Unfortunately, we got her

A piece on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill with two contrasting opinions.

Educators are split over the government's proposed Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, with some saying the move will improve fairness and accountability and others warning it could limit innovation in academy schools.

Opinion 1

Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela School in Wembley, north London, called it "absolutely appalling".

"I'm just really concerned because, at the moment, school leaders have the freedom to do various things that are right for their intake," she told Sky News.

"This bill will take those freedoms away."

Ms Birbalsingh, also known as 'Britain's strictest headteacher', added: "We got unlucky because we could have had Wes Streeting as education secretary, which would have been fine. Unfortunately, we got her [Bridget Phillipson].

"She [Ms Phillipson] is so arrogant. She's just marched in there and gone, 'I know what I'm doing, I'll just do what I want'."


Opinion 2

The founder of Oasis Academies, Steve Chalke, told Sky News: "We're excited about the changes because we feel that education has been in a very, very poor place for the last decade or more.

"Schools have been stripped of resources and there have been giant problems about the recruitment and retention of teachers.

"We feel that this important bill is beginning to address all of those issues."...

He added: "We at Oasis are excited about all of this, but that doesn't mean we don't have questions.

Hmm - one opinion sounds like the hard-nosed voice of experience, one sounds more... well more like jelly.

Other options must be kept open

'Make democracy great again': Thousands protest against Trump at rallies in every US state

Thousands of people gathered in various cities across the US as protests against Donald Trump and Elon Musk took place in all 50 states on Saturday.

The "Hands Off!" protests were against the Trump administration's handling of government downsizing, human rights and the economy, among other issues.

In Washington DC, protesters streamed on the grass in front of the Washington Monument, where one person carried a banner which read: "Make democracy great again."


Here in the UK, we saw something similar after the Brexit referendum, although at the time we may not have seen it as a growing international trend in supposedly democratic regimes. 

Maybe these US defenders of democracy are after a version of Keir Starmer's proposal in 2018, a second vote if the first one doesn't go your way -


Sir Keir told Labour activists if a general election was not possible "then other options must be kept open".

"That includes campaigning for a public vote," he said.

"It is right for Parliament to have the first say but if we need to break the impasse, our options must include campaigning for a public vote and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option."

Defunct EPA Museum

Watch: Peek inside the now-shuttered EPA Museum that closed because it cost $4mil to build, $600k annually to operate & received less than 2000 visitors

Climate Depot's Marc Morano: "The now-defunct EPA Museum evokes memories of an old East German government propaganda effort. Future generations will look back on this climate-obsessed era and marvel that a civilization ever took this climate crap seriously."

The video embedded in the linked page is worth watching.

The Final Tea Party

Something strange is going on with elites and we all see it.

A characteristic of elites is that they must have a certain status which sets them apart or there would be nothing to define them as an elite. Status has been achieved in many traditional ways as we know, such as wealth, costume, asset ownership, religion, profession, social class, language, education and so on.

Yet in comparatively recent decades, traditional elite status has been vigorously eroded by economic growth, mass production, mass education, mass media, cheap books and a much wider access to information.  

In our digital age, the erosion of elite status has become so acute that it has had some strange effects on one particular aspect of status - the role of high status gatekeeper to social and political narratives which control and circumscribe behaviour. We have seen the rise of weirdly nonsensical and clearly untrue luxury narratives which still circumscribe behaviour, but in absurdly damaging ways. More absurd than the past at any rate.

Alice and the rabbit hole provides an excellent idiom for this ridiculous state of affairs. Modern elites have become rabbit hole gatekeepers for the world of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. In this bizarrely artificial world they bolster their status with nonsense narratives which a mass audience finds difficult to digest and impossible to align with common sense.

We call this weird development ‘woke’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘politically correct’ or 'environmental' or a host of other names, but all of these shifting nonsense narratives are suited to shoring up the crumbling status of elites as opposed to non-elites.

Elite nonsense has always been with us of course, always valuable as an arcane badge of elite status. Yet in our modern world, the arcane nonsense has retreated down the progressive rabbit hole where nothing makes sense, where rational and informed people cannot follow. 

The Mad Hatters are having their final tea party.

The clues are in the questions

Westminster council offers staff chance to take ‘privilege’ quiz

A flagship Labour council offered staff the option to take a “privilege test” in a move to combat unconscious bias against ethnic minorities.

Westminster Council workers are asked to take an online quiz which gives a privilege score based on answers to statements like “I am a white male” or “I have an illness or disability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The council said the questions appeared on a Powerpoint presentation from 2021 and do not form “any part of formal policy, training or recruitment process.”


The clues are in the questions so we may as well extend them into the realms of deranged absurdity where they belong -

I frequently travel by private jet +100

I am given free tickets to expensive shows +50

I travel in an armoured limousine +100

I feel oppressed by privilege tests -10

I can't afford to run the central heating in winter -20

I have dandruff -10

I work for Westminster Council -1000

Missing Highs

Highs and lows of Five-Year Keir: The PM's journey from Doughty Street to Downing Street

Sir Keir Starmer's first five years as Labour Party leader have seen dramatic highs and lows - but the next five will perhaps be even more challenging.

To win the backing of left-wing Labour activists, he backed a wealth tax on the top 5% of earners, abolishing university tuition fees, nationalising water and energy and restoring freedom of movement between the UK and EU countries. Whatever happened to those promises?

Presumably that's where some of the highs are, lying to the rabble, but it's a bit of a stretch. There are attempts to paint Starmer as a capable international statesman, but it's all very thin and mainly based on his attempts to sidle past Brexit, in his freebie trousers perhaps? 


Though the UK is no longer in the EU, Sir Keir has forged strong alliances with European leaders - particularly France's President Macron - as he attempts to build a "coalition of the willing" to defend Ukraine. And he has won the trust of Ukraine's President Zelenskyy.

The stupidification

Malcolm Clark has a useful Critic piece on Scottish education. It is not complimentary.


The stupidification of Scottish schools

Scottish education is being dumbed down in the name of diversity

At the end of last year, Scotland’s education chiefs announced a new list of approved texts for pupils taking English exams at secondary schools. It represents everything that is wrong with Scottish education and the country’s cultural Establishment.

Ten years ago the SNP government decided there would be only one compulsory question asked in Scotland’s equivalent of GCSEs and A levels in English, and it would be about Scottish authors. It was claimed this would encourage pupils to study the great writers Scotland has produced, from Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson to Burns and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

There was nothing to stop a teacher teaching other great writers like Jane Austen, but this compulsory question would highlight Scotland’s proud literary tradition. Now, with this latest revision of the list of approved texts, it is clear the country’s education chiefs are on a mission to dumb down. The list, we are told, is all about “increased diversity”.


The whole piece is depressing but well worth reading as an indicator of how far down the rabbit hole progressives can go. Even further than this presumably.


That’s why this list perfectly embodies Scotland’s new national culture after 25 wasted years of devolution. It’s no accident the bulk of the list is made up of short texts with simple, sometimes even infantile language that require the least possible effort from pupils. Kids are even reassured they only have to study the first section of Duck Feet. Perish the thought they might have to deal with a whole novel!

There is of course one other terrifying possible explanation for the cultural vandalism this list represents. Might many of Scotland’s teachers now be so lazy and so thick this is all they are capable of teaching?