Stat's the way...I don't like it

This may sound a little bit weird coming from someone in the communication business but I really am suffering from information overload at the moment.

There is just so much stuff out there to deal with and the difficult job seems to be deciding what you do need to know about – and what you don’t.

Take this week. As you will have seen in every newspaper we have become a nation of crime-spotters this week. For, on Tuesday, the police launched a website where you can see exactly how many crimes have occurred in your street, estate, village or town. The idea provoked such interest that the website received 75,000 hits a minute and the computers nearly blew up as a result. It was like the Take That tour all over again.

But, I don’t really understand why we need to know all this stuff. Sure, in the newspapers I work for we like to report on trends and it’s important to know, roughly speaking, if you live in a benign area or Beruit. But to take it down to the detail of how many crimes are actually on your street without any real context as to their seriousness will just leave us all convinced that the crime situation is far, far worse than it really is.

I checked the post code for example for my very pleasant area and discovered that in December there were no robberies (hoorah!) but quite a lot of examples of anti-social behaviour. I haven’t seen any, hadn’t heard about any but now I am worried that I’ve accidentally moved to The Bronx. So what was the point of all that palaver then?

It’s the same with school league tables. Yes we report them in our titles because some parents do like to study the figures but the fact that ‘School A’ does better at maths than ‘School B’ doesn’t mean that School B is a worse place to send your child. The ‘A-C passes’ say nothing about the friendliness of the teachers, the standard of the school meals or the levels of bullying and yet in the era where ‘info is king’ the stats are all what some people really care about.

And nowadays as well as finding stats about local crime and local school tables, you can, with just a few clicks of the mouse, find out whether you live in an area where people drink a lot, whether your neighbours exercise enough, how old you might be when you die if you stay there etc. etc. etc ad nauseaum. Why? And why should we care?

Oh and, it’s also worth noting that as you trawl the internet to find out the answers to these and other questions, that there are lies, damned lies and internet statistics. For instance I just ‘self-Googled’ and was delighted to see that the phrase ‘Sam Holliday’ yielded 935,000 results. I suddenly thought I was far more important and well known than I could ever have dreamed of – until I saw the third entry which referred to the fact that ‘I’ was apparently a former director of Stability Studies at the US Army War College.

Ah well I at least got the top two spots in 'my' list – but something tells me I won’t have got the 900,000th . . .

Give our kids a break hey?

Originally printed in the Bath Chronicle on Thursday, August 19 - the day the A level results came out

Aug 19

Today, like many parents, I will be eagerly waiting by the phone. For, during the course of this morning, I will find out how my son has done in his AS levels and how my daughter has fared in her A-levels.

I’m trying not to put any pressure on them (hence I will keep them far away from this column!) but I’ve sensed in the last couple of days their tension rising as they prepare to go to school to collect those dreaded white envelopes.

My two are just like the hundreds of others in Bath and surrounding towns and villages who will be collecting their results over the next few days (the GCSE ones are due on Tuesday) and it is on days like these that I’m just so glad I’m no longer a teenager.

Personally, I think that the pressure on our 16 to 18-year-olds today is far more than I ever felt when it came round to exam results collection time. In my day (and yes, I do accept that is a phrase we always swore we’d never say when we were younger!) the pressure to do well in exams normally just came from yourself or possibly your parents.

Nowadays youngsters have to face incredible pressure to do well from not only their school but also, it strikes me, from society as a whole.

The school pressure comes from the fact that not only do our wonderful teachers (for I do have an enormous amount of respect for that profession) want to see their pupils do well for the sake of the youngsters themselves, but also because the school is under enormous pressure to do as well as possible in the league tables.

Personally, I hate those league tables as I don’t think they truly capture the whole essence of a school’s life – I’m sure there must be schools nationally with great exam results but where bullying is rife, for example, so how can that be a good guide?

However, many parents do take the tables seriously nowadays and because they have what I see as the ‘illusion’ of choice they are more likely to send their sons and daughters to schools high up the table. And that means teachers are desperate for their charges to do well to ensure they stay afloat in that artificial premier league.

And then we come to the pressure from society. It is not only in things like league tables that youngsters are judged these days but they also have to face the rather pointless but relentless claims that no matter how hard they work it is all irrelevant because the exams are so ‘easy’ these days.

So, unless something is very different today, most news bulletins will include phrases like ‘record results’ but will be swiftly followed by words like ‘amid claims of dumbing down’. This is poppycock.

It is virtually impossible to judge an exam today against one 10 years ago and even if it was possible then it is not the fault of youngsters – they don’t set the papers.

So let’s please try and give the students some respect if they do well. Let’s not spoil any celebrations our youngsters feel if things have gone well by sneering childishly ‘well, of course, they have, things are so easy at the moment. Just give ’em a break, hey?

Rant over. Phone at the ready.