Curios of the week #101

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Room 101 is the place Winston Smith least wanted to be because it contained the worst thing in the world. Hopefully, Curios post number 101 contains lots of interesting things instead.

For me, this week began down on the Barwon River in Geelong, watching my youngest compete in her first rowing regatta. I thought I was pretty smart in finding a great parking space but I discovered my colleague was far craftier. It helps to be in the know and I will be in future.

It was hot down by the river and that theme has continued, with Victoria experiencing something of a heat wave. If you are in Victoria, I hope you managed to stay cool and if you’re in the frozen north, I hope you managed to stay warm.

This week’s Curios include industrial action, mechanistic phonics, socially constructed labels for special educational needs and much more.

Cuts of the week

At the same time that the U.K. government seems determined to gift Mauritius an island and up to £18 billion, it is embarking on a series of cuts to education programs for disadvantaged students that are likely to save just a few million.

In Curios 95, I noted reports that the British government was abandoning support for a Latin program for government school students, halfway through the school year when students had already embarked upon the course. I value Latin for its own sake. I want to live in a world that is also home to Latin scholars who can bring the classical world to life and pass on its wisdom. However, the kind of people I will courteously avoid calling ‘philistines’ may not see it that way. No matter, the education minister, Bridget Phillipson, has now swung the axe on programs that will confound even those who view education purely as preparation for the workforce. According to Lydia Chantler-Hicks, writing in Schools Week, this includes cuts in the Advanced Mathematics Support Program, a scheme that, ‘provides special support to schools in disadvantaged areas,’ to teach advanced maths courses, as well as cuts to the Stimulating Physics Network and computing hubs.

If the British government is concerned about a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in its finances, the money saved by dropping these schemes will have minimal impact on that scale of a problem, whereas the potential economic upside of extending the proportion of the population with advanced mathematical, scientific and computing skills seems to have been forgotten.

So, I don’t really understand why they are doing this and I have a suspicion that they don’t really understand why they are doing it either. To butcher a saying: It’s just rabbits in headlights, all the way down.

Insight of the week

Over on Twitter/X, Old Andrew has been doggedly pursuing the thankless task of pulling people up on their dodgy statistics. For years, this has involved him responding to false claims about school exclusions in England and ethnicity. Finally, The Guardian has taken a proper look at the data.