Society

According to data released by the Department for Education today, free schools have topped the league table when it comes to Progress 8. This metric, introduced three years ago, tells you how much progress children have made in a particular school between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to the progress other children have made with similar starting points. It’s a way of controlling for the fact that children enter secondary school with varying levels of prior attainment. If you just look at raw GCSE data, those schools that get the best results might not be the most effective; it could be that they’re attracting children of above average

How could the sort of bullying and sexual harassment detailed in Dame Laura Cox’s report on the treatment of House of Commons staff really have gone on for so long? There were policies in place for dealing with complaints, and on paper everything looked as though it was working well to prevent the rise of the ‘serial offenders’ that Cox refers to. This was the very defence initially mounted by the parliamentary authorities themselves when the allegations first came to light in the press earlier this year, but Cox’s report shows how structures and cultures can be very different indeed. The problem, she writes, was largely one of culture so

James Kirkup’s article (‘The march of trans rights’) discussed many of the complexities created by the issue, and rightly so. It also briefly mentioned the ‘bathroom battles’ in the United States. Such episodes illustrate the practical problems with legislating against such societal developments — new laws often do not solve but escalate the issue. In North Carolina in 2016, legislation was introduced to prevent transgender individuals from using particular bathrooms. The policing of this law presented practical issues. It would be impossible to guard every gender-specific public bathroom in the state. Either it would require a significant increase in police numbers, or be up to the business to enact the

The indignation over the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has taken an interesting turn now that Donald Trump has promised to inflict ‘severe punishment’ on the Saudi government should it turn out that he was in fact tortured and killed in the Saudi embassy in Ankara – though not obviously to the point of cancelling US military contracts with the kingdom. And the indignation is entirely justified. For agents of a foreign state to infringe the human rights of its subjects in another country is a calculated insult to the country in question quite apart from the unpleasantness of exhibiting abroad the behaviour visited on critics at home.

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who is under intense pressure to explain what he knew about his disgraced predecessor, the sex abuser and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Wuerl had asked to resign. He knew his position was untenable: not only is there widespread scepticism about his claim that he didn’t know McCarrick routinely assaulted seminarians, but he’s also under fire for alleged mishandling of abuse cases when he was Bishop of Pittsburgh. His departure hasn’t come as a surprise: he is past retirement age anyway. But many Catholics are disconcerted – to put it mildly – by the Pope’s letter to Wuerl,

The Batumi Olympiad ended as a great success for the teams from China, which captured the gold medals in both the open and women’s sections. England finished a most creditable fifth in the open, behind USA (silver) Russia (bronze) and Poland, our best result for decades. Meanwhile the bitter contest for the Fidé (World Chess Federation) presidential election concluded in victory for the Russian candidate, Arkady Dvorkovich.   Mr Dvorkovich evidently appreciated the value of the English candidate for president, grandmaster Nigel Short, since he promptly appointed him vice president after Short stepped down at the last minute. It was unfortunate that the English Chess Federation misguidedly failed to back Short and instead