Home-schooling and the digital divide

From the BBC:

Parents say they feel "deserted" having to home school during lockdown with a lack of access to computers... Bristol mother Edwina Ogu said home schooling four children with no computer during the first lockdown had been a "nightmare". The Department for Education (Dfe) has pledged to provide one million devices for schools and colleges.

Agreed. If your kids are over (say) seven years old, have a bedroom and a laptop or PC each, home-schooling is manageable. But plenty of people are not in this happy position. Halfway decent laptops or PCs cost £500 and up; internet is patchy in some areas; not all kids have their own bedroom etc.

There's actually a cheap and simple solution to this.  You can get a new TV with Freeview and internet capability for under £150. There are plenty of channels broadcasting complete crap during the day who can be taken off air until 3 in the afternoon.

For kids up to age 14, all you need is one channel for each school year broadcasting a standard curriculum from 9 until 3 with an hour for lunch. All the kids in the UK can watch whichever channel is broadcasting for their year. The TV teacher sets the homework - kids take, email or post their homework back to their actual school once a week and it gets dished out to be marked by their actual teachers.

I accept that different schools use different textbooks, but run with it. School teachers just have to keep tabs on what was covered in their subjects that day and be ready to field questions from their pupils, online, by phone or in person.

It gets a bit more complicated for age 15 to 16 when kids are doing GSCEs. But I'm sure that 99% of GSCEs are in less than twenty different subjects. If I understand the rules correctly, there will be relatively few subject clashes and it might only need another dozen channels (i.e. half a dozen per year x two years of GSCEs).

Switching channels is no more difficult (conceputally) than switching classrooms. So after maths (which appears to be compulsory, not that you'd notice) which everybody watches on the main channel, the history pupils switch to the channel which is showing the history lesson; the geography kids pupils switch to the channel which is showing the geography lesson etc. After that, they all switch back to compulsory English Language (not that you'd notice that either) on the main channel.

Inevitably, there will still be timetable clashes for pupils doing unusual combinations (what's new) but as long as there are a couple of free periods each week and kids have halfway decent internet, they can use the 'catch up' function for that. If they don't have halfway decent internet, they'll just have to choose a workable combination of subjects.

Don't blame the algorithm, blame the people who designed it.

One idle thought I'd had was, if we are going to allow teachers to hand out GSCE and A-level grades, a good way to prevent grade inflation (or deflation) would be to bear in mind that a school's overall results don't change much from year to year and each school is allowed (or is obliged) to award the same number of each grade in each subject as pupils achieved in 2019.

So if last year, 50% of pupils achieved an A grade in GSCE maths at a particular school, this year, the teachers are allowed to give 50% of pupils who would have taken maths GSCE an A grade.

Still a bit unfair, but to be honest, exam results always are a bit unfair; exam marking is fairly subjective. Some people argue that the whole exam system is unfair (I've no complaints myself, I usually did very well in exams). And sure, pupils at private schools will get given better grades, but they would have got those anyway, so that's not really an objection to the algorithm.

It turns out that that is what was supposed to happen:

From the BBC:

Teachers were asked to supply for each pupil for every subject:
- An estimated grade
- A ranking compared with every other pupil at the school within that same estimated grade

These were put through an algorithm - or mathematical procedure. The biggest element in that was the school's performances in each subject over the previous three years. The idea was that the grades this year - even without exams - would be consistent with how schools had done in the past.

So far so good, but the idiots didn't design the algorithm properly, and pupils at independent schools were awarded 4.5% more grades at A and above than the pupils in the previous year.

That is a bit of a smoking gun, if you ask me.

Lockdown is a golden opportunity to realign the academic year with the calendar year

My daughter, who is in her first year of doing A-levels came up with this plan, which I thought was pretty good:

1. Schools and universities all start again in September with the syllabus they were supposed to cover in the summer term.

2. Pupils and students who should have taken exams this summer just take them in December instead, when everything is hopefully nearly back to normal.

3. The academic year now ends in December with a few weeks off for Xmas and New Year before the next academic year starts. Hooray, lazing around and partying without anything to revise and no homework to do!

