In the Spectator today, I’ve written a blog post about another act of vandalism by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary. This time, she’s got the free schools programme in her sights.
By any measure, the free schools programme has been a resounding success. If you judge schools by how much progress their pupils make between the ages of 11 and 16, free schools occupy the top five positions in the most recent league table and eight of the top ten. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider free schools comprise less than 3 per cent of schools in England and Wales.
A free school – King’s Maths School – was the top performing sixth form in the country for the ninth year in a row in 2024 and in 2022 was designated ‘best sixth form college of the decade’ by the Sunday Times.
Another one – Harris Westminster Academy – got 49 Oxbridge offers this year, one more than Eton.
The first free school I helped set up – the West London Free School – hasn’t fared quite as well, but it has done okay. It’s in the top 2 per cent of non-selective state schools in England when it comes to GCSE results and the sixth best state school in London in terms of A-level results.
All told, the free school programme has delivered over 650 schools, providing hundreds of thousands of new places, and it’s done so more quickly and cheaply than Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
Yet Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has announced that the free schools approved by the last government which haven’t yet opened are being ‘reviewed’, with the future of the 44 mainstream schools in the pipeline in doubt.
A source close to Phillipson told the Times that free schools were a “Tory vanity project”.
“State schools have been left crumbling for too long, while the Tories’ ideological drive saw capital budgets funnelled into building new free schools with surplus places,” a Labour insider told the paper.
In fact, of the 650 plus free schools that have opened since 2011, a majority are in areas where there’s a need for additional school places. Yes, some have created surplus places, but you need surplus places if parents are to have a choice. Increased choice means more competition and competition drives up results.
In maths, England rose from 17th place in the OECD’s international league table in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average. Scotland, unlike England, doesn’t have any free schools.
So why is Phillipson targeting the most successful education policy of the last 14 years? I can think of two reasons.
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Can you imagine if they’d had a PCR test for flu and for years prior to 2020 it was just normal and encouraged by government health officials to use these LFTs and PCRs routinely, even if you didn’t have any symptoms? We’d be dab hands at this lockdown business by now wouldn’t we? The world would have ground to a halt years ago because it would be inevitable that they could manufacture a flu ”pandemic” every single year based solely on mass testing. The entire scamdemic rested entirely on the testing.
Even the PsyOp wouldn’t have had much effect without the testing because those ‘positive’ test results needed to be generated. Otherwise people would twig and think, ”what’s all the fuss about? I feel fine/no worse than previous viruses I’ve had. Why do I need to stay home and stop living? Only the old people are dying, like they do every winter” So, without turning this into an essay, the only way they can even attempt a future scamdemic is if they go back to mass testing, this time for another ”novel” and ”deadly” virus that we allegedly have zero immunity against. And if the same people fall for that humongous farce again then they really have got excrement for brains.
Hancock is a loathesome piece of trash but so is this fake inquiry, handled by the Rona true believers (the mafia investigating itself).
But as the article states there will be a ‘consensus’ around Wancocks’s views.
‘Dames, Ladys, Sirs’….what a joke. Our ‘betters’, ‘superiors’.
No they are not smart. They are as dumb as they look and more corrupt. All of them swilled in the Rona trough of billions.
$120 mn quid this will cost us. For what?
To tell us that we will be imprisoned and stabbed again circa 2025 to 2030, to meet Agenda 2030’s goals?
We need a real inquiry, by real people, with real questions, real data, real facts, about real things like LD and stab deaths and injury, vs the real 20K dead from Rona, not with fake tests.
We don’t need the usual pantomine which asks nothing of importance. I wouldn’t doubt if the ‘report’ is already written.
To be fair, in defence of his strategy, I reckon I could suppress Matt Hancock “out of the air.” I just require a Titan sub to do it.
I would love to suppress Wancock with a very large rock dropped from a cliff on top of the soyboy below, as he fondles his married lover.
Ferdill,
It Has been suggested by some heartless people, perhaps those naughty “far-right” folk we are constantly warned about; that we need a Real Inquiry, with Real Peasants, Real Flaming Torches and Real, well sharpened Pitchforks.
Whilst such an Inquiry might be more productive than your sensible and quite modest proposal, I fear we are extremely unlikely to get either.
