Free school meals

[strichener]

http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7670

"Current school spending has been protected compared with other areas of domestic spending. The current schools budget has increased by 3% in real-terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15 (equating to a 0.6% rise in spending per pupil after accounting for growth in pupil numbers). In contrast, current public service spending has been cut by 8% in real-terms over the same period."

Yes, you seem to have once again redefined education as being schools. From the full report:

The real-terms cut to overall DfE resource spending of 1.2% between 2010/11 and 2014/15 has been relatively small, certainly compared with resource spending across other

departments, which has fallen by 8.3% in real terms over the same time frame.

In terms of overall spending on education there is no increase and your selective use of figures is shown in context below.

[Ad Lib]

Yes, you seem to have once again redefined education as being schools. From the full report:

In terms of overall spending on education there is no increase and your selective use of figures is shown in context below.

DEL Budget.png

I never said that education as a whole had risen in real terms you fucking rocket. I said schools. I was always comparing the schools budgets.

[strichener]

I never said that education as a whole had risen in real terms you fucking rocket. I said schools. I was always comparing the schools budgets.

*sigh*

And yet the post you originally responded to and each one since has been about education budgets. Imagine only comparing school budgets when the conversation was about education budgets. There is only one of two reasons for this:

1. Stupidity

2. Obfuscation

You choose.

[Ad Lib]

*sigh*

And yet the post you originally responded to and each one since has been about education budgets. Imagine only comparing school budgets when the conversation was about education budgets. There is only one of two reasons for this:

1. Stupidity

2. Obfuscation

You choose.

Except they haven't. They haven't just been about the education budget as a whole. Literally the whole point of bringing up the issue of the schools budget was to show that cuts to schools (the clue is in the thread title) are a choice and question of spending priorities on the part of the Scottish Government and not something that can be fobbed off as Westminster cutting our overall budget.

The stats I provided with you related to schools budgets. I used the word schools repeatedly. You then denied that my stats were right. You referred to a report that specifically showed Scottish schools spending to be lower than the UK average, contra your claim in post 30 that "Scotland, on average, spends more per pupil than England". That assertion was total bollocks for the simple reason that you were taking education and training spending rather than schools spending, and people in further education are students, not pupils. It was you, not me, that was playing fast and loose with the difference between education and schools.

It is not "stupidity" or "obfuscation" to look at how much money is spent in schools and how it is spent north and south of the border when considering the educational outcomes produced by schools. It's called looking at the relevant evidence.

[strichener]

Except they haven't. They haven't just been about the education budget as a whole. Literally the whole point of bringing up the issue of the schools budget was to show that cuts to schools (the clue is in the thread title) are a choice and question of spending priorities on the part of the Scottish Government and not something that can be fobbed off as Westminster cutting our overall budget.

The stats I provided with you related to schools budgets. I used the word schools repeatedly. You then denied that my stats were right. You referred to a report that specifically showed Scottish schools spending to be lower than the UK average, contra your claim in post 30 that "Scotland, on average, spends more per pupil than England". That assertion was total bollocks for the simple reason that you were taking education and training spending rather than schools spending, and people in further education are students, not pupils. It was you, not me, that was playing fast and loose with the difference between education and schools.

It is not "stupidity" or "obfuscation" to look at how much money is spent in schools and how it is spent north and south of the border when considering the educational outcomes produced by schools. It's called looking at the relevant evidence.

Here is the post that you replied to:

You do realise what happens to Scottish funding if England dwcide to knock £800,000,000 out of their education budget?

Meanwhile we subsidise MPs, Lords and Royal food.

And this was followed up with

You can quote increases and decreases in %age terms all day long. Let's look at absolutes and we can quite clearly state that Scotland, on average, spends more per pupil than England. This is despite England's "protection" of education spending.

The following, taken from the HOC Library shows that we spend more per head than the UK average:

EduSpending.png

What a load of waffle that doesn't substantiate the argument that barnett gives more because of rural cost of delivery. I know we are specifically talking about education here but in terms of resource allocation, the highest density are of the UK is he costliest.

It is not "stupidity" or "obfuscation" to look at how much money is spent in schools and how it is spent north and south of the border when considering the educational outcomes produced by schools. It's called looking at the relevant evidence.

It is when I asked about the education budget.

[Ad Lib]

Here is the post that you replied to:

And this was followed up with

It is when I asked about the education budget.

I answered your questions about the education budget and never disputed your point about it being slightly higher overall or that it was dependent to some extent on English education spending. What I did was provide a more specific and relevant line of inquiry to the principal subject matter, which was schools (the clue is in the words free school meals).

