Civitas Blog

This year’s annual Hay-on-Wye Festival has just ended. In his column in last week’s Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson wrote this about the annual twelve-day jamboree:

‘You might imagine that Hay is a lovely day out for all the family, a chance for children to meet all the authors they love… Of course, it’s no such thing. Mainly it’s a chance for ramblers and hippies to gather in a field and convince themselves everyone thinks the same way that they do.’

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Lord Darzi’s Healthcare for London report, published last July, outlined ambitious proposals to introduce a series of polyclinics in the capital. While the national Next Stage Review currently being conducted may not take the London report as a template, it is likely that polyclinics are to form a part of Lord Darzi’s conclusions once again.

But what is there likely impact? Are polyclinics the emperor’s clothes – it’s certainly a new, untried, model – or could they serve as a means to the integrated care we all crave? At a debate hosted by Civitas last week, the medical profession and leading academics had their say.

The press is littered today with references to a new report on system reform in the NHS produced jointly by the Audit Commission and the Healthcare Commission – two well respected watchdogs. It concludes ‘the [competitive] reforms [in the NHS] have not yet delivered the desired change’, adding that ‘there is no evidence from our fieldwork that choice policy has so far... led to an improvement in the quality of service offered’.

Education secretary Ed Balls announced this week that the lowest performing secondary schools, as judged by the number of A*-Cs at GCSE, will be closed or replaced if they do not demonstrate an imminent 'turnaround'.

The National Challenge, as the proposed strategy for aiding these turnarounds has been termed, is modelled on the London Challenge scheme. As the Times Education Supplement comments, the London Challenge has courted controversy by advising schools to focus on those GCSE pupils who are borderline C/D – thereby on boosting the results in the crudest terms, rather than on whole-school learning. If, as the precedent of the London Challenge suggests, ‘failing’ schools will become ‘successful’ schools by bolstering the grades of a particular group of pupils through intensive exam preparation, then the reality is that for the majority of pupils these schools will remain unchanged. (Yet the government will have achieved the results it needs as evidence that it is improving schools.)

Schools in the state sector in Sweden can offer the acclaimed International GCSE (IGCSE) science qualifications that have been denied to British state school pupils by the government, according to Swedish Lessons, a report published today by independent think-tank Civitas.

Shortly before last week’s unexpected referendum decision in Ireland, a journalist in the Scotsman explained why the Irish had chosen to reject the Lisbon Treaty despite the benefits the EU have showered on their country in recent years. He wrote:

‘The anti-EU lobby … have plastered Ireland with posters warning that the treaty will force Ireland to surrender its sovereignty on moral, military and financial matters. One conjures up the memory of Ireland's patriot dead from the 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. "They died for your freedom. Don't throw it all away. Vote no," it reads.’

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Much of the western world, including Britain, currently seems in process of economic melt-down. To take our minds off all the depressing economic news, and hence off how lamentably the present Government has prepared this last decade for the years of national belt-tightening that now lie ahead, we need reminding that, as well as love, among other things money can’t buy is happiness.

Step forward on cue to deliver the message none but the present Government’s happiness tzar, Lord Layard about whom there is a big feature in today’s Guardian, just about as friendly a newspaper to the present Government as it is possible for one to be.

The Conservatives made a first small step in the right direction on NHS policy yesterday, reaffirming their pledge to scrap the endless targets that have - to not put too fine a point on it - bludgeoned the life out of the health service over the past decade or so; and instead focus on outcomes. As this blog has written many times - such as here and here - targets are a sure way to demoralise staff and distort clinical priorities like none other. Outcomes are what we should be looking at.

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but 'this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check' (p.xii).

This week Gordon Brown gave us his assessment of the factors thwarting social mobility in Britain today. Where he was right, was to point to the impact which unemployment had on social mobility under Thatcher. Where he was wrong, was to ignore the role which his very own government is playing in thwarting social mobility today – again through unemployment.

When Slovenia shuffles off the podium of the EU Presidency tomorrow, France will assume the European Union’s top post for the second half of 2008. Among its priorities, the French leadership has asserted its ambition to formalise a common European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP).

However, France must prove that the EU needs a common ESDP to supersede member states’ security policies, and furthermore to demonstrate that the EU can be trusted to manage highly sensitive security and defence issues. 'Is the EU really up to the job?', asks Claire Daley.

Lord Darzi today publishes his eagerly awaited Next Stage Review of NHS policy.

Ostensibly it heralds the end of the top-down era; a shift away from central targets to more self-sustaining means of driving performance, based on user-empowerment, information, choice and competition - but the system will work against it.