Remember, Our Money Is Safe In Their Hands…

Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for education Melinda Tilley warned children in the city have been left “unable to read” because the city council decided to launch its own three-year reading programme, at a cost of £505,000, rather than taking up a county council scheme.

/facepalm

… all six schools on the KRM reading programme – John Henry Newman, St John Fisher, East Oxford, Pegasus, Windale, and Orchard Meadow – had dropped out two years into the three-year scheme.

/doublefacepalm

Mrs Tilley said: “I’m really upset there are children who still can’t read in the city because the city council didn’t follow our programme.

“I asked the city council if they wanted to come in on our reading programme and they didn’t say yes or no. Then they went on and started their own programme and lorded it over us saying we weren’t doing our jobs properly.

“The reason it [the scheme] failed was because it wasn’t purely reading, it was based on lots of psychometric testing which causes kids to lose interest.

“Now I’m stuck with trying to help the city’s children and I don’t know if we can now get any more money to do it.”

Naturally, the council is in full ‘It’s not our fault!’ mode:

Spokesman Jonathan Solity said it was a “pity” schools had dropped out and added the programme had been “highly effective” .

He said: “The programmes achieved what they set out to achieve, were extremely successful and demonstrated that the gap in attainments between pupils in schools in disadvantaged communities can be bridged through the quality of what is taught and how it is taught.”

He added: “[Mrs Tilley] is looking to score cheap political points at the expense of children’s education rather than take the time to check her facts.”

City council spokesman Chofamba Sithole said Mrs Tilley’s comments illustrated “a disappointing lack of understanding about the KRM programme” and failed to address the basic question of why the county “has been unable to address the underperformance of these schools over many years”.

So, who’s right?

Ah, who cares? It’s only taxpayer money, isn’t it?

You Don’t Have To Be A Control Freak To Work Here…

…but it clearly helps! Dan Sabbagh, the ‘Guardian’s’ head of media and technology really doesn’t seem to understand what it is he’s writing about:

Social media brings out the worst in some of us.

Well, OK. Just like any kind of freedom, right? It'll always be abused by someone, somewhere...

Why else would you set up a Facebook group to pay a twisted tribute to "legend" Dale Cregan? (Cregan was arrested on suspicion of murder, for his alleged involvement in the killings of two police officers in Manchester.) Or write that "Every police officer's death is a course [sic] for celebration"? There should be no consolation in poor grammar either: such trolling seems to be a persistent phenomenon with so-called "tribute sites" appearing for the killer Raoul Moat – as well as the racist abuse aimed at Stan Collymore or Fabrice Muamba, or the sexist insults directed at Louise Mensch.

None of which is actually 'trolling' as the original meaning of the term would have it. You'd think - if you really had selected the right man to be 'head of media and technology' - the difference would be understood.

But no.

At least the police are taking action.

And the fact you regard that as a good thing simply points up the uselessness of the 'Guardian' in defending free speech.

It is illegal to send "grossly offensive" messages, according to the Communications Act 2003 (although few people probably knew that). Today a 22-year-old man was arrested in Netherley, Liverpool in the light of that act.

Did he 'send' them? Does me posting a comment to Twitter constitute 'sending'?

The law - because it's useless and outdated and was almost certainly drawn up by technological Luddites - says yes. Sensible people would argue no.

However, we are asking for a lot if we expect, or believe, that the police can get involved every time somebody makes grossly offensive remarks online.

Well, quite! So how about we give them a break and act like adults, instead?

It will always be hard for the police to tackle the decline in civility that seems to come the moment you hand people a computer, the internet and a darkened bedroom. Many would like to argue that such abuse is a necessary excrescence of the digital world, matched perhaps by the freedom that social media give to express and organise, as the #coverforgmp campaign demonstrates.

It's not hard to see that Yet it is hard to be sure that Facebook and Twitter could not do more.

Really? What could they do?

Facebook likes to talk about how content on the network is monitored by 900m users, any of whom can report abuse to a team of uncertain number and resource based in Dublin. Facebook doesn't say how many pages it has taken down, how many complaints it gets, or how fast it works, but on the Cregan case will say it mainly took pages down because they were set up by people with false identities – for Facebook, the original sin.

No, merely a breach of their stated terms and conditions. In other words, something for which they can act, and will act.

Transparency, of course, would only give the public a chance to work out if Facebook does a good job in regulating its own network. Facebook, however, declines to be specific, as it presumably knows best…

It's entitled to 'know best'; it is, after all, providing a service free of charge. And the only problem for people like you is that it's willing to tolerate things you clearly aren't. I see that the rampant Statism that affects the rest of the 'Guardian' staffers has reached here too...

Pre-moderation is impossible for a social network, but everybody has access to a search function, including the owners of the network themselves. There will be Facebook tribute pages to the next person arrested on suspicion of murder too; one would hope that they could be deleted almost the moment they appear – and that it is not just left to the public to complain and the police to deal with the consequences

So in order to gain your approval, social media needs to take on a huuuuuuuuge staff to vet every single post and Tweet made?

