News and Updates

This autumn, trials will go ahead in the South West of England to test the suitability of controlled shooting as a method of culling badgers in an effort to combat the problem of bovine TB (bTB) in England, to test...

What an odd title, you might think, given that NZ was the first country to have universal suffrage.  However, you might like to read the admirable and utterly irrefragable Bronwen Hayward on the latest efforts in Christchurch to rebuild a...

It is hard to know which is the more disturbing – a politician ordering an exam board to raise candidates' GCSE grades, or the board meekly saying "Yes sir, of course, sir.  Very happy to oblige."  The latter, probably.  Both...

On my more bleak days, I think this is government policy, but all I have to do is to read one of Mr Gove's speeches to be myself again. Actually, it's the title [ No Child Left Thinking – democracy at...

The outcome document from Rio+20, The Future we Want, has something to say about education.  Something, but not very much, despite UNESCO apologists' (and the overly-optimistic) talking it up. This is the education-specific text for which we might have some...

The research on the effectiveness of sustainable schools that colleagues and I carried out at the University of Bath some while back has been reinstated on the DfE website.  You can find it here.  This was originally removed when all that...

I have come across Play England rather late in life.  Its purpose is to ensure that children and young people in England have the space and opportunity to play freely as part of their daily lives, at school and other services,...

The latest edition of the SEEd E-Newsletter contains this statement from an experienced ESD primary school teacher in relation to what she took away from SEEd's 2012 sustainable schools conference ... “To go back and remember to include pupils and...

The BBC had a programme the other week, 'Greening the Military', which looked at how British (and other) armed forces are increasingly having to take account of the environmental impact of their activities.  This is part of the BBC's blurb for...

It is reported that the Secretary of State for Education (for England), Michael Gove, is exempting further categories of taxpayer-funded schools from having to employ teachers with formal qualified teacher status (QTS).  The  Guardian reports the DfE as saying: "Independent...