Britain is languishing behind Albania in a league table for maths and science education, according to an authoritative international study.
A report by the World Economic Forum has ranked UK schools 43rd in the world – behind countries such as Iran, Trinidad and Tobago and Lithuania.
The findings are a damning indictment of Tony Blair’s pledge to prioritise ‘education, education, education’ and come after education spending doubled from £35.8billion to £71billion under Labour.
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September 09, 2011
September 07, 2011
Another Depression Ahead?
Europe is in disarray, stock markets are plunging, the banking crisis is back in full swing, gold is at record levels, and both the UK and US are self-evidently slipping back towards recession – not since the autumn of 2008 have things looked quite so ominous.
We appear to be at another pivotal moment, with Western economies once more staring into the abyss. At a conference in Frankfurt this week, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, compared events to the Lehman Brothers catastrophe of 2008 and warned that many banks in Europe are essentially bust. His opposite number at KfW went further still and said that the present cocktail of negatives was “much more dramatic than 2008”.
Back then, governments and central banks still had the financial firepower and the will to attack the problem with massive injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus.
Today, the fiscal armoury is exhausted, while it is not clear that further monetary easing through the printing presses of “quantitative easing” would have any effect beyond adding to inflation.
Indeed, the parallels look alarmingly closer to the banking collapses of 1931, which plunged the world into prolonged depression, than the storms around the Lehman collapse.
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We appear to be at another pivotal moment, with Western economies once more staring into the abyss. At a conference in Frankfurt this week, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, compared events to the Lehman Brothers catastrophe of 2008 and warned that many banks in Europe are essentially bust. His opposite number at KfW went further still and said that the present cocktail of negatives was “much more dramatic than 2008”.
Back then, governments and central banks still had the financial firepower and the will to attack the problem with massive injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus.
Today, the fiscal armoury is exhausted, while it is not clear that further monetary easing through the printing presses of “quantitative easing” would have any effect beyond adding to inflation.
Indeed, the parallels look alarmingly closer to the banking collapses of 1931, which plunged the world into prolonged depression, than the storms around the Lehman collapse.
CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE ENTRY.
September 05, 2011
Illiterate Staff at a Shopping Mall!!!
Hundreds of staff at the huge new Olympic shopping mall had to be taught to read and write after bosses found they could not even fill in basic forms.
Employees at Westfield Stratford City have been given remedial tuition after Australian director John Burton made the "incredible" discovery that they were illiterate.
The boss of the £1.45 billion mall said he was amazed that so many have left British schools without basic skills. He told the Evening Standard: "The most difficult thing was the number who simply do not meet the basic reading and writing criteria.
"They could not even fill out the forms without getting assistance. They just weren't ready to interview."
His discovery is the starkest example yet of the literacy crisis in the capital's deprived areas which inspired the Standard to launch its Get London Reading campaign aimed at training adults to provide literacy support to primary schools in poorer areas.
The remedial education blitz comes as Newham council said it is set to exceed its target of securing 2,000 jobs for local long-term unemployed at what will be Europe's largest urban shopping centre when it opens on September 13 next to Stratford's Olympic Park.
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Employees at Westfield Stratford City have been given remedial tuition after Australian director John Burton made the "incredible" discovery that they were illiterate.
The boss of the £1.45 billion mall said he was amazed that so many have left British schools without basic skills. He told the Evening Standard: "The most difficult thing was the number who simply do not meet the basic reading and writing criteria.
"They could not even fill out the forms without getting assistance. They just weren't ready to interview."
His discovery is the starkest example yet of the literacy crisis in the capital's deprived areas which inspired the Standard to launch its Get London Reading campaign aimed at training adults to provide literacy support to primary schools in poorer areas.
The remedial education blitz comes as Newham council said it is set to exceed its target of securing 2,000 jobs for local long-term unemployed at what will be Europe's largest urban shopping centre when it opens on September 13 next to Stratford's Olympic Park.
READ THE REST OF THE ENTRY HERE.
