The most read posts of 2011

The temptations of Twitter meant that I blogged rather less in 2011 than in the previous years. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the 9,400 unique visitors who made some 16,500 visits to the blog during the year, according to Google Analytics. For the record, here are the most visited posts (excluding those visiting the home page).

1. Eating out in Keynsham: just to show life isn't all politics and education!
2. Errors with EBacc haste: why Gove may be too academically focused.
3. Why Michael D is more likely than Martin McG to become Irish President: and why this Blog is a better bet than the Guardian in picking Irish winners.
4. Gove goes back to basics: The education secretary rediscovers the purpose of academies
5. Here's the proof: Labour DID improve social mobility: some cracking FT analysis
6. Clegg's real threat to coalition school plans: the Lib Dem leader in love with local authorities
7. Reforming the curriculum: will the changes work for every child?
8. Hidden by the hacking: end-of-term education manoeuvres: Gove does some summer U-turns
9. Danger of dumbing down GCSE statistics: Tory MPs talking down school improvements
10. Slow progress on free schools: A cautious start to a flagship programme


For the record, by far the biggest sources of visitors in 2011, aside from Google searches, was Twitter. But after those, I should thank Hopi Sen, whose excellent blog is back, Stumbling and Mumbling, Scenes from the Battleground, Matthew Taylor, Public Finance, Left Foot Forward, Slugger O'Toole  for Total Politics, The Guardian and the Spectator for adding to my traffic during the year.

My top ten lists

This blog may not get the readership of some. But I am impressed that there have been 11,556 unique visitors with 28,843 page views since January 1, 2009. Quite a few of those visitors are regulars too, and I wish you all a happy new year.

For the record, here are the ten most read posts (at least among those accessed directly) during 2009 (some had been written in 2008) and the ten blogs that sent me most readers. The data is drawn from Google Analytics.


1. Field or Bercow: Make a maverick moderniser speaker
2. Eating out in Keynsham
3. Alan Johnson was right to sack Prof Nutt
4. Irish woes
5. Rising above party politics?
6. The death of Fianna Fail?
7. Is the tax rise good politics?
8. Ireland looks at tuition fees again
9. Ireland shows the Tory approach to the recession in action
10. Christmas in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

And here are my main sources of traffic, aside from those who come to the site directly, or via Google, AOL or Bing search engines:

1. Hopi Sen
2. Iain Dale
3. Matthew Taylor
4. Bloggers4Labour
5. Total Politics
6. British Blogs
7. Scenes from the Battleground
8. John Rentoul
9. Tom Watson
10. Progress Online

Thanks to all those blogs for mentioning posts or listing this blog in their blogrolls.

Lies, damned lies (cont.)

For years, we have been told that we are spied on by CCTV cameras 300 times a day. I have always thought the figure sounded pretty fishy. Now, thanks to a brilliant piece of detective work by David Aaronovitch in today's Times, we know it is. Could we now subject all other such spurious 'facts' to similar scrutiny?

Where is this man when you need him?

A few weeks ago, Sir Michael Scholar (pictured here), who heads the UK Statistics Authority, launched a full scale attack on ministers for the premature publication of knife crime statistics, which hadn't yet been fully cleared by government statisticians. (Godot would have arrived in the time it usually takes for government statisticians to provide timely data). This attack was justified on the grounds that the professional integrity of statisticians had been impugned.

Yesterday, the Office of National Statistics waded into a difficult political row about immigration by publishing seriously misleading statistics on migration, which wrongly suggested that the only people getting any new jobs were foreigners. As an excellent leader in today's Times points out, the briefing (published prematurely on the grounds of 'topicality') made no distinction between people born abroad but permanently resident here and those who arrived recently. Only someone of the greatest political naivety could publish such a briefing without proper context, and without considering its effect on a potentially poisonous political debate.

According to its website, the Statistics Authority's main objective "is to promote and safeguard the quality of official statistics that serve the public good. It is also required to safeguard the comprehensiveness of official statistics, and ensure good practice in relation to official statistics." It is also intended to oversee the work of ONS. I trust Sir Michael Scholar, who apparently attended the weekly meeting of Whitehall permanent secretaries yesterday "to discuss the importance of abiding by the new regime for releasing figures" can bring himself to show the appropriate indignation on this occasion, and issue a severe public rebuke to ONS head Karen Dunnell in the same way he has with ministers. After all the premature publication on this occasion threatened public order rather than simply highlighting a minor ministerial success story.

