Should all schools, whether government, Catholic or independent, be forced to follow a centrally designed and monitored curriculum? And should this central curriculum be imposed upon schools regardless…
Children’s access to high grades at GCSE is determined by our examination system, which assigns grade limits in some subjects. Known as tiering, this means that some 16-year-olds sit a foundation GCSE…
A Level results are in and as teenagers pore over their grades, a record number will be able to take up places at university. The results – which show a small decline in the overall pass rate for the first…
Teenagers across England are waiting nervously for their GCSE, AS and A Level results. Now new figures have shown more of them are choosing to take more “academic” subjects, such as the humanities, languages…
The Donnelly-Wiltshire Review of the Australian Curriculum is due at the end of the month. We know a bit about what the reviewers thought before they began, but what have submissions to the review told…
Ukraine’s recent political crisis, a pro-Russian separatist movement and violence in the East has yet again drawn attention to the competing loyalties of Ukrainian citizens. Ukraine gained statehood in…
Our world is changing at a greater pace than ever witnessed before. Our economies are changing and our understanding of the world around us is changing. Our education systems must also change too because…
The process of reform in any complex organisation is difficult, uneven and subject to being blown off course by events. In two recent articles in the Conversation I have drawn attention to the cultural…
In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…
Ask a parent what a school should teach and they’ll tell you, “When my child leaves school, I want them to be able to understand money, to work well with others, go to university or to get a good job…
Subjects need to be seen once again for what they are. They are divisions of human knowledge made in order to advance knowledge in universities or to teach existing knowledge in schools. Academics and…
Science evokes images of Bunsen burners, coloured liquids, vapours rising from flasks, white coats and safety goggles. But are we making too much of the rigid assessment of the practical parts of science…
Ever-envious of Singapore’s much-heralded success in teaching maths, politicians are keen to see its methodology arriving in UK classrooms. Education minister Elizabeth Truss explained some of the background…
The public response to a recent article in the Guardian on a campaign for more children to study art history at school left me thinking about what more we can do to shrug off stereotypical views of the…
The closure of the secondary section of the Al-Madinah free school in Derby will be celebrated by those who oppose free schools and what are euphemistically labelled “faith” schools. Whatever the stated…
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…
Computing is an important subject, but it is only one of many that schools have to teach, and few would argue that it is more important than English, maths, or science. But as a high-profile debate continues…
It’s been a big week for education. Amidst all the confusion and politics on school funding of the last week there have been a couple of repeated mantras by the federal education minister – namely that…
There has been a high profile debate recently about the merits of teaching so-called “21st century skills” in the new Australian Curriculum. The national curriculum, some argue, has too much focus on these…
In the last week of the campaign, some naggingly familiar comments came out from the Coalition. Then opposition leader Tony Abbott said he wanted to see the national curriculum in history changed because…
Campus and Secondary Principal at the International School of Geneva's La Grande Boissière, Research Associate at the University of Geneva's department of Education and Psychology, Université de Genève, Université de Genève