Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Britain’s hospitals may be bad but the regulators are worse
Another week, another hospital scandal. The story is beginning to be all too familiar: dozens of patients dying needlessly, in filthy conditions that would shame a Third World country.
It emerged on Thursday that inspectors making unannounced checks in October on Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust discovered a collection of horrors: blood spattered on floors and curtains, mattresses soaked with foul-smelling stains, contaminated equipment, a high rate of pressure sores among the elderly, long waiting times in the accident and emergency department and, worst of all, poor nursing care, with old people deprived of food, attention and dignity. As a result, about 70 people in the care of the Basildon and Thurrock trust may have died needlessly: its mortality rate is a third higher than the national average.
Ministers and media expressed shock and horror, but within hours there was news of another scandal of just the same sort. On Friday the regulator Monitor, which supervises NHS foundation trust hospitals, announced it had sacked the chairman of the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust: Colchester also has higher than average mortality rates. Monitor charges the trust with poor leadership, long waiting times, poor infection screening, poor children’s services and worsening patient satisfaction. It is not often that someone gets sacked these days — something must be really bad.
That makes three hospital horror stories this year, counting the reports in March about conditions at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust; 400 people died there needlessly. Monitor has concerns about a further eight trusts.
What on earth is going on? It is bad enough that we have some — perhaps many — dreadful hospitals, even though the NHS budget has tripled in the past decade. What is even worse is that it seems difficult to have any confidence in the many people and organisations responsible for overseeing hospitals and anticipating these problems — not just bad hospitals but bad supervision. Why has it taken so long for these bad practices and poor outcomes to be noticed? The mortality figures have been available for more than 10 years.
In the case of Basildon and Thurrock, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the new independent regulator for all health and social care in England, was the body that inspected the trust and published the dreadful findings. Yet last month it posted on its website a glowing report on the trust, giving it 13 out of 14 for cleanliness and 5 out of 5 for keeping the public healthy. This report, astonishingly, is still there.
The CQC knew this information was wrong; it must have realised the report would be misleading to the public who went to the site to check hospitals’ performance. Yet it has left the report on its site. One can only wonder about the information on other hospitals. Why should one trust any of it?
Baroness Young, the chairwoman of the CQC, found herself in an impossible position last week, confronted with this inconsistency. Wriggle as she would under the probing of the Today programme, she could do no better than to say her organisation is only eight months old and the report on the website was done months ago under the previous regime — the Healthcare Commission — and things are going to be much better now. She failed to deal with the problem of public trust.
She also failed to inspire confidence in her strange attack on the methodology of hospital mortality figures provided by Dr Foster Intelligence, an organisation the public might actually be able to trust. It is a partnership between the NHS and the Dr Foster unit at Imperial College; it provides monthly and carefully adjusted mortality figures across the NHS, which are known for their reliability and which have directly prompted all the recent investigations into problem hospitals. Dr Foster now makes a point of writing to all NHS hospital chief executives to warn them when their mortality rates begin to rise.
I wonder what Baroness Young thinks is wrong with the figures or their methodology. The rest of the CQC seems to think they are all right and a useful tool for looking at hospital performance. In fact, everyone seems to accept the Dr Foster figures apart from a few ministers. On Saturday morning, for instance, Andy Burnham, the health secretary, called for an investigation to uncover high death rates across the NHS.
But that information exists already, in neat monthly packages from Dr Foster Intelligence; there can be no point in calling for it, other than wearisome politics.
Altogether this government’s NHS policies bring to mind an interfering child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Since 1997 we have had six secretaries of state for health. That means an average of two years in post. It is impossible for anyone to understand the essentials of our byzantine health service in such short fits of attention.
As for the regulators, including the one Baroness Young seems to think was not up to snuff, we have had at least three upheavals of regulations under Labour — the Commission for Health Improvement, then the Healthcare Commission and now the CQC. Such constant change must be at odds with good management.
It is hardly surprising that the public has become so suspicious; there may not be many data about the death of trust in this country, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Who monitors the monitors? Not only hospital regulation is at issue.
All around us this question keeps emerging.
To the weary citizen, the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war looks just another attempt to avoid any awkward truths. No one is to be on trial; no one is to be blamed. No one has to appear, either, and Macavity Brown, to his shame, won’t be anywhere to be seen. Who is there to insist on what’s right?
