This Easter Monday, members of the National Union of Teachers voted in favour of a motion for strike action this summer. The threat of industrial action reflects an ever deepening rift between teachers…
It is believed that at least 25 schools in Birmingham are now being investigated in response to allegations of what the media and city council are routinely describing as “takeover” bids by “hardline Muslims…
With the creeping rise of exam results over the past few decades, many have questioned whether standards are really as high as they were in the past. More worrying still is whether pupils in the UK can…
It’s no longer enough for children just to be able to read, count or multiply. With computers now doing many mundane repetitive tasks for us, many jobs in today’s world require analytical skills and the…
I have often argued that I would not let any teacher into a school unless – as a minimum – they had read, carefully and well, the three great books on education: Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Émile and…
What would you do with $1m? One lucky teacher may have to start thinking. Entries are now open for a new $1m Global Teacher Prize, launched by the Varkey GEMS Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Dubai-based…
The recent debate in the House of Commons on the cost of going away during the school holidays has reignited a long-running concern about price banding in the tourism industry and the educational impact…
Who should teach the teachers? The answer seems obvious. The best teachers should teach the teachers in the way that the best cooks teach the cooks. That’s the apprenticeship, the craft or “sitting with…
England’s 164 state grammar schools form a distinctive but controversial part of the nation’s education system. These schools are distinctive in terms of their high levels of performance – one consequence…
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have…
Do you become a teacher through intellect, reading, discussing, thinking and writing about the issues? Or is it a collection of behaviour, responses, routines and techniques that can only be learnt by…
Manu Kapur, National Institute of Education of Singapore
Learning from mistakes, errors, and failure seems intuitive and compelling. Everyone can relate to it. But if failure is a powerful learning mechanism, why do we wait for it to happen? Why can’t we design…
The issue of teaching character, which until now has mainly been debated within the ivory towers of academia, is suddenly all the rage in policy circles in the UK, in the wake of the report by the All-Party…
For more than a decade, Singapore, along with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Finland, has been at or near the top of international leagues tables that measure children’s ability in…
In 2016 the Department for Education (DfE) will radically overhaul their school league tables and replace their five A* to Cs grades measure with a new approach measuring results across pupils’ best eight…
There is a common misconception that genes are deterministic and that human potential is fixed at birth. This could not be further from the truth. We, as behavioural geneticists, see no evidence whatsoever…
Teaching assistants can help children improve literacy and numeracy skills if they work in small groups with specific pupils known to have low attainment levels, new reports indicate. The findings appear…
Proposals to allow schools to start looking after two-year-olds go to the heart of a long-standing tension in education policy: is early childhood provision about childcare for working parents or is it…
It is not very often that an education story is the lead item on the BBC’s Today programme, but the apparent sacking of Baroness Sally Morgan as chair of schools inspectorate Ofsted and comments by its…
Are you a teacher? When you are at a party, a wedding or in the pub, and asked: “What do you do for a living?” – what do you say? Why might you lie? Is it too boring? Too complicated? Much too likely to…