Archive for March, 2007
Who’s truanting?
Posted by David Conway in Education on 30/03/2007
The Times Education Supplement’s [TES] front page headline, ‘One in four parents who home-educate children provides little or no teaching’ ties neatly in with the alarming news that our already very high secondary school truancy rate ‘is at least 18% higher than thought’ [BBC News]. The connection between home schooling and truancy lies in the revelation that ‘some schools are encouraging parents of persistent truants to register as home educators to get their attendance up’. The other connector is bullying: 1 in 3 pupils truant because they are being bullied – and it is thought that a significant number of children are removed from school and educated at home in order to evade bullying. But the ultimate connection is, as stated by the TES headline: that some home schooling might boil down to truancy.
That Kafkaesque NHS again
Posted by Nick Cowen in Health on 28/03/2007
Dr Crippen delivers a steady drip feed of episodes that demonstrate quite how ridiculous and dangerous hospital bureaucracy has become. This diary entry from yesterday was exemplary.
Tuesday 27th March
One of those irritating but glorious phone calls.
I saw Mrs Jones, a middle aged lady, and heavy smoker, with an ominous lump in her neck last week and, after a few routine tests, referred her urgently to ENT. She called this morning to say that she had been phoned by the hospital to say that they could not see her until they had had a letter from her GP. Had I sent the letter? I confirmed I had sent it both by post and by fax. Well, they say they won’t see me without a letter, and they have not received it. Are you sure you sent it? It was clear she did not believe me.
I said, Mrs Jones, please, think about it. How does the hospital know that you need an appointment if they have not received my letter?
Ah!
Setting the captives free
Posted by James Gubb in Civil Liberty on 27/03/2007
The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement.
In a smart London club, an elegant young graduate fresh from Cambridge is seated at the gambling table, delighting his friends with his wit and charm. From a business family and already an MP, he has a fortune behind him and a promising career ahead.
Who would imagine that these two worlds could have anything in common? Yet that young man was to become the principal instrument in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the bicentenary of which we celebrate this week, writes Dr Peter Heslam.
What is really happening to freedom
Posted by James Gubb in Civil Liberty on 26/03/2007
With great fanfare the BBC has launched a prime time documentary called The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. It is the usual bravely radical, groundbreaking BBC stuff of course. In other words it is full of soft left clichés recycled from the heyday of collectivism, writes Graham Cunningham.
I was reminded of that 1960’s folk music ditty Little Boxes, popularised by Pete Seeger. Older readers may remember it. Here are a few snatches from memory:
And the people on the box
All went to the university,
Where they ticked all the trendy boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s teachers and film directors,
And tv executives,
And they’re all full of radical-chic tacky
And they all think just the same.
OK I confess. I might have changed the words a bit!
Outlaw alienation
Posted by David Conway in Education on 23/03/2007
Education secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement that school dropouts will be criminalized has met a mixed response. ‘Attendance orders’ will be slapped down on teenagers detailing a course that they should attend; teens who breach the order face a £50 fixed penalty or prosecution. As Alex Frean points out in The Times, criminalizing school non-attendance is not in itself a new concept in our education system. What’s new is that the move criminalizes pupil rather than parent, and of course that the offence applies to over 16-year-olds.
Time to get tough
Posted by James Gubb in European Union, Foreign Affairs on 20/03/2007
Today – in fact at this very moment – the EU-ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific) Joint Parliamentary Assembly convenes in Brussels for their biannual plenary meeting. Talking shop or not, the Assembly has acquired an increasingly prominent role, particularly given the tensions surrounding the EU’s intention to end its preferential trade arrangements with ACP countries in favour of bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The blurb on its website states: ‘A substantial part of the work of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly is directed towards promoting human rights and democracy and the common values of humanity….in order to guarantee the right of each people to choose its own development objectives and how to attain them.’ If so, then now, given the situation in Zimbabwe, is the time to prove it.