Making it up

BBC NEWS | Politics | Rubbish charge trials to go ahead

Trials of a scheme to tax householders who throw away too much rubbish are to forge ahead, Downing Street has said.

I’m fascinated by how that would work in this area. There’s next to no recycling facilities - the area we’ve come from was collecting glass, cans, paper, garden waste and cardboard, with optional paired shoes and textiles (if you bagged them and put them out on recycling day) and black bin rubbish on alternate weeks. Oh, and we had a compost bin for food waste other than meat. Here there’s a black bag (not even a bin, we had to buy that ourselves) and when I mailed and asked we got a green bag that can take paper and thin cardboard, and a black box that takes glass. That’s it.

So everything else I’m collecting up and stacking in separate piles in the ex coalhole (apart from compostables, which right at the moment I’m sorrowfully binning - suppose I could take it to school and bung it in the bin there) for the moment when I’ll feel up to going and finding the local recycling facilities other than those at tesco. Although at least Tesco has a recycling bin for juice boxes, so I’ve been taking those every so often for the past few months. I need to find somewhere for plastic, cans and heavier cardboard. Not so much to ask is it?

Really ought to get outside and do some gardening - think I might grab half an hour once I insert the children into bed. Given how loath they are to get in the bath that might be some time away yet. They need it though - due to several late nights they haven’t really bathed and certainly haven’t hair washed - we’ve been spiritually keeping up with the campers At least we’ve had a fairly relaxing weekend though, and fitted quite a lot in, including yet another shoe shopping trip for Big (she now has some very nice trainers for bike riding after another 45 minute session in Clark’s. I feel like I should be getting names and addresses from the shop assistants and sending them birthday cards!), another party for Small (bit of a busman’s holiday with so many children from school who seemed to think that I was there to assist! One of the mums bought me coffee though ), catching up with a sister and cousins and finally managing to walk both children to the park.

The park was heaving, with one family from school, which was quite nice as the boychild, N, has a bit of a crush on Big, and it was good for the mother to finally understand who she is and another family from where I used to work, also good to play catch up. Did point out to him that I might be up for some emergency cover given our current slightly strapped situation - Tim is away on another job interview, thumb holding appreciated (tomorrow at 10).

And that’s about as much as I have energy for given that I’ve still got to get the kids into bed, excavate the kitchen, find the mending and do it, and crack through some paperwork. At least we’ve got darker curtains on the bedroom window now so I ought to sleep past dawn!

From the story Tim links to below:

To those who see him as out of touch, he stressed his “ordinary” upbringing, knowing hardship, and the friends he still keeps from Kirkcaldy schooldays represent today’s Britain.

Ordinary upbringing?

From wikipedia:

Brown was educated first at Kirkcaldy West Primary School[13] where he was selected for an experimental fast stream education programme, which took him two years early to Kirkcaldy High School for an academic hothouse education taught in separate classes. At age 16 he wrote that he loathed and resented this “ludicrous” experiment on young lives.

That sounds very ordinary. I don’t know whether being a son of the manse was a good or bad thing, certainly we seem to have ended up with an awful lot of scottish personalities who can claim it in the background, but again, not enough to call it ordinary.

Do you think we need to send him a definition of the word? I’m also wondering how many friends he’ll have retained from Kirkcaldy who weren’t in that academic hothouse - in other words, not that many ordinary friends.

BBC NEWS | Education | Teachers jeer children’s minister

Rona Tutt, a delegate from Hertfordshire, had asked the minister what she was going to do to reform the “test-ridden education system”.

Ms Hughes responded by saying headteachers’ views were important “but it’s not the only perspective”.

She said: “The views of parents are also important.”

They really are making it easy to get political today. Headteacher’s views are indeed not the only perspective. There are class teachers, the majority of whom think the tests are too much. Parents, who think the tests are too much. Children, who think the tests are too much. Are you spotting the pattern yet? In fact, about the only group who seem to think the tests are judged right are politicians, many of whom don’t have a clue what mainstream education is like as they didn’t go and they didn’t send their children either.

(Incidentally, the article appears to have been edited while I was writing this and now reads very differently to how it did 45 minutes ago. Sorry.)

I’m tempted to say that I think our children’s education is far too important to be used as a political football, and that only ppl who have actually have experience of it should be involved in deciding policy, but I think you get a whole load of fools involved that way too. What I am sure of is that the current system of plucking ideas out of the air and implementing them across the entire country without paying any attention to the stakeholders (parents and their children, and to a lesser extent, teachers) is absolutely ludicrous and should be stopped.

