Westministenders: A Year of Johnson

[RedToothBrush]

So having given the benefit of the doubt...

... whats your reflections?

Good (and yes do have some thoughts on the positive - challenge yourself on this one as its important) and the bad (and yes this is the easy bit but keep it within reason)?

Tell that to Gove who thinks that education should be all about rote learning like it was when he was at school

The quality of his education and his ability to put it into practice can best be illustrated by his belief that "all schools should be above average"

@prettybird

Tell that to Gove who thinks that education should be all about rote learning like it was when he was at school

The quality of his education and his ability to put it into practice can best be illustrated by his belief that "all schools should be above average"

I don't think it's a party political issue, actually. It's more a reflection of the paucity of thought everywhere in modern life, which has created a series of systems that are back to front.

Instead of working out what is needed and what would be most useful in the modern world, and then shaping education (or health or policing) around that, it's been found to be much easier to work out what metrics look best in the Daily Mail, and work towards keeping those good.

Moving away from education for a moment, it's why there has never been an attempt to frame drugs policy as "what's best for reducing the harm ?", when "how many arrests can we make ?" is so much easier to measure.

With education it's not "How can we ensure students are best equipped to meet the demands of the modern world ?", but "How can we bump up the exam results for the league tables ?"

And so on.

I went to private selective schools and thence to University
I never met anybody from outside that world until after I graduated

In the the UK's current political system
most of the decision makers NEVER step outside the selective school bubble
there have no comprehension of how others think

there are solutions
they are being worked on
the current government are an impediment

Instead of working out what is needed and what would be most useful in the modern world, and then shaping education (or health or policing) around that, it's been found to be much easier to work out what metrics look best in the Daily Mail, and work towards keeping those good.

This, exactly this. Example of the damage Gove and Cummings did with that strategy.

My DD had evidence of need going back to Year 3 in relation to extra time in exams as well as by the age of 16 having 3 separate sets of tests by Educational Psychologists, at 7, 11 and 15. With just six weeks to go to A levels we were called in by the SENCO. The rules on extra time had been changed, eligibility for extra time now depended solely on scores for working memory and processing being below a threshold, effectively the lowest 14% of the population. This applied irrespective of ability, no matter that if your ability was in the bottom 14% of the population and that is the score you would expect. No matter if your ability was in the top 1% of the population, most of whom no doubt had potential to make a positive contribution to society, and a score in even the bottom 50% would mean you face challenges in showing your potential in a time limited exam. Ed Psychs were booked up by people racing to get the evidence required in such a short time. Some people lost their extra time even though they very clearly faced an uneven playing field. Decades of progress with levelling the playing field for pupils with SpLDs were lost. At the time the Daily Mail was on a "sharp elbowed middle class parents are buying extra time for their children" schtick, claiming that it had led to a huge increase in the number of pupils claiming exceptional circumstances, never mind that they were still nowhere near the 10% level of actual incidence.

Meanwhile at GCHQ "
" It also actively seeks people who class themselves as neurodiverse, with conditions including autism, Asperger’s syndrome and learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia or dyscalculia.

Officials believe people with such conditions can approach difficult problems from completely different angles. GCHQ even has a well-established club, the Think Differently group. Its chair, Mike, a senior project manager, says he landed his current role despite being both dyslexic and dyspraxic and having problems with his short-term memory.

Mike says his memory problems can turn routine tasks, such as remembering how to get to a certain meeting room, into an ordeal. But he adds: “I’m great at problem-solving.” www.ft.com/content/ccc68ffc-7c1e-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560

Remember Doms call for misfits and weirdos "with genuine cognitive diversity"

It all harks back to that old adage about people and fish.

Give a person a fish, and they'll eat for a day.

Teach a person to fish, and they'll eat for life.

English education (and I know Scotland has long held a different approach which starts to show when people get to about 30 ?) is of the "give a fish" approach.

It used to be the case that having a degree was more important than what the degree was in.

@Sostenueto

What is really upsetting my Dgd at the mo is endless bad reporting about how grades will be allocated in August for gcse and A level students. Isn't it enough they are all worried sick without all the scarmongering in the press? Now according to the Daily Telegraph they will be allotted with little emphasis on teachers predicted grades because teachers over estimated. This is a brighter cohort, the teaching on new format a lot better but hey let an algorithm decide your DC's future chances. It is a shambles and no wonder lots of DC have depression and anxiety!

I have a DF who's eldest will have his GCSEs 'given' this year and they're worried to hell that his progress he's made this year with the added help they've had to fight for given his learning disabilities won't be accounted for. I always did well in exams and consistently got above predicted grades. I'm one of the few friends she has that gets why she and her Ds are fearful. My DS should have done KS1 sats complete bullshit tests in my view but hasn't had to sit them and has been allocated greater depth in all, DD would have had the same except she was pressured hard and very narrowly missed when she sat them - the opposite to me. It's a mess in general without random algorithms getting involved.

