Almost six-in-10 teachers reported encountering pupils who are left hungry through lack of food at least once a week, it was revealed.

OK, a problem.

Research by the union also found that many teachers have seen a rise in the number of children on free meals at their school.

So it’s a problem we’ve already solved then, yes?

Excellent, on to the next one then.

The numbers of pupils in comprehensive schools has steadily increased since the mid-1960s and in that period standards have risen continuously. Around six times as many pupils get five good GCSEs as did in 1968.

Given that GCSEs were introduced in 1988 (1986 they started being taught, ’88 was first examination year) I find that to be, well, not quite true. Garbled bloody nonsense in fact.

Five times as many go on to university and

The expansion of university is not an advertisement, nor of course a condemnation, of the comprehensive school system. It’s an expansion of the universities, no more.

Myth 2: Local authorities run schools This ridiculous statement is used repeatedly by politicians who should know better, especially if they are Conservatives, as it was their party that introduced Local Management of Schools in 1988, removed direct financial control from local authorities and decentralised power to heads and governing bodies, who have been able to allocate resources, recruit staff and make decisions about subjects and exams ever since.

So, your whining about how academies remove local democratic control has no basis then?

Myth 3: Autonomy leads to higher standards Autonomy alone is not a golden bullet. Ask the Swedes, who have seen their country slip down the international league tables since they introduced more “free” schools. The most recent DfE performance tables, and successive reports from Ofsted‘s chief inspectors, show clearly there is very little difference overall in either results or inspection grades for academies and maintained schools in similar circumstances. Indeed, on several key indicators, maintained schools outperform academies with similar intakes. This is not to suggest that academies haven’t improved, simply to point out that maintained schools have improved at the same rate. It is a mystery why ministers, who are responsible for both, won’t take credit for that.

Snigger. So, since the introduction of academies standards have improved. This shows that the introduction of academies has not improved schools in what manner?

Take it futher: we generally assume that competition improves all participants in a market. One supermarket getting better gets those competing with it to buck up their act: however owned or managed.

Ms. Millar’s prejudices are not impressive, are they?

Now the coalition’s devious use of the school admissions code – introduced by Labour to bring more fairness to the system – will allow popular schools to expand without constraint or consultation.

Quite. Isn’t it just entirely disgusting that parents might be able to send their children to schools that are popular among parents to send their children to?

I mean really. What’s the point of spending an entire lifetime telling people how they must educated their children if they’re going to be free to ignore such telling? Where would I be if that were allowed to happen?

Pay children to attend top private schools, Government told
Dozens of top private schools are calling on the Government to provide state subsidies to allow bright pupils to be admitted irrespective of family background, it emerged today.

The actual idea is pretty good, effectively, give them back the tax they’ve paid for the State school system if they’re not using it.

But it’s still rent seeking.

Update: Re the Latin. My slightly strange experience was to go from the RAF School in Naples straight into the maw of Prep School. First Latin lesson I’m told to stand up and translate something on the fly from a language I’d never even seen before. And boy did having a Pozzuoli accent (hey, Latin is just Italian without the jesticulations), something closer to Catalan mumbled through a mouthful of pizza than anything else, cause confusion.

But what really got me was the Cambridge Latin course. It’s all about this family that live on the side of the Bay of Naples, Baia, and then at the end of year one, while they’ve gone to Pompeii it blows up and, well, everyone else wa doing the verbs n’ stuff and I was going, hmm, there’s good swimming just where they are now. And yes, used to go picnicing at Cumae where they are now, and that Sybil’s Grot was just over the lake from us and got badly bombed in the war…..that Temple of Jupiter is where my mate Adam jumped in and cut his foot on a dumped car.

Beginning of second year and the remnants of the family had turned up in Bath….the Worstall familial home before and after Naples. We used to have Dolphins swimming club in the Cross Bath which is fed from the Roman plumbing of the old Baths……

Never did learn buggery of the language but still, nice of them to place it all in geography I knew about.

We’re getting there slowly:

Nursery workers so illiterate they stuggle to read stories aloud

The proposed solution?

Prof Nutbrown will set out her recommendations in the summer but has suggested raising entry requirements for courses and bringing a licence for nursery workers similar to that of nurses.

Nurses, of course, need to be graduates now.

