Death at work numbers plateau
The steady improvement in the number of fatal injuries in UK workplaces appears to have tailed off, according to data recently-released to the FT by the Health & Safety Executive*.
173 workers were killed on the job in 2011/12, a rate of 0.6 deaths per 100,000 workers.
Taking into account chance variation, the overall trend suggests that death rates have plateaued since 2008 after a decade of downward trend.
O-levels and social mobility
The Daily Mail has published a rather startling story: from 2016, children will sit something akin to the old O-levels. Some parts of the story are relatively uncontroversial: the idea that there should be one exam board in each subject has many friends.
The newspaper also discusses abolishing the National Curriculum for secondary schools. However, if you have a single GCSE available in each subject, that sets a national curriculum in all but name. So these are less interesting than the sum of their parts.
But, if the Mail is correct, there is one proposal which stands out: splitting the GCSE. According to the report, under this new scheme some children would get the new O-level, and the bottom 25 per cent would take “CSEs”. This strikes me as a high-risk policy.
The GCSE’s strength is that it is a full-spectrum exam, measuring low to high ability. It includes questions designed to distinguish candidates that should get a G from candidates than deserve an F, as well as questions to filter A* candidates from those getting an A.
This is also its greatest PR weakness: it gets attacked by people citing the low-level questions. The Mail approvingly notes “questions like ‘Would you look at the Moon with a microscope or a telescope?’ from science GCSEs will be a thing of the past.”
The benefit of this system is that you get comparable qualifications, and there is no need for schools to attempt to sift children, guessing who will finish up with less than a C. The GCSE exams themselves do that work for them. But, according to the Mail:
Mr Gove believes those teenagers have been encouraged to think that a D, E, F or G grade at GCSE is a ‘pass’ when the real world treats those grades as a ‘fail’.
I confess that I do not see how it logically follows that the lower end of the GCSE should therefore be replaced with a CSE. The government would replace a D at GCSE with a certificate where the top grade is capped at a D. Maybe something got lost in the briefing.
The change would, however, have significant practical effects. Read more
Why free schools are small schools
At the moment, groups putting forwards bids to open free schools – new academies opened from scratch – are finding out whether they have been approved for 2013 opening. This is an opportune moment to take a quick look at this programme.
Last week, I explained part of why the “converter academies” programme is so popular: it usually comes with a cash incentive to join in. But free schools have their own funding wrinkle. This one encourages primary free schools to be smaller than other local schools.
Using the DfE’s formula for free school funding, we can work out how much a primary free school would get in revenue (day-to-day) funding, plotted against how big it is, if it were to open at full capacity in the London borough of Camden in 2012-13.
This is the output of a formula: every primary free school gets a £95,000 payment plus a certain amount per child, which varies from borough to borough. In Camden, once you have counted in the pupil premium, SEN (special educational needs) funding and other funding, each extra child brings in, on average, an extra £5,870.
But the structure of the formula – a lump sum plus a roughly flat per-pupil payment – means that the amount you receive on average falls as the school grows. This is because the £95,000 lump sum (which is the same for all boroughs) gets shared between more and more pupils.
With bank profitability unlikely to recover to pre-crisis levels, many investors now argue that cutting staff wages is the only reliable route to higher dividends.
This interactive graphic shows the results of an FT analysis of how the “spoils” to be divided between shareholders and employees at each of the world’s 13 big international banks have changed since 2000. With the pot of “spoils” defined as net profits with staff costs added back in, the chart shows the proportions allocated to dividends, pay and retained earnings.
On grammar schools
Grammar schools are a seductive idea: skim off high performing children at the age of 11 for education together. At the moment, there are 164 such schools in England, in a few counties which did not manage to slough them off. But their success is a myth. Read more
How to spot successful schools
What measures should we use for spotting schools that are effective at helping poor children? Not the one proposed by the Department for Education. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Kate Allen works in the editorial statistics team in London. She previously specialised in housing data reporting for a national trade magazine.
Chris Cook works in the FT's comment team. After joining the FT in 2008 as a Peter Martin Fellow, he worked for two years as a leader writer and then as education correspondent.
Emily Cadman joined the FT in 2010 and is head of the interactive desk.
Martin Stabe works on the FT's interactive team, specialising in databases for interactive graphics.
Keith Fray heads the editorial statistics team, providing data for articles and graphics. His background is in economics, studying at Birkbeck College, London.
Norma Cohen is the FT's Demography Correspondent.
Valentina Romei is a statistical researcher at the FT. She joined the FT in 2008 after working both as an academic and market researcher.
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