The head of a Gravesend school yards from where a 12-year-old girl was hit by a car and dragged under a bus this morning is calling for urgent action… Oh, let me guess. Speed restrictions? It is, after all, the usual demand. That, or lollipop patrols. … to slash the volume of traffic. Eh..?! How..? What’s causing it? The section of Rochester Road, between the junctions with Forge Lane and…
In London, where I live, the fact that we have the best schools in the country is meaningless at a local level, where there’s a chronic shortage of non-denominational, non-selective, mixed-sex school places. Does it really matter if you don’t have those things, if you have ‘the best schools in the country’? Clearly, results speak for themselves! Don’t they? From the outset, our approach was pragmatic rather than ideological: to…
Oliver’s move came as public health officials and doctors joined a growing number of education and food organisations in criticising the education secretary. In a move that astonished experts, Gove insisted that he would not apply the nutrition standards that cover all other state schools to academies and free schools – even after a report by the School Food Trust charity found last week that many were selling sub-standard products.…
Peter Preston on the double-standard relating to school attendance: Parents are responsible for making sure their children go to school. Headteachers say so; ministers say so; the law says so. If your child is registered to attend a school, then he or she must turn up – and the full weight of Section 444 of the 1996 Education Act is there to make sure that happens. If you find yourself…
Ron Glatter (emeritus professor of educational administration and management at the Open University): A special report on the UK says that in Britain “both the within and between-school impact of socio-economic background on educational attainment are well above the OECD average”. In fact more of the variation between the performance of different schools is related to their socio-economic intake in the UK than in any of 33 other OECD countries…
…sneer at the names children are given by their parents? I ask, because, on occasion, I hold my nose and take a peek at the ‘Guardian’ educational pages, where one sometimes finds articles like this one: In my roles of moral icon, sage, clot and dotard, I have been asked many questions. The most frequent goes thus:“Can we send Hugo/Rhapsody/Electra to your school?” “Yes! Turn right at the lights. Multiple assassins and…
No, don’t get too excited. Oh, you weren’t. Remember the Polly Conundrum: ‘Is she a moron or a liar?’ Hm, tricky. Polly Toynbee, rousing the comrades to continue flogging their dead horse fighting the class war, writes without a trace of either irony or self-reflection: The postwar years did see an exceptional upward surge, as a great increase in white collar and middle managerial jobs changed a two-thirds working class society…
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