Brown speaks out for English
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Gordon Brown will today spearhead his trip to China and India by announcing a radical plan to promote the English language across the world.The prime minister has set up a new learning, teaching and training website to help 2 billion people learn English by 2020.In a message recorded especially for international students, teachers and educational [...]
Schools choice for all parents impossible says minister
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A government pledge to give all parents a choice of school for their child was yesterday called into question by the minister and chief civil servant responsible for delivering it.Schools minister Jim Knight told the schools select committee that in some rural areas it was not possible for parents to choose from a range of [...]
Popularity of boring geography on wane
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Geography teaching is in decline, with schoolchildren claiming it is “boring and irrelevant” and teachers avoiding field trips due to health and safety concerns, school inspectors report today.Pupils are failing to gain an understanding of climate change, environmentalism and global citizenship through lessons which are too often led by non-specialists, according to the study from [...]
Two worlds collide
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“Charities must not be ‘exclusive clubs’ that only a few can join.” That judgment hardly sounds controversial. It tallies with all teaching about charity, from the good Samaritan to the Qur’an. But its inclusion in official guidance published yesterday raises big questions for some organisations enjoying charitable status - and the tax breaks that come [...]
Teaching unions consider strikes over threeyear pay offer
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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 [...]
Education in a different league
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As someone who has taught A-level students in both state and private schools, I am not at all surprised that so many students from state schools are unwilling to make applications to Oxbridge (State teachers’ views of Oxbridge stop pupils from applying, January 11).In my experience pupils in the state sector have a much more [...]
Private schools preserve apartheidstyle system says head
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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 [...]
How best to support parents will be key
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Three years ago Ruth Kelly made her first keynote speech as education secretary and pledged to put parents at the heart of education. It was met with a mixture of cynicism and optimism. The idea of parent power was not new, but the renewed emphasis from a politician who was also a young mother gave [...]
Can we have economic growth alongside social cohesion
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Educational research institutions are not noted for picking grabby titles and the newest one - Learning and Life Chances in the Knowledge Economies and Societies - is hardly going to break that mould.But Llakes will be investigating one of the more compelling conundrums of human life: is it possible to enjoy the best of both [...]
A question of quality
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Is the Quality Assurance Agency (a) a safeguard designed to maintain and improve academic standards or (b) the “worst thing to happen to higher education in recent times - and perhaps ever”?If you answered (a), you may have accepted that universities couldn’t expect to remain independent of any external monitoring system for ever. If you [...]
