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 ….

Half-baked Breakfast Plan

I've just returned from three days  external examining in Belfast, where the lead story in Thursday's local paper was about the new president of the Faculty of Public Health describing his plan to prevent parents from driving their children to the school gates. Apparently, Professor John Ashton thinks that childhood obesity can be tackled by forcing pupils to walk a couple of hundred yards each day.
He says that

"One of the things we really should be doing is strictly prohibiting cars stopping outside school to drop kids off but have drop-off points, if at all, a few hundred yards away so at least the children get to walk a quarter of a mile each day from the dropping-off point ... it would make a difference."

Now it isn't that I think the sentiment is wrong, after all surely any exercise is better than nothing, but the removal of parental choice surely is. Pr Ashton's bullying tone is nothing to do with suggestions or recommendations, it's entry-level fascism. "Strictly prohibited" applies to all parents; not just those who haven't the sense to work out a food/fresh air ratio, or realise that maybe fried/fast food leads to little Johny/Jane/Jamal turning into something not-so-little around the middle.

This will doubtless lead to parents either risking the legion of ticket-happy goons waiting to enforce this directive on any car that dawdles by the school gates, or allow teenage art projects than have taken weeks to prepare getting ruined by a rain storm or blown apart in a gale. And for those who play sport, there's now the disincentive of lugging a cricket/hockey/football/rugby/etc bag an extra half-mile a day in addition to their school books!

Pr Ashton doesn't appear to have thought this though, but if he's the "UK's leading public health expert", what sort of alternative plan would those less qualified have come up with?

Parrot Fashion Disaster

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that teenagers will now be encouraged to learn, by heart, some of the 130 poems in a new anthology for a nationwide competition. Parrot fashion we called it at school. Not an enlightening way for a young mind to learn anything because they end up with as much understanding of Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hardy as, well, parrots.

Gove claims that this "policy" is intended to help "pass our cultural legacy on to the next generation", but in reality it'll only mean that our literature education regressing to the days of fold-up desks, ink wells, chalk boards and clips around the ear; but as most of our older generation remain utterly clueless when it comes to Shakespearean language or the works of Shelley, it obviously didn't work back then either. Does he not have any advisors who care (know?) about education enough to tell him that this is an ill-considered substitute for teaching, and that learning poetry, or pretty much any subject worth studying, is more to do with developing an understanding, not memorising by rote?

What next for the self-interested point scorers who want to take us back to some mythical golden age of education? Returning imperial measurements to the classroom alongside metric because that’s the way it was when everybody had rickets?

Oh dear.
Apparently that's already another "policy" with no obvious benefit to future of the nation....