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If parents have a choice, the decision about where to send a child to school and what will be best for them can be a really difficult one.

One question that comes up frequently in media reporting is whether single-sex or co-ed schools are better for students. There is ongoing debate about this for both private and public schools.

There has been community outcry over some schools’ plans to go co-ed. So it may surprise parents to know this isn’t a key question for many education researchers.

As someone who studies gender, social justice and schools, there are other questions I consider to be more important, such as: does a school give students equal opportunities for education and future life success? And how do we make sure all our schools do this?

What does the research say?

Single-sex vs co-ed debates have been going for decades. Which creates better outcomes? Is co-ed better for boys? Is single-sex more suitable for girls?

But decades of research into the topic is inconclusive.

What we can say is that the biggest predictors of a student’s academic success are socio-economic status, whether they live in a rural or remote area, and whether they are Indigenous.

There is also a widespread view it’s good for boys to be with girls, but better for girls to be on their own. But again, there is little comprehensive research evidence to support this premise.

These debates are also dominated by a belief that girls and boys learn differently. There is no strong basis for this in educational research.

Read more:
Why do we have single sex schools? What’s the history behind one of the biggest debates in education?

A different question

Looking only at gender differences between boys and girls at school can mean we ignore other important factors that impact on students’ educational success such as social class, race, school location and funding.

This is why, instead of getting stuck in old debates about single-sex vs co-ed schools, we should be asking more important questions:

do schools support all students?
do they create an environment that gives every student a fair chance to succeed?

US philosopher Nancy Fraser has a helpful framework for us to think about these questions. Her framework provides guidance about what schools and schooling systems should focus on to provide a fair and quality education.

This includes three elements: economic, cultural and political justice. These elements support not only students’ academic and social learning but also their physical, social and emotional wellbeing.

If we just look at gender differences we can ignore other important components of school success.
Jacob Lund/ Shutterstock

What about funding?

Economic justice is about fair access to resources. In Australia, reforms like the Gonski model aim to do this by focusing on student needs, such as location, Indigenous background, disability and language support. The idea is schools in needier areas should get more government funding and support.

However, there’s still a long way to go for funding equity. Public schools that serve the most disadvantaged students remain underfunded compared to private schools, which receive substantial government support.

This funding gap limits students’ access to the resources, safe spaces and support they need to thrive.

Respecting all backgrounds

But money alone isn’t enough. Schools need to respect and value the different backgrounds and experiences students have.

In Australia, with its rich multicultural makeup, it’s important schools focus on cultural justice by recognising and challenging discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religious background and ability.

They can do this by, for example, including Indigenous perspectives across the curriculum, teaching gender respect in relationships and setting up classrooms where cultural differences are valued. This helps create a welcoming and supportive school environment for everyone.

This is not about reducing identities to stereotypes. It is about supporting a deep understanding of different cultures that goes beyond labels and addresses the issues that keep certain groups marginalised.

Read more:
Australian schools need to address racism. Here are 4 ways they can do this

Are all voices heard?

Schools also need to foster political justice. Good schools provide opportunities for all voices — especially those from marginalised communities — to be heard and be part of decision-making.

This is something that can easily be obscured in debates about single sex or co-ed schools being better for one gender. For example, while single-sex schools may try to address gender-specific needs, they often reinforce stereotypes and can exclude non-binary and transgender students.

Schools can foster political justice by creating ways for all students, families, and communities to have a real say in policies and practices.

Inclusive decision-making helps students, families, and the school community feel connected and valued.

Schools should allow all students to contribute to decisions and policy.
DGL Images/ Shutterstock

What can you look for in a school?

Parents interested in whether a school is working to give all its students opportunities to succeed, could ask questions such as:

how does the school allocate resources to support disadvantaged students and ensure equal access to facilities and opportunities?
does the curriculum include diverse perspectives, celebrate cultural differences, and address issues like racism, sexism, and ableism?
are teachers trained to respond to diverse student needs?
how does the school ensure students, families and communities have a voice in decision-making?
finally, does the school’s staff reflect the diversity of its student body and if not, are there steps to rectify this? Läs mer…

It is a new idea to many Australians that their past is connected to the tragic history of transatlantic slavery.

Some aspects of this relationship have begun to be uncovered: for instance when Britain abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies – places such as Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Grenada – it struck a deal with the slave-owners to pay them £20m compensation for the loss of their human “property”.

An online database hosted by The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery allows anyone to search for the individuals and companies that benefited from this money. New historical research has traced the extensive investments of this compensation in the settler colonies of Australasia.

Review: Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia – Santilla Chingaipe (Scribner)

Along with capital, investors brought knowledge and attitudes – how to grow sugar in Queensland, for example, using techniques developed on slave plantations in British Guiana.

Digging the Cane-holes. Ten Views in the Island of Antigua,1823.
Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, British military forces violently quelled slave rebellion in the Caribbean and then travelled to Australia, where they applied the same techniques of violent punishment against First Nations Australians. Using biographical and genealogical methods, many stories are also tracking the movement of people from Caribbean slave-worked colonies to places such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

But this is frequently a top-down view, reflecting the continuing imbalance of power, recorded evidence, and prejudices flowing from this unequal past. In her new book, award-winning filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe sets out to explore links to slavery and their legacies from another direction, focusing on Black convicts of African descent.

Santilla Chingaipe.
Scribner

Ambitiously, and “with much urgency” she also aims to investigate how hierarchies of race, class and gender came to be in the Australian justice system.

Chingaipe began this journey in 2018 after visiting an exhibition about the colonisation of Australia. It mentioned at the start that Africans were among the first arrivals here – but did not further explore this history.

