The Times and The Sunday Times

  • Give children rewards and they’ll soon fleece you

    As a teacher, I’ve tried every bribe in the book The news that a mother rewards her 13-year-old daughter with cigarettes when she behaves has confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a while – rewards are, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, positively damaging. A jobless single mother, Tracy Holt, 43, of Gosport, Hampshire, is […]

  • My profession needs a better voice than these morons

    On Saturday the work-shy teachers at the NUT conference backed a boycott of SATs. On Sunday they moaned about too many tough guys going into teaching (if only!). On Monday they demanded an eye-popping 10 per cent pay rise and yesterday they were threatening to strike over the vagaries of sixth-form funding. What next? A […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • A Window on the Heart of Africa

    The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s website was not encouraging. It advised against all but essential travel to the state I was now rattling through in a beat-up Nissan taxi. I was in Bayelsa, in the Niger Delta, a remote region of Nigeria: taking hostages for ransom had occurred here. Near by, local youths had invaded […]

  • Who examines the examiners?

    SHAKING HIS HEAD IN exasperation, my pupil, Nicolas Christodoulou, 16, asked if he could write an e-mail of complaint to the exam board, AQA. It was a bleak February morning and my English class had just read the “pre-release anthology” issued to all candidates studying GCSE English. The idea was for students to read the […]