Will Orr-Ewing

Founder of Keystone Tutors. Work on schools and schools policy.

[Will Orr-Ewing @willorrewing]

"The deeply humane nature of the enterprise, pursued through extreme & often lonely conditions, is the quality that unites Nelson & Coleridge. The method is radical, the purpose deeply conservative, concerned for ‘all old & venerable Truths’ in a world threatened with change."

[Adam Boxer @adamboxer1]

This is spectacularly silly.

Disadvantaged students do not need untested AI tutors. They need excellent behaviour, high expectations, explicit instruction, and systematic retrieval.

Not this.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Green politics and love of your country, in action.

I’ve known @paulpowlesland for 15 years. I’ve never met someone with so much energy, enthusiasm and pragmatic idealism.

[Louis Mosley @louismosley]

Few have done as much as Charlie Peters to bring the full extent & horrors of the grooming gangs to light or to give brave survivors a voice. Palantir’s software would transform the Met Police’s ability to collate data and analyse grooming networks, and we stand by ready to help.

[Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield]

30,000 fewer children in private schools.

1,900 fewer teachers in state schools.

A lose/lose proposition.

[Despotic Inroad @DespoticInroad]

Again, an awful lot of gaslighting re: "neoliberalism", denying the existence of a ~50yr policy/governance agenda on the basis of "the state spends a lot of money".

Public spending as %-of-GDP isn't high because we've had a period of Leftwing hegemony. (Outside of the arts, the academy & the social/cultural policy sphere, that's obvious nonsense). Rather, it's high because:
👉Demographic pressures have pushed up the 2 massive spending outlays, health & pensions – a problem common to the vast majority of Western democracies
👉UK growth/productivity has been stagnant for ~18yrs, since The City of London collapsed under the weight of its own poor investments, while spending pressures have continued to grow apace
👉We have a growing (& expensive) debt pile as a result of the taxpayer twice being forced to bail out the private sector to the tune of several hundred £BN – 1st during GFC, 2nd during Covid lockdown
👉We have huge revenue pressures from "sticking plaster" subsidies covering up the underlying issue of chronic low investment, e.g. housing benefits ballooning while municipal capex on housebuilding shrinks; or tax credits/UC top-ups disguising stagnant real wages; or increasing day-to-day NHS spending after years of squeezed capital budgets/social care sector collapse

Neoliberalism is defined by privatisation, the embrace of globalisation/free trade, monetarist central banking, the emasculation of the labour movement, & the transformation of the state from a prime actor in national production/investment into a post-hoc fiscal distributor. It has been consciously driven by market-liberal true believers (some even self-identifying as "neoliberals") – on the Right by Hayekian/Friedmanite think tanks, business groups & various Conservative ideologues, and on the Left by Third Way modernisers (see Blair) and their intellectual forebears in Marxism Today's revisionism, the Democratic Left etc. etc.

Pretending none of this happened (because 'muh the state still spends £££') is pure sophistry. They want us to believe they didn't sell off airlines, steelmakers, coal mines, energy generators, water companies, car manufacturers, banks, bus/train contracts & millions of council houses. That they didn't deregulate financial services to get their 'Big Bang'. That they didn't abolish rent controls, or capital/exchange controls, or wage boards, or price commissions. That they didn't outsource core services and state capacity to corporate providers. That they didn't impose some of the most draconian/restrictive trade union laws in the democratic West. That they didn't cede monetary policy to an independent central bank, or cede trade/migration policy to an unelected, supranational, continental bureaucracy. That they didn't squeeze public investment or prioritise tax cuts over infrastructure spending. That they didn't eschew industrial policy and take a lax approach to deindustrialisation because the future was services & the "knowledge economy".

This isn't simpy an accumulation of random policy titbits, but is the outcome of a coherent intellectual project that has consistently rebalanced the labour/capital relationship in the latter's favour. These people are conning you.

[Farhaj Mayan @farhaj]

BREAKING NEWS:

It's time to start Britmaxxing 🇬🇧

[Sian Griffiths @SianGriffiths6]

Private schools have lost 30,000 pupils since introduction of VAT

https://t.co/DKtc9c2WZn

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

I am just back from the Oval and I regret to inform you that London has in fact fallen.