My contention is that the problems in the Scottish education system are a product of policy choices made at Holyrood not to prioritise investment of the money they have in deprived secondary schools. This has been completely clear throughout. Your contribution to this thread has been to conflate pupils and students, to say "ah but Scotland spends more on education" and "the Barnett formula is pure shite so it is".

I suggest you focus less of your energy on blaming Westminster for everything and a bit more on the record of 8 years of the Scottish Government running our schools less well and less effectively tackling the attainment gap than their colleagues at the Department for Education.

[Fide]

I never said that education as a whole had risen in real terms you fucking rocket. I said schools. I was always comparing the schools budgets.

Ad Lib is VERY angry these days isn't he?

Must be hard being incorrect, despite paragraph after paragraph of hot air and bluster.

[Swampy]

The "student loan thing" isn't "pure obfuscation". It's true. Lower-earning graduates (those who earn a career average, inflation adjusted salary of less than 1.3 times or so the national median household income) pay less in total student loan repayments under the English student finance system than they do under the Scottish one, for broadly equivalent maintenance support.

And I did vote Yes. I was public about it. I shared a platform with Tommy Swinger Sheridan four days before the vote. I've been completely honest that I do not regret voting that way but that I wouldn't do it again in a second referendum.

Barnett absolutely has to go. If you think that Scotland would be a basket case without it, you are suggesting that independence itself would have similar consequences, at the very least in the first couple of decades. I think Scotland' is a bit more resilient than that. Why do you seem to think we are dependent on the rest of the UK to sustain effective levels of public spending?

Yes, this is because Scotland has more low population density areas, meaning provision is more expensive. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the reason Barnett allocates more money per capita to Scotland than is spent by equivalent in England.

If Scotland were less rural and didn't have any islands, the structural spending gap would all but not exist.

The cost of delivering an acceptable quality of education in Scotland is higher than it is in England. That's not an excuse for the Scottish government when it fails to keep-up the schools budget in-line with inflation.

Right, sorry for the delay, you know your stuff so I wanted to make sure I had sufficient time to get this post right.

Student loans: it's obfuscation because:

1) student loan payments in Scotland don't kick in until you're earning over £17k a year.

2) Scottish students tend to have lower loans in the first place due to absence of tuition fees and a (relatively) low graduate endowment fee

Basically you can define a really narrow set of parameters via which England does better, but it's like pointing out that every seat on the dinghy has ocean views when it's up against an ocean liner with some inside staterooms.

Voting yes: it's really easy to say that but I think we both know the next referendum is going to be the one that actually matters. It was the ultimate in bet-hedging and I'm not the only one who saw it that way.

Barnett: you replied to this part already to say I had no evidence that any settlement would be worse than the status quo. I really don't see how, the UK political scene being as it is, it could be anything but. Do you think the Tories would be caught dead doing anything other than 'taking back' from Scotland? In any case while I think the SNP would love FFA, I agree that it would be a disaster. I don't think you can really have 'proper' FFA without independence. But my point is that the political scene between Scotland and the rest of the UK is confrontational, and far from the blame being on the feckless nats, it's because Jock-baiting is a vote winner in England. Even Corbyn's at it.

Education: strichener's pointed this out well, but I think nitpicking over amounts and budgets is putting the cart before the horse a bit. We have very solid evidence of what can improve school performance (two key factors - class size and level of educational attainment of teachers) and rather than just arbitrarily say "more funding!" the object of funding should be defined first and the amounts decided later. I don't think the SNP has been perfect on education but I do think there's a tendency to blow the budget thing out of proportion.

Also, academies are for nutters with a Christ complex like Blair and his goons, I hope they all collapse into rubble (during the holidays, obviously.)

[Ad Lib]

Right, sorry for the delay, you know your stuff so I wanted to make sure I had sufficient time to get this post right.

Student loans: it's obfuscation because:

1) student loan payments in Scotland don't kick in until you're earning over £17k a year.

2) Scottish students tend to have lower loans in the first place due to absence of tuition fees and a (relatively) low graduate endowment fee

Basically you can define a really narrow set of parameters via which England does better, but it's like pointing out that every seat on the dinghy has ocean views when it's up against an ocean liner with some inside staterooms.

No it's not obfuscation. I make no secret of the repayment threshold. A repayment threshold that is lower than England's. Far more graduate jobs have a salary that is caught by the Scottish threshold than the English one, and when it's caught it demands more back and earlier. It's not "obfuscation" when I'm specifically shining light on those aspects of the Scottish policy and demonstrating how they serve to make low earning Scottish graduates less well off despite not one penny of tuition fees contributing to their nominal debt amount.

