Talking-up Scotland

Am I the only one to think that athletics is about as interesting as school sports? Apart from the Commonwealth and Olympic Games, how many of us watch athletics on TV? As for attending local, regional or even national athletics events in the UK, who goes along apart from relatives and close friends of the competitors or perhaps retired athletes?

BBC Scotland, desperate for bad news as always these days, has dug this information up and seems to be blaming Sport Scotland for neither knowing nor doing anything about this alleged problem. Back in 2014, the BBC seemed to have less enthusiasm for pushing children into elite sports:

‘How elite sport can be a lonely, isolating and vulnerable place.’

Most elite athletes in individual events spend almost all their waking hours, for years, in mindless repetition of the same few actions, either alone or with a coach mercilessly pushing them harder and harder and it’s not at all good for many of them. See this from Frontiers Research in 2016:

‘A growing research base suggests that the high performance environment has the potential to be a risky domain for many elite performers. This evidence has accumulated across disparate topics relating to elite sport including eating disorders among males, post-event depression, stigma towards accessing service provision in psychology and the emergence of organizational stress as a catalyst for mental health challenges in sport systems.’ 

Back to the one in ten not taking part in running, jumping, throwing and balancing, what are they doing instead? Well, the good news is that they, boys and increasingly girls too, are playing the beautiful game, football. I don’t know if top footballers are mostly working-class but judging by the accents and dialects in interviews a reasonable number are.

And, playing football and practising football Is great fun. I’ve done, I’ve seen it and thousands across the country are doing it as often as they can. Football builds teamwork, sharing, friendships, loyalty and even a good sense of humour. Even those who don’t play it, love it, watch it in huge numbers and build friendships around it. As Bill Shankly, former Liverpool Manager, may have said, ‘It’s socialism in action.’ Athletics, to me, is often ‘self-obsessed individualism in action.’ No wonder it can be bad for mental health.

How good is football for all of us? Here’s what the BBC Sport Website has to say:

Why get into football?	Simple yet endlessly exciting and dramatic, it’s the most popular sport in the world for a very good reason!
Who is it for?	Whatever your age, ability or fitness level, there is a type of football suitable for you.
Is there a cheap option?	All you really need to play the beautiful game is a football. Kick around on your own or with friends.
What if I want a proper workout?	Joining a weekly five or 11-a-side game increases your fitness and improves your game. Plus it’s a good way to see your mates.
Can I take it to another level?	There are leagues galore and it’s very competitive, with professional clubs recruiting players as young as seven.
Is there a disability option?	National Associations across Britain are increasingly pro-active in providing disability football options.
Is there a family option?	Family Fun Days run throughout the year to encourage families to take part in football-related activities.

Come on the Bairns!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/get-inspired/23152583

Birmingham-based, BMG Research surveyed 1002 Scots between December 9^th and 13^th. I’m going to take a wee but intelligent leap here and say that these results come from cold calls, mostly in a Birmingham accent (?), to telephone land lines. I’m basing that assumption confidently on the time scale being too short for face-to-face interviews or questionnaire returns. The former is highly unlikely anyway because it costs too much and the latter tends to get a very poor response rate. Finally, I’m basing it on information from employees and ex-employees on a website where they have commented on their experiences of working for BMG. If I’m wrong about this, all that follows in pointless. First see these reservations, from YouGov, about telephone interviews from the opinion polls which got the EU Referendum so wrong:

‘There’s a big difference between the online and telephone polls on the EU referendum – with online polls showing the sides neck-and neck and telephone polls showing about a 15% gap in favour of ‘remain’. Why? It’s striking that both methodologies right across the different polling companies give about the same number to the ‘leave’ campaign, around 40%. The difference is in the ‘remain’ number, which is around 52% from the telephone polls but only 40% for online polls.’

So, commonly, telephone surveys generate conservative, negative or status quo returns. Respondents are more likely to say no to a question about a big change of some kind. I don’t know what effect an English accent would have.

Also, BMG haven’t published the response rate. The more people who refused to answer the questions the less reliable the results.

