However keen the Government is to quickly get healthy children vaccinated against Covid, more than half of schools in England will fail to host Covid vaccinations by its target date, according to a new survey of headteachers. The Guardian has the story.
A survey by the Association of School and College Leaders [ASCL] found that only two out of every five secondary schools will have had a visit from vaccination teams by the October half-term break.
The survey also revealed that 95% of headteachers said teaching has been affected by pupil and staff absences, with nearly a third rating the impact as severe. 93 school leaders reported pupil absences of 10% or higher, while 63 schools said 10% or more of their staff were absent for Covid-related seasons. [sic] …
[ASCL’s General Secretary Geoff] Barton… said an “additional difficulty” for schools was having to deal with anti-vaccination protesters. 13% of the 526 eligible schools reported seeing protesters outside their school.“This is at best incredibly unhelpful, and at worst very distressing, and we appeal to those concerned to see sense and stop this nonsense,” Barton added.
The Department for Education has said that in schools that have been visited, uptake rates were around 35% of pupils.
Worth reading in full.
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Dear God, I just read the UCU statement linked in the article. These people are completely mental.
And did you read the responses to that statement. The members of the union all seem to believe they are taking huge risks all the time and they are only objecting to the pohoto because it showed people sitting together not wearing masks.
It just shows how far we are from any sort of normality, and how terrified / self interested so many people have become after 18 months of government lies and propaganda.
“Terrified/self interested”, maybe.More like totally fucking lazy
They look like a collection of student union activists from some downtrodden polytechnic in the late 1970s. God knows what knowledge is being imparted to students paying thousands of pounds per annum to “study” for a degree or higher qualification taught by that rabble.
We always said that lectures were a method of transferring the lecturer’s notes from them to us without passing through the brain of either. Like home working, maybe this is the wake-up call that the system was due an overhaul anyway. But as with WFH, there will be unintended consequences. My main client is really struggling to get people back into the office because WFH is more convenient to the employee but that’s a very one sided view.
Doesn’t it just – that’s the worrying part of that. I’ve been tracking daily positive tests (aka “cases”) in my local town and they’re rising – currently about 2/3rds of the peak in Jan/Feb. Nobody is panicking and nobody is dying either – long may that continue. It’s almost as if the message should be “nothing to see here, move along” but as was always predicted turning off “fear” is way harder than turning it on.
Well, almost certainly they all read (and believe!) The Guardian!
I am sure you are meant to genuflect when you say The Guardian.
https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrewLawrenceComedy/videos
Andrew Lawrence has been great as always, help out and view his comedy as his sketches are banned from live gigs.
Staggering hypocrisy, but sadly not surprising or unusual levels of it for trade union mask and lockdown advocates.
Masks and lockdowns for thee, but not for me.
Panic for when it gives us more power and status, or political leverage, but not for when it interferes with our own convenience.
Fear for when others bear the costs, but not when we don’t feel like it.
Precisely
“Panic for when it gives …. etc”. Exactly right. I’ve noticed that whilst some are genuinely terrified there is a significant group of people who have no trouble ditching the rules when it suits them and seem completely unaware of the hypocrisy.
Muzzles are only for the peasants, not the barons.
Surely we’ve established this by now?
“I would like to close this piece by reminding readers that not all academic staff are UCU members, and in my experience a decent majority of lecturers are enjoying the return to proper teaching. Sadly, as so often in life, it is a relatively small but very loud-mouthed minority who are making things difficult for the rest of us.”
Pretty good summary and characterisation of most of the remnants of the British trade union movement.
As a left-winger, I unfortunately have to agree with you. I was a member of Unite for a number of years and cancelled my membership because their two principal interests were pushing pet political causes, and using their member lists to try to flog unrelated stuff to their members (PPI claims, etc).
Unite nearly shut Scotland in 2013, over a dispute at the Grangemouth refinery where their member had been fully guilty of what he was charged with.