The 'purity' of statistics

Ben Brogan relates the valedictory whinge of the Statistics Commission, one of the most self-important, prissy creations of Gordon Brown's years at the Treasury. They are upset that ministers dare to sully their pure statistics with comment (published separately from the statistical releases, as it happens) as they are published. The implication is that their statistics are sacred facts, whereas politicians' interpretations are vile propaganda. In fact, government statisticians collect rather too many irrelevant facts that are of little use to anyone; a cull of such information should be a priority for the Commission's successor, along with the collection of more genuinely useful data. As I have previously blogged, some of the figures collected by statisticians have been simply ridiculous: such as counting as a 'class of 40' an assembly that happens to coincide with the annual class size census.

In the real world, unless government politicians attempt some explanation, they won't get a look in as the media put far more outrageous spin on the statistics than any minister. Of course, the statistics should appear in full, and independently in statistical releases for those that want to read them (and I am one of those who does). But the idea that a minister should not separately and simultaneously highlight the good news when everyone else will alight on the bad is as silly as trusting the Daily Mail to provide a fair and balanced presentation of the data. Perhaps the new UK Statistics Authority could busy itself ensuring that government statisticians collect more genuinely useful and reliable information rather than worrying too much about how politicians debate the results. That was the job the Statistics Commission was supposed to do.

Lies, damned lies?

This week's revision of government estimates over the number of foreign workers in Britain has brought into sharp focus the whole business of collecting statistics. Critics assume it is a simple matter, and the failure to get it right is either charitably, a matter of ministerial incompetence, or conspiritorially, a sign of deliberate obfuscation. Having seen at first hand the trouble with government statistics I know it is neither.

There are three main types of statistic collected by the government's fiercely independent statisticians (the idea that these people have any political axe to grind is laughable). The first - the one that caused all the problems this week - is that based on a sample. The Labour Force Survey, which estimates activities for the entire adult population based on 59,000 households, or in education, the Youth Cohort Study, which looked at the activities of 1.9 million 16-19 year-olds based on samples of around 9000 in each age group, are good examples. The second is a census - a collection of information on every pupil in every school or every member of the population. And the third is an estimate derived from that census based on certain assumptions, as in the revised population estimates used to determine local government funding allocations, the subject of today's LGA complaints.

Of course, the second should be the most accurate: we know how many pupils are in each school, and about their exam achievement, gender, ethnicity and so on. Indeed it is the richness of data now available in education - and in health - that makes reform easier there (contrary to the ideological opponents of targets in education, the sort of floor targets set out by Gordon Brown yesterday have already been remarkably successful, if grossly under-reported). But the Labour Force Survey is better - as with opinion polls - when it is dealing with larger numbers related to the population as a whole - numbers in jobs or unemployed - than when it tries to deal with a subset that might reflect 2 or 3% of the workforce as with some migrant communities.

Indeed, the only way to get a better sense of those labour force figures without a great extra burden on business would be through a national ID register (though the Tory critics who shout loudest about these figures want nothing to do with that). As for the estimates, the LGA are right to suggest that the richer education and NHS data should be pooled with other information to get a better sense of who is living where. But even then it will never be 100% accurate. That is because of the nature of the statistics, not because of ineptitude or distortion.

Dismal science

This is why economics is the dismal science. The number crunchers at the Office for National Statistics divide spending by GCSE results and claim 'productivity' in education is falling (or at least did so until a year ago and is now 'flat'). Their calculations are meaningless rubbish akin to quite a lot of what the statisticians come up with, even if the leader writers at the Torygraph have been salivating over them. Schools have improved immeasurably over recent years, as anyone who visits them can attest. A lot of the extra spending since 1997 has gone on paying teachers a decent salary, hiring teaching assistants, installing computers and rebuilding schools. It will take years to measure any effect of this spending on GCSE results. Even those who have had five years of the literacy hour have yet to take their GCSEs. When I worked in the DFES, the statisticians told me that there were still classes of over 40 well after we were sure we had got most classes down to 30. Given they had taken a census - and we had data for every primary school in the country - I asked them to tell me which schools they were so we might target extra teachers to them. A few days later the statistician returned, sheepishly, to inform me that the classes in question weren't actually classes at all. The data was based on where children were at 11am on a particular day in January. Those in 'classes of 40' were in assembly or watching a film with another class. I won't repeat any cliches about statistics.