Tag Archives: education

Hunt’s Budget cold-shoulders society’s poorest, says disability organisation

Jeremy Hunt’s Budget failed to offer support to millions of disabled people, despite mountains of evidence on their economic and social hardship, according to Disability Rights UK.

Perhaps he hadn’t been lobbied for it by Conservative MPs who had in turn been lobbied by groups (possibly of Tory donors).

The only exception – described as “meagre” by the organisation – was a six-month continuation of the Household Support Fund, money that allows local authorities to make discretionary payments to people in need. It is now set to close when next winter starts.

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The Disability Poverty Campaign Group (DPCG), of which Disability Rights UK is a member, had called on the Chancellor to help Disabled citizens struggling with household bills and inadequate social support.

In a statement, the organisation said:

DPCG asked that action was taken to increase social security to meet the essentials of life including food, energy and medication and the extra costs of disability; invest in public services to enable Disabled people to receive health services, educational support, and social care; and to ensure that housing and transport were accessible and affordable.

We were, alongside others representing the poorest and most excluded in society, deeply concerned by the Government’s failure to acknowledge or address growing levels of poverty and to invest in grossly underfunded public services such as social care and educational support to Disabled children and young people.

With the Government set to be questioned by the United Nations on 18 March on its record on achieving equality for Disabled people, this Budget is yet more evidence of its lack of commitment to improving our life chances.

Source: DR UK Statement on Spring Budget: ‘Government Turns its Back on the Poorest in Society’ | Disability Rights UK


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Kwarteng cuts £18 billion from the NHS and schools – to fund his tax cuts for the obscenely rich

The grinning Kwarteng: he’ll be smiling on the other side of his face when the roar of protest against his attack on our health and education reaches him.

Your health and your children’s education are to suffer in order to make the rich richer, Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed.

He didn’t say it in quite that way, of course – but he has announced that public services will lose up to £18 billion per year – and that is a result of his decision to cut taxes for the rich.

He – and prime minister Liz Truss – has claimed the non-existent “trickle-down” effect means these fat cats will spend the extra money into the economy, making other people richer too.

But this is not true. Instead, the money will most likely go to tax havens while you suffer due to the loss.

Here’s what has been announced:

CHANCELLOR Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed that public services face further cuts of up to £18 billion per year.

This comes following his dramatic U-turn on the 45p tax rate.

Budgets will not be topped up in order to take account of soaring inflation, the Chancellor said.

The move has been described by economic experts as one which is likely to have an “extraordinary” impact on the NHS and schools.

Last week, head of the IFS Paul Johnson said: “It is pretty extraordinary. There’s a real problem for schools and hospitals. It’s going to be a real squeeze.”

Paul Johnson isn’t the only one saying there are real problems. Already the social media are filling with outrage:

In terms of the NHS, it’s murder by proxy – if you think about it.

Truss and Kwarteng used the fear that you wouldn’t be able to heat your home as an excuse to bring in changes that mean you may not even be able to afford to live in it.

Then, mindful of the effect of these changes on your health, they are now imposing changes that mean the National Health Service will have to turn you away to die – after you spent years paying for it with your taxes.

Remember: health and education are your right; you have paid for them and the Tories have a contractual obligation to provide them – up to the highest standard.

Kwarteng should be reminded of this. It might make him grin on the other side of his face.

Source: Chancellor confirms cuts of up to £18bn for public services amid economic turmoil

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Jonathan Gullis is an education minister. Is Liz Truss trolling us? [VIDEOS]

Jonathan Gullis: he’s the jeering beardie weirdie behind Boris Johnson’s left shoulder who didn’t feel the need to wear a mask during the Covid-19 crisis.

Liz Truss has appointed Jonathan Gullis – the “House of Commons hooligan”, as Maximilien Robespierre dubs him – as an education minister.

Watch the following to understand why the appellation is appropriate:

Gullis has been drawn to This Writer’s attention once in the past. Feel free to read that article for yourself but if you don’t have the time, take a look at this video clip from it:

And this one:

What a lunatic.

