The Tories are once again just playing to their base

A-level grade inflation is another fine mess the Tories have got us into. The apparent “simple” solution to the educational challenges of the 2020-21 student cohort was the application of a grade awards system based on teacher assessment that mirrored 2019 results. One can only hypothesise as to the reasons why such a “free for all” was the resulting approach.

Perhaps, once again, the government was playing to its base. The faithful would expect the advantages of private education to continue to result in better grades than state schools even when lockdown negated better facilities, smaller class sizes, and quality of tuition. Learning online, apart from the experience of students on the margins of society with poor access to devices, was a great leveller.

With typical Johnsonian cynicism, a smokescreen was created that delivered the usual desired quota of privately educated students getting places at top universities without the “normal advantages”. And now, as a result of blatant gaming of the system, there must be a reckoning? One more reason to vote “anyone but the Tory” in the forthcoming general election.

Congratulations to all the young people this year regardless of the results.

David Smith

Taunton

In spring 1972, Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, invited world leaders to the giant Folkets Hus conference centre on the Soderstrom river, Stockholm. Some 114 countries were represented at possibly the first global summit focused solely on protecting the natural world.

The Stockholm negotiations took place against a backdrop of profound growth in global environmentalism. Just two years earlier, around 20 million people – 1 in 10 Americans – had marched across the US for the inaugural Earth Day. There was an increasing consensus that economic prosperity counted for little if people were forced to breathe toxic air, drink contaminated water, and walk along streets littered with plastic. Something had to be done. And so, on 15 June 1972, the international community voted to establish the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) headquartered in Kenya.

Fast-forward half a century, and in November this year, the world will descend on UNEP’s Nairobi offices for INC-3 – the third meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international treaty on plastic pollution. The talks take place in a world that produces nearly 10 times more plastic than it did at UNEP’s founding in Stockholm.

UN member states made concrete progress in the form of agreeing a mandate for INC chair Gustavo Adolfo Meza-Cuadra Velasquez to prepare a first version of the treaty text, known as the Zero Draft ahead of November’s Nairobi talks. Senor Velasquez – a career diplomat with 30 years in Peru’s foreign service – has the mammoth task of building consensus around a draft from countries with a varying set of wants and needs.

The world’s small island developing states are relying on the INC chair to deliver a zero draft of the treaty that will address the profound challenges they face. Idyllic islands such as Maldives, Grenada, and Palau contribute little to the global plastic problem. But they are faced with a deluge of plastic pollution that washes up on their pristine white beaches. This in turn threatens the tourist trade they rely on.

Senor Velasquez should deliver a zero draft treaty that will cap and rapidly phase down plastic production, ban or severely restrict single-use plastic, mandate reductions in the chemical complexity of plastic, and require global standards for extended producer responsibility (EPR). EPR is a regulatory system where the polluter pays for the full cost of the pollution created by their product. It will also have to deal with the transboundary nature of plastic pollution and make provisions for legal recourse to manage legacy plastic in the ocean.

A robust treaty will also have to address pollution from abandoned fishing gear, known as “ghost gear”. The treaty should also tackle high levels of plastic waste generated by global tourism and support small island states in developing effective waste management solutions. These solutions should be funded by plastic producers who are in a much stronger financial position than small island states themselves.

The entire international community will benefit from a treaty that protects some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. If the world can deliver for the countries with the most complex challenges, this will maximise the chance of addressing the plastic crisis in all UN member states.

At UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, the world has an opportunity to deliver a draft that affords these beautiful countries’ long-term protection from the global plastics problem.

Jo Royle

CEO of Common Seas

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides an opportunity to turn sitting exams from non-learning assessments to, at least partly, summative assessments. This would give pupils the opportunity to learn from their mistakes; the AI could show what they had got wrong and also provide feedback on what a correct answer should look like. This may be useful if they move on to further or higher education. The same approach could be used at GCSE.

Dr Mike Scott

Northall

Although our government and the rest of the world seem to be ignoring the growing adverse effects of climate change, it seems that Just Stop Oil, Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, and other pressure groups, are wrong to be critical of this ignorance. If they don’t do, or say anything, who will? Or is it that homo sapiens wishes to evolve into homo stupidus?

John Laker

Marlow

Leaving aside the rights or wrongs of the pension triple lock, could someone please explain how a probable 8 per cent increase next year, following a 10 per cent increase this year to pensions, that benefit a mainly Conservative voting section of society, isn’t inflationary – while similar pay rises for public sector employees who mainly vote Labour apparently would be?

Am I missing something here?

Stephen Lawrence

Enfield