Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Why are the authorities refusing to fund France’s oldest Muslim school, now facing bankruptcy? | Education | The Guardian Today’s Guardian Education supplement on how bigots in a north Paris education authority are using...
Editor-At-Large: Our bitching and bullying is a form of class warfare – Janet Street-Porter, Commentators – The Independent Yesterday, this article by Janet Street-Porter on the depressing saga of the boy who represented the...
Yesterday, while Barack Obama was discussing how to save the world economy with Gordon Brown, Berlusconi et al, Michelle Obama put in a planned, but mostly unannounced, visit to a girls’ school in Islington,...
BBC Radio's File on 4 put out this programme last week about how teachers' careers are being ruined by false accusations, particularly of assault, often coming from pupils with a history of violence themselves....
Islamophobia Watch and a Muslim Facebooker drew my attention to the “scandal” of the head-teacher in Sheffield who was “forced out” after Muslim pupils (and, presumably, parents) objected to her whole-school assemblies. She had...
Naomi Alderman, a regular Guardian columnist, on one of my pet hates in popular attitudes to education – the emphasis on the supposed value of competitive sport. I'm sure we've all heard the attacks...
Will there be no end to the repetitions of the myth that faith schools are the cause of the problems in Northern Ireland? A professor called David Canter has published a study, based on...
Yesterday, a new organisation was launched called the Accord Foundation, which claims to be "a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religous schools". Its...
Last Tuesday a British court upheld the right of a Sikh girl living in south Wales to wear the kara, or Sikh bangle, to school. Her school, Aberdare Girls', bars all religious symbols and...
This morning, one of the topics on the Vanessa Feltz show was a young man named Majid Ahmed from Bradford, who had been offered a place at Imperial College, London, to study medicine. Three...
Yesterday, the Guardian published an article on the special challenges facing girls and women with autism (It's not just boys who are autistic), in a special women's page guest-edited by Bridget Orr, who has...
Five Chinese Crackers covers the tabloid response to the recent NUT faith education proposal. I did start writing a piece after reading the Guardian's write-up of it, by which account it seems to be...
Over the past couple of weeks, a scandal has emerged of a serious culture of child abuse at a major children's home on Jersey, Haut de la Garenne, which was closed several years ago...
Only class war on public schools can rid us of this unhinged ruling class – Guardian Unlimited George Monbiot wrote this article in yesterday's Guardian, outlining the damage that boarding schools, especially boarding prep...
Recently it's become fashionable for people concerned about the state of our country to talk of something called segregation. Trevor Phillips, in a famous speech in 2005, which touched off the phony debate on...
BBC NEWS: ‘Bangle’ pupil is excluded again This is a report about a Sikh girl, aged 14, who has been excluded from school in south Wales for insisting on wearing the kara, or bangle,...
BBC NEWS: Former head sentenced for cruelty This loathsome creature, who ran a dumping ground, I mean special school, for children with special needs in Norfolk – not a million miles from the place...
Every so often I do a Google search for the name of my old school, Kesgrave Hall. (Even before Google came online, I used to search for it using other search engines like Infoseek...
New Statesman – The talking cure This is a review by Samir el-Youssef, a regular in the New Statesman, attacking a new book entitled Why Are the Arabs Not Free? by Moustapha Safouan (a...
BBC NEWS: Abuse conviction concerns raised This story is about a man who had been in court as an expert prosecution witness in the trial of two staff members at a school for disturbed...