Pants on Fire?

Congratulations to the BBC's sharp-eyed Sean Coughlan for pointing out that the DfE's Nick Gibb was trying to mislead the public about education funding last week when he claimed that his department was “spending record amounts on our school funding ... the third highest spender on education of the 36 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."

However, it turns out that on a per-pupil basis, this equates to a cut in real terms of about 8%, and that the OECD figure includes private school fees, university tuition and all sorts of other non-state school funding and it's for the whole UK, not just England.

Tut, tut.

Nice to know that the UK Statistics Authority and the Office for Statistics Regulation are investigating and will publish findings “shortly", but there's nothing about whether Mr Gibb's pants are currently, or will be, on fire ….

Double Standards? Or Just Very Standard Hypocrisy?

Watching the news in my London hotel where the lead story has been around England’s participation (or not as a result of the chemical attack in Salisbury) at the World Cup, a thought hit me like a football below the waist. As the Conservative Party has apparently received around £3million in donations from Russian associates in just over five years:

• Are they proposing to give it all back if the Football Association try and bring Vladimir Putin to book?
• Or is it just some headline-grabbing grandstanding from politicians out of touch with more than just higher education?