Seniors find school work less taxing
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Older adults have long volunteered in schools, but at Field and other schools in Park Ridge-Niles District 64, seniors are paid the Illinois minimum wage of $7.50 an hour to assist teachers and pupils in the classroom.The district is one of two in the northwest suburbs that pay seniors to tutor students, help [...]
Wanted A few bad teachers
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Buying off bad teachers is part of his effort to improve education, Berman said.
“What I really want to do is jump-start a conversation,” Berman said. “There are lots of kids who can’t read or do math and are well behind in science. … I’ve interviewed teachers who say their colleagues are not competent to teach [...]
Principal under fire in ministers back yard
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The beleaguered principal of Harlow College is facing calls for his resignation following publication of the results of A-level modules that his opponents claim are “far from satisfactory”.The president of the college’s students’ union, Victoria Broad, maintains that large numbers of students either failed or received low grades in exams taken in January. The college [...]
In practice
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Maths teacher Helen Luxton may only have joined Caroline Chisholm school in Northampton last year, but she has already transformed students’ approaches to money.Today, the year 11 group of 15- and 16-year olds, who are taking the IFS School of Finance Intermediate Certificate in Personal Finance (a GCSE equivalent), are learning about credit cards. The [...]
Stress still main cause of ill health in teachers says ATL
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The rash of government education policies over the last five years has undermined attempts to agree a proper work/life balance and led to increasingly stressed teachers, according to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).Delegates at the ATL conference in Torquay heard that stress-related illness remains the principal cause of ill health in teachers and [...]
Lost opportunities
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The government proudly boasts it is increasing the funding available for adult learning to the highest level ever. Then the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education reports that 1.5 million fewer people have taken up adult learning in the past two years. The government rightly places emphasis on improving basic literacy and numeracy, and emphasises [...]
Keep Big Brother out of the classroom says union
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The new president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) will warn of an impending Orwellian education system at the first day of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today.Targets, testing, league tables, inspections and increasing use of camera surveillance in classrooms could lead to “Big Brother watching over schools in the next five [...]
Notebook
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More support for Estelle Morris’s complaint, reported in this column last week, that the government has to be seen to be doing something, whether or not it works. Among the 180 people at the recent Anti Academies Alliance conference, Notebook spotted the former health secretary, and now anti-academy campaigner in his Camden constituency, Frank Dobson, [...]
The new seekers
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I’m most like a ’seeker’,” says Fiona Fung, 21, from Brunei, in her final year of a BA in media and performance at Salford University. “But I’ve got friends who are ‘gekkos’.” “I’m a ‘bono’,” says Cecilia Ostlund, 23, from Sweden, in her last year of a BA in languages and management at Lancaster University.What [...]
Should elite cease to be a dirty word
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YesThe idea of an academic elite is a fundamental, democratic good and one that we must defend vigorously if British education is to compete seriously on the global stage. The trouble is that the word elite is now heavy with pejorative connotations. Its beginnings were innocuous enough. It came from the Latin eligere, meaning “to [...]