But I can’t resist responding to this:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he understands people’s “hurt”, in the aftermath of Labour’s worst local election results in 40 years.

Mr Brown told the BBC it had “not been the best weekend”, adding that voters were worried about rising petrol and food prices and utility bills.

“I do understand this and I feel the hurt that they feel,” Mr Brown said.

Do you really Mr Brown? Do you really worry about whether you can afford to fill up the car to get to the job that pays you £3.90 a day after you’ve paid for childcare? Are you sure that you feel the pain of rising utility bills - do you actually pay them, living in 10 Downing street, which is after all, offices as well as a flat? Are you sure that you are concerned about the price of every day items, given that you can charge many of them on expenses?

Do you understand that removing the 10p tax level while replacing the money in tax benefits that many ppl can’t bring themselves to claim because of the incompetence of the agency involved means ppl standing in supermarkets looking at food they can’t afford?

You know, I don’t think you do. Because you are paid £187,000 and your two houses are rent free, so you aren’t feeling the pinch of disappearing mortgage deals either. You probably haven’t noticed that while the base rate has been cut, credit cards are currently raising their interest rates, and I doubt very much that you stress about the credit card shuffle or wake in the middle of the night as you suddenly remember a bill you’ve forgotten.

Mr Brown, please don’t say that you feel our pain, you haven’t got a clue.

If you are a parent, a teacher, a nursery worker, a childminder, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, or you just like children and think childhood is a good idea, please sign up to the openeye petition on the petitions site.

It reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to commission an urgent independent review of the compulsory Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) policy framework, and to reduce the status of its learning and development requirements to ‘professional guidelines’.

and the supporting information is

We recognise the government’s good intentions in its early-years policy-making, but are concerned about the EYFS legislation, which comes into force in England next September.

Our concerns focus on the learning and development requirements, as follows:

1. They may harm children’s development

2. They will restrict parents’ freedom of choice in childcare and education

3. Their assessment profile requirements may place an unnecessary bureaucratic burden on those who care for young children

4. Recent evidence suggests that government interventions in education generally may not be driving standards up and may be putting too much pressure on children

The request I received (after I’d signed up (with a typo in my name )) is:

When signing up to the petition please state your interest i.e mother, nursery
teacher, trainer, child-minder, grand-parent etc, etc. It will help the Government
see how widespread concern is about this legislation.

Thank you

Anna Firth
Open EYE Campaign Coordinator

Please spread this request around blogs, forums, mailing lists and anywhere else you can think of - the drive is on to get this publicised and as many ppl as possible signed up as fast as possible. Let’s let the government know that they can’t mess with our children’s lives without us fighting back.

ETA does anyone here read alphamummy and feel up to getting the readers there involved? Or Mumsnet? I’ve pretty much given up on forums recently (can’t think why) but from what I remember appearing and starting a thread doesn’t always go down as well as it might, whereas forum regulars starting a thread about this kind of thing will get more buy in.

Feel free to leave a comment linking to any of the mentions you make so that everyone else can come along and join in!

Oh, and tag your posts with things like Open EYE - let’s get this up the search rankings for Open EYE and EYFS.

Campaign site can be found at Open EYE

A week ago I attempted to create a petition on the new petitions site. It was rejected for having party political wording in it.

I reworded it, and today I’ve been told it’s been rejected as it overlaps with another petition live on the site.

Now, can you tell me whether this:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: ‘accept that
the population has lost confidence in this government and
resign.’

Following the latest misgivings about the home office and
illegal immigrants, the crisis at Northern Rock, the fiasco at
HMRC with lost data disks and the current misgivings over the
government’s compliance with the Political Parties, Elections
and Referendum Act 2000, it’s time for the prime minister to
accept that the only way for confidence to be restored in the
political system is for him to resign and allow a general
election.

is the same as this:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Resign.
for his blatant failure to protect the citizens of England,by allowing the scum of the earth to enter this country,without any basic i.d and background checks,compromising security.This will increasingly be at the cost of more lives lost,from criminals and terrorists activities.I call on the whole inept Scottish government to go now,and allow England to be governed by the English before we become the worlds dustbin

I don’t think it is, and I won’t be signing up to the live petition. I’ve mailed in to complain as well, but I daresay that that won’t get me anywhere at all.

