Tag: news

  • Free School Meals for All London Pupils

    All primary pupils in London schools are going to get Free School Meals from September 2023 according to an announcement from the Mayor of London on Monday. This new policy will cost £130 million, save the average family £440 a year and benefit around 270 000 children. In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme…

  • Why are Teachers Striking?

    Over 90% of National Education Union Members who were balloted voted for a series of six days of strikes which start today (1st February 2023) and go on approximately every two weeks until the 15th of March. The main reason teachers are striking is over poor pay and long working hours, which are the main…

  • Zahawi’s Tax ‘Carelessness’

    Nadhim Zahawi is the Conservative Party Chairman and previous Chancellor of the Exchequer who this month paid around £5 million in tax, which included a 30% penalty from the HMRC for underpayment of previous taxes. To understand why Zahawi received this tax penalty we need to go back to the year 2000 when Zahawi co-founded…

  • Bias in Presenting Quantitative Data

    Newspapers can ‘bias’ the presentation of quantitative data by stretching out the scale of the data they present, making differences between bars seem larger than they actually are (or vice versa!).

  • Liz Truss’ Energy Price Cap Will Benefit the Rich more than the Poor

    State hand-outs for TNCs and more support for the rich – this is neoliberalism on steroids!

  • The Covid-19 Pandemic Exaggerated Health Inequalities in England

    The Pandemic has increased health inequalities in England, according to a recent report by the Institute of Health Inequalities – Build Back Fairer – The Covid-19 Marmot Review: The Pandemic, Social and Health Inequalities in England. Prior to the Pandemic, from 2010 to 2020, health inequalities between the least and most deprived were increasing in…

  • Sociological Perspectives on the 2020 Downing Street Christmas Party

    There seems to be increasing evidence that around three dozen people attended a party at Downing Street in December 2020, shortly after tier three lockdown restrictions were introduced. These lockdown rules explicitly prohibited people from having social gatherings (like Christmas Parties) and even prevented people from visiting their relatives who were in care homes or…

  • ‘Results’ Day

    Students like to think that their exam results are primarily down their own individual effort and ability (their ‘merit’ if you like), and these are two of the factors which influence their exam results. However, the results statistics clearly show us that social factors such as parental income, wider social class background, gender and ethnicity…

  • Coronavirus Media Narratives

    While Coronavirus is no doubt a real-life event, with real-life social and (for an extreme minority tragic) individual consequences, it is also very much a media event, especially since isolation is correlated with a significant increase our media consumption with news sites especially seeing a surge in visits (U.S. data)… Social media usage (Facebook, Twitter,…

  • Churnalism and the News

    Churnalism refers to a process where journalists produce news based on pre-packaged press-releases from government spin doctors, public relations consultants or news agencies without doing independent research or even checking their facts. The journalist Waseem Zakir has been credited with first using the term in 2008 while working for the BBC when he noted that…