Author Archives: Cambridge Town Owl

TL/DR? Broken systems of governance You can: In Cambridgeshire, the picture is grim. You can see us in the dark purple separated by greater London by the grey-purple patch of Hertfordshire. Cambridgeshire is in the bottom 15% of funding for public services in the country. Which is rubbish. “But Cambridge is full of rich andContinue reading “Why is Cambridgeshire one of the lowest-funded counties for per capita public spending? (According to the IFS)”

Compared to the 9,000 or so who took GCSE Maths that year, that’s under 2% of the cohort. In London the percentage (using a much greater baseline of nearly 90,000 year 11 students using the figure for GCSE Maths as a very rough approximation for the total number of candidates taking GCSEs per county) wasContinue reading “Only 145 year 11 students took the GCSE Citizenship Studies in 2022 in Cambridgeshire”

I spent the second year of my time at university living in accommodation that was eventually condemned as ‘unfit for human habitation’ by Brighton and Hove Council in 2001 – so I’ve lived it. What’s astonishing is the utter failure of ministers past and present to understand the basics of the problem, let alone askingContinue reading “The student housing crisis represents a collective public policy failure from successive governments”

TL/DR: The shortcomings of basing citizenship workshops around existing academic-based syllabuses – something that some vocational courses have overcome. Remember how I said things were getting more complex? That. I’m still of the view that local/combined authorities responsible for lifelong learning policy should be providing citizenship courses – including but not limited to the accreditedContinue reading “The public health and town planning gaps in formal politics & citizenship courses”

TL/DR? I’m sick and tired of reading about powerful and wealthy institutions (and their representatives) talking about the future of my home town at events that exclude so many of the very people that make up our city and call it ***home*** “Cambridge is the most unaffordable place in the UK” Above: A choice toContinue reading “To organisers of conferences about the future of Cambridge: “Nothing about us without us””

TL/DR? Have a browse – what do the courses and workshops show about our city and district beyond? What activities are missing that you would like to see? “Again, I remain stubborn in my call for an annual Cambridge Societies Fair which I first wrote about in 2012.” Cambridge Town Owl – 19 June 2022 IContinue reading “Greater Cambridge’s adult education offer, Autumn 2023”

After attending a couple of meetings/events very recently, the task seems to have gotten even more complex than I had anticipated – and I wasn’t expecting it to be a walk in the park either. TL/DR? Our response has to reflect the diverse needs and the complexity of our city. Have a look at CambridgeContinue reading “How do we ensure democracy and citizenship learning methods connect with the many?”

The only qualification you need to become a politician is a mandate from the people at the ballot box – or so the various sayings go. Yet recent decades have exposed the limitations of this as one of the very few checks on an aspiring politician’s rise up the political ladder. Prof Sir Geoff MulganContinue reading “Geoff Mulgan’s case for training politicians”

…with the big stick of ‘If we do nothing, Michael Gove gets to turn Cambridge into a theme park where on the outside you have pastiche buildings and on the inside you have sci-tech things only, making money for developers but where no water flows out of the taps.’ Sounds reasonable? Actually, I was writingContinue reading “Turning grassroots-based ‘future of Cambridge’ ideas into actions”

Cambridge City Council’s Citizenlab website (where council consultations are hosted) has just announced proposals for a North Cambridge Design Code for new and revamped buildings. But doesn’t the council need to ensure more residents know the essentials about how our city functions – and our place within it as individuals and collectively, in order toContinue reading “Helping people understand how the city of Cambridge functions”