The Ofsted report last week was deeply depressing for its cautiously expressed findings — failing schools, illiterate children and poor teaching. What’s worse is that Ofsted and its predecessors have been inspecting and reporting fairly cheerfully for decades, while standards have fallen lower and lower. The Walker inquiry into banking is yet another affront to an angry public. Who is there to insist on public probity? That is the question, sadly. Who will guard the guards themselves?
The most dangerous British hospitals
Twelve NHS hospital trusts have been identified as “significantly underperforming” on a range of safety measures according to new research which has ranked every general hospital in England.
The low performance conclusions came despite overall patient care at eight of these trusts rated as good or excellent last month by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the health service regulator.
The critical research conducted by Dr Foster, a consultancy that collates independent league tables on NHS trusts, also identified 27 trusts with unusually high death rates involving the deaths of 5,000 more patients in the past year than had been expected. The new data are contained in The Dr Foster Hospital Guide 2009 which contains a league table of NHS trusts across England with their performances rated on patient safety.
Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust and Lewisham Hospital NHS Trust in south London are identified as the poorest overall performers. Basildon and Thurrock, Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in Greater Manchester are also named by Dr Foster as having the highest mortality rates.
The report includes incidents of 209 foreign objects such as drill bits left inside patients after surgery; 82 incidents where the wrong part of the body was operated on; and 848 patients under the age of 65 admitted with low-risk conditions who subsequently died.
Barbara Young, who chairs the CQC, last night assured Andy Burnham, the health secretary, there was no evidence that direct intervention was needed in other hospital trusts, apart from Basildon, despite the Dr Foster data.
The NHS boss in charge of Basildon and Thurrock had received an 11% pay rise in the past year. Alan Whittle, chief executive of the trust, who was paid £150,000 during 2008-9, also saw the value of his pension pot increase by nearly £500,000 to £1.5m over the same period.
Details of Whittle’s pay emerged after a CQC report found that poor nursing, dirty wards and a lack of leadership had contributed to an estimated 400 avoidable deaths at the Basildon hospital last year.
A CQC spot check last month had uncovered soiled mattresses, poor clinical practices, mould growing in suction machines and out-of-date medical equipment.
Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, a pressure group, criticised a culture of “rewards for failure” within the National Health Service. “Surgeons and doctors who fail patients can be struck off and the same should be true of NHS executives,” she said.
Michael Large, the trust’s chairman, said Whittle’s 11% pay rise reflected the hospital’s higher turnover and greater responsibilities for executives.
Yesterday it emerged that Whittle is having a relationship with Karen Bates, a hospital safety manager who also serves on the hospital’s board of governors.
British woman dies after cancer screening blunder at NHS hospital
And the blunder was covered up
One woman has died and hundreds of other cancer patients put at risk after a crucial machine used to test for the best way to treat the killer disease developed a fault that was not repaired for at least a month. The NHS hospital at the centre of the blunder failed to tell patients their results may have been wrong due to the broken equipment. It also did not report the incident to the medical authorities – an apparent breach of Department of Health rules designed to protect patients and alert doctors to problems.
Last month, mum Tracey Kindley, 43, died of breast cancer after learning her treatment had been based on inaccurate test results. She was being treated at a private hospital in North London after she discovered a suspicious lump in March 2005.
Her doctors performed a biopsy and sent it to a local NHS Trust’s pathology department, which confirmed her cancer. But one of the machines used at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, in Welwyn Garden City, crucial in assisting her doctors in deciding the best treatment for the cancer, was not working correctly. The machine – used to test hormone levels – gave a ‘false negative reading’ for oestrogen, meaning she was not prescribed certain life-saving drugs because it was thought they would have no effect on her cancer.
Her doctors spotted the error only when she failed to respond to treatment and the cancer spread. The doctors ordered new laboratory tests on the original biopsy and these results showed very high oestrogen levels in the cancer cells, alerting them to a major error. Health service managers at the Queen Elizabeth II ordered checks and discovered the machine had developed a fault around the time of the tests on Mrs Kindley.
A service report on the equipment shows a ‘critical repair’ was carried out on May 6, 2005. The managers claim the machine was ‘fixed within days’ of the problem being identified, but crucially Mrs Kindley’s tests were carried out on April 8 – almost a month before the fault was spotted. The East and North Herts NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital, re-examined the results of other patients whose samples were tested on days either side of Mrs Kindley’s.
