Simon Cook is The Spectator’s associate editor (data).
A sobering reminder of the challenges facing Britain’s education system is the persistent failure to recruit enough teachers in critical subjects. Each year, the Department for Education publishes its targets for teacher training alongside the actual recruitment figures – and this year’s report showed an ongoing tale of two disciplines. Take the humanities. History in particular
One of the perennial scapegoats of the NHS is the patient who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment. The headlines write themselves: millions of pounds wasted and other patients can’t get seen. But while missed GP visits have become a symbol of inefficiency, a far bigger – and often overlooked – problem lies within our hospitals. Every
Are independent schools gaming the system to give a disproportionate advantage to their pupils in exams? That’s one possible inference from a new data release from Ofqual (the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) on access arrangements for school exams. The release sheds light on adjustments designed so that students with disabilities aren’t disadvantaged in
Every year, the government weighs and measures children in Reception (ages 4-5) and Year 6 (ages 10-11). The National Child Measurement Programme isn’t always popular with parents but it gives us priceless public health information on hundreds of thousands of children. With such a robust data set, it gives us the ability to look at
Some £22 billion of the £40 billion in tax rises the Chancellor announced this week will go straight to the NHS – an NHS that was already better funded than at any point in its history. It seems that no matter how many cash injections – huge or enormous – the health service gets, its
The good news picture continues to build for Omicron. Late on New Year’s Eve, the UK Health Security Agency released an update to their estimates for vaccine effectiveness, and for the first time they’ve been able to give a picture of how well vaccines protect against hospitalisation from Omicron. The figure is strong: 88 per
Omicron is sending Covid case numbers surging ( a new high of 189,000 cases reported yesterday) and hospital admissions along with it. But another important piece of data, intensive care admissions, shows a significant fall. This is early data, but worth noting as it may be part of an important trend. And it adds context
Length of hospital stay is a crucial metric, but hard to do with much accuracy unless each patient is certified Omicron or Delta. The closest proxy we have right now is information on patient stay and there are graphs for two cohorts: those admitted from 1 May (third wave) and from 1 December. The graphs were
Man makes Covid predictions and God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is useful. That’s why South Africa is so important: it’s a country with a well-digitised healthcare sector that we have to thank for sequencing the Omicron variant, and has been first to experience the impact. That’s
