Quarantine madness

At my daughter's school, one of the pupils in Year 8 had Covid-19 symptoms or tested positive (not sure). As a result, the whole of Year 8 has to stay at home for two weeks. I assume that this also applies to all teachers who gave a lesson with that pupil in it (she wasn't sure).

I don't know whether the school is under some legal obligation to do this, or whether they are overreacting to cover their arses, but this is surely madness?

There are one hundred pupils in each Year plus two dozen teachers. Mass Covid-19 testing indicates that about 2% of people test positive. So if they actually tested everybody in a whole Year and all the teachers regularly, the probability that at least one tests positive is over 90% (1 minus 0.98^124).

On that basis, most pupils and most teachers will be in quarantine most of the time (there is no test yet to see whether people have had it and are immune AFAIAA), so they might as well continue doing online lessons and everybody stays at home.

"How to View the World like an Economist"

Something in an article that was in City AM a year ago has been bugging me ever since.

Most of it is good stuff...

When a politician blithely commits to “making childcare higher quality”, you wonder how much any new regulation of the sector will push up prices, and hence make formal care less affordable...

When Jeremy Corbyn states that the existence of profits in certain industries means lower prices could be delivered under nationalisation, you consider whether public ownership is more likely to become captured by producer interests or suffer from worse profitability.

When governments continually tell us that HS2 will be “good for the economy” because the economic benefits exceed the costs, you consider whether other investments, such as road schemes in areas with bottlenecks, would generate even higher returns.

When someone calls for banning plastic bags for environmental reasons, you think about what the effects of paper bags are for the scale of landfill sites, or the health impact of repeat use of linen bags given hygiene risks.

Agreed to all that. But his first real life example is a very bad one:

Remember when the coalition government’s policy of “free” school meals for five to seven year-olds was announced in 2013?

Campaign groups rallied to praise the £600m commitment, claiming it would enhance educational attainment, based upon results from narrow pilot schemes. It was only economists who seemed to question whether this spending really obtained the best bang for the buck to increase attainment, or whether the money could be better used in other departments — or even, heaven forfend, be left with taxpayers.

Of course those lunches aren't "free", that's a nonsense. But the alternative is not 'leaving the money with taxpayers', it's making the self-same taxpayers make their kids a packed lunch or give them some lunch money for the school canteen.

In the grander scheme of things, funding basic* school lunches for all kids out of progressive taxes (income tax or LVT) ticks all my boxes:

1. It's like a Citizen's Income, non-means tested and mildly redistributive downwards. Vastly better than means-tested "free school meals" for a minority with all the stigma, cheating and administrative hassle.

2. Saves parents the hassle of sorting out a packed lunch or remembering to give their kids some lunch money, which they might or might not spend as intended (or have taken off them by school bullies).

3. It must work out much cheaper per meal if the school bulk-buys and everybody gets the same.

4. ... so it's not necessarily worse value for a better-off parent. They pay £5 extra tax and their kid gets a school dinner costing £2.50., but in the absence of school-lunches-for-all, they might end up paying £5 anyway (or spending a bit less than that but wasting ten or twenty minutes a day sorting it out). They've lost nothing and low-income parent is up £2.50.

5. It is good for solidarity between pupils, they all get the same. School lunches a bit crap? Every kid can moan about it equally, same as moaning about having to wear a school uniform. Best kind of quality control is, teachers sit in the same canteen and eat the same meals as the kids (they did that at my school).

6. It protects kids with low-income or lazy/forgetful parents from being humiliated by the lucky kids with posh lunch boxes/lots of lunch money.

7. At the margin, it helps educational attainment of kids with low-income or lazy/forgetful parents. It's difficult to concentrate when you are hungry, as the advert says. And has similar health benefits.

* The word "basic" is important here. Funding fancy school trips abroad for all would clearly be a total waste of money.

This unexpected response was mentioned in 'Freakonomics'.

From the BBC:

Fining parents for taking children out of school in term time in Wales has had no effect on overall absence rates, a review has found. It shows the number of unauthorised family holidays actually increased after fixed penalty notices were introduced in 2013...

Several respondents said that the level of the fine was too low to encourage behaviour change. They said this was particularly the case for unauthorised absences for holidays in term time because some parents preferred to pay a £60 fine compared to the price of going away in the school holidays.

One respondent said "in this deprived area many families cannot afford the costs of a holiday out of term time. If they can, they soak up the cost of the fine as part of the holiday cost (which means the fine has zero effect)".

This phenomonen was mentioned in the book 'Freakonomics', here's an article from 2013 explaining it:

In Haifa, day care centers almost uniformly closed at 4pm, and simply depended on the good intentions of parents to pick up their kids on time. Somehow, this worked: parents picked up their children on time and rarely, if ever, came after 4:30pm.

Why were parents rarely late? As Uri will tell you in our book, being late meant relying on the generosity of one teacher, who would inevitably stay late to look after your child. Being late meant facing that same teacher and having to apologize to her for the inconvenience of waiting.