However, an internal investigation concluded the incident was a ‘one-off’ and that despite testing hundreds of patients during the period, no other patients could have been affected. The conclusion meant patients tested when the machine is known to have been malfunctioning – a period of around four weeks – were never alerted that they, too, may have been given the wrong results.
In the weeks before her death, Mrs Kindley began a legal action against the hospital. Her lawyer Hugh Johnson, of Stewarts Law, believes that had she been given the right treatment, she would have had a 70 per cent chance of making a full recovery.
In his letter to the Trust, Dr Nihal Shah, Mrs Kindley’s consultant clinical oncologist, wrote that she ‘had concerns that a similar scenario does not arise for other patients’.
Mrs Kindley died on October 28. Yesterday, her husband said he blamed the test errors for his wife’s death. ‘I believe they robbed me of my wife. The right results would have opened up other forms of treatment and I believe she would be with me and her son Max now.’
Last night, the Trust acknowledged the tests carried out had given a ‘partial false negative result’ and it has apologised that this should have happened. It admitted that the problem had not been reported to the Medicines and Healthcare product Regulatory Agency. ‘That decision is now being reviewed.’
British vetting stops pupils caring for elderly
The tradition of pupils visiting lonely pensioners for a chat or to help with housework is under threat because schools fear that both the teenagers and the OAPs will have to be officially vetted to check they are not potential abusers. Several independent schools have abandoned the visits, which have become the latest example of interaction between children and adults falling victim to the government’s strict vetting regime.
Staff believe the prospect of someone in their eighties or nineties undergoing a criminal check before pupils are allowed into their homes would be bureaucratic and degrading. Under the vetting and barring scheme, people working with children or vulnerable adults — including the elderly in some cases — will have to start registering with the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) from November next year.
Some organisations have started implementing policies to reflect ISA requirements and some schools have dropped home visits following seminars by ISA officials. A Home Office spokeswoman said she “could not believe” schools had been given the advice and blamed them for getting “completely and utterly the wrong end of the stick”. She said neither the old people nor the pupils would have to be vetted as the visits did not involve formal caring.
Some, however, have been advised teenagers making visits should be checked as elderly people were vulnerable. Others were told the elderly would need to be screened, while in some cases, staff were told both should be vetted. The advice is the latest example of apparent over-zealous application of the scheme. Other results that appear to defy common sense include:
• A visiting hockey team planning to play at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne had to cancel because players were due to stay with parents who had not been vetted.
• The Loft theatre company in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, has banned appearances by children under 18 and is considering closing its youth theatre because of the need to vet adult actors and staff.
• Watford council has banned unvetted parents from two playgrounds as other people’s children are present.
• Exchange visits by children from abroad are being scrapped around the country because parents object to being vetted.
Sir Roger Singleton, the ISA chairman, insisted the scheme was proportionate. He said some people, such as piano tuners or electricians, might choose vetting even if they did not have to for “commercial advantage”. The ISA has a budget of £40m and a staff of 220. Professionals will pay £64 to register; volunteers will not be charged.
Wellington College, Berkshire, is reviewing all its home visits to the elderly, while King’s College school, an independent school in London, said it would avoid home visits.
Mark Lewis, in charge of community work at Millfield school, Somerset, said it had dropped home visits after being advised the pensioners would have to be vetted. “The idea of going round for a friendly chat, running off to get the newspaper or befriending them in that way is finished,” he said. “We now only visit nursing homes.”
John Claughton, chief master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, said the regulations were heading towards “madness”. He added: “I went to a governors’ meeting at a school where the head was constructing a policy to ensure there were no unaddressed child protection issues in pupils showing prospective parents round at open morning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Margot James, a Tory parliamentary candidate, who visited an elderly lady when she was a Millfield pupil, deplored the system. She added: “I had to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau when I wanted to give work experience to a 14-year-old this year. I was told the work would have to be outside my home. My office is in my home, so I ignored them.” Her party’s family spokeswoman, Maria Miller, added: “It is disgraceful the government has allowed the new system to become a deterrent for volunteers. It is yet another way this government is undermining trust in society.”
Helen Wright, headmistress of St Mary’s Calne, Wiltshire, said 18-year-old pupils were checked before they could help at residential homes. “It is ridiculous. What a waste of time and money,” she said.
