I was of a number of complainants to the Press Complaints Commission about the Sunday Telegraph story headlined 13,000 died needlessly at 14 worst NHS trusts, as the Telegraph journalists had been explicitly told by the originator of the figures, Professor Brian Jarman, that this was an inappropriate interpretation.

The government is pushing ahead with proposals for a maths qualification to be taken by 16-18 year-olds who got at least a grade C in Maths GCSE but are not doing maths A level.

The current consultation on GCSE subject content and assessment objectives for Mathematics GCSE features major changes for probability and statistics.

I encourage everyone with an interest to respond (before 20th August): here is my personal take on the topic.

The proposals are as follows:

It was interesting to hear ‘regression-to-the-mean’ being discussed on the Today programme this morning, even if the quality of the debate wasn’t great. The issue was the effectiveness of speed cameras, which tend to get installed after a spate of accidents. Since bad luck does not last, accidents tend to fall after such a ‘blip’, and this fall is generally attributed to the speed camera, whereas it would have happened anyway: this is what is meant by ‘regression-to-the-mean’.