The word obfuscation means to obscure. I am doing the polar opposite of that. Unless you earn more than the household median income as your career average salary, about £28kpa in today's money, you pay more, and more of it when you're poorer, under the Scottish system. This isn't no one. It's about half of all graduates.

Frankly if graduates are earning a starting salary of £28-30k at KPMG I couldn't give a toss if we ask them to pay as much as £2kpa more in student loan repayments than a teacher. They can afford it.

Voting yes: it's really easy to say that but I think we both know the next referendum is going to be the one that actually matters. It was the ultimate in bet-hedging and I'm not the only one who saw it that way.

I never pretended not to have reservations about independence. This is a revelation only to yourself. Making the lazy claim that I didn't vote Yes when clearly I did serves no useful purpose whatsoever other than to ad hominem by association.

Barnett: you replied to this part already to say I had no evidence that any settlement would be worse than the status quo. I really don't see how, the UK political scene being as it is, it could be anything but. Do you think the Tories would be caught dead doing anything other than 'taking back' from Scotland? In any case while I think the SNP would love FFA, I agree that it would be a disaster. I don't think you can really have 'proper' FFA without independence. But my point is that the political scene between Scotland and the rest of the UK is confrontational, and far from the blame being on the feckless nats, it's because Jock-baiting is a vote winner in England. Even Corbyn's at it.

I think you have too uncharitable an opinion of Tories. If they wanted to f**k Scotland they'd have offered FFA in June. They didn't.

Education: strichener's pointed this out well, but I think nitpicking over amounts and budgets is putting the cart before the horse a bit. We have very solid evidence of what can improve school performance (two key factors - class size and level of educational attainment of teachers) and rather than just arbitrarily say "more funding!" the object of funding should be defined first and the amounts decided later. I don't think the SNP has been perfect on education but I do think there's a tendency to blow the budget thing out of proportion.

Also, academies are for nutters with a Christ complex like Blair and his goons, I hope they all collapse into rubble (during the holidays, obviously.)

Two points:

1. Class sizes needs money for buildings and more teachers. That's money. Academies were the vehicle for that in London. QED.

2. There is a certain irony to saying that the budget point is beings "blown out of proportion" when all that's happened is that the stats have been laid bare (3% real terms increase in schools spending plays 10% real terms cut) and the observation made that this has coincided with educational outcomes especially in secondary schools getting worse in Scotland and better in England.

Meanwhile

3. You blow fringe problems with academies completely out of proportion when most of them are no more religious than comprehensives, while ignoring the concrete successes of many failing schools that have been converted into academies. A silver bullet? No. The apocalypse? No. A model several successful education systems have a variation of and worth exploring despite the SNP dismissing any suggestion of trialling anything that challenges comprehensive hegemony? At the very least an open question.

[Fide]

I think you have too uncharitable an opinion of Tories.

Ladies and gentlemen, the busted flush.

[doulikefish]

Ill stick this in here

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-06-05/scotland-most-well-educated-country-in-europe/

[Ad Lib]

Ill stick this in here

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2014-06-05/scotland-most-well-educated-country-in-europe/

Ah, another classic where SNP supporters try to claim credit for the education of a section of the population most of whom left tertiary education before Margaret Thatcher even left office.

[doulikefish]

Ah, another classic where SNP supporters try to claim credit for the education of a section of the population most of whom left tertiary education before Margaret Thatcher even left office.

Can you point out where i said its all down to the snp?

[Fide]

Ah, another classic where SNP supporters try to claim credit for the education of a section of the population most of whom left tertiary education before Margaret Thatcher even left office.

Utterly, utterly scrambling for relevance.

[Todders]

Can you point out where i said its all down to the snp?

HI SNPbaaaad tourettes kicking in big time there.

[Todders]

His SNPbaaaad tourettes kicking in big time there.

[Todders]

Ah bugger it. I hate posting on a phone!!

[doulikefish]

Can you point out where i said its all down to the snp?

coooeee

[Ad Lib]

coooeee

Can you point out where I said you said that?

I was pointing out the total irrelevance of the article to the SNP's record, the matter being discussed in the thread. It's not simply that it's not "all down to the SNP"; it's that it's statistically incapable of being even remotely down to them.

[invergowrie arab]

The point is surely that whilst the SNP can't take credit for Scotland being the most educated people in Europe it is no coincidence that that educated populace chose the SNP.

HTH