The Government is in charge you know!

INFORMATION YOU NEED TO KNOW

Ofsted cheats!

Ofsted, the government's education standards watchdog, has admitted that parts of an inspection report given to a top Birmingham school were copied from a report on another school more than 100 miles away. Lordswood Girls' School - judged in government league tables to be the best in the country for improving pupil performance - is planning to sue Ofsted after discovering that two pages of a critical review were identical to an earlier report on Parkside School in Bradford.

Pasted from Brian's Educational Blog

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Conservative bloggers and the BBC (located at London W1)

Conservative bloggers are often accused of being obsessed with a certain Shepherd's Bush pro-terrorist lobbying group. Liberals put on their oh-so-reasonable act and enquire why one media organisation sends us so reliably ballistic. One answer is simply this: The Indie might be horrible, but at least you can read a copy of Right-Wing Maniac Monthly without having to give Robert Fisk a fiver. So yes, the licence fee does grate. But even that's not all of it.

In an excellent article in the American Spectator, Lawrence Henry points out that even in America - home of Rush, Fox et al - the news agenda is still massively influenced by the legacy media. That's why the BBC matters. If journalism is the first draft of history, then the BBC's output sets the frame of reference. It's no exaggeration to say that the Beeb acts as a gatekeeper, determining which stories are the scandal d'jour and which are left by the wayside. That's why BBC bias matters - not only the outright distortions the BBC airs, but also the way it can hype a non-story that suits its agenda (Jenin!) or strangle one that doesn't (Ivory Coast). As long as we have a government-coddled elephantine media organisation in existence, it will be able to distort the news agenda to suit its own ideology.

Pasted from House of Dumb

Blair won't be happy until every single one of us is on his payroll

All governments in modern times have looked to the "payroll vote" to help get their Bills through Parliament. Until now, the phrase has meant only those ministers in the Lords and Commons who draw their salaries from the public purse, and depend on the Prime Minister's patronage for their livelihoods. But Mr Blair's administration is attempting something much more ambitious, and more sinister.

The idea behind this relentless expansion of the public sector, at the expense of the private, seems to be nothing less than to spread the payroll vote throughout the entire country. At the rate we are going, there will soon be enough public servants in every constituency, dependent for their livelihoods on the taxpayers' largesse, to tip the electoral balance in favour of the party of bureaucracy and big government.

Pasted from The Telegraph

Tony Banks: Hero of the People?

Tony Banks, standing down as MP for West Ham, says he finds the problems of constituents to be "tedious" and that his work is that of a glorified social worker. West Ham is one of the most disadvantaged constituencies in the country, but Banks evidently prefers his not-at-all elitist work as chairman of the works of art committee, which he admits to finding more intellectually stimulating.

Pasted from Labour Watch

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.