Why the ATL (and The Observer) should be ashamed of themselves

I said yesterday that the ATL’s methodology for its attack on parents and children couldn’t possibly be as dodgy as the one I used for the NASUWT twenty five years ago. This morning David Aaronovitch confirms that it was! The ATL (usually a serious and thoughtful union) should be ashamed of itself. I wonder whether there are any maths or statistic teachers at their conference and if so whether they would teach their GCSE pupils to rely on a self-selecting, unrepresentative, deliberately skewed sample in order to legitimise a major attack on the behaviour of large sections of British society. As for The Observer – which dedicated four pages to this tendentious nonsense- well that’s the last time I’ll be parting with £2.

I said yesterday that the ATL’s methodology for its attack on parents and children couldn’t possibly be as dodgy as the one I used for the NASUWT twenty five years ago. This morning David Aaronovitch confirms that it was! The ATL (usually a serious and thoughtful union) should be ashamed of itself. I wonder whether there are any maths or statistic teachers at their conference and if so whether they would teach their GCSE pupils to rely on a self-selecting, unrepresentative, deliberately skewed sample in order to legitimise a major attack on the behaviour of large sections of British society. As for The Observer – which dedicated four pages to this tendentious nonsense- well that’s the last time I’ll be parting with £2.