Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Gups]

So I looked into it and that chart's not super clear it's around 70% and peaked at 75%.

Overall attainment of 5 GCSEs (inc English and maths) is around 75-80%. But it is a little difficult to measure across time now as we've moved from A*-F to a number based system and I'm not sure what it really means - it looks like different statistics are measuring grade 4 and above v grade 5 and above. So it's not totally clear to me where a "pass" is in the new money.

4 is a pass.

[Josquius]

Why would it control for location?

It's usually the explanation  for this kind of variation based on race.
The thing the far right love about white boys having such low attainment for instance - thats because it's looking at them nationwide, including the coastal towns, ex industrial wastes, and so on, whilst immigrants obviously don't immigrate to those places in large numbers leaving them 99% white.
Compare the native  kids to the immigrant kids within individual areas and you get a far more accurate picture - maybe there still is an immigrant boost, but at least there you've controlled for other factors that might give this appearance.

[Sheilbh]

It's usually the explanation  for this kind of variation based on race.
The thing the far right love about white boys having such low attainment for instance - thats because it's looking at them nationwide, including the coastal towns, ex industrial wastes, and so on, whilst immigrants obviously don't immigrate to those places in large numbers leaving them 99% white.
Compare the native  kids to the immigrant kids within individual areas and you get a far more accurate picture - maybe there still is an immigrant boost, but at least there you've controlled for other factors that might give this appearance.

Sure. But I'm not sure why that would be relevant in relation to PISA or educational attainment measures and need controlling for? It seems to me more like an explanation than something that needs controlling for, no?

For what it's worth the same broadly shows up in London, white British kids have a lower attainment than kids Chinese, Asian and other minority ethnic heritage and about the same as mixed race kids - but better than black British kids (although again I think there's a split between Caribbean and African heritage). Although that is ethnicity which isn't necessarily first or second generation immigrant - especially I imagine for black Caribbean kids.

An indicator that is also relevant on immigration the same in London as elsewhere is that kids who have a language other than English as their first language tend to better than kids who have English as their first language (which makes sense to me).

Separately and specifically on Scotland - worth noting that Scotland also has lower numbers of working class kids going to university. In part because they decided not to do tuition fees, which are too high in England, but also fund grants for poorer kids - and means the sector gets less money and has expanded less so there's a stricter cap on places. It's basically turned into a bung for the middle class (like a lot of signature SNP policies). Again if I was living in Scotland and looking at how important education was in the 90s/00s when I lived there and there was real pride in having the best education system in the UK, I would be furious at the SNP's record in the last 15 years. Also worth noting it's not clearly something to do with spending:


Interesting piece from an education academic who has been a long-standing critic of the SNP's new curriculum - and more broadly on the knowledge v skills debate (where England went in very strongly on knkowledge and Scotland very strongly on skills). My understanding is that there is a lot of research which backs this academic's view but it is counter-intuitive for a lot of the public:

PISA 2022 in Scotland: declining attainment and growing social inequality – Lindsay Paterson
    05 December 2023

The headlines for Scottish education from the latest round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are dismaying. In all three subject areas covered by PISA, the scores of Scottish 15-year-olds declined between 2018 and 2022. The drop was 18 points in mathematics, 11 points in reading, and 7 points in science. A change of 20 points is approximately equivalent to one year of mid-secondary schooling. So these falls correspond to nearly a year in mathematics, over six months in reading, and a term in science.

The explanation might seem to be the disruption caused by Covid. Attainment fell in most countries, and so Scotland's problems are certainly not unique. But that is nowhere near to being the whole reason for decline. Doubts are raised about the Covid explanation by Andreas Schleicher, director of the PISA studies, in a detailed analysis of the global data (available on the PISA web pages). Not all countries did show a fall. For example, attainment rose in Japan and Korea in all three domains, and rose in two of the three in several others, for example Singapore, Italy and Israel. In fact, there was only a weak overall relationship between countries' change in score and the extent of their school closures during the Covid period.

