Yesterday morning I received this letter from a head teacher of a school where all the teaching staff, including the head, have been trained in Sounds-Write: Dear John,Please find enclosed a copy of a piece of unaided writing recently carried out by a child at our school. It is a testament to the power of… Continue reading Creative writing at five years of age!
What we can’t seem expect from today’s politicians is for them to take anything remotely like a radical or even a necessary decision. Why? Because they are such a pusillanimous lot: they are terrified that if they do anything other than tweak or tinker with the education system as it stands, they’ll lose the votes… Continue reading Our craven politicians
After training teachers and marking large quantities of undergraduate essays, I resurface! And it is with glee that I read Roland White’s speculation in this week’s Sunday Times that Ed Balls may be the next victim of the Portillo moment. According to White, Mike Smithson of Political Betting.com has ‘punted quite heavily at good odds… Continue reading Hasta la vista, Baby!
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.
Once again the Labour government has displayed its true bureaucratic colours and decided to refuse to recognise IGCSEs, exams which many schools, independent and state, have insisted are more rigorous than GCSEs and more suited to the needs and abilities of their pupils.In today’s Independent, Dr Kevin Stannard, director of education at Cambridge International examinations,… Continue reading The dictatorship of the Ball-etariat
Controversy has flared over the launch of Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are.Like the book, first published in 1963, the row, or rumpus as the book might have it, has erupted because some parents are worried that the images in the film will frighten the bejesus out of… Continue reading Sendak tells parents worried about the film of his book to go to Where the Wild Things Are!
The Sounds~Write linguistic phonic teaching programme was conceived and written in 2002/3. An essential component of the authors’ thinking about literacy tuition is that all teachers of literacy deserve high quality training. This is needed to help dispel the many myths and inaccuracies pervading teaching practices that stem from a variety of sources including: personal… Continue reading Sounds-Write study on 1607 Key Stage 1 pupils in state primary school across the country.
I was so taken with this posting on Kitchen table Math from Palisadesk that I asked permission to reproduce it in full and disseminate the maxims a little more widely. So here it is: Education Non-Myths I couldn’t resist sharing these maxims from a new blog :www.incentiveseverywhere.com whose author I know from a previous book… Continue reading Education Non-Myths
The Guardian and The Independent are today both reporting Terry Leahy’s attack on Gordon Brown’s ‘woefully low’ standards in education.It’s the usual complaint – huge amounts of money spent for a very poor return – though for the UK’s largest private employer (Tesco) to voice such an outspoken attack is highly significant.Leahy claims that standards… Continue reading Standards in education ‘woefully low’, says Tesco boss Terry Leahy
I had to confess to some surprise the other day listening to the P.M. programme on Radio 4. The programme included a piece in which people were interviewed and asked to recite ‘Jack and Jill’ and other, what I thought were well known, nursery rhymes. What did I know? Hardly anyone who was interviewed could!One… Continue reading Of nursery rhymes and picture books