Compass apologises for poor quality of some UK food delivery parcels criticised by Marcus Rashford
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A survey found that over 50 per cent of teachers with pupils due to take exams next summer felt they were not on track to get the results they should achieve.
Questions surround next year’s GCSE and A-level exams after ministers, unions and private schools raised doubts that they would run as normal.
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My daughter is back at school and touch wood, there haven’t been any cases of Covid at her school yet. They have cameras in each of the classrooms, so girls in quarantine at home, can join in lessons. However several independent and state schools in London have put entire year groups or individual classes into quarantine, several days after starting back. We have friends with daughters currently confined to home school as a result.
Whatever happens at Westminster, the prime minister knows closing schools again would be political suicide.
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The criminal, the banker and the person who may not make it to 21 are all there, says the artist and film-maker of his extraordinary project to exhibit pictures of 76,000 of the capital’s kids
Earlier this year, the actor John Cleese, now 80, repeated his claim: “London is no longer an English city.” In 2011, he had told an Australian audience: “I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates you’re left thinking: ‘Well, what’s going on?’” He had previously declared: “I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”
In May, he doubled down, insisting his foreign friends felt the same way, “so there must be some truth in it”, and describing London (wrongly) as “the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU”.
We will leave aside the fact that Cleese lives in the Caribbean. His meaning was clear: in a familiar, wilful and tiresome confusion of race and place, he was disoriented by the multiracial and multicultural nature of Britain’s capital.
For his own peace of mind and ossified sense of nostalgia, Cleese should steer clear of Tate Britain for a while. Because next week, the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen’s Year 3 will open there – a display of school photographs from almost two-thirds of London’s primaries. There they stand: more than 3,000 photographs, showing about 76,000 children. The project’s photographers have captured the full range of the capital’s seven- and eight-year-old citizenry: from state, private, religious and special education schools, uniformed, non-uniformed, daffy grins, big ears, long braids, scuffed shoes, ironed headscarves and wild afros.
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Schools are under fire for penalising pupils who suffer from a rare blood condition that mainly affects people from African and Caribbean backgrounds.
Campaigners say schools and workplaces are failing to support people with sickle-cell disease, an invisible condition that affects 15,000 people in the UK.
Sickle-cell anaemia is a hereditary disease in which the body produces unusually shaped red blood cells that clump together, blocking blood vessels. This results in painful episodes called sickle-cell crises, which can last for months, as well as organ failure and, in some cases, death.
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British schools are being offered a programme for morning assemblies that are entirely secular and free of religion for the first time.
All state schools in the UK are currently required to provide an act of daily worship of a “broadly Christian character” under the 1944 Education Act.
But Humanists UK, the campaign group for secularism and non-religious belief, has drawn up an alternative model that takes God out of daily school assemblies, focusing instead on respect for the individual, the environment and justice for the developing world.
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Imagination should infuse teaching of science as well as the arts. Children are not pitchers to be filled with facts
You can’t see it, smell it, hear it. People disagree on how, precisely, to define it, or where, exactly, it comes from. It isn’t a school subject or an academic discipline, but it can be learned. It is a quality that is required by artists. But it is also present in the lives of scientists and entrepreneurs. All of us benefit from it: we thrive mentally and spiritually when we are able to harness it. It is a delicate thing, easily stamped out; in fact, it flourishes most fully when people are playful and childlike. At the same time, it works best in tandem with deep knowledge and expertise.
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Interestingly, we have recently had the should we move to California conversation. We love Suki’s new school and are both keen she stays until the end of her A’levels.
Californian children will be able to stay in bed longer in the mornings after the state became the first in the US to delay start times at most public schools.
The new law is a response to scientific research suggesting that a later start to the school day would improve pupils’ health and generate better educational outcomes.
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School Cuts coalition warns of real-terms cuts despite government’s cash injection
Four in five state schools in England will be financially worse off next year than they were in 2015 despite promises by Boris Johnson’s government of a multibillion-pound funding boost, according to research by teachers’ unions.
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Schoolchildren in deprived areas are being given the chance to learn about enterprise as well as maths.
James Ludlow, head teacher of the King’s Church of England School in Wolverhampton, often stops pupils in the corridor to ask them what they want to do in the future. For years, the answer has always been the same: “I don’t know, sir.”
The secondary school contends with some of the toughest conditions in the country for providing education. Its near-700 students are drawn from 40 different primary schools and speak more than 40 languages. One pupil who joined recently had escaped the war in Syria.
In the past year, however, answers to the head’s corridor question have become far more varied as a new focus on providing careers skills has started to pay off. Pupils talk regularly to entrepreneurs and business leaders and are invited to work at local companies — including the Mount, a plush hotel where visiting Premier League teams stay if they are playing Wolverhampton Wanderers.
King’s is playing a small part in a quiet revolution in schools. Along with English, maths and science, pupils are being taught the skills required to start businesses and thrive as workers in a changing economy that values entrepreneurship as much as it does qualifications in traditional subjects.
At the same time, the push — both by government and private interests — is helping improve social mobility by addressing one of the big inequities in the business world: a shortfall in working- class entrepreneurs.
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