Ed Balls: one announcement, two reasons to apologise

A little while back, the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, made a dramatic announcement that one in six schools in England are breaking the admission rules.

Two problems though.

First, the claim was – shall we say – not exactly right. When it came to checking the evidence – the evidence wasn’t actually there for his claims.

And second, it looks to have been carefully timed to bury some genuine bad news about the number of pupils not getting into their first choice school.

Ah well, you can’t really expect the chap in charge of school education of all people to worry about things like getting your research right and writing things up accurately, can you?