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So says the Guardian. And here's more.
Blair's approach to education is... his internal Iraq. How can the man be so damn wrong-headed? Does he genuinely think that poor people are going to be the ones getting these slots, and that the successful schools are going to grow like Tesco's does?
If this keeps up, we're going to see some mighty poor services, almost exclusively for poor people, pretty soon.
What is it with these upper middle class journalists who think that everyone's life is relatively similar to their own? Maybe it's not a crime never to venture outside your own social circle, but surely it's arrogance to the Nth degree to not have enough sense and vision to realise that different economic groups face wildly different risks and behave in very different ways. You'd think that Sebastian Mallaby, who wrote a decent if overly glib bio of the World Ban's Wolfesohn, would be sensible enough not to have forgotten this.
Telly Sa-fat-sis
A study published in the latest issue of The Journal of Pediatrics found that the risk of adult obesity increases by 7% for every additional hour of weekend television watched by five-year-olds. The study of 11,000 children (the 1970 British Cohort Study), was balanced for variations in social class, hereditary factors and birth weight, but curiously found no link between weekday television watching and obesity. The researchers concluded that weekend viewing has a much greater impact because it is more likely to take the place of outdoor play and other physical activity, helping to establish a sedentary lifestyle which persists into adulthood. (Sunday Times, 23 Oct 2005, p12; Mail, 24 Oct 2004, p12)
Child Development
Educational baby toys can stimulate infant mental development, and there is a growing market for them, but experts say that parent child interaction is still key to children's development. (Independent, Mind and Body, 28 Oct 2005, p.6)
Crime
A new tier of low-level courts would deal with yobs and nuisance neighbours in plans drawn up by Public Policy Research, a think-tank with close links to Downing Street. Community Offender Panels - COPs - would not be allowed to impose fines or send people to prison. Instead, they could send offenders on drug treatment courses or impose community service punishments such as cleaning up graffiti or repairing damaged property. (Sunday Telegraph, 23 Oct 2005, p15; Mail, 24 Oct 2005, p6)
Education
Tony Blair's efforts to introduce the most radical transformation of British schools for 40 years is expected to prompt a furious backlash from Labour MPs, parents and headteachers who are increasingly concerned his reforms are unworkable. In a White Paper to be presented to Parliament on Tuesday by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, the government will call for greater private involvement in the running of schools and a diminished role for local authorities. In a speech on Monday, Mr Blair will say that he wants every secondary school to be able "quickly and easily" to become an independent self-governing state school, broadly on the model of city academies, working with business, employers and the voluntary sector. The reforms will not allow selection by ability, but will permit schools to become trusts setting their own curriculums, specialisms, and employing teachers and owning their assets. Mr Blair argues that the reforms will be self-sustaining and by giving parents greater powers to force their schools to go independent, inject a new pressure from below for improvement. Popular schools will be encouraged to expand, so addressing the lack of places in good schools. John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, is said to be opposed to the reforms, believing that they would discriminate against pupils from working-class backgrounds. Critics claim the prime minister has spent eight years getting back to the system of school independence inherited from the Conservatives and dismantled by his administration. As expected, Tony Blair's speech at a Downing Street conference called Public Services: Progress and Challenges, drew complaints from teachers and Labour MPs that his plans to turn all secondary schools into "self-governing independent state schools" would create administrative chaos and more inequality. Mr Blair said that every secondary school will be expected to become an independent, self-governing academy within five years. Parents would be given power to change the curriculum, replace failing heads and start new schools. Councils will be stripped of their responsibility for schools; businesses, churches and wealthy individuals will be allowed to take over schools; independent schools will be encouraged to accept state cash and join the state sector; and there is to be a new emphasis on grouping pupils by ability and offering advanced classes to the brightest. Mr Blair accused critics of promoting "a version of the old levelling-down mentality that kept us in opposition for so long" and said the plans marked a "pivotal moment" in the life of his government. The National Union of Teachers said Mr Blair's "obsession with choice" would "lead to chaos" and accused him of "pandering to the pushy middle classes" at the expense of poorer children. John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, warned that increased freedom for schools threatened to create a two-tier system. He said it would make teaching "much more difficult for the schools serving the most disadvantaged communities. It will stretch the gap even further between the highest and lowest achieving pupils". The long-awaited White Paper on education - Higher Standards, Better Schools for All: More choice for parents and pupils, was published on Tuesday. Among its proposals are: a new breed of "trust" schools with freedom to set their own budgets and run their own affairs; the removal of barriers to make it easier for popular schools to expand; LEAs to