Foreign Perspectives

One of the principal aims of the Northern Ireland education minister is to end the 11+ selection system and thus kill off the grammar school system.

However, her thinking is extremely flawed. Yes, socialism is all about equality of opportunity but it seems to me that it’s more than that: it’s about giving the opportunities to those who are able to benefit from them. Her banning of selection tests removes the ability of the education system to allocate places on the basis of ability rather than on the basis of how much money one’s parents have.

Whilst clearly it makes some sense to allocate places on the basis of distance from the school what that does is raise property prices in areas near good schools as it already has done in England. Thus the ability of a working class family to send their child to one of these “good schools” is severely diminished as they are priced out of the housing market near these schools very quickly.

Making the primary selection criteria that the child is entitled to free school meals just seems like a joke. What that really means is that those in relatively deprived areas get priority over those in areas a little better off however it also discriminates against the many families who could claim but won’t claim free school meals on principle. Taking that particular criteria what seems sure to happen is that, by and large, those who would have gone to a grammar school will go to the secondary school instead and vice versa. That’s a system that’s sure to fail everyone. How long will it take the less able pupils to do the typical one or two hours a night grammar school homeworks? Three? Four? In reality it’s not going to take long before they fall behind. Similarly in the secondary school system there just aren’t the mechanisms in place to stretch the pupils. Thus we will have a school system that will be suitable for nobody.

However, the main problem with removing selection is that those that can afford it will simply move into the private school system which seems set for a major expansion on the back of her “no academic selection” policy. Without a grammar school system many children from working class families who would have benefited from a grammar school (which is, after all, effectively a private schooling but without the cost) will lose out as will we all.

Of course, banning selection at 11 doesn’t remove selection. In France, everyone is guaranteed a place in university which seems a grand socialist ideal and so it is. The problem is that it results in a dropout rate of 50% in the first year (and is up to 70%) compared to only 8% in the UK.  Surely it can’t make sense to raise expectations unrealistically as they do in France?

The working class need grammar schools. Yes, the selection process isn’t perfect but let’s not kill off the biggest educational advantage that they’ve ever had by wiping out grammar schools.

Although I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, I hadn’t really done anything with it ’til last week.

Simple reason for that really: Twitter lets you type up to 140 characters in a message and I’m very much a long winded kind of person as y’all will know by now. Also, I knew diddly about promoting myself on Twitter so had next to no followers ie I was effectively talking to myself.

However, last week I took another look at it and found a neat way of bumping up the number of followers (Twollo)  and also found that I could add Twitter to sociable on the blog. The first gave me a way of gathering followers whilst the second meant that I could do a short tweet with a link to a more lengthy blog article and together these overcame my issues with not using Twitter.

Twollo is a slightly odd application to use. What it does is let you put in words and automatically follow those that are using them, the theory being that quite a lot of the people who you follow will follow you back thus building up your followers. It kicks in surprisingly quickly too and I picked up over 400 followers within a matter of days. It is a little odd though as you need to use words that people use within their tweets rather than actual subject so, for example, although there are lots of expats tweeting  few use the word “expat” in their tweets so they don’t appear a lot in my followers.

One other problem with it is that you quickly get to the point where you’re following 2000 people which is the initial limit. That’s solveable though Twitter Karma which lets you remove those who’ve not followed you back: all you need to do is to sit back ’til you hit 2000 then run it. You can follow more than 2000 but it needs to be balanced with followers eg with 2000 followers you can follow 2000 plus 10% ie 2200, once you hit the 2200 you can add another 10% and so on.

My initial experiments at reposting some blog posts via Twitter seem to be working in that they’re pulling a lot of new readers to the blog posts (click-through is around 5% at the moment). In theory I could repost the whole lot but in practice my current thinking is that I’ll repost the reference style ones from OurInns, some of which have already been picked up by other tweeters.

So a good start I think with a whole bunch of new readers.

Yes, you guessed it, we’ve all got sore throats, sniffles and generally feeling pretty rotten and certainly not up to taking advantage of the lovely weather here at the moment.

Adding to the complications is that John’s came out in a rash although we reckon that’s down to the small mountain of chocolate that he put away yesterday. Isn’t it awful the way the stuff you like messes you up?

Oh well, at least we have most of the rest of the week to play with and, so far, only things booked in for Wednesday and Friday to mess the holiday week up for us.

After considerable debate we decided against what seemed like the best bargain around, namely the 37″ LG2000 essentially because it’s out of stock locally, can take up to a week to arrive with anything up to £60 delivery charge and it’s only a 720p set.

So, instead of paying £399 for that we’ve gone for the 42″ LG5010 at £549 and will be off to collect that once we get the old 28″ JVC CRT style monster into the car (the store does recycling).

Why that one? Well, it’s 1080p ie full HD, it’s 5″ larger and it’s in stock locally. In reality full HD doesn’t really matter a whole lot to us right now as the only thing it will directly affect is our full HD camcorder but I imagine that over the years we’ll accumulate a whole bunch more full HD programming to make use of the extra resolution. I suppose in principle we could go for Sky’s full HD offering right now but I’m too stingy to pay for what seems like a lot to pay for very little programming.

Still, at least this telly should keep us going ’til they start rolling out 3D…

One of the slightly peculiar effects of my five year absence is that it takes a while for the name of some people to come to mind that I’ve seen in the local supermarkets.

It’s not that I didn’t recognise Colin [test to see if he’s really reading this!] pretty much instantly, but that it took me AGES to remember his name! Is it just the five year gap, or creeping senility? Funnily enough I remembered David J’s name almost the instant I saw him even though I’ve worked a whole lot more with Colin over the years. Bryan’s a lot easier to remember of course in that I seem to have been constantly bumping into him in Tescos or Sainsburys every time that I’ve been over here.

Anyway, for Colin’s benefit, yes I’m back in NI. Why we’re back right now is down to a whole bunch of reasons that meant early in 2009 was always going to be the best time logistically for us to return and although it might seem a bit of a sudden decision, in fact we’d been aiming to be here since something like two and a bit years ago.