In another YouGov report we read:

‘Now however we can reveal a real, significant and evidence-based difference between the two methodologies that explains why they are divergent and why it is online that appears to be calling it correctly.’

See this online survey report from the, far from sympathetic to Scottish Independence, Scotsman newspaper in June 2016:

‘Nearly six out of 10 Scots say they’d vote Yes in a second independence referendum. In a clear reflection of the growing backlash north of the Border to Thursday’s Brexit result, a ScotPulse online survey of 1,600 Scottish adults on Friday (24 June) showed that 59% of Scots now back leaving the UK.’

Further, not everyone has a landline to be called on. Roughly 20%, especially younger and economically disadvantaged citizens do not have one so cannot be surveyed. As the Herald report points out, the young and the less-well-off are more likely to prefer independence.

Here’s an even more interesting thought, from the USA admittedly:

‘There now may be something unusual about people who are willing to answer the phone to talk with strangers, and we should be sceptical about generalizing from the results of these surveys. It is possible that the new habit of non-phone-answering is evenly distributed throughout the population (thus reducing this as a sampling confound), but this seems unlikely.’

Now, are NO voters more unusual than Yes voters?

https://www.indeed.co.uk/cmp/Bmg-Research/reviews

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/02/23/commentary-what-explains-difference-between-phone-/https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/02/23/commentary-what-explains-difference-between-phone-/

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/05/20/revealed-evidence-greater-skews-phone-polls/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/386778/share-of-calls-enabled-landlines-in-uk-hoseholds/

http://www.scotsman.com/news/poll-puts-support-for-scottish-independence-at-59-1-4163338

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/09/20/what-if-the-problem-with-phone-polls-is-that-they-are-phone-polls/

‘Ambulance response times were delayed in London overnight after technical problems hit the control room, the ambulance service has said.’

 On a night when the London Ambulance Service attracted the big headlines with a collapse in its computer system, the long-anticipated (hoped for?) crisis in the Scottish system seems not to have materialised. As with yesterday’s report on the NO crisis in Scottish hospitals, by contrast with those in England, over the festive period, predictions of failure earlier in the year have not come to pass. BBC Scotland’s website could only report tamely (see below) on an increase in demand for ambulances but offered no evidence of problems meeting it. They couldn’t, of course, praise them despite the mention of the apparently smooth and effective planning with extra staff on duty. BBC Breakfast’s broadcast this morning had no Scottish section.

Back on 31st January 2016, the Sunday Post had reported ‘Ambulance crisis: Crews late for 1 in 3 life and death cases with service in meltdown.’ In April of 2016 we also had from the GMB union:

‘GMB Scotland Warns STUC of ‘Chronic Underfunding’ Consequences Across The Scottish Ambulance Service The current state of the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) is putting lives at risk says GMB Scotland.’

As recently as 28^th October, we had Alex Bell, in the Guardian, under a picture of an ambulance, telling us:

‘Audit Scotland has issued a strong warning about the state of the NHS in Scotland. It says the NHS is underfunded, has been unable to reform and faces unprecedented savings targets.’

You might remember Alex Bell as former ‘senior policy adviser’ to Alex Salmond but now serial critic of SNP policy.

I wonder, could this SNP initiative, reported in the Times newspaper in July 2016, have helped?

‘A thousand new paramedics are to be trained to work in the ambulance service over the next five years. The first 200 paramedics, recruited from the ambulance technician workforce, will begin training this year, backed by £5 million of Scottish government funding.’

Here’s the full BBC Scotland report:

Increase in Scottish New Year ambulance calls 

The Scottish Ambulance Service had a busier Hogmanay than last year.

Ambulance staff dealt with 2,184 calls between 19:00 on Hogmanay and 07:00 on New Year’s Day.

Additional crews, call handlers and dispatchers were on duty. The busiest time was from 01:00 to 04:00, with 739 calls.

The New Year total was 35 higher than the previous year. The Christmas period, from 23 to 27 December, saw a 10% increase on 2015.

