Author Archives: Cambridge Town Owl

Jeffery Francis Quarry Switzer gave a lecture in 1962 the text of which was included in a book that I fortuitously picked up from Plurabelle Books on Coldham’s Road by the Computer Museum which covered Cambridge’s town planning problems of the era. You can read the transcript here. Six decades on and I wonder whyContinue reading ““Cambridge people don’t understand their town planning problems!””

Before I begin, for those of you that find this interesting/useful, and are willing. &able to do so, please consider supporting my research costs via https://ko-fi.com/antonycarpen. (And thank you to those of you who do- you’ve enabled me to purchase some books for some future workshops!) Now…town planning. (Why are there no evening classes onContinue reading “Scrutinising the formal application to redevelop The Beehive Centre – it’s massive!”

What impact have they had in the past, and are things changing? Ploughing through this collection of books that I’m somehow intending to distribute at future citizenship & democracy / how Cambridge functions & malfunctions workshops is that many reports come up against the same barriers time and again.. In Cambridge, the debate on howContinue reading “What impact do social policy academic reports have on public policy and UK politics?”

You’ve seen the headlines, but how can local government tax the one-day coach tourists? Cambridge Connect Light Rail provides part of the answer. It was the leading headline in this week’s Cambridge Independent. See the article by Gemma Gardner here. Essentially the proposal is for a levy on visitors staying in overnight accommodation, similar toContinue reading “A tourist tax for Cambridge?”

The Education Secretary hardly covered herself in glory with an off-the-cuff remark that reflected a lack of awareness on the impact of exam results in our teens. Why not listen to the teenagers and young adults themselves to suggest ideas for an overhaul? Which then begs the question: Why bother with all those exams (andContinue reading “It’s not fair on the teenagers – I hope young voters make exams an election issue”

Only 37 people have downloaded Qasir Shah’s paper for UCL (have a read here), yet his paper identifies the similar gaps I’ve been blogging about for ages. Given the way public policy works in the UK, elected politicians could put these findings to ministers and combined authorities in order to boost lifelong learning – andContinue reading “The need for adult citizenship education – going beyond jobs and income success measures”

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”