Useless and Rotten degrees

A bit of a spat about the quality of UK university degrees. Peter Williams of the Quality Assurance Agency says
"The way that degrees are classified is a rotten system."

Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University (the UK's only private university), begs to differ. He would do, though, wouldn't he? It's obvious he's never had to teach or mark students' work.

Oustanding Schools on Government Hit List

This is a government in complete disarray. It doesn't know what it's doing, cannot organise itself and yet continues to come out with ill-conceived, untested policies.

Hence the fact that having announced that it would name and shame 'failing' secondary schools, threatening them with closure and privatisation (working with 'sponsors', as Ed Ball-Brains call it) it now appears that about a quarter of these schools have been rated very good by Ofsted.

Read about it here.

Watch video report with Ed Ball-Brains here.

And listen to the Today programme excerpt here.

More Bilge From Bottler Brown And His Mates

Calibrating compassion: it seems the government believes there is absolutely nothing in life that cannot be measured and rated and turned into figures for their authoritarian regime. Even nurses are to be rated on their compassion.

Labour has confirmed that it will not field a candidate against David Davis in the forthcoming by-election. All Brown had to do was put up a candidate with strong pro-42-day-detention views and see how popular his legislation actually was. But, as usual, he's bottled out of it.

Deprived as we may have been on a referendum about the Lisbon Constitution (sorry, Treaty), we can nevertheless sign a petition.

David Davis; Grade Deflation; Lost Data

More for the govt to worry about (or ignore, which seems to be their standard mode of operation).

David Davis has a website, plus a Twitter link: David Davis For Freedom. It comes to something when you find yourself agreeing wholeheartedly with a Tory. Will the useless British media allow any proper discussion of these matters to happen?

And at the same time the govt manage to buy its way through to passing its disgraceful 42 day detention bill (security, security, security), news of more lost data (security data).

More evidence of the degradation of the education system in the UK. Firstly, the gradual return of O-levels under a new guise. More than 250 private schools have already ditched GCSEs and state schools are also now looking for an alternative. GCSEs are obviously real good, then, innit?

Secondly, the grade inflation rife in UK universities.

And thirdly, Imperial College London are to extend their undergraduate degree courses by one year because students have not been given the basic skills at A-level. That could be done with Humanities subjects as well. We now have the situation in universities in which English students cannot write English, Maths students cannot do basic arithmetic and Architecture students cannot draw. The govt, however, think this is fine.