be stripped of power to run schools, they will have a new role as "champions" of parents and commissioners of services; a new schools commissioner will advise parents and trust schools on making choices work; parents will have new rights to force weak schools to improve and to demand that new schools open; trust schools will be backed by businesses, charities, faith groups, universities and parent groups; legislation will give teachers a right to discipline children and restrain them if involved in fights; parents to face fixed penalty fines of £50 if they allow children excluded from school to roam the streets; free transport for disadvantaged pupils to give them a wider choice of schools; independent schools to be allowed to "opt in" to the state sector. The proposals, outlined in a Commons statement by the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, were greeted by loud cheering from Conservative MPs who saw them as a return to the old grant-maintained system of schooling abolished by Labour when it gained power in 1997. The support from Labour backbenchers was muted. Many of them believe the proposals foreshadow the privatisation of the education service. Teachers' leaders poured scorn on the proposals. Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said "Talk of increasing the supply of education providers is political nonsense. It is a product of policy wonks with little idea of what works". Deborah Orr (Independent, 26 Oct, p31) comments "And for the parents, the voters, and the taxpayers, we who are supposed to be empowered by this weird, disjointed, contradictory paper? For us, the betrayal is that our elected leaders have told us that we can open our own schools if we're not satisfied with what's on offer, because after eight and a half years and an investment of £39bn, Labour has not been able to sort things out. If the taxpayer wants anything done, Ruth Kelly and Tony Blair have told us, then we really ought to do it ourselves". (Mail, 22 Oct 2005, p6; Independent on Sunday, 23 Oct 2005, p15; Mail on Sunday, 23 Oct 2005, p2; Observer, 23 Oct 2005, pp1-2; Sunday Express, 23 Oct 2005, p11; Sunday Mirror, 23 Oct 2005, p8; Sunday Telegraph, 23 Oct 2005, p1, p16; Sunday Times, 23 Oct 2005, p1, p10, p18; All papers, 24 Oct 2005; All papers, 25 Oct 2005; All papers, 26 Oct 2005)
Teachers in England could have the clear legal right to discipline disruptive pupils and restrain them through the use of "reasonable force" as early as the start of the next school year. The report of the Steer group, published on October 21st, set out more than 80 detailed recommendations to tackle widespread low-level disruption as well as serious misbehaviour and violence. The Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, promised to implement the key recommendations "as soon as possible". The schools minister, Jacqui Smith, said the new legislation could be on the statute book by September next year. A DfES spokesman said the precise definition of "reasonable force" would come later. The proposals were broadly welcomed by teachers' leaders. Steve Sinnot, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said "I am especially delighted that the government accepts the need for teachers to have a statutory right to discipline pupils rather than leaving it to the vagaries of ancient and modern case law". (Express, 22 Oct 2005, p14, p17; Guardian, 22 Oct 2005, p4; Independent, 22 Oct 2005, p11; Mirror, 22 Oct 2005, p11; Telegraph, 22 Oct 2005, p6; Times, 22 Oct 2005, p8; Guardian Education, 25 Oct 2005, p5)
Higher Education
Research by the DfES indicates that students who work during term time to support themselves at university are far more likely to graduate with a poor degree thus harming their employment prospects. (Times, 28 Oct 2005, p.3; Telegraph, 28 Oct 2005, p1.)
HIV
A study into the spread of HIV has found that male circumcision significantly protects men from contracting the infection. The research followed infection rates in more than 3,000 heterosexual men over nearly two years and found that circumcision reduced a man's risk of acquiring HIV by 60%. Adrian Puren at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg and a team of researchers in Paris recruited 3,274 uncircumcised volunteers from South Africa aged 18 to 24, who were considering circumcision. The researchers then monitored both groups for HIV infection over the next 21 months. So marked was the difference in infection between the groups that the study was halted on ethical grounds. Of those who had been circumcised, 20 tested positive for HIV while 49 per cent of the uncircumcised group had contracted the virus. The World Health Organisation said "If male circumcision is confirmed to be an effective intervention to reduce the risk of acquiring HIV, this will not mean that men will be prevented from becoming infected with HIV during sexual intercourse through circumcision alone. Nor does male circumcision provide protection for sexual partners against HIV infection". (Guardian, 25 Oct 2005, p11)
Social Policy
Single mothers on benefits are to be made to actively seek a job as soon as their youngest child reaches 11, in a government clampdown on unemployment in lone parent households. The drive to get more lone parents of secondary school aged children into jobs will be launched by David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in a Green Paper on Welfare to Work. The proposals are designed to cut child poverty and help the government meet its target of raising from 56 to 70 per cent the proportion of lone parents in paid work. Currently parents with children must attend work-focused interviews when their youngest child is aged 14. (Independent, on Sunday, 23 Oct 2005, p4; Express, 24 Oct 2005, p4)
Tim has just pitched for the redevelopment of the Packington estate. Depending on how i might be able to use it in class, it would be fun to interview him in order to get his thoughts on the process.
