Based on this thread it does make me wonder to be honest. I'm not asking for a fully costed manifesto, but I'm a bit bored of posting up projects that are making a difference right now, only for them to be shat on, so I thought I'd turn the tables and ask you how you'd go about building your fair society. I'd rather you didn't use generalities like root and branch overhaul. Some specifics please, and if you can have some evidence that your ideas have worked, either in trial situations or on a larger scale, that would be great
How can I? That's the whole point isn't it - the socio-economic gap is so vast and nothing has been done, so there's no examples of practice to begin with.
What I can point out, and just did, is academic proof that poverty and lack of resource has a massive impact on educational achievement.
Poverty significantly affects the resources available to students. Due to this lack of resources, many students struggle to reach the same academic achievement levels of students not living in poverty.
So let me think... if poverty and lack of resources has such a profound impact on attainment, what oh what should be done to fix that? I wonder!
Here's another one:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks.
In the above paper, look at the notes on meaningful early intervention via resource led initiatives - costed, on the ground intervention from groups with a set curriculum and attainable goals to achieve an end result.
Here's another:
http://www.cisga.org/the-impact-of-poverty-on-academic-performance/
Blaming the schools and even blaming parents or others has not overcome the stressors facing children, nor does it free them to become good learners. Many of Georgia’s children – hundreds of thousands of them – come to school lacking the support system needed for them to be successful students. It is not that these children cannot learn. Rather, the day-to-day stressors form a barrier blocking much of the good work administered by our teachers. The tragic result: thousands of students unnecessarily falling behind academically, failing, and eventually dropping out of our schools.
This highlights how blame culture for people being in the situation they are in doesn't work - active intervention does.
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So under that line, here's what I would practically do. I would raise the spending on education substantially, use it to increase phonic teaching standards in the early years, invest heavily in science education, scrap university fees for medical training to encourage desperately needed UK application into the NHS. I'd partially fund that by closing non-dom loopholes and lowering the foreign aid budget, specifically terminating assistance to Pakistan, but generally it'd require government spending - deficit or not.
I'd then lower VAT to at the very least 17.5%, take the Income Tax threshold to £15,000, and restore the 50p rate for high earners. The aim of which is to lessen the tax gap between the poor and the rich.
In an ideal world, I'd also have children starting school at six, assessed on entry as to standards at beginning, I'd abolish SATs for a more student orientated testing system upon entry to high school, instead of the school being pressured into cheating (which does happen), and have Year 10/11 dedicated to a lecture theatre/seminar style system to prepare kids adequately for the shift into university standard learning procedure.
