Neet solution
Posted by admin
January is the toughest month for colleges. Cold mornings can easily crumble the resolve of students who were not absolutely committed in September but stuck it out until the festive season.Teaching staff expect to be hitting phones to track down errant members of their classes who have not shown up after Christmas. Last term’s students [...]
Letters
Posted by admin
No democracy for the NUSThe NUS leadership condemns critics of its plans for governance changes as the “hard left” (New year, new union, January 8). Many of the dissenters are, in fact, moderates, at least on the student politics scale - people like the Young Greens, who have no truck with hard-left factionalism.The critics object [...]
Letters
Posted by admin
Alarming failure on payIn her outline of the issues raised for schools as a consequence of the Single Status project, Louise Tickle (Equality backpay comes at a price, January 15) points out that John Sutcliffe, of the Local Government Employers, is “adamant that schools have set their own salary levels” and are therefore liable for [...]
Immersion is a difficult lesson
Posted by admin
It was an ambitious plan pushed through by Malaysia’s leader, Mahathir Mohamad, despite fierce opposition. Five years on the decision that all Malaysian children should be taught maths and science in English still causes heated debate.With an election looming, nationalist politicians are again seizing on the charged issue of language in an ethnically diverse country [...]
Teaching unions consider strikes over threeyear pay offer
Posted by admin
Teaching unions are considering industrial action in response to a three-year pay offer which they claim will leave teachers worse off.Ministers yesterday unveiled a 2.45% rise - more than the 2% Gordon Brown has ordered for all public sector workers. The National Union of Teachers, which has called for a minimum of 4% to keep [...]
Private schools preserve apartheidstyle system says head
Posted by admin
Private schools are perpetuating an “apartheid” system of schooling, creaming off the most able students and leaving state schools to flounder, according to an influential independent school head who today launches an outspoken attack on his colleagues in the independent sector.Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington college in Berkshire, warns that plans to force private [...]
Desperately seeking students
Posted by admin
Almost every day, scores of desperate teenagers tune in to Nippon Housou Kyokai - Japan’s equivalent of the BBC. Not for some light relief from schoolwork, but for a show that helps them to cram for tough university entrance exams.For how much longer though? Japan has one of the oldest and most well-respected higher education [...]
Heads face tougher rules on exclusion
Posted by admin
Headteachers will find it much more difficult to exclude children they suspect of serious offences such as drug dealing, carrying a knife or violent bullying if a major legal challenge is successful in the High Court.Lawyers say that children accused of the most serious wrongdoing are not being given a ‘fair trial’ and that government [...]
Faiths come together in school experiment
Posted by admin
It will be a faith-based school like no other; one that unites rather than segregates. Tomorrow night a group of Irish parents, religious leaders and academics will start enrolment to a unique educational experiment teaching Christians, Jews and Muslims together.They claim their school will be the first of its kind in Europe: one based on [...]
A league table to worry us all
Posted by admin
The results of the third phase of Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) make interesting reading. Every three years, Pisa tests 400,000 15-year-olds from 54 countries in reading, maths and science. Like all international assessments, Pisa has methodological and statistical limitations. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), however, uses elaborate procedures to ensure [...]