I’ve just heard a report on schoolkids learning Mandarin, and they make the point that boys tend to find it attractive in a way that they don’t Spanish and French. I think there might be a good opportunity here to market Chinese languages to an otherwise underserved group (boys). For instance, you could use martial arts films – they’re something boys can identify with, and they are very very fun (and not a little comedic, which makes learning all the easier).
Week 3 SPP seminar question A.
No, but you could argue that markets, like capitalism (or is that democracy – what did Churchill say?) are the least bad solution. One fairly tremendous advantage of markets is that they give incentives for companies or whoever to meet need – incentives that might not otherwise exist in a non-market situation. On the other hand, markets only meet the needs of those who can afford to pay (in one form or another); those who can’t, or those whose custom isn’t worth the effort, tend to be systematically ignored by or shut out of marketplaces – like hoodied teenagers and that Kent shopping mall. (Kids – along with the poor – might be one of the main groups that certain markets don’t meet the needs of. Certainly the markets for products meets and even expands kids’ needs, but there may not be enough incentives to meet kids’ welfare needs via the market.)
I think what I’ll do here is to look at some of the basic welfare needs, seeing how markets may or may not meet them for various groups of people. First, though, a close-to-home example of how markets sometimes don’t “give opportunity for all”.
It’s about Wendy and her job. At the BBC, the way one gets a promotion isn’t by getting good performance ratings and recommendations. They have what they consider to be a much more scientific and objective method, one that they feel remedies some of the problems of the old boys’ network system that may have previously existed there. Instead of getting your promotions on the words of others who may have a vested interest in you moving up the ladder, you get them through boards, which are direct interviews with the bigwigs at your station or even the BBC as a whole. No matter how good or bad (within reason?) your prior work has been, promotions are through boards. In this context, the boards are a marketplace in which there are a limited number of highly desired goods, which those who are adjudged to have the most capital can then have.
The problem is in the type of “capital” you need to do your job well and the type of capital you need to succeed at the boards. In the boards, being an extremely quick thinker and – most importantly – an extremely good bullshitter are the most important skills you can have. In her daily job, the first is quite important, but it isn’t as important as many other skills: having good editorial judgment, being reliable, knowing which of your staff can be trusted and who can’t, having excellent people management skills, having the confidence of the presenters and staff, etc – these are all more important in the big picture, though being a quick thinker and non-panicker are key, too (though in a different way than in a board – eg on air, things rarely come in completely out of the blue. The quick thinking she has to do is usually related to choosing between two or three somewhat well understood options.) But none of these day-to-day skills – the capital required to succeed at work – are tested in the boards. So someone with a lot of key skills/capital like Wendy turns up to the BBC job marketplace and finds that her pockets have a hole in them. She doesn’t have enough capital for this particular marketplace, so she doesn’t get promoted. Instead, someone who might lack the capital to do the job well but who is a particularly good bullshitter and blabber – someone like me, for instance – will succeed in this particular marketplace where Wendy will fail.
Is there a gender inequity in the BBC jobs marketplace? I’m not sure that it would appear so – at least at Wendy’s level there are a lot of female asst editors and at least one female editor (though I suspect that above this it’s mostly male). However, there may be some cultural norms that are perhaps more “male” than female that are particularly favoured in these boards. I’m reminded of the SATs, in which guys do better on timed tests, but girls and boys score equally on non-timed versions.
Ok, back to markets giving opps for all. As noted in another seminar post, Julian LeGrand argues that markets can be incentivised so that schools, for instance, don’t shut out those who would otherwise give them the least “profit” for their effort. For example, as things currently are, school choice is something of a misnomer, because where a school is very popular, it is the one doing the choosing, rather than the parents and kids. Schools can cherry pick and the market is reversed in a sense, with kids competing to sale their skills to the school. On the bottom end of the spectrum, poor and/or trouble kids are shut out of the good schools because they are more trouble than they are worth. There are huge incentives for choosing the best kids – they improve your ratings, which improves your desirability, which improves your ratings, etc – and huge disincentives to choosing the worst. So what we need in this broken market, argues Le Grand, is a new incentive – for instance, schools that choose bad kids – or perhaps even specialiste in them – will be paid more money by the governement than those that choose better kids.