Wonder if I could get this published in a newspaper somewhere, or is the slow suffocation of democracy no longer newsworthy?

I find M’hell more and more depressing. Friday afternoon, last one in November and it was absolutely heaving. I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t that busy even 5 years ago - mother and I used to go regularly on a Friday with Big (when she was little and before there was a Small) and it used to be quite a pleasant day out. No way you could describe it that way now. And the traffic on the way there is horrendous - are there more cars on the road than there were 5 years ago?

Anyways, must get myself organised and work out what I’m doing for the present side of Chrimble. I’d love to just tell everyone that I’ve become a Pagan and am no longer celebrating it, but as I can’t find certainty in myself for that set of beliefs (or indeed any other) I guess I can’t. Don’t think the kids would go for it either.

Haven’t told the kids but we were supposed to be heading up to Meltham today. Given that I am upright only through copious application of painkillers, and still hurting slightly, and Tim is no longer upright at all, it’s not happening. Not quite sure what’s felled him, but I’ve got a stinking head cold. I might not have been so bad if I hadn’t been woken at 7.15 by shrieks about the cat wetting on the end of Big’s bed (guess we’re back to the shut door policy after all) but then again, maybe I would be. Have spent the morning in bed reading . But I finished it now, and Tim needed to lie down, so I’m up.

Kids so far seem unaffected by any of these bugs, but are suffering from a surfeit of tv and computer games. Although there is a part of me that is determined that they should continue enjoying them as much as they want, in defiance of the latest diktats from the idiots in Westminster. It’s a shame that none of these ppl can understand the studies that are causing their panics, none of the papers seems to have a problem.

The Times says:

As the study measures comparative performance of reading among 4,000 10-year-olds in 40 countries, there is no evidence that reading standards have fallen in England, only that other countries have caught up and overtaken English children.

(Although they don’t go as far as noticing that if other countries are able to improve and overtake our standards, presumably we should be able to improve our standards as well.)

I read around about the EYFS stage yesterday after Michelle’s post on the topic. Pretty much all the papers had the same coverage, but I couldn’t find anything on the EYFS site that actually told me what they were worried about. Figures. Why would the government actually be open about this stuff? The bit that’s confusing me is that all the EYFS stuff was announced a year ago and it doesn’t take affect for another year. So why is the panic rising now? Odd.

It’s called nuspeak.

It’s for the occasional post where I rant about redefinitions by politicos to make the world fit their targets, instead of having their targets fit the world. I might even go back and recategorise a post or two (the one where satisfactory stopped meaning good enough springs to mind).

The inspiration for this effort?

The target of making two million people take up physical activity by 2012 has been regularly cited by ministers but is quietly being dropped. Official participation rates in sport are likely to fall by at least a million people, as the most popular activities - recreational cycling and walking - will no longer count. From April, the number of grassroots clubs and coaches that can win lottery money to support their work will also fall.

Cycling is no longer a sporting activity it would appear. And funding is only attached if you’re wearing a strip and in a team. (Pauses to wonder whether swimming is a sport then.)

And has anyone told Gordon Brown?

But his message is at odds with that given 10 days ago by Gordon Brown, when he addressed a Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation conference through a video later posted on YouTube. He said: ‘The government has issued a challenge to sport. We want two million more active people by 2012. It’s our responsibility to make sure that women and girls represent at least half of those two million … it’s a great opportunity. Let’s take it.’

guardian

Beware, this is a long post. It may even turn into a series of posts. Or should that be rants?

David Cameron is really enamoured of those swedish schools. They’re in his green paper:

Fifteen years ago, the Swedish government introduced choice into the national school system, with great success. Money follows the pupil so that parents can send their child to any school of their choosing.

He goes on about them some more:

So we will open up the system to provide all parents with the sort of choice currently only the rich enjoy. The country that provides the closest model for what we wish to do is Sweden. Over the past fifteen years, Sweden has introduced a new system that has allowed the creation of many new high quality state schools that are independent from political control. All parents have the power to take their child out of a state school and apply to a new independent state school. The money that went to the failing state school is transferred to the new independent school. All the new independent schools are free. They are not allowed to be selective.
The results? Hundreds of new schools have been started. Thousands of children have been saved from failing schools and given a chance in life. In particular, thousands of children from the poorest areas have been able to escape failing state schools. And, crucially, standards have risen across all state schools because failing state schools have been forced to reform. These are the basic dynamics we will introduce into the British school system.
And there is evidence already that what has worked in Sweden can work here.

