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Spending more doesn't make public services better

18 replies

moondog · 27/04/2013 09:02

As most of us realised long ago

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sinpan · 27/04/2013 09:26

Fraser Nelson has a strong interest in reducing government expenditure and has frequently written on the subject and given interviews. He's selective in choosing sources to bolster his position, like anyone with an agenda. In this case he hasn't even linked to the report, which is about school spending, not public spending, or at least I cant find a link.

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WinkyWinkola · 27/04/2013 09:27

Spending doesn't necessarily make service better. Yes.

Vicious cuts DEFINITELY don't.

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moondog · 27/04/2013 10:12

My main interst is in schools.
Everyone has an agenda-even you I am sure Sinpan!

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purits · 27/04/2013 10:18

vicious cuts?

That's rather an emotive adjective. Do you really think that they sit there saying "who can I be vicious to today?" Hmm

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flatpackhamster · 27/04/2013 10:29

Yes, I saw this article. And, unlike Sinpan, I was able to not only spot the clearly marked link to the report, which is found at the very top of the second paragraph, in BOLD, but to successfully read it.

And if you choose to actually read the report, as I have done, rather than merely dismiss it as the ravings of a partisan hack as Sinpan has decided to do, you will note on page 13 and 14 that the article very specifically states that there is 'no correlation at all between the level of pupil funding and educational outcomes'.

This is a pretty devastating conclusion, as Fraser Nelson writes, since it tosses out the entire ideology behind Labour's massive spending programme, and reinforces what many have been saying which is that doubling expenditure on education was a mistake, a waste of money and did not improve educational standards.

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YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes · 27/04/2013 10:38

er, yes they are! - they are seeking to cut areas that have the least power and are more likely to vote Labour/left - have you not noticed? Working class, lower middle class, women, ethnic minorities, disabled, unemployed and under-employed, people on lower incomes (working tax and housing benefit attacks) are all being attacked, people on higher incomes, upper middle class and really wealthy are being given tax breaks. How can you not notice!!

Employment law changes to reduce the rights of workers on short contracts and/or part time (more likely to be women, career breakers (more likely to be women), transient workers (more likely to be ethnic minority/low income). Charging for taking employers to tribunal (cases affected more likely to be poorer workers who cannot afford legal representation, working for employers with poor employment practices and procedures).

Sectors of the population more likely to vote conservative, who spend large parts of the welfare budget have not been targeted - eg the more affluent, white middle class state-dependent pensioner has had no cuts.

To top it all, how they are not embarrassed about constantly recruiting people nearly from the same bloody year at Eton?! - a public school with less than 0.24% of the population at it, (the 'which year' bias would reduce this to 0.03% of the population!). A massive bias towards the extraordinarily wealthy male that would never stand up in ET as it is so blatant and so biased.

Bear in mind that the average conservative cabinet minister has utter contempt for people without even a pubic school viewpoint (i.e. 93% of the population) and probably a bias against people who didn't go to 'top' public schools, you have a cabinet who frankly doesn't care about anyone but the top earners/particular classes and sees anyone outside that as fair game.

This is different from the Thatcher/Major tory, whose average supporter reached much further down the income distribution - Thatcher and Major tories were almost by definition lower middle class, with a smattering of the working class tory. The current lot are pretty much the nastiest of the wealthiest and are constantly playing out a Jane Austen/Upstairs Downstairs fantasy. It will come back to bite them, sure, and some areas of the government aren't quite as bad, but the Osbourne cuts strategy is right out of the early 19th Century in attitude - take away money from the poor to force them to work, but then encourage employers to pay as little as possible so that wealthy shareholders can make money from the desparate poor - its crazy that we, and the Liberals, allow this.

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YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes · 27/04/2013 10:48

er no, that report shows why it is ridiculous that public schools supply so many people into top jobs - if money spent has no impact on student outcomes!

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YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes · 27/04/2013 11:00

Note -

  1. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu have a ridiculously biased recruitment programme into its graduate positions in favour of UK universities with a 30-50% public school intake - only 7% of all university entrants come from public schools.
  2. Performance measurement based on outcomes, rather than improvements is a flawed measure - and the subject of a legal case in the USA.
  3. What should be measured is added value by the school - if a pupil is taken from a 'fail all' curve to a 'pass 5' curve by a school this would be a worse outcome in the survey than a 'pass 7' curve student falling to a 'pass 6' curve - because the only measure is the '5' or '6'.
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flatpackhamster · 27/04/2013 11:18

YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes

er no, that report shows why it is ridiculous that public schools supply so many people into top jobs - if money spent has no impact on student outcomes!

The report clearly explains that it is the quality of the school and its ethos, not the amount of money spent per pupil, that has the biggest impact on educational attainment. That is clearly the case with public schools - their ethos and their teaching is what matters.

1. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu have a ridiculously biased recruitment programme into its graduate positions in favour of UK universities with a 30-50% public school intake - only 7% of all university entrants come from public schools.

That's presumably because they want the best and brightest rather than people who might do OK. If that's a definition of bias, then I think most businesses are 'biased'. This appears to be an argument along the lines of 'boo hiss, Deloitte and Touche are evil' rather than 'they are wrong and this is why'.

2. Performance measurement based on outcomes, rather than improvements is a flawed measure - and the subject of a legal case in the USA.

It's only a 'flawed measure' if you imagine that actual attainment is a bad thing.

