This week’s TES is reporting that the chief inspector of Estyn (the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted) Ann Keane has just published a report claiming that 40% of pupils starting secondary school in Wales do so with a reading age of six months below their chronological age. What I would like to know is how she… Continue reading Welsh education – ‘producerism’s last hurrah’!
This morning’s Telegraph is reporting that Michael Gove expects that children aged as young as eleven should be reading fifty books a year. Graeme Paton thinks that Gove’s latest ruminations probably reflect his thinking on the tour he’s just made ‘of high-performing “charter schools” – state-funded institutions that are run free of Government interference –… Continue reading Fifty books a year?
Trying to effect change within the educational establishment is, as the former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead once put it, ‘as slippery and hard for reformers to wrestle down as a greased cow in a swamp’. Woodhead (after the US education secretary William Bennett) called the ‘tribe’ that make up the civil service, the… Continue reading Brogan on the Blob
After spending a huge amount of time training teachers and teaching on a children’s literature course for the OU, I’m back.The Sunday Times (27 06 10) and the Telegraph yesterday reported the chairman of BT Sir Mike Rake as saying that around a quarter of applicants (six out of twenty-six thousand applicants) for places on… Continue reading Illiteracy – the blight on the UK economy.
Following up on my posting on the teaching of classics, I note that Boris is going to launch a campaign to try and convince more schools to start teaching them. Graeme Paton in the Telegraph is reporting that the charity ‘Friends of Latin’ have produced new research in which it has been found that ‘pupils… Continue reading Friends of Classics
The government’s latest edict is beginning to make it sound like a Private Eye parody of itself. Its latest decree is to ‘guarantee’ children a legal right to a good education. According to last week’s Telegraph, John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, ‘warned that the proposed laws risked creating one of… Continue reading Government guarantees – the new “cones hot-line”!
The issue of school places has stirred up a passionate row in the press this week. There’s a piece in the Telegraph by an infuriated Judith Woods, titled ‘Ed Balls’s insane education policies make school gate cheats of us all: The lack of decent schools has driven parents to desperate lengths’. In it, she lays… Continue reading Of school standards, swindlers and Soviet style education policies.
The latest row (see Saturday’s Telegraph) to erupt over testing is over the request by some state schools to be allowed to allow their pupils to sit IGCSEs.IGCSEs are generally regarded as being more rigorous, which is why many private schools have now opted for them. In March of this year, Manchester Grammar school also… Continue reading IGCSEs