to think that it's appalling that society has come to this

[floraloctopus]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-48119099

The school is described as the 4th emergency service (yes, I know that's the coastguard/lifeboats) as they are providing a food bank service, helping get rid of head lice, running training courses on cooking on a budget, meanwhile they are having to make staff redundant because of budgets.

It shouldn't be like this, children and families are suffering whilst the rich get richer thanks to the government policies which take from the poor and give to the rich.

I totally agree Janet, it frees up school places, the wealthy would opt for the schools in the best catchments or for grammar schools with private tuition anyway making less availability for others.

It is not the politics of envy to pointmout that the education bedget varies depending on the number of children in state schools, thus by not educating your children there you are affecting the numerator AND the denominator. I'm not sure how much more simply I can express that...

OK, so if there were 615,000 more students in the UK state system in the autumn but no increase in the tax base, where would the money come from?

There would be more school places if there were more children - it's poor planning and unpredictability that results in pressure on school places. And funnily enough, the perceived quality of any state school relates very closely to the perceived quality of the children... more "high quality" children in the state sector and hey presto, you find more state schools getting good results and being popular...

There would be more school places if there were more children

But where would the money come from?

Oh. So before you were saying 'they can't do that unless you have an enforced CCJ" , and now you are saying oh well 'they can't do that if you have a debt relief order in place" . hmm..

UC taking 40% of the already minimal amount someone has to live on.. OF COURSE that is going to drive food poverty..

AlaskanOilBaron - as money is an invention of human beings to get things done, and more can be magicked up from thin air by the Bank of England, I would rather cynically say that it appears if the will is there and people have trust in it... it doesn't always appear in the right places of course, because not everyone is sufficiently invested in the project for it to do so...

AlaskanOilBaron - as money is an invention of human beings to get things done, and more can be magicked up from thin air by the Bank of England, I would rather cynically say that it appears if the will is there and people have trust in it... it doesn't always appear in the right places of course, because not everyone is sufficiently invested in the project for it to do so...

So you don't really have an answer, then.

AlaskanOilBaron - do you have an answer to the question why isn't there for money for education? Do you think the Lib Dems, Labour Party, Green Party, UKIP, Change UK, etc, would all have the same tax and spend policies?!! Do you think taxpayers' money was well spent on trying to bribe the DUP?

Personally, at a time of already great discontent, I would not have wasted several years putting people off investing in this country by creating massive uncertainty and doubt about the sanity of the people supposedly running this country. If we don't have enough money for education, we definitely can't afford Brexit.

If there had actually been a plan... but no. No plan.

@AlaskanOilBaron I haven't been keeping up with the thread after posting a couple of days ago, but are you saying that if there is no money in the pot, that is why the schools/families aren't getting money? If so, you are wrong - the money is being give virtually as blank cheques to the private sector instead all sorts of ways. One example I gave up thread - to do with children in care because of poverty. Other examples include hospitals, schools, housing.

No the politics of envy play out on here every time a social housing tenant posts a thread. THEN the usual suspects line up to berate the tenant for their "free" house.

Look at the thread about I;m really not a nice person. Lots of people admitting they take satisfaction when a friend is down in their luck, loses their job, etc.
A lot of people are actually not very nice. No wonder they don't give a shit about vulnerable people.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/09/woman-81-killed-herself-after-pension-was-frozen-in-error?CMP=share_btn_tw

Speckledhen10 - do you read the Daily Fail by any chance?

Maybe if more of the people running and influencing the country (and making decisions on school budgets, social policies etc) were not from privileged backgrounds (ie rich) , with no direct knowledge of how ordinary 'non rich' people live, the inequality in our country would not be growing so much? The statistics are shocking.
Just 7% of UK children are privately educated.
Of doctors in training, a third were privately educated and just 6% grew up in the most deprived areas of the UK
In 2012, only 25 new recruits to the Civil Service Fast Stream out of more than 600 were from working-class backgrounds

83% of new entrants into journalism do internships, which are on average for seven weeks and 92% of these are unpaid - therefore freezing out those from less advantaged backgrounds
1% of the UK public was educated at Oxbridge, however graduates from those two universities make up 75% of senior judges, 59% of cabinet posts, 57% of permanent secretaries, 50% of diplomats, 47% of newspaper columnists, 44% of public body chairs and 33% of BBC executives.
82% /81% of offers from Oxford/Cambridge went to students from the top two socio-economic groups in 2015, almost a quarter of places go to children from just one of England’s nine regions - the SE (in 2015 students in the south-east were awarded 24% of places at Oxford and 22% at Cambridge).
In summary (and to generalise because of course there are exceptions) , a minority of rich, privately educated people from the South East are having a dramatically disproportionate influence on how our society works. Until that changes, it is unlikely that social inequality will improve. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

That is a super post crackerjackernacker

I don't think most people are aware of what is going on in terms of money being given to private companies, nor just how much has changed in the last decade or so for some families.

Nor are they aware that of what it is like to grow up in a subculture, not privileged, where you are set off on one trajectory from birth simply because of where you live and the circumstances of your birth, and how hard it is to get onto another one.