Y Safle

An article on BBC news today informs us how we should all embrace a new test of phonics for children at age 6 as part of ensuring all children learn the phonics system systematically and early. This post is not a comment on phonics though, but rather on the terrible state of education amongst… our education ministry.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: “There is no doubt we need to raise standards of reading. Only last month we learnt that one in 10 boys aged 11 can read no better than a seven-year-old.

So the scandal here is that 1 in 10 boys reads well below the average seven year old. Indeed Nick Gibb is not clear whether he means the average 7 year old or one very special 7 year old, but I suspect if the latter, the numbers would be much higher than 1 in 10.

What is wrong with this statement though?

In brief: “There is no doubt we need to raise standards of reading” does not follow from the statistic we are given. Indeed, it should be entirely unsurprising that a significant proportion of boys lag their peers by this amount.

The reason for this is that in the population of all 11 year olds, there will, as in so many things, be a distribution of reading ages. That distribution ought to follow the bell shaped curve of a normal distribution, with the mean reading age being at the 11 year old mean, but notably with 10% of boys lying a little over 1 “normal distribution” from the mean (see graphic).

So what is wrong with this picture?

Well if you raise reading standards for all and by the same amount for all then all you do is move the means! In particular if all children get better at reading then the average 7 year old after the intervention may now read as an average 8 or 9 year old. The average 11 year old may also improve to the level of the average 12 or 13 year old (although as most improvement comes early, it may be that the means now are closer together). If the spread of results remains unchanged, because you improve results for all, then you would expect that you would still have 1 in 10 boys reading at the ability of the average 7 year old.

To be clear, you would not expect ANY improvement in that statistic. Indeed you might in fact expect it to worsen, as you expect the means to move closer together!

In other words, a worsening trend on that statistic could be a sign of success!

Of course, the tests can be standardised. You could call the average 7 year old attainment now as “level 7″ and not move the average ad standards improve. Then you could judge success of improvement against the level 7 baseline as well as a level 11 baseline. But that is not what the minister said, and it is not clear he understood why what he said was wrong. And this is from the education Minister!

Going wth the raw averages, the best ways to ensure no significant numbers of boys read at the mean 7 year old level, and thus achieve your education targets are:

1. Separate the means. Improvement is hard, but we can hold back 7 year olds instead. If we do not teach them to read at all until they are 7, then their mean reading age will drop, but their rapid progress thereafter should ensure that no 11 year olds read at the level of the average 7 year old.

2. Reduce the spread. That is, concentrate on the poorer readers and hold back the better ones and try to homogenise the group. One would hesitate to suggest this may be a reason why me might insist every child be forced to learn through phonics!

An article on the BBC about a vote in the coomons to ensure pregnancy advice prior to terminations is independent, spurred this comment from one of the readers:

What should me and my girlfriend have done when she fell pregnant aged 18 me aged 20 with a combined income of less than 30k a year. No house to call our own, no savings. What a wonderful life that child would have had being brought up living on benefits. Were now planning our own family when we’re ready and neither of us regret what we did as it was not just for our good but for our would be baby

One wonders whether the child may have preferred that life over the alternative. Sadly as they are now dead, we can never ask.

Last week we had riots in London – opportunistic public disorder by a bunch of numbskulls who thought theu could go late night shopping without bothering to pay for what they took. It is quite right that arsonists, murderers and such like should suffer the full weight of justice in response to this, but I was troubled by all-night special sessions of Magistrate courts, and the general retributive language of an enraged conservative party eagre to appear tough on law before a baying mob.

To be clear, if the coercive apparatus of state are employed in the same hysterical ane emotionally charged manner as the hysterical mob of thugs on our streets, what chance justice?

Some examples:

• Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw were jailed at Chester Crown Court for four years for inciting a riot on Facebook. Note that they are not convicted of rioting, and the riot they incited never happened. And yet they are in prison for longer than most people who cause death by dangerous driving?
• Anderson Fernandes, 22, was warned by a judge at Manchester Magistrates’ Court that he may face jail after he admitted stealing two scoops of ice cream. Yes he was rioting too, and no there is no excuse. But two scoops of ice cream?
• Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from Lidl supermarket. Personally she would be better off putting a bucket out, as it rained the following day. But again, since when was six months jail considered the norm for petty theft?
• Perhaps worst of all: Mother-of-two Ursula Nevin, from Manchester, was jailed for five months for receiving a pair of shorts given to her after they had been looted from a city centre store. Yes that’s right – receiving a pair of shorts. She did not steal them, nor riot. She is not guiltless, but five months in jail for hot pants?

These people were caught up in the emotionally charged circumstances of a riot. Throughout history we have seen riots, where the criminality of a few spills over and sucks in people who, in the cold light of day, would never have thought themselves capable of such acts. It is human nature – a pack mentality.

And that same pack mentality is being allowed unfettered into our criminal justice system, to our lasting shame. Are magistrates the new rioters? Who will watch the watchers?

