September 2014

England's Department for Education has bowed to pressure from Ofsted and agreed to appoint 8 regional education commissioners (and a super, 'national' commissioner to keep an eye on the other 8).  Their role is to oversee the ~4000 free schools and academies in...

On Monday the 4th of August, at 2300, a small group of people from the village I live in met to plant an oak tree to "remember the start of the 1st world war in 1914".  This was the day and time the British...

The Economist's Schumpeter column reports that Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong venture-capital outfit, has appointed an algorithm to its board of directors.  VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences), having run the numbers, gets to vote on which...

Why is it so difficult for most institutions to do well in both the NSS national student satisfaction survey, and in the green league?  Only Exeter has managed to get close to squaring this circle recently by being 13th in the green league (2013) and...

After Sustainability Denial, Hope, Retrieval is a new book by John Foster.  The blurb says: Dangerous climate change is coming. Some people still deny that it is happening, others that it is now too late to prevent it. Both denials spring...

You can still come across poor presentations at conferences, and often these are not because of incompetence, but owing to a poor attitude towards the audience, one that is frequently rooted in insecurity. I sat through an ECER presentation of...

The transport system is so good here, and my expectations of it, so low, that I arrived at my first meeting over twenty minutes early.  I then made the mistake of looking at my map for the building I was...

This is an extract from the latest e-message from Think Global’s Chief Executive, Tom Franklin: As you may know, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will be including ‘Global Competence’ in its ‘PISA’ international measurement of different countries’ education...

I am at the ECER conference in Porto – my last.  This is the first full meeting of the new Network 30 – environmental and sustainability education research, which has been guided into existence by the commendable Per Sund. The...