Children should get lessons in prison life to stop them becoming involved in crime, according to the Duke of Westminster’s daughter. Lady Edwina Grosvenor, who has dedicated her life to prison reform, today called for the classes to be included in the national curriculum. Why does everyone with a tuppenny-ha’penny cause or idea feel they have the right to demand it be shoehorned into the bulging national curriculum? Surely children…
Members of both the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the NASUWT are picketing the entrance to the Littlehampton Academy today (April 17) ahead of further walkouts in the coming weeks. The unions decided on the strike action after “months” of complaints over “excessive micro-management” and “bullying” . Or ‘normal practice for private companies’, in other words. This apparently taking the form of performance management. Speaking to The Argus, NUT…
Is it just me, or…? Prof Snow said: “The speed limit is 30mph but drivers seem to go a bit faster than that. It would be safer if it was a 20 as it goes right past the school. “The road is a 60mph limit until just before the school, meaning people don’t always slow down in time.” They don’t slow down in time from 60mph to 30mph, but they…
Experts today praised a London school where lessons start at 10am saying it can help boost grades and reduce levels of depression and self-harm. Yes, I’m sure it can. Until they try to find a job keeping those hours… Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience (Ed: !!) at Oxford University, said more schools should take account of the fact that teenagers have a biological pre-disposition to go to bed later and get…
…we aren’t that far behind them: According to MSNBC, Fox News Baltimore, and a host of other media outlets, the latest case of OMG (oh my gosh, or perhaps it should be called “oh my guns”) an incident involving Josh Welch, a 7-year-old second grade student at Park Elementary School in the Brooklyn Park area of Baltimore, Maryland, made the news on Friday when the boy was suspended from school…
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…
It’s no secret that Facebook distracts students. Being able to interact with your friends at the click of a button is not conducive to hard-core study. And thanks to Spotted pages – university-wide Facebook pages where members can post comments about people they see in the library– it’s not just students’ close friends who are interrupting their studies. Naturally, to the progressives, this expression of ideas and opinions is the…
…they are merely chess pieces on a board, and the game is ‘Social Cohesion’. It’s like ‘Risk, only with the potential for far more warfare: American-style “bussing” should be introduced in London to break down the segregated school system, a leading headteacher said today. Oh, and how dim do you have to be to come up with this idea? The idea was put forward by David Levin, head of the…
Francis Gilbert on the Free Schools policy: The free schools policy is the most ideological of all the coalition’s policies. Trumpeted in the Conservative manifesto, it was one of Michael Gove’s first projects as education secretary. His vision was that thousands of schools set up by parents, private companies and faith groups would spring up in direct opposition to their state-run counterparts – as they did when a similar policy…
Cracked! missed one on their recent list of the 5 Biggest Pussifications of Schools, and while it’s probably not unique to this place the recent example comes from a school just south of Melbourne. No touching. Parents claim they were not told directly of the new rule, which extended a ban on contact sports … Yes, they’d already gone that far, and that depressingly common policy is touched on in…
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…
When I saw this report, I had to double-check the date to make sure it wasn’t someone at the ‘Mail’ jumping the gun with an ‘April Fool’: A Government initiative to test school literacy levels will see more than 500,000 six-year-olds asked to read ‘words’ such as jound, terg, fape and snemp. During the summer term, teachers will sit down individually with every Year 1 child and ask them to…
Recommendations that babies should be breastfed for six months, without introducing solid food or other liquids, is considered “unrealistic and unachievable” by many families, experts from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Stirling argue. Well, that’s why they are ‘recommendations’, and not ‘edicts’ or ‘instructions’. If you can’t achieve them, for whatever reason, no problem! Right? Well, no. Not in our increasingly infantilised world, it isn’t. Not in…
Latest Comments