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
Today’s NAO report on free schools has recognised the ‘clear progress’ we have made opening 174 schools in three years with significantly lower costs than Labour’s school programmes. But, as Isabel Hardman, Toby Young and Policy Exchange’s Jonathan Simons have pointed out, instead of reading the report the BBC and PAC Chairwoman Margaret Hodge have chosen to ignore the facts.
The OECD released a report this week on education standards. It makes for grim reading: we’re bottom of the class. Those aged 16-24 in England came 22nd of 24 for literacy, and 21st for numeracy. We’re behind almost every other advanced nation in the world. What’s gone wrong? There’s a clue in the different scores by
Peter Gershon, David James and many others have scoured government for rare prey; wasted expenditure that no-one wants. And there are indeed signs that a culture of plenty, and a lack of cost control, has generated fat in Whitehall – the many new subdivisions of the Communities department testify to that. However, the unacknowledged truth
The focus of the UK economic debate of recent weeks has been the credit crunch and the evolution of Northern Rock. Now, however, the Government’s plans for fiscal policy will take centre stage. This week’s Budget provides the Chancellor with an opportunity to set out a new approach for government spending, based on the notion