British child protection watchdog destroyed files that showed their negligence
AN insider has accused Ofsted, the children’s inspectorate, of destroying “smoking gun” documents that could expose an attempted cover-up in the Baby P childcare scandal. The Ofsted whistleblower alleges the watchdog deleted draft reports from its computers that gave a highly favourable verdict on Haringey, the London council whose failings contributed to Baby P’s death. The drafts were about to be finalised and released when the tragedy became public. The assessment was then hurriedly scrapped and rewritten to condemn Haringey as inadequate.
The Ofsted documents are being demanded by lawyers for Sharon Shoesmith, the former director of Haringey children’s services. Her dismissal was ordered by Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, over the council’s failure to protect Baby P. Critics believe Shoesmith may be able to pick up hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation from the taxpayer because of the behaviour of Balls and Ofsted. Shoesmith’s legal team, pursuing her claim for wrongful dismissal, argue that the final report — along with another whose drafts Ofsted also tried to suppress — was toughened up only after excessive pressure from Balls on Christine Gilbert, Ofsted’s chief inspector.
Tim Loughton, the Tory children’s spokesman, said: “This all seriously calls into question the integrity of the way Ofsted has been operating. “There are indications of a cover-up and, given the failings of all parties in this case, it is essential we have transparency. In particular, Ed Balls needs to explain exactly what discussions he had with Ofsted behind the scenes.”
The whistleblower has come forward because of concerns that the inspectorate will fail to disclose the evidence in court, where they could constitute a “smoking gun” vital for Shoesmith’s legal team. The insider, who is preparing to disclose the full evidence in public, said the papers had been “deleted from the Haringey shared folder on the Ofsted system and the High Court should have access [to them]”, adding that the deletion of the documents was an attempt to remove the “clear audit trail of all assessments relating to Haringey council”.
The new claims will increase pressure on Gilbert, wife of Tony McNulty, the Labour MP who resigned as a minister in the summer amid controversy over his expenses claims. Gilbert faces questioning by the Commons children’s select committee over her conduct.
Baby P, Peter Connelly, died on August 3, 2007, aged 17 months. He endured months of torture, suffering some 50 injuries, despite being seen by council and NHS staff about 60 times. His mother, Tracey Connelly, her boyfriend Steven Barker and her lodger Jason Owen were jailed for causing or allowing the death.
While Haringey was failing to spot what was going on in Baby P’s home, Ofsted was giving the council a clean bill of health. In 2006 a review by Ofsted and other watchdogs praised Shoesmith’s “strong and dynamic leadership”. In November 2007, just three months after Baby P’s death, its annual performance assessment (APA) rated Haringey’s management of its children’s services as good.
The documents leaked by the whistleblower, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Times despite the alleged destruction of many of the originals, include draft reports, evidence notebooks and minutes of meetings. They show that in November 2008, Ofsted was within days of releasing yet another favourable assessment of Haringey. Then the convictions took place, the Baby P case became public, Balls ordered an emergency inquiry and the draft APA was scrapped. The final 2008 APA, released last December, gave Haringey the lowest rating in four out of seven categories: “In staying safe [the category for safeguarding children], outcomes are poor”, adding that as a whole its services were “inconsistent … and … inadequate overall”.
The whistleblower’s leaked draft, approved by a key Ofsted committee known as a regional consistency panel just days before Baby P’s death became national news, had given far more favourable judgments — a grade 3 “good” rating in both safety and overall effectiveness.
Ofsted said this weekend: “We have made no secret of the fact we scrapped the draft and started again. It was right to do so. The data and evidence that back up our APA findings have been retained. The material has no relevance in the court action, to suggest otherwise is a red herring.”
Beachcroft, Shoesmith’s solicitors, said: “We did request copies of the APA reports but never received them. We were told they were not relevant. That is not our view … we would be very interested if they are still around.”
The documents are the second set of draft reports Ofsted has tried to keep secret. It was criticised by Mr Justice Foskett for withholding drafts of the emergency inspection report ordered by Balls. The Treasury solicitor has now asked Foskett to hold back their release to The Sunday Times and other media.