4. Bonus #1 is that people will get real GSCEs or A-Levels in December 2020, instead of notional GSCEs or A-Levels awarded by their teachers. Surely a real B grade is better than a notional A grade?

5. Bonus #2 is that the anachronistic and nonsensically long summer holiday would be a thing of the past, each school just pencils in a few shorter holidays of two or three weeks* scattered through the year, which would reduce the price differential between 'summer season' and 'rest of year'.

* So they can have holidays to coincide with European Cup, World Cup, Olympics, Wimbledon (for the posh schools) etc and kids and teachers can enjoy them in full. A level pupils get a few weeks off during festival season. And so on.

Good idea; good idea; bad idea

Good idea

Paul Ormerod in City AM:

Here is a great opportunity for the government to both increase the level of human capital in the economy and be seen to be delivering for the "left behind". There are already rumours that the chancellor is planning a big increase in spending on FE in the March Budget.  

Investment in university students has gone well past the point of diminishing returns. In contrast, the neglect of the FE sector offers the chance of getting a real return on increased spending.

The obvious beneficiaries will be the young people who do not go to university. With extra skills, they can earn an "FE premium". It may be modest, but being able to earn even £10 an hour instead of the minimum wage makes a big difference to the individual concerned.

Good idea

From The Daily Mail

Prince Andrew was urged by lawyers today to 'get on a plane' and answer questions from the FBI as part of a reciprocal deal that would see US spy's wife Anne Sacoolas sent to the UK where she is accused of killing teen Harry Dunn.

The demand was made in an extraordinary press conference in New York where Lisa Bloom, lawyer for alleged victims of billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, teamed up with Dunn family lawyer Radd Seiger in an attempt to break the stalemate that has ensnared both of their cases in political red tape.

A publicity stunt, but an excellent one, even better if it works. The UK is way too keen to extradite people to the US, or let the threat hang over UK citizens' head for years and years (Gary McKinnon, Hound of Hounslow etc), funny how that doesn't apply to Prince Andrew. The US never sends anybody back, but that woman quite clearly killed somebody.

Bad idea

Also from City AM:

The [Retail Sector Council] report is expected to include several recommendations, including the proposal to raise corporation tax by two per cent to raise around £6bn a year by 2022/23.

According to Sky News, the extra revenue would be used to reduce the business rate multiplier to around 40p in the pound. Other proposals cover VAT reform and tax and property cost transparency.

Robert Hayton, head of UK business rates at real estate adviser Altus Group, said the move to increase corporate tax and reduce business rates would be an "eminently reasonable fiscally neutral solution".

The actual rental value is a fairly fixed figure and is shared between landlord and government. The tenant doesn't care how it's split.  A corporation tax change does not affect total rents as they are paid out of pre-tax profits.

Let's do a worked example and see who gains or loses from this, using premises with an actual rental value of £21,000, which is currently split into £14,000 to landlord and £7,000 to government (50% of £14,000). Under their suggestion, it would be split £15,000 to landlord and £6,000 to government (40% of £15,000).

Winner #1 - the landlord, who currently gets £14,000 less 19% corporation tax = £11.340. That would go up to £15,000 less 21% corporation tax = £11,850.

Winner # 2 - owner-occupier business with low profits (pre tax or rent) of £40,000 who owns such premises. Current net profit after Business Rates and corporation tax = £26,730. That would go up to £26,860.

Loser #1 - tenants - the higher their profits, the bigger the hit..

Loser # 2 - owner-occupier business with high profits of £100,000 (pre tax or rent) who owns such premises. Current net profit after Business Rates and corporation tax = £75,330. That would go down to £74,260.

Not huge numbers, but a marginal gain for landlords and unprofitable owner-occupier businesses, and a tax hit for tenants and profitable owner-occupier businesses.

Hypothecated bequests

Everybody is piling in with their opinions on this story. From an economics/accounting stand point, those schools are stupid for turning down the bequests, which were earmarked for paying for school places for "poor white boys".