But he’s a lunatic with insane right-wing views about education who has just been appointed to the Education Department.

By Liz Truss. She’s got to be having a giggle – right?

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Why are the Tories letting schools face 200% energy bill price rise?

A class at school: but what will happen to education if this institution has to divert all its resources, simply into paying its heating bill?

It’s as though the energy price rise is being used to drain the UK of all its resources – including education, which is still (mostly) run by the government.

Schools are facing energy price rises of more than 200 per cent – with more to come – and they can’t just turn off the lights or the radiators in rooms that aren’t being used, or take a £400 government subsidy like households.

And schools are also being asked to make pay awards for which the government has provided no extra funding at all.

(And this is the background against which Liz Truss wants to make tax cuts?)

It’s bizarre that the government has allowed this to happen. Look at France, where price increases are capped at four per cent, no matter what; this is a political choice to harm the education of millions of UK children:

Without additional funding, school leaders are warning of redundancies, bigger class sizes and cuts to the curriculum, which they say could damage children’s education for years to come.

Kenneth Baker, who was education secretary from 1986 to 1989, said schools would go into the red without government intervention. “We’re heading into a really ghastly two-year period and it’s going to require remarkable leadership to come out of this smiling,” he said.

Like the funding we need to pay these bills, remarkable leadership is absent from the UK’s current Tory government.

Read the full nightmare scenario: Leading Tories call on new PM to tackle crisis facing schools over soaring costs

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Parents: do you know the Tories are stealing your rights relating to your children’s education?

Vulnerable child: the Tory Schools Bill is likely to harm youngsters who have special educational needs or who are bullied at school.

Are you a parent? If so, how do you feel about the fact that the Tory government is stealing your rights out from under your nose?

It will be nearly impossible to get those rights back if you lose them.

So, for example:

The government plans to change the law to require councils to use their powers to promote regular attendance and reduce absences.  Schools will also be required to publish attendance policies and implement efforts to promote regular attendance.

The education secretary will be allowed to decide what will warrant an absence fine, which is currently set at council level. Current laws on granting absence will be extended to academies. The government wants these changes to come into effect in September 2023.

Also:

The government will legislate to create a duty on councils to keep a register of children not in school. There will also be a duty on parents to provide information to councils for the register.

Out-of-school education providers will be required to provide information to LAs on request. Councils will also have to provide support to registered home-educating families where it’s required.

And:

The government will also legislate to speed up the issuing of school attendance orders, which are issued by councils on behalf of heads to parents or carers of absent pupils. School attendance orders are a precursor to absence fines.

It is not currently against the law for parents who have been issued with an order to withdraw their child from school. This will become a crime under the proposed legislation.

The maximum penalty for breaching an attendance order will increase to a £2,500 fine or up to 3 months’ imprisonment.

You may think those measures seem reasonable. But that would be to ignore the reasons why children avoid school and parents switch to home learning.

This excerpt from a Facebook post may put the situation in its proper context:

Currently in the UK our rights include the right to make sure that our children are recieving a full time education that suits their aptitude, abilities and needs.

One of your legal rights as parents in the UK, is that if your child has SEND or bullying issues at school, you can make the choice to withdraw them to home educate them, send them to another school if you prefer, and you have other routes and choices you can go down. You can visit schools and speak to SEND specialists, all before making your choices. This is just one tiny example.

Under the new bill, if you decide to home educate, you will need to obtain consent from the school your child is registered at. You may then get local authority staff who are not trained in education or SEND, assessing your child’s learning, well-being and development. The local authority will have the power to decide, at a moment’s notice, that your child must return to school, and they may send them to an inadequate school of their choosing, where your child’s needs may not be met, and from which they will not be allowed to be withdrawn by you.

Your rights, as parents, will be removed from you and given to the government. You will no longer have any control over your child’s education.

The Schools Bill is being advertised as a bill only targeting those ‘missing education’. However, if you read the actual document, you may well feel outraged! You do need to read it thoroughly though. To not read it, would mean to blindly accept that the government knows what is best for your child and you do not.