Here is something rather disingenuous that I have not seen anyoune pick up on. Paul Stephenson, the ex Met Commisioner, giving evidence to parliament on his contact with News of the World said:

Between 2005 and 2010, 17% of his connections with the press were with the News of the World and 30% were with News International as a whole, he told the committee.

The News of the World represented 16% of press readership while News International represented 42%, he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14212485

So he spent 17% of his press time talking to people from a newspaper representing 16% of the readership, so he says. Sounds fair enough. Except when you remember that the News of The World was just the Sunday version of the Sun.

So in fact he spent 17% of his press time that, in a week, sold just 2.4% of the papers.

And anyone thinking “Oh, well maybe the News of the World sold 17% of papers in the UK with some massive circulation” can check out the figures themselves. The News of the World had a slightly lower circulation than its sister paper, The Sun.

17% of the Commissioners time, and 2.4% of the circulation does not sound so balanced, does it?

And I also don’t recognise this 42% Murdoch stake in our press either. If it is just the Times and Sun/News of the World that he owns, then the circulation even among leading papers (not including all the smaller press) is only about 33% for the period described.

The real reason, of course, for all this contact was because these same people had weedled thair way in to the Downing Street machine for both Labour and Conservative parties. The police have their own political agenda and this contact was part of acheiving that.

Tony Blair allowed Ian Blair to heavily influence Government policy to all our detriment. Labour is far from blameless in this whole debacle, and whatever I think of the coalition, their undoing of many of the more heinious assaults on our civil liberties are to be applauded. It is high time the police went back to realising that policy making is for the government, and their duty is simply to uphold the law.

Fat chance of course. Politicised police, with consultants paid for at great expense with public money are no doubt well entrenched. Let us hope that one benefit from this whole scandal is police political lobbying being brought to heel.

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated

So said Mark Twain famously. And now Vince Cable may be saying the same. “Over my dead body” would the News International takeover of BSkyB happen, he had boasted – and following public revelation of that view, he was stripped of his powers to block the bid by David Cameron, who two days later courted Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch at a private dinner.

This led to much tittering and blogs saying “Vince Cable is dead, he just hasn’t realised it yet”. But it seems the Liberal Democrat caution about the deal has now become the policy of the nation, and today News International pulled out of the proposed takeover.

Let’s be quite clear: if Vince Cable had not referred this matter to Ofcom in November, this takeover would by now have been a done deal. We have Vince Cable and the Guardian Newspaper to thank for preventing such an outcome.

Not that we will expect to hear such thanks. MPs are queueing up to take credit for today’s announcement, and one thing the Liberal Democrats seem to be quite bad at doing is blowing their own trumpet.

“An Avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Thomas Paine

A lovely way to end a warm end of summer Sunday. I have nothing more profound to add at this time!

Now that I have an iPhone with built in GPS I thought I would try my hand at geocaching. Combining this with an afternoon trip with the girls up Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, I located a geocache allegedly on the hill.

I can’t say that the experience was wholly successful. The notes said that we could exchange the items for something on the theme of Orange, so the girls hunted out an orange pen they were willing to give up, and I went armed with a pocket version of “A Clockwork Orange”. That part of the hunt, of course, took place at home.

We then went to Constitution hill, took the cliff railway to the summit and followed the GPS compass on my iPhone down a track through the gorse brush. The track was fairly easy going, but we had a couple of complaints from the girls from mild scrapes on bare legs. But when we were in the given location we could not find any plastic container. Worse, my iPhone settings had somehow reset themselves so that I could not access the website to check details.

A phonecall home later I had the iPhone set up right, only to find – posted in the notes at the bottom of the page – a note by someone that the cache had been “muggled” – i.e. found by a non player of the game who had wrecked it. There was an alternative cache but the co-ordinates were not in the iPhone format of degrees, minutes and seconds and in any case Hannah was loudly declaring “I quit”, so we went to the bouncy castle on the summit instead.

Still we will try this again as it was fun trying. Hoping we find a cache next time and the girls enjoy their secret treasure.

I have added a book review widget using LibraryThing to my blog. Since experimenting with Shelfari and LibraryThing I have come to like the latter very much – particularly because of its excellent export facility. It is easy for me to export my entire library to a spreadsheet and import it elsewhere. In this way I keep ownership of my data. (Shelfari allows export too, although not quite as full featured).

I have now, with the aid of a bar code scanner, imported about 1500 books of my library into LibraryThing, and written a couple of hundred reviews. Thus I have added a widget that displays a random review from my collection on this page.

Here is also a random selection of my LibraryThing books. You may notice on the talk on that site that I have so far read 144 books this year.

Yesterday I downloaded the iPhone application for WordPress. I discovered that I needed to upgrade the software on my site too but after doing that it all seems to work perfectly.

So this is the first post that was born on my iPhone. Maybe with this in hand I may start blogging again more often.

Kudos to the team who brought this open source app to the iPhone. My next task will be to find and look at the source to see how iPhone apps are built.