Our schooling system needs a rethink.
- Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Derby
The proposal for a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) announced by universities and science minister Jo Johnson in early July that would recognise “excellent teaching” and “make good teaching better…
There are double the number of Oxbridge graduates teaching in English schools today as there were 12 years ago, according to a new report from The Sutton Trust education charity. The numbers have dramatically…
It easy to lampoon education reforms in Finland that aim to scrap the teaching of traditional subjects in favour of broader topics. The new initiative could see history, geography and languages replaced…
Freedom of speech is at the heart of academic life and a university should be a place where every issue is discussed and debated. Not so, according to the findings presented in the first ever Freedom of…
Those who have agitated for subject knowledge, rather than skills, to be the focus of the national curriculum, may have been pleased to hear the secretary of state for education, Nicky Morgan, following…
There may well be an outcry from student unions and lecturers’ organisations against proposals in a new counter-terrorism bill from home secretary Theresa May for a new statutory duty on universities and…
Teachers’ professional development is “fragmented, occasional and insufficiently informed by research”. These were the conclusions of a recent British Educational Research Association (BERA) and Royal…
Parents could soon face fines for parking too near to a school, according to a new Manifesto Club report on new Public Spaces Protection Orders. This comes after a record number of 63,837 fines were imposed…
This year’s GCSE results day is predicted to be “chaos” if recent exam reforms cause large fluctuations in students’ grades. Exam boards, teachers and teacher unions are talking of “nervousness”, “turbulence…
Many teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively? But there is a problem…
As another teachers’ strike looms on July 10 it is worth setting out the reasons that teachers are unhappy with their profession. It’s not just because of conditions of service, pay, and pensions. Teaching…
It would take a “bold secretary of state” to argue for more faith schools in Britain, wrote Newsnight’s policy editor Chris Cook commenting on the so-called Trojan Horse storm about Islamist extremists…
Subjects need to be seen once again for what they are. They are divisions of human knowledge made in order to advance knowledge in universities or to teach existing knowledge in schools. Academics and…
The stabbing to death by a 15-year-old pupil of Anne Maguire, a much loved teacher who had worked at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds for more than 40 years, has attracted much attention across…
I have often argued that I would not let any teacher into a school unless – as a minimum – they had read, carefully and well, the three great books on education: Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Émile and…
Who should teach the teachers? The answer seems obvious. The best teachers should teach the teachers in the way that the best cooks teach the cooks. That’s the apprenticeship, the craft or “sitting with…
The closure of the secondary section of the Al-Madinah free school in Derby will be celebrated by those who oppose free schools and what are euphemistically labelled “faith” schools. Whatever the stated…
Philosophy was always dangerous, as the life and death of Socrates taught us. He was, need I remind you, executed not by an authoritarian regime but by a caring democracy. Times have changed however, and…
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