She undertook her own research about men of African descent on the First Fleet and in colonial Australia. “What I was not expecting,” she writes, “was for quite literally hundreds of non-white people from across the British Empire to reveal themselves in the archives.”

Her publisher tells us that Black Convicts “builds on” and takes further “Chingaipe’s critically acclaimed and award-winning [2021] documentary Our African Roots”. While not a professional historian, Chingaipe undertook study in history to acquire the tools she needed to research and tell this story.

Narrowing her focus to convicts – and consequently the convict colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemens Land – Chingaipe engages with a “handful of scholarly accounts” and archival sources, as well as drawing from newspaper accounts, radio interviews, and websites in producing her “collection of transatlantic stories”.

She is also critical of some previous historians in this field, singling out award-winning writer and historian Cassandra Pybus for her use of “racialized language and stereotyping” in writing about certain Black subjects. As a Zambian-born Australian, Chingaipe seeks to write something “beyond” history that might “act as a partial corrective to the epistemic violence of these narratives” and to help “us see these people as more than commodities and convicts”.

However Chingaipe’s aim to counter the misrepresentations of previous accounts perhaps leads her to overlook or deny existing scholarship, with some ill effects. Early in the book she states, “I have been able to conclusively identify at least ten people of African descent” who were convicts on the First Fleet, based on their archival description.

These are John Moseley, John Caesar, John Coffin, John Randall, John Martin, Daniel Gordon, John Williams, Black Jemmy Williams, Thomas Orford and Samuel Chinnery.

This misleadingly gives the impression that no one had done so before her – yet all of these figures have been previously researched and written about by historians, notably in Pybus’ 2006 Black Founders and Mollie Gillen’s 1989 The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet.

Indeed almost all are subjects of online biographies published by the Australian Dictionary of Biography or People Australia. In “correcting” previous biases I believe it is important not to introduce new ones.

In places, this partial engagement with conventional historiography shallows Chingaipe’s analysis: for example, the case of Mauritian convict Eugene Doucette who in 1848 helped arrest a First Nations man has been researched by Queensland historian Libby Connors, who noted his friendship with Noonuccal man Bobby Winter and his acceptance by the Noonuccal at Amity Point on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island).

Connors pointed out that Doucette’s and Winter’s arrest of another First Nations man “was probably a product of traditional law” as much as British colonial justice”. Her analysis opens up our understanding of the sophistication and underlying logic of First Nations law rather than seeing these events through the colonisers’ lens.

A fresh perspective

These limitations aside, Chingaipe brings a fresh and urgent perspective to bear on Australian history, re-telling many stirring, surprising, captivating moments of encounter or Black experience. Over much of the book, reflecting its foundation in her documentary film, she adopts a movie-like method of gleaning a crucial point or argument from the work of an established historian, whom she then interviews or takes to visit a historical site.

This technique enlivens her narrative and links it to the present, as she literally travels from places such as the ruins of Fort Dundas in the Tiwi Islands, where a disproportionate number of Black convicts were sent in 1824, to rowing across Sydney Harbour in a boat like that of ferryman William (“Billy”) Blue.

Born into slavery in the United States, Blue became a soldier in the British army. In London in 1796 he was sentenced to transportation for stealing sugar. In Sydney he married white convict Elizabeth Williams and they had six children together. As harbour watchman and ferryman, Blue became well-known and is still remembered through landmarks such as Blues Point.

This book is perhaps best appreciated as a film rendered in words, and is no less powerful for being so.

‘Ugly truths’

With a bowerbird eye Chingaipe looks again at our seemingly well-known, White-dominated past to show Black people as active and indeed integral participants across the colonial period.

For example, she examines the status of Black emancipist John Johnstone as a perpetrator of the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre of Wirrayaraay people in New South Wales.

Johnstone was of African descent, born in Liverpool, Britain, and was transported to New South Wales in 1829. Chingaipe points out that

to presume Johnstone’s actions could be predicted from the colour of his skin is exactly the sort of blindness this book sets out to challenge.

Scribner

As her account shows, by the time of the massacre, Johnstone had spent a decade on the violent frontier, his shifting status as victim/perpetrator shattering the binary view of colonial race relations.

In telling her cinematic stories, Chingaipe raises numerous topics and places, threading together Africa, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Australian colonies. Her book shows how themes such as water, sugar, capital, labour, Black protest and resistance, the survival of African religious beliefs, and the experience of Black women and children weave through Australian history, embedding it within global processes.

One revealing life journey is that of Robert James, born in 1809 in Barbados, and transported for the rape of a white woman. He made a life for himself in Hobart, where he married Lucinda, a woman from St Helena, their marriage witnessed by two other Black convicts, Thomas and Mary Jane Burrows.

The couple opened a lodging house in Collins Street, which was seemingly a haven for Black people, and James died at a venerable 86. Their friends, the Burrows family were not so fortunate. Their son Francis Burrows’ story is especially confronting.

Aged ten, Francis was living with a white farmer, ominously named Charles Slaughter, charged with looking after his cattle. Following continued mistreatment and abuse Francis died in late 1859. Slaughter was exonerated of murder. As Chingaipe comments, “it’s hard not to feel that” this injustice “had something to do with Francis being Black”.

While underlying structures linking slavery and colonisation remain implicit, as collective biography these empathetic stories build up a picture of Black experience across diverse contexts and moments.

Clearly-written, with a frequently poignant turn of phrase, the result is a fresh and compelling account of Chingaipe’s journey of discovery, that carries the reader along with her.

