Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate.
Sorry?
Tarryn Phillips is a medical anthropologist and associate professor of crime, justice and legal studies in La Trobe University’s department of social inquiry. Danielle Couch is a public health researcher, health sociologist and adjunct senior research fellow at Monash Rural Health. Carmen Vargas is a research fellow at Deakin University’s school of health and social development
So, the argument:
In addition to creating “villains”, crisis narratives also cast “heroes” and “victims” in misleading ways. While in-store shoppers were vilified during Covid-19, Australia’s supermarket giants were positioned as either innocent victims or as virtuous “heroes” saving the day. This framing deflected attention from the role of these large institutions in monopolising the industry and shaping (and profiting from) the scarcity.
….
And, as the cost of living continues to increase, it is understandable that those already living on the edge may feel a need to buy extra petrol now before the price goes up. By portraying individual “hoarders” as the problem, attention shifts away from corporate profiteering, bad policy decisions and crisis management failures.
It’s the system, innit!
As Australians stock up on jerry cans amid fears of oil shortages due to war in the Middle East and politicians label such behaviour as “un-Australian”, a familiar blame game is taking place.
But pointing the finger at “panic buyers” misses the point, obscures the real problems and can make matters worse. We can learn a lot from the way we handled – and mishandled – the Covid-19 toilet paper crisis.
This from “public health” specialists.
It’s because we live in a capitalist, corporate dominated, economy that people panic buy. Apparently.
The morons have clearly never considered what happens in a socialist economy when there’s supply. And, having lived there and done that, what we call panic buying here and now pales in comparison.
This whole idea is simply moronic. Close the universities.
Romanians are claiming a record number of student loans in a suspected widespread fraud, an investigation by The Telegraph has found.
The number of Romanians taking loans of up to £13,000 is nearly four times higher than the closest other nationality and second only to the 1.1 million British students borrowing money to fund their studies.
Student loans claimed by Romanians have tripled in five years, rising from 25,046 in 2019/20 to 78,325 in 2023/24 and dwarfing the 19,653 Polish nationals receiving funds.
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has admitted a “disproportionate” number of Romanians are receiving student loans and vowed to crack down on the franchised colleges where most of them enrol.
You know, that idea of higher education as being one of our thriving export industries?
When, in fact, we lend J Foreigner the money first, then they spend it, then they don’t pay it back. So there’s no export at all. It’s just cycling govt money into fourth tier crap.
Close 90% of the universities, obviously.
It was never a typical school. No uniform. Vegetarian. Origins in eastern mysticism. No “Sir” nor “Miss”, with teachers referred to by their first names.
For bohemian London parents who wanted to send their children off to board, this alternative culture was precisely the appeal of St Christopher’s School ever since its founding more than 100 years ago.
Yet for decades, beneath the alluring sheen of “progressive” education, rampant predators were free to roam its 25-acre campus. It was a “hunting ground” to target children.
Now, after a seven-month investigation by The Telegraph, the disturbing sexual, psychological and physical abuse endured by pupils at the school, in Letchworth, Herts, can finally be revealed.
I’ll spare you the Agatah Christie working it out thing.
It was the staff. Or some perhaps.
How unlike progressives, eh?
Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high school students.
Rather, teens are given excerpts of books, and they often read them not in print but on school-issued laptops, according to a survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents by the New York Times.
The reasons are many – including the belief that students have shorter attention spans, and schools’ efforts to teach students to perform well on standardized tests.
One factor is the Common Core, a set of standards adopted by many states in the US more than a decade ago. Given those standards, many schools use curriculum products like StudySync, which uses an anthology approach to introducing students to literature.
Well, OK, horse’s mouth and all that. Given that schools get ever larger budgets to get ever worse perhaps that near exclusive control of the school system by Democrats might be the thing to change?
The very public claims that Farage, a man with pretensions to lead our country, hurt people as a racist school bully and refuses to atone or suitably acknowledge their hurt now that he is a dog-whistling adult.
It’ll be demanding reparations next.
Half of graduates would be earning a better salary if they had skipped university and taken a higher-level apprenticeship instead, according to a think tank.
A report published this weekend says the country is “obsessed” with university degrees, which comes at the expense of the economy and is to the detriment of many students.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found that, five years after qualifying, a higher-level apprentice earns £5,000 a year more than an average graduate.
It usually was true that a new graduate earned less than someone of the same age – say, 21/22 – who had been working for three to five years. Some firms employing such graduates deliberately “undepaid” in fact in order to make sure they were hiring the right sort. Bit like those Army regiments with astonishingly high mess bills. They’d end up with only those with family money which could subsidise those first few years.
But the gap usually reversed after the first few years – by late 20s, certainly. The white collars were, by that time, earning more than the blue. That’s what the change is here, not in those starting salaries, but in those, hmm, early career numbers?
It’s also an obvious sign that there are just too many doing grievance studies.
Farage was educated at Dulwich college from 1975 to 1982; there, fellow students have told the Guardian, he allegedly used racist insults about fellow pupils and sang a song with the lyrics “Gas ’em all”. I attended Eton a couple of decades later, but the attitudes of some of the people I encountered there were not very different. One pupil, having fallen out with me over some perceived slight, boasted that his great-grandfather was a slave driver. A Jewish friend who was there with me at the same time told me how common it was to hear “Jew” or “rabbi” being used to describe anyone who was thought to be mean with their money. When I later saw Old Etonian Boris Johnson referring to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, I thought back to the peers of mine who would erupt into rants filled with racist stereotypes whenever they saw the West Indies cricket team on the TV.
School? That’s to educate people. Right?