Climate change data dumped
Leaky Jonathan does a straight report for once (below). Is his faith wavering? He does not however go as far as puncturing the excuse given by the CRU below: That the dumped data was on obsolete media. Transferring it to modern magnetic media would have cost virtually nothing in terms of both space and money
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals – stored on paper and magnetic tape – were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data. In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, `Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years. He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
The great climate change science scandal
The report below appeared in “The Times” of London, which means that the news concerned has now gone mainstream and has become general public knowledge. And it is again an objective article from the keyboard of Leaky Jonathan! Quite a change! He can obviously tell which way the wind is blowing
The storm began with just four cryptic words. “A miracle has happened,” announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change. “RC” said nothing more – but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate. There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
Jones is a key player in the science of climate change. His department’s databases on global temperature changes and its measurements have been crucial in building the case for global warming.
What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning. In one, Jones boasted of using statistical “tricks” to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature. In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.
It was a powerful and controversial mix – far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones’s belief in man-made climate change. Within hours the file had been stripped from the site. Several hours later, however, it reappeared – this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America. What’s more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones’s statistical tricks were now public property.
Steve McIntyre, a prominent climate sceptic, was amazed. “Words failed me,” he said. Another, Patrick Michaels, declared: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”
Inevitably, the affair became nicknamed Climategate. For the scientists, campaigners and politicians trying to rouse the world to action on climate change the revelations could hardly have come at a worse time. Next month global leaders will assemble in Copenhagen to seek limits on carbon emissions. The last thing they need is renewed doubts about the validity of the science.
The scandal has also had a huge personal and professional impact on the scientists. “These have been the worst few days of my professional life,” said Jones. He had to call on the police for protection after receiving anonymous phone calls and personal threats.
Why should a few emails sent to and from a single research scientist at a middle-ranking university have so much impact? And most importantly, what does it tell us about the quality of the research underlying the science of climate change?
THE hacking scandal is not an isolated event. Instead it is the latest round of a long-running battle over climate science that goes back to 1990. That was when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the group of scientists that advises governments worldwide – published its first set of reports warning that the Earth faced deadly danger from climate change. A centrepiece of that report was a set of data showing how the temperature of the northern hemisphere was rising rapidly.
The problem was that the same figures showed that it had all happened before. The so-called medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago saw Britain covered in vineyards and Viking farmers tending cows in Greenland. For any good scientist this raised a big question: was the recent warming linked to humans burning fossil fuels or was it part of a natural cycle?
The researchers set to work and in 1999 a group led by Professor Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, came up with new numbers showing that the medieval warm period was not so important after all. Some bits of the Atlantic may have been warm for a while, but the records suggested that the Pacific had been rather chilly over the same period – so on average there was little change. Plotted out, Mann’s data turned into the famous “hockey stick” graph. It showed northern hemisphere temperatures as staying flat for hundreds of years and then rising steeply from 1900 until now. The implication was that this rise would continue, with potentially deadly consequences for humanity.
That vision of continents being hit by droughts and floods while the Arctic melts away has turned a scientific debate into a highly emotional and political one. The language used by “warmists” and sceptics alike has become increasingly polarised. George Monbiot, widely respected as a writer on green issues, has branded doubters “climate deniers”, a phrase uncomfortably close to holocaust denial. Sceptics, particularly in America, have suggested that scientists who believe in climate change are part of a global left-wing conspiracy to divert billions of dollars into green technology.
A more cogent criticism is that there has been a reluctance to acknowledge dissent on the question of climate science. Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned green campaigner, has described the climate debate as “settled”. Yet the science, say critics, has not been tested to the limit. This is why the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia is so significant.
Its researchers have built up records of how temperatures have changed over thousands of years. Perhaps the most important is the land and sea temperature record for the world since the mid-19th century. This is the database that shows the “unequivocal” rise of 0.8C over the last 157 years on which Mann’s hockey stick and much else in climate science depend.
Some critics believe that the unit’s findings need to be treated with more caution, because all the published data have been “corrected” – meaning they have been altered to compensate for possible anomalies in the way they were taken. Such changes are normal; what’s controversial is how they are done. This is compounded by the unwillingness of the unit to release the original raw data.
David Holland, an engineer from Northampton, is one of a number of sceptics who believe the unit has got this process wrong. When he submitted a request for the figures under freedom of information laws he was refused because it was “not in the public interest”. Others who made similar requests were turned down because they were not academics, among them McIntyre, a Canadian who runs the Climate Audit website.
A genuine academic, Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, also tried. He said: “I was rejected for an entirely different reason. The [unit] told me they had obtained the data under confidentiality agreements and so could not supply them. This was odd because they had already supplied some of them to other academics, but only those who support the idea of climate change.”
