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  • The Well-Beloved By Thomas Hardy

    Now this is a great novella. A sculptor growing up on a small, quarried island just off the Dorset coast, is afflicted by this condition whereby he falls in love with ‘the well-beloved’ in a woman, and that this essence of feminity, this life principle, jumps from woman to woman in a maddeningly capricious fashion.…

  • What’s happened to Iain Banks?

    Read ‘The Steep Approach To Garbadale’ and couldn’t believe how poor it was. Where has the energy and originality of his old books gone? Where’s the invention of ‘The Wasp Factory’, ‘The Bridge’, ‘The Crow Road’. More than where’s the writing ability? His prose is so lame and tired now. And the plot! It could…

  • Interesting article on a parents who set up their own state school

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article2935515.ece‘

  • Will sacking lots of teachers solve our woes?

    Appeared on BBC News, responding to a government adviser who says we should be sacking teachers in schools which are performing badly. I say that many good teachers are unhappy because of the multiple pressures that they face: pupil indiscipline, lack of parental support, government paperwork, the pressure to get results versus giving children a…

  • Radio 5 Live with Richard Bacon

    Spoke again about raising the leaving age for school leavers to 18. I was on air for forty minutes and was able to explain myself more clearly than the 30 seconds on BBC Breakfast: I talked about the problems of keeping students on in school when they’d already failed for eleven years to get a…

  • BBC Breakfast, Monday Morning

    Spoke on BBC Breakfast about the new legislation meaning that all students will have to be in some form of training until they are eighteen. I said it would be a nightmare for teachers, and explained that if a pupil hadn’t learnt to read and write properly by the time they were sixteen, what good…

  • Simon Mayo Show

    Appeared on the Simon Mayo show with a number of other teachers: a ex-soldier now teaching in Liverpool, a Deputy Head, Andy Bell, who won the Teacher Of The Year Award, and a Special Needs teacher. It was an hour long, civilised debate, where we all defended our holidays, explained the stresses and rewards of…

  • The Man Who Went Into The West

  • Teen Rage with Channel 4 at the RSA

    So how did it feel having most of the audience wanting to lynch you?’ an elderly member of the RSA asked me after the event. I had been invited to speak at a debate about Teen Rage at the RSA (http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2407) with several notable guests. I had given a short talk on the history of…

  • Leave Us Kids Alone — BBC Breakfast

    Appeared on BBC Breakfast having watched Leave Us Kids Alone, a BBC3 Doc about teenagers who run their own shambolic school. I said I thought the teaching looked quite poor. I was speaking with Amy, one of the teenage teachers. She was the best thing on the show: she looked like the only organised teenager…

  • On BBC News 24 October 12th 2007

    Spoke on the Beeb’s news about the problems children suffer at school and home, commenting on an interesting report from the Howard League,

  • Off The Page — Know Your Place

    The first rule: look the part. This was my first mistake I made as a student teacher. I walked into my first ever lesson with my hair down to my waist, unwashed for three years, and expected to be taken seriously. No one listened to a word a word I said. Second rule: don’t pick…

  • Rewarding the bad, punishing the good

    ‘Oi, you little c**t, why can’t you hurry up you slow coach?’ I heard a mother say to her son last week outside a swimming pool changing rooms. An eight-year-old boy was doing his best to stuff his wet towel into his bag but it wasn’t fast enough. A little later, he started banging a…

  • The re-marking lottery

    Any experienced Head of Department knows that results’ day can be a nightmare. The worst problem to deal with is the sobbing student, often accompanied with the angry parent, brandishing a tear-stained results’ slips, exclaiming in loud and outraged tones that there’s no way he or she could have got their sub-standard score, and that the…

  • Media appearances in August

    Appeared at midnight on the Anita Anand Radio 5 Live show on Thursday morning. It was great because I was allowed to talk more than usual, explaining why essay writing skills have disappeared in schools. Because teachers have to teach to the Assessment Objectives, they are much keener on shovelling content into pupils’ brains than…

  • Free Food For Millionaires — book review

  • The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster — a review

    This is definitely the best Paul Auster I have read. I have always been intrigued by his novels but found that they start well but quickly fall to pieces: the City Of Glass, Mr Vertigo, the Music Of Chance being the ones I have tried. The Brooklyn Follies though engages throughout: it has the classic…

  • Gang violence in Britain

    Two fascinating pieces in the Guardian about gang culture, which appear to suggest it’s so much the break-up of the family that’s the problem with gang violence but that many youths get dragged into violence by their families. The older generation of yobs are inducting the younger ones into their ways. The report on the…

  • Time further endorses the findings in ‘Yob Nation’

    1. One of the major contentions in ‘Yob Nation’ was that Blair’s government was a yobbish government, motivated by an aggressive, theatrical desire to promote itself. The publication of Campbell’s diaries, countless commentators on Blair’s Iraq disaster, and the news that Brown is now cancelling classic ‘yob’ innovations such as gambling super-casinos, now show us…

  • “You are an arrogant, young man”

    It was the ‘young’ part I liked the best. Peregrine Worsthorne was not very happy with me. We were sitting around microphones in a Radio 4 studio, talking about ‘Knowing Your Place’ for the lunchtime Radio 4 programme ‘Off The Page’. I started being provocative because the debate was becoming rather cosy. I said that…

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