As I was saying to Wendy yesterday, I think this would be a great idea. I also think it would help British schools deal with their exclusion problem. Set up schools like Oakwood, give them good incentives to take in these kids, give them the resources they need, and you’d be both giving the bad kids a real chance and freeing up mainstream teachers to spend less time on discipline and more time on teaching the majority of non-troublemaker kids. I can’t see why they don’t try this here.
The big issue right now isn’t education education education, though; it’s healthcare. Will increasing the market aspects of the NHS give more choice to consumers? I just don’t think so, really, at least at the level of the consumer. For instance, even though I’m the type of guy who gets Which Online to help me choose the best refigerator, I would have no clue how to go about choosing the best hospital for my problem – and frankly, I’d consider it a fairly stupid exercise anyway, as there are only ever going to be two or three hospitals that are convenient for me anyway – and that’s in central London. For people in rural areas, I just don’t see it. (How does Canada handle there healthcare re this issue?) However, on a GP level, perhaps it might offer some advantages. For instance, if I trust my GP, and my GP tells me that for a particular health concern I could go to Kings or Guys, but that she would recommend Guy’s for this issue, then I’d choose Guy’s – as would most people, probably. So at the GP level, where there is more than one option, I can see a more market-based approach working. But the GPs would have to be very well-informed, and how much time do they have to do that? Unlike in education, healthcare has tremendous in-built asymmetries of information. And that ain’t good for markets.
I guess in the US there’s another example of the market not working in healthcare. In this case, it’s another matter of what sort of capital you need to actually get inside the souk, the ticket for entry being a job, old age, loads of money, or extreme poverty. Without these things, you are effectively shut out of the American health care marketplace.
Turning to housing, I think that the marketplace has done far better than early Labour ever envisaged – with 2/3 of the households in the UK owning their own homes, a very impressive majority of the populace seems to be getting satisfaction of one degree or another from the marketplace. And perhaps it makes a big difference that owner-occupation offers a combination of market and personal activity (eg in the form of upkeep), coupled with government intervention and regulation in the form of mortgage help and the like. Of all the pillars of the welfare state, though, housing is by far the most marketised.
Where this fails is for the poor. Council housing has not been a disaster in the 20th century, but it certainly has been at the lowest rung of the ladder. Is that inevitable? Are services for the poor almost surely going to be poor services. Does that massive cost of providing not just housing but very intensive management of the full welter of social exclusion issues preclude doing it well?
Does the market work for food? Yes, but because of cultural and historical reasons, the UK and US could probably do with some regulation and state intervention to more strongly affect peoples’ choices and behaviours.
Do markets give opportunities for all in transport? Absolutely not. Private companies have extremely strong incentives to underinvest in infrastructure, leading to very poor performance on train lines etc. Those who are dependent on those lines then suffer hugely.
I partly think yes, because it will help me to understand/not forget as I go. But I also think that the more I read, the more these various strands will come together, and that as I learn about more of these different aspects of social policy, I’ll understand each one that much better. So that would mean that my efforts would be better spent waiting until December, than reviewing all the seminar questions and all the major stuff I’ve read, and writing it all up then. The big advantage of that would mean that I would have less of an overwhelming revision load for April/May – and that it would be a perhaps better rationalized use of my time right now. I want to make dead sure, though, that I don’t find myself going through this entire term without really learning or grasping much of what we’re talking about. That’s one of my main fears of the ‘save it for Dec’ approach. How to overcome that? Probably be trying to have a quick review of the reading each Thursday before the next day’s class. That and doing a good 2,000 or so words of writing every weekend.
I partly think yes, because it will help me to
understand/not forget as I go. But I also think that the more I read, the more
these various strands will come together, and that as I learn about more of
these different aspects of social policy, I’ll understand each one that much
better. So that would mean that my efforts would be better spent waiting until
December, than reviewing all the seminar questions and all the major stuff I’ve
read, and writing it all up then. The big advantage of that would mean that I
would have less of an overwhelming revision load for April/May – and that it
would be a perhaps better rationalized use of my time right now. I want to make
dead sure, though, that I don’t find myself going through this entire term
without really learning or grasping much of what we’re talking about. That’s
one of my main fears of the ‘save it for Dec’ approach. How to overcome that?
