Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

TANKER

Why don't you vote UKIP ?

and you can COMMAND your family to follow you - or else!

Alf, have they tried seasonal jobs on farms in the fields for instance? if these youngsters are in the south east where you are and can't get work down there then their are plenty around the regions, basic accommodation and food as well are provided.

Also driving jobs?

RIP Australian batsman, Phil Hughes, who has died from his injury after being hit by a bouncer. He was apparently not adequately protected by the helmet he was wearing at the time. How very sad.

ohhhhhh how sad. Lovely young chap aswel.

Cricket will be the loser today.

specific young chap is just recovering from a severe compound leg fracture that has taken 3 years(!!) to heal

being on benefits and barely literate/numerate, the system (quite rightly) demands that he attends a course on a daily basis to strengthen these basics and also (i think) to give him basic computing skills

at least he got as far as 2nd interview to read meters, but fell at the last hurdle
interestingly, this public company insists that these guys work on a self-employed basis

Self-employed (for most) = unemployed, except for brief periods of work.

Any budding photographers out there?

Here's a deal for a mere £19 for an online photography course, which normally costs £495!

http://www.groupon.co.uk/deals/milton_keynes/shaw-academy-84/49895470

Forty years of comprehensives have put Tristram Hunt at the top

The Labour north London elite's hypocrisy for attacking private schools is staggering, says Allison Pearson




Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt Photo: PA



Allison Pearson
By Allison Pearson

9:00PM GMT 26 Nov 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/11255093/Forty-years-of-comprehensives-have-put-Tristram-Hunt-at-the-top.html



The other night, I went to a feast at a Cambridge college. The hall thrummed with the grave rumble of mighty brains and the crystal and silverware sparkled in the candlelight. I asked my learned neighbour how the college was doing raising the number of students from comprehensive schools. His reply was shocking. So desperate was the college to improve its ratio of state-school undergraduates that it had actually started accepting some kids with Bs, and even Cs, at A-level.


These youngsters arrived in Cambridge grossly unprepared and were promptly sent for a year, at the college’s expense, to a local sixth-form crammer where they would be taught to write essays and to generally master all the things that privately educated high-fliers can do by the age of 16.


As a Comp Kid myself, I suppose I should have welcomed the news, but I was angry. Of course, it was very decent of the college to bend over backwards to accommodate applicants who hadn’t made the grade, but why couldn’t bright children from backgrounds like mine count on their secondary school to educate them properly in the first place?


How humiliating that poorer kids were now admitted on “potential”, rather than knowledge and flair. I was staggered that a Cambridge college, which exists to stretch minds of the highest calibre, was paying for teenagers to be taught the basics to compensate for a comprehensive system which has never matched the thorough intellectual grounding offered by grammar schools.


This country, which once educated boys and girls in those grammars to the highest level – far better than many of the fanciest private schools – was now engaged in covert affirmative action, to meet fair-access targets. What other choice was there?


Imagine explaining to a bright spark who won a scholarship to Cambridge from a grammar school in my part of South Wales in the 1950s that, in 2014, it would take noblesse oblige and extra tuition to enable a child like them to make the same leap.

Meanwhile, the admissions process is increasingly weighted against the privately educated kids who actually know stuff, but whose parents have paid their own money for costly tuition. Still, the kids that were spending a “gap year” in a crammer will register in the statistics as state-school applicants thus helping the university look more socially diverse. Huh?

You don’t need a PhD in moral philosophy to work out that something fishy is going on. And what solution does Labour, the party of the underdog, offer? Well, with the UK tumbling down the international league tables in literacy and numeracy, the big new idea of Tristram Hunt, the shadow Education Secretary, is… to attack our private schools. Yup, you know, those simply dreadful institutions with a worldwide reputation for unparalleled excellence?

The same evil schools, that is, where so many prominent Labour supporters send their own offspring to gain the selective advantage their party denies to children from less well-off familes. Baron Hunt of Chesterton, for instance, who was leader of the Labour group on Cambridge council in the early Seventies elected to send his son, little Tristram, to University College School in north London.

How can you possibly preach one kind of education as a Labour councillor then send your own child to an elite, fee-paying school?