Admit it, Dan, this is simply you lining up jobs for all the CiF moderators when this rag finally exhausts the resources of 'AutoTrader' and folds, isn't it?

Another Review That Tells Us What We’d Already Predicted…

…and unlike Anna, I’m not so inclined to give the state a pass:

The report into the death of a young Bristol boy who died after being given methadone by his drug-addicted parents says there was a lack of co-operation between the various agencies dealing with his family.

I’m shocked, shocked to the very core I tell you! This is so unprecedented…

The report said there was a lack of co-operation from Jayden’s parents with all involved in dealing with them. This included drug agencies, midwifery, housing, health visitors, social workers, with regular failure to keep appointments or be home when visits were being made.

These are the ‘vital State support services’, remember, that the left-wing press demands we shell out more and more in tax for…

The report says: “What was lacking was the authoritative challenge to this lack of co-operation, there was a lack of enforcement of consequences. There was a lack of challenge by practitioners across the range of agencies.

“The only way that his death would definitely have been prevented was if he had been placed away from his parents. The opportunity to do this was lost due to the failure to follow through on the initiation of care proceedings.

“However, a better-planned and authoritative approach to the family may also have prevented his death.”

It may indeed, but then, why should we rely on it anyway, when removing the child from the care of admitted drug addicts would have been the right thing to do?

After all, it seems to be easy to do for some cases where there's no real injury…

It was revealed today that Jayden suffered two head injuries – one at seven weeks and one at 11 weeks – and parents gave the same explanation. The report says that this should have raised concerns that the injuries were not accidental. He also sustained injuries to his face at 21 and 23 months old and again the same explanations were given when he was seen by medical professionals.

If only they had been these medical personnel, eh?

But how many more of these are we going to have until someone gets a grip, and decides that no more resources will be swallowed up by these useless, lazy, incompetent State employees until they can get their act together?

Finally! Carrot, Not Stick!

Schools are being encouraged to offer special meal deals to lure pupils away from local takeaways and into dining halls for healthier lunches.

The Department for Education is lifting restrictions that force schools in England to charge the same price for the same item for every pupil, in order to allow them to offer price promotions.

Sanity? In government policy? Well, I never!

The pilot, which offered children in 20 local primary schools all meals for £1 saw school meal numbers rise from 6,360 a week to an average of 11,242 during the first half of the spring term. Some schools more than doubled the number of children usually served. But when the North Somerset pilot, supported by the School Food Trust, finished, the council was unable to plug the financial gap. The price of school meals soon shot up to £2.

Ah. I see a drawback looming...

Councillor Lynda Mitchell, commissioning and contracts manager at North Somerset council, said: "If you do special offers and sibling discounts then that can be an awful lot of money. Without council funding it's proving impossible for the schools to take the extra hit."

Really, councillor? Can't you just...cut something else?

I mean, looking at your jobs site, do you really need that Area Officer job to 'improve and enhance the maintenance of the streetscene'? And I can't see why childcare should be the job of the council, so just get rid of those 'Early Years Sessional Worker' and 'Early Years Worker' posts and let the private sector pick up the slack.

And as for 'transporting students to and from our centres and on activities in our minibuses', well, can't they get the regular bus instead?

There! That wasn't so hard, was it?

Time To Cut Out The Dead Wood...

Sheila Lawlor hits back at the government's plans for FE cuts:

The row over university cuts does no credit to the government, nor to those universities that have been panicked into destroying the only thing they have to offer – academic teaching. Lord Mandelson has announced cuts of 5%. They come on top of earlier cuts. But the problem is not just less money. The government seems set on attacking the academic subjects in the humanities while promoting its agenda for "access".

Quite...

What we see today is yet another consequence of the boom and bust philosophy that underpinned the Blair-Brown years. The universities – or at least student numbers – boomed; but like other public sector booms, growth in numbers was least pronounced where it matters, the frontline jobs.

We can all see it. Why are more people not saying it?

Gordon Brown's great legacy to Britain is in bloating the growth in public employment by 14%, though few of these jobs were for university teachers, hospital medical teams or adequately educated new schoolteachers. From the universities, in fact the story was rising student numbers without equivalent expansion of teaching staff but with the management and administration side more than making up for it.

It's a crazy idea to think that you can increase productivity by increasing, not the people who contribute to that productivity, but the people who feed off it...

The lesson from the benighted health service should be salutary. The legacy of the last decade is one of wards closed, medical teams dispersed and sick people often shunted miles for basic treatment – as are mothers about to give birth. Nonetheless, the proportion of non-medical administrative and management staff remains at an unshaken high as does the discredited philosophy that goes with it.

And that pattern is replicated in the civil service and local public sector too.

Why not look to other ways of curbing costs? Many of the most successful companies in the UK have not shed jobs, but have taken pay cuts. New posts have been frozen and no new support jobs are advertised. Translated to the universities, this would mean a cull of non-teaching jobs and an opening of the system to allow universities meet, not turn away from, demand for places.

It's a no-brainer, indeed.

Why are they not doing it?