for creative writing educators
for teachers of English

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

The Cambridge Review of Primary Education is speaking sense to me. We have constructed a curriculum that fundamentally alienates our children with its emphasis upon attainment and its lack of thought on how we intrinsically motivate our children.

Document 1

Document 2

Related reading

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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

  • Four reasons why children are being excluded from school

    I appeared on Vanessa Feltz’s Talk TV on 15th April 2024 talking about this issue, because a recent report shows that children who are excluded at primary school are more likely to achieve badly in their GCSEs than their peers. To sum up what I said, I believe there are four main reasons why children […]