The Tepid Take

In the aftermath of last night’s Top Gear , I thought it pertinent to travel back in time to the middle of May, to discuss the impact that the government has on our national broadcaster. This article is just long enough to help you forget about Chris Evans. The government, with the publication of its original White Paper for the British Broadcasting Corporation, made the claim that the BBC had intentions of imperialism and to monopolise the media industry in the United Kingdom. The committee responsible for the White Paper therefore posited that the BBC ought to scale itself back in order to perform more in line with the level of production expected by a publicly owned entity. The middle classes, myself included, were outraged at the prospect of losing eleven thousand recipes as the facade of this downscaling, but there’s actually much more to it than that. Is this all about how to braise a chicken, or is it really something more sinister? I want to start with some simple economi

Recently, there’s been a row in the news over the level of grammar expected of pupils taking their SATs in schools across England, with private academy owners, the Schools Minister, and even David Cameron coming under fire for not being able to answer the questions these children are faced with. On the day, multiple parents took their children out of school on the basis of learning through ‘fun, play and adventure’ rather than the expected method of differentiating a preposition from a conjunction. Of course, we have to start considering how far parents are prepared to go when it comes to taking their children out of the classroom in response to an examination they consider beyond the call of duty. Complaints have been coming for years about how we treat testing, not just from concerned parents, but from GCSE students and beyond. How much testing do we really need, and who does it help, really? Everyone knows that the methods by which we test children (and indeed young adults) in th