Scottish Ambulance Service chief executive Pauline Howie said: “The overall level of demand for our service over the festive period has exceeded previous years and Hogmanay was one of our busiest nights of the year.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38483124

See these two disturbing quotes from the Telegraph of 18^th December 2016

‘GPs and nurses will be sent to the front doors of casualty units to turn away less serious cases, in a bid to tackle record demand and overcrowding as Christmas approaches.’

‘Hospitals have already been ordered to stop carrying out the majority of operations for at least a month, in a bid to reduce dangerously high levels of bed occupancy.’

On Christmas Day, the Telegraph also warned:

‘Overstretched hospitals were forced to cancel more life-saving operations last month than at any time since official records began, new data reveals.’

‘Almost double the number of urgent procedures, such as heart surgery, were delayed in November than during the same month the year before.’

‘MPs said the figures showed hospitals in England are “close to breaking point” even before most parts of the country are hit by severe winter weather, which traditionally exacerbates demand for services.’

NHS England is clearly in a crisis. There’s no other reasonable interpretation of these actions. The potential for increased deaths resulting from errors made at the front doors of A&E units and deciding which operations, from thousands of cases, to cancel.

In Scotland, our UK Nationalist media would surely be all over this kind of thing if it applied here. They haven’t.  Back in September and October 2016, the Guardian, STV, BBC, the Daily Record and the Daily Express were all confidently warning of coming ‘crises’ in a general sense or specifically about staffing, in Scotland.

By December 2016, the Daily Record was using the word about A&E waiting times in Ayrshire and Arran Health Board only, at the bottom of the Scottish league table. The Daily Express had managed to find a similar increase in waiting times at the new Glasgow Hospital (I won’t use its royally wrong name). Nothing from BBC Scotland! Remember Scotland’s A&E has been repeatedly been rated the best in the UK and on one occasion the best in the World.

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/11/04/is-scotlands-ae-still-the-best-in-the-uk-in-2016-is-it-still-the-best-in-the-world-as-it-was-in-2015-did-bbc-scotland-mention-this/

Other than that, we only had the GP’s trade union, the BMA, warning of a potential crisis unless they get more money.

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/06/14/scotland-has-more-gps-per-head-of-population-than-any-other-part-of-the-uk-newly-released-statistics-show/

http://newsnet.scot/commentary/scottish-gps-satisfied-least-stressed-uk-possibly-world/

So, that’s NO reports in the Scottish MSM of:

1. Being turned away from A&E by hard nurses at the front door
2. Cancelled emergency operations
3. The majority of operations put on hold
4. A real crisis across NHS Scotland

Oh, aye, and still no junior doctors’ strikes in Scotland. Why is that Reporting Scotland? Do tell.

Right, it’s Happy New Year and if you’re no weel, get right along to NHS Scotland, the noo.

See this from the Aberdeen Evening Express on 12^th December 2016:

‘Scotland’s “expertise in renewable energy” is in demand around the world, with businesses working in more than 40 countries, according to new research. Projects include advising the government of Japan, providing cranes to build wind farms in Morocco and South Africa and working with the World Bank in Chile, industry body Scottish Renewables said.’

That’s pretty impressive, huh? Scottish businesses are working in more than 40 countries including Japan, Morocco and South Africa and Chile! Wow, we’re global! If I was the editor at Reporting Scotland (I know, the very idea is very funny) that’d be a top headlined story. It has everything a young student of ‘news values’ is taught to look for. In only two Google ‘pages’, I found 14 news agencies reporting almost exactly the same headline. There are maybe more. Even the Scotsman and the Daily Record covered it! Reddit listed it. The National covered it too, as we would expect.

I’ve searched long and hard but there’s no sign of BBC Scotland or STV covering it.

I tried, for December 2016, ‘STV Scotland renewable energy expertise’ and ‘BBC Scotland renewable energy expertise’ but found nothing.