Foregrounding her Black perspective on a seemingly well-known narrative, Chingaipe achieves her aim to ask “us, as Australians, to confront some of the ugly truths of our history”. Läs mer…

Drag Race Down Under is back for a fourth season, only this time something is different. The Australasian franchise is no longer helmed by the eponymous RuPaul. Instead, this season the main judge and host is RuPaul’s long-term “best Judy” Michelle Visage, a woman from New Jersey who came to fame in the late 1980s as a member of dance-pop group Seduction.

Visage has worked as a panellist and judge on all US variations of Drag Race since 2011, and on the UK and “Down Under” (Australia-New Zealand) spinoffs.

On Down Under, Visage has now become the authority who determines who sashays and who stays in the fierce contest between ten queens.

This promotion has significance far beyond Visage’s own career. Importantly, it has prompted debate in drag communities that brings to light tensions across queer gender politics, and also reveals shifts in drag culture – for which Drag Race’s huge global popularity is largely responsible.

The mother of queens

On one hand, Visage’s elevation to host can be seen as a milestone for cisgender women in the world of drag, a culture long dominated by cisgender gay men such as RuPaul himself.

Along with the rising mainstream profile of drag over recent years, a growing number of cis women have identified and performed as drag queens (a category sometimes called “bioqueens”).

In 2021, UK Drag Race contestant Victoria Scone made headlines as the first cis woman to compete on a Drag Race franchise.

More recently, runaway pop sensation Chappell Roan – famous for elaborate costumes and makeup – has claimed the mantle of drag queen. Cis women have also performed as drag kings for decades, though “kinging” remains comparatively marginal and under-resourced.

Visage taking the reins is something categorically different: a position of power and authority within the drag world conferred by no less than RuPaul, the world’s preeminent drag artist.

It’s one thing for a cis woman to self-identify as a drag artist; it is quite another to be anointed as a drag gatekeeper by the individual who almost single-handedly brought this queer artform to the mainstream.

Although notoriously reluctant to allow trans women to compete in Drag Race, RuPaul has no qualms about extending queendom to Visage. In the foreword to Visage’s 2015 memoir The Diva Rules, RuPaul wrote Visage “knows the world of drag (she’s a drag queen herself)”.

RuPaul wrote Visage ‘knows the world of drag (she’s a drag queen herself)’.
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Not so long ago, cisgender heterosexual women in gay culture were often dismissed as “fag hags”, a sometimes misogynistic (and also homophobic) label that reduced them to mere hangers-on.

Now, Visage is in the spotlight. The season’s blocking, editing, wardrobe and dialogue all position Visage as direct successor and equal to RuPaul.

There can be no doubt: on Drag Race Down Under, this cis woman is now the mother of all queens.

More than an ally

Since Visage was announced as host, Drag Race fandom has been alight with debate, with many concluding Visage lacks necessary credentials.

Online disputes among Drag Race fans flared on Reddit, asking if “they couldn’t find an Aussie?” and questioning whether Visage could legitimately be considered a drag queen herself.

Most conspicuously, Willam – a US Drag Race celebrity alum – was indignant “a drag ally is the host of a drag show”.

On the podcast Race Chaser, Willam said:

Why would you have someone who is not a drag queen hosting a drag show? […] It’s like someone who is coeliac hosting a baking competition.

But Willam seems to have missed some new developments, as well as certain histories, in drag culture.

Visage and RuPaul first met in New York’s ballroom scene, a subculture established in the mid-20th century by Black and Latinx queers, especially trans women (or “femme queens”) in response to racism in white-dominated drag spaces.

In ballroom, individuals are adopted into Houses, who then compete in categories such as “Vogue” (a dance style inspired by fashion modelling) or “Face” (a beauty category that focuses on the contestant’s face) at regular balls. Ballroom and drag are not synonymous, but ballroom has been a strong influence on contemporary drag culture and Drag Race.

Visage entered the ballroom world in the late 1980s, adopted into the House of Magnifique, becoming a top vogue dancer. As she said in her memoir, she was a “wild drag child”.

As a white, cisgender heterosexual woman, Visage was an outlier in ballroom but, nonetheless, the community became her “surrogate family”. During these years Visage created her drag persona. Born and raised as Michelle Shupack, she changed her named to Visage (French for “face”) after winning the Face category at many balls.

Drag and ballroom were once necessarily peripheral. They were spaces marginalised queer people carved out for themselves where they could celebrate, empower and compete, setting their own rules.

Yet, in the past decade, the global Drag Race phenomenon and social expansions of gender categories have changed how people engage with these previously underground subcultures.

All drag is valid

In this new drag-world order, Visage can ascend to a rightful place as a bona fide drag queen – a status she claims with “drag queen” tattooed on her upper thigh.

For Visage, all genders have equal claim to the artform:

I think that trans women do drag just like biological women do drag, just like trans men do drag […] all drag is valid, and all drag is welcome.

As the drag artist Michelle Visage, her name has become synonymous with a distinctive aesthetic: leopard print, exaggerated make-up, big hair, long nails and (until recently) artificial DD breasts – a high-camp nod to her New Jersey roots.

Michelle Visage’s elevation to Drag Race Down Under host is a milestone for cis women in drag.
Stan

“This is my shield, my superhero costume,” Visage explains. “When I put on my makeup, my drag, I feel like I can take on the world.”

She may not yet have conquered the world, but this queen has certainly conquered Drag Race, forging a new frontier for cis women in drag culture. Läs mer…

The global shortage of trained nurses has been described as a health emergency by the International Council of Nurses.

In response, Australia and other countries have developed nursing workforce strategies to protect their health systems. But there has been no response to calls for a similar approach in New Zealand.

Registered nurses make up the largest proportion of the healthcare workforce, in New Zealand and elsewhere. A sustainable supply of culturally and clinically competent nurses is fundamental to a safe health system. But because of funding constraints, New Zealand is grappling with both a nursing shortage and an oversupply.

