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.

I agree Fred, the comment section frequently is the best part of the articles.

FREE SCHOOLS
one for freddy i'm sure ......
always assuming that these schools meet standards, what can be the legitimate objection to them?

there are two in my area that i know about
one is all-ability co-educational day and boarding school for students aged 11 – 19 years with 6th-form intake to follow

the other is "special needs"

Manuel,

My grandson goes to a grammar school, which is constantly having its "state" funding reduced and is funded more and more by the parents directly and by various Parent Organisations and various fund raising ideas they have. It is in a reasonably affluent area.

It seems very good and certainly well run and caters for his needs and his parents expectations up to now. (I have some questions over its methods of financing and because of catchment area and selection process it draws from those of “advantaged” areas educationally “wise” parents. Probably and unfortunately, this is done at the expense of the children of less well informed parents and is producing less well-maintained schools in the area.)

As you would expect I am a less than enthusiastic about free schools, but if fully self-funding would not preclude them from the education system, as long as the levels of performance are at, or better than a defined National Standard of Expectancy for the various years and pupils are taught the basic national curriculum.

(I would preclude religious education.)

If they were set up from "private" money and not accepting or receiving any state funding out of taxation and "charities" I would still regulate them by frequent inspection and overseeing of their standards and activities by regular examinations of results.

From listening to my daughters, education in some areas of the country seems to be in chaos. The chaos can in my “opinion” be traced back to the Shirley Williams’ and her race to “comprehensive education” with the “comprehensive schools” being made up from various schools on various sites under one new management of a single head master with no previous test out knowledge of what they were undertaking.

Also, standards varied across those grouped schools and expectation and abilities of staff and pupils varied tremendously. They weren't coordinated for years.

Chaos reigned in many of these schools.

The policy might have been right, but its introduction was rushed on political ideology, just like Cameron and his crony Gove are attempting to do. (Once again, change being carried out on unproven ideology.)

Also, I see the motivation of Cameron is an attempt to removed the responsibility and funding from central government to local government. ( Strange that it this is opposite to the Thatcher period, when everything was centralised.)

I wonder why the responsibility and funding is being changed. Perhaps, one can see why he is being called Dodgy Dave.

Just as with the Health Service he is pushing for more and more “privatisation” of education, which he thinks will advantage himself and those of his own ilk.

i confess i don't know how "free schools" are funded
for sure they get a proportion of state funding and are also classed as charities - to neither of which do i have any objection
i assume, but do not know for sure, that most of not all the initial set-up costs (and part of the everyday running?) come from private sources and/or company sponsorship

the "all-abilities" school that i mentioned looks fantastic and how can one be against the setting up of a "special needs" school when these are in such short supply?

I refer the question back to you.

Why are they in such short supply?

"free schools"?
presumably because they require a strong and highly motivated driver

Are you one of the awkward squad?

and how can one be against the setting up of a "special needs" school when these are in such short supply?

I would have thought "such schools" to be the norm for a country which has the 5th biggest global economy aspires to have a decent society.

I forgot tax cuts are more important.

oh stop being so pathetic!

from the bit i have now managed to find, certainly the "all-abilities" school that i'd heard about was intrinsically privately funded and sponsored .....
"at least 20 per cent of entrants must be eligible for the pupil premium, a government subsidy for poorer children. Others will be drawn from the surrounding area based on geographical proximity, rather than academic ability" .....
"those who can afford to pay will help to subsidise bursary places for those who cannot"

i'm sure that other "free schools" will have different formulae, though i dare say there are many similarities

Ed Miliband's absurd TV debate law reveals his totalitarian instincts
What kind of politician demands people dance to his tune and seeks to criminalise those who won't? Only one who cannot conceive that anyone would honestly oppose him


By Graeme Archer9:43AM GMT 09 Mar 2015Comments775 Comments
If you don't read this, you are in breach of the criminal law, and will be prosecuted to the full extent of that law. It's a new law (keep up), my own invention.
You see, I only want the best for you, the British people, the hardworking ordinary British people, the hardworking, ordinary, decent British people, who want to participate in the democratic process and who tire of the injustice and toff-inequality that holds this great country of ours back.
What do you mean, you don't like reading my stuff? But I'm contributing to democratic debate. Don't you support democracy? Only the unreasonable or the prejudiced or the mentally ill could find fault with either the spirit or the intent of the Read Graeme Archer provision in my new Political Processes (I am One with the Nation) Bill.
You have been warned. Now get reading.