Perhaps Bryan Thwaites did this for entirely benevolent and altruistic reasons; perhaps he was a downright racist - that is entirely irrelevant.

The point is that such schools usually award a few free places anyway to maintain the pretence that they are charitable institutions, which secures them a very modest corporation tax break and a very hefty Business Rates discount (which will be phased out in Scotland next year). Ultimately, the reason for this is to bump up their grade averages, thus attracting more fee-paying pupils, it's like a loss leader.

We would assume - or hope - that some of those free places would have gone to "poor white boys" anyway, so all the schools have to do is to match the income with the corresponding largely notional expense.

Let's say that in the absence of the bequest, they would have handed out ten free places, five to "poor white boys" and five to "poor non-white boys". The bequest pays for, say, two free places, they just earmark two of them as "Thwaites Scholarships" and reduce the number of other free places awarded to "poor white boys" from five to three; thus maintaining the intended five/five ratio (and banking the bequest for themselves).

If they want to be politically correct and pass on the benefit of the bequest, then in addition to the two "Thwaites Scholarships", they could also award the planned ten free places off their own bat, four to "poor white boys" and six to "poor non-white boys", meaning that instead of five/five it's six/six and everybody wins, including at least one "poor non-white boy".
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To give another example, I vaguely remember a case where a non-white person was prepared to be an organ donor, but insisted that his organs could only go to a non-white person (or perhaps it was the other way round, doesn't matter). The NHS turned him down for being racist.

Equally stupid.

If you are white and on a waiting list for a new heart, the chances are there are some non-white people ahead of you on the list. You aren't going to get that non-white heart, but a non-white person above you on the list will, so at least you move up the list and benefit from the donation, however indirectly.

We own land! (near a good state school. Labour wants to) give us money!

Labour wants to ban private schools. Well, not all private schools, nurseries, private tutors, and universities will still be able to charge fees, but most of them and all of those that are misleadingly called "public" schools, and especially Eton, yes, most especially Eton.

Quite apart from the fact that the main reason for doing this appears to be based on a fallacy (the same wealthy, privately educated families keep hold of the top jobs down the generations, not because they are privately educated, but because they are descended from the elite), such a measure would fail to convert what is effectively a privately collected tax, i.e. school fees, into a publicly collected one.

Much is made of "redistributing", actually confiscating, the private schools' assets, but the income derived from these forms only a tiny proportion of private schools' income, mostly because the rich schools are a very small minority of private schools, and the vast majority of the extra £3.6Bn needed to educate the 615,000 pupils currently educated by the private sector would have to come out of the state education budget.

Where would the £10.5Bn currently spent by parents each year on school fees go? The most likely answer is into higher land prices near good state schools, as parents move to be in their catchment areas. The inevitable result of such "edugentrification" would be that poorer families would be gradually priced out of these catchment areas and the "good" state schools would become publicly funded versions of the private schools they replaced.

Indeed, with some plans for the abolition of private schools proposing the subsuming of the private schools into the state sector, together with all their facilities, the new upper tier state schools could be exactly the same schools as the current private schools.

The only difference would be that the billions that went to fund education under the old system would go to fund higher land prices under the new.

More school statistics...

... which most people would have guessed anyway if they thought about it for a few moments, and which can be used to support any particular point of view/prejudice:

From The Telegraph:

Choosing a nursery could be more important than secondary school when it comes to ultimate academic achievement, a study has found. The contribution of a school to variation in pupil attainment is in fact “relatively small”, according to researchers at University College London's (UCL) Institute of Education. 

I wonder when another university will do the same analysis of whether universities make much difference either, for a given standard of student...

This means that sending children to what they regard as a “good” secondary school - meaning one that fares well in GCSE results and official progress measures - only adds a small amount more value than if they went to a “bad” secondary school.

The report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, found that once you control for the characteristics of pupils within each school, the difference in attainment linked to school is below ten per cent of the total variance between children.

