Still puzzled by primary school closures?

| 31 December, 2020

So am I. I couldn’t help thinking that there must be some logic I’m missing. So pulled together more data. The table below uses data the excellent London Datastore to see if there was any discernible pattern.

Short story. I still haven’t found one.

If you want to look for yourself the table below is sortable (there’s a little black sort button on each column about half-way up on the right-hand side of each header). You can sort by multiple columns by holding ‘shift’ as you click. The size of the table does make it a bit unwieldy on phones, sorry.

I have tried to explore a few different explanations. The first is the good old Inner/Outer London split. You are a bit more likely to be in an open borough if you are inner London.

I looked at population density and school age children to see if this could offer any explanation. This might be the most logical reason for openings that looks odd, since the boroughs vary enormously in size, which might result in decisions that there odd at first sight, but made sense when looking at the numbers. Again, I couldn’t see any pattern here. I did explore by trying to look at the number of schools and how that might affect things. Again, this produced no obvious answers, although that might be skewed by things like cross-border and private schools.

I also wondered about educational need. Given the government’s repeated statements of the importance of keeping children in education it’s possible factors related to educational need might have relevance. I used English proficiency or children looked after as imperfect proxies for these but, once again, there was no obvious link.

The other possibility is that the government have been looking at trends, but given their inability to spot and act on nationally rising rates during the last national lockdown I suspect it’s unlikely they can do this on a borough level.

I have tried various combinations of factors and other data, but not managed to come up with anything. It is possible, of course, that the Department for Education is using a weighted combination that I’ve not come close to. I like to think that there is some logic to it. But unless and until the criteria used are published it’s very easy to conclude the reasoning behind the decisions is not entirely based in controlling the virus.

Borough	Status	Inner/Outer London	Case rate	Control	Primary schools	Population density (per hectare) 2017	Proportion of population aged 0-15, 2015	% of pupils whose first language is not English (2015)	Rates of Children Looked After (2016)	GLA Population Estimate 2017
Barnet	Closed	Outer	730	Con	91	44.9	21.1	46.0	35	389,600
Croydon	Closed	Outer	780	Lab	86	44.7	22	36.7	86	386,500
Ealing	Closed	Outer	623	Lab	68	63.3	21.4	43.6	46	351,600
Enfield	Closed	Outer	949	Lab	68	41.2	22.8	55.3	43	333,000
Brent	Closed	Outer	632	Lab	60	76.8	20.9	37.6	45	332,100
Bromley	Closed	Outer	825	Con	77	21.8	19.9	38.9	40	327,900
Redbridge	Closed	Outer	1,027	Lab	52	53.9	22.8	66.5	28	304,200
Hillingdon	Closed	Outer	743	Con	69	26.0	21.3	29.6	49	301,000
Greenwich	Open	Outer	705	Lab	63	59.2	21.9	44.1	78	280,100
Waltham Forest	Closed	Outer	857	Lab	51	71.2	21.8	62.4	43	276,200
Hounslow	Closed	Outer	708	Lab	53	49.0	21.1	50.6	45	274,200
Havering	Closed	Outer	1,095	Con (council NOC)	61	22.6	19.3	38.9	42	254,300
Harrow	Open	Outer	726	Lab	42	50.0	20.5	57.6	32	252,300
Bexley	Closed	Outer	1,006	Con	57	40.3	20.6	32.6	46	244,300
Barking and Dagenham	Closed	Outer	950	Lab	44	57.9	27.2	41.7	69	209,000
Merton	Closed	Outer	776	Lab	44	55.3	20.6	34.2	35	208,100
Sutton	Closed	Outer	747	LD	40	46.2	20.7	34.3	50	202,600
Richmond upon Thames	Closed	Outer	593	LD	45	34.4	20.7	53.5	26	197,300
Kingston upon Thames	Open	Outer	595	LD	36	47.1	19.6	39.3	30	175,400
Newham	Closed	Inner	894	Lab	66	94.7	22.7	58.8	42	342,900
Lambeth	Open	Inner	696	Lab	60	122.7	17.6	39.1	73	328,900
Wandsworth	Closed	Inner	685	Con	61	93.7	17.8	50.8	41	321,000
Southwark	Closed	Inner	673	Lab	74	108.9	18.6	29.8	75	314,300
Tower Hamlets	Closed	Inner	917	Lab	70	153.7	20.1	51.1	47	304,000
Lewisham	Open	Inner	696	Lab	63	86.3	20.6	40.9	69	303,400
Haringey	Open	Inner	785	Lab	64	93.9	20	48.0	67	278,000
Hackney	Open	Inner	751	Lab	58	144.0	20.7	44.2	53	274,300
Camden	Open	Inner	481	Lab	42	111.3	17.3	25.2	41	242,500
Westminster	Closed	Inner	476	Con	40	112.7	15.9	52.6	39	242,100
Islington	Open	Inner	593	Lab	46	155.6	15.9	57.6	88	231,200
Hammersmith and Fulham	Closed	Inner	587	Lab	37	113.0	17.4	48.9	58	185,300
Kensington and Chelsea	Closed	Inner	476	Con	27	131.1	16.4	45.8	37	159,000

Data: London Datastore

Article

Schrödinger’s Covid

James Cousins

| 26 October, 2020

I find myself in the interesting position of both having and not having a confirmed case of Covid.