Now if Gove hadn't chosen to meddle in education and get rid of course work, children would have had a year and a half's already assessed work from which to allocate a grade.

This of course, would not suit the Oxford types, for whom results mostly rested on final exams and being bone idle for a couple of years with last minute cramming could pull a decent degree classification out of the bag.

""hostage" appears to be an overused word:"

Big difference in useage:

Those other examples were people complaining about being held hostage

Crispin Blunt was advocating using Ireland as a hostage

The difference is between a complaint and a threat / incitement
When said by and about individuals, instead of countries, the latter can often be a criminal offence

@BigChocFrenzy

""hostage" appears to be an overused word:"

Big difference in useage:

Those other examples were people complaining about being held hostage

Crispin Blunt was advocating using Ireland as a hostage

The difference is between a complaint and a threat / incitement
When said by and about individuals, instead of countries, the latter can often be a criminal offence

If we had to correct every Brexiteer on nuance, we'd never get any work done.

The only other high-level politician I can think of who even vaguely expressed such contempt for their nation's people is Trump:

"I love uneducated people"
and even he meant that in a friendly way about his own voters, not such shocking contempt as Patel & her Tory MP chums expressed for the British:

“The British are among the worst idlers in the world"

"Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

What is baffling is that many Brexiters talk about their vote as "rebelling against the elite", "a patriotic vote"
but look at what leading Brexiters have published about ordinary British people

That's published, not just a drunken rant at a party, or a careless retweet of something they didn't bother to check.

I might be wrong BCF but didn't the same document also go on about company directors playing golf more than working? It was offensive on many levels I seem to remember. However because of that I suspect the golfer looked at the kids and pointed the finger and the kids looked at the company director and did likewise.

BigChocFrenzy
Crispin Blunt was advocating using Ireland as a hostage.
The difference is between a complaint and a threat/incitement.

Your quote is in the past tense - he appears to be making an observation, not a threat;

Crispin Blunt MP@CrispinBlunt
UK side had the money, the people, the huge trade deficit, amongst other advantages,including a hostage, the RoI, if EU behaved like this.
We capitulated.

"he appears to be making an observation, not a threat;"

Not an academic observation

Tory Brexiter Crispin Blunt MP was lambasting the UK side for failing to use all its advantages & levers,
which included - in his opinion - using Ireland as a hostage

Now think how you'd react if Corbyn tweeted about using Israel as a hostage

• no matter in what context he used it, you wouldn't accept any explaining that away but even he isn't dim enough to go that far

Well said Bcf

Olivia de Havilland, Gone with the Wind star, dies in Paris of natural causes, aged 104
The last of an era

Helen Mirren is 75 - nooo she can't be !

Ooh I watched all of the Prime Suspects on Netflix a couple of months ago. Amazing.

pmk

I watched Prime Suspect the first time round, when it was genuinely something new to see a woman on TV battling dinosaurs at work, as well as crime,
not pretending all was going swimmingly and everyone was accepting
not with women as fashion plates but a bit grungy.

I'm using lockdown to catch up on watching TV I've missed...

Chernobyl - heartbreakingly brilliant
Killing Eve - enjoying it so far...
The good place - got bored after so. Great premise for a show though
Altered carbon - absolutely brilliant...watch it!

Tim Shipman's review of BJ's first year contains this comment on how it all went wrong after bat-shagging ....

Shipman also reports in the Sunday Times that the UK chief negotiator David Frost has been reassuring Brexiter MPs that he will get a deal with < 60% of BJ's aims

Remember of course that BJ was able to spin to them that getting the EU to agree to a deal with their original preferred proposal for Ireland was a concession by the EU
and not (as May) "something that no UK PM could agree to"

btw, does anyone keep thinking of the "real", sadly late, David Frost, who was such an excellent interviewer, so talented at getting politicians and others to open up,
in great contrast to today's lot

His famous in-depth interviews with Nixon - such a scoop for a British journo

Then there was Robin Day and several others who could actually get answers to questions
and had read their brief to ask intelligent questions and to know when the answers were rubbish

It seems an art that has been lost

• or, more probably, those that have it are not employed

I saw Helen Mirren walking through the foyer of the National Theatre last summer. When she isn’t inhabiting a character she actually does look like a fairly average septuagenarian woman and easily slipped into the invisibility of the over 50 woman, certainly not the “real woman poleaxed by passion” that she played last time I saw her there commanding the audience whilst lusting for Dominic Cooper in Phedre. That’s great actresses for you.....

It's funny when you see so many trade deals are worth 66bn and then realise Grayling spaffed that up the wall within a year.