There was no pandemic
Yep no painted cross on any door I saw, no carts going round collecting the dead, but some Welsh councils did dig some extra graves just in case. A lot of “measures” were a modern version of the King Charles 2nd version of 1666, so there was some planning.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/lessons/2267-popup.htm
Sadly – needed repeating tof.
It seems to me like the strategy of the establishment for cementing lockdowns, testing, masks and jabs as the default response to future “pandemics” is to pretend that the effects of flu are radically different to coronavirus or other respiratory viruses, and so require a radically different approach.
I suppose the public aren’t scared enough of the flu so they need to be gaslighted into thinking flus and colds are so radically different as to requite radically.different approaches
One of the essential ingredients of the hoax, yes.
The reason why this committee met last in 2010 is obviously that there was never a reason to exist for it at all save as Government’s doing something!
headline generator at a time when the WHO was trying to inflict another Deadly pandemic!!1 onto mankind. 2009 – swine flu hoax. 2010 – end of political fallout from that.
Give me patience, Lord, and please administer a celestial size 11 boot up the backsides of these numpties.
There was no pandemic. There have been no real “public health” emergencies in decades, except for those that seem to have been caused by “authority” insisting on mandated poisoning of the environment and the animal and human populations.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years. Seems that those with vested interests like to perpetuate the myth that disease and pestilence would be stalking the population without them riding to rescue on white chargers brandishing syringes full of the latest patented prophylactic.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years.
2004, to be precise, the Bird Flu pandemic which never was and also the time when flu vaccines started to be marketed aggressively. By that time, I was very much surprised that someone even considered vaccinating people against the flu.
Yes and the line of questioning or reading between the lines of the KC seems to suggest his own bias and the inquiry conclusion already. Lock down sooner, more control in plans, harder lines of forced compliance, any suggestion of a novel virus treat as deadly to all, more control of the elderly …
And if they are still doing lateral flow tests to testify at this expensive spectacle ? Then it is a forgone conclusion. Authoritarian recommendations for the future.
When ignoring all the side issues, ie, hordes of Scottish and Welsn teetotalers charging into the hospitality industry on their wooden hobby horses, Corona was a giant money-making scam which probably only came to an end because taxpayers had been plunderen so thoroughly that there was nothing more left to take. The second season is to follow as soon as economic recoverly is complete enough that the merry looting can profitably recommence.
Have you noticed that people now often define themselves by their malady, “hello I’m diabetic/asthmatic/have ME/MS, an auto-immune disease/allergy? No longer are they the butcher, baker,candlestick maker. We need to stop talking about medical conditions and go back to talking about the weather…..
Ok, I think that you have not quite understood the tactics of the KC here. He is gradually asking questions to limit the answers that can be given later, Hancock has already said faster harder lockdowns, but there is no evidence that these did any good, and a great deal that they did so far, untold harm. The next question in module 2 will be something like “what made you think that lockdown was the correct policy”, followed by “what eveidence have you from the first, to decide on more?”. This puts the so called experts right on the line when they have to answer “none at all!”. Then “why did you call for the then”?
The next part will be expert evidence on the PCR tests (forget the lateral flows, they were just nonsense placebos, which were very non-specific). The answer to that will be they are very good and accurate. Except that they were not, because they were misused in method. 40 cycles would find a single incidence of a small bit of DNA in a sample. But it is widely known that this is far too sensitive, and does not show replicating anything! A test at 20 cycles (in other words about a million times less sensitive) would show a large population of the DNA, therefore likely real infection. The chance of a single incidence of something causing infection is very small.
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles? Because the Chinese told them to! There you have the whole scam in one sentance. Who profited? The Chinese. Who suffered severely, US. Job done!
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles?
As far as I know, that was because the two guys who developed and sold the original tests (Christian Drosten and a business partner of him who owns/ owned a company manufacturing such test kits) recommended doing so. Possibly unspecifically: Start with 20. Increase until you find something. That got us the pandemic where each and every conventional measure of disease was supplanted with positive test results plus something, eg, death because of skull trauma after getting hit by a cow suddenly falling from the sky with a positive test result a fortnight ago => COVID death, positive test result without anything else => asymptotically sick, chronic nosebleed because of constant swabbing => long COVID and so on.