Two tier education system. Yes please. But call it two path.

I'm not a fan of Gove. I think he's in it to maintain the status quo like most senior Tory. But I am not going to let that cloud my judgement of his actions. I believe educating all the same is the wrong way. A multi-tier education system would be better. But can we call it multi path?

Guess what - I can't spell for toffee and do not remember words well, or names. There is no chance in hell of me learning another language and my punctuation is atrocious. Plus when I read I often see what I expect so spell checking is largely impossible.

I have a friend called Pete who is very good at those things who has admin access to my blogs. And if he has been here before you read this it will seem less . . . I'm not going to be politically correct. Less retarded.
But I am not retarded. Pete please confirm. . . fine . . sod you Pete.

I personally find it easy to understand how things work, including people, and invent solutions. I pick up most physical skill activities easily, am quick witted in conversation, and comparably good at maths. 

Now ask me to sit in an exam room and regurgitate information using a pen and paper.

I have long complained that the education system is flawed. It channels many of the talents a person might have through the narrow field of the written word.

The point I am going for is that while we must be able to read, write, and do basic maths, and time must be dedicated to these areas throughout our education, we should separate the learning paths to suit the talents of the learners.

I suspect that the people who decide how we should learn were invariably those for whom exploring the beauty of language was a skill and a joy. They won spelling competitions and composed magical phrasing and were praised greatly for their skill and their behaviour in a typical classroom setting.

That same person who may struggle with IT can't put a cupboard together, and has possibly never had an inventive thought in their life, potentially put in a position of management where intuition and inventiveness are of more value. A role to which they may be poorly suited, but confident of their cognitive intellect thanks to the affirmation they received while regurgitating information throughout their education.

Those same people also turned IT into the use of Microsoft Word for an entire generation.

Some children with keen cognitive intellects should be coming out of school knowing how to make an alternator. Having actually made one with loops of wire and magnets. They should understand the workings of a combine harvester. The reading and the writing for which they may have little aptitude carefully infused into the functional learning from which they may become an actual benefit to society, be happy and prosper.

But they can not prosper. Not while lawyers and tax dodgers run parliament. Rules creation and manipulation are the most significant competitive edge a company can hope for. Keeping business and politics tied. Making the masses work harder for less security. While ironically the few work harder still, just to grow an already impossibly large trust fund.

But I digress. We can't fix everything in the same breath.

So yes. I do seek a multi tier education system. Separate the learning styles of scholars, the technicians, the scientists and the artists and let all prosper doing things they have talent at and learning in a way that suits their mind. It makes them happy.

And that's really why we are here.

What is affordable housing?

People are up in arms about developers lobbying and applying to build on every bit of the south east.. But what we do not know is they have to give something back.

I heard on twitter that for the #wokyregen the princely sum of £28k per dwelling was to be paid to the council for each planned dwelling.

There is also a requirement for ‘affordable housing’. So that clears that up.

Regarding the £28k. How much is the land worth with and without planning permission. Much more than £28k. That puts a lot of money behind influencing planning decisions. Where there is a way there is a will. Also 28k is the highest I've heard.

But then there is the affordable housing the developers build for our low paid and needy.

But what does ‘affordable housing’ really mean.

Here is the council's own information on what ‘affordable housing’ is. Have a look. See if you can find out what it means from a cost to the developer point of view?

http://www.wokingham.gov.uk/planningcontrol/planning/planningpolicies/housing/adoptedaffordablehousingspd/

Hard to put in into a nutshell as there are lots of options and there are a lot of discretionary work arounds. However.

Most significant developments will make 40% affordable housing of which.
20% will be 1 bedroom flats and houses.
15% 2-bed flats
30% 2 bed houses
20% 3 bed houses (some as bungalows for dissabled)
15% 4 bedroom +

Shared ownership. Part owners rent the councils / housing association / registered providers stake for 1.5%.
Intermediate affordable housing. Prices and rents are above social prices but below market prices but can be privately owned. What is to stop the developer from selling these houses to friends and landlords I don’t know.
Social rented housing. Guideline target rents
Affordable rent. No more than 80% of local market rates

The provision of affordable housing will be based on ‘70% social rent 30% intermediate housing model of the Lewel’s Affordable Housing Visibility Study paragraph 4.32 of the core strategy. No I have not bothered. But it is discretionary anyway.

