Thursday 6th April 2017
Posted: Thu 06 Apr, 2017 7:10 am
Morning all.
My kids both have type 1 (since they were very young, 3 and 4). The only rationing point that has ever been made to us was to tell us not to rush to test for ketones unless there were several indicators. Monitors tell you to test whenever you're hyper but as I understand it those particular test strips are very expensive and there isn't a need to check off the back of one hyper reading unless you know there are other things going on (sickness, reduced insulin dose...)TechnicalEphemera wrote:The whole diabetes service round here is slowly collapsing as funding is diverted elsewhere. I guess more people will end up in hospital as a result.HindleA wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... es-uk-says
NHS risking people's health by rationing test strips, Diabetes UK says
Diabetes charity finds patients face restrictions on test strips prescribed, which they need to monitor blood glucose
A decision so stupid you could stick a blonde wig on it and call it foreign secretary.
There you go - this is what happens when you care more about your party unity than what people are really worried about.Laurie Macfarlane
@L__Macfarlane
Follow
More
Incredible chart: Until the referendum, people weren't too bothered about the EU http://www.economist.com/news/britain/2 ... ion-search" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; …
The Government's Lifetime Isa scheme is in chaos as not a single high street bank is offering the accounts, amid fears it could result in a mis-selling scandal.
Despite officially launching on April 6 just three providers have agreed to offer the accounts, one of which was last night accused of ripping off savers by charging "disturbingly" high fees.
Daily Telegraph calculations reveal that the Share Centre's Lifetime Isa will leave savers as much as £60,000 worse off than they would be if they save the same amount into a company pension over the course of 30 years.
adam wrote:Supreme court rules for council and against parent in appeal on school absences
Judgement here
Which isn't that brilliant - we work towards a target of 96%.His lawyers had argued that there was no case to answer since Platt’s daughter had attended school regularly. The school register recorded her attendance at 92.3%.
I think there is a 'notional' national target of 96%, up from 95% a few years ago. The holiday made her attendance drop from 95% to 90.3% - at a time when it was very clear in law and practice, and in the news, that parents were likely to be prosecuted for taking their children out of school on holiday during term time.RogerOThornhill wrote:adam wrote:Supreme court rules for council and against parent in appeal on school absences
Judgement here
from the Guardian story.
Which isn't that brilliant - we work towards a target of 96%.His lawyers had argued that there was no case to answer since Platt’s daughter had attended school regularly. The school register recorded her attendance at 92.3%.
Parents aren't allowed to make reasonable decisions about their own children's lives and welfare in our extremely authoritarian country.Supreme court backs council, not parent, in term-time holiday case
The supreme court has just delivered its ruling in the term-time holidays case. And the Press Association has snapped this.
Jon Platt has lost a supreme court battle over taking his daughter on holiday to Disney World during school term-time.
holy cowQ: What do you say to people who think putting VAT on private school fees to extend free school meals is a good idea?
May says if Labour got into power, they would bankrupt Britain. Schools would be in a parlous condition. They would borrow £500bn. The government is already getting more pupils into good and outstanding schools. Labour want to level everything down.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/bl ... 76df18b1ba" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Willow904 wrote:Supreme court backs council, not parent, in term-time holiday case
The supreme court has just delivered its ruling in the term-time holidays case. And the Press Association has snapped this.
Jon Platt has lost a supreme court battle over taking his daughter on holiday to Disney World during school term-time.
I've been a secondary school teacher for about 18 years, all but the first year in one big inner-city school, so my experience is quite long but limited to one place. I honestly think that this is an extreme reaction.Parents aren't allowed to make reasonable decisions about their own children's lives and welfare in our extremely authoritarian country.
Where a child has historically low attendance, the point can be reached where some kind of medical evidence will be asked for before any further ill-health absence is authorised, but it's very rare. I think it happens once every two or three years, which would be a rate of between 0.2 and 0.3% - it's an outlier.Jon Platt is right. Your parental instinct that your child is too unwell to attend school can be second guessed by a head teacher who can choose not to authorise the absence and thus criminalise you for simply caring for your child. Children aren't allowed to be ill.
