Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
The Sunday Times reported today (gleefully as you might expect) that Alexandra Spelman, the head of Ofsted, the British schools inspectorate, had announced a plan for her inspectors to ask primary school-age girls who...
400 years on from Guy Fawkes, Britain’s Catholics still face prejudice | Catherine Pepinster, the Guardian Currently on the BBC there’s a serial about the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics in...
Last week a man who had been studying for a social work degree at Sheffield University lost his appeal against the university’s decision to expel him for remarks he made on Facebook in a...
Hot on the heels of the Tower Hamlets Muslim foster care hoax, the Times today printed a story (behind firewall) claiming that home schooling was part of “a breeding ground for extremists and future...
Over the weekend I saw a touching story about an elderly Moroccan lady who completed the first grade of her country’s school system after having been illiterate all her life and having spent three...
Last Sunday I saw a Facebook and blog post by a mother who said her son would not be accepting his award for 100% from his school, which would have meant a trip to...
Last Sunday Mariella Frostrup answered a letter from a father whose son wanted to drop out of school and become a rock star. He complained: Our son has given up on study. He has...
Earlier this week Jeremy Corbyn announced that if Labour wins the election next month, they will abolish university tuition fees, which were brought in under Labour in 1998 and were increased dramatically by the...
BBC iPlayer - Party Election Broadcasts: Labour - English Local Elections: 21/04/2017 I just saw the Labour Party Election broadcast, which is intended as being for the local elections next month (4th May), although...
The other day I saw an exchange on Twitter between some Labour activists in which Jeremy Corbyn got the blame for Theresa May’s announcement that the ban on new grammar schools was to be...
The other day I came across a discussion on the forum MumsNet about a boy at primary school who had been, for the umpteenth time, given a trivial role in his school play while...
In today’s Guardian, there is a piece by Giles Fraser about what might be the significance of the book Watership Down, whose author Richard Adams died earlier this week. Focusing on the part of...
Back to school bill: pencil case, pens, rubber … and a £785 iPad (from today’s Guardian) This is about how state schools (private schools have been doing this for a while) have started asking...
Experience: I paid to have my daughter kidnapped | Life and style | The Guardian This article was published today and appears to be due for publication in the “Experience” slot in the Weekend...
A week or so ago, I found a link that Karen Ingala-Smith, a prominent British campaigner against violence against women, posted about an ‘experiment’ in Harrow, north-west London, in which victims of domestic violence...
I saw a graphic that was presented next to an article for childminders on how to teach ‘British values’, as now required by the government, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted (which also governs children’s...
The Goldfish last week posted an entry in which she examined the complaints of ‘silencing’ and ‘censorship’ regarding the petition to prevent Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University on the grounds of having...
Girls must choose career or motherhood, says top head - Telegraph The Telegraph has interviewed the ‘headmistress’ of a London private girls’ school, Francis Holland in Regent’s Park, who says that she’s “not a...
Last Thursday Woman’s Hour, the 10am slot on BBC Radio 4, had a feature on the growing trend in the UK for schools to ban girls from wearing skirts (it starts at 32:25, not...
There is a story going around that the NUS recently passed a motion to align itself with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, while a year ago having rejected a motion...