Civitas Blog

For those sufficiently fortunate never to have needed to know, WDWTWA stands for ‘Who Do We Think We Are Week?’ For those still none the wiser, according to the proud boast of the Department of Children Schools and Families, 'WDWTWA is a new, DCSF-funded education project, designed to engage primary and secondary school teachers in the exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship with their pupils.’

TWTWTW stands for ‘That Was the Week That Was’, a sixties satirical tv show that brought the likes of Bernard Levin and David Frost to fame. Since it supposedly took place last week, WDWTWA has now mercifully become TWTWTW. I say "mercifully" because of the awful twaddle it well and truly was.

It was a theme that ran throughout Lord Darzi’s final report, published earlier this week. ‘High quality care cannot be mandated from the centre – it requires the unlocking of the talents of frontline staff....where change is led by clinicians and based on evidence of improved quality of care, staff who work in the NHS are energised by it and patients and the public more likely to support it’, he wrote. Never a truer word.

But this is precisely what the system doesn’t like to countenance.

Newly published guidance for play leaders and nursery teachers instructs them to be on the look-out for and to reprimand racist attitudes evinced by toddlers.

“No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action”, they are reportedly instructed.

Among potentially racist behaviour of toddlers for which nursery teachers are instructed to be on guard and ready to take them to task is their saying “yuk” when presented with unfamiliar foreign food. The guidance warns: ‘Children [might] react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying “yuk”.’

… you still have plenty to fear, especially if your name is a popular one in Britain. The state has rewarded one Amanda Hodgson’s willingness to volunteer to help at a local school by branding her an alcoholic thug and heroin addict. Rather than receiving an apology for the obvious errors, she has been told to supply even more information, including her fingerprints, in order to prove she is innocent of the crimes that her name and date of birth have convicted her. If she doesn’t, Lancashire Education Authority will revoke her license to hug.

Related today: Esther Rantzen acknowledges some of the more pernicious aspects of the new culture of child (over)protection.

Following Wales’ request last year, the EU is close to recognising Scottish, Gaelic and Welsh alongside the current 23 languages officially used by the EU institutions.
Welsh is already used in the country’s own Assembly and spoken by one in five members of the Welsh population, but under the new proposal, Scottish and Welsh citizens will be able to correspond with the EU Council of Ministers in their native language - a similar arrangement to the one negotiated for Spain's regional languages - Basque, Catalan and Galician - in 2005.
The added translation costs will be financed by the Scottish and Welsh governments.

‘Until last month’, writes Jenni Russell in The Guardian, ‘it had been years since I'd been inside [A&E]. In the intervening time I assumed that the money poured into the NHS would have made a visible difference to A&E too.’ In her view, it hasn’t; ‘barbaric’, ‘no-one to help’, ‘inhuman’ are powerful words. Yet sadly, it’s an all too familiar tale.

The NHS might be seeing some five million more in A&E now than in 2000 and rushing the majority through in under four hours, but the experience of patients all too often remains unchanged. ‘At a time when the government is increasingly concerned about how people interact with one another in public places’, Russell continues, ‘it seems perverse that institutions run by the state should abdicate their responsibility for setting more civilized norms.’ Perhaps true, but has the state ever been particularly good at this? By extending its regulatory capture ever further, is it not becoming part of the problem?

Brussels’ ever tightening grip on EU member states has seen supranational powers creep into the daily lives of ordinary Europeans. This loss of local power has eroded regional identities. However, some of Europe’s citizens are taking a stand against the surge of Brussels’ influence; battling the tide of EU domination in small, but hugely significant, ways.

If anyone were seemingly less well-suited to be in charge of the country’s education system, it is surely the current Secretary of State for Schools, Ed Balls.

For anyone to be qualified for that job surely demands that he or she should have some modicum of feeling for what the purpose of education of is.

Yet, judged by the account he is reported to have given of its purpose in last week’s Times Educational Supplement , it is clear he hasn’t a clue.

