BBC Skiffy show Torchwood presents an interesting dilemma in their most recent five-part story arc. A powerful yet mysterious alien race visits earth and demands ten percent of all the world’s children be delivered to them within 24 hours, for absurd reasons of plot development.
The plot is not quite as bonkers as the plan of the aliens from eighties miniseries “V” [remake on its way] who came to Earth to steal our water, despite flying their spaceships right past uncountable numbers of enormous comets and the hydrogen seas of planet Jupiter. But it’s a worthy second place.
Anyhow, without giving away the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen all five episodes of “Children of Earth”, at some point a discussion takes place at the highest levels of British government to decide how to select the 10% of the country’s children demanded in tribute by the aliens. After some discussion of random lotteries, and further discussion of why the children and grandchildren of the country’s leaders will be safe, it is decided by a Blears lookalike that the children representative of the lowest achieving section of society will be getting a one-way ticket to Alienville.
“the failing schools, full of the less able, the less socially useful'; those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits, occupying places on the dole queue and frankly the prisons”
Given that the civil service would only have 24 hours to sort out the delivery of said children, it occurred to me that this might be a larger-than-usual Torchwood plot hole; surely there is no way you can do the number crunching and identify the sacrificial victims in the time allowed. But actually it takes about fifteen minutes.
In Torchwood, the aliens helpfully did the first bit of work and established that they wanted 325,700 British children, which if you look at the population pyramid for the UK is a pretty good estimate of ten percent of the 4-12 years age bracket.
Since the independent education sector consistently outperform the public sector, you can be confident that the lowest performing decile will be generally represented by those children educated by Britain’s Local Education Authorities. Bit unfair, but blame the teachers, politicians or aliens depending on how you look at it.
To make up the national total, you need an estimate for the number of primary school children in each local authority area, which you can get from the National Statistics Office. For the Bristol Local Education Authority (LEA), the figure is around 28,947, giving the local quota of aliengeld [is that a word?] as 2,895.
Next you need to rank each school in the LEA using a simple performance measure. This is easily done by reference to the Key Stage 2 results compiled on behalf of the Department for children, schools and families, specifically the average point score achieved at each school.
For Bristol, in the last statistics available 3,869 pupils sat the KS2 tests at the end of their primary education, so if we treat these as representative of the whole school then the kids embarking on spaceships would be:
Final check – look up each school at the Direct.gov Schoolsfinder site and record the total pupil numbers [added as last column] to establish if you are short of the required 2895 “units” as they are euphemistically referred to by the wicked politicians and civil servants in Torchwood. In Bristol’s case another 49 “units” are need to top up the quota.
So rest assured. Even though the state sector is incapable of matching the performance of the independent sector in the field of education, it does at least have the edge in production of education statistics and the potential for rounding up innocent people.
[Quick moan: can someone sit the Doctor Who/Torchwood writing team down and explain the difference between executive and legislative branches of government, and between appointed civil servants, elected politicians and military officers. And I know the BBC loves fancy costumes and flair, but American 3-star generals do not give orders to British ministers; at least not in an obvious fashion.]
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