It was against this background that the emails were leaked last week, reinforcing suspicions that scientific objectivity has been sacrificed. There is unease even among researchers who strongly support the idea that humans are changing the climate. Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said: “Over the last decade there has been a very political battle between the climate sceptics and activist scientists. “It seems to me that the scientists have lost touch with what they were up to. They saw themselves as in a battle with the sceptics rather than advancing scientific knowledge.”
Professor Mike Hulme, a fellow researcher of Jones at the University of East Anglia and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, said: “The attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organisation within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”
There could, however, be another reason why the unit rejected requests to see its data. This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites … We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world’s understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: “Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, `Trust us’.”
WHERE does this leave the climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that the world is getting warmer and that humanity is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing. Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant”. Lawson said: “Climate change is not being properly debated because all the political parties are on the same side, and there is an intolerance towards anybody who wants to debate it. It has turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion.”
The public are understandably confused. A recent poll showed that 41% accept as scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made, while 32% believe the link is unproven and 15% said the world is not warming.
This weekend many of Jones’s colleagues were standing by him. Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at UEA, said: “We wouldn’t have anything like the understanding of climate change that we do were it not for the work of Phil Jones and his colleagues. They have spent decades putting together the historical temperature record and it is good work.” The problem is that, after the past week, both sceptics and the public will require even more convincing of that.
Big backdown. Shamed University of East Anglia to release climate data
This is still much less of a concession than it appears. It will only be data as “edited” by them which will appear — unless their claim to have “lost” the raw data was a lie. It will still be interesting, though. Comparing their edited data with any available sources of raw data should be MOST instructive. It will reveal any biases in their editing methods — and expect plenty of those. It is precisely such comparisons that they have obviously been fearing for years
Leading British scientists who were accused of manipulating climate change data have agreed to publish their figures in full. The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, “stolen” by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics. In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.
The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.
A grandfather with a training in electrical engineering dating back more than 40 years emerged from the leaked emails as a leading climate sceptic trying to bring down the scientific establishment on global warming. David Holland, who describes himself as a David taking on the Goliath that is the prevailing scientific consensus, is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain’s most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws. Mr Holland, of Northampton, complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week after the leaked emails included several Freedom of Information requests he had submitted to the CRU, and scientists’ private responses to them.
Within hours, a senior complaints officer in the ICO wrote back by email: “I have started to examine the issues that you have raised in your letter and I am currently liaising with colleagues in our Enforcement and Data Protection teams as to what steps to take next.” The official also promised to investigate other universities linked to the CRU, which is one of the world’s leading authorities on temperature levels and has helped to prove that man-made global warming not only exists but will have catastrophic consequences if not tackled urgently. Mr Holland is convinced the threat has been greatly exaggerated.
In one email dated May 28, 2008, one academic writes to a colleague having received Mr Holland’s request: “Oh MAN! Will this crap ever end??”
Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It’s like David versus Goliath. Thanks to these leaked emails a lot of little people can begin to make some impact on this monolithic entity that is the climate change lobby.” He added: “These guys called climate scientists have not done any more physics or chemistry than I did. A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don’t believe they can ever be wrong.”
Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement, said yesterday: “CRU’s full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data.”
Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were an alleged note from Professor Phil Jones, 57, the director of the CRU and a leading target of climate change sceptics, to an American colleague describing the death of a sceptic as “cheering news”; and a suggestion from Prof Jones that a “trick” is used to “hide the decline” in temperature. They even include threats of violence. One American academic wrote to Prof Jones: “Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”
Dr Michaels, tracked down by this newspaper to the Cato Institute in Washington DC where he is a senior fellow in environmental studies, said last night: “There were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating when I kept insisting terrible things are going on here. “This is business as usual for them. The world might be surprised but I am not. These guys have an attitude.”
Prof Jones, who has refused to quit despite calls even from within the green movement, said last week in a statement issued through University of East Anglia, “My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.” He suggested the theft of emails and publication first on a Russian server was “a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks”.
He added: “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.
New leader for the UK Independence Party
Lord Pearson of Rannoch has been elected leader of UKIP. It should be interesting: as I reported last month, the new man has said he will make the fight against radical Islam a major focus for the party.
