Civitas Blog

Passing a lesser-known London park this morning, it was pleasing to see a neat phalanx of young men raising the Union Jack - writes Peter Smith. Rather than joining their peers for a ‘night on the tiles’ to mark the end of school, these young men – teenage boys, if you will – are members of the Scouting movement. At 8 am today, thousands of Scouts from across the world celebrated the one hundredth birthday of an organisation that has instilled civic virtues in tens of millions of young men.

One wonders what Robert Baden-Powell would make of the Scout Association today. Its beginnings were austere: a handful of boys taken on a week-long ‘experimental camp’ at Brownsea Island, Dorset, followed by the re-publication of field craft books originally written for soldiers in the Boer War. But Baden-Powell was (as marketing strategists say) ‘on to a good thing’ and the organisation stands as it does today, with 28 million members today.

What’s the secret to the Scout Movement’s success? Many famous leaders in politics, science, exploration and culture are proud to be still associated with one of their childhood pastimes. In a word, its values. Scouts are taught to become self-reliant, responsible, caring and committed members of society; in other words, they become adults. Baden-Powell mixed working class and public schooled children to promote integration and team work across social divides. The formation of young minds according to a common syllabus but with plenty of scope for individual challenge and creativity provides a keen template to educationalists, social commentators and politicians today. It remains a showcase for how entrepreneurial people can better the lives of many others without the interference of central government. Scouts everywhere, happy birthday, and here’s to another hundred years.

Reports released this week by the King's Fund on Agenda for Change, by the Information Centre for Health regarding the GP contract, and earlier in the year by the NAO on the consultant contract have all shown little evidence that any of the contracts have had a positive impact on productivity.

But none of this should come as too much of a surprise, according to an online briefing released on Tuesday by Civitas. Instead, the findings should be seen as symptomatic of deep-seated inefficiencies in NHS staff planning, largely caused by 'pressures to meet an explosion of central direction that has forced a focus on targets and (later) financial pressures, thereby creating an upward-looking service with short-term goals, rather than one that is truly patient-centred and able to match supply and demand'.

Cameron gave a much publicised – as well as much satirised by the newspapers’ cartoonists – speech on Tuesday. School discipline was the theme in, as the Times Education Supplement puts it, ‘a speech designed to appeal to traditional Tory values’. Appealing to Conservative values was something more than one commentator considered rather urgent, with many a quip about Cameron’s inability to discipline his own party printed the following day. But looking at the content of the Tory leader’s speech, it would seem that concern rather than ridicule was in order.

Key Stage 2 results published yesterday by the government don't stand up to scrutiny. Instead, teachers have been compelled to generate artificial results, at horrifying costs to pupils.

Results released by the DCSF show that 80 per cent and 77 per cent of pupils have reached the government's expected standard, Level 4, in literacy and numeracy respectively. However it is widely accepted by educationalists that Key Stage 2 results cannot and should not be taken at face value.

'Not only are these results exaggerated, achieving them has had hugely damaging consequences for children' says Anastasia de Waal. 'The only people these "record" scores serve is the government.'

The BBC reported yesterday ‘that the number of serious complaints made against GPs over out-of-hours care has soared in recent years’. Complaints received by the Medical Defence Union (MDU) increased from 30 new cases in 2003 to 100 in 2006, and by the Medical Protection Society (MPS) from 120 in 2002, to 182 last year.

This may seem relatively insignificant, but when one considers that they only get involved in the most complex cases, ‘such as those that involve deaths, compensation claims, or issues involving the GMC’ (simpler complaints are dealt with by GP practices or PCTs), it is anything but so. Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GP committee, tried to gloss over this rise by offering the following remark: “It is a fact that patients are annoyed when they cannot see their normal doctor and I think it is more likely to make them complain”. But, for one, you would then expect the overall number of complaints to the MDU and MPS to have increased, which has not been the case – the total number of complaints they have received each year has remained steady at around 3,500 p.a. And, more poignantly, the statistic on serious complaints is just the latest worry in a whole string of concerns over out-of-hours care since the GP contract caused 90% of GP practices to opt-out of provision.

I am certainly no Alexis de Tocqueville, but a recent visit to the United States threw up some interesting comparisons with the increasingly United States of Europe and offered a great insight into American perceptions of European politics.

