Society

It’s three days since rumours swirled around France that President Macron was going to impose a ‘tit-for-tat’ quarantine on UK visitors. While waiting for the axe to fall, several friends who had booked flights to visit us in Saint-Tropez were unsure whether to come or not. Julian Clary, who had already accepted the fact that he was going to have to quarantine upon his return home to London, told me: ‘I don’t mind having to stay at home — what I mind is not being able to visit my mother.’ ‘Well, I haven’t seen my eldest two children or my grandchildren for nearly six months,’ I retorted. There seems to

This morning, Matt Hancock claimed on the Today programme that the government is now working as fast as it can on developing a mass testing programme, which is ‘incredibly important’ if we want to ease coronavirus restrictions. The health secretary is right to finally focus on mass testing. So far, the UK’s performance has been relatively poor in fighting the pandemic, and we are currently expected to come out among the worst in the two-by-two matrix comparing Covid-19 performance on deaths and forecast economic impact: While some of this is structural – we have an economy that is more exposed to the service sectors than others and our population is

Coronavirus has changed our lives. In fact, there is very little that has been left untouched by this pandemic. A risk assessment has been done for every aspect of life, no matter how mundane. So, it should not surprise that St John Ambulance is no different. Its Covid CPR advice may be matter of fact but nevertheless at first sight it is still somewhat shocking: instead of asking people to selflessly give mouth-to-mouth, it now advises rescuers to place a towel over the mouth of the collapsed person to protect the volunteer from Covid. It may not be exactly the ideal image, but in truth this is a sensible way

So now that A-Levels will be judged on teacher-assessed grades (or centre assessed grades) where does that leave us? At the last count, about 55,000 students were given undergraduate places at either their second choice (insurance) or clearing. So that’s 55,000 students whose place at university might be changed now that teacher-assessed grades are being used. There were a further 80,000 students ‘holding offers’ – in other words, where the university or the student has yet to confirm the place, perhaps because they were waiting for the appeals process. When universities make an offer that is ‘conditional’ on their grade achievement, they are contractually obliged to accept those students who

On Friday 20 March, I had an email exchange with a friendly professor at a top university. He confirmed that his prestigious course is heavily over subscribed. The course makes offers to double the number of students for whom it has places. Entry grades are set exceptionally high and only 60 per cent of places are taken by students who actually hit those grades. The remaining 40 per cent go to the nearest runners up. It’s a system of rationing and provided enough other factors are stable and the mechanism rigorous – it works. A-level exam grades are currency. They can be traded advantageously and they have a crucial role as gate-keeper,

Elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge don’t have a good track record in taking mitigating circumstances into account. One Oxford history graduate tells me that even though it deemed her to have been ‘very seriously impacted’ by her home circumstances last year, the university declined to bump up her final grade enough – by 0.3 per cent – for her to enter her masters’ course. So what does count as a good enough excuse for missing your grades? Sitting your exams during a pandemic surely would – particularly if, like Soutiam Goodarzi, you’re a member of an underrepresented group that Oxbridge claims they want to uplift. Soutiam is a sixth former eligible for

I have recently read a fascinating new paper, via a Mail on Sunday report, about the growing number of children presenting as transgender to gender clinics. It raises all sorts of questions, and deserves to be read widely and carefully. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, can be found – unlike a lot of similar work, for free – here. Among its seven authors are two staff from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, the main NHS clinic for children with gender identity issues, including the service’s head, Polly Carmichael. The other authors include clinicians in Australia and the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The