NI schools to receive record funding
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Schools in Northern Ireland will get record government funding next year.The Northern Ireland assembly plans to spend a total of %26#163;1.8bn on education next year, of which the bulk - %26#163;1.05bn - will go directly to schools, an extra %26#163;20m on this year.Some %26#163;12m will go towards literacy and numeracy schemes, %26#163;25m to carry out [...]
Teachers critical of unrealistic culture target
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Government plans to give all children five hours of high quality cultural activities each week have drawn widespread criticism for being an impossible target to meet.The schools secretary, Ed Balls, and culture secretary, Andy Burnham, launched a %26#163;25m pilot scheme today aimed at giving all children more time to develop their creative skills at school [...]
Do summerborn children need saving
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Are we asking too much of our children by sending them to school at four? That’s the question at the heart of a new report on school starting age. Its authors, Anna Riggall and Caroline Sharp, of the National Foundation for Educational Research, say not only is it stressful for children to start school so [...]
A clearing in the jungle
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After more than two years of hacking a path through it, the people reforming the vocational qualifications “jungle” have made a discovery.It isn’t really a jungle at all. More of a wood. Granted, it’s pretty dense, and nobody knows precisely how many trees there are. But far from being a wilderness, its inhabitants all know [...]
The signs are not good
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When her daughter, Isabella, was born profoundly deaf, Polly Burton made the decision to communicate with her using British Sign Language (BSL).Every Wednesday, mother and daughter made the journey from south to north London to attend the nursery drop-in centre at Frank Barnes school for deaf children in Camden, where Isabella could mix with other [...]
A peep into the past
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Sydney Race was a minor civil servant, working in education, who died 40 years before the dawn of reality television. But programmes such as I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Big Brother contain some of the inherent cruelty reflected through his observations of the seedy world of Victorian freak shows and [...]
Wanted attractive Swedish model
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The taxi drops me off in the middle of an industrial estate and I do a quick double-take. There’s a drab sign nailed haphazardly to the outside of the warehouse that tells me I’ve arrived, but I’m not convinced. In the snowy, November half-light, Stockholm tends to come in various shades of grey at the [...]
Who needs maths
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Soon after the first sudoku puzzles began to appear in newspapers a couple of years ago, there came hurried reassurances from worried editors. Sudoku might be a number grid, they soothed, but don’t let all those nasty ones, twos and threes frighten you, because you don’t need to be any good at maths to do [...]
The folly of our test fixation is plain to all. Except ministers
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Let’s give the government some credit. Faced with almost united criticism over the way its testing regime has placed pressure on children and distorted learning in schools, it decided to try a different approach. Last December more than 400 primary schools took part in a pilot scheme for new, shorter Sats tests. The key idea [...]
School complaints over bizarre exam marking
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England’s qualifications regulator is investigating the quality of GCSE and A-level marking after receiving complaints of “bizarre” grades from schools.According to the Times Education Supplement, Eton College is among the schools that have contacted the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.The independent school gave QCA a dossier of examples, including two pupils who were given zero marks [...]
