June 2022

The fuss over OCR's decisions about which poets to feature in its English Literature GCSE seems to have died down since I first wrote about it last week.  In the light of the changes made (fewer poems now by dead...

Gerard Manley Hopkins has been excluded from the OCR GCSE English Literature list.  Happily, Hopkins wrote brilliantly about nature and so is a good candidate to be part of the new natural history GCSE syllabus.  One possible choice would seem...

It's quite something for a secretary of state for education to accuse an exam board of cultural vandalism, but that happened yesterday when Nadhim Zahawi commented on OCR's decision to update its poetry anthology by  dropping its only examples of poems by...

An article in the Economist's Bartelby column this week served to inform and amuse.  But should it have done? It begins: "Few things are more depressing than estimates of how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of...

Another astonishing story about DfE civil servants and my second of the week.  A Schools Bill (about the work of academies) is currently meandering its way through the parliamentary process.  Conservative peers have tabled a motion to delete the first...

An example of DfE civil servants drinking the Kool-Aid was reported the other day.  It seems that rather than referring to girls or female students, DfE advice on free sanitary products in schools referred to "pupils who menstruate", "young people menstruating” and...

Thanks to a recent NAEE weekly news round-up for alerting me to news that the Education and Training Foundation [ETF] has issued Professional Standards for teachers and trainers in the further education and training sector. Under the heading of Professional Values and Attributes,...

I wrote the other day about the 2021 manifesto from Education International.  This post comments on another manifesto: the more recent one from NAEE.  This was launched in early 2022 and you can read a number of comments here.  Before...

The UK government launched its sustainability and climate change strategy in April.  This applies to schools in England. I've written about this initiative a couple of times already but I'm now writing following a bit of reflection after scrutiny of other responses. Although...