Thetownend.com

My wife has just come home from work and relayed a story about the lady who works with her and that lady's sister.  The lady's sister has been suffering for a long time now with feet problems and has now got to the point of not being able to walk unaided.  After almost two years of seeing various doctors, registrars and finally a consultant she got put on the list for an operation - she was told that in view of her chronic condition she was going to be classed as an emergency.  That was four weeks ago, yesterday she received a phone call to tell her that she would not be getting the operation as they had run out of funds for this type of op!!  We are under two months into a new financial year for the hospital and they have run out of funds!!!  Was this what Cameron meant when he said the NHS would be safer in his hands than under any other potential goverment?

cuts cuts cuts. Of course wealthy tories have private health care so they're ok.
Schools are losing staff due to cuts too. The list goes on and on and on

the cuts (or brunt of)  are yet to begin :)

Totally agree with you Arriba, grandaughter came home from Swindon Academy yesterday to tell her parents that the uniform is going to cpmpletely change and they would have to wear a blazer, blouse, skirt and tie - the school colours are changing as well so any uniform presently worn is going to be obsolete in September.  To soften the blow the Academy is going to provide existing pupils with free blazers and ties this time.  What a total waste of money - especially as the school was highlighted in the Adver earlier this week as morale is at an all time low amongst staff due to massive cuts and redundancies.  Priorities wrong I would say!!

Wonder if it would even be physically possible to bone that

Wrong thread flashheart, I'm presuming?!

Oh deary me.

Yeah, I was supposed to post that in the fat chick thread.

Thing the main problem with the NHS is that it is measured on quantity and not quality, something which Labour brought in to make it look like the NHS was working better than it was. As a result they aim to meet targets and use any tactics they can to break the rules, they might meet those targets but the patients suffer in the process.

But nothing changes the fact we're broke and there simply isn't the money to pay for everything.

Yes, but John Terry will be paying less tax this year.

We're all in this together  :flaccid:

Think it was the stuff about school girls, that got Bangkok going.

I am having a Colonoscopy at the GWH tomorrow (ouch), waited 6 months for it.

I often wish ill thoughts upon the current administration, although dont worry, David Cameron "feels our pain"

I just wish he could feel mine tommorrow

Just don't fart until its all finished!!

 :eek: Are you speaking from experience?

Maybe, although mine was a few years ago and the procedure may have changed now, certainly got a bit uncomfortable towards the end!!  Best of luck for tomorrow anyway!

Cheers, just had the first sachet of bowel death

Tehehe. Could be worse.

Enema : Not a friend.

Should have just had a couple of pints of 3B's - that would have sorted you out! :pint:

Half way through Sachet number 2, not a bloody thing yet, i better not be starving for fuck all  :doh:

Academies are ruled by businesses. Businesses want their schools to have a 'smart' appearance to improve their branding.

Government policy is as follows:

1. Cut funding to education.
2. Schools become desperate for money.
3. Schools link with businesses to form Academies.
4. Corporate involvement means that management decisions are no longer made in the interests of pupils and learning. Instead, they are motivated by branding and business profit.

Schools need to resist corporate involvement for as long as possible, until this government is out.

Also add into that, that inspection measures are being changed. The tories want more schools to fail so they can justify business involvement. Once they (the businesses) are in, they are hard/impossible to get rid of.

Gove is a cunt.

I had mine in Penzance - think I could have gone to Lands End and farted and flown the 26 miles home  :( :D

Believe me, i would give my right arm for a fart right now  :-[

Would you like to be the next Minister for Education?

Would love to. I've worked in schools for four years so have four years experience on Michael Gove. I think he and Piers Morgan are possibly the only two human beings that repulse me.

Pretty much like crap teachers then.

Hahah, identical in that respect, yes.

I'm quitting my post to go traveling, so we had 6 candidates come in to interview for my job on Friday. 5 of them were good or very good, but the bloke who came was absolutely hopeless. Been teaching for about 10 years too. One kid spent the majority of the 15 minute lesson drawing a detailed picture of Hulk Hogan on his whiteboard, and by the end of the lesson most of the others were rolling around on the floor shouting, before he attempted to restore some sense of order. When asked in the interview whether he would take the job he said, "Mmmmm.... well, I've got another interview this afternoon so I'd have to see how that one went first." Bet his current school can't wait to get rid of him.

