Opinion

Here I comment on a wide range of issues from education to politics, the arts and more. I welcome lively and opinionated debate, so please leave your comments.

Towards boundary crossing: primary and secondary school teachers teaching creative writing and its redrafting
This academic article, written by Professor Tom Dobson and I, explores the research we did looking at primary and secondary school teachers attitudes towards creative writing and redrafting. This is a rare piece of research which compares primary and secondary school teachers’ approaches to teaching creative writing. It shows that primary school teachers can be formulaic in the way they teach creative writing, using product approaches. However, in secondary schools the picture is different: teachers, particularly those, who are writers themselves, give students more agency in redrafting and shaping their writing. This indicates how professional development should involve primary and secondary school teachers in dialogue with one another to cross boundaries of practice.

The British Library, research and creative writing
Creative writing can be used to help people engage with the British Library and its collection. MA students led members of the public through the Library, inviting creative responses to its archive and exhibitions.
What can the opera ‘Carmen’ teach us about domestic violence?
A blog written for my publishers, Blue Door Press, which explores how and why the opera ‘Carmen’ can be seen as a critique of violence and masculinity.
Four reasons there is a Connected Curriculum at Goldsmiths
Why bring all the students at a university together to learn critical thinking and research skills?

Should schools ban short skirts?

I think they should. At the moment, there’s a bit of an epidemic of short skirts sweeping through the land far faster than the swine-flu virus. Some of this attire doesn’t actually deserve the name of ‘skirt’, ‘belt’ would be more appropriate! Quite frankly, I don’t think that the girls wearing them are aware of the negative […]
Is 1984 the most influential novel ever written?

Emphatically not! Orwell’s last novel has not survived the test of time. I know this through the hard graft of having to teach the dreary novel to reluctant Year 10 and 11 students. There are a number of serious flaws with the book. First and foremost, the plot is predictable and relatively undramatic: a miserable […]
Is passion all that matters in education?

Is stirring a pupil’s passion all that matters in edcation? Ken Robinson’s new book, The Element, suggests that this is at the heart of getting the best out of children. I appeared on Radio 3’s Nightwaves arguing a little differently. I said that if teachers just tell pupils to follow their passions then they could […]
Do thirty-something men need their mothers more than ever?

I found Sutcliffe’s novel very easy to read, skipping through it in a day. I particularly enjoyed the way Matt, the features editor of a lad’s magazine, was depicted. The scenes where his mother gate-crashes a launch party he’s at, bosses him around in his warehouse flat, sets him up with a girl are funny, […]
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
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?
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 […]
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 […]
Teenage pregnancy and sex education

Attended a heated debate at Channel 4, which launched their sex education programmes this autumn. All the experts on the panel pointed out that British teenagers get the worst sex education in Europe: many parents don’t have conversations about sex with their children, many sex ed lessons in schools are patchy and ill-informed, and teenagers […]
Could mobile phones help learning in the classroom?

A recent survey conducted by Nottingham University has shown that mobile phones can really help boost standards in the classroom if they are used wisely and imaginatively. Pupils can Bluetooth their work to each other, set deadlines on the digital diaries, research issues on the web, take videos of teachers explaining key points (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/09/04/dlmobile104.xml) I […]
Vital moral question: should a teacher have pupils as friends on Facebook?

I don’t really take Facebook seriously, but increasingly as I mindlessly click on people to be my friends, being confronted with some pupils I teach, I click them in thinking: friend’ on Facebook doesn’t mean ‘friend’ in real life. It’s just a label for someone you don’t mind snooping over your silly Facebook page. I […]