Shame that he didn’t read on about them (here for example) to find out:

“Municipalities are obligated to provide a place in a preschool class for all children beginning the fall term of the year the child turns 6. The preschool class program shall comprise a minimum of 525 hours per year and stimulate the learning and development of each child, as well as lay the foundations for continued schooling.

… The 9-year compulsory school program is for all children between the ages of 7-16 years. Upon the request of the parents, a child may begin school one year earlier, at the age of 6. ”

(I found this on Wikipedia as well.)

Which makes it unlikely in any of those schools, that children are being tested to find out whether they can read at age 6. Ooh, sorry, we’re not talking about that yet, are we? Getting ahead of myself.

(more…)

Or is it just in the way it’s being presented by the timesonline?

Right at the moment if you go to their education section you will find that headline no 1 is

Tories want reading tests for 6-year-olds while headline no 3 is:
Tories want reading test for 7-year-olds

Aargh!

Look, Mr Cameron (I know you aren’t reading here, but you might actually stir me to write to you direct), stop it. More tests won’t help. You can’t expect all children to be reading at age 6 - there are many countries, far more successful than us educationally, who don’t even start teaching reading until age 7. Stop headline grabbing and have a look at the root cause of the problem which is overbureacracy, central control and this insistence that one size fits all. Synthetic phonics has proven to be very effective for lots of children, so you say, so it must be used on all children. No! Not all children are the same. Teachers know which children can read, you don’t need externally managed, and no doubt very stressful, tests for 7 year olds. What are you trying to achieve? Out labouring nulab?

Please please please, for the sake of our children and our sanity, could you base your educational policy on what educational experts tell you?

Oh and :

He also wants Ofsted, the government inspectorate, to check schools are using “tried and tested” teaching methods such as synthetic phonics, where children learn to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters.

There are tried and tested techniques that go back much further than synthetic phonics you know, you could consider some of those if you really wanted to shake up primary education.

Alan Johnson, a Hull MP and the health secretary, is to visit his constituency after its council said it had become the “forgotten city” of the flooding.

Mr Johnson will visit a flooded estate. An estimated 35,000 people have been affected by flooding in Hull.

Ms Blears is visiting Sheffield on Thursday and Hull on Friday to witness the aftermath of the devastation caused by the water.

bbc

It appears that now they’ve finished reshuffling they’ve finally noticed that large parts of the country (outside of London) are under water. Perhaps when they drop by they could answer a few questions like, where were they last week? How come neither of our prime ministers thought this was worthy of comment or a visit? Where are the green goddesses that could be used to help with flooding?

I’d quite like to ask the BBC as well what it takes to get this sort of news on the front page? Hail in London is important it would seem, but ppl dying, losing their houses, businesses, the M1 being shut for nearly a week, Meadowhall (one of the largest shopping centres in the country) being shut for days, none of that seems to matter at all.

Good for Prince Charles who seems to have done all he could to raise the profile, shame on the rest of them.

MPs battle over freedom exemptions:

And in a letter to the Times, several groups, including the Campaign for Freedom of Information and Liberty, condemned the bill.

They wrote: “To pass this bill would send an extraordinary signal to the public - MPs feel an obligation to pay lip service to transparency but are unwilling to take on serious openness obligations themselves.”

But its supporters insist the bill is necessary to protect the “priest like” confidentiality of correspondence between constituents and MPs.

Members on both sides of the House have found their correspondence to a public authority already revealed to a third party
Martin Salter Labour MP

I’m sorry, they are not priests, they are representatives, serving the ppl. And, Martin Salter, if they are writing to public authorities, surely the key work there is public? why would they feel that they should be able to say anything they like and not be accountable on it? I’d despair, but it’s pointless.

Tim got a letter, urging him to be involved. I particularly recommend paragraph 2.

Then Labour MPs decided they didn’t need any of those pesky labour party members or non politicians involved after all.

Gordon Brown says he is “truly humbled” by the scale of the backing given to him by Labour MPs as their choice to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister.

Still, in a country where a government is elected by 22% of the electorate, [This was despite polling only 35.2% of the popular vote, equating to approximately 22% of the electorate based on the estimated turnout of 61.3%. ] I suppose that having 300 or so ppl select the next prime minister probably passes as just economical.

