When US soldier Bowe Bergdahl was released after being held captive by the Afghan Taliban for five years, his father said his son was “having trouble speaking English”. Many will find this statement incredible…
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Education – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 1626 - 1650 of 1825 articles
For many children from Eastern European families, the 3pm school bell on a Friday isn’t the last they’ll see of a classroom until Monday. Many attend complementary schools, voluntary community-led programmes…
Thankfully, nobody speaks academic English as a first language. The English of the university is a very particular form that has specific features and conventions. Sometimes, this is just referred to as…
At the end of last week the government released the autumn figures for pupil absence in English schools. The figures show an ongoing drop in the number of children skipping school. But they also raise…
Inequality and its rise across many developed societies poses threats of alienation and marginalisation and has been a feature of numbers of recent publications. Now research led by Simon Burgess at the…
Women now form 56.5% of the student body, make up 53.8% of the whole workforce and occupy 45% of academic jobs in higher education in the United Kingdom. But their representation declines dramatically…
The English schools inspectorate Ofsted has announced it will be terminating contracts with its three private inspection services providers from September 2015 and will be employing school inspectors in-house…
Children who compete in spelling bees often dazzle with their ability to spell complex words. In this year’s televised Scripps National Spelling Bee, two American teenagers were so good they were crowned…
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…
All children deserve a good start in life, and we know that high quality early years provision can help to support children’s development. Research shows that it is particularly beneficial for disadvantaged…
Brain drain has been a continuing problem in many developing countries for several decades. China is no exception. According to a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were more than…
The recent University Alliance report on quality in higher education brings into sharp focus one of the major issues facing contemporary UK higher education: how we ensure that the sector maintains its…
The recent horrifying spectacle of a disturbed student fatally stabbing his teacher in front of his classmates in Leeds has spurred a national dialogue about how schools should address violence. Perhaps…
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…
When it comes to US public education, few topics engender such heated debate as a new set of maths and English standards for school children known as the Common Core. Since the final standards were released…
Ten years ago, if a school in England was deemed to be failing, there were three broad responses: send in a team of advisors to support the existing leadership, parachute in a “super-head” to turn the…
The Erasmus+ programme, which aims to boost the number of students and staff studying and working abroad across the European Union, started on January 1 2014. It will provide €14bn to 33 countries over…
The upcoming ban on the use of calculators in most maths exams for 11-year-olds in UK schools reminds me of a persistent concern in education: when do the tools we use to learn become crutches we can’t…
Two large Chinese funding bodies for scientific research are promoting so-called “open access” to research outcomes, according to an article in Nature. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National…
“PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…
Chile’s newly re-elected president Michelle Bachelet has announced a radical set of educational reforms that are set to review the country’s market-based approach to primary and secondary education. Bachelet’s…
Richard Walden, chairman of the Independent Schools Association, has claimed that state schools fail to provide pupils with a “moral compass” because of a relentless focus on exam results and league tables…
Imbalances in the share of growth across the regions continue to be deep-rooted, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed. By 2012, the South East was the only region that had only just crept ahead…
Does it matter what we call our teachers? Some academics seem to think so, and have called for the titles “Sir” and “Miss” to be banished from the classroom because they are sexist. Yet their use in the…
As the United States approaches the 60th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown vs the Board of Education Supreme Court judgement that helped outlaw racial segregation in American schools, the mainstream…