“their two principal interests were pushing pet political causes, and using their member lists to try to flog unrelated stuff to their members”
Not unrelated, I suspect, to the development of the political left in this country that I discussed below, and the hounding out of those whom Peter Hitchens described as “anti-Communist trade union patriots and Christians”. They were replaced by people who saw the working classes themselves as embarrassing necessities (“awful, bigoted” people), and their organisations as mere vehicles for their own advancement and the advancement of their radical political fanaticisms.
Yes, didn’t Francois Hollande despise the French working classes as well?
Would it be such a terrible thing if we killed them all ??
I’m going to have to take the Fifth on that one….
I seem to remember that Arthur Scargill was not representative of many miners.
My wife works at a university as a science technician. For all the “our members are telling us they are worried …..” she is not aware of anyone being asked. Clearly, some members are expressing concerns, but the Union is making no attempt to find out what, overall, members actually think.
Might not get the answer they want that way! They know that those most likely to express opinions without being asked are the paranoid ones, which will fit their narrative.
Maybe the students could stop protesting about statues, and tackle this.
The students expect to get allocated A grades and skip exams etc.
Although employers may skip over their CVs and not risk employing them
Well, for completeness, I tweeted the image in reply to that statement. You know, just so that people can make their own minds up
Why should we be surprised? It’s just the same as with ecology where the disempowered are constantly berated by people who own multiple mansions, fly every other day in private planes, who invest in companies that promote deforestation, unsustainable mining, plastic production, yet more schemes to get people to buy more things they don’t need etc. etc. etc. The list could go on, and on, and on…
“ a decent majority of lecturers are enjoying the return to proper teaching.”
I was pleased to see this bit of balance at the end, reflecting what I know to be the truth about those that I know.
Undoubtedly, the UCU, like other teaching unions, has been a pathetic disgrace – certainly a poor advertisment for academic skills as a relevant advertisment for more than disappearing up your own arse.
… which is more than a local difficulty, given the current crying demand for reasoning skills.
(The age profile of that audience is interesting).
One thing … the address as an event at the Labour Party conference is a double whammy, since that event was notable for representing a dwindling membership as Starmer’s jackboot right-wing takes over from the traditional broad and argumentative base – notably by attacking and expelling jews who oppose the Israeli state and its assaults on rights on grounds of ‘antisemitism’. (The informed will know about the strong links between that state and repressive regimes, including our own establishment-in-the-shadows).
Well, ‘jackboot’ maybe, but I doubt if even Kneeler knows which wing of the party is graced by his presence!
Oh – he does – if you follow what’s been going on (and I don’t blame you if you can’t be arsed).
As I’ve pointed out before, Kier Starmer and the Blairites are only “right wing” to members of rival leftist sects such as yourself. They are “centrist” or “moderate” to those who are spoonfed their opinions by the establishment media, and hard left to conservatives. I don’t agree with Peter Hitchens on everything, but as a former Trotskyist himself and a lifelong journalist and observer of politics, he is excellent on the machinations of the political left:
“Your leading article (‘Comfort spending’, 28 November) makes the classic mistake about modern politics which prevents so many from grasping what is going on. You refer to Sir Keir Starmer as the leader of a battle against Labour’s left by its ‘centre’. Since Neil Kinnock’s pantomime battle with Militant in 1985, political journalists have been beguiled by a fantasy. They think that Labour leaders who attack villainous leftist factions do so in the cause of moderation. But this is in fact a battle by the sophisticated left — of post-1968 cultural revolutionaries — against the crude and embarrassing steam-powered left of Militant or Jeremy Corbyn. Each thinks the other is the wrong kind of socialist. Keir Starmer, like Anthony Blair himself, is a former Trotskyist who may not be that former. He recently told an interviewer who explored his dalliance with the fascinating tendency known as ‘Socialist Alternatives’: ‘I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.’ And why should he? The group’s preoccupation with sexual politics and green issues has since then become the ideology of all the major parties. But the old Labour right of anti-Communist trade union patriots and Christians was hunted down and wiped out almost 40 years ago, and can barely be found any more. Labour’s struggle, like so much British politics, is a left vs left combat. If you want anything else, good luck. But you won’t get it from Sir Keir.”
