IN CASE you missed any of our ten most read blogs of last week, here they are for you again – and well worth the read.
Kathy Gyngell: Lecturer falls foul of university’s Faculty of Thought Policing
Alan Ashworth: Off the beaten tracks: The Beach Boys come of age
Kathy Gyngell: The care homes ‘Chernobyl’ that we predicted: Hancock must go
Thantirimudalige Canisius: If post-colonial Sri Lanka is at peace with its Empire heritage, why isn’t Britain?
Edmund Fordham: The doctor who’s curing covid-19 with zinc and hydroxychloroquine
Andrew Devine: The school that tried to end racism where it didn’t exist
William Collins: Marriage has turned from a contract into a trap for men
Julian Mann: Philby’s school appoints pupil diversity police
Chris McGovern: Last rites for the integrity of public exams
Campbell Campbell-Jack: The C of E’s second-in-command who doesn’t understand Christianity
My pick of the week outside the top ten is a blog that I would really like Chancellor Rishi Sunak to read. He is too young, it seems, to understand that throwing money indiscriminately at worthy causes maybe headline-catching but all too often in application proves wasteful or even counter-productive. The Government’s latest financial incentives for apprenticeship schemes and training without fundamental reform is a case in point. In an important piece of investigation, ‘Why the failing British apprenticeship scheme must be transformed’, Janice Davis contrasts the the failure and waste of Britain’s past and present ‘levy’ schemes and its potential for middlemen contractors such as Euan Blair’s White Hat company to key into, with the effective models found in Switzerland and Germany. Her conclusion? Britain’s ‘model’ not only fails to inspire the apprenticeship concept but is in need of urgent reform. Sunak’s budget should have been used to announce a comprehensive review into the levy. It wasn’t. But he must.
You can read her devastating account of our country’s clumsy, wasteful and bureaucratic apprenticeship system here.
Margaret’s choice is Michael O’Dowd’s clearly argued ‘The illogicality of science “racism” protest’ which asks why we should expect different cultures to produce the same proportion of scientists. He wonders if music labels should stop hiring black artists because they are already over-represented.
