All articles on this site

  • Too many tests?

    Emphatically not! I think schools need to test and assess children more; more often, in shorter and sharper ways. At the moment, we have these clunking assessments for children at 7 years, 11 years and 16 years. These exams fail to assess children properly because they are so unwieldy, and the test papers are so […]

  • Is journalism about humiliation

    A powerful piece by Jill Parkin highlighted the issues connected with writing personality based journalism — especially if you are a woman. They are increasingly being asked to write about very humiliating subjects: weight loss, their sex lives, their troubled children and so on. Is the new journalism about humiliation? Have the values of reality […]

  • Life on a Refrigerator Door — the first post-it note novel

  • Dishing out fines won’t stop the chaos in class

    There are riots, drugs and even death threats… and all our leaders offer are sticking-plasters As a battle-hardened teacher, I can’t help but be a little cynical about the latest government initiative to quell indiscipline in our schools. A three-year study into classroom behaviour has called for teachers to be able to slap £50 penalties […]

  • Teaching as triumph

    It is impossible to read Frank McCourt’s new memoir, Teacher Man, about his life as a teacher in New York, without the incessant rain of Ireland drizzling into one’s thoughts. McCourt’s first book, Angela’s Ashes, published when he was 66, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, was turned into […]

  • Worrying about schools

    The worrying has started! My child is in Year 4 but already I’m worrying about where he might go to secondary school. Living as I do in Tower Hamlets, the choices are rather stark. There’s an Academy which all the parents want their child to go to; there’s a pretty good Local Authority comp but […]

  • Are A-Levels still the gold standard they used to be?

    My answer is a resounding “No!” Several things have made it a lot easier to get an A grade: The Assessment Objectives: if pupils tick the right boxes, they’ll get a good grade Re-takes Less stringent marking. The old English A Level was a difficult exam to get an A grade in. Overwhelmingly, you had to write […]

  • The horrors of Ecstasy

    Very troubling article about Ecstasy in the Guardian today – it’s had a good day.

  • Dealing with grief

    An amazing article on a wife’s grief after the death of her husband for sixty years.

  • Are we the same as the war generation?

    Just finished reading One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes, a rather wonderful short novel published just after the Second World War. The novel largely describes in lyrical, humorous and incisive detail one hot summer’s day in the life of a housewife living in a rural village just after the war. For me, the book was […]

  • Was Rousseau the first person to write about being alone?

    Reading Rousseau’s biography, in which it is stated that great philosopher was the first person in his autobiography to write about being ‘alone’, to explore the interior state of a child who felt lonely, isolated, alienated. In his Confessions, Rousseau describes feeling troubled and isolated as he ventured through a graveyard in the dark, hearing […]

  • What is ‘well-being’ and how do you measure it?

    Now that schools will have to report on student’s well-being and consider it more deeply than before, it prompts the questions:What is well-being?How do you measure it?How do you improve students’ well-being?Is well-being contradictory to raising standards?

  • Getting closure

    Despite clear roads and public transport running, schools are still closed because teachers can’t afford to live near where they work At least my school isn’t one of the wussy ones – it’s got a blizzard-proof excuse. The comprehensive where I teach is essentially stuck in a field in Essex and is currently encased in […]

  • The league tables are a game – don’t take them too seriously

    My old school is now one of the ‘most improved’ in the country. Yet I’m not sure it’s so different from a decade ago. I will never forget the day when I learned that the secondary school in which I was teaching had come bottom of the School Performance Tables. That was more than 10 […]

  • Please, Mr Johnson, stop tinkering with our schools

    THE Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, is definitely a worried man. You only have to look at the all the spin issued by his department to know that something is up. The school inspectors Ofsted issued a report last week, 2020 Vision, that called for every pupil to have lessons and exams tailored to their "personalised" […]

  • Can computer games help children to learn to read?

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

  • The dangers of wealth

    Adam Thorpe’s new novel, Between Each Breath, really explores the dangers of wealth; it is about a talented composer who marries an heiress who is an ecological worker and child of the privileged. The composer isn’t and, although loved by his wife, he becomes stultified, frozen, trapped in a mundane routine, rattling around his Hampstead […]

  • Spooks in the classroom

    Of all the roles I thought I might play as a classroom teacher, it never occurred to me that I might be called upon to be a spook. Social worker, surrogate parent, cleaner, technician, crowd controller, salesman for the damaged goods of the national curriculum, yes – but I never imagined I might be required […]

  • Should there be more male teachers?

    Definitely! We are a dying species in education at the moment and the few of us who are around tend to hide in our offices behind bits of paper. The problem is particularly acute in primary school where we are virtually extinct. I appeared on BBC Breakfast TV this Tuesday to talk about this: a […]

  • What are schools for?

    Increasingly beginning to think that schools have to think about child’s lives in their totality if they are going to give them a truly rounded education. I argued about this with Gaby Hinsliff, a political writer at the Observer; she argued that schools were there primarily to educate and that possibly things like providing children […]

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