News and Updates

Years ago, I saw a grainy VHS video that explored the wide range of primary schools that existed in Rhode Island.  What struck me was their diversity and how parents could choose a school to fit with how they thought...

Click here, to read Herman Daly on The Fracking of the Limits to Growth.  Here's a brief taste: The first Woodlands Conference in 1975 was a great success.  Its theme was “Alternatives to Growth.”  In addition to the Meadows, speakers...

The ever-alert Learn from Nature pointed me to an article in a recent Observer on how the rate of climate change is likely to outstrip nature's speed of adaptation.  The article reports a paper in Ecology Letters, an on-line journal,...

PlantsOut! is a pressure group formed to resist the steady rise in non-English plants found in the countryside, gardens, planters, window boxes and vases generally. Today, their website announces a new partnership with UKIP to resist the flood of Bulgarian,...

Those of us following Kelly Teamey and Udi Mandel's progress round the globe via their blog will not have been particularly informed by last week's piece in the THE, even though we might have been a little bit disappointed at...

The Education Forum carried a sharp article recently on Gove, history and the history curriculum.  It's here. This will make pleasant reading for all those who despise Gove's overly-political influence on the school / national curriculum – and that not...

A recent THE carried a story about Ofsted and university ITT courses.  It runs, ... Universities have suffered under Ofsted teacher training inspections since Michael Gove unveiled plans to increase school-based training, in what some claim is a politicised inspection regime...

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) are working "with experts" (that excludes me) on the development of a new guidance document for higher education providers on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).  An initial draft looms,...

I cast a jaundiced eye over the Guardian's university league table the other week, and not just to see how Bath was doing – rising majestically, since you ask (but keep your Kipling open at the right page). Reading on,...

It’s not widely known, but, when the UK's Vice Chancellors last marched on Whitehall, they did it to this chant: What do we want? More leadership development materials ... When do we want it? At the end of the next...