Is school funding at a record high in 2024?
The Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan recently claimed that school funding was at a record high. She claimed that schools were being funded at the level of £60 billion a year, the highest per-pupil figure in history.
However this is not accurate, according to a recent episode of More or Less on Radio 4.
According to Luke Sibieta, research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies…
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Why is the clear up rate for crime in the UK so low...?
Only one in 20 offenders now get charged, according to a recent BBC Panorama documentary: Will my Crime get Solved…? For burglaries, only 4% of home burglars are charged.
And in 39% of crimes police fail altogether to identify a suspect.
The documentary does the ususual job of combining case studies and interviews with experts who drill down into the statistics.
The case studies are with…
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Should we control children's use of mobile phones more?
The Department for Education recently revealed new guidelines on ‘banning’ mobile phones from classrooms across England.
The D of E points out that by the age of 12, 97% of children have their own mobile phones. These can potentially cause students to get distracted from learning. Worse, they can facilitate harassment, sexual abuse and bullying in and outside of school.
The guidelines present…
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Are British students being 'pushed out' by foreign students?
A recent investigation conducted by the Sunday Times found that international students were being offered places at British University with much lower grades than British students.
However, on reading the article beneath the headline we quickly discover that the international students were being recruited onto one year foundation courses while the British students were being recruited onto…
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81% of young adults are furious, frustrated or angry about house prices
In 1980 50% of young adults aged between 18-34 owned their own homes.
Today only 20% of young adults live in their own homes. (1)
This is because of increasing house prices. In the 1980s the average house price was 4 times the average wage. Today the average house price is eight times the national wage.
It now takes 13 years on average to save for a deposit on a property. Assuming you start at…
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Is banning prayers in school discriminatory?
Michaela Secondary School and Sixth Form lead by Katherine Birbalsingh is openly secular. It is also the BEST school in the country. It has ranked number 1 for Progress 8 in the last two years. It gets better GCSE results than many private schools despite having 25% of its pupils on Free School Meals.
For eight years they had no prayers in school, and provided no prayer rooms for pupils, making…
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Kweku Adoboli... From Rogue Trader to Critique of the Banking System...
Kweku Adoboli was convicted in 2013 of the largest fraud in British history. While working for UBC bank as a trader he disguised the amount of risk his trades were exposing the bank to by creating fake hedging trades which could have minimised losses.
He ended up losing the bank £2.3 billion, plead guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2013.
He served 3.5 years, and then…
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The North South Divide in Education
There is a clear north-south divide in education: children who live in the north of England are more likely to live in poverty and be absent from school, both of which are correlated with lower educational achievement.
This is according to a recent report published in 2021 called ‘Child of the North‘.
Child of the North: Key Findings
27% of children who live in the North of England live in…
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Should Trans People have Equal Rights?
Should Trans People have Equal Rights Purely on the basis of their self-declared gender?
This issue came up recently in January 2024 in the case of Rachel Meade versus Westminster Council.
Rachel Meade is a social worker who works for Westminster Council. She recently posted content on Facebook which criticised the idea that society should just accept trans’ people’s self-declarations of their…
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Michelle Mone, and the PPE Rip-off: A Rare overt example of the extractivist attitude of the elite..?
During Lockdown in 2020 Baroness Mone used her contacts to help set up a contract to provide PPE equipment worth £220 million between the Department of Health and a newly founded company established by her husband, PPE Medpro.
The company provided gowns for the astronomical sum of £120 million, but they were unusable, and Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, made a profit of £60…
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Is progressive education the cause of declining education standards?
The latest PISA data, published on 5th December 2023, shows that Scottish education standards have dropped between 2018 to 2022. The downward trend in the standards of Scottish education, as measured by the PISA tests, mirrors trends in Scandinavian countries, France and Quebec.
What all of these countries have in common is the introduction of progressive education models.
In progressive…
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From fear of crime to a general concern about safety and security
The British public today are not so much concerned about crime in the classic sense of the word. They aren’t so worried about being victims of burglary, or theft, or street violence for example.
People today are less concerned about their chances of being a victim of formally defined crimes. People are more concerned about a broader and more general range of social problems which more subtly…
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Why did girls' mental health deteriorated during lockdown?
The number of girls and young women reporting eating disorders and self-harming were significantly higher than expected during lockdown. In contrast, the number of boys reporting these psychosocial disorders was lower than expected during this period.
This is based on recent analysis of the medical records of 1.9 million females and 1.4 million males from over 1800 GPs, conducted between March…
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Police and Policing in the U.K.
The police have legal sanctions and are able to use legitimate force to control crime and deviance. Policing embodies the quest for general and stratified order, from parking tickets to class repression. The police are the people who the public turn to when they feel something ought to not be happening, and that someone better do something about it now!
Definitions of the police and policing
It…
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The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing
The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) is a scientific examination of how the population of England is ageing from a multidisciplinary perspective.
ELSA explores how a number of factors such as income, wealth, social inequalities, past life experiences, work, spending patterns, physical and mental health and well being are all related through the ageing process.
The study has been…
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Radical Criminology, aka New or Critical Criminology
Radical, new or critical criminologies of the late 1960s and 1970s had their basis in Marxism, Libertarianism, anarchism or American populism.
They sought to understand crime control by referring to power, politics and inequalities and emphasised the need for political activism or praxis.
Chambliss (1976, Box 1983) saw crime control as an oppressive and mystifying force. Legislation and law…
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How many people are destitute in the UK?
3.8 million people in the United Kingdom experienced destitution in 2022, including 1 million children. This is according to the Destitution in the UK report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The number of people experiencing destitution has increased by two and half times since 2017. Three times as many children experienced destitution in 2022 compared to 2017.
According to the Joseph…
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