Children with below average attendance are referred to welfare officers, even if the school knows they have health issues and paediatric appointments. This is my own personal experience and it's truly exasperating.
Children can't all have below average amounts of absence. Children with health problems are included in attendance figures so academies chasing an outstanding Ofsted report don't want them, or want them in school even if it's detrimental to their health and well-being.
Again, and (I hope) not confrontationally, I think this is an extreme reaction - parents would be told if there was likely to be a problem with authorising - it would only be relevant for students with historically poor attendance who had already been told that any further medical evidence couldn't be self-certified.Since the rule banning taking term-time holidays came in a culture of suspicion, accusations and hostility has crept into the relationship between parents, children and schools which is hugely damaging. Woe betide anyone who has a child who starts throwing up on a Monday and stops on a Wednesday, takes off the advised 48 hours from last vomiting and sensibly doesn't take their child to the doctor's because it's just a stomach bug and it would be irresponsible to expose sick, elderly people unnecessarily. Your headteacher now has the power to arbitrarily make you a criminal by simply deciding not to authorise your absence.
Never, ever pulled up on this bullshit.citizenJA wrote:holy cowQ: What do you say to people who think putting VAT on private school fees to extend free school meals is a good idea?
May says if Labour got into power, they would bankrupt Britain. Schools would be in a parlous condition. They would borrow £500bn. The government is already getting more pupils into good and outstanding schools. Labour want to level everything down.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/bl ... 76df18b1ba" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
And this is on top of the points you raised the other day, about divorced parents and second families.Willow904 wrote:Except the government has completely failed to put any credible system in place by which women can claim via the rape exemption.
How this got through parliament is incomprehensible. The government is merrily volunteering random people such as nurses, who haven't been consulted and may not even be willing, to seemingly guess if a claim is credible or not. On what basis they are supposed to make this guess is unclear.
My bold. Quite a few conservative councillors wouldn't agree with her, never mind the rest of us.May dismissed claims that government cuts are making it impossible for councils to deliver decent services. Labour was to blame for the need to cut spending, she said. And she said that Conservative councils showed how costs could be cut without services suffering.
[Conservative councils] have been able to keep council taxes down and they have been able to deliver good quality, and improving in many areas, local services as well.
She said that the Conservatives were the party of low council tax.
Under Labour, council tax doubled.
Under the Conservatives council tax in England has fallen by 9 per cent in real terms.
That headline national figure is a result of Conservative action.
Locally and nationally, we helped freeze council tax in the last parliament, and we have given local residents a veto over excessive tax rises.
Oh. Just a casual drop-in, is it? Is this how they're hoping to play it in future? (Going forward, if you like. Clearly.)11:49
Donald Tusk, the European council president, will be arriving in Downing Street at about 1pm. He and Theresa May will not be holding a press conference after their meeting, and No 10 sources are playing down the significance of their talks. It is “not a major event”, one said. (Politics Live, Guardian)
I believe that has happened to me as well.AnatolyKasparov wrote:Simon Jenkins wrote something I actually agreed with recently. Took me a while to compose myself, tbh
Cameron's "long march through the institutions".NonOxCol wrote:I believe that has happened to me as well.AnatolyKasparov wrote:Simon Jenkins wrote something I actually agreed with recently. Took me a while to compose myself, tbh
But you can't seriously write about the *current* BBC political coverage, state that it's "palpably left of centre" and expect to be taken seriously. It's absolutely flabbergasting that anyone still accepts or believes this, given the hard evidence concerning senior appointments and even censures of certain individuals.
Can't argue with a lot of what you say. I would say that I very much agree with this - my two will never have perfect attendance records if only because of regular medical appointments they have no timetabling control over, and I know it's true for lots of other students. I've started to show students the trend of their attendance - our system will produce an up to date graph for anyone - so that it's possible to identify a student who has had their attendance slip on specific occasions because of their existing condition but that other than this they can see they're doing well, and another who is drifting down in steps because they have a single day off sick every few weeks.Willow904 wrote: Rewards for perfect attendance re-enforce this, making sure children understand that those who are ill more often are less worthy than those blessed with perfect health. Poorly kids will face enough of this when they become poorly adults, surely a little bit more understanding and a little less expectation of perfection wouldn't harm children's education that much?