Earlier this year, hundreds of experienced international nurses registered to work in New Zealand struggled to find jobs. At the same time, nurses continue to report being short-staffed, with no back-filling for staff on leave or off sick.

It is difficult to respond to rapid changes in demand because the time it takes to train a nurse creates a significant supply lag. But not maximising nursing investment makes little strategic sense and I argue New Zealand urgently needs a workforce strategy.

Investing in growing our own

Preparing a registered nurse for practice requires significant investment. It takes three years of full-time undergraduate or two years of full-time postgraduate study.

The study pathway is intensive, with at least 1,000 hours spent in clinical learning across multiple health settings in primary and community care, mental health and hospital services. This includes undertaking rostered and rotating shift work as preparation for registered nursing practice.

The Tertiary Education Commission investment in undergraduate nursing represents around a third of all undergraduate health funding and 7% of all undergraduate funding in the tertiary sector.

In 2023, 1,784 new New Zealand-educated registered nurses were available for employment in the system. This represents a cumulative national investment of around $70 million.

“Cost-containment” cuts previously led Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand to freeze employment of graduate nurses into the hospital system. This risks not only losing these valuable new health professionals but also reducing new enrolments into nursing programmes.

Nursing programmes are financially challenging. Many nursing graduates incur considerable debt related to their tuition fees (around NZ$30,000 across the whole programme), plus the additional costs associated with the clinical learning requirements (immunisations, clinical equipment, uniforms and travel).

Recent announcements in Australia of financial support for health students to address placement poverty (financial hardship during unpaid clinical placements) have been welcomed. There are no plans for similar initiatives in New Zealand.

Potential triple impact on nursing

Addressing the financial barriers to nursing students completing their education and subsequent employment is critical to achieving equitable access to healthcare and universal health coverage.

Creating a sustainable nursing workforce has a triple impact in supporting better health outcomes, the economic growth of communities and gender equality.

The latest government policy statement on health sets an objective for a culturally competent and homegrown workforce that reflects the population of New Zealand.

According to the Nursing Council’s 2023 annual report, New Zealand’s current nursing workforce is making slow progress toward better reflecting the population it serves. But we have a solution within the current body of nursing students.

Of the 8,885 students enrolled in nursing bachelor programmes in 2023, 18% identified as Māori, 15% as one or more Pacific ethnicities, and 25% as Asian. This student body (if retained) will have a positive impact on the current profile of nursing in New Zealand.

There is also an international expectation that developed countries reduce their reliance on the recruitment of qualified nurses from less developed countries, which places their health systems in peril. New Zealand ranked second in the OECD in having the lowest proportion of domestically educated nurses in 2021, at just 70.1%.

Most other OECD countries in that year reported that 90-95% of their nurses were domestically educated. Australia is an outlier at 82%.

But now New Zealand’s proportion of domestically-trained nurses has declined even further to only 53.7%. Our current reliance on internationally qualified nurses is not a sustainable strategy and risks not delivering on government workforce policy and equity targets for Māori.

Where to from here

Registered nurses are critical to the sustainability of health systems globally. New Zealand will not be able to continue to pull from overseas jurisdictions. We need to grow and keep our own domestic nursing graduates to meet government targets around the health workforce.

The are some potential solutions already in place. The current voluntary bonding scheme could start in the final year of the pre-registration programme to address some of the placement poverty issues.

Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand could explore models such as the New South Wales state government’s GradStart approach which provides a job with the option of metro-to-rural or rural-to-rural employment exchanges offered through a supported central system.

There is a critical need for the development and resourcing of a New Zealand nursing workforce strategy that considers recruitment (growing our own) and retention (keeping them). Both are critical elements of a sustainable workforce plan informed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

This would support the system to proactively plan for and resource a more sustainable approach to protect the investment we have already made in nursing education. Läs mer…

Why do people attend college or university? While there are many reasons to do so, a widely accepted outcome of completing post-secondary education is increased opportunity. Gaining and keeping stable employment at a higher income than a high school graduate is significant.

In Canada, median incomes for bachelor’s degree graduates are 47 per cent higher then those with a high school diploma. Nearly 75 per cent of employment growth in Canada is connected to occupations requiring a post-secondary credential. Currently, the majority of those with lived experience in Canada’s child welfare system are not completing high school. This contributes to youth unemployment.

More targeted efforts by provincial and federal governments are required to monitor and evaluate health, social, economic and educational impacts on the lives of those who have experience with child welfare systems.

Recent study on youth homelessness

A recent national study on youth homelessness by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness included 1,103 youth respondents who experienced homelessness. Among these youth from 47 different communities across Canada, more than 60 per cent had a history of involvement with the child welfare system.

A man walks through an encampment on Notre-Dame Street in the east end of Montréal in October 2024.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes.

Those with experience in the child welfare system face emotional challenges related to trauma, abuse and neglect. In addition, they contend with multiple changes in their living situations and schools. As a result, they generally have less education: for example, former youth in care are less likely to have graduated from high school or to complete post-secondary education than those without care experience. Consequently, they earn less income as adults.

Post-secondary graduation has the potential to transform lives and reduce unemployment. It is also a pathway for historically marginalized populations to improve their life chances and overall quality of life.

Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ+ youth

Existing data indicate that post-secondary education not only contributes to employment and income over a person’s lifetime. It also positively impacts health and social outcomes, making education a key social determinant of health.

Education is a key social determinant of health.
(Pexels/Newman Photographs)

Despite this, Black, Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ youth who are over-represented in the Canadian child welfare system are vastly under-represented in post-secondary programs.

