All articles on this site

  • Rupture by Simon Lelic

    This tale of a London comprehensive is absorbing, convincing and truly frightening Simon Lelic’s debut novel, about a teacher who turns out to be a psychopath, is genuinely frightening. Lelic manages to evoke in crisp, accessible prose what it’s like to work in a modern school where bullying is rife. Perhaps most terrifying of all […]

  • What makes a great teacher?

    David Cameron thinks a good teacher is all about having a good degree but, says one member of the profession, that couldn’t be further from the truth David Cameron’s proclamation that the Tories will be “brazenly elitist” about the calibre of candidates entering the teaching profession betrays the fact that he doesn’t know anything about […]

  • Complications — The intrusion of Serjeant Troy

    Complications – The Intrusion of Serjeant Troy   Revision of Chapters 1 – 24 Who did what? STARTER ACTIVITY   Caused a stir in the Casterbridge Corn Exchange and set the farmers’ pulses racing. Lost his sheep, became a tramp and then got a job as a shepherd. Missed a wedding because of going to […]

  • Don’t judge teachers by their degrees

    I’ve seen too many graduates with first-class degrees die in the classroom. David Cameron’s ‘elitist’ policies would be destructive So what makes a good teacher? Suddenly, answering this question properly seems to be of crucial importance. Today, with much fanfare, David Cameron, trumpeted plans to stop graduates with poor degrees from so-called “poor” universities from […]

  • Should the school day be extended to 10 hours?

    I asked my pupils this and EVERYONE of them said that it shouldn’t! Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? However, there are plans afoot for some schools to imitate certain American schools, Charter Schools, and run a school day from 7.50am-5pm. The idea is that the children from the poorest neighbourhoods don’t have good […]

  • Should parents shun the state sector and go private?

    Having been there and done it, I feel now that parents are usually best off sending their child to the local school as a government adviser recently suggested. Having helicoptered my child into a private school and seen him subjected to rote-learning and the barbaric, pointless competition of the private sector, I decided to pull […]

  • Are truants overwhelmingly from poor backgrounds?

    Recent research completed by the Tories suggests what we’ve known for a long time that kids from socially deprived backgrounds are much more likely to bunk off school than their middle class peers. I appeared on BBC Breakfast talking about the issue. I categorised children who bunk off into three categories: the arrogant, the alienated […]

  • One of the most important books of the Noughties

    It’s getting to that point when we’re all looking back at the decade and thinking about what are the really important books. My vote goes to Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy With A Top Knot, a brilliant memoir about Sathnam’s quest to find the truth about his father’s madness. Satnam grew up in Wolverhampton in the […]

  • Abu Dhabi — The only city thriving in this recession

    Abu Dhabi is not suffering like Dubai because this Emirate has cash reserves of billions, built up over the years by storing the profits from its oil. Now it’s beginning to spend it, building Dubai-style malls and hotels. I’m here visiting a friend who is the Business Editor of the National, a new newspaper set […]

  • 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

  • Sacking top teachers will be a bloodbath

    Ed Balls’s latest plans will be disastrous for schools such as mine It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious — the Government’s latest wheeze is to sack thousands of teachers. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, announced yesterday that to cut spending 3,000 teachers could be kicked out of their jobs in the coming […]

  • Why ARE so many of my fellow teachers breaking the ultimate taboo?

    Heaven knows what it must be like to be among those parents with children at Headlands School in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. And who could blame them if they feel utterly betrayed by an education system that would seem to have failed lamentably in its duty of protection and care? In just three years, three male […]

  • Labour ripped the heart out of education

    Scratch beneath the surface of successful GSCE figures and you’ll find a morass of ‘robot teaching’ that fails our children So the first generation of students to be entirely educated under New Labour has just got its GCSE results. On the surface, the government’s achievements look fabulous: boys have caught up with girls in maths; […]

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