It’s part and parcel of a long process of professionalising child care. Something which makes it hugely more expensive, of course. First really got going a decade back as the licencing and regulatory regime was tightened and up above you see the onward march of the campaign, regardless of who is in government.

The real point to be made though is that, given that anyone who is 16 years old has been forcibly educated by the State for 11 years, how come any of them are illiterate? And why would more years of the State’s embrace change this?

It’s not as if everyone is praising the literacy skills of the current crop of graduates, is it?

Recruitment programmes that filter out candidates who fail gain at least 2:1 degrees run counter to many employers’ duties to hire a “diverse” workforce, it is claimed.

Imagine that, discrimination against the thick and or lazy.

“Schools are being cajoled and bullied out of the maintained sector based on a divisive and false prospectus, when the real English success story is the improvement, especially in deprived areas, of thousands of maintained schools.”

Are you quite sure you actually meant to say this?

For what you’ve said is that as maintained schools are opened to competition from non-maintained schools then maintained schools improve.

Which rather seems to argue in favour of opening maintained schools to competition from non-maintained schools, doesn’t it?

UK trails Poland and Bulgaria on adults educated to A-level standard

Lecturers’ union says European data shows Britain risks languishing in ‘mid-table obscurity’ due to rising cost of learning

We should therefore reduce the cost of learning by paying lecturers less and having fewer of them.

There, job done.

Not quite what I’d expect the lecturer’s union to suggest but…..

In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Dr Joy Schaverien identifies a set of symptoms common among early boarders that she calls boarding school syndrome. Her research suggests that the act of separation, regardless of what might follow it, “can cause profound developmental damage”, as “early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns”.

When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accommodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed.

It should be obvious that this system could also inflict wider damage. A repressed, traumatised elite, unable to connect emotionally with others, is a danger to society: look at the men who started the first world war.

A MONK who used to teach at one of England’s premier Roman Catholic boys’ schools has been jailed for five years after being found guilty of abusing pupils under his charge in the late 1980s.

Richard White, now 66, was a geography teacher at Downside School near Bath when he was identified as a possible risk to pupils, but no legal action was taken. Instead, Father Nicholas – as he was known at the school – was warned about his behaviour towards a 12-year-old and was switched to teaching older boys.

No, don’t know him at all, just after my time there.

But something really doesn’t ring true about this at all. A monk teaching geography? Surely not.

Every public school I’ve ever heard of reserves that subject for the games masters I thought.

You know, on the basis that it’s a simple enough subject that they should be able to work out which end of the book to start reading to the class from?

Certainly for years I thought that a geographer’s uniform was some variation of a tracksuit.

Parents will be stripped of the right to object to the expansion of grammar schools, under a new school admissions code laid before parliament.

Campaigners against academic selection say this could force some schools into a battle for survival as grammars expand to take on their neighbours’ best-performing pupils.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, is scrapping restrictions on the expansion of the most popular schools. The move means weaker schools will come under increased financial pressure as their pupil numbers dwindle.

For this is really what markets do well. No, not reward the excellent, but eliminate the shite.

And yes, I think we really rather would like to eliminate the shite schools which is why we should have a market in them.

It is claimed that giving profit-making companies access to state funding will create a system in which institutions pursue short-term financial gains at the expense of a decent education.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph today, professors say that proposals spelt out in a recent higher education White Paper will “condemn generations of students” to an experience similar to that in the US where many undergraduates fail to complete their degree and struggle to pay off loans.

One set of data shows children’s average vocabulary scores at the age of five – when pupils start compulsory education – and ranks them from one to 100.

Children with highly educated parents in Britain – those who had at least a degree – ranked 67 on average, while those whose mothers and fathers left school with few qualifications had an average rank of 29.

The 38 point gap was “significantly larger” in Britain than in all countries other than America, where it extended to 46 points.

The problem being that there’s more than one possible way of explaining it. A bit like that conundrum about the way prices move in a perfectly competitive and in oligopolistic markets. They’ll move in concert in both cases and purely observing the price changes doesn’t tell you which type of market you’re observing.

Here the way we’re encouraged to interpret the numbers is that highly educated parents educate their kids, teach them to read, talk to them with their larger vocabulareies, before the children go to school. And that the schooling for poor children in the UK is shit.