I don't come to mock Ed Miliband's shiny new TV-Debate-or-Prison law, though it deserves mockery, as much as does its author.
More than mockery is required, because Miliband's proposal is so much worse than buffoonery. It's a revealing slip, the more so because I doubt the Labour leader has the psychological machinery to comprehend why his proposal found few supporters, other than among the robo-human replicants supplied by Len McCluskey to stand in place of actual Labour candidates around the country (sorry, "this great nation of ours"). It's that psychological deficit which is so politically fatal.
Because what sort of person says, "your free choices do not align with my own desires, and so I will make you a criminal"? What kind of politician restricts the degrees of human freedom so casually, merely in order to curry favour with powerful sectional (but not democratic) interests such as trade unions or broadcasters?

Would it be the sort of politician who cares so little for the truth that he creates language which moulds the world as he'd like, rather than the one we actually inhabit? (There is no "bedroom tax." This seems like a small thing to those who campaign against welfare reform, but it is not a small thing. It's as huge as Mr Miliband's desire to criminalise his opponents). What do you call a politician who abuses language in order to deceive?
Well, a "liar", yes. Just as you'd call the pusher of a TV debate law a "buffoon". But "liar" and "buffoon", while necessary to describe the Miliband approach to politics, still aren't sufficient.
The word we're missing is "dangerous". Totalitarianism comes in many forms. It's not all faceless foreign dictators moving tanks against borders while starving and shooting their internal dissidents. Sometimes it can appear domestic, part of the British furniture. It can look like a gormless little millionaire from Hampstead, someone who uses that gormlessness to disarm his critics: if he can't even consume a sandwich without looking like a fool, what damage could he do to our open, free society?

I begin to suspect the gormlessness is an act. You don't gormlessly sacrifice your brother to your own desires, after all.
Of course Mr Miliband isn't sufficiently competent to be Prime Minister; of course his party would wind Britain back to 2008 before you could say "they killed my pension. Again."
But these are not the principal reasons to vote anti-Labour on May 7. The principal reason is that Miliband would criminalise you as soon as look at you, and would do so for no other reason than that he cannot conceive that his thoughts or intentions could ever be wrong.
And if you think he'd restrict that criminalising tendency to his Tory opponent in a general election - well, gormlessness isn't a characteristic unique to millionaires from Hampstead.

Check again!

"and how can one be against the setting up of a "special needs" school when these are in such short supply?"


And also check why they are in short supply.

Serious spelling mistake noticed in post no.57373.

Soccer is splet like this... Football -):

irrelevant, but because successive gov'ts have pissed around with education in general (and nhs as it happens)

much more importantly, stop trying to belittle the fact that private initiative has created good quality educational establishments
that must really stick in your throat

your next predictable lines will be to moan and groan and whinge that they are classified as charities (and why not indeed?) and also get a certain amount of gov't funding (and why not indeed?)

Are you on the hard stuff?

Check what I wrote and stop blustering!

Try and utilise the fewer grey cells you have as the number you have are decreasing everyday.

In your case seemingly quite quickly!


I can't help it if your icon Dodgy Dave is wetting himself!

Fred is sounding more and more like his gormless hero Wallace Millibandus.

"Check what I wrote or I'll make it law" Fxxk off it's your usual twisted left wing shite!

Why you bother to converse with this moron is beyond me cynic. Just leave him to it everybody else does. :0)

any one who believes in a god must be a simpleton their is no god no higher supreme god nothing we are a freak of nature and has now been proven that we all came from monkeys .
god is a fairy tale for children like father Christmas . the people who want to believe in god are people who are scared of life.

not one person has ever come back from the dead .
and their is no proof of a god
religion was dreamt up by people thousands of years ago thinking the earth was flat
and if you walked to the end you would fall off
get a life and live and die

Don't worry Manuel he is not looking after you.

Ozzie has the back stabbing long knife in his other pocket.

Max,

I think the English cricket team must have had a pep talk in the dressing room by Dodgy Dave Cameron before going out to play.

He is leading the lemmings like Manuel over the cliff.

Probably out of despair.

from earlier ......
fred's standard default defense is "go back and read what i wrote"
of course one knows perfectly well what he wrote, but default comes into play when fred doesn't like the response