Why have we gone so wrong with the way we educate our children?

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• Are Blair’s children better educated than previous generations?

  So the first set of GCSE results have come through of children entirely educated under New Labour. Has Blair’s mantra of ‘education, education, education’ worked? I think not. The GCSE results are just now trust-worthy; they are effectively rigged. Proper analyses, such as the OECD rankings, where countries are compared for their pupils’ attainment in […]

• Proof that Gove by-passed his own Expert Panel to push through idiotic curriculum changes

  The British Educational Association has just published the major correspondence about their President’s (Mary James) involvement with the National Curriculum Review. The documentation details in depth exactly what Mary James and her colleague, primary school expert, Andrew Pollard, objected to in the National Curriculum Review. We already had some information about this from Andrew Pollard’s blog on The Institute of […]

• Can computer games help children to learn to read?

  At Channel 4 tonight, there was a debate about this question, organised by

• The government is wrong to devalue vocational qualifications

  Vocational courses help students develop key skills employers are crying out for. League tables should reflect this The government’s decision to drastically downgrade the value of vocational qualificationsis deeply troubling for teachers like me, and must be sending many schools and colleges into a tailspin of despair. At the moment over half a million teenagers are […]

• The terrible names parents give their children

  What kind of parent calls their child ‘Storm’, ‘Beetroot’, or ‘Brussell Sprout’? Only the kind that hasn’t thought about the consequences for that child. I appeared on Woman’s Hour, with Dea Birkett, who had called her children ‘Storm’ and ‘Savannah’. I complained that called your child ‘Storm’ forces a personality, an attitude, a metaphor upon […]