My children (of 6 and 8 years) have never been happier, they are multilingual and fathers are treated as importantly as they should be. That is, as equally importantly as mothers.

I feel that the current government in the UK are destroying the UK’s children with their anti-male and declining “one size fits all” education policies. How you can have the likes of Harriet Harman as number two is beyond me.

A friend of mine was surprised by a mutual nurse of ‘ours’ who arrived at his flat late at night, jumped his bones before he was awake, and skedaddled pregnant – I’m still mortified almost 30 years later, despite having had a similar experience myself

I don’t know what the solution may be.

Perhaps a state persecution of ‘cultural christianity’(sic) would help?

you seem to be clouded my the miscomprehension that regular, structured paternal contact (be it school-organised or not) has to involve some sort of junk food. That point is entirely moot, as the focus of this organisation was to provide a background of comfort and alterior gratification – in this case sugary treats (hooray!) – to detract from what could be an uncomfortable and unpleasant situation; as Humanite was referring to in the very beginning of these comments. Not to increase the proportion of overweight kiddies running around.

“Why do the left always have such trouble untangling empirical cause and effect ?”

firstly, i feel vaguely amused at your wonderfully brazen generalisation of ‘the left’ – as if we were some sort of tree-hugging, armchair army; the personification of all irrational thought. Hmm.
be that as it may, i see little evidence in the previous comments against which you have tried to form a rebuttal of the entanglement of cause and effect; indeed in many other articles, that would warrant such an out-of-the-blue and clearly irrational steretype

there is more than a glimmer of resentment that these inferior, less intelligent mortals than yourself have an ‘easy’ time of it, as clearly such new-fangled claptrap like “calculators” – *gasp* -have no place in modern education. i would just like to point out that in less priviledged school areas, 30% of the children will come away this summer with no GCSEs whatsoever. What is needed is a more universal standard of good quality education, and less grumbling about the good old days

Oh, and just fyi, Everest has decreased 1.3m in height in the past 34 years

Climers have better equipment. The mountain is still the same size. Therefore someone with lesser ability can acheive the same result with less effort and ability

Kids today have scientific calculators in exams. I had log Tables. Kids today can take text books into English exams. I had to memorise whole tracts of Shakespeare. Therefore someone with lesser ability than me can acheive the same result as me with less effort/ability

With intensive training, most people can significantly improve their IQ scores, but it doesn’t make them more intelligent, as in their wider academic performance doesn’t improve. Why do the left always have such trouble untangling empirical cause and effect ?

Slightly more serious than information about parents eveneings is the fact that unmarried fathers have no legal rights whatsoever in respect of their children, (and Government via the CSA and the Family Courts has worked hard to keep it that way) and that, again at the behest of the government, the rights of a child to a father in donor IVF programmes no longer needs to be considered.

LEAs often get this wrong for example the definition of parent in the 1996 education act is pretty all encompassing and includes biological parents as well as anyone else who has care and control over the child. so a breach of a parental duty in the act can lead to a prosecution against grandparents as though they were parents.

sometimes, actually quite often, LEAs get this wrong and miss names in a prosecution, especially in truancy and section 437 prosecutions. This can lead to them loosing their case even against the parents named as it can be argued to being discriminatory prosecution. In law you are not allowed to chose who you go after in a criminal case, if the defense can show that the law has been unevenly applied the case can fall.

In any event fathers have a right in law, unless the right has been removed by the courts, to information held by the school. Fathers should be informed as are mothers.

if the father looses his parental rights thats a different thing of course.

but remember a father with parental responsibilities can be held liable for prosecution for truancy even if he does not live with the child. but, by not sending him info about the child’s misbehavior they provide him with a defense or at least mitigation especially if he can show that the mother was hiding info from him.

Given the demographic changes in family structure, we really need to think how we support and empower both men and women to be fully involved in the raising of their children.

My own experience couldn’t contradict that postulate more so I was asking if there were any links to research that showed this trend.

It comes from the School of the Bleeding Obvious in the same chapter as ” the more you practice the luckier you will get”

Please can you provide citations for that?

The grade boundaries for the AQA Physics GSCE for 2007 were 75% for an A* and 66.7% for an A.

For the GCE physics paper I used as a comparison, in which the question is considerably more rigorous and demanding, the grade boundary for an A ranges from 76% – 80% depending on the year.

The paper wasn’t clear, and there isn’t any material easily findable (read: first three pages of searches with reasonably obvious terms) on what the TDA test they use for comparison actually shows.

If, as vaguely implied in the paper, it’s primarily logic/reasoning, then this is exactly what you’d expect from an improvement in standards – kids who are less ‘naturally’ bright are doing better in the exams because they’re taught better.