Very easily, judging by how few of Labour’s north London elite has actually acted on their principles and enrolled their kids in the nearest state school. Not for them the exciting, multicultural challenge of the notorious Islington Green School, heavens, no! “I mean, we believe in diversity, darling, but Poppy’s got processing difficulties, so she needs to be at Dame Alice Owen’s.”

Dame Alice Owen’s, by the way, is the highly academic school in leafy Hertfordshire where Islington MP, Emily Thornberry, sent her son in 2005. Obviously, Emily, who was sacked from the shadow Cabinet last week after tweeting a photo of a council house in Strood, couldn’t run the risk of her sensitive offspring mixing with Child of White Van Man.

The hypocrisy is staggering. If you have to find something better for your own child then, at least, have the courage to admit that the system is not good enough for any child.

No such admission is permissible, sadly. For Labour took an education system that wasn’t broken and “fixed” it for ideological reasons. The tragedy is that getting rid of grammar schools only served to entrench class privilege. The wealthier went private or bought a house in a good catchmemt area and the poor got what they were given.

You know, I have had it with ideologues, from Anthony Crosland to Tristram Hunt, playing politics with a state education system of which they have zero experience. Would Tristram have become a top TV historian if he’d had to survive one of the shambolic comps a mile down the road from his Hampstead alma mater? I seriously doubt it. Yet this lucky man actually wants fewer kids to enjoy what he had!

There are subtle signs that the tide is turning. Addressing the CBI last week, Ofsted head Sir Michael Wilshaw said that pupils should be directed towards either an academic or vocational school halfway through secondary education. Sir Michael insisted he was not advocating “selection at 14” but “maximum opportunity at 14”.

Hmmm. Sounds remarkably like grammar school by any other name, doesn’t it? And about time, too.

Let me end, as I began, with a Cambridge dinner. On Saturday night, I will be toasting a friend of mine, the Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and joint winner of the million-pound 2014 Brain Prize, given “in recognition of his pioneering research into higher brain mechanisms underpinning literacy, numeracy and and social cognition”.

Fifty years ago, Trevor, who grew up in a terraced house in south London and attended a superb grammar school, won a place to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. No special favours needed. No noblesse oblige. No year in a crammer paid for by his college. Back then, the brilliant working-class boy had an education as good as any of his titled contemporaries, featuring proper hard science and mathematics.

Trevor tells me he doesn’t see kids from his background coming through much any more, though he reckons that nearly all of the best British scientists of his generation came from grammar schools.

Forty years of comprehensive school education and where has it got us? More Tristrams at the top of society and fewer Trevors in store. As an experiment in promoting greater social equality, I’d say it was a C minus.

Wouldn’t you, Tristram?

max - a bit of a cynical view, but of course it also saves the company big actual and admin expenses in other areas

it also happens to blow something of a hole in one of the regular rants of the "bitter brigade"

One guess as to who gets her SEVENTH boob job done today (or was it seven guesses as to who gets her FIRST boob job today? I forget):

Can I ask how he broke his leg and how bad the fracture was and what stage of rehabilitation is he at?

Also you say he is barely literate so a manuel job should be his first point of call job wise, not least to get him into the routine and structure which breads confidence and independence at the same time, Rather then computer knowledge (which will and should come later).

Stan on them courses they have to do computer courses so as to put a CV and covering letter together to find work.

They havent changed one bit from the 80/90s , just roll them out under a different name.

Get Tristram Hunt to help him out, after all, he has a decent private educashun, so the job applicashun thingy shouldn't be a problem.

c.

To be self employed on the minimum wage is a non starter, the running costs and paper demands alone will defeat him.

And that's if he can get 40 hours a week. Sounds doubtfull.

pretty much right sticky

fracture was appalling and arguably the guy should have been done for ABH
however, it was in sunday league football so independent witnesses and stuff that would stand up in court not available

========

max - it was a potential opening found for him by the job centre i think, or however these things work

I see on the news we have another polish murderer on the run
as we know the polish gov let all criminals out of prison if they left the country
now we have the murderers on our streets

So much for twitter!

Conservatives lead at 1

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 26th November -

Con 33%, Lab 32%, LD 6%, UKIP 16%;

Brown was a better chancellor than Osborne is now, poll finds
NOVEMBER 26, 2014 9:52 AM

http://labourlist.org/2014/11/brown-was-a-better-chancellor-than-osborne-is-now-poll-finds/