Extremely tenuous link: I have just written a paper on how systemic failure is endemic in the English higher education system and is wasting huge amounts of money, energy, and talent — even where individuals are competent, systemic deformity will kill you.
post18.co.uk/blood-debt-t...
If people running a system no longer know WHY they do things (vet people to avoid hiring people who might engage in high risk behaviours), then you end in a world where FCDO spent money on a process no one was interested in hearing bad outcomes from, and yet now everyone involved has been sacked.
All systems require some performative activity (“justice seen to be done”) but if you divorce that performance *entirely* from the substance (by, eg, running vetting when you clearly don’t care about the outcome), it is not only pointless but *dangerous*.
Even if individuals have screwed up here (and seems pretty clear they have, though people are clearly divided about who did and when), this is a systemic failure as much as a political or personal one, and a failure buried deep in how protagonists understood what they were doing (or not) and why.
I think it is possible that there may be something quite profoundly wrong with a system in which no one apparently knew anything about how the processes they were running were supposed to work or how the outcomes might interact with, you know, reality.
The English uni fees and loans system was supposed to insure English higher education against Treasury penny-pinching.
But despite 30 yrs of sound and fury:
Per-student funding in 1997: ~£10k (today’s money).
In 2025–26: ~£10k.
I wrote about why here:
www.linkedin.com/posts/johnda...
So you’re saying it’s time he was given a new government job, right?
“Like a badly-wired plug, the English HE system operated, but the longer it did so, the more likely it would spark. The current financial state of the sector suggests that, somewhere, the fire has already begun.”
My first essay for The Post-18 Project is published today.
The essay is available in full online and in PDF format:
post18.co.uk/wp-content/u...
“Like a badly-wired plug, the English HE system operated, but the longer it did so, the more likely it would spark. The current financial state of the sector suggests that, somewhere, the fire has already begun.”
My first essay for The Post-18 Project is published today.
Misread this as “non-human otter”, wondered what I’d missed since giving up Mass.
“We can S-P-el how we like!
If enough of us are wrong, wrong is right!”
[smash cut to white text on black screen:]
“All of the children of Crunchem Hall went on to fail English GCSE and are now currently in the fifth year of compulsory re-sits.”
I get that there are very much other important things going on, but I feel if we could work out what that slide had on it, we might be able to replicate it’s magic so the President of the United States might be able to remember anything else.
What would be amazing is if we could find the original slide Trump accidentally remembered from a briefing that gave him this fixation on power plants and bridges over, say, roads or port facilities or any other form of infrastructure.
Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!
Feels like “failed vetting” is one of those phrases that ought to end anyone’s route through a recruitment process?
Like, if you have a job requiring that you vet people, successful vetting doesn’t seem to be a “nice to have”? Very much on the “Essential” list, possibly quite near the top of it?
🚨NEW PODCAST🚨
If the student loan system is the problem, is a 'graduate tax' the solution?
@jonathansimons.bsky.social and @johndavidblake.bsky.social join me to explore the pros and cons of switching to an entirely new model for funding Higher Education.
Listen here: insideyoured.com
This reworking of “Anything You Can I Can Do Better” is really weird.
Arguably, there is a case for students who consistently perform poorly in exams but where we have reason to believe the method is obscuring the learning to be offered alternative assessments BUT if we moved *everyone* on to those, it would breed so much inconsistency that the system failed everyone.
Replacing GCSE/A-level exams wholesale would be not only costly and disruptive but cut against the purposes of their purpose (to certify a general level of knowledge & skill in the subjects concerned). It wld also (as we know from 2020) be profoundly disadvantageous to less privileged candidates.
At its most demanding levels, HE is abt *creating* new knowledge (both theoretical and practical) & therefore has to adopt assessment practices that would be neither necessary nor useful in prior schooling (using vivas instead of or alongside exams, for example). It doesn’t mean exams were “wrong”.
It doesn’t make any assessment inherently wrong — the questions are always “how can we assess, with high reliability and validity, the thing(s) we want to know”. That is not always straightforward to do, but the principle isn’t complicated, even if the execution is more or less resource intensive.
At HE, assessment may be more “authentic” because we have less interest in being certain the core disciplinary skills have been mastered (because prior assessment might assure us of that) and it is necessary to test that knowledge in action (as with medical simulations).
That does not, inherently, require “only exams” or even necessarily “more exams” in HE. Instead what is needed is properly-defined assessment constructs with clear requirements to demonstrate validity and reliability.
It is true that HE and compulsory often use different assessment language, but it is HE that ought to change, but not necessarily in the way implied here.
Assessment is about *reliability* and *validity* — the method needs to follow that, not precede it.
What could they possibly do to top this moment in their lives?
Link: www.tiktok.com/t/ZTkDwwh5f/
Chemical Ali —> Comical Ali —> Comical Barbie.
Right now, the conversation isn’t about nuclear programs, or free and fair elections in Iran. It's about reopening a body of water that was open before this war started. Chalk that up as a win for Tehran.
I personally believe at least two of these, so obviously those ones are not ridiculous. But the rest of them are pretty strange.
"My dog keeps pissing on the carpet, perhaps he is aware of and self-consciously trying to subvert Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory of self-presentation."