Of most relevance to the Scottish explanation, however, is Schleicher's further point – that attainment was declining long before Covid, and that Covid merely gave it an extra downward push. That is certainly true of Scotland, as is well known. Scottish attainment fell from early in the century to the middle of the first decade, stabilised for a few years, and then, from 2012, started a steady decline which was unmitigated except for a brief rise in reading in 2018 (which was wiped out by the 2022 fall).

As a result, over the whole decade from 2012 to 2022, the Scottish decline was equivalent to about 16 months of schooling in mathematics, 8 months in reading, and 18 months in science. The baseline of 2012 is significant because it is the first PISA group to have any experience of the Curriculum for Excellence after it was officially inaugurated in 2010. Thus the decline started to become noticeable at the moment when the new curriculum started to impinge systematically on children's learning. The 2022 group was the first to have all 10 years of their schooling with the new curriculum, and attainment has never been so low as it is now.

That the loss over the decade was greatest for science, next for mathematics, and least for reading is consistent with one of the main criticisms of the new curriculum, that it neglects knowledge of the kind that students can obtain only from expert teachers. To some extent reading can be taught by parents, but fewer parents are likely to remember enough mathematics to teach their children beyond the end-of-primary stage. Science knowledge is even rarer, and in any case learning science needs access to specialist equipment.

This interpretation of the impact of the curriculum on students' knowledge is reinforced by two further aspects of the 2022 data, both relating to inequality of attainment. The first is the difference between students at the 10th and 90th percentiles of attainment in each domain. Table 1 shows the score at each of these points between 2012 and 2022. In reading there was barely any fall at the 90th percentile between 2018 and 2022, and in fact a rise of 9 points from 2012. At the 10th percentile, by contrast, there was a fall of 22 points from 2018 and 33 from 2012.

A similar contrast is evident for mathematics and science. In mathematics, the fall from 2012 to 2022 was 16 at the 90th percentile but 36 at the 10th. In science, the corresponding falls were 13 and 47. The contrast between the two percentiles is thus, again, greatest for science, next for mathematics, and lowest for reading. For all three domains, an analogous but weaker form of this contrast was found in the middle of the distribution of attainment (not shown in the table), the decline being greater at the 25th percentile than at the 75th.
Table 1: Scottish results in the PISA studies, at 10th and 90th percentiles in each domain, 2012-2022
Sources: PISA data bases (2012-2018), and pp. 358, 360 and 362 of Vol 1 of OECD report on PISA 2022.


It may be inferred from this that the decline most affected students who are weakest academically, and thus are most dependent on the formal teaching of schools. Weaker learners depend more on formal, structured teaching than do stronger learners. That has been one of the critiques of skills-based curricula since the 1970s, and would certainly appear to be applicable to the Curriculum for Excellence.

A further contrast along similar lines is in the changing social inequality of attainment, shown in Table 2. Social inequality is measured in the PISA studies by an index of 'economic, social, and cultural capital'. The PISA reports compare mean attainment in each of the four quarters of this index. The table shows the trajectory in this from 2012 to 2022.

Table 2: Scottish results in the PISA studies, in lowest and highest quarters of the index of economic, social, and cultural capital, 2012-2022

Sources: PISA data bases (2012-2018), and online supplementary data for 2022 at https://stat.link/ax46rt.

In reading, inequality rose between 2012 and 2022 because the score in the lowest-status group fell twice as fast (a drop of 20 points) as in the highest-status group (a drop of 10). The change of inequality for the other two domains is somewhat stronger. In mathematics, the contrast is between a fall of 38 points in the lowest-status students and 25 for the highest-status. In science, it is 39 and 29. Again, the contrast between the middle two quarters of social status (not shown in the table) is a weaker version of these comparisons of the lowest and highest.

The speculative explanation is then that students with the least economic, cultural and social capital from home are most dependent on gaining access to these through the school curriculum. These are less available from a curriculum that places less emphasis on knowledge than on skills and on well-being – such as Curriculum for Excellence.