3. What should be measured is added value by the school - if a pupil is taken from a 'fail all' curve to a 'pass 5' curve by a school this would be a worse outcome in the survey than a 'pass 7' curve student falling to a 'pass 6' curve - because the only measure is the '5' or '6'.

Your posts are exactly what I expected from people opposed to these findings - attacking the messenger rather than looking at the findings and either analysing why they might be wrong or accepting them and looking at whether or not lobbing money at schools is really the solution to poor educational attainment.

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moondog · 27/04/2013 13:21

Thank you for your perceptive comments Hamster.

As for this

'Performance measurement based on outcomes, rather than improvements is a flawed measure - and the subject of a legal case in the USA.

It's only a 'flawed measure' if you imagine that actual attainment is a bad thing.'

Indeed! And yet for many, attainment is it seem inherently wicked.
Insane eh?

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Fargo86 · 27/04/2013 16:03

If Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu are operating a flawed recruitment system, they are the ones who will suffer as their competitors will recruit candidates from state schools that are superior.

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YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes · 27/04/2013 18:19

NOt true exactly re recruitment - that is the biggest problem in employment today - there is a presumption that recruiting from 'top' universities gains you the brightest and best staff - in fact all you are effectively doing is recruiting from an income and private school bias i.e you are recruiting by class, not ability. Because nearly all graduate schemes have this bias, there is no real way to make comparisons in graduate employment nor is there a way to track recruits who don't come from the 'top' ten. This becomes even more difficult in a recession, because recruitment is scaled back to focus on five universities. This is done by nearly all graduate recruiters, but is even more prevallent in employers with high graduate starting salaries - like Deloitte.

It is true that one way to gain competitive advantage in graduate recruitment is to identify people with high levels of ability who didn't choose the top 5 or top 10 universities to focus their recruitment on.

In fact one way to see how valuable this can be is that both Oxford and Cambridge recruit researchers in this way, from lower tier universities and their research profile is phenomenal as a result.

Of course as someone who has worked in recruitement, I have recruited people who have outperformed Oxbridge/Russell Group candidates. The sad fact is though is that working for DTT, is another 'public school-like' badge on your CV that falsely causes other employers to pay you a premium because of all the misconceptions that selection is based on intellectual ability and attainment - it isn't because there is both an application bias and a selection bias that means at no time is a University selecting the best attaining students in the country.

Its difficult to 'get' these arguments if you have already decided your boxes and are sticking to them. Funnily enough, if I want a high performing knowledge workers, the last ones on the list are those with fixed ideas who repetitively argue the status quo..

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YohedYoshoulderYonisandYotoes · 27/04/2013 18:37

The 'attainment' argument goes like this.

  1. You have someone who has had maximum resources available, learning resources, educational trips, private education, intellectually capable family friends, books, films.. They get B, B, A at A-level.


  1. You have someone going to a mediocre school, not a very wealthy family, not many educational trips, but school's usual turnout is 5 GCSE or 2 a-levels per student. This student gets A,A,A at A-level after begging to do the third.


In our current system, the first is likely to attend a top five university, be recruited onto a graduate scheme by a 'top' employer, and have a starting salary of about £26,000, and numerous training schemes and international development.

The second is likely to attend a top 100 university, probably half-way down the league table, will be missed by nearly all graduate recruitment schemes, take an 'entry level' job that is effectively dead-end, and manage their own career whilst working for employers who do not pay for training and development.

The question is, what would the second do with the resources and opportunities given to the first?
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MammaBrussels · 28/04/2013 12:18

Sorry, can't open the Telegraph link (have looked at my 20 stories for this month already). Would someone mind linking to the Deloitte report for me?

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purits · 28/04/2013 16:02

they are seeking to cut areas that have the least power and are more likely to vote Labour/left - have you not noticed?

If you really believe that then do you also believe the corollary: that Labour only spend to gain popularity i.e. they buy votes.

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MammaBrussels · 28/04/2013 16:23

Managed to open the link and study. It makes for very interesting reading.

IMO the conclusion would be better explained as "...there is no correlation at all between the level of per pupil funding and educational outcomes" in this year (2010 - 2011). It cannot consider the impact of raising funding on performance over the past ten years, so it's not correct to dismiss policies that increased educational spending over the Labour years as completely ineffective based on this report because that's not what it's examining. Nor does it examine the impact of raising funding on schools in deprived areas (those which will benefit most from the pupil premium) whereas Nelson concludes that "unlikely to be helped by a bit of extra cash poured into a dysfunctional system" -the report doesn't suggest that. It doesn't look at the impact that raising spending has on in schools in poor areas.

As a teacher, it's great to see that the biggest improvements come from the quality of school (as based on OFSTED ratings). However, there's a paradox in using this as a statistical measure of pupil performance as pupil performance is measured as one of the OFSTED indicators so the data is picking up the same information twice. I suppose though that the 'how well do pupils acheive?' OFSTED target focuses more on CVA than raw points so maybe this wouldn't contribute to errors?

So, how do we improve the quality of schools? Tricky to come up with policies that won't add to costs!

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flatpackhamster · 29/04/2013 07:41

MammaBrussels

Sorry, can't open the Telegraph link (have looked at my 20 stories for this month already). Would someone mind linking to the Deloitte report for me?

If you're using Firefox for your browsing, then go to the Firefox/File menu and select 'new private window'. Then, when you go to the Telegraph website through the private window, you won't get the '20 story limit' pop-up.

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MammaBrussels · 29/04/2013 10:11

Thanks Flatpack that should come in useful.

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