Primary schools have failed to return to pre-lockdown standards across reading, writing and maths, new figures reveal. The Telegraph has more.
Key stage 2 Sats results, which assess attainment in literacy and maths for Year Six pupils in England, showed only 61% of pupils achieved the expected level in the three core disciplines this year.
While up one percentage point compared to 2023, it is still significantly off the 65% achieved in 2019, before the Covid pandemic and controversial lockdowns.
The new figures add to the mounting evidence of the harm to children caused by the physical closure of schools in 2020 and 2021.
The current crop of 10 and 11-year-olds “experienced disruption to their learning”, the Department for Education said on Tuesday, “particularly at the end of Year 2 and Year 3”.
In individual subjects, scores were higher than last year, or the same.
In total, 74% met the expected standard in reading, up from 73%, and 72% met the expected standard in writing, up from 71%.
More than four in five – 81% – met the expected standard in science, up from 80%.
Overall, 72% met the expected standard in grammar, punctuation and spelling, which was the same as last year, and 73% reached the expected standard in maths, which is also unchanged.
However, only just over six in 10 pupils showed a satisfactory standard in each of the three disciplines reading, writing and maths.

Worth reading in full.
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The problem with the WHO is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and (The Bill Gates funded) GAVI are its chief funding source(s).
Therefore Gates’ agenda of Global vaccine rollout and digital compliance becomes the WHO’s agenda, and Gates will become the principle beneficiary of this initiative as the software used in digital ID (see ID2020) is created by Microsoft.
In the early months of the ‘pandemic’ there were a number of video conferences involving Bill where for some reason he was the ‘go to’ person for advice on pandemics. On one he held up a hand written sign saying ‘work from home’ and on another he expressed his pleasure at how well MS Teams was working.
It’s also worth remembering that not long before the pandemic, the media, particularly the BBC, gave air-time to environmental activists that were demanding we all work from home to ‘save the planet’.
“As WHO represents all of its 194 Member States, each country should have a turn helping to run things, just as large countries like China and India should have a commensurate influence on its decisions.”
No merit of skill then?
Perhaps we should adopt the same principle when flying, so that each passenger has a turn at flying the plane?
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.
They are looking out for their careers all the time. If their personal interests and those of the people are aligned, great. If they aren’t, then you can be sure that their personal interests will prevail.
Any leader who stands up to a major global bureaucracy these days is signing away all their career prospects going forward.
If throwing national sovereignty is required to advance or protect their careers, so be it.
They have plenty of bogus but plausible arguments to defend their self interested positions. That’s not hard at all.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Thomas Sowell
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
Thomas Sowell
Great stuff from Sowell, as always.
However, it’s slightly outdated, I think.
To me, public office these days seems like a stepping stone to lucrative positions in corporations or NGOs. The power of public office may not be the ultimate goal or ambition any more.
It’s a continuation of the aims of people like Jean Monnet who was one of the founders of what is now the EU, a supranational organisation run by people who no longer need to be elected and take decisions without any interest in the people who are no longer asked to vote for them and their policies.
And to further clarify where politicians sit:
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.”
I think both these statements can be true. Politicians are obviously working for themselves. They are meant to work for us. But in order to advance their own interests they may choose to align themselves with other groups or movements. I think you’ve kind of made this case yourself in your reply below. What we don’t 100% know is whether some of them believe some of the claptrap they spout.
I reckon they do. Most of us believe what is convenient for us to believe.
I don’t believe very much in the archetyoe of the movie villain who is comically devoid of conscience or compassion and gets perverse pleasure from being evil.
I expect you are right. The capacity for doublethink is probably a necessity for most of them.
I think this is why we should be very suspicious of anyone that tries to impose things on us “for our own good”. They are much more dangerous than obvious thugs or crooks.
A good article, and a well made point. It doesn’t matter, at all, that North Korea has rotated around to being on the board….anyone saying anything about the fact that they are on the committee with Afghanistan, Cameroon and Belarus….?
The worrying thing, as others will point out, is the 80% Bill and Melinda funding…the BigPharma funding, the disproportionate influence of different countries..and no doubt many other things….. the fact that this supranatural, unelected body, is being given power over the health of ‘the world’ is tremendously worrying.
I don’t doubt we would all have had to be jabbed for monkeypox if they had had the power they are now seeking..and been given….that is our future..
“On the 5th of this month The European Commission and WHO launch landmark digital health initiative to strengthen global health security”…..THIS is the problem….the unelected insane asylum calling itself the EU …willing to hand over everything to another unelected set of nutters..while we seem to be able to do very little about it..
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-06-2023-the-european-commission-and-who-launch-landmark-digital-health-initiative-to-strengthen-global-health-security
The EU has been planning vaccine passports for over a decade. The timeline for rollout started in 2018.
https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-12/2019-2022_roadmap_en.pdf
It would be a mistake to assume that the EU and WHO haven’t been collaborating for a very long time.
It depends what they actually mean by the term “vaccine passport” and how it would be used. It’s not a new idea to have personal records on a portable device for such items that could be useful. However, when I started using one (in 1996) it was just a printed A6 booklet made by one of the Pharma firms, and all hand written form entries. It has a list of all the known products at the time, and a few blank rows etc. Names of products used, dates administered, and recommended renewals etc.
I did actually carry it alongside my British Passport, in case it could have been useful on some global trips, but that isn’t the same thing as having to do so for any other reason.
Having hand written medical information is not a problem because it’s voluntary and is not recorded in official databases.
Once it is a digital record, connected to your social credit score, you’re on the hook and you will never be allowed to wriggle off.
With North Korea in the board, perhaps they can be blamed for bad decisions if there is significant complaint against the WHO.
It’s both things that are a problem, North Korea being involved on the board is bad in itself, it’s made worse by the abdication of responsibility for using our own brain cells on the part of western governments.
Freedoms were paid for with the blood of our forbears, the WHO has plenty to do with genuinely severe disease problems, it doesn’t need to declare a lockdown for a new sniffle, but it will because that’s easy and visible while the hard work is not and there is much less press coverage.
Don’t worry our Government won’t sign up to anything that would infringe the democracy we think we’ve got !
Governments, or at least the powers pulling the strings behind them, of Communist dictatorships and the freer states of the world perhaps have more in common that many would like to believe. Governments have always used fear to control populations, presenting themselves as virtuous defenders against some great evil, which they frequently had a hand in creating. Lockdowns and associated restrictions, under the pretext of protecting people from the threat of a virus (or maybe another virus or maybe Climate Change or maybe Institutionalised Racism or maybe Transphobia or maybe Russia or maybe yet another virus), provided a powerful control mechanism for suppressing dissent and controlling capital flows in the inevitable collapse of the debt-based monetary system, a collapse resulting from demographic decline and sheer weight of fraud. But ultimately they only delayed the inevitable: as the financial collapse is now upon us, the truth is becoming harder and harder to conceal.
Fully agree with your comments.
However, the fact that North Korea (as well as some other suspects) is now on the executive board should be a red flag.
I have been actively fighting against these new WHO proposals. Most people don’t have a clue this is happening. At what point will people engage? How far can people be pushed before something awakens?
Will it be a single incident which changes the dynamics or will it be a slow realisation?