The advice is to read the Schools Bill – you can find it here – then write to your local MP and any local members of the House of Lords, whose job is to hold the government to account, and ask them to oppose the Bill’s ckauses that strip parents of their rights and hand those powers to Tory ministers.

The Facebook post continues:

Do you have a child who is sick or poorly a lot? This bill will affect you.
Do you have a child who has mental health issues and is too anxious or depressed to attend school at times? This bill will affect you.
Have you had a bereavement in the family, and your child wants to attend the funeral or needs some time off to grieve and process things? This bill will affect you.
Do you have a child with undiagnosed or unmet special or additional educational needs? This bill will affect you.
Is your child being severely and persistently bullied or socially ostracized at school, to the extent that it’s affecting their physical health, mental health and well-being? This bill will affect you.
To put it bluntly, if you have a child, this bill will affect you.

Do you want the well-being of your child to be handed to faceless council functionaries performing tick-box exercises for Tory ministers like Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi?

That is what the Tory government is planning – unless you help stop it.

Tories do listen to public opinion. They fear unpopularity – and will act to curb legislation that may lead them to lose their Parliamentary seats; seats which are already in jeopardy because of the loss of Boris Johnson’s credibility.

So, if you’re a parent, it’s up to you. Will you let Nadhim Zahawi walk all over you – and trample any vulnerable child into the asphalt of the playground?

Or will you take action?

Source: Schools bill: The 15 new laws proposed by the DfE

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Chaotic scenes at Education Department as civil servants outnumber desks

Jacob Rees-Mogg, making a gesture that well defines him.

Is this Jacob Rees-Mogg’s comeuppance after he went around leaving nasty notes on empty civil service desks, for them to see after they returned from home working?

In notes left for civil servants, he wrote: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”

Nadhim Zahawi took Rees-Mogg’s demand for a return to the office seriously, and told officials at the Department for Education to “immediately” return to “pre-Covid working” after an audit found that the DfE had the lowest attendance of any Government department, at a quarter capacity.

Well, unless pre-Covid working took place in corridors and canteens, he didn’t get his wish!

It turns out that, before the pandemic, the DfE only had an occupancy rate of 60 to 70 per cent because of the department’s flexible working policy.

And changes to the department’s estate, such as giving up space at the DfE’s London headquarters, has meant there are fewer desks than previously – 4,200 to accommodate 8,009 staff.

So after the department’s top civil servant, permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood, was joined by ministers to tell officials to work 80 per cent of their week in the office, chaos ensued:

Civil servants at the Department for Education have been forced to work in corridors and canteens.

Whole teams have been turned away from some offices because of overcrowding.

According to Schools Week, staff were sent home from the department’s Sheffield office after a mass return earlier this month, despite some staff already working from the canteen.

Online meetings were also forced to take place with staff perched on the end of shared seating because meeting rooms were full.

The Tories have insisted that having more people than desks was the practice at the department.

Were they saying that chaos is supposed to be the practice at the Department for Education and that it was the intended result of Rees-Mogg’s interference. How revealing!

And isn’t it curious that, while DfE staff – and presumably other civil servants – scrabble for desk space, another government department looks set to spend £20 million on a luxury townhouse for a single, privileged representative – so she can hold lavish parties?

Source: Department for Education descends into chaos as civil servants can’t find desks after returning to office

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Good riddance, Gavin! Williamson sacked as Education Secretary

Ooh, don’t have a Betty: Gavin Williamson was dubbed the Frank Spencer of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet due to his ineptitude and lack of intelligence. Worse still, he didn’t have the heart that Michael Crawford gave his comedy character. In fact, let’s face it – Williamson has no redeeming features at all.

England’s education system is (momentarily) stronger with the announcement that Gavin Williamson has been sacked from his post as the minister in charge, as part of a Cabinet reshuffle by Boris Johnson.

His two-year tenure stands as testament to the fact that having no Education Secretary is better than having him in the role.

Incompetent Williamson’s failures are fast becoming the stuff of legend, with the headline disasters well-known to all of us:

In 2020, when A-level students could not take their exams because of Covid-19, he used a algorithm to allocate marks – that was rigged to make it seem that privately-educated pupils were more intelligent than the riff-raff from the state system that he ran.

