Education

This is because we do not have in this country the electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, tilers, scaffolders, bathroom fitters and roofers who would be needed to build 300,000 homes every year. Their skills cannot just be conjured up, but need training and apprenticeships that can take years. They are the very skills that will also be in demand to retrofit existing homes with heat pumps, change cladding that should never have been installed, and work on big infrastructure projects such as HS2. And they are skills that we — we as a society, including industry and schools, as well as ministers of all parties — have not been producing in sufficient numbers for a long time.

So, did Hague, at any point, suggest that closing down all the trades schools and turning them into universities was going to be a bad idea? That teaching everyone grievance studies instead of building might be a bad idea?

No, no, he didn’t, did he?

A second school accused of Islamophobia may be forced to close its doors over its headteacher’s decision to ban children from wearing pro-Palestinian badges, The Telegraph can reveal.

Barclay Primary School in Leyton, east London, sent a letter to parents warning that it may have to “revert to online learning” if the safety of children and staff cannot be guaranteed after it had received bomb threats over the policy.

Clearly, there’s some activist group behind this. Bomb threats are not to be allowed and so on.

But who is supposed to define such things? Assume a majority of parents desire it to be allowed for a moment. No, just assume. Should parents be able to decide how their children are educated? Or should it be the State?

Which is a lovely problem for what I assume are left wing activists. By demanding that Palestinian badges should be allowed they are, of course, arguing in favour of school choice.

They think they’re societal entrepreneurs, radicals and revolutionaries even. Instead of the folk paid to make sure buildings don’t fall down:

Architects HLM, based in Aldgate, designed the school paid for by the Welsh Government. At the time the company said: “The new school will improve the social and cultural well-being of its users and facilitate a larger range of different learning requirements, intertwining both social and educational environments – a school for boys and girls to thrive.”

All lovely and open plan and collaborative and….

London-based architects designed the “sustainable communities for learning” school. It has large open balconies around a central “heart space” of dining hall, main hall and terraced courtyard.

But the design has been blamed for violence – with 136 exclusions at the 1,100-pupil school since term began in September.

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) said the open-plan design was contributing to poor behaviour.

Debra Thomas, interim head teacher at the school, admitted that it was “painful” to say that the “design of the building is quite a big issue”.

Large open space areas become colonised by gangs of feral teenagers.

Surprise, eh?

It is almost unbelievable that the secondary curriculum and teaching methods have changed little since Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Educational research now stresses the need to prepare young people in creativity and teamwork, in physical and mental fitness, and in skills relevant to the modern world of work – and play.

It’s just that all the educational research is done by those who ascribe to the more fatuous of the lefty shibboleths about hildren, the mind and humans. Tabula Rasa and all that. There’s not a single conservative anywhere in educational academia – or at lesat I’m willing to be there isn’t.

Politics latest news: VAT raid on private schools will not cause pupil exodus, insists Starmer

So why are you doing it then?

The insistence is – from Polly Toynbee leftwards – that private schools should not exist therefore they must be taxed into oblivion. Because equality. Or only if all attend the state podding hutches can the New Briton be created. The urge isn’t, not really, anything to do with money, it’s abolition. So if people won;t stop because money then why bother?

A British boy who went missing in Spain six years ago has been found “alive and well” after escaping from a “spiritual community” in France.

Alex Batty, from Oldham, Lancashire, was 11 when he did not return from a family holiday near Marbella with his mother Melanie Batty, then 37, and his grandfather David Batty, 58, in 2017.

His grandmother and legal guardian, Susan Caruana, said in 2018 she believed Alex may have been taken to Morocco as part of his mother’s pursuit of an “alternative lifestyle”. She had taken him to a commune there on a previous trip.

Prosecutors said the teenager, now 17, had been found near Toulouse after escaping a rural community. The boy reportedly said he had not been trapped in the commune, but wanted to “set his own path”.

University of Pennsylvania head quits amid anti-Semitism row
Liz Magill faced fierce backlash after refusing to say calling for the genocide of Jews constituted ‘harassment’

That’s the smirking gimp gone. We might think only two to go.

But that’s not, in fat, right. From hte Rabbi who resigned from Harvard’s antisemitism board:

Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.

It’s an Augean Stables job:

American academia – especially the elite colleges – is in the grip of a series of delusions of which antisemitism is only one. The generation’s grand task is to educate those delusions out and reality in. It is not easy, but it is necessary for our civilization to survive. After all, the purpose of those colleges is to educate our children, not mis-educate them. So, we’ve got to sort them out, put them back on the right track.

(That last is not the Rabbi. But it’s what he meant).

Children of the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and US were caught out as the financial crisis scuppered the economy just as many started work: generational progress ground to a halt as millennials’ pay took a step down from the levels their predecessors enjoyed at the same age. But that was 15 years ago – some of those “kids” are hitting their 30s and 40s, with children and wrinkles emerging. How are they faring today?

US millennials have staged a recovery – the incomes of those in their early 30s today are 21% higher than those of their predecessors at the same age in 2007. Sadly, new Resolution Foundation research finds the same can’t be said for their British peers, who still have lower incomes today than 30-somethings in pre-financial crisis Britain. The typical weekly pay of graduates aged 30 to 34 fell by a staggering 16% between 2007 and 2023.

