State of this children's home in Lancashire, run by the private company Care 4 Children Residential Services Ltd: this Ofsted report was uploaded today

Firstly, it is a shit hole (excuse the language, but...)
A child's clothes and shoes are taken away to stop him from running away.
The home is short-staffed and in chaos.
Staff take under-age children to buy cigarettes.
Staff share mobile phones with children and exchange personal telephone numbers.
This is supposed to be a home for children at risk of sexual exploitation. It is hard to understand how children are being protected in this environment.

This meant to be their home.
Care 4 Children provides children's homes and foster care for some 100 local authorities and is responsible for 150 children and young people.
Its latest accounts reveal that it was paid more than £17 million by local authorities last year and earned profits of £2.5 million. But it can't fix the heating at a children's home in Lancashire.

https://t.co/CEJA0hNhmY
Its statement to investors includes this gem:
Privatisation of children's services is bad for children and families, bad for communities and bad for taxpayers.

It doesn't have to be this way.
A recent investigation into this company: https://t.co/SBd91X4TND

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Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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