He later tried to force disadvantaged, black and minority ethnic children in England to take exams when other kids didn’t have to, claiming that they respond better to examination conditions. It seemed clear racism – an attempt to put these children down with duff results.

He made it clear that the government expected all schools to open as normal in January this year – then closed them after just one day because prime minister Boris Johnson ordered a new lockdown and he was unaware of it.

He decided to foist Latin as a subject onto state school pupils, rather than anything useful. At the time I wrote: “Having killed the economy with Brexit and enormous numbers of the population with Covid-19, the Tories now want us all to learn a dead language.”

He scrapped dozens of legal rights for children.

He also wanted a clampdown on indiscipline in schools after the return from Covid-19 lockdown – but provided no evidence whatsoever to support his wild claim that our children had gone feral.

Before Boris Johnson gave him the bullet, it was suggested that Williamson would blame school pupils and parents if Covid-19 infections spike after the start of the school term.

It’s still too early to tell whether that has happened but we will be able to judge his successor by whether they choose to follow the same cowardly strategy.

If Johnson continues to follow his “Cabinet of all the idiots” strategy (he thinks it makes him look like the intelligent one) then our children’s education may be in for an even worse battering.

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Priorities: Tories fail to provide funding for schools to recover from Covid-19 because they want YOUR kids to fail

Gavin Williamson: he could provide the funding needed to help your kids catch up with the education they’ve missed due to the Covid lockdowns – he just doesn’t want to.

Tory priorities in action: they have billions to waste on PPE provision contracts for donors who were never going to be able to provide anything, but they absolutely refuse to spend enough for your kids’ education to recover from the effects of the pandemic.

The gap between what is needed and what they’re offering is apparently so wide that England’s school recovery commissioner (did you even know there was such a person) has resigned in disgust:

The education recovery commissioner for England, Sir Kevan Collins, has resigned in a row over the lack of “credible” Covid catch-up funding.

Sir Kevan took on the role as catch-up tsar in February to develop a long-term plan to help pupils make up for lost learning during the pandemic.

But on Wednesday he stepped down saying the government’s funding for the plan “falls far short of what is needed”.

Head teachers labelled the £1.4bn cash over three years as a “damp squib”.

The Education Policy Institute had calculated that a catch-up funding recovery would need £13.5bn – and Sir Kevan was reported as having put forward plans costing £15bn.

The government’s proposal represents £50 per pupil per year.

The government’s response has been to thank Sir Kevan for his work, and to claim that already £3 billion has been put into helping school pupils catch up.

So that’s an admission that they’re providing less than a third of what is needed.

The tragedy of this is that the government could magic up the cash for this in a heartbeat – but our dunce of an Education Secretary, Gavin “Algorithm” Williamson, together with Boris Johnson himself, simply doesn’t want to.

To explain: governments create money and invest it in the economy wherever their priorities lie. Last year, Johnson created £300 billion to keep the UK ticking over during the Covid lockdowns.

So, if the government really wanted to invest in your child’s education, it would create the money for it and pump it into the education system.

The only conclusion to be had is that the Tories don’t want your child to be properly educated. Why should they? Their children are privately-educated.

Source: School catch-up tsar resigns over lack of funding – BBC News

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This is how governments attack minorities: they cut funding to councils

End SEND cuts: the Tory war on kids with special needs has been going on for years – this image is from 2019.

Your Tory government has targeted youngsters with special needs for persecution.

Oh, it hasn’t announced an attack on kids whose life opportunities are limited by accidents of birth. Oh no. It doesn’t have to.

Instead, it has simply cut funding – creating a shortfall of more than £500 million in the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system.

There’s no need for the cuts. Experience over the last few years has shown us that the government could easily create the money needed and dedicate it to this purpose, if ministers were included to do so.

They are not.

Don’t be surprised. This is just the latest stage of the ongoing Tory war on people with disabilities. Eugenics disguised as economics.

