Education

Today’s Guardian has an interesting story on the success of the New School Network, an organisation set up to get parents’ to take up the opportunities offered by the Tories’ planned school reform. The Guardian reports that 200 parents groups and 100 groups of teachers are interested in setting up schools. I suspect that take up of the Tories new schools will exceed expectations. One person involved with the New Schools Network told me recently that they would judge the policy a failure if it did not lead to the creation of a 1,000 new schools in the first two years. From a political perspective, the problem for the Tories

On Thursday night Michael Gove announced that a Conservative government would pay off the student loans of those with good science degrees from quality universities. The move, paid for by cutting out a level of bureaucracy in teacher development, would help address the shortage of science and maths specialist in state schools. It was a smart piece of policy that even Ed Balls didn’t attack. But the Telegraph reports carping amongst various unions that the scheme does not go far enough. The NUT says that, “It is a real mistake to think that they can designate small number of universities as being better than the others.” This quote sums up

It’s all a bit of a puzzle. How will David Cameron incentivise marriage? In an interview with the Mail, Cameron dismisses IDS’s transferable tax allowance scheme. “It would be wrong to say that they are Conservative Party proposals.”                      Considering the scheme will cost £4.9bn, the pro-cuts Tories can ill-afford an incentive that would benefit the middle class in the immediate term. Cameron and Osborne are searching for a cheaper way to honour the pledge. Pete and Fraser debated whether marriage should and could be financially incentivised. On balance I side with Pete, marriage should not be financially incentivised. I’ve nothing to add to Pete’s analysis except that I

Things never seem to go smoothly for Gordon.  On a day when the Telegraph carries details of his Whitehall savings programme, the FT has news that one of his closest allies, Ed Balls, is calling for relatively hefty spending increases elsewhere.  Apparently, Balls has asked the Treasury to grant his department – the Department for Children, Schools and Families – real-terms spending increases of 1.4 percent until 2014.  That’s an extra £2.6 billion in total – and goes beyond previous Labour commitments to “protect” schools spending. It’s a brassy move by Balls and one which is sure to aggravate his colleagues.  After all, remember when Labour called Cameron “Mr 10

Administering injections is not an academic process. Like construction and policing, nursing is an essential professional and appropriate training is a pre-requisite. Procedures must be mastered and techniques known by rote. 2 year nursing diplomas have always provided that function effectively. Academic degrees develop critical intellect, something I’m sure nurses will appreciate as individuals but which will add nothing to their professional skill. Melanie Phillips argues that ‘nursing has been in the grasp of an ultra-feminist orthodoxy which regards the essence of nursing as demeaning to women.’ The plan is to furnish nursing with an equivalent status to doctors. I can’t comment on whether ultra-feminists are responsible for this change

In all the excitement, I forgot to flag up to Coffee Housers a fact that we dropped in the leader column of today’s magazine. Michael Gove’s new Swedish schools will, it seems, be allowed to make a profit. I said in the editorial that: “Crucially, it now looks likely that the new schools will be able to run for profit — as Anders Hultin, the architect of the Swedish system, argued in this magazine last week. This may come in the form of a ‘management fee’. But if this happens, then Britain’s obsession with the quality of schools could blossom into an education industry.” Hultin’s article was picked up by The Daily Telegraph.