Probably be trying to have a quick review of the reading each Thursday before the
next day’s class. That and doing a good 2,000 or so words of writing every
weekend.
Housing, week 4.
I think one of the key underpinnings of a lot of what went wrong as architects and urban planners strove for utopic housing over the 20th c. can be traced back to shock and distaste that so many planners felt towards the grit, grime, crowding and hurly-burly of Victorian-era cities. If I remember my Jane Jacobs correctly she criticizes Ebenezer Howard very strongly as someone who just didn’t like cities and who felt that they were perhaps necessary but were mostly bad. He believed in clean fresh air (can’t blame anyone at this time for this), wide open spaces, and the need for “urban lungs”, in the form of such open spaces in general and parks in particular. And though they seem polar opposites in how they expressed themselves, I think that many of his prejudices – which were, as I say, largely understandable at the time – were shared by the ghastly Le Corbusier and other early proponents of “machine living”, the main difference being not that la cucaracha loved cities where Howard did not, but that Le Corbusier loved geometry and repetition in a way that the garden city types did not. (It shold be noted that Le C’s plans for the city of tomorrow include a suburban garden city element – he wasn’t just about cities and high rises.)
Like Howard (Jane Jacobs’ view of him, anyway), Le C disliked the grime and confusion and disorder of urban life. He talks of the city as a beast that must be tamed, and wants to eliminate as much human-detritus and disorder as possible in order to subdue the metropolis.
The way to do this was to build up up up, and the end to this means (or was building high an end in itself) was to create space space space. Space to see and contemplate, and to calm us with its beneficent non-crowdednes. He also believed in a green belt. What role did the green belt fetish eventually play in the UK’s decision to build upward?
He wanted cities to be less congested, and was very willing to make living and working areas more dense to meet that need. Jacobs has some great stuff on why density isn’t bad (overcrowding is).
Again, it’s all about order: he hated mixed use streets, and particularly loathed crossroads, where various interests and directions came together. Street life is poison to the rationally-minded man, it would appear.
He loved efficiency, but didn’t ask if it was effective. I’ve seen these two terms compared in something I’ve read this week, but I can’t recall what. It was for SPP.
Some notes as I review:
It’s ironic that Le C talks about ‘watertight’ formulas for arriving at the fundamental principles for modern living, as it was mass-produced concrete slabs’ problems with damp – with not being watertight – that led to many future residents’ complaints.
Speaking of residents, you’ll note that in this entire chapter, I’m not sure he mentions residents’ desires once. He talks of being in “a postioin to experience the intense joys of a creative art which is based on geometry” – some sort of wild-eyed architectural raving – but doesn’t mention anything to do with the part that comes after the creating – that is, the living. This is of course mirrored in the approach the UK took to council home building: focusing on the frenzied, testosterone-fuelled joys of creating, without looking at the actually end to that means: living.
Le C talks in terms of battle and war. I guess this was a popular way of looking at things at the time, particularly with the artists he probably ran with.
Was so in love with order that he believed that, because rivers provide services (eg delivery of goods via ship) that they shouldn’t run through cities – even if people like to look at them.
I’ll give it to him and to others that at this stage in our development, it was logical to think that industrialization could bring great benefits to housing, as it had to so many other industries. A good question then, is what went wrong? Maybe it’s that housing has so many different uses, whereas a car or a ship only has a few. (Just as housing is the most “fragile” or “wobbly” pillar of the welfare state, it is perhaps the most complex of industries.) And that, while industrialization of automobiles, eg, didn’t effect the size of the product or our basic realationship with it, industrialization of housing required building on what has proven to be an in-human scale, at least in housing. And that it resulted in housing that, almost by definition of the sizes and shapes and forms required by insutrial building, couldn’t meet the residents’ needs – and in fact generally exacerbated their problems. While automobile factories might be “severe and exact” in their industrial processes (Le C’s laudatory terminology), they didn’t inherently produce severe and exact autos – the process was distinct from the product. In housing, the two somehow couldn’t be separated: so “severe” techniques produced severe homes.
Why did he fetishise geometry and repetition of form? Just because he dug it, or because we were turning our backs on the organic and messy past?
Did the war and the sense of the end of an old order have anything to do with all this?
Blimey, that’s a complicated one to answer. I
want to read a chapter of Sen before I plunge into it, but my first guess is
that which way you answer will serve as something of a litmus test as to what
side of the political spectrum you stand on (or shout from).
I need to read one more of the readings to address this.
