Trio of stories about Anansi, the spider from West African and Caribbean folklore, will be available free and with accompanying activities
The Guardian has partnered with the Unicorn theatre to present a free digital theatre series inspired by its acclaimed 2019 production Anansi the Spider.
Read MoreI read about Gui on Monday and was very impressed. I can roller skate and ice skate, but am absolutely useless on a skate board.
Gui Khury lands holy grail of skating while in lockdown
Brazilian surpasses previous record first set by Tony Hawk
The closure of schools in Brazil due to the coronavirus pandemic gave 11-year-old prodigy Gui Khury plenty of time to perfect his skateboarding skills as he became the first person to land a 1080-degree turn on a vertical ramp.
Read MoreI’ve actually known about this for well over a year. I have friends and students at Thomas’s Kensington. I had also suggested that they could possibly buy the current Royal Academy of Dance building. My daughter started her ballet lessons at RAD, so I know the layout well.
EXCLUSIVE: New building planned as popularity soars following Cambridges choosing school
The £19,000-a-year prep school where Prince George and Princess Charlotte are pupils is to start offering places up to age 18 after a huge surge in applications, the Evening Standard can reveal.
Thomas’s Battersea has bought the home of the Royal Academy of Dance next door and will turn the building into a new independent senior school accepting students from September 2021.
Read MoreDavid Walliams has joined a select group of authors to have sold more than £100 million worth of books.
The comedian turned children’s author joins the likes of JK Rowling, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson, Jamie Oliver and Dan Brown in reaching the landmark figure.
Read MoreStories and mathematics have always been woven together in my mind – two foundational ways of looking at the world, not incompatible but complementary. When I was growing up, my mother told me myths and fairytales at bedtime, while my father recounted stories of famous mathematicians and gave me his favourite maths riddles to try to solve. Which is maybe why in my new novel, The Tenth Muse, I try to bring the two together, while challenging the many mistaken assumptions people hold about maths. My protagonist is a brilliant and ambitious mathematician who happens to be a woman tackling one of her subject’s most pressing conundrums.
I hope her journey provides a history of mathematics and the ways it has changed the world, the challenges women in particular have faced in trying to join its professional ranks, and a glimpse of how exhilarating it can be. My favourite kind of maths reveals the outer reaches of the imagination and how in finding a solution it is possible to illuminate an idea. Maths can shine a light on both the simplest and most complex things; the same is true of my favourite literature.
Read MoreOften, gifted kids are referred to as being bright. We want to be careful when labeling them with this because it is not always accurate.
There are a few clear distinctions between the two. For instance, the bright child is a hard worker, while the gifted child tests well. That does not mean that all gifted children do not work hard, but what it does mean is that some gifted children do not have to work hard in order to achieve good grades. As a result, some of these gifted children have learned not how to work hard, but how to hardly work. And who can blame them?
Read MoreWhat happens when you bring together high-school students, teachers, and technology entrepreneurs to experiment with new ideas for learning? Christoph Wittmer talks about shaping the future of education with innovation.
Read MoreItaly is to become the first country in the world to make classes on climate change compulsory in schools, Lorenzo Fioramonti, the education minister, said yesterday.
From September, schoolchildren will dedicate an hour a week to learning about global warming and the possibilities of sustainable development.
Read MoreMyopia rates among under-16s have tripled since the 1960s. Opticians urge parents to send their children outside
An epidemic of short-sightedness is linked to youngsters staring at screens, reading books and doing homework, say scientists — who recommend removing their gadgets and sending them outside for at least two hours a day.
Researchers have found a direct relationship between the time youngsters spend on “nearwork” and myopia. They also predict a surge in the numbers of people who become blind or visually impaired, as people who develop short-sightedness early in life are at far higher risk of serious eye problems when older.
Read MoreThey are denounced for preserving privilege and ensuring the wealthy keep their grip on society’s glittering prizes. But one boarding school charging up to £35,000 a year is accepting pupils from troubled families in a move that could ease the pressure on Britain’s care system.
Kingham Hill School, set in 100 acres of Cotswold countryside near the home of David Cameron, has admitted its first pupil part-funded by local social services. Oxfordshire county council is contributing £14,388 a year to the boarding fees of a girl whose fostering arrangements fell through. The same sum will be contributed jointly by the school and Buttle UK, a children’s charity.
Read MoreEver tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. But try to succeed 85 per cent of the time.
Scientists have discovered that there is a perfect amount of failure, suggesting that those who get the answers wrong 15 per cent of the time while studying have found the optimum difficulty level to stimulate fast learning.
Researchers said that a success rate of 85 per cent, or getting about six of every seven questions or challenges right, was the “sweet spot” for fast learning, explaining that anything above this is too easy and anything below is too difficult.
Read MoreParents should avoid leaving blanks on their children’s school application forms since they risk being assigned to the least popular school in the area, according to experts.
Calling for an overhaul to simplify the system, the Good Schools Guide said parents were forced to conduct labour-intensive research and fill in reams of paperwork during a process that “no doubt favours certain sections of society”.
It notes that there is significant variation in school admission policies, with individual schools demanding different information and using different criteria for admitting pupils. The Local Government Association (LGA) has called for a review to make the system more inclusive.
Read MoreSchools 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.
Read MoreReading fairy tales and solving puzzles with your children could reduce their risk of developing dementia in later life, it has been claimed.
The suggestion came after research found that eight-year-olds with strong problem-solving skills retained them in old age.
Scientists studied 502 Britons born in the same week in March 1946 who took thinking and memory tests at eight and again between the ages of 69 and 71. They found that “childhood cognitive ability was strongly associated with cognitive scores . . . more than 60 years later”.
Read MoreBritish 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.
Read MoreIt feels like something is beginning to shift. It was noticeable during the past few days as we marked World Mental Health Day and many of us shared our stories. The Britain’s Got Talent final was paused for a minute and viewers were asked to talk to each other about their mental health.
Interrupting primetime Saturday night TV to think about mental health would have been unthinkable only a generation ago. Only recently has mental health been seen on a par with physical health. Yet, in the UK, one in eight children and young people are affected by mental health problems. During the Britain’s Got Talent final, we were told there has been a 48% rise in anxiety and depression among British children in the past 15 years.
Read MoreThis year, students in Florida headed back to school for reading, writing and a new Big Brother. The Florida Schools Safety Portal, a statewide database, will collect, sort and analyze sensitive data about students to share with law enforcement. Created in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, the portal is described as an early warning system to identify and assess potential threats. But responding to legitimate concerns about school shootings with a system that invades student privacy and labels children as threats will not make schools safer.
Read MoreGrown children going back to live in the family house cost parents an average of £5,000 a year extra, with sons tending to cost more than daughters, pension advisers say.
Government statistics show that there are a million more young adults aged 20 to 34 living with their parents than there were 15 years ago.
Read MoreSix thousand schoolchildren are to be part of a pioneering project that will monitor the effects of classroom air pollution on education and health.
The project will involve 20 primary schools in Greater Manchester amid concern that air pollution acts like an “invisible bully” that prevents children from realising their potential, damaging health and hindering academic performance.
Read MoreChildren and teenagers are using simple loopholes to circumvent Apple parental controls that are supposed to limit daily screen time, experts say.
They have called for improved, tamper-proof restrictions after details of how to bypass the limits were circulated online.
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