Source: Councils in England facing funding gaps plan to cut special needs support | Special educational needs | The Guardian

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Nothing for you if you’re sick, disabled, at school or in care: reaction to the Tory budget

They all do this: but the way Rishi Sunak held the red box indicated there wasn’t much in it. And there wasn’t.

Rishi Sunak’s budget has shown he is a diehard Tory, with concessions for businesses while those of us in need can go whistle.

He has claimed his hands are tied by huge Covid-19-related debts – but we all know that he has already paid them off, by the simple means of creating the money needed to do so.

And his big plans for the future were pathetic: new ‘free ports’ that have always been a bad idea, and an investment bank to replace the one a previous Tory government sold off a few years ago.

We are ruled by intellectual pygmies – and that is being harsh on the pygmies.

I watched the budget speech and commentated on it on Twitter, so I can provide a first-hand account of the announcements – but first, I’d like to go straight to what wasn’t announced, with comments from people who were reading at the time:

So the people who did all the hard work during the Covid-19 crisis will receive no reward for their sacrifices at all – even though many of them sacrificed their lives, contracting the virus and dying because Matt Hancock couldn’t be bothered to supply proper personal protective equipment (PPE) at the right time.

However:

People with disabilities who did not receive the £20 benefit uplift because they are on so-called “legacy” benefits will still receive nothing more, even though the uplift will remain in place until September. After then, it seems people who lost their jobs because of Covid-19 will fall over a so-called “cliff edge”, with the uplift cancelled, forcing them to live on much less.

The Tories have made a major issue of education in the crisis, demanding that our children must go back to school as soon as possible in order to catch up on what they have missed – but Rishi Sunak has provided no extra facilities for this in his budget. It seems it was all talk and – in fact – the plan is to reopen a major vector for transmission of Covid and hope that the increase in infections – and deaths – won’t be noticed amid the falling numbers triggered by the vaccination programme.

And after years of promising to fix problems in the social care system – that became hugely pronounced when 30,000 people died in care homes because of Tory stupidity – Sunak is breaking that promise by offering nothing.

Meanwhile, those who profited hugely from the pandemic – either by being perfectly situated to continue selling goods to people in lockdown or by receiving government Covid-related contracts to provide services at hugely-inflated costs (many of which were not actually provided because the contractors were not qualified to do so) are to get off scot-free because Sunak has backed away from calls to impose a wealth tax.

So, what has he done?

Well, he carped on a lot about borrowing a huge amount of money to pay for Covid-19. That was a stream of lies from start to finish, as I pointed out:

So we were led to expect tax hikes a-go-go. But this didn’t happen:

The refers to income tax, National Insurance and VAT. However – and this is indeed a ‘however’:

This is the amount you earn before you start paying tax, or before you start paying it at a higher rate. Because these thresholds are frozen, it seems more people will pay at a higher rate due to wage inflation, so there will be a de facto increase in taxes. But this depends on people receiving pay rises to cover their costs and Tory policy over the last 11 years has been to discourage that – it’s the reason real take-home pay has fallen by thousands of pounds per year since 2010.

This was the only increase in taxation, and it is only on a tax on profits. So firms that pay corporation tax can avoid it by ensuring that they make no profit from 2023. The best way to do that is to invest in infrastructure and wages (by employing more people, perhaps).

It would be wrong to say that Sunak’s budget does nothing for ordinary people – but it’s all based around existing Covid-related schemes:

Sunak went on to announce plans for government investment. The main points were:

But “free ports” are not new, nor are they likely to help:

Here’s an interesting point:

Mr McDonnell himself promptly answered it:

There was also some muttering about policies that give a nod to the environment but if you blinked, you missed them – and This Writer blinked. They certainly don’t constitute a “Green Industrial Revolution”!

As Tory budgets go, this is not the disaster for working-class people that it could have been – although the main hits have been offset, so it may be a few months or years until we can know the effects for sure.

The lack of any hard taxes or austerity measures suggests a tacit admission that Covid-19 really is bought and paid-for, and there won’t be any real need to pay for it again.

So This Writer is left with a huge sense of anticlimax. I was expecting to be fearful after today; instead I feel let down.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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