More Arsenal shirts than Surrey shirts. Forget about Palace or Charlton.

Arsenal fans everywhere in South London. Yesterday I was in East London at my parents - their local pub had more Arsenal fans in it than West Ham fans for the Conference League 3 years ago. Lots more. Not even close.

The "London FC" people are right. I don't like it, but they're right. And given the way that London tends to eat the world, don't get smug if you're outside of London. If we have half a decade of Arsenal dominance, by the end of it they'll have taken over Liverpool and Manchester too and the economy will be one giant Arsenal merch store with a few farms and data centres tacked on.

Foreign leaders will grant profitable trade and visa deals in return for being allowed exclusive pre-access to the new Declan Rice hologram experience in the Emirates Museum.

[Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield]

Anyone who thinks the opponents of private schools will stop at VAT should get real.

If private schools want the next round to go better than the last one did, they need to shore up their support - particularly with the middle classes.

Here's how:

https://t.co/sae9l5PLZb

[Iain Mansfield @IGMansfield]

Politically, Labour's pledge to put VAT on private schools was one of its most effective.

Simple, value-laden and wildly popular - even with many who'd vote Tory.

But why did private schools lose the middle classes - and how might they win them back?

https://t.co/sae9l5PLZb

[Department for Education @educationgovuk]

🚨 NEW: Parents can use a new childcare tracker to find childcare near them, check what support they’re entitled to and estimate what childcare should cost them - helping eligible families access savings of £8,000 a year on average.

Find out more here➡️ https://t.co/HsNEGUppwB

[Will Orr-Ewing @willorrewing]

Love!

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

“Yes, this is Aston Villa in the modern age!”

[Andrew Bennett @andrewjb_]

the most ambitious thing you can work on today is rebuilding the country

maybe that’s at a company, like building our TSMC

but maybe it’s at @britishprogress, who are leading a new generation of high-leverage non-profits raising our national policy ambition

strongly recommend applying:

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 WATCH: Reform UK Mayor of Hull Luke Campbell says he thinks Andy Burnham would be a champion for the North as PM

"He seems like a really nice guy to me"

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

I went to the same nursery school as Wes Streeting and grew up on the housing estate opposite his.

Here is a little thread on what the East End was like at that time.

Take it as the East End equivalent of those Johnson / Cameron era Old Etonians explaining what Pop was like.

[O.W. Root @owroot]

Yoto player is a fantastic invention. We have them for our kids. We were thinking about giving them tape players to listen to stuff but then we discovered the Yoto and it achieves the same thing in a more modern way.

They have great stories, classics, and geography, science and stuff like that too. Our kids honestly learn a lot of great stuff from them.

A great alternative to screens on long trips etc.. Listening to something is different than watching. I think it's because when listening we still have to use our imagination in some way. Like listening to a book, or a radio broadcast (in the old days) etc... I think there is a little more going on in our brain.

Yoto is good.

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

This is worth thinking about if you are in education.

- What do we want our future leaders to study - at school & university? In the past Classics was seen as ideal elite training - today it's PPE. Were either of those actually ideal? Do we need something else today?

- Are 60s & 70s politicians a great model? They were certainly more impressive than current politicians - but were they better at running the country? If not, what does that say about the importance of education?

- Does education matter that much? Are character & judgement more important?

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

This looks awesome. Going to get one, I think.

[Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo]

"The important thing is that he is the long historical result of a society that has proceduralized itself to the point where procedure no longer mediates trust but replaces it."

Basically I think he's saying Starmer is VAR...

[Aeron Laffere @aeronlaffere]

"Since the referendum to leave the European Union in 2016, the British voters are burning through their political options and finding them all wanting. They threw out the Tories. They turned down Boris Johnson, they turned down Theresa May. It looks like they're going to turn down the Starmer government. They kind of turned their back on Labour, they brought Labour back in to destroy the Tories, they're going to use Reform to destroy the Labour Party if the polls are to be believed. And so it seems to me they're looking, people are genuinely looking for political alternatives. It's a difficult and tortuous process but it's very real." @thephilippics on Anglofuturism last year.