This spending could do with a "triple lock".
Thatcher-Major were good at it too. Appointing people with "business experience", they used to call it.AnatolyKasparov wrote:Yes, it is no coincidence that some "Cameroon Tories" made a point of reading Gramsci as well.
I think what the likes of Jenkins mean by this, is that they weren't totally uncritical cheerleaders for Brexit.NonOxCol wrote:I believe that has happened to me as well.AnatolyKasparov wrote:Simon Jenkins wrote something I actually agreed with recently. Took me a while to compose myself, tbh
But you can't seriously write about the *current* BBC political coverage, state that it's "palpably left of centre" and expect to be taken seriously. It's absolutely flabbergasting that anyone still accepts or believes this, given the hard evidence concerning senior appointments and even censures of certain individuals.
Is s/he right ?So it is proposed to make free school meals available to all primary age children, including not just middle-income parents who can well afford to pay, but presumably the children of parents who are earning enough to have their child benefit taxed. It would surely be more logical and a better use of limited funds to find a means of ensuring that kids who currently qualify for free school meals during term time get adequate nutrition in the school holidays as well.
Labour's suggestions on VAT appear to have fallen into the same trap as Michael Gove, writing in The Times recently. School fees are currently exempt from VAT. This means that schools do not charge VAT on their outputs (fees) but can't recover the VAT they are charged on their inputs (expenses). If you make school fees VATable (and you can't do this in any case until the UK is out of Europe, because the VAT exemption is the result of an EC directive), then you also allow private schools to reduce all their standard-rated input costs by 16.7%. Since the VAT system involves paying over (or being repaid) the difference between the VAT you have charged and what you have been charged in an accounting period, you could well end up with a situation where schools with large capital expenditure programmes receive large, regular cash refunds from the taxpayer.
Britain Elects @britainelects 2m2 minutes ago
More
Mark Reckless AM (South Wales East) has left UKIP.
I have lots of doubt. They're more worried about schools not being able to afford teachers.Matt Zarb-CousinVerified account
@mattzarb
Theresa May will now introduce a variation of the free school meals policy. Have no doubt about that.
From the daily politics. I think they have a very good point.Ukip says Reckless should stand aside for next Ukip candidate on regional list
Widely reported that he tried to rejoin the Tories, and they told him to naff offRogerOThornhill wrote:Britain Elects @britainelects 2m2 minutes ago
More
Mark Reckless AM (South Wales East) has left UKIP.
It would need to be a hell of a capex programme, given that presumably by far the biggest expense of a school would be teachers. No input VAT on wages.pk1 wrote:I don't know much, if anything, about VAT in schools & on supplies of FSMs but found this interesting comment BTL at the Times:
Is s/he right ?So it is proposed to make free school meals available to all primary age children, including not just middle-income parents who can well afford to pay, but presumably the children of parents who are earning enough to have their child benefit taxed. It would surely be more logical and a better use of limited funds to find a means of ensuring that kids who currently qualify for free school meals during term time get adequate nutrition in the school holidays as well.
Labour's suggestions on VAT appear to have fallen into the same trap as Michael Gove, writing in The Times recently. School fees are currently exempt from VAT. This means that schools do not charge VAT on their outputs (fees) but can't recover the VAT they are charged on their inputs (expenses). If you make school fees VATable (and you can't do this in any case until the UK is out of Europe, because the VAT exemption is the result of an EC directive), then you also allow private schools to reduce all their standard-rated input costs by 16.7%. Since the VAT system involves paying over (or being repaid) the difference between the VAT you have charged and what you have been charged in an accounting period, you could well end up with a situation where schools with large capital expenditure programmes receive large, regular cash refunds from the taxpayer.