Archive for August, 2007
What do they take them for?
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 16/08/2007
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.
Why Brown Should Ignore the Recommendations of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee
Posted by Nick Cowen in Foreign Affairs on 14/08/2007
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.
I’m ill. It’s 6.30pm – where do I go?!
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 09/08/2007
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.
Faking it. ‘Best ever’ Key Stage 2 results – but how many children who reached Level 4 can actually read this sentence?
Posted by James Gubb in Education on 08/08/2007
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.’
Standards of behaviour
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 03/08/2007
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.
NHS staffing inefficiencies run deep
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 02/08/2007
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’.