There was an outbreak at work meaning many, but not me, were either confirmed cases or required to self-isolate because of exposure. I swabbed as a precaution but given the lack of symptoms both in my team and me, and the timings since the outbreak I was fairly confident I’d escaped. And when there were delays at the lab on Friday I didn’t worry too much that I was leaving for the weekend without a result.

On Sunday I was tired, but that could be anything so thought nothing of it (some people might, totally hypothetically, have drunk too much gin the night before, although obviously I can’t imagine anyone doing that). This morning I dragged myself into work, still feeling incredibly tired but ascribing it to a bad night’s sleep or perhaps a common bug.

It was just after 9am I got my Schrödinger status. I was waving the person with my negative swab result away from my door as I was on the phone with Test and Trace discussing my positive result.

This isn’t to criticise either Test and Trace or the lab, mistakes are made. I’m assuming an input error and that I may never find out the definitive result. However, having come home to self-isolate I fell asleep for most of the day and awoke to find my sense of taste has gone and a feeling I’m never quite taking a full breath. I now have a pretty good idea what the result should have been.

Hopefully, these will be the end of the symptoms for me and I will mostly sleep through it. And hopefully, I will be lucky enough not to pass it on to my family. Fortunately, I can be confined to my own room and while the sense of lost liberty is acute, the fatigue means I am not actually motivated to go anywhere. In any case, unlike actual prisoners I’m allowed books and the internet.

The lesson, for me, is how easy it can be to catch this thing. I have been very cautious in my mask wearing and distancing. Possibly not cautious enough, it transpires, but certainly someone who tended to go beyond the current regulations.

And the other lesson is how much luck plays a part. Were it not for London’s move into tier 2 it’s possible I would have transmitted the virus to other family members at the weekend. And, from there…?

The odds are heavily stacked in my favour; I’m relatively young and relatively fit. It might be unpleasant but I’m likely to be over it soon enough. But other people are not in that position and I hate, absolutely detest, the idea I could now be a link in the chain of transmission to one of them.

I have always had an over-developed sense of responsibility, so even knowing I followed guidance means I cannot shake a sense of ill-defined guilt for an outcome that may never happen and I will never know either way.

Imagine if I’d been the anti-mask type where I would have been more certain of the outcome of my irresponsibility. I oddly never felt my liberty infringed wearing a mask but I’m sure that death pretty severely cramps your personal freedoms.

Be careful. Keep your distance. Wear a mask.

Article

It’s the hope that gets you

James Cousins

| 16 August, 2020

It is difficult, sometimes, to pinpoint the exact cause of the depressive pessimism that it the mood music of 2020. Is it Covid-19? Or is it the government’s strange inability to collect and publish statistics on it? Or their tendency to blame others for problems rather than solving them? Is it that nagging sense that while the way contracts are being handed out might not be corrupt technically, it’s hard to avoid the whiff of something a bit off?

Is it the incompetence of the handling of A-level results? Or is it the bizarre situation where we’ll get worked up about a handful of people braving the Channel in a dinghy because they, bizarrely, think that life will be better here than any other European country? Or maybe it’s the utterly surreal suggestion by Priti Patel that they are trying to escape French intolerance?

I have started wondering if, actually, it’s because of all the polarisation it’s the one between optimism and pessimism that is most profound. It’s hard to imagine how making ourselves economically weaker while stoking intolerance is a cause for optimism but, when packaged up with terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘control’, it seems that even a government that’s equal parts ideology and incompetence can provide enough of the population with hope that it can dominate a broken electoral system like first-past-the-post.

The difficulty is that there is a finite capacity for pessimism and outrage. So, taking the A-level results, while there is so much focus on young people missing out their Oxbridge places there is hardly any media attention given to those elsewhere on the spectrum such as those who will miss out on a university place entirely. Those for whom the downgrading doesn’t mean the difference between a prestigious university education and slightly less prestigious university education but, instead, is a set-back that will last, with a huge economic cost, for the rest of their lives.

Or, looking beyond this, year, the fact that the algorithms have simply highlighted (and perhaps amplified) an annual inequality that downgrades the potential of children from deprived areas every single year of their education. Surely that is where the outrage should be: by limiting their potential we hold back the whole country.

I’m obviously one of the 55% or so that finds little cause for optimism in the UK. Perhaps the biggest cause of pessimism is that I don’t really expect the government to do anything to appeal to me, why should it? There is no need for consensus building when it can achieve electoral success by just appealing to its base.

Once upon a time politics was about hope and optimism. Remember that Obama poster? Perhaps that is an analogy, something that started positively but ended in disappointment and court battles. But politics was about hope. From Attlee’s ‘Face the Future’ manifesto in 1945, Thatcher in 1979 exhorting people to vote for a ‘better life’, Blair in 1997 offering the country a ‘new life’. Even May’s shambolic 2017 election, despite the comically memorable ‘Strong and Stable’, was under a manifesto entitled ‘Forward, Together’. The consistent theme is that, as a country, things can be better. And now…?

If there could be a more visceral image of a government destroying hope than downgrading the exam results of thousands and thousands of young people, mostly from less affluent areas I do not want to know what it is. Can we really take four more years of it?