From the NZ Herald today: The Government has declined KiwiRail’s request for an extra $1.47 billion for portside infrastructure needed for Cook Strait’s new mega-ferries. KiwiRail says it cannot proceed without further Government funding and its board will now oversee the wind-down of the project and review plans for the vital transport connection. The state-owned enterprise was replacing its increasingly unreliable and ageing Interislander fleet of three ferries with two new rail-enabled ferries under the Inter-island Resilience Connection project (iReX). The stakes were high after Kaitaki narrowly avoided disaster this year when it lost power in the middle of Cook Strait with 864 … Continue reading Chaos as new ferries and harbour bill doubles from $1.5bn to $3bn, New Zealand government refuses to pay for Labour incompetence and KiwiRail cancels the ferries

Last night, Reporting Scotland‘s Andrew Kerr, cast doubt on the evidence of attainment increases and gaps narrowing in Scotland’s schools because an ‘expert’ said it was comparable to ‘teachers marking their own homework.’ I guessed straightaway in was the above regular SNP critic. Here’s why: National Improvement Framework: Consultation on measuring the attainment gap and milestones towards closing it Submission by Lindsay Paterson1 4. Why using teacher judgements is unreliable https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files/134464725/submission_by_Lindsay_Paterson.pdf And: Why is Paterson not an expert at all? This: Professor of Educational Policy at Edinburgh University, Lindsay Paterson is a statistician with a background in agricultural and medical … Continue reading ‘Teachers marking their own homework’ The so-called expert on Reporting Scotland

I’m guessing most of you know how to answer the above question but I hope to add something. Why is Scotland’s largest teacher union, the EIS, not jumping quickly in to defend the professionalism of its members. Imagine the Scottish Government blamed them for some failure of pupils learning? Here’s the EIS site on news today: Not a word in defence of their own members’ reputations. What are the latest statistics on attainment in Scottish Primary schools? Attainment at a record high The proportions of pupils in primary achieving expected levels of literacy and numeracy have reached record highs for … Continue reading Is the largest teacher union not defending its own members against BBC accusations of amateurism, as attainment climbs and gaps narrow under SNP, taking one for the team, Labour?

A Labour Party leaflet might hesitate on some of these claims and the outrageous wording. Missing from the drug deaths headline is the word ‘suspected’. These are official stats but they are not based on tests proving the presence of a restricted substance in the blood. They are based only on police assessment of the scene. When these figures were plummeting in 2021 and 2022, they were largely ignored by our media in favour of the NRS data where the dramatic fall we saw at the end of 2022 had not yet appeared in those stats based on post mortem … Continue reading Daily Record front page is just a Labour Party leaflet based on suspicion and careful lies

By stewartb ‘It’s rich for English Education minister Gillian Keegan to claim English schools are superior ..’ That’s an understatement! However, no doubt she feels able to do this because of the dire state of the mainstream media that supposedly ‘serves’ Scotland. Scotland on Sunday accepted her opinion piece but will it undertake ANY critical assessment on behalf of its readers of Ms Keegan’s claims ? It is in this context that it seems wholly relevant to highlight a recent report on the education system THAT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of Ms Keegan and her predecessors as Secretaries of State in … Continue reading Researchers ‘England has relatively low literacy and numeracy scores amongst non-tertiary educated young adults compared with other OECD countries.’

From Public Health Scotland, today: Referrals to a chronic pain clinic are now back to levels seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the quarter ending 30 September 2023, 5,220 patients were referred, an increase of 6.1% on the previous quarter, when 4,919 patients were referred. Referrals are up by 3.9% compared to a year earlier, when there were 5,026 during the quarter ending 30 September 2022. https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/publications/chronic-pain-waiting-times/chronic-pain-waiting-times-quarter-ending-30-september-2023/ Despite this, based on the graph above, the number seen within 12 weeks has increased for the last three quarters as has the total seen within 1 year. BBC Scotland, on chronic … Continue reading Chronic pain waiting times continue to shorten for third quarter despite referrals returning to pre-Covid level

Leah Gunn Barrett It’s rich for English Education minister Gillian Keegan to claim English schools are superior when English school buildings are literally crumbling. Her own department admitted that England had cherry-picked better performing schools with more affluent students to take part in the PISA exams, violating a rule that each participating nation should select pupils of average academic background.[1] England cheated, which won’t come as a surprise to most Scots.  Keegan fails to mention another little detail. Just 4.7% of English secondary schools took part in the PISA exams, whereas 32.8% of all Scottish did.[2] This should invalidate any attempts to … Continue reading A better metric for judging a nation’s education system

From the Guardian today: Peers [led by former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, above] call for urgent overhaul of secondary education in England – Lords report says there is too much learning by rote and many key Tory changes should be reversed. The House of Lords report says the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is too focused on academic learning and written exams, resulting in too much learning by rote and not enough opportunity for pupils to pursue creative and technical subjects. The committee recommends instead that schools and teachers should be allowed to offer a more varied range of … Continue reading English Lords ignore Pisa test results and call for curriculum more like Scotland’s

From Politics Home yesterday: English state schools plunged into a financial deficit last year, new figures have shown, with teachers’ leaders warning of a “bleak” future. Financial data obtained by PoliticsHome under the Freedom of Information Act, covering 8,539 non-academy state schools in 93 local authorities, shows the schools made an average in-year surplus of £13,963 each on their day-to-day revenue spending in 2021/22. But this plummeted to an average deficit of £10,561 each in 2022/23, as rising inflation and growing numbers of children with complex special needs combined with sustained underfunding by Government to squeeze schools’ finances. Taking all 8,500 schools … Continue reading SNP in government – funding schools 18% higher and increasing faster than in other nations

From BBC Health today: Campaigners have written to the chief constables of Norfolk and Suffolk to request an investigation into thousands of mental health deaths in those areas. They say coroners are raising safety issues but no improvements are being made. A report by independent auditors found as many as 8,440 patients had died unexpectedly over three years. Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust said it had started a review of patient deaths. Coroners worried about the risk of future deaths highlight unsafe practices in what are known as prevention-of-future-deaths reports (PFDs). And authorities are required by law to respond with an action plan … Continue reading 8 440 unexpected hospital deaths but no political responsibility