Just a couple of graphs to show how effort might affect attainment in relation to inherent ability.

Assumptions - The output probablility curve for attainment if all learners applied average effort would be normal. 

It seems a sad reflection on the politicisation of education that marketing slogans seem to be necessary to get education professionals attention rather than the use of sound evidence based pedagogy.

Aims

I have been updating the menu links for the different languages that the INGOT learning site supports. Some things are far from intuitive! So I decided to document what I found here. 

On this site the Primary links are across the top of the page

Home - Certificates - Users - etc

These are the main menu links additional to user account details in the upper right hand block.

Phone hacks aside, the newspapers are good at taking statistics out of context and making emotive headlines from them. A recent headline that 5 schools contributed more Oxbridge undergraduates than the weakest 2000 state schools sounds like the educational conspiracy of the century.

Phone hacks aside, the newspapers are good at taking statistics out of context and making emotive headlines from them. Or maybe journalists, being mainly English graduates, are inumerate or scientifically illiterate and assume that the rst of the populations is too. A recent headline that 5 schools contributed more Oxbridge undergraduates than the weakest 2000 state schools sounds like the educational conspiracy theory of the century. However, I think I can show that it is a natural consequence of the system as it is.

Even the Roman Empire came to an end. Communist Russia was a lot shorter-lived and it seems the longevity of an empire is tending towards Andy Worhol's "famous for 15 minutes" as technology accelerates the way we live.  So need we worry about monopolies and too much wealth and power concentrated into the hands of small interest groups? One argument is that it doesn't matter because all these things come to an end.

The exact death toll from the earthquake in Japan is not known with any precision but it is certain to be more than ten thousand, The Indonesian Tsunami killed nearly quarter of a million people as did the earthquake in Haiti. Yet millions of people continue to live on Earthquake fault lines, slopes of volcanoes and coastlines known to be at risk. Istanbul, San Francisco, Rotorua? Where will be next?

The Importance of Teaching and the effect on school qualifications

The publication of a schools White Paper defines government thinking for the rest of this Parliament.  It is a lengthy document and in some ways poses more questions than it answers. If the National Curriculum is to be slimmed down, how? What will the effect be of the Wolf review on vocational qualifications? Many questions as yet unanswered. So what are the implications for current school qualifications? Are there any clear signals?