[Peter Hitchens, letter to Spectator December 2020]
The recent history (past half century or so) of the Labour Party is of the decades old utter rout and substantial exclusion from almost any influence or access to office of the old left that represented indigenous working class interests (what Hitchens referred to as “anti-Communist trade union patriots and Christians“), and a subsequent civil war between two rival wings of the ideologically radical left, which is characteristically “woke” (or “politically correct”, as they were called back in the 1990s).
The Blairite wing of radical woke leftists (rather than the other, Corbynite wing of radical woke leftists) has essentially been the political establishment, and largely the social, business and cultural establishments, in this country for decades, and took over the “Conservative” Party in the early 2000s That’s why they are invariably misrepresented as “moderate” and “centrist” by the establishment media. They don’t adhere to the old state socialist nostrums of the Corbynite wing, but share pretty much all the other radical goals of overturning all traditionalist resistance to their radical social agendas and Rebuilding Mankind (and Society) Better, by virtue of their own Cleverness – the definitional feature of leftism.
Apart from the obvious hypocrisy it looks like she may be a raving alky as well – have you seen the size of the glass of wine in front of her? If she drinks like this when she’s working then it’s no surprise she can’t think straight.
Yes but the virus can tell your political affiliation so this is following the science or some other such fucking rubbish.
Yes but this is a highly sophisticated crowd: you can tell immediately by looking at the two people with vaginas at bottom right!
Omg they are so fat that they’d have get a third party opinion on whether they have a vagina down there or not.
why don’t these massive fatties do something about their own risk factors first?!
Fart & give us a clue?
What a shower. Whenever a union or Labour Party conference descends on Brighton, the obesity profile must go up tenfold. If these people are ‘unsafe’, it is no one’s responsibility but theirs.
Study the photograph carefully, it backs up what I’ve observed in Hull – the majority of mask wearers are young men.
i think its actualyl a bit like fashion you know like the stupid beards and stuff masks cannot make those people look sillier
I agree 100%, maybe the baby faced ones do it as a surrogate beard.
Whats their weird hard to figure out agenda im stumped .No one benefits from this sort of disruption
i think its ironic that they are “fighting for jobs pay and conditions” whilst doing fuck all whats to complain about ?
Unfortunately, the university lecturers I know all believe the covid propaganda and look surprised when I offer a different (more objective) perspective. I feel thoroughly disappointed in them, that they don’t seem to have made any effort to actually examine the subject beyond listening to the mainstream news (or reading the guardian!). If this lot are “educating” and setting an example for our next generation of adults, god help us. I was meant to be doing some uni teaching myself but I turned them down when I saw the list of crazy covid rules including masking of students at all times. No thank you.
A grey haired group of Harvard alumni representing different professions, including academic, were meeting weekly via zoom to discuss the “pandemic.” I tried to introduced them to this site, to The Great Barrington group, Yeadon, Bhakdi, Iannides…. You get the idea. They nervously refused to consider any of these. Conformity is at its worst amongst the “intellectual” class.
Sadly that doesn’t surprise me. I think we need to redefine the terms “intellectual” and “academic”.
It always has been.
You can always tell a Harvard man. You just can’t tell him much.
And is it any wonder that the vast majority of the UK population believe all the government propaganda when ‘university teaching’ is in the hands of such academics?
It’s not surprising that most Unions just say BS to bring down democracy and capitalism. What has shocked me is that the Tory Party seem hell bent on it too.
I’m not anti-union. They are important when they serve the worker’s fair rights to stop the excesses of some employers but most unions are more focused on the political agenda of forcing socialism and communism even at the expense of the workers.
I have the sixteen page risk assessment from my Son’s university. It basically attempts to reimpose all the restrictions that were lifted months ago. To make matters worse, this was only sent to students the day before term started (once all cheques were safely cashed and rent paid).
Scared of a virus or scared of the ire of students? It’s students they won’t face.