Education

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Fraser Nelson discuss the last stand of Michael Gove”] Listen [/audioplayer]Tristram Hunt seems delighted today that Britain’s first profit-seeking school has been deemed ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted. The scores of council-run failing schools, several in his Stoke constituency, don’t seem to be worthy of his ire. But when a free school stumbles, in Suffolk, he declares this to be… ‘…more evidence of the damage David Cameron’s Free School policy is doing to school standards. The lack of local oversight and a policy that allows unqualified teachers into classrooms on a permanent basis is the wrong approach. We know that this is not an isolated case. That’s

You may have heard about the Family and Childcare Trust’s survey today, about the costs of childcare. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines but it actually found that in England, costs have fallen for the first time since the survey started 12 years ago. The figures in the report show that, after inflation, the cost of nurseries fell by two per cent, the cost of after-school clubs fell by five per cent, and the cost of a child-minder’s after-school pickup fell by a full 13 per cent. There is now mounting evidence that childcare costs have at last stabilised after more than a decade of rising prices. The health

 São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it has always seemed to me very unfortunate that there isn’t a matching one for the four biggest established economies. According to the International Monetary Fund, these are currently the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom (based on last year’s GDP figures). I therefore propose ‘Juugs’. The rise of the Brics and the fall

Whatever happened to Scotland’s upper-middle class? That’s one of the questions asked by Hugo Rifkind in his characteristically interesting column this week. Why, more to the point, are they so reluctant to play a part in the independence stushie? When did they become so bashful? It is time, Hugo says, for the timid posh folk to speak out. Perhaps. But the alumni of Scotland’s private schools are hugely unrepresentative of Scottish life and, in many cases, far removed from the Scottish mainstream. Privately-educated Scotland is a tiny place. Everyone knows everyone (though the saddest people in Scotland are those who know only privately-schooled people). Even in Edinburgh. True, 25% or

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t all that bright. Sixteen per cent of us have an IQ below 85 – that’s about the level of intelligence you need to need to drink through a straw. And even a high IQ is no a guarantee of success. According to a study cited by Professor Joan Freedman in The Gifted Child, only six from a sample of 210 ultra bright children turned out to be successful adults. So, even those blessed with an abundance of grey matter can stuff things up royally on contact with real world things such as parking meters or women who cry a lot. In a busy

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) has released its latest admission statistics, and they aren’t pretty. Of the 580,000 people that applied for places at British institutions, 333,700 of them were women. Only 246,300 men applied, a difference of 87,000. The figures show that the gender gap is particularly wide among poorer households. Perhaps this is some small victory for the women’s movement – after all, more women in tertiary education means more women with decent career prospects. But what about the men? If feminist ideology defends equal political, social and economic rights for women, then by that token, they should want equal political, social and economic rights for