April 2014

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove is clearly a Drifters fan – well, aren't we all; I'm always thinking about being somewhere under the boardwalk, down by the sea. However, the cerebral Mr Gove, as you might expect, rather...

Sadly, however, the OECD only praises them for minimising gender differences in attainment.  Boys and girls now do equally badly, it seems.  This is not what equal opportunities was supposed to be about. I searched the report in vain for...

UE4SD – University Educators for Sustainable Development – is a new project on professional development and ESD in universities, working across Europe “to locate and capture recent efforts to support the development of ESD capabilities of university teaching staff.”  The...

Every once in a while, some Think Tank or other publishes a report (the contents of which it usually takes pains to accept no responsibility for) about the brain / green washing of delicate young minds by politically-motivated teachers and...

In my time, I have sat through many a cheerless meeting trying to fathom the relationship between ESD and EFA, with Venn diagrams and other aids to understanding usually thick on the ground.  It’s a popular myth that EFA /...

Well, if you are, and you are open-minded about globalisation, and want to help your students be the same, you might well look at this week’s Schumpter column in The Economist.  But, if you’re not, and you want youngsters to...

I hear that the redoubtable Sara Parkin has been appointed to the Board of the Higher Education Academy [HEA], and the welcome sound of feathers being ruffled is already audible.  This is evidence I'm told, by those who know about such...

Thursday evening's BBC Radio 4 PM programme had an interview with the Defra secretary of state, Owen Patterson, on England's failed pilot badger culls.  You can listen to it here, at around 40 mins in. The consistently admirable Eddie Mair...

Here are the IPCC's headline statements taken from its Summary for Policymakers Observed Changes in the Climate System Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia....

I took part in a Twitter encounter [ #ASEChat ] between the ASE and NAEE the other night with environmental education as the focus.  Although I never quite discovered what the purposes were,  just having an encounter seemed  almost worthwhile...