If, as you seem to be suggesting and the paper also implies in places, it’s a test of subject knowledge, then how the hell do they deal with curriculum changes? (not much use in consistently asking history questions every year on the Vikings, if the A-level syllabus is all about the Nazis…)

“I gave a simple, empirical, demonstration of the decline in knowledge requirements in GCSE physics in this post…”

No, as commenters Simon and Dan on your post demonstrate. I’d add to their comprehensive list of points, that you’d also need have the distribution of marks and associated grade boundaries for each question to demonstrate that one was harder than the other (e.g. if an A at O-level involved getting 50% of the marks for that question while an A at GCSE involved 80%).

(and the fact that you’ve found a teacher who thinks A-levels are easier than they used to be doesn’t prove a lot. I can throw a metaphorical stick in blogland and find a whole bunch of policemen with daft views about crime, but that doesn’t make them right…)

In a climate of league tables and parental choice, I can’t think why schools and teachers would teach people how to pass GCSEs and A-levels.

I gave a simple, empirical, demonstration of the decline in knowledge requirements in GCSE physics in this post…

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2007/12/11/the-key-to-future-global-wellbeing/

You can’t a more straightforward comparison than a juxtaposition of two examination questions on the same topic.

And for the record, When talking to my son’s physics teacher at an open day earlier this year, the teacher freely admitted that to cover the same syllabus I studied at ‘O’ level 25 or so years ago, my son would have to take an AS level in the subject.

The researchers who wrote the study are just doing what good academics do, commenting narrowly on what their results are showing. But the results are solid grounds for saying that similar grades at A-level do not represent the same level of developed abilities in students as they used to. And that is why universities are struggling to work out who are the good candidates for their courses, and why employers are struggling to find skilled workers.

From the Graun

But the paper you cited doesn’t contain any evidence at all that students are learning less than they used to.

Its authors don’t even believe the evidence is strong enough to conclude that the standards required to get a particular grade at GCSE or A-level have fallen [which, given that students are getting progressively better grades at GCSE and A-level, wouldn't be evidence that they're learning less than they used to] – much less that overall educational standards are lower.

(has Mount Everest become less tall over the last 50 years, or have climbers become better-prepared?)

Humanite, this sort of area is always open to interpretation but the evidence that A-levels have got easier is damn near as close to rock solid as can be. See: http://www.cemcentre.org/documents/CEM%20Extra/SpecialInterests/Exams/ONS%20report%20on%20changes%20at%20GCSE%20and%20A-level.pdf

It is possible that the “higher grades/not any better students” result isn’t down to the exam questions themselves but the format (repeated for best results, narrower curriculum, prior knowledge of questions coming up) but that is to get rather nuanced about the what the meaning of “easier” is, and the important thing is that students are learning less then they used to, not exactly what grades they are achieving.

The problem is the political establishment simply haven’t woken up to this problem yet. The government itself is very much in denial. Until whatever ideology is keeping politicians from seeing the problem comes crashing down, talking about parent/school interactions is going to be very much a middle-class luxury while ordinary children are being failed consistently by a system which lacks anything resembling a feedback mechanism. This is why it is important to talk about the quality of the education, because if you ignore it, you are actually ignoring one of the few things that schools really could impact on.

This is socialisation, rather than education, is it? It doesn’t sound that way…

I continue to believe that given it has been shown that a kid’s reading ability, particularly boys, improves beyond measure in correlation to how much reading they do with their dad – it’s time for pro-actively engaging fathers more.
I’m sure lots of you reading this (fathers) are engaged and equally involved with your kids – but this is about improving a situation where there is need

Educational standards are not excellent, they are terrible compared to thirty or even twenty years ago. Todays A Level papers are not difficult – that is entirely the point I was making. They are dumbed down beyond belief, and are just one of myriad examples of Labour’s failed education policy (remember “Education, Education, Education?)

If you think choice counters actually getting an education that means something, and that the application of a more limited education balance against rigour, the “ramblings”, as you so generously put it, are entirely your own.

Role responsibility is largely explained upon school entry, the problem arises when the contract between the parties is not fulfilled adequately or where it was inadequate to start with.

But this is a problem for all sides: some parents reject certain responsibilities, some find it impossible to comply; many schools don’t have adequate funding or facilities to provide sufficient range, bredth or depth of opportunity to every child, while more are faced with the choice between basic standards for all and excellence for the few.

Of course we all want things to be better, but what are you prepared to exchange from your current settlement in order to make it happen?

However, educational standards are excellent. There is more choice for students, they have any number of different subjects to choose from; and they are taught more and more how to apply their knowledge. For the record, most people given today’s A-Level papers would fail them. They are very difficult and students are put under a lot of pressure.

But all of that is really besides the point, the article is not about education standards, it’s about socialisation, families and schools. Even if your ramblings were true, they aren’t relevant. If you wish to find space on the internet to sound off about Labour, I doubt you’ll have too much trouble.