Providing better access to post-secondary education for former youth in care can help improve their individual circumstances. It can also address intersecting social, employment and income disparities more broadly.

Addressing barriers

Data from a recent Ipsos poll conducted in April 2024 indicates that 91 per cent of Canadians agreed that post-secondary education is beneficial for the future prospects of youth in Canada. The poll was conducted for the Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada.

Ninety-three per cent of those surveyed felt that youth in care should receive equal access to education. The same percentage of respondents agreed this would be beneficial for all Canadians and for our collective economic prosperity.

Considering the low income levels among those with experience in the child welfare system, and their disparities in finishing high school and post-secondary education, it’s clear greater action is needed to address barriers to education and employment.

Better data needed

Increased government efforts to bolster equitable educational opportunities and supports for people with experience with child welfare systems are needed. Actions should include collecting comprehensive, longitudinal data on indicators of success, such as:

completing high school;
successfully transitioning to college or university;
getting and maintaining employment;
securing stable housing;
improved physical and mental health.

A lack of comprehensive longitudinal data is part of the overall problem in understanding the complex issues facing former youth in care. Scholars from the University of Kansas have offered plausible strategies for research with youth in foster care. Such data would better clarify whether and how current child welfare initiatives contribute to better outcomes across people’s lives.

We need to better understand how former youth in care secure stable housing over time.
(Shutterstock)

Wrap-around supports critical

To further reduce disparities in the employment and income of those with experience in the child welfare system, we must ensure that appropriate wrap-around care supports are provided.

Child care, mental health services and housing need to be available and accessible to ensure equitable access to education. This is supported by recent research in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

Research from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs indicates that Canada is among governments falling behind in ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting life-long learning opportunities — Sustainable Development Goal 4.

A provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “every child has the constitutional right to access the benefits of education.” However, this isn’t the case for far too many youth with child welfare system experience.

More inclusive pathways needed

It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2020, the not-for-profit organization People for Education released The Right to Education Framework.

Schools, boards, policymakers and education systems can use this framework to monitor, measure and be publicly accountable for ensuring every person can access a quality education that prepares them for a brighter future.

By monitoring and evaluating core educational equity issues impacting youth with care experience, Canada can establish more inclusive and supportive pathways to education and employment. Through needed efforts, the overall quality of life of people with care experience can be vastly improved. Läs mer…

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his creation of the eccentric detective, Sherlock Holmes. But he was also interested in architecture and worked on several projects throughout his life, from his home in Surrey to a golf course in Canada. Now, a building designed by Conan Doyle, the Lyndhurst Park Hotel in Hampshire, is under threat of demolition. The hotel’s east wing was designed from sketches provided by the author during a stay there in 1912.

In The Greek Interpreter (1893), Holmes tells Watson that he has “art” in his “blood” from a French relative. Conan Doyle too had art in his blood. After settling in London in the 1820s his Dublin-born and art-trained grandfather, John Doyle (1797-1868), became a famous political cartoonist. He even sketched Queen Victoria when she was a child.

Conan Doyle’s uncle, Richard “Dick” Doyle, was a fairy painter and provided the illustrations for the cover of Punch magazine. Another uncle, Henry, became the National Gallery of Ireland’s first director in 1869. Even Conan Doyle’s godfather, Michael Conan, from whom he acquired part of his surname, had trained in art.

His father, Charles, also had artistic talent and took up an architectural post in the Office of Works in Edinburgh as a designer and draughtsman. However, in contrast to his elder brothers’ success, Charles’s career was marred by alcoholism, leading to his committal to asylums.

Charles’s only lasting achievement was to design the statues of the fountain, commissioned by Queen Victoria, in the forecourt of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The deterioration in his health and his frequent inability to work created an unstable home for his wife, Conan Doyle and his siblings. Much of the rest of Conan Doyle’s life was dictated by a need for financial and domestic (and so architectural) security.

Building Undershaw

This need was underlined by the design and building of Undershaw in Hindhead in Surrey for his wife Louisa. Undershaw was a medical necessity as well as a home. In October 1893, Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then an incurable disease. Two months later, Conan Doyle had Holmes grapple with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in The Final Problem (1893). It marked the end of the detective – or so readers believed.

The Conan Doyle family spent the succeeding years travelling between Switzerland and Egypt to alleviate Lousia’s symptoms, until the novelist Grant Allen advised them to try the Surrey air.

Conan Doyle duly purchased a plot and drafted designs before hiring his friend, the architect Joseph Henry Ball. The pair had bonded over their shared interest in paranormal investigations.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s children playing on the driveway that leads to Undershaw.
Victorian Society, CC BY-SA

The name of the house came from its setting under the trees (“shaw” is from the Anglo-Saxon meaning wood or copse). The 11-bedroomed house provided a comfortable interior for Louisa with special door handles fitted to aid her rheumatism, and featured stained-glass windows with the coats of arms of his family. The family moved into their new home in October 1897. Built by profits from the Holmes stories, Undershaw was a testament to Conan Doyle’s literary status and, poignantly, a refuge for a wife who could not be cured.

It was while living at Undershaw that Conan Doyle returned to Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901.

Described as a “block of a building” covered with ivy from which “a window or a coat of arms broke through” and with “twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes,” Baskerville Hall is a home under threat. The Baskervilles live under the shadow of a curse, seemingly haunted by a spectral hound. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead at the edge of the moor near the giant footprint of a hound, it seems that the curse has struck again.

Architecture in Sherlock Holmes

In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective fixes the problems in the home by investigating its architecture.