In the US the expansion of the universities took place a generation before it did in the UK.

So the effect of the boom in supply of graduates took place a generation before it did in the UK. The Resolution Foundation’s report is comparing the US post the boom in supply to the UK during the boom in supply. That is, the UK numbers include the effect of having too many univiersities as it happens, the US the stable landscape of already having had too many universities.

It is, in short, completely shite analysis because it is not certeris paribus. But then that’s the Resolution Fouondation for you.

The answer, as ever, is simply to close any university which has ever employed R. Murphy. And sow the land with salt etc, obvs.

Parents should have a legal right to know what their children are being taught at school, senior lawyers have said.

In a new report, the Society of Conservative Lawyers has proposed legislation that would give parents online access to all teaching materials, except an individual teacher’s lesson plan for a particular class.

It said that although there is a consensus that children should be taught more about sex and relationships, as well as race and equality issues, there was less agreement on what exactly children should learn within those areas.

Many parents were worried about what their children were being taught about transgender issues, white privilege, unconscious bias and climate change, it added.

Completely mad. For of course parents should be able to know such things, the madness is that anyone requires it to be a legal right before allowing them to do so.

Private schools will “have to ask themselves” whether to pass Labour’s planned VAT raid to parents, Sir Keir Starmer has said.

Amid growing controversy about the proposed move’s effects on middle-class parents, the Labour leader said private schools would not have to pass on increased VAT costs by raising fees.

Where does he think there’s a 20% margin in private school budgets? Wages? Profits?

Exports don’t pay VAT.

Educating a foreigner is an export – at least it is in economics.

So, would school fees charged to foreigners carry VAT or not?

Bonus question. If school fees should pay VAT why not university fees?

Labour’s private schools tax raid ‘will make education more elitist’
Labour plans to add VAT to school fees if it wins power at the next election, claiming it could raise £1.6bn to improve state education

The actual rich aren’t going to be moved one way or the other by 20% on school fees. The aspiring – or extant – upper middle and middle classes probably will be.

Let’s say that it halves the private sector – an exaggeration, but run with it. The 3.5% that still go will be only the rich perpetuating, won’t they?

Bolton in uproar over proposed name change for university
Vice-chancellor accused of chasing international students with proposed ‘Greater Manchester’ rebrand

At least it’s not Al-Ahzar University West…..

A professor accused of fraudulently claiming to be of Native American heritage has agreed to resign after complaints from colleagues.

Andrea Smith is an ethnic studies expert at the University of California, Riverside but had been dogged by allegations of lying about having Cherokee ancestry.

If you can’t accurately define an ethnic then how can you study one?

Students are being “ripped off” by universities offering bad degrees, Rishi Sunak warns as he unveils a crackdown on low-quality courses.

Writing exclusively for The Telegraph, the Prime Minister says too many young people are being sold a “false dream” that going to university will give them the skills they need to get a “decent job”.

As part of a government plan to improve standards, the universities watchdog will for the first time take future salaries into account when judging if a course is failing participants.

That is what that means, no?

Or change their taxation either.

Angela Rayner: Don’t waste your money on private education
Deputy Labour leader says state sector is just as good

If the state sector is just as good then the private schools don;t, in fact, convey any privilege. Further, those who send their kids to them are alleviating the state of a considerable expenditure – why try to tax them as well?

From the usual lefty standpoint the only argument against private schools is if they are actulaly better. If they’re not…..

Children’s ability to speak clearly will be given the same status as numerary and literacy under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged as he vowed to shatter the “class ceiling” by ending snobbery over the value placed on university degrees.

The easiest way to do this is to ban a degree requirement for entering a job or profession. Like, say, nursing. Or that latest idea that child care should be done by graduates. You can already be an accountant without a degree, think you can still do articles as a solicitor? True, doctors will be a little more tough but the general principle stands. Want to make vocational training more valuable, degrees less, then remove the restrictions on what you may only do with a degree.

QED.

Teacher at Prince George’s former school admits paying £65,000 to view child abuse

If they’ve got that much cash to spend…..

The Telegraph has heard a recording of the heated exchange taken by one of the pupils, in which the teacher starts by saying “how dare you – you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity”.

The pupil responded: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”

The teacher then asks the girls “where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders”, adding: “It is not an opinion.”

The teacher said that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.”

She added that “there is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is a gender who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.

The girls said they “don’t agree with that” and that you “can’t have” a gender because “if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy – that’s it”.

The teacher interjected in a raised voice: “What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law … Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be – you are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”

If we start from the point which is true – gender is presentation, feeling even, sex is biology. OK, so there are however many genders anyone wants and you can, by self-declaration, be any gender.

Sex is the biological immutable. So the teacher is right. But onloy in what she says, sadly she’s almost certainly wrong in what she believes. Because it’s fairly clear that she’s using gender to mean sex here.

Where this distinction matters is that some parts of life are indeed run by gender. “Mornin’ Miss” being an example. But other parts of life ncessarily run on sex – who gets the prostate felt, who gets the cervix swabbed, say. And there are those inter- bits where folk are still arguing. Are changing rooms to be judged by gender or sex (sex says me)?

Shrug.

Just seen an account on Twitter that describes himself as a “heterodox sociologist”. Umm, marriage matters, moral agency exists? That sort of heterodox?