So a plausible explanation of the widening inequality is the curriculum. This widening is not merely between 2018 and 2022, but stretches right back to 2012. Curricula that do not concentrate on formal knowledge are particularly unhelpful to academically weak students and to students who come from homes where that knowledge is not readily available. The school curriculum is not so indispensable for able students, and for students from affluent homes where the parents themselves have abundant formal education.

Many writers have suggested this egalitarian potential of a curriculum based on knowledge. It can narrow social and academic inequalities in student understanding. Well-known examples in England are Daisy Christodoulou and David Didau. In Scotland, Bruce Robertson – rector of Berwickshire High School – has argued in his Teaching Delusion series of books that knowledge is empowering.

When the distinguished American sociologist E. D. Hirsch noted the widening educational inequalities in France after its move away from a knowledge-based curriculum in the three decades from the mid-1980s, he concluded this in his Why Knowledge Matters:

"If students gain the knowledge and vocabulary of the public sphere, they will score well. ... If accidents of birth have excluded that knowledge from the home environment, and if the school does not supply it, then they will score badly."

After the shock of these new PISA results, Scottish policy makers ought to take note.

Lindsay Paterson is emeritus professor of education policy at Edinburgh University.

[Tamas]

I know the pitfalls of trying to go by comment sections but this is kind of what I mean/feel that Starmer was right to hold his ground on the "save Hamas, order a ceasefire!" demands.

There's this article on the Guardian with oddly comments left open:

How do young Britons see the massacre in Gaza? These Luton students will tell you
For many people under 25, opposing Israel's brutal onslaught has become their generation's rallying cause

Then in the comment section there's a Guardian pin on two comments wholeheartedly supporting the article. You got to the full list of comments and you see on the top (for number of upvotes) overwhelming numbers for comments highlighting the hypocrisy of ignoring Hamas etc. in other word going straight against the line pushed by most Guardian articles. (next to this article is an opinion piece titled: "Islamophobia and antisemitism are equal scourges – and the EU is finally recognising that" by Shada Islam)

[Tamas]

This feels related to the Biden thread, the UK right is just the meagre little brother of the US one:

Rishi Sunak claims new Rwanda asylum bill will prevent legal challenges
Prime minister holds emergency press conference to try to regain control over immigration debate as Tory rebellion grows

[Sheilbh]

I mean it won't happen for multiple reasons - but the whole thing is also just another example of why I think Sunak isn't actually very good at politics.

[Tamas]

I mean it won't happen for multiple reasons - but the whole thing is also just another example of why I think Sunak isn't actually very good at politics.

Yes but what I meant is them being shill cruel panickmonger pricks, except that they are luckily less efficient with it than the GOP. Then again I guess they have full control over the British state which the GOP lacks over the US one.

[Josquius]

Sure. But I'm not sure why that would be relevant in relation to PISA or educational attainment measures and need controlling for? It seems to me more like an explanation than something that needs controlling for, no?

For what it's worth the same broadly shows up in London, white British kids have a lower attainment than kids Chinese, Asian and other minority ethnic heritage and about the same as mixed race kids - but better than black British kids (although again I think there's a split between Caribbean and African heritage). Although that is ethnicity which isn't necessarily first or second generation immigrant - especially I imagine for black Caribbean kids.

An indicator that is also relevant on immigration the same in London as elsewhere is that kids who have a language other than English as their first language tend to better than kids who have English as their first language (which makes sense to me).