Fathers no longer needed under fertility law overhaul | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Dr Harris, a member of the Commons science and technology select committee, said the existing act was “unjustifiable, discriminatory and vindictive. It was also unsustainable in human rights and equality terms. The evidence suggests children do very well brought up by lesbian couples and solo parents, so good riddance.”

And on the other
New powers to target child support debtors

Registering the names of both parents at birth will also become compulsory “unless it would be unreasonable to do so”.

I’d like to point out to anyone who doesn’t already know, that until very recently, if you weren’t married you could only register the father on the birth certificate if you could get him to turn up to the registration office. They seem to have changed the rules slightly since then, but it still relies on the parents cooperating with each other - the frequent implication that feckless women can’t be bothered to write down some bloke’s name really irritates me.

When are we going to recognise that you can’t legislate responsibility into ppl? I’m too wound up to blog coherently on this topic right now, I may return to it soon though.

Tim is watching some scif-fi program about a series he saw yonks ago: Survivors - The Complete Series 1 [1975].

Someone narrating mentioned the links between The Good life and this series, as well as a book, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Loved the quotes on the wikipedia page I’ve been wanting to get a grip on the possible economic patterns that could support the alternatives I think we need, so this looks like a good way in.

And then from the bottom of the wikipedia page, Earth Healing - Fifty possible ways to challenge over-commercialism by Al Fritsch, S.J. Think that’s another one that I’m going to enjoy perusing.

A jolly good nights browsing if you ask me. Now, if I’d only managed to find a source for organic, ethical business clothing yesterday, I’d be well set up

Help pupils now | Schools | EducationGuardian.co.uk

So what makes it politically incorrect to teach children parenting? How a parent can encourage, or hinder, a child. How babies and children learn, develop, respond. I’m talking about replicating in schools the natural development of parenting skills that used to happen in extended families and close communities. I don’t mean in a dry academic way, or by heavy-handed state interference. I mean using resources that already exist in abundance to introduce the value of family interaction and parenting.

In some primary schools, older children already help younger kids with reading, or mentor them to stop bullying. Why not make this universal? Encourage young mums to bring their babies into school, so children can learn to hold and cuddle. As children grow older, don’t confine life skills to avoiding unwanted pregnancies. Explain how to nurture those babies that one day they will want to have.

Or alternatively, why not stop removing three year olds from their families and putting them into groups with other three year olds. I can understand the need for an education system, but why not base it around small schools, multi ages. I’m thinking more a family environment, with facilitators and resources, children driving their own education instead of passively receiving. Yes, it’s more difficult on the teachers, but I think the benefits would be felt across society very quickly.

Which to be frank, is why no one wants to try it. Not particularly one for a conspiracy theory but it’s not in the interest of the ppl in charge to deconstruct society really, is it? They don’t want to change the status quo, which isn’t particularly to say that they want to keep ppl down, I think it’s more that they can’t really truly see what is wrong with what is going on. After all, it isn’t going wrong for them. It’s akin to the ppl who say ‘well I was smacked as a child and it never did me any harm’ or even better, the ones who know it wasn’t fun, but because they went through it, they want other ppl to go through it too.

Oh well. We just have to keep chipping away from the underneath

this? Silent Spring (Penguin Modern Classics)

I was glancing through the bbc news website, as I do on a fairly regular basis. I came across this article about Rachel Carson, which sounded interesting. I’d never heard of her before, so I went wandering off to find out more and found her biography on her own website.

This all tied quite neatly into a couple of other things I was looking at last night, a comment is free article about genetically modified spuds and the personal implementation of the oil depletion protocol.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no kind of scientist so I’m not sure about all this genetic modification stuff. What I mean there is I’m not sure what precisely they are doing. Genetic modification by controlled breeding I understand perfectly, but splicing and dicing in a laboratory, no. So I don’t know whether it’s safe, and I don’t think we can know whether it’s safe until we’ve seen what happens over the course of years, and by then, it’s a bit difficult to decide, no, it wasn’t and go back.

On the oil depletion stuff, I came across the site following Gareth back to his blog. It’s a slightly scary site, but then again, it’s a slightly scary world that we’re living in, and I think that’s a large part of the problem. Many of us can’t see where to start to make a difference, so we just don’t start. I know I’m one of the worst offenders atm with my pootling up and down the motorway on a daily basis, but trust me, I really don’t want to do it. Problem is that the whole house selling stuff is yet another thing I can’t really see where to start on, so I’m ineffectually flapping about doing stuff all.

