Volterra’s Lucy Dean and Alex O’Byrne present at Annual Transport Practitioners Meeting

Lucy Dean and Alex O'Byrne at TPM

  Lucy Dean and Alex O’Byrne were recently invited to speak at the 15th Annual Transport Practitioners Meeting (TPM) in Nottingham. TPM is the annual meeting place for all transport planners, highway engineers and urban transport designers. Practitioners, policy makers and academics are invited to present topical papers over the two days. Lucy’s presentation ‘What might the […]

Volterra: industry partners at UCL’s hands-on training event

Paul Buchanan and Kieran Arter were recent ‘industry partners’ at UCL’s How to Change the World hands-on training programme (HtCtW, 30 May – 9 June 2017). Students were challenged to come up with ways to improve the Strategic Road Network. Paul and Kieran were on hand to answer questions from the participating students. Group discussions then […]

Volterra are challenge partners for UCL’s How to Change the World Programme

UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy has run a hands-on training programme – How to Change the World – for its students since 2014. The programme aims to teach students how to direct their own learning and use their initiative to scope out problem statements and design solutions, with guidance from industry […]

Diane Abbott is rubbish at maths – but not compared to the rest of the country

Diane Abbott,2016 Labour Party Conference

Diane Abbott’s car crash of an interview on LBC radio last week hit the headlines. Asked politely but firmly for the numbers and costings of Labour’s plans on the police, her answers varied wildly from sentence to sentence. Of course, being charitable, it was always open to Labour’s shadow home secretary to spend a few […]

Too many young people are wasting their time by doing worthless degrees

It’s an exciting time of the year for many young people, with some setting off to university for the first time and others starting to polish their applications for next year. Good news if you have been accepted to read economics at Cambridge, say, or business studies at Oxford. A survey by the Sunday Times […]

The blob is wrong: competition and independence raise school standards

The A-Level results released last week confirm the dominance of schools in London and the South East. Provisional league tables have only appeared so far for state schools, but these two regions have two-thirds of the top 100. South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and Wales did not have a single school between them in the […]

A radical idea for reviving the North

The Head of OFSTED, Sir Michael Wilshaw, warned last week that secondary schools in Liverpool and Manchester were ‘going into reverse’. Too many pupils in Northern towns and cities are simply not prepared for the next phase of their education, training or employment. In Liverpool, for example, four out of every ten schools are judged […]

A-levels, culture, and the great regional divide

Last week saw the ritual tears and joy of the announcement of the A level results.  An encouraging aspect was the increase, albeit small, in the percentage of entries in traditional academic subjects, now standing at 51.2 per cent.  This is yet another example of incentives at work.  The universities have been signalling that non-academic […]

Do short-term governments affect the UK’s productivity?

Since the economic crisis labour productivity growth in the UK has been very poor. The Bank of England estimate that output per hour (productivity) is 16% lower than it should be given pre recession trends. With output recovering and high levels of employment, many argue that the so-called ‘productivity puzzle’ is the reason behind lagging […]