Archive for June, 2007
A glance at patient safety in the NHS
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 14/06/2007
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>
A physics teacher begs for his subject back
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 13/06/2007
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.
Adding Insult to Injury: the Appalling P.C. Misreporting of the Latest ‘Honour Killing’
Posted by Nick Cowen in European Union on 12/06/2007
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.
Corruption of the Curriculum – Press Release
Posted by James Gubb in Education on 11/06/2007
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
A view from the classroom
Posted by David Conway in Education on 08/06/2007
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
Don’t be fooled by the surplus…
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 07/06/2007
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.