Professor Alex Bryson, UCL’s Chair of quantitative social science a co-author of the report, added: “Schools do still matter, but they don’t matter as much as people think. What perhaps is slightly surprising is that an awful lot of time and effort goes into trying to improve schools – but over the 13 year period we looked at, the variability accounted for by schools has remained fairly constant.”

Which would happen if all schools were to improve by the same amount, so this does not mean that schools haven't improved.

But:

Researchers found that school competition, measured by the number of schools within 5.5 kilometres of each school, accounts for up to seven per cent of the variation in pupils’ attainment.

That could be 'competition driving up standards' (hooray), or just as possible, slightly cleverer kisd getting into the perceived better schools and vice versa, leading to a widening gap between schools perceived as better or worse.

Meanwhile the pupil-teacher ratio - an indication of how well resourced the school is - only accounts for around one per cent of the variation. A report last year by researchers at King’s College London found that genetics are a bigger determinant of academic success than sending your child to a grammar school.

We could have guess the last bit, it's genetics and parents pushing their kids to do their homework etc.
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On the subject of competition between schools and/or competition for better pupils between schools, from the BBC:

Most families do not choose to send their children to their nearest school, shows the biggest ever study of state secondary school choices in England. More than 60% opt for a school that is further away - usually because it is higher achieving.

"Contrary to a widely-held belief, only a minority of parents choose their local school as their first option," say researchers.

Why would parents not put down a perceived better school as their first choice? Be daft not to; and what are the chances that the perceived best school within reasonable travel distance is not the nearest one? Fairly high, I would have thought. Bear in mind my point above that there is likely to be a wider perceived gap between two nearby schools than between two isolated schools which all children in an area attend, simply because there are is no realistic alternative.

It also debunks the idea that richer families are more engaged with choices... Despite any assumptions about the "sharp elbows" of middle-class families, there was no significant difference in behaviour between wealthier and more disadvantaged parents.

Again, that doesn't really prove anything.

If a school is perceived as good, then higher income families will choose to move near it and will drive out lower income families from the area. This leads to the self-enforcing gap between the areas. Higher income families, having paid over the odds to access the 'free' education they've paid for two or three times over (income tax and higher house prices) will of course send their children to the nearest school - because that one is perceived as best (or else they wouldn't have moved there etc).

The reverse applies to low income families where parents 'just want the best for their children'. They can't afford to live close the perceived best schools, but they can still put them as first choice on their applications.

And so on. All quite fascinating in a Freakonomics kind of way.

Private school bullshit

From The Daily Mail (as The Times is behind paywall):

Private schools save the taxpayer billions of pounds every year, their head teachers claimed yesterday.

The schools not only provide a huge financial benefit to the Exchequer but also wider benefits to society, according to analysis from the Independent Schools Council.

The report found that private school fees have doubled over the last 15 years, with the latest annual rise hitting more than 3 per cent.

Fees go up at compound 7% year because they are largely rent, they charge according to what parents are [daft enough to be willing] to pay*. The fees have nothing to do with real costs, if parents' net disposable income goes up by £x,000, then fees go up by £x,000.

But heads said the savings from taking pupils out of the state education system as well as the added benefits of community facilities, jobs created and tax contributions added up to a £20billion boon for the taxpayer, The Times reported.

£20 billion? That's bollocks. There are 615,000 children at private school, the average cost of/amount spent on one child at a state school place is about £6,000 a year, 615,000 x £6,000 = £3.7 billion a year.

Ah...

This was made up of £3.5 billion saved by freeing up state school places...

OK.

... £4.1 billion in tax paid by the schools and their suppliers

How is that relevant? If people weren't doing work for private schools they'd be doing something else, possibly much more useful to the economy, and still paying the same amount of tax.

... and a further £13.7 billion in the value of the work supported by the schools across the economy.

A completely made up figure, in other words.

I wonder why they opened themselves to ridicule like this, had their headline figure been £5 billion a year, that still sounds like a lot of money to Joe Public (although it isn't, in national accounts terms) and I wouldn't have questioned it.