All of which prompted us to wonder: what would happen if these day care centers stopped relying on generosity and started relying on a financial incentive — like a fine — to discourage parents from showing up late? Few would have predicted what we found: introducing a financial penalty for showing up late actually caused parents to do just that. Parents stopped showing up on time entirely.

To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness levels eventually leveling out at about twice the pre-fine level. That is, introducing a fine caused twice as many parents to show up late. What about the remaining four day care centers that remained fine-free? Tardiness didn’t change at all.

The picture that emerged from this experiment, co-authored with Aldo Rustichini, was that parents had a whole set of non-financial incentives for being on time – incentives that were completely incompatible with money. Like, for example, avoiding the guilt of inconveniencing the day care workers. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid that guilt, they took it en masse.

Car hits school

From the BBC:

A car crashed into the front entrance of a secondary school at the height of the morning run.

The black BMW was seen driving "at speed" around the car park of Fir Vale School in Sheffield at about 08:25 GMT before it hit the building.

Two men, aged 23 and 20, have been arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and causing criminal damage.

Inevitably, they were driving a BMW.

Fun with numbers (race to the bottom)

From The Evening Standard:

Fast-food takeaways will be banned from opening within 400 metres of schools in a bid to tackle the capital’s child obesity epidemic.

In addition, all new chicken, fish and chip and pizza outlets will have to sign up to minimum healthy food standards before getting planning permission. Sadiq Khan will announce the policy in his draft London Plan, the capital’s “planning bible”, due to be published later this week.

You know the answer is going to be 'zero', but let's do the numbers.

400 yds = 366 metres.

A circle with a radius of 366m has a surface area of 420,000 sq m = 0.42 sq km.

There are approx. 3,700 schools in Greater London (24,372 x 8 million/53 million).

3,700 schools x 0.42 sq km = 1,554 sq km.

Surface area of Greater London 1,569 sq km

I was a bit slow on the uptake here.

Dan Cookson beat us all to it, and even the BBC has pointed out that "In some parts of London, the only places that new fast food outlets would theoretically be allowed are in the middle of parks or the River Thames."

School Catchment Areas

From the BBC

The University of Birmingham School will have new buildings, a strong academic ethos and will benefit from links to the university and its staff and facilities.

And if it used a conventional admissions system, based on distance, it would be very likely to become a magnet for middle-class families and be accused of poaching pupils from existing schools.

But the school is actively trying to do something different.

It is basing its admissions for 11-year-olds on how close families live to four "nodes" across the city. One of these will be the school site in Selly Oak and the other three are in Small Heath, Hall Green and the Jewellery Quarter.

And that will make little difference.

I went to an all-boys school. It's a school that did really well. It was based in quite a nice bit of town, so had lots of boys from the nice areas nearby going there, but as it was also an all-boys school, it also had a catchment area of the whole of town. I knew boys who lived 4 miles away who caught a bus there.

Personally, I thought the school was quite good. There were a number of excellent teachers, and a few duffers. But looking back on it, most of the kids did about as well as their background. Sending poor kids to what was thought an excellent school, with the best results in town, didn't seem to do anything for them. They still left with maybe a reasonable CSE in metalwork and not much else. The sixth form was mostly stuffed with the middle-class kids.

And I've seen this with one of our neighbour's kids. These people aren't rich, but the dad works really hard. The daughter went to a school that's not well regarded and is now doing Maths at university. The eldest son is on track for really good A levels from the same school. How come these kids do well, and there's so many other failures out of that school?

The other thing of note is that good schools are nearly always in "nice" places. Either in large, middle-class villages, or in leafy suburbs. You never find a new school being created in a modern estate that does any better than any other school in a modern estate.

So, how much is a school about the teaching, and how much about the intake? And if it's about the intake, what do you do?

Boring American Books Axed From GCSE Syllabus

From the Telegraph

Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck novella, is one of a number of boring American books that have been axed from new English literature GCSEs after the education secretary insisted students must study boring British works.

Michael Gove’s intervention means three-quarters of the books on the government directed GCSEs, which will be unveiled this week, are by British authors and most are pre-20th century.

OCR, one of Britain’s biggest exam boards, said: "Of Mice and Men, which everyone really dislikes, will not be included. It was hated by 90% of teenagers taking English literature GCSE in the past."

Always been a bit dubious about schools "careers advice"

From the FT

Sajid Javid, the new culture secretary, was once tipped by his school careers officer for a career in the media. “I was told that I should apply for a job at Radio Rentals as a television repair man,” he recalled.

Sajid Javid is a year younger than me, and when I was 20, I bought a TV because I worked out renting was just silly (once TVs went solid state the thing that would cost you was the tube, and they had decent warranties anyway). And it was pretty obvious that the pattern was generally that renting TVs was on the way out.

It's often difficult to see what the industries of the future are, but it's often quite easy to see those that are disappearing.
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MW adds, in reply to Lola's comment, there are even recruitment/employment agencies who specialise in finding career adviser jobs for people. And presumably there are other people who run training courses for people who would like to work for a recruitment/employment agency and specialise in finding people jobs as career advisors and so on ad infinitum.