Excuse Abuse – Racism, child abuse and the culture blame game
COMMENT – I had occasion to complain to the BBC last week. Now that I’m in my early 50s, I’ve reached the age where I actually complain, rather than just banging on at…
Gravity, Not Mediocrity – The real reason kids do not always reach for the stars
COMMENT – I’ve been out of the education news loop for a while, dealing with real-life issues of my own (God bless the NHS for saving my mother’s life – a couple of years…
Releasing geniuses from their straightjackets – Cambridge News
Can we really recognise greatness during the school years? Tricia Kelleher explains why good schools should be unleashing the potential of the next generation. More.. Please submit your comments below.
Plan Out – Gove’s cunning plan for education laid bare
COMMENT – Do you remember how Baldrick was forever offering Blackadder his latest ‘cunning plan’? And how these plans invariably ended up being totally ludicrous, like the one in Blackadder III, in which…
Clock Wise? Calling time on Wilshaw’s pay and performance policy
COMMENT – I can’t help it. I’m fast becoming completely obsessed by the increasingly barmy, illogical and paradoxical utterances of Gove and Wilshaw or, as I’ve begun calling them, MichaelDum and MichaelDee. In…
Bacc Passage – Gove gives GCSEs an old-school seeing to
COMMENT – I’m always amused by the notion that changing the name of something will de facto cause all and sundry to believe that the thing itself is better. For example, I’ve always…
Unhelpful Labels – OECD Education Report States the Bleedin’ Obvious
COMMENT – Have you noticed how most educational research, conducted by seemingly elite bodies and organisations, has a tendency to culminate in what Basil Fawlty would have described as a ‘statement of the…
Stranger than Fiction 2 – Gove’s Epic Dickensian Nightmare on Waterloo Road
COMMENT – A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece which mentioned how badly television fiction represents schools. It was with some astonishment, therefore, that I realised this week how wrong I had…
Feeding a Line – The double-talk behind Gove’s selling of school fields
COMMENT – I thought that my last piece said all I wanted to say about the government and school sport, but I should have known better, if only because the Coalition’s ineptitude tends…
Heads we lose – The real reasons why schools find it hard to recruit leaders
COMMENT – I found myself gazing at a photograph of Michael Wilshaw today. It accompanied an article in the Telegraph of 17th November, describing a speech at the London Festival of education by…