In The Speckled Band (1892) the crumbling country pile of Stoke Moran reflects the decay of its owner, Doctor Grimesby Roylott. Roylott tricks his stepdaughter, Helen Stoner (her surname suggestive of both abuse and incarceration), into occupying the room where her sister died on the pretext that building work on the house requires the move. When Holmes investigates the bedroom, he discovers a vent which adjoins Roylott’s room, through which Roylott sends a deadly snake, Julia’s killer. Roylott wants the sisters’ inheritances to shore up his home.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street.
Wiki Commons

The story marking Holmes’s return from the Reichenbach Falls in 1903 is called The Empty House. Here Holmes and Watson hide in an unoccupied house directly opposite 221B Baker Street to catch a murderer intent on shooting Holmes.

The building of 221B Baker Street is perhaps Conan Doyle’s finest piece of literary architecture. The house, which did not exist in Conan Doyle’s time, functions as both Holmes and Watson’s lodgings and their detective agency. A Baker Street property modelled to recreate the stories’ conception of 221B was established in 1990 as a museum. There, visitors can believe that Holmes and Watson really existed because Conan Doyle “built” them so well.

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In villages across the country, irate farmers have accused the government of trying to end the tradition of the family farm by scrapping agricultural property relief, a measure which previously sheltered farms from having to pay inheritance tax on farmland.

Since Brexit a consensus has emerged that farmers should have to produce public goods in order to receive public payments. These “goods” include enhanced biodiversity, which could oblige farmers to plant trees or wildflower meadows.

How will scrapping agricultural property relief affect these plans for a green transformation of farming? First, let’s consider the changes.

The government has introduced a new minimum threshold for inheritance tax which means that farm assets worth over £1 million (US$1.3 million) will be charged, albeit at the discounted rate of 20% (instead of the standard 40%). Some farms may be able to claim a threshold of £2 million or even £3 million.

Labour claims this tax will only target rich landowners by asking them to pay a fair share of tax. One argument in favour of the tax is that it might deflate land prices and make it easier for new people to enter farming. The outcome is hard to predict, but this seems unlikely.

Despite the tax there will still be increasing demand for land to accommodate bigger farms, conservation areas, timber plantations, solar panels, wind farms, housing developments, and the like. This is, after all, an explicit aim of this Labour government: to stimulate investment in new green infrastructure.

In interviews, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has repeated the line that 73% of UK farms are not liable for the tax. But the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has challenged this, claiming that around half of all working farms will be hit. These are farms that produce a lot of food, with high turnover and a lot of capital tied up in land, but low profit margins. Which farms get taxed and which dodge it will depend on who has the best plan put in place by their accountant.

The NFU says that more farms will be liable for the tax than the government claims.
Mminson/Shutterstock

The NFU’s figures illustrate the possibility that, even spread over ten years, the inheritance tax bill alone could erase all of a farm’s would-be profits.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to know how much money the new inheritance tax arrangement will raise for the treasury as there are many ways to dodge it, such as gifting the farm to children seven years before the death of the landowner or putting the farm in a trust. The sudden death of the legal landowner before an effective plan is put in place could see a hefty tax bill fall upon the next generation.

How it will affect tenant farmers, those who rent from a landowner, is harder to predict. Landlords might seek to evict tenants in order to sell the land and pay the tax bill. Or it might mean more land is available for tenants to buy themselves.

Eating away at farm profits

What has received less attention, despite also costing farmers, is a new carbon tax called the carbon border adjustment mechanism. This will be applied to imported fertiliser, as well as steel, cement and hydrogen. The EU is bringing in the same taxation policy but at a slower pace, giving European farmers a competitive advantage in the meantime and a chance to adapt.

Labour plans to accelerate the transition from the previous subsidy scheme, which paid farmers for the amount of land they managed, to the new one, which aims to pay farmers for public goods. Add in a tax rise on double-cab pickup trucks and a rise in national insurance contributions for employers and it will be businesses already struggling that will feel the biggest pinch.

In a global economic system characterised by competition and uneven regulation and taxation, if British farms cannot afford to produce food then production will shift to where it is cheaper (and probably more environmentally destructive) to do so, blunting any attempt to curtail carbon emissions. It would also see British food production decline.

It doesn’t help its case that the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been underspending its budget for the environmental land management schemes, the replacement subsidies for farmers aimed at paying for actions such as improved soil management. Frustratingly, Defra is going to return that money (£100 million) to the treasury rather than commit to spending it next year. Defra has also said the department was not properly consulted on the inheritance tax change.

The overall result is that farmers feel neglected during what is an increasingly difficult time. One researcher has documented a mental health crisis among farmers who are struggling to grow food in increasingly volatile weather, with little to no external support.

A genuinely green transition of agriculture will require both investment and radical reform of the entire food and farming system. Labour is showing no appetite for this.

The contradictions of the market

Farm businesses were already feeling the squeeze. The budget will tighten their economic constraints.

It might’ve helped Labour to sugarcoat its bitter changes by committing to other incentives or reforms. After all, it’s hard for farmers to repair ecosystems and reduce carbon emissions when invoices are coming thick and fast. There have to be carrots along with the stick.

Climate change has made food production more difficult to manage.
EPA-EFE/Tolga Akemn

Some notable farming figures have celebrated the rich paying a fairer share of tax. In reality, it is likely that it will only generate what the treasury calls a “rounding error” – in other words, relatively little. It may backfire and harm working farms and, in turn, the environment, if farms choose to intensify their operations by demanding more produce from the same land in order to remain profitable.

As author and shepherd James Rebanks has pointed out, repairing ecosystems requires a profitable business in order to fund the work required. Farmers have to shell out first and claim back later. Where a farm can’t afford work, like creating new wildlife ponds, the work simply won’t be done.

Whatever Labour’s long-term plans, stoking resentment among farmers in order to raise a relatively small amount of money will surely prove counterproductive for a green transition.

