Why does the paid interns debate always have a London bias?
Yesterday, in a massively generous concession to the youth workforce currently suffering a 20%+ unemployment rate, the Lib Dems have said they will now pay for lunch and travel expenses for their parliamentary interns.
But a major problem with MPs isn’t just that they are often middle or upper-class millionaires who don’t live with the problems of the struggling majority, but they also seem unable to conceive of the idea that some people don’t actually live in the Greater London area.
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The EMA is to be replaced by Victorian style charity
contribution by Reuben Bard-Rosenberg
Begging your A Level teacher for an extension on your coursework can be an uncomfortable experience. Begging your teachers for a tenner so that you can afford the bus to school is probably somewhat more degrading. Yesterday, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced the replacement for the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).
The scheme will cost £180 million, a little over a quarter of what was put into the EMA. Just 12,000 students, less than one in every hundred, will qualify for a bursary. Meanwhile, 90% of the cash will go to headteachers to allocate at their discretion, to help students pay for books, food and transport. All of which makes sense when you consider the mean-spirited rhetoric with which the attack on EMA was justified.
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How will teaching be affected by the Big society curriculum?
contribution by Martin Paul Eve
Over the weekend, the Observer reported that the Arts and Humanities Research Council had come under pressure to divert its already scant resources into research prioritising the values of the Big Society.
There has been a lively and informed debate on both sides and it is worth bearing in mind that the so-called “Haldane Principle” is not a sacred binding constitutional document whose altar has been violated.
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Why is the government imposing ‘Big society’ on academia?
Is this the latest “big society” paradox? The Observer reports that senior academics are deeply concerned about the way in which a department of state is alleged to have insisted on the ‘big society’ as a major academic research theme as a condition of renewing academic funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
This report of about rather top down insistence on studying the bottom up doctrine speaks to a recurring tension as to how government can get traction for its ‘big idea’ without undermining the point.
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Why the coalition’s take on localism is unsustainable
Contribution by Rick Muir
This government wears localism as a badge of pride: it says that the days of ministers dictating local service targets from Whitehall are over, and that it wants to move to a world where more power is exercised at the local level.
But the form of localism being pushed by the coalition is full of tensions and inconsistencies. For a start, while some powers are being pushed down, others are being sucked back up into government departments. In health, the Government has abolished Strategic Health Authorities – but much of what they were previously doing is now being done directly by the Department of Health. In education, the expansion of academy schools means that more and more local schools are being funded directly by Michael Gove rather than by local authorities.
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In defence of LGBT History Month: a reply to Toby Young
contribution by Jules Mattsson
Last week I read two columns by journalist Toby Young attacking my old school for celebrating LGBT history month. His lack of understanding seemed to unite pupils, staff, parents and ex-pupils alike in anger over his claims.
The fact that the sole source for his columns seems to be a third hand blog post maybe gives him the defence of wilful ignorance. LGBT issues do not replace the curriculum, nor are they separate to it.
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I’m the fourth NUS candidate: why you should vote for me
contribution by Thomas Byrne
The other day, Liberal Conspiracy interviewed the three “front runners” in the race to be National Union of Students President. What they failed to mention is that there are only four candidates. I am that fourth candidate, and I’m grateful to this site for giving me the right to be heard.
The reason I was not featured was quite simple: I’m not left-wing. But that doesn’t mean my platform can’t be appealing to those on the left.
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Upcoming NUS elections: meet the three candidates
There are three front-runners in the election in April to replace Aaron Porter as President of the National Union of Students. The contest is significant for students and non-students alike, so I’ve interviewed all three.
Liam Burns is currently President of NUS Scotland, Shane Chowen is Vice President (Further Education) of the NUS and Mark Bergfeld is member of the NUS National Executive and spokesperson for the Education Activist Network.
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Five reasons why Aaron Porter was right not to seek re-election
It’s official: Aaron Porter will no longer be the British student movement’s official figurehead. For only the second time since 1969, a NUS President will not serve a second term.
Aaron Porter chose the wrong time to be a Blairite at the helm of the student movement. If the joint NUS/UCU demo on November 14th had been half as big, Porter would still be in office. But it lit a torchpaper. No-one on left or right had a real sense of the burning anger on campuses and in sixth forms across the country.
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Despite his politics, Aaron Porter does not deserve the harassment
Let’s remind ourselves of the catalogue of disappointments commonly known as Aaron Porter’s career as NUS president.
He failed to support union members facing legal action, he opposed most demonstrations his members wanted to hold, and yesterday it transpired that he allegedly praised the changes to higher education tuition fees as ‘progressive.’
So far, so contemptible. It’s little wonder a motion of no-confidence was raised against the NUS’s El Presidente, and quite right too.
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Five Tory ‘cuts’ that will actually cost us money
contribution by Jon Stone
Back in October I outlined five irregularities that support the idea that the Tories’ cuts are ideologically motivated, rather than a necessity.
