It emerged today that the Department for Education has written to staff, telling them not to use certain words and phrases because they are too closely associated with the old government.
Children and Young People Now, which broke the story, reveals that there is a list of approved alternatives:
Filed under: Skills | 2 Comments »
I see that primary SATS scores for reading have fallen for the second year running. Has anyone else been struck by the avalanche of conservative columnists welcoming the tougher standards?
Me neither.
Filed under: Skills | No Comments »
Sometimes, two separate news stories are presented in the same news bulletin and, taken together, make a wonderful statement about the world we live in.
This was my experience this morning as I watched BBC Breakfast. Today’s programme contained the worrying news that, according to figures from the university admissions service, Ucas, universities have received more than 660,000 applications and a record 170,000 students are thought likely to be denied a place this autumn.
Filed under: Financial crisis, Politics, Skills | 3 Comments »
The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has written to the QCDA to confirm that legislation to close the agency will be introduced in the autumn. His letter sets out which functions of the QCDA’s work will be retained, and which will be cut. In response, the Chairman of the QCDA has stated that his organisation is focusing on the wellbeing of its staff and on completing its ongoing work during the exam season. The Coventry Telegraph has claimed that, when combined with the jobs to be lost at BECTA, 830 jobs will be lost locally.
Filed under: Cuts Watch, Cuts Watch: Education, Skills | 1 Comment »
The main cuts to education and skills announced today comprise £200M from the higher education budget, £200M from the budget for the Train to Gain skills programme, and a range of ‘efficiency savings’ applied to skills quangos.
The £200M cut to Train to Gain actually involves a refocusing of this expenditure on apprenticeships and college buildings rather than a direct cut. In effect this means that the overall cut to the BIS budget of £836M is in effect scaled back to £636M. Out of the £200M saving from Train to Gain, £150M will go to creating an additional 50,000 apprenticeships. The other £50M will go to supporting capital investment in colleges. Read more »
Filed under: Cuts Watch, Cuts Watch: Education, Skills | 7 Comments »
Friday fun for you in the form of a little ditty (with a serious point, natch) about exploitatative internships. It’s part of a new TUC campaign looking into improving the lot of the UK’s interns: rights for interns. Read more »
Filed under: Earnings, Skills | 1 Comment »
The Department for International Development (DFID) issues today its new education strategy, designed in particular to educate the 72 million children who currently don’t go to primary school, and the 300-400 million who get inadequate schooling. There are welcome proposals to build at least 15,000 classrooms a year; train at least 130,000 teachers a year (although the world needs another 10.3 million teachers by 2015); and raise DFID spending on education to over £1 billion a year.
But the strategy is almost all about the supply of education places and the quality of teaching – and access and quality are simply not the reason so many children currently don’t get an education. To tackle that would require a challenge to child labour: and as so often, DFID ignores the labour standards element of poverty reduction. Read more »
Filed under: International development, Skills | Comments Off
I’ve had a couple of posts rather critical of the cuts package proposed by Vince Cable at the Lib Dem conference. It would be churlish not to report his excellent contribution to a TUC fringe meeting at the Lib Dem conference where he shared a platform with Brendan Barber to discuss the TUC’s Touchstone pamphlet, the Real Middle Britain. Read more »
Filed under: Politics, Recession, Skills, Tax | Comments Off
The BBC’s flagship radio news programme Today has had a couple of interesting pieces on happiness in the last couple of days, including a report from Denmark, which regularly tops polls as the happiest place in Europe. They included a clip of David Cameron’s call for more consideration of general well-being than gross domestic product. Much of the modern interest in this flows from Richard Layard’s book Happiness in the UK and the positive psychology movement in the USA spearheaded by Martin Seligman. Of course happiness has its critics too. Should there be a trade union perspective?
Filed under: Employers, Inequality, Skills, Social mobility | 3 Comments »
Today’s Low Carbon Transition Plan is a very welcome document that maps out not just a proper response to the threat of climate chaos but also starts to map out the shape of the UK economy after the recession. Read more »
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Skills | Comments Off
Who said this?
“The UK economy needs to be weaned off its dependency on financial services. To do this, it needs a national economic council to provide strategic leadership and an industrial bank to help businesses shunned by traditional high street lenders. Other ways to help could include the government sending signals about its long term priorities to give companies the confidence to invest. Government should also use its £175bn a year purchasing power to suport emerging industries and it should target investment in strategic sectors of the economy.”
Filed under: Economics, Manufacturing, Science, Skills | Comments Off
Today over 200 trade unionists and green campaigners are gathering at Congress House for the TUC’s annual climate change conference. They’ll be the first to get their hands on the new TUC publication Changing Work in a Changing Climate, which is the result of a major new piece of research into what adapting to climate change means for jobs and working lives in the UK.
Filed under: Employers, Environment, Equality, Safety, Skills | Comments Off
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