Today The Times reported: “A UKIP source said that if Lord Pearson or Mr Batten were elected “You are going to see quite a lot stronger position from us. Nigel has always been afraid of the Islam thing backfiring. But the BNP are taking ownership of issues that have not been addressed by Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems and they need addressing.”
So I imagine UKIP will now probably make immigration and radical Islam as much their thing as Europe, and move closer to the Dutch Freedom Party, whose leader Geert Wilders is an ally of Pearson. It might not make them the darlings of White City, but it will play well to the public, many of whom are horrified about the direction the country is taking, and who want to physically puke every time they see a Westminster MP on television, but who are not prepared for the mental leap of voting for the BNP.
Promotion of failure by Britain’s school inspectorate
A whistleblower tells how her fellow school inspectors fret more over pupils’ lunch boxes than their literacy
One day last summer I found myself sharing a table with three seven-year-olds in an inner-city primary school. It was chaos. The three children were giggling, kicking each other and chatting. Their attention was on what was immediately in front of them — each other. Somewhere on the periphery of our vision, the teacher walked about, struggling to keep order. Elsewhere, behind our heads, hung a whiteboard with work on it — gleefully ignored.
I was getting crosser and crosser. It was not just that my knees were hurting nor that the girl opposite, with striped bobbles at the end of each plait, had spat something pink and sticky onto my handbag. No, what upset me was simple. Nobody was learning anything.
When I helped Cedric, the boy next to me, with his comprehension, I got a shock. He could barely read, let alone write an answer to the question. He shrugged, threw a rubber at the girl with the bobbles and was sent out of the class.
It was the last straw. I liked Cedric, who was obviously bright. I forgot I was meant to be an observer and confronted the teacher. Instead of sending children out, I said, why not improve discipline and concentration? We could rearrange the tables to face her and she could stand in front of the board. She looked at me with horror. “The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,” she said, her voice almost drowned by noise. Had I not appreciated what was going on?
Ofsted’s annual report to parliament, submitted last week, makes clear this is taking place across the country. More than a third of schools are providing inadequate teaching. Also last week Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer, one of the nation’s biggest employers of school-leavers, summed up the implications of the incident I had witnessed: “They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”
I have spent the past year visiting schools and interviewing teachers, pupils and parents in an attempt to find out why black Caribbean and white working-class boys are failing. Again and again I saw the dire impact of educational ideology and government initiatives on children’s lives. A 16-year-old heroin dealer from Streatham, south London, summed up the effect this had on him: “School shatters your dreams before you get anywhere.”
Ofsted’s report blames schools and teachers for the shortcomings. What I saw made me think further: what about Ofsted’s inspection process? How much is it to blame for what is going wrong?
Shortly after encountering Cedric, I was in a scruffy south London sandwich bar. My informant had insisted on meeting there because she feared being seen with me. Amy (not her real name) was an Ofsted inspector and she was very angry. She had taught English for 20 years and had inspected schools for more than five. Far from protecting the education of our children, she told me, Ofsted inspectors were “ actively discouraged from inspecting what really matters”. Take reading and writing: despite the introduction of a literacy hour and a big increase in spending on education, a third of 14-year-olds have a reading age of 11 or below. One in five has a reading age of nine.This is an extraordinarily high level of failure. Why do we accept it?
There is compelling evidence that synthetic phonics is the best method of teaching children to read. Unfortunately, in the surreal world of education, success is not enough. However good the evidence, synthetic phonics is unfashionable among teachers such as Cedric’s because it depends on direct teaching, not learning through play.
In her report, Christine Gilbert, the Ofsted chief, blamed primary schools for the fact that a third of pupils start secondary school without a grounding in the basics. This is disingenuous. It is her inspectors who are not enforcing the rules — as Amy learnt in an inner-city primary school with weak Sat scores. She asked the chief inspector why nobody was checking the reading method used. Was it synthetic phonics and how well was it being taught? He shrugged and said: “I don’t ask the question.” Presumably it was contrary to his educational philosophy. Amy, outraged, complained to Ofsted. And was duly “fobbed off”.
Ofsted’s lack of interest in these basic skills is clear from the self-evaluation report every inspected school must present. Amy pulled one from her bag. It was dauntingly thick and contained 48,000 words: of those, a mere 12 dealt with literacy and numeracy. They read: “School X promotes good basic skills, especially in literacy, numeracy and ICT.” Amy dismissed this as “wish fulfilment”. She went on: “It ‘promotes’ but what does it achieve? It says nothing about achievement.” Amy wanted to replace the useless self-evaluation with maths and reading tests done by Ofsted inspectors without warning: “That would make schools sit up and take notice.”