* I am happy to report that my 18 year-old's grammar school has taken the last term's fees, ever, and I have cancelled the direct debit. That's £150,000 I'll never see again. Two more years of my 16 year-old's school gouging me and I'm done with this bullshit, which was all Mrs W's idea, as you can imagine.
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UPDATE re Bayard's comment: "I do know that now they charge what the market will bear so that they can offer bursaries to pupils from a less wealthy background, which they didn't do in my day. If you wanted money off then, you had to win a scholarship. However, I don't suppose all private schools do this."

I'm not sure what the difference between a 'bursary' and 'scholarship' is, but I was clever/lucky enough to get a free place at what was (and possibly still is) a very good grammar school Up North in the late 1970s. It was blindingly obvious to me even at the tender age of ten or eleven that this was not an act of charity or benevolence on their part, they needed ten per cent or so of smart kids from poorer families to bump up their grade averages; thus making the school more marketable to wealthy parents.

So I got the 'free' (and very good education, no complaints there, apart from Mr Illingworth the maths teacher and Mr Dorian the English teacher who were unalloyed cunts, but even they couldn't drag me down from an A at O-level) and the school could bump up their fees a bit; both parties win! I fulfilled my side of the bargain by getting very good O-level results, much better than the average for my year, and then my idiot parents fucked both sides over by taking me out of school at 15 3/4.

"Unregistered schools given council funding"

The BBC at its PC best.

You can guess pretty well what this is about just from the headline, but you have to slog two-thirds of the way through the article before they come out and actually say it.

There were a couple of tantalising clues along the way. They've removed the reference to the school which taught "English and Arabic" as that would have been too obvious, just leaving this to keep you going...

... inspectors said that many children were still being taught in this "murky world", with the biggest number in London and the West Midlands.

A bit like the Daily Mail articles where they don't mention the house price until the very end.

Nobody move or the exam timetable gets hurt!

Going round the silliness clock with the TES:

Pupils might have to sit their GCSEs and A-levels on later dates or at alternative sites in the “nightmare” scenario of a no-deal Brexit causing significant traffic disruption, Tes can reveal.

Exam board sources have told Tes that in the most extreme scenario of a large number of candidates not being able to sit a paper, “drastic” action could be taken to postpone the sitting across the entire country.

Do private schools increase competition?

Somebody at a political discussion meeting made a throwaway remark that he thought grammar schools/private schools were A Good Thing because they "increase competition".

Ho hum. At the school level, of course they do. There is no doubt in my mind that children who attend private schools get better academic results than if they'd attended state schools, which is hardly surprising, but I'm not sure that's relevant. Let's assume that state schools see themselves as competing with private schools, so maybe at the margin, they up their game slightly, again, A Good Thing.

But the point of secondary education is to equip children for a life of work and/or give them the best chance of getting a university place, which in turn is to help children end up in the best possible job. Education (beyond a certain basic level) is not really an end in itself - consider a family with children who are planning to move abroad in a few years, there is no point in the taxpayer paying for the children's education as they will not see any benefit.

Beyond a certain level, this is just an arms race. If every child were 10% better educated, then that would just mean that most of them end up in jobs for which they are 10% over-qualified i.e. from the point of view of an individual child, you want the best education you can get, taking society as a whole it would be a waste of resources.

"Competition" can mean different things:

i. If Producer A does his best to supply goods and services which are better/cheaper/whatever than Producer B, that is good for the economy, because Producer B then has to play catch up and overall standards increase. That's a clear win. Key to this is that consumers (or potential employees) have full knowledge about the goods and services (or working conditions) and can make fair comparisons (which they clearly don't).

ii. If Producers A and B have innovated and improved as much as they can, they "compete" by spending more money on advertising (providing misinformation or irrelevant facts) and trying to lock each other out by fair means or foul. That is a waste of resources and a loss.

iii. There are some competitions that are just competitions for the sake of competition, like athletics. How does society benefit if an Olympic runner sets a new world record a couple of milliseconds quicker or a few inches higher/further? Answer: not at all, at best it has a short-lived entertainment value. This is a humungous waste of resources. Compare this with films or music - that is also pure entertainment value, but people can enjoy the same films or songs for decades after they were released. Who sits down and re-watches the Olympics of a few years ago, or a horse race that was on last week? I guess nobody.

