John Walker, Sounds-Write

🚩UK Dept of Ed Study: Popular US school mental health program has no "statistically significant" effect on emotional difficulties, and actually INCREASES problems 9-12 months after intervention, with worst outcomes in schools with no prior SBMH programs. Earns "DO NOT ADOPT" recommendation: “We would not recommend YAM to be delivered in English schools.” 1/n

The Man Who Would Save Labour Cannot Save His Own Seat Wes Streeting is preparing his case to be the next Prime Minister. His allies say he is the only candidate who can beat Reform. The results of May 7 invite a more basic question: can he hold Ilford North? In 2024, Streeting survived with a majority of 528 votes over a pro-Palestine independent candidate. The forces that nearly unseated him then, bloc voting shaped by overseas grievance and organised Muslim community pressure, have strengthened since. Reform is targeting his seat from the other direction. The man positioning himself as Labour's answer to the national mood represents a constituency that has already begun to abandon him. A majority of 528 is not a springboard. It is an epitaph. Set the electoral arithmetic aside and the financial questions are more pressing still. Since entering Parliament in 2015, Streeting has accepted around £372,000 in donations from companies and individuals with links to private healthcare, representing over sixty percent of his total declared donations, at a rate of approximately £10,000 a month. Those donations did not stop when he became Health Secretary. They accelerated. Among the most significant donors is hedge fund manager John Armitage, who has contributed £95,000 to Streeting since 2022 and holds more than $500 million in investments in UnitedHealth, the largest private health insurer in the United States. The Good Law Project has asked the obvious question: what do those donors think they are getting for their money? Streeting has not answered it. He has also declined repeated requests to publish his communications with private health donors, despite publishing his WhatsApp messages with Peter Mandelson under pressure. The Mandelson connection matters for reasons beyond the messages. Global Counsel, the lobbying firm Mandelson co-founded and in which he held a 24 percent stake, had Palantir as a registered client. That connection was reportedly absent from Mandelson's vetting as ambassador. On 27 February 2025, Mandelson arranged an undeclared meeting between Starmer and Palantir executives in Washington with no minutes taken. Seven months later Palantir won a £240 million MoD contract without competitive tender. Streeting pressed ahead in October 2024 with transferring half a million GP records to Biobank at precisely the moment Chinese access to that data was under active security service scrutiny. He has not explained why. These are not questions about policy disagreements or matters of political taste. They are questions about the financial relationships that shaped decisions affecting the NHS, and about what was known, when, and by whom. A candidate for the premiership who has accepted over a third of a million pounds from private health interests while overseeing the expansion of private provision in the NHS, and who has declined to publish the communications that would establish whether those decisions were made independently, is carrying a burden of unexplained connections that no leadership campaign can simply stride past. Streeting's allies argue that holding Redbridge proves he can beat both left and right. Redbridge is not the country. Sunderland fell after fifty years. Gateshead fell. Tameside fell. Blackburn fell. These are communities Labour was built to represent, and they did not vote Reform because they wanted a rebranded version of the same political network with better retail skills. They voted because they have concluded that the arrangement itself has failed them. Streeting is a product of that arrangement, funded by it, connected to it and, when pressed, evasive about it. The country does not need a more photogenic version of what it just rejected. The question is whether Labour understands that. The answer, so far, is no. "Since entering Parliament in 2015, Streeting has accepted around £372,000 in donations from companies and individuals with links to private healthcare."

The myth that the Finnish model was worth copying still won’t die. Finland’s 2000s PISA success was because of the more traditional model that preceded it by decades…which they abandoned right as their PISA scores shone. So people went there and oohed and aahed at a model that would lead eventually to their educational deterioration. Never stop pointing this out.

First student’s paper had quotes from unassigned readings and all the text had been pasted into Google Docs and then slightly tweaked. Pangram flagged as AI with strong confidence. He flatly denied using AI. Offered a dubious account of pasted text (“I wrote it in Word on a different computer and then copy-pasted it”). More notably, he couldn’t explain the meanings of the quotes from unassigned readings or explain the meaning of his own prose. VERY suspicious. Unless he can provide that word doc and it somehow clears him, I will almost certainly have to report him to the dean.