Separately and specifically on Scotland - worth noting that Scotland also has lower numbers of working class kids going to university. In part because they decided not to do tuition fees, which are too high in England, but also fund grants for poorer kids - and means the sector gets less money and has expanded less so there's a stricter cap on places. It's basically turned into a bung for the middle class (like a lot of signature SNP policies). Again if I was living in Scotland and looking at how important education was in the 90s/00s when I lived there and there was real pride in having the best education system in the UK, I would be furious at the SNP's record in the last 15 years. Also worth noting it's not clearly something to do with spending:


Interesting piece from an education academic who has been a long-standing critic of the SNP's new curriculum - and more broadly on the knowledge v skills debate (where England went in very strongly on knkowledge and Scotland very strongly on skills). My understanding is that there is a lot of research which backs this academic's view but it is counter-intuitive for a lot of the public:

Surely the problem here is they're measuring a decline in test scores for a curriculum which doesn't see test scores as the most important thing?
This piece is missing the point of the different curriculum?

I have very little knowledge or specific interest in the Scottish education system so maybe it is bad anyway. But this is a pretty terrible way to try and show it.

Separately, I will say its nice that there seem to be signs of there being extra support for the talented kids in the national results.  This was always my problem at school. So much help and support for those really struggling to try and scrape them up to getting a GCSE or two (grade D most likely) whilst for anyone better than that...quite ignored. You'd be fine. No help to try and be better than fine.

[Gups]

I mean it won't happen for multiple reasons - but the whole thing is also just another example of why I think Sunak isn't actually very good at politics.

Yes but what I meant is them being shill cruel panickmonger pricks, except that they are luckily less efficient with it than the GOP. Then again I guess they have full control over the British state which the GOP lacks over the US one.

The Supreme Court begs to differ

[Sheilbh]

PISA isn't a test that you are aiming for. It runs on a three year cycle, is a representative sample of kids at a certain age in participating countries who complete some tests and respond to some questionnaires. That's then used to get the score which is broken down - so, for example, English schools are performing much better on mathematical reasoning than they did a decade ago so it's not just rote learning.

Scotland has seen a decline in those surveys since the mid-2000s in numeracy and literacy. I think a curriculum that is delivering that is not fit for purpose, particularly if it's working as intended - and particularly given that it seems to be delivering even worse results for kids the poorer they are.

Again, obviously DfE are boasting about this, but this is impressive and will have an impact on the lives of kids:


The main reason Scotland (and Wales) is of interest is because of the point Iain Martin made in the Times yesterday. England has been on a process of education reform for about 30 years - it started under the Tories in the late 80s, was picked up by New Labour, then the coalition and the Tories again but all broadly in a similar direction. And it's worked. Scotland has rejected that reform agenda and also opted for an alternative curriculum model (in a big education policy debate over curriculum models) and have demonstrably worse results over the same survey that's conducted every three years over that period.

It is also of personal interest to me because I grew up in Scotland and education was a point of pride growing up. Both that it was better and more equitable than in England - and it's a real shame to see that unravel in the last 10-15 years.

Yes but what I meant is them being shill cruel panickmonger pricks, except that they are luckily less efficient with it than the GOP. Then again I guess they have full control over the British state which the GOP lacks over the US one.

But I think that's sort of the point, no? That actual despite all the theoretical powers of a British executive - which are unbridled. In reality, they're not. I think over the last few years the main shock for me has been the lack of knowledge among political pundits and commentators about how our constitution works.

In this case parliament absolutely can (and has in the past) passed laws that have "deeming clauses" that basically say the state considers x to be prima facie factual, and ouster clauses that say the courts have no jurisdiction. Of course the courts will decide how to interpret those clauses - broadly speaking the more, for want of a better word, outrageous a government/parliament wants to be, the more the couts will need them to explicitly spell it out.

But even that assumes they can pass this law legislation - and they can't.

[Josquius]

The main point against PISA rankings in my book is if you look at which nations do well you see it tends to be dominated by China, Japan, et al. These are absolutely not nations with education systems to emulate.
Its arguable tests have a valid role to play in education, but I don't think you'd find many who disagree that East Asia takes it way too far.

[Tamas]

BREXIT DIVIDEND:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/08/part-time-and-shift-workers-to-lose-up-to-248m-holiday-pay-in-uk-rule-change

[Sheilbh]

Now obviously this is Ireland - which will have a very different system etc. But on English speaking countries having problems with developments and housing This is maybe the argument against GF's just bribe them theory...