Now drop the word ‘expertise’ and for STV you get only:

‘Shepherd loses legal battle to stop Perthshire wind farm’

For BBC Scotland, despite meeting its renewable energy targets, it’s still not good enough and we get this grudging comment implying the Scottish Government is still not doing enough:

‘Conservationists and the green energy industry are demanding the Scottish government sets a new target to ensure half the country’s power comes from renewables by 2030.’

So, back to the beginning of the story, at least some of us got it. Spread the word.

https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/pipe/news/scotland/scotlands-renewable-energy-expertise-in-demand-worldwide-says-new-research/

Here’s just a quick response to today’s Labour Herald story.

Hardly any of us ever use more than basic numeracy in our lives. I’d put it at no more than 5%. You don’t need ‘significant’ or ‘advanced’ mathematics even for computer coding.

There’s no shortage of people with mathematics and science degrees. There is a shortage of creative people and sadly people willing to do unskilled and caring jobs.

Here are some views from people who’ve studied this more than I have. Mind you, in thirty-five years as a school teacher, education lecturer, senior lecturer, head of department, Associate Dean, Acting Dean and professor, I never ever needed Geometry or Algebra. I don’t need it check my pension either. I did need to use spreadsheets with averages and percentages but you can teach most 11 year-olds that.

It’s not just my opinion that the above is a big fat myth.

‘The second question is more fundamental: How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask yourself that — and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher. Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life. That courses such as “Quantitative Reasoning” improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth. All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss. Most adults have no contact with math at work, nor do they curl up with an algebra book for relaxation.

Mathematician G. V. Ramanathan (2010) in: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102205451.html

‘Aren’t Algebra and Geometry essential skills? The number of people who use either in their jobs is tiny, at most 5%.’

Andrew Hacker, The Math Myth, (2016) in: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/education/edlife/who-needs-advanced-math-not-everybody.html?_r=0

‘Math Is Not Necessary for Software Development’

Ross Hunter (2014) in: https://www.mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2014/01/14/math-is-not-necessary-for-software-development/

Go on; contradict me with any real evidence.

*Update: I’ve taken the ? out of the title after a reasonable confirmation (below) that the not-so-good prof is actually the father of a LibDem MSP recently investigated for expenses irregularities: http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/our-region/edinburgh/corstorphine/lib-dem-msp-alex-cole-hamilton-faces-expenses-probe-1-4239214

Here’s the STV report:

‘Falling standards in Scottish schools has been partly blamed on pupils being taught multiple qualifications in the same class. A leading professor at St Andrews University says multi-course teaching should only be used where absolutely necessary. This month the [PISA] report concluded Scotland’s performance in school s has slipped to ‘just average’ compared with other developed countries.’

Here’s some of the Herald report:

‘A SLUMP in school standards has been blamed on the controversial practice of teaching pupils different qualifications in the same class. A leading academic said so-called multi-course teaching was one of the reasons for the decline highlighted in a prominent international education survey – particularly in science. In December, the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) concluded that Scotland’s performance was now “average” compared to other developed countries in science, as well as in maths and reading.’

Here are some problems with, David Cole-Hamilton, the ‘leading professor/academic.’

1.       He has done NO research into this topic or into any other educational methodology. He is a retired professor of chemistry with only chemistry research publications like: ‘Synthesis of bifunctional monomers by the palladium-catalyzed carbonylation of cardanol and its derivatives.’

2.       He does NOT appear to have a teaching qualification or any experience of teaching in schools judging by his biography at: http://chemistry.st-andrews.ac.uk/staff/djc/group/david.html

3.       He works in a university (St Andrews) with NO teacher training faculty

4.       He might be a LibDem or even a LibDem MSP’s dad? 

Here are two more problems, with the Herald and STV reports, stupidly linking the prof’s ideas with the PISA test results:

1. ‘Every PISA survey tests reading, mathematical and scientific literacy in terms of general competencies, that is, how well students can apply the knowledge and skills they have learned at school to real-life challenges. PISA does not test how well a student has mastered a school’s specific curriculum.’ The professor’s opinions are based on the idea that teaching Higher, National 5 and National 4 in the same subject, in the same room is somehow damaging. He has no evidence.
2. The prof even tells us that, in wee rural schools, this is not a problem because ‘they know how to do it.’ Is he really suggesting that qualified teachers in urban schools don’t know how to handle different levels yet rural ones do? Again he offers no evidence and there’s no suggestion that he might be qualified to offer any in his cv.