So you think there will be less academies and business funding of them under the party (Labour) that came up with the idea and implemented it in the first place?

I'm not sure the problem is anything to do with funding anyway, I'd argue our education system is fucked from top to bottom and we pretty much need to start from scratch to sort the mess out. What it really needs is cross party agreement to do it but there is no chance of that happening.

I'm certain of it.

Labour started their academy programme in 2002 and by the time the coalition came to power in 2010 they'd opened 203 academies. Since then, the Tories have raped the shit out of the idea and we now have 1,807 academy schools.

I don't agree with your last bit. We have one of the best education systems in the world. What makes it "fucked from top to bottom?" It'll be fucked from top to bottom if all of our schools are sponsored, and therefore partially controlled, by Carpet Right.

If anything it would be worse under Labour as the need to increase public spending (especially on education and health) is so ingrained that they will take money from anywhere they can get it. Hence the PPI schemes, hence the academy scheme and so on. They would need to find money from somewhere to increase (or just maintain) spending which will be from the private sector.

You say our education system would be damaged with more business control, I'd say it is being damaged with the level of control that the main universities have. We've seen this recently with a co-ordinated push from various parties to give universities more control over the curriculum and teaching methods to prepare students better for university. The problem with this is that it doesn't help those at all that don't go to university and is also a negative for some of those that do - the heavy focus on academic studies isn't necessarily a good thing.

There obviously needs to be a balancing act between academic and vocational study but at present it is weighed far too heavily towards academic. Which I think is largely responsible for the high level of youth unemployment - too many kids leaving school and college without the real skills they and businesses need.

My main area of interest is IT education especially in schools and colleges. I spent some time recently researching this and came to the conclusion it is presently a complete and utter crock of shit. This is something which the government acknowledge but haven't done anything about as they are too busy commissioning reports and then reading them rather than doing anything about it. There are some very quick and easy fixes but that would be far too easy.

Education hasn't changed since I was at school, I see!

this 100%

johnny, aside from the fact that you use the word a couple of times, none of that is about academies.

I agree that more needs to be done in secondary schools to cater for those not going to university. I think too many people go to University, and would be better going down the vocational route.

It looks to me that the tories want to pass the buck of stuggling schools over. Schools in deprived areas will always struggle to meet targets due to the pupils there though.

You asked me why I thought our educational system was fucked so I gave one example, though I could talk all day about it.

As regards academies I don't see a problem with business being involved nor private money. I think they're unnecessary though and just complicate and fragment the system. I'd prefer we went back to basics and focussed on getting secondary schools and colleges working properly, rather than continually coming up with new schemes that just paper over the cracks. The same applies to the NHS.

Businesses will be about profit. Schooling should remain government run and aided accordingly,not cast aside as certain ones don't meet the targets set out for all schools. The sats are a joke along with league tables and should be scrapped.

A "light hearted" serious  view of targets in the UK public sector.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9TH5ktKFE&feature=related 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIFvpRilSc

The problem with all the targets and league tables is that they're used solely as a measure of performance and of success and failure. Rather than using them to identify where improvements can be made and learning from those that perform well.

A good example I read some time ago was a GP surgery that needed to give appointments within 48 hours. When they couldn't meet this they didn't look in to why and try to solve it (maybe getting more doctors, more efficient scheduling, reducing the demand for appointments, directing some patients to nurses and so on), they just stopped answering the phone so the patients couldn't contact them and the 48 hours didn't start ticking. They met the targets but it didn't help the patients.

Same thing with education. A school that gets straight A's from the brightest students is praised more than a school that raises the grades of the less bright students a few levels.

One of the worst things about school league tables was the concentration of resources on the kids on the cusp of making the minimum grades.  Lots of funding available to get primary school kids to Level 4 SATs or secondary kids to Grade C GCSE.
Any kids that were not going to get A stars but would comfortably manage a B/C were often as good as ignored as they wouldn't make any difference to any league tables for the school.