Archive for April, 2009
What about the NHS’s culture?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 30/04/2009
In all the talk about what the NHS is going to have to do with its tighter budgets one thing seems to be missing: the underlying culture of the organisation (or, more accurately the organisations that make it up). Discussion is focused on structures, processes and levers that the NHS has, or doesn’t have, at its disposal to drive efficiency.
Read the rest of this entry »
The gender pay gap does not exist
Posted by David Green in Race and Equality on 30/04/2009
Harriet Harman claims that women earn on average 22.6% less per hour than men and takes it for granted that this difference is the result of discrimination against women by men. And yet the Government’s own figures support no such conclusion.
Read on at the Daily Telegraph Blog
Will Jim Fix Our Broken Spoken English? Oo Kaerz? I 4 1
Posted by David Conway in Education on 28/04/2009
According to a report in yesterday’s Times, among the recommendations in the about-to-be-published final report of the Rose review of primary education is one calling for primary schools to teach their pupils to ‘recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English’.
The million dollar question
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 24/04/2009
As target and league table pressures have increased, so has suspicion that examining boards are jostling amongst themselves to boost candidate numbers by producing the most ‘accessible’ courses. That is, offering the exams in which schools and students can best maximise their marks.
The moral standards of our MPs
Posted by Norman Dennis in Politics on 23/04/2009
The US magazine, Time, wrote in October 1951 that morality in public service was probably higher in Britain than anywhere else in the world. The way that the moralistic Labour Party in Attlee’s day regarded even the suspicion of a Labour MP personally milking public life for his or her own benefit was illustrated by the resignation of the Parliament of a junior minister to the Board of Trade, John Belcher. Read the rest of this entry »
It is Not Just Family Unity or Income that Determines Childhood Well-Being
Posted by David Conway in Education, Family, Marriage and the Culture, Immigration, Multiculturalism on 21/04/2009
Far be it from me to say a bad word about the institution of marriage or the benefits of the two-parent family. However, anyone tempted to hold the vast recent increase of family break-down and single parent families in Britain responsible for the country’s very low place in the European rankings for youth well-being should think again.
Many European countries with appreciably much higher rates of out-of-wedlock births than Britain come much higher than it in those rankings. One other European country, with a much lower rate of out-of-wedlock births than Britain (Lithuania), comes even lower than it does in the rankings.