Finally is the prof an unbiased commentator. Is he a LibDem? Is he even a LibDem MSP’s dad? I’m not saying he is but…………….

I see there’s an Alex Cole-Hamilton in the Scottish Liberal Democrats. See this on Facebook:

‘Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP | Facebook https://en-gb.facebook.com/alexformsp/ Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western, where I live with my family Alex Cole–Hamilton MSP shared Scottish Liberal Democrats‘s video. David Cole–Hamilton, Jane Cole-Hamilton, Cathy McInnes and 14 others like this.’

Also see this letter to the Independent in May 2015 strongly supporting the LibDems:

Lib Dems pay the price of the Coalition

Sean O’Grady (“Ah, Nick, you could have been a contender”, 9 May) paints a picture of what might have been if after the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats had remained in opposition, supporting the Tories only when appropriate.

He seems to ignore two things. The first is the positive things that the Coalition gave to this country entirely as a result of the Lib Dems. These include the rise in the lower tax threshold, giving £800 to many people, although not the rich; making sure that pensions will rise at least 2.5 per cent per year; introducing 1.6 million apprenticeships since 2010; tackling climate change and creating 200,000 new jobs by investing in renewable energy; creating the first green investment bank; providing free school meals for all Year 1 and 2 children. None of these crucial changes would have occurred without the Lib Dems being in government.

The second is that, at the start of the last parliament, there was no need for the Conservatives to serve the full term, and they could have called an election at any time. If the Liberal Democrats had voted against the much deeper cuts the Conservatives proposed or measures such as the right of bosses to fire people for no reason, the Tories would have called an election, which almost certainly would have given them increased support and would have decimated the Liberal Democrats for bringing down the Government. We would then have been where we are now but without the raised threshold for tax, the pensions lock, etc. Nick Clegg was right to go into the Coalition, and we shall see now what it might have been like if he had not.

David Cole-Hamilton

St Andrews, Fife

 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/letters-why-the-country-voted-tory-10240035.html

Finally, for more on why PISA results are no use at all, anyway, see:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/12/08/scotlands-schools-pisa-results-lean-toward-nothing-meaningful-finlands-success-is-not-real-south-korea-and-chinas-educational-programmes-amount/

The Herald headlined today with:

‘SNP priorities on health all wrong, warns leading Scots doctor’

The BBC website unsurprisingly echoed the story with:

‘BMA leader warns NHS struggling to cope’

Here we go again; the forces of Unionism never sleep.

I’ll get to the main point soon but I need to deal with the ‘leading scots doctor’ bit first. Peter Bennie is chairman of the British Medical Association’s Scottish branch. I’ve had a wee search but I can find no sign of him being a leading doctor. There’s no sign of awards for exceptional practice nor research publications presenting cutting-edge findings to move practice on nor is there even sign of him having managed anything much. It looks like he might be a leading trades unionist though, again, he’s no Bob Crowe, late of the RMT and the BMA Scotland is pretty wee. If he’s leading anything it’s in an essentially political role and not medical role so he’s not a ‘leading doctor.’

I’m not knocking being a trade union leader by any means. I was a lifelong member of the teachers’ EIS union. I remember many of its ‘leaders’ at different levels. Often good trades unionists, I don’t remember any of them have been leading educationists. They were usually people who had become more interested in the political role of the unions and gradually rose within those organisations on the basis of popularity.

So Doctor Bennie is primarily getting attention in the Scottish mainstream (Unionist) media because he is a trade unionist in a union with a posh sounding and very Unionist sounding, name.

