budget and a principle of cost containment, i.e. that its organisations either stay in surplus or balance.

The real issue is why such deficits have mounted in the first place. This is no easy question to answer, but the root cause almost certainly lies in the structure of the NHS itself.

On Wednesday the Daily Mail ran a piece quoting Civitas, about the shortage of science and maths teacher which is leading to more mixed-ability classes in comprehensive schools. The concern is that this is not only diluting learning, but exacerbating poor pupil behaviour.

A secondary science teacher from Brighton who read and agreed with the article wrote in to us about her own experiences in the classroom. Here, in diary form, is what she considers to be the underlying reasons for disruptive pupils – as well as her solutions.

'Today I have again been up against the coalface so to speak. With an insight, perhaps we may not entirely blame pupils for poor behaviour in schools. Let me explain

The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

See full press release.
Embargo: 0.01am, Monday 11 June

At a recent Civitas seminar, in the London offices of the European Parliament, Syed Kamall MEP spoke robustly about the over-regulatory realities of the EU. Drawing from his experiences on several legislative committees he detailed a number of key areas where the European Project is going astray and then proposed a series of suggestions as to how this could be remedied. However, the discussion that followed resulted in a somewhat pessimistic conclusion as to whether these solutions could ever be realised. Below is a brief summary of some of the issues discussed. I leave the reader to decide if they can identify any signs for greater optimism…

Despite all the appalling details to have emerged in today's press about the truly dreadful ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, given yesterday’s guilty verdict of her father and uncle for arranging her murder, the true and horrendous significance of one aspect of her case, to my mind, has yet to have be adequately noted or commented on.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Echoing many of the problems our latest report The Corruption of the Curriculum has examined, Wellington Grey writes in an open letter to AQA and the Department for Education:

I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers — if there will be any.

I graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and pursued a lucrative career in economics which I eventually abandoned to teach. Economics and business, though vastly easier than my subject, and more financially rewarding, bored me. I went into teaching to return to the world of science and to, in what extent I could, convey to pupils why one would love a subject so difficult.

For a time I did. For a time, I was happy.

Improving patient safety was identified as a key goal for the NHS in the DoH report, Building a Safer NHS for Patients (2001). This built on the seminal report, An Organisation with a Memory (2000), which estimated that adverse events in which harm is caused to patients happen in an unnerving 10% of admissions to NHS hospitals (c.850,000 cases a year) costing at least £2bn p.a. The report considered around half these incidents to be preventable. A new online briefing released today by Civitas looks at how the NHS been doing since. <click here>

Yet more trials for testing and tests this week. The General Teaching Council has called for the standard assessment tests (Sats) taken by pupils at ages 7, 11 and 14 years old, to be scrapped. The teaching standards watchdog argues that the tests are doing nothing for standards, simply stressing out pupils and teachers.

Marta Kowalska is currently an intern on the EU Project. On the birthday of the Kaczynski twins, Poland's President and Prime Minister, she explains those factors determining the Polish position on the present constitutional debate.

It is difficult to observe the current political debate about the European constitution from an international perspective, as many of the decisions and arguments of member states seem irrational and hard to comprehend. It can be very frustrating that others are not able to see the ‘real’ importance of events. The discussion about the New European Treaty shows how ‘common European interest’ is defined differently at the national level and how much depends on the class of politicians and their political background.

The Polish attitude in EU negotiations is very often misjudged by other member states, due to a lack of understanding of the history of Poland and its political mentality. Fifty years of communist experiences are not simply eradicated by 17 years of democracy.

"Unfortunately, the U.S.A., Britain, the alliance, our government... are driven... by the obsession to eliminate the Muslims from the surface of the earth. Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of blood will invigorate the Muslim movement."

So reportedly said the leader of the “British brigade” in explanation of why "his team" stands ready to carry out suicide attacks in Great Britain. He reportedly did so in a valedictory speech delivered at a graduation ceremony for future suicide-bombers held ten days ago at a training camp somewhere inside Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

There are aspects of the new Conservative White Paper on health to applaud, but they are, by and large, pretty much restricted to the supply-side. That advocated for commissioning is quite a different matter.

A new online briefing released today by Civitas looks in detail at statistics relating to government performance on waiting times, in particular those recently released on the 18-week referral to treatment target. It argues that a number of statistics hidden in the data suggest the NHS has a massive, and probably insurmountable, challenge to meet the 18-week RTT target by 2008 without compromising patient care. In particular that:

- A substantial number of patients are still waiting significantly longer than 18 weeks;
36% are waiting beyond 26 weeks and 12% are waiting beyond a year.

- There are real variations in the time waited by patients both geographically and across medical specialities. For example, just 25% of orthopaedic patients are seen within 18 weeks, compared with 79% of those receiving thoracic medicine; and just 33% of patients in the South East Coast SHA are treated within the target compared with 60% in the East Midlands SHA. It will be incredibly difficult for those with low proportions of patients treated within the target to turn this around in little over a year.

-The NHS remains some way off meeting the goal that patients receive all diagnostics within 13 weeks of their first outpatient appointment, which will have to be considerably less if the 18-week pathway is to be met. 109,694 people were still waiting beyond 13 weeks as of March 2007.

Moreover, despite the improvements in cutting waiting times for inpatient and outpatient appointments, median waiting times have actually increased and 700,000 people are still on waiting lists for inpatient treatment with over 950,000 waiting for an outpatient appointment.

And NHS patients are still waiting much longer than those in other health systems. According to surveys conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the Commonwealth Fund merely 6% of primary care physicians in the UK thought their patients 'rarely or never experience long waiting times for diagnostic tests', compared with 76% in Germany; and 41% of respondents in the UK reported waiting longer than 4 months for elective surgery, compared with just 6% in Germany and 8% in the US.

Being desperate to stop the radicalisation of British-born Muslims, the government turned for expert advice on how best they may be taught about Islam so that they would learn that only moderate versions of their religion were, if not authentic, then at least palatable.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

As Blair prepared his goodbyes this week, we’ve been looking at his record in schools. Our verdict? Improved results denote a decline in standards. Have a look at the full report which examines the ways in which results have been boosted, here.