'Serial' objectors blocking housing plans to extract money from developers
Mon, 04 Dec, 2023 - 08:03
Sally Gorman

Two brothers, operating as environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs), are systematically objecting to planning applications in order to extract money from developers, an RTÉ documentary will reveal on Monday night.

The two brothers, who have gained a reputation as "serial objectors", have lodged multiple objections to residential and commercial developments across the country, and as a result, multimillion euro projects have been put on hold.

RTÉ Investigates: The Property Trap will follow the journey of several developers who have come up against these men and found themselves out of time, out of options and out of pocket.

In November 2022, developer David Hogan was granted planning permission to build 74 houses, allowing him to expand his development Watergrasshill in Co Cork, where there is big demand for such starter homes.

The brothers submitted an appeal under the name of an environmental group called An Lucht Inbhuanaithe, "The Sustainable People."  Mr Hogan had concerns about the group's motivations.

At a meeting with one of the brothers, Mr Hogan tried to address the environmental issues raised in the appeal but the conversation turned from environmental concerns to money. 

Mr Hogan said one of the men told him: "In the event of the appeal being withdrawn, what about my costs? 

"And he says, if you have a proposal to make, I will be happy to listen.

"I had said to him that I would wait, I could afford to wait. And he kind of leaned in towards me and he said, well, you're in a lot better position than most of the guys I'm dealing with."

It is now almost 11 months since his planning permission to build 74 houses in Cork was appealed by the two men.

Mr Hogan has plenty of potential buyers for his development, but he is continuing to refuse to pay the two men to withdraw their appeal, so he must wait for the planning appeals board to adjudicate on the case.

In another case, a developer paid them, and was also asked by them for sites in that development, in return for them withdrawing their appeal against a significant residential development.

The agreement gives one of the men an option to buy sites in the housing development for just €1,000 each when the sites were considered to be worth up to €50,000 each at the time. 

The documentary will show how the men were paid more than €50,000 in return for a planning appeal being withdrawn.

Since 2000, An Bord Pleanála also has the power to dismiss financially motivated appeals.

However, according to Freedom of Information requests, there has not been a single appeal dismissed on these grounds.

The two brothers have been increasingly prolific in submitting planning objections to housing and commercial developments around the country.

These objections have been described as mischievous and financially motivated by several planning experts.

The brothers frequently describe themselves as environmental consultants with NGOs which are typically not-for-profit advocacy groups although, RTÉ Investigates could find no record of them being registered with the charities regulator or the companies registration office. Nor could they find any online presence explaining the group's goals.

As there are no state regulations for NGOs at present, there is no obligation for them to do any of these things. 

Sadhbh O'Neill, Environmental Lecturer & Activist said: "What makes me so angry is that I know all the organisations that I've worked with who put so much time and effort and voluntary hours into building their organisations, establishing codes of governance and practise, and complying with all of those rules in order to be able to present themselves as legitimate environmental organisations representing the public interest. And these individuals claim to have environmental concerns, but these are clearly nothing to do with what's going on."

Watch RTÉ Investigates: The Property Trap tonight at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.

Separately interesting thread on carbon of demolition:
https://x.com/zoeavison/status/1732873175900254651?s=20

Edit: Also I feel like we've really fucked ourselves when there's corruption in stopping things being built

[Josquius]

I guess good news this is being reported on. Hopefully it blows up and uncovers this is widespread across the UK&Ireland.

As yeah. Ireland has it worse than the UK even. And ridiculously so as it has so much more developable space.

As I said recently Dublin has more the feel of a provincial British city than a European capital. I wonder if there's some way sensible Irish people can kick their idiots into gear with this observation (assuming it's not just me)

[Grey Fox]

  

However that's not NIMYBism public opinion stopping elected or appointed boards from authorizing housings and other improvements. Which, to me, seems to be the regular UK opposition.