To return to the theme of private schools, you can give your child an advantage in later life by sending them there. Does that increase 'competition' in the positive sense mentioned at i. above? No, it just means that some other child is at a slight relative disadvantage for no particular reason, which is like the bad competition at ii.

To tie this in with iii., if real life were a closed system liked athletics, private school children have a one second advantage when qualifying for the Olympic running team, so they are more likely to get in. Does that mean the Olympic running team will be any better when it gets to the Olympics? Probably not, it just means that the private school kids starting training earlier, they still have a couple of years further training before the Olympics, by which time the state school kids with a one-second handicap would have caught up anyway.

Here endeth today's rant.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it is not as simple as people think. Going to the other extreme and banning private schools might just make things worse, as there'd be nothing for state schools to compete with, so standards might slip for everybody.

Maybe the least bad system is bottom-up privatisation of state education i.e. giving parents 'education vouchers' and letting them choose which school to 'spend' them at? But if parents can 'spend' the vouchers at private schools and pay top up fees, that just compounds the original problem, so it's not as simple as that either.

The Regional Skills Gap

Something else that has been bothering me for a while is the notion of the 'regional skills gap', as mentioned for example here.

Productivity and Skills for West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) region are one of the biggest challenges for the regional economy. GVA per head in the WMCA is currently at £19,423, nearly £3,500 [less than the UK average] for each of the 4 million WMCA residents leading to a £14bn output gap compared to the national average.

WMCA report that the components of the output gap highlight issues across all the productivity drivers with insufficient skills, too few in employment and the quality of the indigenous WMCA business base.

* Skills: % of number individuals with qualifications at NVQ4+: in the West Midlands Region is 27.6% against a national picture of 34.9%

* Employment: employment rate in the West Midlands Region is 67.2% against a national picture of 71.5%...

It is essential that Education and Business work together, not just through the Corporate Responsibility Agenda and supporting students develop the essential work ready skills but also to:

* Shape academic programmes and content to reflect the needs of regional sectors

*Identify the key growth areas across the region to ensure that training and development reflects the local economy

It's a bit like the notion that you can get house prices down in the South East by building more homes - it only makes sense if you ignore the fact that people can migrate freely within the UK.

If you assume that people growing up in the West Midlands intend to stay there, then sure, train them in things which will get them a job locally. But they won't.

It's a circular problem.

1. Those with the initiative to undertake education and training want to do whatever will earn them the most money, which is unfortunately not the productive sector but the non-productive sector, finance, insurance, real estate, legal and accounting (i.e. little old me).

2. The best paying jobs are in London, which is why, apparently, nearly half of recent graduates from UK universities move to London.

3. So the reason why relatively few people in the West Midlands have NVQ4+ qualifications is not because there's anything wrong with their education system, but because many of those with NVQ4+ qualifications bugger off elsewhere.

4. The less ambitious/less qualified remain in the West Midlands, inevitably, productivity and output declines, exacerbating the effect; businesses do worse, meaning fewer well paying jobs, meaning people are more likely to bugger off.

5. If the West Midlands offers more education and training, that makes it even easier for people to bugger off.

As an aside, Flipchart Rick did a post a while back called "Why a richer Africa means more migrants" explaining that this is effect is observable on an international level.

To paraphrase, few people from really underdeveloped countries emigrate because nobody wants them. Developing countries try to lift themselves with their own boot straps and invest what little surplus they have into improving their education systems - but that makes it easier for their people to emigrate (Filipino nurses, for example) instead of staying and helping grow the economy. So for some decades, this is a net loss to the country. It is not until the economy has developed to the level where there is less incentive for people to move abroad that their economies really benefit; but you can't grow an economy until the better-educated people stay there etc etc in a vicious circle.