Right, on the main point – what are the actual priorities that he says the SNP is getting ‘all wrong?’ Well, he’s a bit short on detail and just seems to want more money spent on NHS Scotland. He doesn’t for example have anything to say about the big SNP priority of integrating social and health care which is receiving praise (https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/integrated-care-northern-ireland-scotland-and-wales?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_term=socialshare)

and looks like working in terms of, for example, reducing bed blocking by the elderly in the way English hospitals are being paralysed by. So, like all trades unionists, he asks his members if they want more money and resources and they say yes, please. Is that how he thinks you run anything at all?

Back in June, I posted a list, fully sourced, of fifteen ways in which NHS Scotland was doing well, by UK and global comparison, regardless of his judgement that more cash was needed or we’d be heading for a crisis. I’ll repeat the link for them at the bottom of this. First, though, here’s a novel idea. Here are some things that NHS Scotland, thanks to the Scottish Government, is NOT doing….badly….unlike Tory-managed NHS England:

1. We’ve had NO junior doctors’ strikes causing thousands of cancelled and delayed operations because the SNP unlike the UK Tories haven’t tried to bully them into new contracts. Thank goodness for BBC News at 6 telling us this because Reporting Scotland won’t touch the story with a disinfected endoscopic probe.
2. NHS Scotland has NOT been cancelling large numbers of urgent operations like NHS England (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/24/number-of-urgent-operations-cancelled-record-high-nhs-england). If they had, do you think Reporting Scotland would have neglected to tell us?
3. Scottish hospitals have NOT been told to put thousands of operations ‘on hold’ over Xmas and New Year to ‘free up beds.’ (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/16/hospitals-in-england-told-to-put-operations-on-hold-to-free-up-beds). Again, if they had, do you think Reporting Scotland would have neglected to tell us?
4. There is NO social care and bed-blocking crisis in Scotland because the Scottish Government has been integrating the two for years now (https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2016/dec/21/theresa-may-recognises-social-care-crisis-but-solution-seems-far-off)
5. Bed blocking by the elderly is down 12% in Scotland (http://www.scotsman.com/news/bed-blocking-in-scottish-hospitals-continues-to-fall-1-4160213) and up 80% in England for the same reason (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/10/tory-plans-making-social-care-worse?CMP=share_btn_tw)
6. There’s NO evidence of a crisis in Scottish Maternity wards despite a shamefully distorted Reporting Scotland story (https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/11/22/the-power-of-early-morning-nightmares-and-expectant-mothers-bbc-scotland-callously-undermines-the-morale-of-midwives-their-patients-expectant-mothers-and-their-relatives-with-highly-selective-and/)

So, as so often before, the Unionist media shamelessly ‘weaponise’ NHS Scotland with apparently no care for the possible effects on anxious prospective patients. Who knows how many they’ve scared into delaying requests for treatment.

Finally, here’s the link for the list of 15 I published in June:

http://newsnet.scot/archive/stand-nhs-scotland-bucking-uk-trend-despite-media-attacks/

Take care, everyone. Don’t let the bastards grind us down.

You might remember my earlier criticisms of the PISA school attainment test results which Reporting Scotland and the other Unionist media used to attack the Scottish Government – they’re utterly unreliable estimates and meaningless across different cultures.

However, you can reasonably compare Scotland with quite similar educational systems in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. These comparisons become more useful if you can, unlike PISA, use large representative samples or even better complete national results. See this for England in January 2016:

‘Almost half of English Primary School students failing to make the grade, says report.’

The above Guardian headline, slightly exaggerated, was based on a study by the CentreForum think-tank and the Education Data Lab research body. On page five we see that only 58.5% hit the target set for reading, writing and mathematics. I wondered how it managed to be exactly the same percentage across all three subjects but that’s what it says. Here are the Scottish equivalent percentages reaching the targets:

Reading 72%

Writing 81%

Mathematics 68%

Now I know we are not comparing exactly like-for-like here but the two educational systems’ key concepts and standards in core subjects are unlikely to differ much given the cultural similarities, extensive history of collaboration and research over decades.

