Boundary Review expected next month

It has become clear that the Boundary commission will publish it’s ‘Final Recommendations’ on September 5th. The moves will almost certainly be helpful to Tories, with the Conservatives potentially picking up twenty extra seats. It will also almost certainly lead to more wide-scale deselection purges from Momentum.

Gerry can smell blood…

New Toby Young report for CPS

Toby Young, Spectator columnist and free Schools advocate, has written a new report for the Centre for Policy Studies, the centre-rights’ reliable think-tank.

Here’s a bit of the intro…

In this report, endorsed by Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff, Toby Young identifies a key problem that has hobbled technical and vocational education in Britain for more than 100 years and proposes a radical solution. In the report, ‘Technically Gifted’, he argues that we must break the Gordian Knot linking technical education to academic failure by allowing specialist schools to select their pupils according to aptitude for their occupational specialisms, instead of being forced to take those rejected by their mainstream neighbours as not bright enough to cope with the ‘common core’ of academic GCSEs. Rather than thinking of technical and vocational schools as second best for children of below average ability, as they have been since the beginning of the 20th Century, we should regard them as schools of opportunity for children of all abilities who have a particular flair for this type of education. And the pupils at these schools should still be expected to do the ‘common core’, thereby ensuring they don’t become an ‘alternative pathway’ for those who cannot cope with a broad and balanced curriculum.’