Tim Worstall

I’ll admit that I rather struggle to understand this.

Labour will keep its target of sending half of all school-leavers to university despite figures showing that participation in higher education is falling, ministers have insisted.

No, not the failure to hit the target, but the target itself. Other than having been plucked from the air, what is […]

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Children should be banned from leaving school at lunchtime so they cannot gorge themselves on junk food, a Government body says today.
Restrictions should also be placed on the opening of new burger bars, kebab shops, chip shops and sweet shops near schools to remove temptation from pupils, it is claimed.

It’s for the children, of course, […]

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Odd to see this in The Guardian but welcome all the same:

There is now a torrent of evidence emerging that Britain’s rigid, centralised approach to teaching has utterly failed in what it set out to do. It has not raised achievement, enthused pupils, narrowed the gaps between rich and poor, or given children the skills […]

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The new head of Britain’s biggest teaching union has called for the private education system to be nationalised.

Umm, just how will this improve matters? Other than, of course, removing that competition which shows up how crap much of the State education system is? And, umm, removing from the education system that money which parents currently […]

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There is in short a systemic problem - a roadblock on the route to meritocracy. Roughly 7% of children are educated at private schools, but these pupils take up 45% of Oxbridge places and a disproportionate amount at other top universities. When so many prizes are still going to a narrow, self-selecting pool of expensively […]

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Brian Micklethwait asks:

But what about the kind of maths that really is maths, as opposed to mere arithmetic, with lots of complicated sorts of squiggles? What about infinite series, irrational numbers, non-Euclidian geometry, that kind of thing? I, sort of, vaguely, know that such things have all manner of practical and technological applications. But what […]

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Good grief, are students nowadays really like this?

On Saturday I stood at Warwick University’s union bar. I had been speaking at a rather excellent student conference and the organisers had invited me to join the students for the evening. Large numbers of the 400 students present were standing without anything to drink, unable to afford […]

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Gordon Brown lays out his plans to deal with the challenges of globalisation.

To build a world-class teaching workforce, we will shortly announce our proposals for a new masters qualification

Wrong! As teachers themselves seem to think, postgraduate education courses are one of the problems, not one of the solutions.

And from Tim Worstall, unusually, something about education […]

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Point one:

We will never go back to selection

Point two (the next part of the same sentence):

but you could have a situation where 11-year-olds with a particular talent in a certain subject or the potential to go to a certain university are encouraged at an early age.

Leading to:

Potential Oxbridge students should be identified at 11 and […]

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Much burbling about "fairness", "equity":

In a key test case, Brighton will become the first city in England this year to employ the system as a tie-breaker at all of its over-subscribed secondaries. It is believed other areas may be encouraged to follow suit in an attempt to bring greater transparency to the admissions system.
The new […]

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A report from the education front lines:

The report, Able Pupils Who Lose Momentum, found shortcomings in the 37 primaries across England visited by Government advisers.
One of the key problems uncovered by researchers was the failure to put children into ability sets or groups. Even when children were put in classes with children of similar abilities, […]

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No, that’s not my typo nor claim. Actually:

Geoff Riley (Head of Economics at Eton College)

We’re obviously completely and totally fucked if the decline of the education system has got that far .

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Most amusing. Three points:

One of the most welcome parts of Balls’s children’s plan is the renewed commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020. If that happens, and it will take some investment, then many ogres of childhood may melt away.

Could we please get this straight? This wll not be investment. It will be current spending. […]

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So we had the Sutton Trust report.

Parental background continues to exert a very significant influence on the academic
progress of children:
o Those from the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group at age three
drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile
at age five. Those from the richest […]

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One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh here:

Despite billions being invested in education, children born in deprived homes are no more likely to escape the poverty trap than they were 30 years ago, it is claimed.

That isn’t laughing material, to be sure, but this is:

Comparing a series of research papers […]

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Yes, I know the arguments about indoctrination on the taxpayers’ shilling but:

The academic superiority of faith schools was underlined today as they dominated top positions in new league tables for 11-year-olds.
Two thirds of the 250 primaries in England achieving "perfect" test results were Church of England, Roman Catholic or Jewish schools.
Despite making up just a […]

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Something of an indicment of the current way of doing things, don’t you think?

Sex education lessons are so poor that most teenagers have no idea about sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, according to new research published today.

I understand about the problems with teaching 20% of them to read: it’s not, after all, a natural activity. […]

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A quarter of graduates do not have full-time jobs more than three years after getting their degrees, according to government figures.
The Higher Education Statistics Agency, which examined the career progression of 24,000 people, also found that 20 per cent of those who were employed were not working in graduate occupations.

So too many are getting a […]

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It’s time to end faith and grammar schools that damage children’s chances and limit most parents’ choices.

It is absolutely the time to remove the limits on most parent’s choices. Of course, we shouldn’t do that by the method you advocate, which is that pupils are assigned to a school, rather, we should work the other […]

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Yes, I understand Labour’s (perhaps "the left’s" is better) hatred of private schools, I can even get my head around the dislike of Grammars (a single competetive exam at 11 years old might not be the very best way of predicting future academic success, for example) but this is astonishing:

However, the Department for Children, Schools […]

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