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Much is made of the alleged state of Bregret – the idea that even those who voted for Brexit now regret their decision. It is true that a majority (54%) now think Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU. According to a YouGov poll, 62% of people think Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. We even know that 18% of leave voters would now vote remain if they could have another go at the 2016 referendum.

But conjuring up the past is a logical impossibility. A “rejoin” option would not be the same as the “remain” option. The European Union would have understandable hesitations about readmitting the UK without greater commitments than in the past – and might, for example, expect the UK to join the euro.

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When studying attitudes towards rejoining the EU, it quickly becomes apparent that voters see this clearly. The feeling of having made one’s bed and now having to lie in it is quite widespread.

When polled about a potential referendum on rejoining the EU, only 48% of the UK public solidly supported it. When asked if they would rejoin were monetary union to be on the table, support for rejoin dwindles to 34%, showing just how conditional support for rejoining actually is.

The rejoin option is particularly polarising. It drives leave and remain voters further apart than any other option.

And no-one wants to re-hash Brexit divisions: the issue has fallen precipitously in terms of salience (from its heights of nearly 70% in the negotiations period, to a mere 12% today). The public doesn’t want to touch the subject of Brexit with a barge pole – and it should come as no surprise that the current UK government doesn’t want to either. The current public mood is more one of bresignation than bregret.

Both leavers and remainers are in an impossible bind. They recognise that the process of leaving the EU was very far from the pipe dream sold by the Leave campaign but neither can do anything about it.

A new government and a chance to reset.
Flickr/Number 10, CC BY-NC-ND

For leavers, the idea that Brexit was a mistake triggers discomfort. They are in what behavioural scientists call a state of cognitive dissonance. When we cannot change a past action, we often decide to change how we see and interpret new evidence about that action in order to avoid the cognitive inconsistency and the psychological discomfort of being wrong about it.

This is natural and human, it happens to all of us. Together with my colleague Sara Hobolt, I have shown how since the 2016 vote, both remainers and leavers have chosen to retain and believe different aspects of official information on the state of the UK economy to suit their own view on Brexit.

For leavers, this means joining the 47% who think that Brexit is not done, or the nearly 30% who think it could have been a success if the UK had better politicians and negotiators.

These numbers are not negligible: any call for rejoining the EU is, at this point in time, unwise and likely to be seen as extremely radical.

The big reset

To overcome this state of “bresignation” and truly trigger a reset in UK-EU relations, the UK government first needs to gather information on how the current arrangement – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement – is going, and to communicate this evidence in a unifying way.

Some evidence shows that factual information about Brexit effects (e.g. economic repercussions, repercussion on young UK citizens of the end of freedom of movement), or lack thereof (for example, illegal immigration issue not being “solved” by Brexit), are getting across to the UK public.

Commissioning more research on how minimal access to the EU market is affecting the UK economy – and disseminating this evidence in a way that does not point the finger at leave voters – is an essential step. They need to be protected from feeling primarily responsible to be shielded from the state of cognitive dissonance.

Given that it was the responsibility of the Leave and Remain campaigns to clearly spell out the meaning of Brexit, freeing leave voters from blame is also simply the right thing to do.

Public opinion is still very much in favour of retaining control over UK regulations and trade deals, making joining the customs union and single market particularly unpalatable. But there is significant support for a closer relationship with the EU and for the removal of most – if not all – trade barriers on goods and services.

There is, therefore, scope to sell regulatory alignment by focusing on its flexible, conditional nature and on the perks of easing trade with the world’s largest trading block.

People are also less fussed about conditional freedom of movement than the government thinks. They favour flexible immigration quotas to dynamically deal with sectoral shortages, such as in the NHS, or for high-skilled talent.

A reset is in the realms of possibility, therefore. But the UK government first needs to break us free from the state of bresignation. Läs mer…

Just months after Labour won the UK general election and ended a prolonged period of Conservative rule, rural protesters are once again taking to the streets of London. The threat to fox-hunting triggered the countryside marches of the late 1990s. This year, it is the agricultural inheritance tax reforms set out in the new government’s first budget that are troubling those farmers planning to pass on assets to their children.

Agricultural property relief (APR) reduces the amount of tax that farmers and landowners incur when agricultural assets are passed on, for example, after a death. Introduced in the 1980s, it had been set at 100% relief, but from April 2026 full relief will apply only to the first £1 million per person.

A tax rate of 20%, rather than the full 40% that most people would expect to pay in inheritance tax on assets over £325,000, will apply to agricultural claims.

Farmers are asset-rich and often cash-poor, so there is much talk of some of them having to sell off land. However, for a married couple, making use of various nil-rate exemptions, an estate of up to £3 million could still be passed on free of tax.

Much of this benefit currently is being captured by a small number of very large estates. Government figures suggest the top 7% of agricultural estates (the largest 117 claims in the most recent year’s data) account for 40% of the total value of APR – a cost to the taxpayer of £219 million. The largest 2% of estates (37 claims) account for more than one-fifth of the total value (costing £119 million).

Agriculture enjoys all sorts of special treatment and exemptions from rules that other sectors face – these are not widely understood, but have included cheaper diesel, planning exemptions and assorted tax breaks. The APR reforms do not remove the special treatment completely – but they reduce its scope.

Read more:
What Labour’s first budget means for wages, taxes, business, the NHS and plans to grow the economy – experts explain

Debate has raged in parliament and across the media about the number of farms likely to be affected. Critics of the government put it in the tens of thousands. The Treasury says the figure is fewer than 500.

The tone is shrill, and claims of catastrophe abound. Labour are bringing about the “death of the family farm” or undermining the UK’s food security, critics argue.

