Andy Burnham’s boast that Greater Manchester delivered 1,000 extra T Level work placements has turned out to be total bunk. According to FE Week, FOI responses show the combined authority’s employer campaign had confirmed just 92 placements by March, out of 1,204 pledges. Another 322 were in progress, and the authority doesn’t even know what happened to around 790…
Burnham made the claim in a Manchester speech in June, where he said:
“That’s a thousand extra young lives changed every year and it shows what a place can do when it works as one…”
He then repeated it on a podcast recorded in Downing Street in July. The combined authority’s own announcements had described the figures as ‘pledges’, and it has now corrected an annual report that said 1,163 placements had been ‘secured’. Which isn’t quite the same thing…
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”