"Tory and UKIP voters are all thick" vs "Universities are hot-beds of leftie brainwashing"

Click picture for full article:



Another goodie from the BBC:

We know that almost three million extra people turned out to vote in the EU referendum [compared to the General Election in the previous year]. Saying who they are - and what happens if they reappear - is where it gets difficult...

The real mystery is whether those additional voters in 2016 will come out again to vote in the 2017 general election - and what difference they could make... Are they people who are totally dissatisfied with the political system and became serial non-voters but were unable to resist the chance to give the establishment a thoroughly good kicking at the referendum?

I suspect that's correct. Although I have only missed voting in one election in twenty four years (it was a local election and I simply forgot), I voted 'Leave' largely for the fun of stirring up the hornets' nest.

"Is your child's school about to start charging you as government funding dries up?"

From The Manchester Evening News (the first article that came up on Google):

The government is proposing to change its funding formula to individual schools.

It means schools in Manchester will stand to lose £10m a year under the move, more than anywhere else outside London, with funding for schools cut by 2.7 per cent overall...

One of the schools facing ‘financial crisis’ in Greater Manchester is King David High School - one of the region’s’s most successful state schools. Joshua Rowe, chair of governors at King David, says his school is going to be one of the worst hit by the government’s ‘savage’ budget cuts.

Mr Rowe claims his school’s annual income has dropped by approximately £1m in the last four years - posing an ‘existential threat’ to the Jewish high school. He says they have lost £700,000 in government cuts, £250,000 through inflation and are now having to pick up the £120,000 SEN budget, which was previously covered by the council.

Now the state-funded Jewish faith school in Crumpsall has been told it can expect further funding cuts in the next two years and has now launched a huge fundraising campaign, although has stopped short of asking families for payments.

To be honest, why shouldn't councils charge extra fees for places at the best schools? They can transfer that money to the other schools in the area (underperforming or in poorer areas) to try and level things up a bit.

As we know, if you don't make parents pay directly for a place at a good state school, they will pay indirectly via higher house prices in the catchment area.

This also ties in nicely with the idea of education vouchers, where the taxpayer pays a basic minimum figure (maybe £5,000 for a primary place and £8,000 for a secondary place?) and parents pay the difference. Local education authorities just then have to redistribute the extra money somehow, for example by reducing the value of the vouchers for schools with very high extra fees or something.

Land Value Tax is usually the best way of collecting community generated land value, but if the value relates to a specific service that is only used by a small part of the population at any time, then why not do it directly with user charges? They can bump up the user charge until there simply is no measurable difference in house prices between homes just inside and just outside the catchment area.

For sure, this prices lower income families out of good schools, but the land market does that anyway. A canny good school will always have some free places for poor-but-clever children to bump up their grade averages (which is how I got a free place at a private grammar school, seemed to me like a good deal for both parties). There's not even such a thing as a Poor Widow In A Mansion With School Age Children :-)

That's either a crap translation or a tautology.

Question 6 in the BBC's Quiz: How well would you have done at GCSE? is as follows:

FRENCH: Read this extract from a letter to a local newspaper. What point is the writer making? Choose the correct phrase to complete the sentence.
"Pour réduire le nombre d’accidents dans le centre-ville, le conseil municipal propose d’agrandir la zone piétonne."
The writer tells us that the council wants to ...

A - Reduce pedestrian-only areas in the town centre.
B - Make the town centre safer for pedestrians.
C - Increase fines for motorists who cause accidents in the town centre.

You don't need to be a genius to guess that the council proposes to enlarge the pedestrianized area. But that option is not on there, so what do you do? We can rule out A and C (clearly incorrect), so that leaves you with B (which happens to be the correct answer) but that is not a literal translation and is stating the blindingly obvious anyway: "They are going to reduce the number of accidents by making it safer, duh". You could argue that increasing motoring fines or reducing the pedestrian-only areas also reduce the number of accidents (maybe it's cyclist vs pedestrian accidents).

The answer is as follows:

Literally, the sentence means: "To reduce the number of accidents in the town centre, the local council is proposing to expand the pedestrian area."

