UK: The battle between foreign secretary Liz Truss and the former chancellor Rishi Sunak to succeed Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has a lot in the box. The contenders have been showing up with new promises and hopes for the citizens of the country.
Liz Truss has brought forth her vision and policies that she aims to impose and reform the education sector of the country. She has unveiled the ‘six-point plan’ to reform education and achieve greater success in the field. In her words, she wants to give ‘every child the tools they need to succeed and she can be be trusted as an ‘education prime minister’.
Among these reforms , Liz Truss unveiled plans to ensure students scoring the top grades would automatically be invited to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. This would widen access for students to top universities. The details of top scorers will be automatically sent to the Oxford and the Cambridge, where they’d be scant for an interview.
Further, she has expressed her ambition to expand the existing high-performing academy schools while uplifting the ban so imposed on new grammar schools in England.
Rishi’s ‘No-Show’ Penalty
The former chancellor and the PM contender Rishi Sunak has planned to impose penalty of £10 upon patients not showing up on NHS appointments.The patients wouldn’t be penalised on missing the appointment for the first time. A ‘benefit of doubt’ would be given to the patients missing an appointment for the first time.
However, the patients repeatedly missing their appointments will be fined. Though the system will be temporary until the Covid backlog is cleared for NHS. As of February, six million people were on NHS waiting lists in England which constitutes one in nine of the population.
Sunak expressed his disappointment towards the people unnecessarily missing their appointments as those who urgently need to meet their doctors are being forced to wait or reschedule their meetings. Thus a stricter system that cannot be misused needs to be established .
The United Kingdom will get to see its new Prime Minister in September, and battle has already ignited between the contenders with a series of campaigns and hopes coming in for the citizens.