Jim nice to know what some members think of us senior drain in the budget citizens!

I did not say this. I merely pointed out that as we all live longer and have more complicated illnesses that are sucessfully treated, we all use the system more over our lifetimes than was the case a generation ago. Patient expectations have also changed over the years. England’s GP’s had 370 million contacts in 2013, which was 60 million more than in 2008. This is a 16% rise in contacts. Since the population in England increased from roughly 51 million to 53 million in that time ( less than 6%) this cannot be attributed to the rise in poulation alone.

The number of GP’s (32000) remained pretty much static. However since 2013, the number of trainee doctors wishing to become GP’s has dropped and the number retiring or emigrating has jumped.

Regarding the ethnic mix, most immigrants to this country who have arrived in the past few years are young, generally fit and well and pay taxes and national insurance. So the likelihood is that if you have a large immigrant population registered at a surgery, they will use the system less than an equivalent number of the indigenous population who would tend to be from a wider age and health spectrum.

If however you are suggesting that the number of immigrants are increasing the population in an area and therefore there is more pressure on a particular surgery, this may be a valid argument.
This is not directly the fault of the GP surgery affected, this is an issue for the local commisioning group to sort out. Except because of the denigration of GP’s in the media, particularly the right leaning press, the commisioning groups can’t recruit. It is this as well as the squeezed budgets that is causing stress points. Contrary to what is in the press, most surgeries have experienced real cuts to their budgets since 2010, particularly those who were fundholding and/or had pharmacies. For those, the latest ‘reorganisation’ under the last coalition government has meant a cut of up to 25% in income to the surgery. This has resulted in fewer staff being employed, or in the case of expanding list sizes, no extra staff being taken on. It has also meant reduced personal income for GP’s and increased workloads.

I am not sure which stats that Tony T found for you, but a much more significant issue causing pressure in primary care in the NHS than immigrants is the ageing (mostly indigenous) population and the multiple conditions that are being successfully managed for longer. Please do not take this as a personal comment, this will vary around the country and I am not suggesting that it is your own fault that this pressure has caused your particular problem at your surgery

I have just asked one of the Gp’s in the surgery where I have worked and her reaction was that they have had similar issues with patients in the recent past and via the surgery supporting the request, the district nurse team administered the drops.

Primary care deals with 90% of encounters (horrible term but it conveys the idea of contacts) with approximately 9% of the NHS budget. The aim is to get this to 11% by 2017.
Chronic conditions afflict 25% of the population, and this 25% take 50% of GP appointments (and from my own experience of working in a GP surgery more than 50% of the Nurse appointments) and 70% of the primary care and hospital budgets.

From a paper from NHS England
“15.4 million people in England (over a quarter of the population) have a long term condition, and an increasing number of these have multiple conditions (the number with three or more is expected to increase from 1.9 million in 2008 to 2.9 million in 2018). People with long term conditions use a significant proportion of health care services (50% of all GP appointments and 70% of days spent in hospital beds), and their care absorbs 70% of hospital and primary care budgets in England.”

http://www.england.nhs.uk/resources/resources-for-ccgs/out-frwrk/dom-2/

Maybe not, there must be some exceptions. Private education tho’ does provide better teachers. Better, in the sense of teacher centered teaching skills rather than encouraging students to educate themselves with the lack of structure that that entails.

I was desperately trying to give up on this particular section within the thread,thinking, I’ve said my piece, that’s enough everybody else is probably getting bored. But s*d it…

This is b**llocks, pure and simple. Where have you gained direct experience in secondary education in the state sector to back this up? My experience of working day in day out with highly experienced and well motivated staff , who write and re-write lesson plans and schemes of work to ensure that all the students whatever their ability have a structure which includes self-supported study which is vital to engender independent thinking, but not to the exclusion of all other teacher led approaches, in the state sector simply does not support your very black and white perspective.
If you had said, ‘private education may sometimes provide better teachers’ or ‘private education can provide smaller class sizes that allows teachers to adopt appropriate strategies more effectively’ I might be more sympathetic to your point of view.