Well why didn't you fucking offer that as choice B?
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Question 4 is a load of shit as well:

State the denary representation of the binary number 10111010

A - 157
B - 143
C - 186

It takes you a split second to realise that a binary number ending in -0 must be an even number and there's only one even number on the list. FFS.
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The history question blows as well - Dido was a pop singer in the 1990s, not a queen in some ancient fable.

Fun Online Polls: Improving standards in education & Brexit delays

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What should we do to improve standards in secondary education and increase social mobility? (choose all that apply)

Have more selective state grammar schools - 50 votes
Have streaming and setting in state schools - 41 votes
Offer 'education vouchers' so that more can afford private education - 39 votes
Ban or restrict private education - 6 votes
Other, please specify - 4 votes

I would say that is conclusive enough, job done.

Interesting comment:

LJH: "Reactionary expectation that teachers keep orderly classrooms; that literacy and numeracy are more important than selfesteem; that there is a core cannon of facts* a person must learn before voyages of self discovery; sacking and forfeiture of pension rights for teachers in public employment who fail to conform to the above; close all education faculties at the polys- learn on the job."

* Agreed, like being taught the difference between "canon" and "cannon".
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As usual, The Daily Mash says what people really think…

"EVERYONE has agreed to quietly sweep the referendum result under the carpet, it has been confirmed. Britain has confirmed plans to keep its head down and start talking about football or the Olympics whenever anyone mentions Article 50.

A government spokesman said: “The ‘Leave’ thing has become like a workmate’s barbecue where many people agree enthusiastically to attend, then bail on the day after realising they’d rather go to Homebase. Let’s just ignore it and move on – Boris is cool with that, he never gave a shit really and Farage was only doing it to get himself a TV agent and crack the jungle reality show circuit.”

A few days later, The Times repeated this without the satire…

Theresa May has been expected to enact article 50 in January, setting in train the formal two years of negotiations before Brexit. Despite great political pressure to stick to that timetable, she may be forced to delay because her new Brexit and international trade departments will not be ready, City sources said.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

"When do you think the UK government will trigger Article 50, if ever?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Remain Bollocks #173

From the Guardian

Cultural and academic connections are not simply a matter of Britain’s being able to attract the best grants for research or for the arts. They are also a matter of the lives of students and young people. The Erasmus programme has sent 200,000 young Britons to universities elsewhere in Europe. The quantifiable gain is enhanced job prospects; harder to quantify are the sheer broadened horizons. 

Yeah, that would be fine except that according to this, there are 33 participating countries. So, Norway and Turkey are also members. So, assuming we exited to be an EFTA state, this would be irrelevant.

Serendipity Strikes. Yet Again!

I have been idling about listening to Milton Friedman's Free to Choose series on Youtube.  Yetserday and today it was this one:

Checking my emails after that there was this from Capx.

What goes around comes around.

My personal view is that the primary purpose of a national education system is to nationalise education. Ditto health care. Nationalising education is all about control.  Nationalising health care is all about fear, that is to again increase control.

Academies

From the BBC

The government could be forced to retreat on plans to compel every school in England to become an academy because of an emerging broad-based opposition, the National Union of Teachers claims.
The union's leader Christine Blower said there could be a rapid reversal, as happened with disability payments.

OK, I'm not sure academies make much difference. I think they're a typical bit of New Labour/Cameronite private-but-not-really. I think they're deliberately rigging selection to keep out the "worst" pupils. On the plus side, I think giving schools more power rather than having to deal with local authority bureaucracy is probably a good thing.

But I don't understand what the NAS/UWT have against them. I mean, I would get it if they said that academies are terrible, and we should scrap all of them, but they aren't. They think there's many good academy schools. So, what's the problem? Or is there something that affects the direct interests of teachers (which let's be honest, most union opposition is really about)?

Private Education

Thoughts on these two facts?

From the Independent

The research, commissioned by the Independent Schools Council, found that private schooling boosts teenagers’ GCSEs by almost two-thirds of a grade per subject.

From the BBC

The cost of putting a child through a 14-year private education in the UK stands at £286,000, research suggests.