The past month has the seen the Government’s SATS exam system implode in the bureaucratic equivalent of an ageing star collapsing into a black hole. There were delays to the SATS results and claims that the delays were just to make sure that the release was orderly and complete. Then the release this week was neither orderly nor complete with some results delayed until September and head teachers have been forced to send poorly marked or unmarked exam scripts back to the company, ETS Europe, that is meant to be managing the scheme. There was blood on the radio 4 airwaves this morning as John Humphrys eviscerated Ken Boston for the QCA’s handling of the scheme and it turns out ETS Europe have managed to score a lucrative £156 million 5-year contract to administer the SATS marking.

[This commentary by Prof. David Conway was originally written on 10 June 2008 - it is reposted here so it can be linked to John White's response to Conway's claims]

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the national curriculum. To mark the occasion, last week London University’s Institute of Education held a conference on the subject.

There a former professor of the Institute John White delivered a diatribe against the national curriculum, arguing it to be in urgent need of radical overhaul, if not wholesale replacement.

Ireland voted ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty On 13th June 2008. The ‘No’ campaign was led by single-issue pressure group Libertas whose exclusive objective was to secure a resounding ‘NO!’ to the Lisbon Treaty.

Well then, congratulations Libertas! Job done! Surely Libertas’ chairman, Declan Ganley can now return to massaging his business millions whilst enjoying the unique satisfaction of a political career that peaked in triumph (certainly a rare political achievement!) ... Sadly not - because victory in European politics is rarely sweet, or straightforward...

As father of two teenagers growing up in the nation’s capital, I am only too acutely aware of all the physical as well as moral dangers to which young people are exposed these days. No weekend passes hardly but that, along with countless other parents, I spend many hours plagued by mounting anxiety as to their physical and moral well-being, until, by the sound of their latch-keys turning in the door, I know them to have returned safely to the nest from wherever earlier that evening they may have sallied forth with friends.

No one can or should, therefore, reproach me for complacency or callousness if I say I am beginning to suspect that recent media concerns about a so-called epidemic of knife-crime as well as of drug-taking among the country’s young, may well be something of an artificially engineered moral panic that could obfuscate attention from being drawn to what needs to be done in relation to these problems.

The government’s pledge to re-build every secondary school in the country, together with the rapid rolling-out of the academies programme, has put school design at the forefront of the DCSF’s mind. Apparently not, according to the government’s architectural advisers who this week have expressed serious concern over the ‘substandard’ designs of the majority of current plans. Rather worryingly, the design quality architects propose to local authorities is currently largely irrelevant to whether their bid for the contract is successful. As a result, it turns out that 21 out of the 24 proposed school designs seeking planning permission today are, the people at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, tell us, unsound.

‘It’s simply not possible to transform health care to meet the needs of the 21st century without strong initiatives that focus on the demand side; no matter how good the regulator is’, opened Mark Britnell at the latest in Civitas' series of debates on NHS reform.

The NHS’s history, he put it, has been one of provision; never before has the NHS really done commissioning. Previous attempts have merely redefined supply and re-written contracts, with minimal impact on health.

While the DCSF's priority currently is to make all schools "zero-carbon"(an ambition which always somehow reminds me of Pol Pot's "year zero" objective), this amusing take on today's announcement that each school shall have the option of having a policeman on hand reminds us what schools were for before the state got too involved. A police blog has noted how this policy isn't, as the government like to say, "joined-up" with the latest police procedures. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether a new Government announcement is meant to be about crime or about education. In years to come, we can expect the two to blur until schools (or, by then, child management centres) look more like prisons, while prisons will look increasingly like schools. "Zero carbon" prisons will be an interesting challenge for architects!

Commuters this morning faced the Metro's frontpage screamline that British Gas has just put its gas prices up 35 per cent and its electricity prices 9 per cent. At the same time, MPs are calling for a windfall tax on energy profits. The price rises (and profits) are, of course, ridiculous but it would be nice if the news coverage more often dug below the surface of the issue to find out what is driving these rises.