Published in
In this section I archive features and articles that have been published elsewhere. I contribute regularly to the national press, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail.
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A Century of Teaching Creative Writing in Schools: the Newbolt Report and teaching creative writing
Newbolt strongly advocates imaginative ways of teaching writing, championing self-expression above rote-learning.
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The Haunted House: Teaching Creative Writing Through Collaborative Learning to 9-13 year olds
Many teachers of creative writing find teaching 9-13-year-olds tricky. What exactly should you teach? And how? I might have discovered an answer…
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Becoming the falconer: productive feedback for the redrafting of creative writing
Aspects of the neoliberal education system can preclude the development of young writers. Feedback can be unempathetic, but it can also be productive, creating an internal dialogue that develops the writer over time.
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Teaching Mindfulness in an Unmindful System
A case study of a mindfulness teacher, Beth, and her experiences of teaching mindfulness to 11- to 16-year-olds in several English schools
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Education failures are a national tragedy
Finally, the trousers are coming off the Government’s education policies. The news that teenager Paul Erhahon, who was murdered by a gang of youths last Friday in a quiet London suburb, had suffered an earlier knife attack at school has, together with other teenage stabbings and murders, offered a glimpse of the sordid underbelly of […]
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The School’s Lottery
The concept of choice has long supposed to be one of the central plans of the Government’s education policy. Over the last decades, Tony Blair and a succession of Labour education secretaries have trumpetted their commitment to increased parental power over schools admissions. So in a much hyped speech in 2005, the Prime Minister heralded […]
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How Jamie and school meal fascists turn kids into junk food addicts
Her words are enough to make Jamie Oliver tear his hair out. Joanne, 14, a pupil at a large comprehensive in London, is sucking her Triple Power Push Pop as she explains to me why she insists on stuffing her mouth with such sweets. "I don’t buy any of the stuff in the canteen, it’s […]
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That’ll learn ’em
SEVEN KINGS by Fran Abrams Atlantic Books, £9.99; 272pp THE HAPLESS TEACHER’S HANDBOOK by Phil Ball Ebury Press, £10.99; 320pp IT’S YOUR TIME YOU’RE WASTING : A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell by Frank Chalk Monday Books, £7.99; 226pp DOES SCHOOL REALLY make a difference? Do all those thousands of hours of children sitting in […]
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A pub crawl worth toasting
IT IS A SUCH A beautifully simple idea that I am surprised no one has thought of it before — to travel from the southern-most point of Britain to the most northerly sampling as many pubs as possible in between. Ian Marchant has written a digressive diary describing a delicious, drunken romp across Britain during […]
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Hey kids, leave that teacher alone
As a teacher, I felt distinctly uncomfortable watching Channel 4’s new show, The Law of the Playground. But maybe that’s the point. This seven-part series is about all the stuff a phalanx of trendily dressed, tedious twenty and thirtysomethings got up to at school: the silly pranks, the mindless nicknames, the cruel imitations, the ritualised […]
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Sorry Mr Reid, we’ve every damn right to moan
You might expect John Reid to know a lot about the vile culture of violence that has disfigured our country and made it feel less safe than at any time in living memory. Parts of the Home Secretary’s constituency on the eastern edge of Glasgow are notorious. Gangs of adolescent louts with knives have created […]
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A class struggle for Jilly — Francis Gilbert’s review of Wicked! A Tale Of Two Schools
This romp opens with Janna Curtis — a young, flame-haired, attractive deputy head — being appointed to take over Larkminster, which is threatened with closure because of its appalling results and the behaviour of its pupils. The school is on Shakespeare Estate, a shameful pocket of social deprivation in the prosperous, historic, fictional Cotswold town […]
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TEACHER ON THE RUN: True Tales of Classroom Chaos
Teachers in the state sector, many would agree, are troopers, Trojans. Undervalued and underpaid, they have almost no strictures on their charges and little support from parents, the state or its politicians. Impotent, they face the anarchy and hedonism of our times on the front line. Gilbert teaches English in a London comprehensive. With this […]
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Paperback Review Of ‘Teacher On The Run’
Authors usually write about their working lives in order to escape them, draining them of the juicy bits (carefully changing the names and hair colour of key players), then tossing away the husk to enter the glam of literary life. Not Gilbert. This young teacher chronicled his earlier career in ‘I’m A Teacher, Get Me […]
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The Many Faces of British Yob Culture – an interview by Sheena Hastings
"YOB: noun, a colloquialism from the mid-19th century, which is back slang for BOY. Originally it meant a boy. Now an uncouth, loutish, ignorant youth or man, especially one given to violent or aggressive behaviour, a hooligan." The Shorter Oxford Dictionary AT the age of 11, Francis Gilbert saw his dad attacked by a yob. […]
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Asbo City
Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester council’s Nuisance Strategy Unit and now the leading expert on asbos in the country, is a wiry and intense man. ‘The yobs in Manchester are frightened of us,’ he says proudly. ‘We have a reputation for being callous, brutal, obsessive and single-minded. This is an important myth to […]
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Yobs on the job
The stereotypical image of a yob is the hoodie on the streets hurling stones or abuse at passers-by. But some of the worst yobbery goes on in the workplace. And when I compare the testimony of people attacked by thugs on the street with those who were the victims of attacks in their offices, factories […]
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Stuart Jeffries on Francis Gilbert’s ‘Yob Nation’
When Sorbonne students look across the channel before demonstrating in the Latin Quarter, they realise how little France should aim to copy our economic miracle. And how much there is to fight for on the streets. Francis Gilbert’s new book, Yob Nation, is wonderful to read in this context. It argues that when Britons take […]
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Why do they do it? It’s a yobbo power trip
Last Sunday I spotted trouble when I was returning home along the City Road in Islington, north London. At first sight the men looked harmless enough: they were white, well dressed in jeans and designer jackets, with shiny leather footwear and nice haircuts. They were not your typical hoodies at all. But I knew I […]
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Yob Nation Extract — Part 1
The firework exploded at our feet in the grotty north London playground. Three white boys snarled with laughter from behind the hoods of their green parkas. One of them chucked another firework in our direction. It fizzled and snapped. My brother and I retreated, but my father, in a tough-guy Marks and Spencer anorak, approached […]
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The Times’ Review of ‘Yob Nation’ — Diary of a plagued society by LEO MCKINSTRY
FEAR OF CRIME CASTS AN increasingly dark shadow over modern British society. We seem to be beset by problems such as binge-drinking, drug-taking, antisocial behaviour, aggressive mugging, and gang warfare. Many liberal commentators have argued that this perceived decline in social cohesion is an illusion, fuelled by a reactionary press and nostalgia for a mythical […]
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Unsentimental education — Book Review
IS THERE ANYTHING new to say about public schools? Some great books have been written about them, most notably Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious and devastating satire Decline and Fall (1928) and William Golding’s fable about public school morality, Lord of the Flies (1954). These classics, and a raft of others, portrayed these revered, eltitist institutions as […]