Only yesterday I noticed this rather curious report in the Press Gazette… A solicitor failed in an attempt to sue a political blogger for defamation and malicious falsehood when a judge decided that the words of which he complained could not be held to refer to him. The […]

According to the Guardian, things don’t seem to going too well for Michael Gove’s flagship free schools programme in Suffolk: There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools were closed down, there would still be a […]

Apropos of my last post on the subject of GCSE examinations, Caroline Crampton offers a few ‘thoughts’ (a very loose description) on the same subject at the New Statesman: Will Gove’s new O-Levels teach you anything useful? What exactly might Gove’s plans to replace GCSEs (which he feels […]

News that Michael Gove reportedly intends to replace the current GCSE system with ‘tougher’ O-level style exams in a system in which ‘less academic’ students would sit a “different ‘more straightforward’ exam, like the old CSE” has rapidly spawned a debate on ‘segregation’ which looks, to me, like […]

According to Andrew Lansley, speaking at an NHS Clinical Commissioners conference in April, “age is the principal determinant of health need” from which it follows, logically, that the NHS should devote a greater proportion of its resources towards providing health care services is those areas of the country […]

From the file marked ‘Why journalists shouldn’t do statistics’ we have a new front page entry from the Daily Mail. As per standard Ministry policy, I’m not going to link to the Mail’s article but I will quote from it as I tear it into little tiny kibbles […]

As a general rule of thumb anything that winds up Cranmer is usually a good thing so it’s with some amusement that I have report that 24 people including a ‘Jewish Gay and Lesbian group’ have reported his blog to the Advertising Standards Authority over an advert he […]

While we’re waiting for the Department of Health to launch its consultation on the future of pre-abortion counselling, a new study has been published by the Guttmacher Institute which sheds some interesting light on women’s needs and choices at the point at which they make contact with abortion […]

There’s a comment that’s popped up on the #Dorries hashatg that merits a little clarification… Beginning to think Louise Mensch is an #Dorries. Better clothes, similar relationship to reason. Seems a bit harsh on Louise Mensch for reasons that are perhaps best explained by way of a couple […]

Coming back to the Christian-sponsored ‘parliamentary’ report on children and online pornography that I wrote about yesterday, one of the thing that both intrigued and amused me was the inclusion of Psychologies magazine as a reference. Despite the sciency-sounding title, Psychologies magazine is nothing more than a women’s […]