Well, that was a rambling completely pointless kind of post wasn’t it? I’ll try to be back with something more coherent later

BBC NEWS | Politics | Poor ‘may start learning at two’

Children from poor families could begin pre-school learning at age two to help give them more stability and stimulation, MPs have heard.

and

The government is piloting this type of provision for 12,000 two-year-olds in some of the poorest areas of the country.

Ms Hughes ruled out giving grants to grandparents who look after children whose parents are too busy.

So this is about removing them from home and family environments and getting them into institutions nice and early. Don’t get me wrong - there are some nurseries that are lovely, and I really do believe that Big was better off in a nursery than she would have been at home with me full time. By the time I’d had Small I was a very different person, and home was a good place for them both.

But to assume that because a family is poor that the best thing to do is shove the children into a ‘a good quality pre-school learning environment’ is precisely the wrong thing to do. Children need to be in families. If the families aren’t stable environments (though I’d question what right anyone has to judge an entire section of society merely on the basis of their income) and we’re going to throw tax payers money at the children anyway, throw it at the home lives. Grants to grandparents to look after grandchildren would be only fair tbh, you can get grants for all sorts of other childcare, why not assist the families direct?

Gill has another take on this as well.

time to rattle cages again

equal pay for equal work. There’s legislation to mean this is supposed to be so. Doesn’t really go far enough though, as it seems to me that there is still a vicious circle at work, as can be seen by looking at the results of the NHS Cumbrian pay review, where it was discovered that work traditionally done by women was paid less than work done by men, even when the work was, objectively speaking, of the same value. That’s illegal, but without enforcing that kind of review on companies/ organisations, you aren’t really going to change anything. And if you do enforce the review, then there’s the question of where the money for the backpay/ equal pay going to come from. Unsurprisingly, the ppl who were earning more aren’t usually up for just taking a pay cut, so the review isn’t a popular process.

And the thinking that underlies the situation is harder to combat - can’t wait for the value of doctors, barristers and so on to go down, given that you’ve now got more women training and graduating in those professions than men

But in the first instance, it seems to me that there are two simple steps that could be taken. First of all, remove gender identifiers from application forms. No more Ms, Mr, Mrs on there, and only have the first initial rather than a full name. Of course, ppl like me who’d been to a Girls’ School would rather give the game away ;), but even that wouldn’t be insurmountable. It shouldn’t really be necessary to give the name of the school you went to anyway, and perhaps doing away with that would do away with some of the old boy network that surrounds some of the fee paying schools as well.

Secondly, do away with the culture of secrecy that surrounds pay at work. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, even since I moved from social work, where everyone knew pretty much what everyone was paid, as there was a tight payscale and you knew where everyone was on it. Then I started at the bank, where it was a disciplinary offence to disclose details of your pay award/ bonus. Always seemed to me that that could only work in the interests of the employer.

Slightly ashamed to say that in this area I’m right behind one David Cameron - it’s not offend that I find myself cheerleading the head of the conservative party, but when he makes speeches like this one I’ve got to say that I think he’s talking sense.

So, remove gender identifiers from applications forms, and in case you think it isn’t relevant, take the example of an IT recruiter recently who wanted to add one to my cv, as otherwise you couldn’t tell. And why precisely would you need to know whether your prospective programmer was male or female? Yes, I know there are some jobs when it’s relevant, but we currently have legislation in place to take care of that, so I don’t see that being an issue.

Secondly, have companies publish pay information. Not quite sure what form that needs to take, but I’m sure it’s feasible.

The third aspect, of doing pay audits on gender basis would take longer to implement, but I still think it’s something we should be moving towards.

I’m aware none of this is groundbreaking stuff, but I wanted to talk about it, so I did.

Columnists - Yorkshire Post Today: News, Sport, Jobs, Property, Cars, Entertainments & More: LB2
By Colin Cramphorn
Colin Cramphorn is the Association of Chief Police Officers’ portfolio holder for Constitutional Affairs and the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire.

QUIETLY, and without serious debate, a revolution is taking place around the future of policing in England and Wales.
While one element of this revolution %u2013 restructuring %u2013 has belatedly attracted some attention, little if any scrutiny has been made of its more fundamental elements.
Who has any knowledge, for example, of the contents of the Police and Justice Bill or the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill?

We know about it don’t we? And our mps know that we know. I just don’t know how we let the media know that we know and we care.

Technorati Tags:legislative and regulatory reform bill, save parliament