Like, educate vileness, ignorance and bile out of them? So the measure is not what they were like before….
More than six in ten teachers think that parents are seeking special educational needs and disabilities (Send) diagnoses for their children to give them an advantage in exams, a survey has found.
Incentives matter after all.
More than 100 years ago, a Māori woman packed up her life as a tour guide and entertainer in New Zealand and set off for England, where she would soon make history by enrolling at Oxford university.
In a tragic turn, Mākereti Papakura – believed to be the first woman from an Indigenous community to study at the university – died just weeks before completing her thesis, and in the decades since, her family has fought to have her degree recognised.
I’m wholly certain that women from Midlands England studied at Oxford before this lady. You know, indigenes as far as Oxford is concerned?
Anyway, on to the more important questions. What is that special little trick that moves one from indigene to Indigenous?
School absences “significantly contribute” to children’s mental ill health, according to research backed by the Office for National Statistics that shows the risks increase the longer a child is absent.
“Our research shows that the more times a child is absent from school, the greater the probability that they will experience mental ill health,” the authors, from Loughborough University and the ONS, concluded.
A correlation between the two, obviously. But causality?
The study, involving more than 1 million school-age children in England, found the relationship between absence and mental health was “a two-way street”, with lengthy absences increasing the likelihood of later hospital treatment. It also found children with existing mental health problems took more time off school.
Quite so, quite so.
After all, the idea that attendance at a British school is a necessary component of child mental health is a bit odd, no?
Across this work, I’ve seen echoes of the same tactics once used by big tobacco (on health): manufacture doubt to delay regulation and market uncertainty as progress. Parents often feel a quiet unease watching their children absorbed by screens, yet worry that pushing back might leave them behind. That self-doubt is no accident. It mirrors the marketing logic that kept people smoking for decades – big tobacco sowed doubt and turned public concern into private guilt by funding skewed research insisting that there is “not enough evidence” of harm, shifting responsibility on to individuals and pouring vast sums into lobbying to delay regulation.
We must, therefore, fight back against BigEd or something.
Dr May van Schalkwyk, a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and expert in corporate tactics, said: “The evidence is clear. Industries whose products are undermining the health and wellbeing of children and young people fund harmful youth education programmes as part of their corporate strategies. Urgent action is needed to prevent this form of influence and conflicts of interest”.
How much of an expert is she? Enough that you’d take a class with her to work out how to do it?
Or not that much of an expert?
Ministers are poised to scrap the system which ensures pupils with special needs such as autism and ADHD get personalised support at school.
The Government is considering ditching bespoke-education plans for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) under a wholesale review of the current model.
On Sunday, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, repeatedly refused to rule out scrapping education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – legally binding documents that spell out Send children’s individual teaching requirements.
A record 639,000 children in England currently hold an EHCP following an 11 per cent rise in the year to January, with the figure almost doubling over the past six years.
,,,,
The recent increase in ECHPs has largely been driven by three types of need: autistic spectrum disorder; speech, language and communication needs; and social, emotional and mental health needs, which include ADHD.That trio now accounts for almost three-quarters of all EHCPs, while severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities make up just four per cent respectively.
And there’s the mile being taken, isn’t it.
A SEND diagnosis brings benefits these days. So, a SEND diagnosis is something sought. And, often enough, gained.
Shrug, who would expect different?
One staff member said: “It takes me 15 minutes on the train, but 45 minutes walking to get to campus. Now I’m hybrid working, I have to carry a backpack with all my work gear which can weigh up to 10kg due to laptop, headphones, lunch and anything else required for a day away from home.
“By the time I’ve finished two days on campus, I am so tired physically and mentally that I’m good for nothing the following day.”
Therefore on strike at the demand to work 3 days a week on campus.
Get another job. Move. Take the bus. Buy a car. But stop this wingeing shit.
Official figures which claim to show that graduates out-earn non-graduates by more than £10,000 a year are flawed, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has warned.
…
The OSR says that as the data set used to compile graduate premium statistics does not take into account prior attainment (A-level results and their equivalents), they are of limited use.
The bright kids (AAA) will earn lots. The dimmoes (CCC) will not. Having been to university does not change this.
The original mistake was to think that if going to uni increased wages therefore is more went to uni then more people would gain higher wages. But the income distribution is the income distribution. Higher wages will only come if the uni degrees improve the quality of the workforce – increase productivity that is. And who really does think that grievance studies will do that?
Well, other than those employed to teach grievance studies….
The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students and has ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status.
As with much here in the UK, foreign students are near the only ones who pay full freight.
So, all very fun. It’s also more than a bit controlling, no?
a href=”https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/16/children-to-be-taught-to-show-some-grit/”>Children will be taught the value of “grit” to tackle a growing mental health crisis in schools, The Telegraph can reveal.
Always fun when the old becomes new again, eh?
Being shouted at by parents can alter child’s brain, experts tell UK MPs
25 years of work to turn the vile little snot machine into a vaguely functional adult?
How about this as an education system:
He left Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Otley at 14 to train as an accountant
So, grammar school, passed 11 plus (or whatever it was in the 1930s). War service:
He returned to Leeds and resumed his accountancy training, qualifying in 1949.
And:
Glover’s first job was with an accountancy firm in Windsor before joining Price Waterhouse, where he audited several City livery companies including the Watermen and the Fishmongers, of which he was a freeman. He then moved to Deloitte, which posted him to Recife in Brazil.
Etc etc.
So a – reasonably at least – distinguished professional career after leaving school at 14.
Rather than another decade of grievance studies and then…..
And the reason we don’t return to such a system is?