Balls serves up some Brownies
Sam Freedman 7:09pm
CoffeeHouse has been running a series of Brownies – statistical tricks which are used to create a misleading image. But this risks overlooking the important contribution of Ed Balls in the field of manipulating government data. His controversial claim that one-in-six schools is breaking the admission code is an absolute classic in the genre.
To arrive at this crucial “one in six” statistic, Balls did his analysis on three local authorities and projected that across England. His key figure was that 96 out of 570 schools in such areas were found to be in violation. But what marks a violation? This is where Balls worked his magic.
Of the 96 schools in “violation”, 50 were guilty of technical offences which would not have resulted in any child missing out on a place. 45 were listed only for “failure to prioritise children in care correctly”. They will have put children in care at the top of their oversubscription criteria - instead of allocating these children places first, then determining whether the school is oversubscribed and then applying the criteria to remaining children. Was there a wicked plot? Hardly – the schools simply failed to update their procedures following the recent changes to the admissions code.
A further five schools in Northants were only in breach because the schools failed to mirror the statutory wording on SEN correctly. So not a single child would be denied a place. After eliminating these schools just 8 out of Manchester’s 156 schools and 7 of Northamptonshire’s 307 were in breach. So in these two authorities, just one in 30 schools breached the code in the way Balls would have us believe.
Which leaves us with Barnet, the LA in which all six schools who inappropriately asked for financial donations were based (five were Jewish). Most breaches indentified in Barnet were due to nine Jewish schools. These schools do seem to be operating restrictive admissions policies and this is a serious issue. But a nationwide problem? Hardly. It is a local issue – most of England’s 300,000 Jews live in Barnet. As Matthew d’Ancona pointed out on Sunday, the need for a financial supplement is partly due to the sad fact that such schools need extra security as well as paying for non-curricular religious instruction. This is not to say the schools are right to demand it. But it is intellectually dishonest to make out, as Balls did, that this is a UK-wide phenomenon.
This leaves us one with a nagging thought. Was the inclusion of Barnet entirely random? Or was Mr Balls fully aware that one unrepresentative authority could produce a distorted figure? If he wanted to distract attention from the fact that 100,000 parents were denied their first choice of secondary school, he could have relied on this to be a powerful and new story. Top schools forcing out poor children: this narrative would have been perfect distraction. Or would have been, had it been true.
So all of the above could well be a contribution to CoffeeHouse’s list of Brownies. But as Michael Heseltine memorably put it, this isn’t Brown. It’s Balls.
Sam Freedman is a Research Director at Policy Exchange.
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Comments
Balls Watcher
April 8th, 2008 8:54pmWow, that was great. Exposes Balls as the fraud he is - but isnt Balls the real author of all Brownies in the first place?
Max Kaye
April 8th, 2008 9:02pmIt's a frightening thought to think that for all these years of 'prudence' and spin, Balls may have been the 'intelligence' behind the clunking, dithering Brown....
TrevorH
April 8th, 2008 9:09pmYour implication is that Balls is one of the nastiest, most odious, people in British politics. Come come now - think of his family. Think of the effect on his poor wife.
Oh ...
Thomas Cussans
April 8th, 2008 10:48pmIt's dead simple. Balls, his 'brain the size of a planet' according to your own editor, was sucked, a long time ago, hook, line and sinker into the Blair/Mandelson vision of a world in which, courtesy of Blair's televisual charm and Brown's 'towering intellect', a newly confident Labour Party would confine the Tories to permanent electoral oblivion.
Inevitably, his own time would then come.
He overlooked, as he still does, three key facts: 1) that the Blair/Brown utopia was not the result of Brown's brilliant behind-the-scenes scheming and fixing of the economy but of Blair's tinselly appeal electoral; 2) that hitching your star to a man as obviously flawed as Brown would always rebound on those clinging so shamelessly to his coat tails; 3) that he is himself a properly nasty person with the electoral appeal of a slug, a point instantly reinforced every time he appears in public.
Balls, laughably, in thrall to his sense of his own high political destiny, blind to the deeply creepy personality obvious to everyone else, resembles nothing so much as an early, flawed version of the Mekon, the bigger brain that never quite worked and who his creators have been frantically trying to recall and pacify (in order to remove the failed, prototype Brain Mk. I) after he sneakily made off when they weren't looking.
They'll get him in the end. We can only hope he won't do too much damage in the meantime.
Ann
April 8th, 2008 11:17pmWhat 'prudence'? You mean, wasting billions on infantile projects? Or would that be Brown stealing from pension funds? Or perhaps gangster-inspired extortion masquerading as taxes, introduced with lies?
John R
April 9th, 2008 12:05amThe reason Balls picked on Barnet was because scoring points off the Jews is very, very popular among wavering Labour voters of a certain religious persuasion.
Look forward, at the next elction, to Balls reminding us all that Oliver Letwin's Jewish.
Ann
April 9th, 2008 9:14amI am glad you referred to tinsel in your excellent analysis, Thomas, otherwise I might have worried about your blindness to Blair's deeply creepy personality. He made my skin crawl every time I saw him, from the very start.
Why this country kept voting for such obviously deranged people is a mystery to me.
Bradders
April 9th, 2008 7:25pmI watched Balls leading an education debate about 3 months ago. He was the worst despatch box performer I have ever seen. and I agree with one of the previous comments, "he is slightly wierd". He is also the chief architect of this housing and money problem the country is seeing at the moment. Dropping intrest rates to european levels stoked up borrowing and destroyed the balance. They used this to develope a false growth. We will now pay for this and it's not the Yanks to blame it's Godger the Dodger and his mates. The press should now get tough and hound them out of office.