What was Amy allowed to inspect? She sighed. Ofsted orders inspectors to concentrate on social welfare, behaviour and attendance. They have to check if children are “independent learners” in charge of their own education and if a child enjoys “ownership” of its work. Work should not be corrected in red ink by the teacher.
This, like many educational fads, misses the point. Amy put the low standard of writing, even in good schools, down to the low standard of marking. She was shocked to see that a child’s work was often marked only one in three times for accuracy. Even then, children were not asked to write corrections.
When she complained — again — to the chief inspector, “I was rapped over the knuckles for ‘discouraging’ the children. Well, it’s going to be a lot more discouraging when they get to 14 and can’t read the sign on the front of a bus”.
As for government initiatives, “don’t even get me started”, said Amy. “I spend more time looking in children’s lunch boxes then testing their literacy.” In the topsy-turvy world of state education a fizzy drink causes more horror than poor spelling.
The latest buzzword initiative is “community cohesion”. Ofsted inspectors must ensure that a school “has developed an understanding of its own community in a local and national context, including an awareness of each of the three strands of faith, ethnicity and culture, and the socioeconomic dimension”. Nor is that all. Each school has to demonstrate it “has planned and taken an appropriate set of actions, based upon its analysis of its context, to promote community cohesion within the school and beyond the school community”. What does this mean? And why is a body guilty of such gobbledegook in charge of our children’s education? There is no mention of the impact that illiterate teenage boys have on community cohesion.
As well as ideological fads, Ofsted is subject to political pressure. The emphasis is on what makes the government look good rather than what might benefit pupils. Take the “deprivation factor”. A school can be well below average in Sats results but still be classed as satisfactory purely because of its intake. Schools with ethnic minorities, for example, parents without college education, children with special educational needs and even too many boys, all contribute to the deprivation factor. This is nothing more than an excuse for failure. A “deprivation factor” is not going to get a young man a job, buy him a house or take him on holiday.
Progress of learners is another dodgy item on the inspectors’ list. “We are besotted by progress,” said Amy. “The majority of the Ofsted report is based on what the school plans — not on what is actually going on in the classroom.” As long as a school demonstrates progress, it can achieve a “good” and sometimes an “outstanding” Ofsted report — even if the result is still below average. This emphasis on progress has serious implications. A good report means the school will not be inspected so frequently. It misleads parents and the public. Amy pointed out: “If the end result is still weak, however much improvement there has been, how does that help the child?”
Now we came to the crux of what had made her so angry. She leant towards me and said: “We forget that for these children this is their only chance of an education.”
Back in the primary school it was break time. In the staff room the teachers complained that the boys misbehaved every afternoon. They saw this as immutable. I suggested the PE teacher organise football every lunch break. The teachers — female and two stone overweight — looked at me as if I was talking an alien language. They dismissed competitive sport as promoting “negative feelings among our children”.
Cedric had spent his surplus energy putting a schoolmate’s head down the loo and was confined to the library. I showed him a book on castles. He had never seen a castle. He was immediately engaged and asked intelligent questions. In the afternoon he lasted barely 10 minutes in class before being sent to stand in the corridor.
I left the school gloomy. I was interviewing teenagers and young men in their twenties. I knew what lay ahead for bright, energetic boys like Cedric. Our warped inspection process, the emphasis on government initiatives and ideological fads create countless victims. Cedric possesses talents that should be the making of him. Instead he is already another statistic of failure.
British “regulator” is simply making schools worse
Ofsted has become a Left-wing front dedicated to maintaining the pretence that schools under Labour are getting better all the time, writes Simon Heffer.
Things are not looking fabulous for Ofsted, which last year soaked up £222 million in ensuring that schools get progressively worse and pupils progressively thicker. Friends in the education world tell me much has changed since the golden age of Chris Woodhead, and the body has become a Left-wing front dedicated to maintaining the pretence that schools under Labour are getting better all the time. I do not support wholesale retribution against Labour placemen should we have a new government, but the future of Christine Gilbert – Ofsted chief and wife of Tony McNulty, a Labour MP and former minister who recently had to apologise for financial irregularities – should surely lie outside her present field.
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up — on his usual vastly “incorrect” themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