But a lot of these ideological changes that are being packaged as ‘necessary cuts’ are actually going to cost the country money, or not save anything at all. Here are five of the most high profile ones.
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How ‘facts’ do not a good education make
contribution by PaidtoReason
Last week we heard that Michael Gove was launching a curriculum review, in order to create a return to more “traditional” teaching. Quite apart from the dubious aim of the review, the enormous irony of launching a review of something and simultaneously declaring its result is obvious.
As Chris Keates, the General Secretary of the NASUWT union, said, the review is “pointless” as ministers have “already determined that children should have a 1950s-style curriculum”.
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Is Toby Young really the right person to run a school?
contribution by Terence Dickens
The debate over free schools continues. There are many good arguments against them: for one, they transfer money from underfunded local schools into untested ideological experiments.
But an argument that has been neglected is the kind of people that want to set up free schools. If you take over a football team you undergo a “fit and proper” test. A footie team is less socially impactful than getting wodges of cash set up your own school, but the Government certainly doesn’t seem to see it that way.
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Posh and Posher: grammar schools are not the answer
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is the Old Etonian son of a former editor of The Times. But don’t go running away with the idea that he is in any sense a member of a privileged class, he tells a television programme that will be broadcast on BBC 2 this evening. ‘I’m a man of the people,’ he says to the camera, apparently keeping a straight face.
Andrew Neil’s documentary ‘Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain’ highlights one of the few questions on which the editorial lines of Socialist Worker and the Daily Mail are strangely in sync.
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In defence of Education Maintenance Allowance
Sixth formers are spending their Education Maintenance Allowance on ‘booze, cigarettes, CDs, music festivals and clothes’, a commenter called jenny50 indignantly maintains in the one-sided debate on a bile-filled Telegraph discussion board this morning.
And she should know, having “worked in a large comprehensive for many years”.
Well Jenny, if you are reading this, brace yourself for a shock.
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Clegg could make education fairer by taxing private school fees
The ‘pupil premium’ is a good idea about to be sacrificed on the altar of austerity.
The Government has failed to keep the promise in the Coalition Agreement that this pledge – intended to spend more money on disadvantaged pupils – would be funded “from outside the schools budget”. Instead, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has acknowledged that the ‘premium’ will be funded by redistributing money within a shrinking schools budget, which means that most schools will see their funding cut.
Ministers face an unenviable choice: do they risk a backlash from most parents, unhappy at seeing less money spent on their children, or do they let down the worst-off children, whom they pledged to help?
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Why we want to ‘recall’ Aaron Porter as NUS President
contribution by Eleanor Badcock
Yesterday, Sunny Hundal implied that so-called infighting within the student movement would detract from the burning political issues of EMA, tuition fees and cuts, in the campaign of no confidence against NUS President Aaron Porter.
The glaring omission, of course, is that the students pushing for a no confidence votes are the students who orchestrated 130,000 strong student protests against fees and cuts when Aaron Porter was ‘spinelessly dithering’ about whether he could support national days of action.
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Left unity and the bid to oust Aaron Porter
A few months ago I was invited to a meeting of Labour lefties to talk about how internal party democracy needed reform. After agreeing that some recommendations could be presented to the new leader at party conference, I asked who from the Labour-right needed to be on board. I got a blank look.
If we want to push the party to change, I said, surely we need all parts of the party to sign up? More blank looks; some shuffling of feet.
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Why these protests are more dangerous than politicians realise
contribution by Matt Bolton
Soon after seeming to congratulate police for not shooting protestors, Boris Johnson told this morning’s Today programme that he hoped the student fees protests would soon be at an end. No doubt Nick Clegg was hoping for too when he begged Lib Dem MPs to ‘walk through the fire’ with him earlier last week.
But from what I’ve seen, they have sorely misjudged the situation. This is categorically NOT just another political movement. In fact, I’m not sure that it is political at all – certainly not in any way that has been previously thought of in this country.
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The face of our cause isn’t my brother Charlie Gilmour, but Alfie Meadows
contribution by Heathcote Ruthven
A Facebook hate group summed up a brother of mine quite well – “Charlie Gilmour is a Cnut”. Charlie is far more likely to harmlessly scream commandments at the ocean as King Canute famously did, than to maliciously offend or disrespect .
Another dear friend of mine, the humble and witty Alfie Meadows, spent three hours in brain surgery after his skull was bludgeoned in when peacefully protesting in Parliament Square. The media at large have ignored these facts – the first drunkenly, the second morbidly.
There is a fundamental inhumanity in the British media’s decision to spotlight Charlie Gilmour over Alfie Meadows.
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» Are Tories “listening” or “pressing ahead” on NHS changes?
» In defence of Monarchies
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» Why I became a left-libertarian
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» Clubs can’t stop offensive football chants
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