In a blow to Labour’s education legacy, the watchdog said schools serving the poorest 20 per cent of pupils were four times more likely to be “inadequate” than those for the wealthiest 20 per cent.

I certainly wouldn’t disagree with either point.

However, it is possible to look at the same statistics and come to a very different conclusion. Assume that intelligence is inheritable (which it is, it’s the extent to which it is which is scientifically disputed…..ignore the numpties further left who insist that each and every child is an equal blank slate upon which society draws).

We could then say, well, so what? The Anglo Saxon societies have got it right: the intelligent are getting the uni educations, excellent, the dim are not. And that carries on into the next generation as intelligence is inheritable. We would expect the children of the intelligent to be intelligent, the dim dim and that’s all we’re seeing.

No, I don’t believe it either, not as starkly as that, but it is a possible conclusion to draw from those bald statistics.

the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of whom recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course:

“I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and bothers me at my core,” freshman Amanda Bradley told National Public Radio.

There you have it, folks!  In today’s America, even some poor Americans – people who admit to living “below the poverty line” – are enrolled at Harvard University.

I should add something to this though. I have a colleague who is a Fellow at Harvard. He’s less than convinced that the place is recruiting students from the top end of the IQ spectrum these days.

Taxpayers are spending more than necessary on training new teachers because “out-of-date” heads avoid hiring mothers who want to return to work while still having time to care for their families, it was claimed.

Many young people find it almost impossible to find stable work, thanks to a massive increase in the flexible nature of the labour market, something that has been pushed by governments of both the left and right in the 1990s and 2000s.

Dear Lord……the increase in flexibility was to overcome the previous inflexible structure which left everyone trying to fill dead men’s shoes.

Getting something entirely, 100%, the wrong way around really isn’t all that good coming from a Professor at UCL.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

Dear God these people are stupid.

Here’s an outline of Econ 10 at Harvard:

N. Gregory Mankiw, and members of the Economics Department
Full course. M., W., F., at 12. Sections also meet at 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, or 2. EXAM GROUP: 5
Introduction to economic issues and basic principles and methods of economics. Fall term focuses on microeconomics: how markets work, market efficiency and market failure, firm and consumer behavior, and policy issues such as taxation, international trade, the environment, and the distribution of income. Spring term focuses on macroeconomics: economic growth, inflation, unemployment, the business cycle, the financial system, international capital flows and trade imbalances, and the impact of monetary and fiscal policy.
Note: Microeconomics (taught in the fall term) is a prerequisite for macroeconomics (taught in the spring term). Students may elect to take only the fall microeconomics course and receive a half-course credit. Taught in a mixture of lectures and small sections. No calculus is used, and there is no mathematics background requirement. Designed for both potential Economics concentrators and those who plan no further work in the field. The Department of Economics strongly encourages students considering concentration to take the full-year course in their freshman year. This is a required course for all economics concentrators and a prerequisite for higher level courses in economics.

For those who don’t get it, Keynes is studied in macroeconomics, not microeconomics. That is, Keynes is studied next semester, not this semester.

I think we’re getting our proof that Harvard is for the rich thickos, aren’t we?

However, he’s missed the great point about the American education system.

It is a local education system. It’s bugger all to do with the Federal Government. ocal school boards decide what should and will be taught locally.

Sure, you may not like the results but that was the way the system was set up.

Government is keen to emphasise that the studio and technical schools will not limit general learning. But a good education is about more than functional literacy and numeracy or a smattering of science and languages. Young people need not just efficient instruction but the opportunity for exploration – of ideas, history, literature, poetry, music, art, film, politics. These are the things that make and keep us human, and if we don’t learn how to begin to think about these things when young, we may never return to them as adults.

Most telling of all it is those countries that postpone specialisation which top the international league tables so beloved of Michael Gove. “Dual education” Austria was one of the worst-performing countries in the 2009 Pisa tests while informal, inventive Alberta (in Canada) and Finland, in which vocational and academic learning are mixed until later in adolescence, remain at the top.

OK, lovely dear. Finland divides the academic goats from the vocational sheep at 16. So we’re all agreed then that this is what produces the best education system in the world?

Lovely, so we’ll proceed on that basis then shall we?

GCSEs for all, A levels and university for a minority,  BTecs and apprenticeships for the majority after that.

Good, excellent, we’re done then, aren’t we?