And the thing Trump cares about is ‘family’ but only his.
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Billionaires / power / ego anything and everything else is for runts.
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Scammer sacks himself
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Brilliant 
Reform’s due diligence for approving candidates must be limited to does he/she have a pulse.
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I will move this out here now to avoid too much thread detritus (apologies, may also be one for a modwomble as well).
Efficiencies of scale is a bit of a red herring, there is a hard coded limit to how efficiently you can pay a teacher at a certain point on the pay scale.
The issue would then be where you start with the extra spending. You could pay teachers more, you could do that and increase the numbers of teachers so the workload is reduced (more PPA time, although you still want your good teachers actually teaching). Support staff pay is woeful and the more senior staff there (SBMs etc.) are getting towards breaking point so that would need to be addressed.
You could then think about reversing the reduction in provision of “unviable” subjects at GCSE and A Level which puts the breadth of curriculum back or keep smaller (often rural) schools open. You could also stop some of the reductions in the initial SEN interventions that make teaching possible as they are by necessity next on the chopping block for schools who need to cut somewhere.
Oh, and you could do school rebuding at a greater rate than having an average lifespan of 400 years.
I had a particular example in mind which meant thinking more in terms of the numbers of pupils and of schools rather than of teachers. When I was at secondary school my best mate wanted to do O-level Economics in the sixth form. We didn’t have an Economics teacher but the local girls’ grammar did. So he went there for his Economics lessons. The state sector could accommodate that because it had a lot of schools close together (and an FE College in the town too). I suspect independent schools are further apart, so offering Economics would cost them more because every school would have to have its own teacher.
Although now any school that did economics at A level would have to have that teacher doing Business at GCSE (similar for other languages) unless they were teaching in a number of schools. Standard A level timetabling is 9 hours per fortnight (out of generally 50 hours per fortnight in the timetable as a whole) unless they are very much part time.
It is more a question of how many students you need in a class for an A level. Given the funding per student the current reckoning is that you need at least 12 students per class for an A level class to cover its costs (up from the standard benchmark of 10 a few years ago). A few years ago you could probably subsidise a few pet subjects as well, but not now.
I’m struck by how ‘systematised’ this is all sounding. We seemed to have a good deal of flexibility back in the 70’s which let us make the most of the resources we had available.
My town’s Economics teacher was in fact first-and-foremost a PE teacher. He could teach Economics, at least to O-level, because he also had an Economics qualification. He had started out at my (all boys) school which is how my best mate (Charles) got the idea of taking Economics. But before he could start the teacher moved schools (yup, a male PE teacher in an all girls school). It wasn’t a show-stopper though. Between themselves the schools, Charles and the teacher worked a solution out.
I’ve just finished Hilary Cottam’s book Radical Help. She thinks the welfare state, in which she includes state education, is broken. Among other things it has become paralysed by the demands of the business approach that it’s been forced to take. The ‘system’ is now the most important thing:
The welfare state has been reshaped as a service industry. In the beginning the welfare state was a shared project to build a better Britain for everyone. The services on offer were critical: they educated us so we could participate; they housed us and took care of our health. But the services were a means to an end, not the end in itself.
Today that vision has gone and in its place has grown an obsession with the business of service delivery … Nobody feels part of an important shared project. Instead organisational cultures increasingly reflect those of the market they are part of: arm’s length and transactional … See the same doctor ? Too expensive. Help another young person ? Too risky. Provide solutions through a known community group ? Against the rules of competition.
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This. So many things in the UK are fucked as a result.
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The second anyone decided they could try to run something like the NHS as if it was a business, we were doomed.
You cannot create a “business model” for a service that consumes money, but doesn’t, by nature, make any.
One would have thought that was patently obvious, but not to the last few governments it would seem.
I weep for all our futures!
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Sadly for the NHS it is a totally different world to when it was set up after ww2
When it was set up,life expectancy was 20 years less than it is now,which obviously brings up massive problems in terms of cost. Along with having to pay more in pensions,as well as keeping people healthy into their 80s and 90s.
The average life expectancy for men when the NHS was set up was 66.
Not sure what the answer is or what will happen to the NHS. Not convinced it will be about as we know it in the next couple of decades
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I spent most of my working life employed by a (science) Research Council. We consumed money and, with our users (‘customers’, ‘clients’ call them whatever is in fashion), we produced science. At the start of the 90’s Heseltine tried to put us into the private sector. One or two companies looked but quickly worked out that this was no way to make money. It didn’t stop him trying again less than two years after the first attempt failed. He quit after the second one failed too.
AWE didn’t make money either but that didn’t save them. They’re back as an NDPB now though.
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See:
Railtrack.
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Reform and others will see to it that for future generations, this will be the case.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats made a start with Austerity.
How many food banks- or where I live- community larders- have popped up since these measures were bought in!
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I find it baffling that anyone can think,yes farage did a cracking job with Brexit,let’s vote him in.
The emperor will be truly naked once he gets in,saying that,it didn’t seem to harm Johnson.
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My mother trotts out “Well there’s more of us and we’re living longer” reason for the strain on the NHS… Sounds reasonable until you consider if there are more of you then you would have also been paying more tax (Into the pot, money which has already been spent). The Cunt servethemselves attractive low taxations over the decades are calling in the debt.
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Tax spent well spent s a thing
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Yes; also declining birth rate. Because no cunt can afford to live on one job let alone start a family due to cost of living crisis, etc…