Why are the Scottish results better? I can’t say for certain of course because educational outcomes are affected by so many factors that it’s almost impossible to pin down the causes of any change. However, there is one factor which governments can control, which virtually every expert recognises is likely to play a large part and that is the pupil-teacher ratio. The more teachers you have per child the more attention each child should get and rather obviously the better they should do. A very large, in-depth English study in 2000-2003 (CSPAR) was reported in a UK government report and this concluded on p.55:

‘The CSPAR study found statistically significant gains for smaller classes for all ability groups in both literacy and mathematics.’

Here are the pupil-teacher ratios for the four UK areas:

Wales: 18.6/1

Northern Ireland: 17.6/1

England: 17.4/1

Scotland: 13.7/1

Again, I know these ratios are not evidence of actual class sizes (head teachers regularly adjust these to suit ongoing circumstances) but it’s reasonable to assume that Scottish schools will be using these additional staff members either to reduce typical class sizes directly or to increase team-teaching, flexibly, within classes, with the same effect of increasing attention-levels for each pupil.

Once more, you’d never know any of this if all you watch is Reporting Scotland and read the Scottish newspapers.

Sources:

http://centreforum.org/publications/education-in-england-annual-report-2016/

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183364/DFE-RR169.pdf

England: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/533618/SFR21_2016_MainText.pdf

Wales: school.stats@wales.gsi.gov.uk or http://wales.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/schoolscensus/?skip=1&lang=en

Scotland: school.stats@scotland.gsi.gov.uk or http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/SchoolEducation

Northern Ireland: statistics@deni.gov.uk or http://www.deni.gov.uk/index/facts-and-figuresnew/education-statistics.htm

The use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for those in deep depression, where drugs do not seem to help is still highly controversial. However, there are several highly-committed, highly-trained and utterly principled practitioners who feel it can help in a few cases. While it is clearly not in my competence here to debate the efficacy of ECT, it is in my competence as an academic media researcher, to comment on the reported evidence of standards in Scotland and elsewhere with a view, as often before, to remind readers again of the actual high quality of NHS Scotland contrary to BBC Reporting Scotland’s running scare stories based on incompetent or just biased reporting.

First, however, it interesting to note the level of controversy around ECT when it is by no means the only practise where there is debate. I’m thinking, for example, of methadone treatment, breast cancer scanning and the once routine cutting out of non-cancerous prostate glands which longitudinal studies have shown to cause severe negative consequences for many of those operated on.

The Scottish ECT Accreditation Centre Network works to maintain the highest standards for ECT therapy in Scotland. As early as 2004, a National Audit, reported in the BJPsych Bulletin, asserted:

‘ECT is effective in a routine clinical setting and standards of ECT in Scotland are higher than the UK average.’

The report also stated encouragingly:

‘All centres were using acceptable ECT machines by the end of phase 1 of the audit. Anaesthetic equipment was generally of a high standard, the majority of units provided a level well above the College criteria for adequacy…there was regular core of one to three senior anaesthetists and the standard of nursing was high.’

In 1998, only 30% of English units met the standard (BJPsychBulletin, 2004). By 2016, The Royal College of Psychiatrists could only report 78% of English centres as having even been accredited. I know this does not mean that the others are unsafe but it is still a matter of concern, surely?

‘In 2016, all [19] ECT Clinics in Scotland achieved “Accreditation”, 89% achieved “Accreditation with Excellence”. (Information Services Division /SEAN, 2016

Did BBC Reporting Scotland report this? They did report generally on ECT in 2016, see link below, but just to keep the tabloid controversy pot boiling. They made no reference to the above audits – so much for their Royal Charter to inform and to educate?

Sources:

BJPsychBulletin (2004) at: http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/27/4/137

Royal College of Psychiatrists (2016) at: http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/workinpsychiatry/qualityimprovement/ccqiprojects/ectclinics/ectas.aspx

Information Services Division SEAN (2016) at: http://www.sean.org.uk/AuditReport/_docs/SEAN-Report-2016.pdf?2

BBC on ECT in (2016) at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-35606073