At a council meeting I attended recently a developer was trying do get 126 developments into an area where 100 is supposed to be the maximum and it was clear that some of our representatives were keen to just ignore, since it is discretionary notably Mark Cupif, Head of Development Management who even suggested the council might loose an appeal and have to pay costs, even though there were glaring ‘may’ statments in the application. When questioned about the £16k / dwelling section 106 that was suggested in the deal Mark also said that the figure was 'normal'.

The application had 5 members back the a rejection of the application and it was clearly to me that it was a significant disappointment some of the other speakers? Why?

There is a lot to read here and a lot of it is confusing waffle so it would be great to get some clarification on the following questions.

The transfer of affordable housing to the council, housing association or registered provider. Is that free i.e. developers are building 40% of properties to ‘give’ to whoever is providing the care? Or do ‘we’ the borough simply buy those properties for the affordable housing schemes?

There is a Subsidy payment to developers. Appears to be about 5% of the project sell value irrespective of affordable housing. What's that about?

If a property is given to an approved provider. How does that work. I assume they don’t just keep the money they make on the partial rent on a house they did not pay for?

If an ‘affordable’ home ends up in the 80% market rate privately owned category. What is to stop these from being sold cheap to profiteers?

Call me old fashioned but I think affordable homes is for houses to cost  4 to 5 times a working salary. About half what they are now.

That’s not going to happen without one of these.
1. A very nasty war (no thanks)
2. A financial revolution that no-one can predict the outcome of (no thanks but if we must)
3. High inflation (perhaps 7% for ten years, iin all things, including salaries but not property, achieved by the government getting rid of all these easy ways to continue to pay too much for property and making renting out property except the most exclusive unprofitable.

So I go for option 3.

Any other options please let me know.

Problem families. Fix the cause.

Frustrating listening to politicians do their public act on question time last night. Keeping the popular vote and turning the issue of problem families into 'how dare you stereotype' offensive.

I disagree that the main cause is fatherless homes. Boys without moralistic local heroes is a serious problem. And who around them can offer that? There is no solution available to the need for success and recognition for all. They have little hope of a living wage.

For many there is no hope of providing for a family working hard doing something truly productive. i.e. making something of value that was not there before the work was started. All well and good selling it, but the initial part, the manufacturing that will utilise the people volume to provide a role within society for the masses can not provide a living wage in the uk with globalisation as it is.

So we have an impoverished working class.

We naturally seek our success in the path of least resistance. These problem families have simply changed what they measure success against. Not their job, nor the talents they did not nurture as a child, sacrificed cheaply to unlimited entertaining TV and addictive computer games. Many now take pride in things like no fear, being the gangster, do as you like, theft, intimidation.

No one can provide the masses at the bottom with any guidance or opportunity that means working quite hard just for 8 hours 5 days a week will make them a bigger success, because it won't. Even though it should. Why live? What is all this growth supposed to achieve?

And the route problem is simply trade globalisation and over population managed by short sighted cronie capitalism.

Yes fatherless homes is a problem, mainly for the sons. But an immoral father is no better.

A father carrying the shame of his inability to provide suitably for his family and without hope may be as much of problem as none. Thanks to the rules created by the lawyers and bankers who profit globally from the environment in which he has become neutered locally, he has become knows fear and hopelessness. In the words of Yoda  "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate. These are the path to the dark side."

In the mean time I believe we should try to alleviate these symptoms with both the carrot and the stick. I was a wilful child and it would appear that many of left don't see the need for discipline as well as reward. We need both. At the moment, thanks to social workers shouting 'emotional hardship' and 'liberty' in the presence of healthy discipline there is often no real stick to work in conjunction with a carrot which comes in the form of a social worker offering the family unrealistic hope for success as long as you work harder than everyone else.

The fix has to be an economically viable routine for people who sorely need it.

In our capital market the fix must lie with import duties or subsadies that take into account foreign labour rates or restrictions  on labour and welfare to foreign nationals. The other route would be some form of national work to earn the necessities, a form of communism if you will, this would drive all private sector wages above a living wage.

Either, gradually, the lower majority must adopt the working wages and welfare of the Chinese etc to compete, or we must protect our citizens, from hardship. A bigger problem than war in the internet age of the west.