TI fully concur with beermat on his analysis

British State education is in a mess. Fortunately, we still have a thriving private education establishment to provide enough expertise to run the country

I fundamentally disagree with your analysis that private always good/state always bad in the educational field. There is poor provision in both sectors. I have encountered many students who have come from well respected independent schools who have poor study skills and whose GCSE results seemed to bear no relation to their actual ability in my subject, so ‘massaging’ exam results is not exclusive to the state sector. Please don’t suggest that I am imagining these occurrences.

For balance, this also happened with a few pupils from some of our feeder state schools.

I admit that most of my 30 years in the state sector was at sixth form level so by definition I was working with the brighter and more motivated students, but my experience is valid, not all those in private education to 16 achieved their full potential as is also certainly the case in the state sector. Paying for education is not a guarrantee of immediate academic success.

So, I went to private education, among students who were there because they actually wanted to learn.

The implication from this is that those students who are in state education don’t want to learn?

That certainly is not my experience. Most students I taught were very keen to learn and almost all worked very hard to achieve the best results at AS and A level to reach the universities of their choice or go direct into good jobs or more recently apprenticeships.

Interestingly , it was usually those who came from independent schools at 16 who tended to struggle the most in a state sixth form environment. (Roughly between one quarter and one fifth of the 800 annual intake came from independent schools from a 25 mile radius)
For some this was because they had been so used to having their study time formally structured for them they found it difficult to organise their own independent study that was encouraged as an essential part of the courses, and some because they had been asked to leave their schools through lack of application and continued to stuggle in a new environment.

On the other hand we also had a considerable number who thrived in the less formal environment and confounded their independent teachers lack of expectation by going on to achieve dramatically better results at A level than GCSE
I once had an excruciating interview with one such student, whom I didn’t teach but acted as personal tutor for, and his father. The latter spent the entire time telling his son that he had wasted £100,000 on his education and what was he going to do to pull himself out of the mire he had created again. He went on to get AAB.

Others came from the independent sector because of the much greater range of subjects at AS and A level.
I very much doubt that merely having a right wing view point would have held you back in the state education sector, from my personal experience of school’s and college’s senior management teams. I speak as one who achieved (is that the right term?) middle management level in a large college.

But, I did not meet anyone whose conversation did not reveal them as left wing. Sorry. That’s the way it was.

Do you mean left wing, or just left of your own position?
If left wing, do you have real evidence that they then attempted to push that ideology directly or are you just assuming that they were not professional enough to keep their politics out of their work?

If you did ever have clear evidence of such politicising then I would be the first to condemn the practice, whatever their political persuasion.

I never discussed my perspective with students. As I taught a technical subject, there was no part of the any of the specifications that I taught that could be ‘twisted’ to express a particular view anyway. Nor did I ever discuss ideology with colleagues. I would expect if any of them were asked how I voted, no one would be sure (although some may have guessed who I didn’t vote for on 23rd November 1990)
I reiterate a point I have made a number of times. I have never seen any evidence of teachers attempting to influence their students in a political way, either directly or indirectly through omission.
I would agree that there are a very small minority of teachers who are nearing the end of their careers who are counting down the days rather than concentrating developing new initiatives and enthusiasm for the work with students.

I saw it with my own eyes again during the election coverage – the beeb were really pushing millipede and stirgeon – and who could have missed the RED settees LOL.

Whereas I and others saw the BBC following the Tory news agenda by focussing so often the supposed ‘threat’ of a Labour/SNP coalition, even though Labour denied it would go along with a formal or informal arrangement ad infinitum. It just goes to show the perspective of the viewer colours their perception of the same events. If one believes there is a bias, one will see it even when there is scant actual evidence.

Education, judged by my admittedly personal sample was on the socialist shopping list

your institution may have been like that, although I have no idea when or where you taught, but all I can say is that is not my experience in over 30 years teaching in secondary and further education establishments in a number of different parts of the country.

Like so much else in my miserable life again, I’m wrong!

Well, you said it, not me.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree (again) about RR and,I would guess, the Snatcher