The ‘special’ schools that aren’t schools
Restrained and scared - the £100k schools failing vulnerable children (from BBC News) There has long been a section of the “special” education system in the UK that really made no attempt to educate;...
Category: Education
Earl Spencer and early boarding
Last Sunday the Mail printed extracts from a new book by Earl (Charles) Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana, on his time at a private boarding school in England called Maidwell School...
The London school fighting its own pupils
Currently there is a court battle between a London state school with close connections to the Tory party and to its allied think tanks and some of its own pupils. The battle started when...
Zionist censors come for another student leader
Yesterday the BBC reported that the rector of St Andrew’s university in Scotland, Stella Maris (right), had faced calls to resign after writing an open letter regarding the ongoing genocide of Palestinian civilians in...
Uniforms and punishments for poverty
Last week and the week before, there was another wave of news stories, as we have come to expect in early September, of children being punished in one way or another, usually by being...
The need for a representative academia
Last week the BBC’s File on 4 ran a feature on affirmative action, the American academic policy of taking aspects of an applicant’s background, including their race, into account when awarding university places. This...
Why are children in care being sent miles from home?
In today’s Observer, there is an investigation into children in care in England being sent sometimes hundreds of miles from home for lack of care placements in their home areas; they note that children...
What is ‘snitching’? When is it bad?
Earlier this week the blind YouTuber Anthony Daniels (right), whose channel is called Third Eye Visions, did a video on ‘snitching’ and on whether it is OK to inform on bullies or on people...
Not fine at home, not fine in school
Last week there was a piece on the BBC News website by Terri White (a “journalist, author and broadcaster” though this was the first time I’d heard of her) on the importance of school...
Is this abuse?
Yesterday the Observer carried a story about pupil protests in some schools in England against school rules around shorts, short skirts and locking toilet doors during lessons so that pupils are only able to...
Afghanistan and women’s education: why is it even a debate?
In the past week the Taliban, who seized back control of Afghanistan from the corrupt and ineffectual US-backed government last year, issued a decree banning women from the country’s universities, after already having shut...
NUS and antisemitism on and off campus
Last Friday the BBC published a report by Hazel Shearing, its education correspondent (inexplicably filed under “Young Reporter” (a term normally used of student reporters, which she isn’t), about antisemitism in and around universities...
Snow elephants versus democracy
On Tuesday it was announced on Twitter and via the Jewish Chronicle, before it was announced on the organisation’s own website, that the National Union of Students’ President, Shaima Dallali, who had been accused...
Can Labour tackle the private school problem now?
Yesterday I saw a tweet by the Labour MP Rachel Reeves saying that, “as Labour chancellor”, she would end the charitable status of private schools which costs the public £1.7billion per year, and move...
“Have you tried boarding?”
The other day a parent I follow on my social media, whose autistic daughter has been out of school for much of the past several years, mentioned a programme that was on Radio 4...
How we still let our learning disabled down
A couple of weeks ago there was a documentary on BBC1 that exposed how, in the 50s and 60s, young Black children were routinely sent to schools for the “educationally sub-normal” because of the...
‘Free speech’ irrelevant to Batley cartoon row
This week a teacher at a school in Batley, Yorkshire was suspended after showing his year 9 (aged 13-14) pupils, some of them Muslims, a cartoon originating with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting...
How should Muslims react to Holocaust education?
Someone on Facebook shared an article from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, on how immigrant (or immigrant-descended) Muslims in Germany react to Holocaust education efforts such as trips to concentration camps. The article notes that...
On fronted adverbials and other fancy names for everyday things
Recently my Twitter feed has been buzzing with talk of “fronted adverbials” with tales of children losing marks in their school English work for not using enough of them, parents having to ask their...
Nothing brave about Starmer’s cave-in
Today Keir Starmer, the Labour leader elected earlier this year, caved in to pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews to sack the shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who had shared an...