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Wouldn't it be wonderful if the new Duchess of Cambridge were found to have a closet interest in the environment?   Well, NGOs in need of a Patron take note: Kate Middleton has a keen appreciation of the natural world...

Shopping in Waitrose today (I know!), I was, as usual, faced with deciding which local charity to support with my solitary little green token.  The choice was between a local osteoporosis support group, a cat's home (actually: Kat's), and the...

The most recent Schumpeter column in The Economist discussed a recent book: World 3.0: global prosperity and how to achieve it.  The column's headline is: The case against globaloney: at last some sense on globalisation, which gives the reader a sense...

An article in Local Government Lawyer [LGL] at the end of last week reports on a review of capital investment in schools that has criticised the system as "not fit for purpose” and suggested that the public sector had consistently failed...

I watched [part of] the first episode of Channel 4's new "comedy" Campus which was filmed at Bath last year.  I was a bit confused though as I didn't find it funny.  Whilst i know that universities are not supposed...

The news that, despite its lowly position in passing league tables, LSBU is to try to charge its new UGs almost as much as Oxford (and Bath) shows the absurdist position of the new funding arrangements for English universities.  No...

Last Friday's Bagheot Blog recalls a Punch cartoon from just before the second world war which shows a military chap sprinting from a government building to a waiting taxi and crying urgently: "To the Royal School of Needlework – and...

Sitting in a Hay-on-Wye tea shop, reading (what else?) The Guardian, I come across Niall Ferguson's recent blast at school history teaching in the face of what seems like complacency by Ofsted who said in a recent report: "There was...

I have just read, with some despair, an academic's post-UK budget posting to the SHED-ACT [Sustainability in Higher Education Developers Act Network] list serve.  This is what it said: I'm sure by now many of you will have picked up the...

As I read through the 2011 Census form I found myself having many of the thoughts about it that have been widely aired in the press, in particular wondering just how useful such a process really can be for social...