...well not news at all really, just the government’s bland response to an e-petition on the European Union Treaty (or ‘the document formerly known as Constitution’), which has just been posted on the Downing Street website.

I would not wish to inflict on readers the response in its entirety, but here’s a taster:

Yesterday saw the publication of a report on the Middle East by a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Media accounts of it have largely focussed on one of its principal recommendations. This is that the Government ‘should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles’.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

It's not the efforts of A-level students in question, but the government's efforts to educate them.

A new report released today by Civitas argues that A-levels have become more about preparing the government for the next election than preparing students for their future; that knowledge and skills have been forfeited to make government policy add up, and that students have been discouraged from taking subjects with riskier 'grade-returns'.

The Results Generation, exposes the way in which the government has focused on artificially generating indicators of improvement instead of focusing on actually improving schools. This prioritisation of grade gaining over quality devalues both A-levels and students.

The DH sent out a press release today entitled ‘Statistical press notice: Patient choice survey and A&E statistics’. The content’s as bland as the headline; the section on the patient choice survey merely reads: ‘Report on the National Patient Choice Survey, March 2007 England and provisional headline results of the May 2007 Survey’. Yet these are often the ones that are the most interesting; the ones that aren’t spun. You’d better your bottom dollar that if the results had been worth shouting about, the release would’ve been much juicier and, at the very least, actually contained some of the statistics. The fact of the matter is that those on patient choice are a cause for concern.

The Government’s devious handling of the imminent EU Treaty, and its implications for British sovereignty, continues to encourage calls from within the UK for a referendum, but it may be pressure from beyond the UK that raises broader questions over Britain’s continued participation in EU Integration, writes Edmund van der Byl-Knoefel.

‘How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?’

So, according to a report in Saturday’s Guardian, does Anglican canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo protest against the decision by ITV to broadcast, on some as yet unnamed future Sunday, a one-hour documentary setting out the Muslim view of Jesus.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

The EUROCARE-4 study of cancer survival rates released yesterday by the Lancet Oncology journal does not make for comfortable reading for anyone in the UK, least of all the government. In a league of 22 European countries between 2000-02, England comes out 7th bottom, Northern Ireland 5th bottom and Scotland 3rd bottom in terms of the number of patients alive 5 years after diagnosis – much closer to the slightly inferior performance of countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic than the best performing countries such as Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. Cancer survival rates in these countries are some 10 to 15 percentage points better than the countries that make up the UK. The same trend is observed for individual conditions – survival rates from stomach cancer, for example, are as much as 86% higher in Germany than in England.

More worryingly still, is the picture painted over time. A second article, also released in the Lancet Oncology, performs a similar study for the years 1995-99. Comparing the two shows that while cancer survival rates have improved across the board, and the gap between those with the best and worst survival rates is narrowing, those in the UK remain ‘stubbornly low’. Tellingly, this study also found that the UK (along with Denmark) seems to be the exception to the broad trend that those countries that spent the most on health care generally get the better survival rates. So what’s gone wrong?

In the wake of the annual controversy sparked by inflated A-level results, real evidence has emerged that GCSEs are similarly suffering a crisis of quality - writes Thomas Woods. Writing in today’s Telegraph newspaper, a languages examiner has revealed the existence of a co-ordinated system of ‘teaching to the test’. In the French Oral section pupils are at liberty to memorise a string of answers which they are assured will be required in the exam. The writing section (which is now 100 per cent coursework) involves students reeling off identical essays using ‘writing frames’ already set out for them by the teachers. Token attempts at variation are provided with the individuals’ choice of holiday and weekend activity.

As of September, schools will have the power to apply for parenting orders. This means that head teachers will be able to ask the courts to impose a requirement on parents to attend guidance sessions where they receive help and support in dealing with their children.

While Britain’s university lecturers and Vice Chancellors obdurately continue to refuse to offer any form of assistance in the fight against on-campus violent extremism, a trial currently underway in a Glasgow courtroom suggests that the problem towards which Britain's academics seem willing to turn a complacent blind eye could well extend much further than the University sector.

continued on the Centre for Social cohesion blog.