Bill Scott's blog
Thoughts on learning, sustainability and the link between them
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Campus Fugit
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...
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Can you forgive him?
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...
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Adrift somewhere between Delight, Indifference and Despondency
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...
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The Impact of Sustainable Schools
The Department for Education has provided some data on the downloading of the "Evidence of Impact of Sustainable Schools" report that Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, Elsa Lee and I produced last year for the DCSF – with much help from the...
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Lament for History's Lost Narrative
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...
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ESD in Schools to be Compulsory
In a surprise move today, Michael Gove has announced that a study of sustainable development is to be made compulsory in English Schools from September 2012. The Department for Education has confirmed that there will be three elements to this:...
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What some students have to put up with
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...
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UK Census Form Illustrates the Chaos that is FE
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...
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OECD Confirms UK School Grade Inflation
In its recent economic survey of the UK, the OECD devotes a significant part of its comments to a critique of how grade inflation in tests and public examinations [SATS & GCSEs] has obscured a poor performance when compared internationally...
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The Trouble with DfID is ...
I've lost count of the number of discussions and conversations I have these days where someone starts a sentence in this way – and it usually ends, one way or another, with a complaint that DfID is [shock] promoting current...