A more sober analysis by land agency professionals suggests that exposure to the tax can be managed. It can be paid over ten years, interest free. And given that inter-generational transfers usually happen only every few decades, the financial burden on larger estates would still be much less than the rent an average tenant farmer would usually expect to pay per hectare.

And UK family farming was able to survive prior to the introduction of the agricultural relief arrangements through careful business management.

Pastures new

The earlier that succession is thought through and planned for, the better – not only from a tax perspective but also to bring new people and ideas into the running of the business.

New blood is needed as UK agriculture faces pressing challenges – climate change is increasingly impinging upon farming practices and yields. The food system contributes around one-quarter of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and by the mid-2030s, decarbonisation of the energy system will leave agriculture as the UK’s largest emitter.

A farmer protests back in 2004 – anger at Labour’s plans isn’t the first time tractors have rolled up to Westminster.
Lois GoBe/Shutterstock

We will need land to sequester carbon through woodland planting and grow energy crops if a net zero UK is to be reached by 2050. Modernising food production practices to reduce emissions, while avoiding becoming more dependent on food imports, will require innovation and ingenuity.

The last agricultural revolution of the 1940s and 1950s involved a close working partnership between the state and the farming sector. Huge advances in productivity were achieved over a couple of decades. Farms became larger, more specialised and more technologically advanced. Now the green revolution in farming is as much about mindsets as technologies.

The UK needs the same spirit of partnership and unity of purpose now if the climate challenge is to be addressed and agricultural livelihoods are to thrive. Oppositional protest politics feels like a step in the wrong direction and detracts attention from the need for a joint plan for the next 25 years to strengthen food security and reduce emissions. Paring back tax breaks pales besides the challenges and opportunities the net zero revolution will bring for farming and land management. Läs mer…

The UK chancellor Rachel Reeves talks a lot about achieving better growth. And the latest figure – economic expansion in the last quarter of just 0.1% – suggests plenty of room for improvement.

The evening before that gloomy figure was announced, Reeves revealed her latest plan to get things moving – pension reform. And while there was some mention of potential benefits for actual pensioners, it’s clear that the main incentive for change is to channel more of their pension fund money into UK investment.

This will be done through two main sets of reforms. The first concerns the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) for England and Wales, which has 6.7 million members and assets worth around £392 billion. Its members are mostly current and retired council employees – and mostly women.

The LGPS is essentially a cluster of 86 different schemes, which have already been combining to form eight “asset pools” for the purpose of investing their pension funds and creating cost savings. The chancellor wants to ramp up consolidation through those eight asset pools, and also see a greater proportion of the funds’ assets (currently 5%) being invested in local and regional projects.

The hope is that this will boost the growth of local economies. The LGPS is a “defined benefit” scheme, meaning that it promises members a pension in retirement worked out according to a formula based on their pay while they were working and length of time in the scheme. The way its assets are invested does not affect the amount of pension people get.

The second set of reforms apply to workplace “defined contribution” schemes. These are the sort arranged by (and contributed to) by an employer whereby employees build up a pot of savings to provide an income during retirement.

Usually, employees can choose how they want to invest their pension pot, though schemes must offer at least one default strategy. The vast majority of members go with the default. Four out of five employees choose not to review their investments at all.

Workplace defined contribution schemes are either run by a board of trustees, or by a pension company with whom the employee has a contract. The sector is highly fragmented, with thousands of different schemes, many of them very small. However, over the past 12 years, there has been a move towards consolidation.

Again, the government wants to accelerate this consolidation to encourage the emergence of much larger pension investment funds, similar to those seen in Australia and Canada. Controversially, it is also proposing to make it easier for the assets of contract-based schemes to be transferred to other schemes without the consent of members.

One claimed advantage of larger funds is lower costs. However, the Pensions Policy Institute has found that cost savings tail off once a fund reaches around £500 million. But again, the key driver for the government is to create funds that are large enough to take on additional investment risks – without jeopardising their ability to provide people with financial security in retirement.

Larger funds would free up some pension money to invest in areas such as infrastructure and private equity, with potentially high growth prospects. Such investments tend to be “illiquid” (difficult or impossible to convert into cash at short notice) so are suitable only for long-term investment.

More money, more investment?

The government claims that including such higher-risk investments in the mix can “deliver better returns for savers”. This is likely to be broadly correct, since it is a fundamental investment principle that higher-risk investments need to offer higher returns in order to attract investors. However, evidence suggests that the extra return from investing in illiquid assets could be as low as 1% a year over the long term.

Reeves wants to encourage investment opportunities.
Miha Creative/Shutterstock

Nevertheless, Reeves is hoping that an additional flow of funding from larger pension schemes (“megafunds”) will boost investment in the UK economy.

But it’s not as simple as that. The idea that simply increasing the amount of savings in an economy will inevitably cause investment to rise was debunked nearly a century ago.

Back in 1936, the influential economist, John Maynard Keynes showed that the most important factor when it comes to investment is what he referred to as businesses’ “animal spirits”. In other words, it all boils down to a feeling of confidence about whether or not investments will lead to a good return. And that will depend on how the other elements of Labour’s growth strategy play out.

Similarly, pension fund managers and savers need to be confident that the UK – and in particular sectors such as private equity and infrastructure – are the best home for some of their pension pot. The general advice for any investor is to diversify savings not just across different assets (equities, bonds, cash, property) and sectors (manufacturing, services, large companies, smaller ones), but also different geographical regions.

So as these new policies for pension schemes unfold, anyone with a pension may want to have a careful look at where the default fund is investing the money they will rely on in the future. They may even consider choosing their own investment strategy instead. Läs mer…