Evening Standard: Inspiring Girls International: New video hub launched to inspire the next generation of global female leaders

A charity working to give girls around the world access to female role models, has launched a landmark new online platform.

Inspiring Girls Video Hub will showcase stories from inspirational women of all nationalities in a bid to raise the aspirations of girls worldwide.

Influential figures from broadcaster Mishal Husain to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joined Inspiring Girls founder Miriam Gonzalez Durantez to mark the event at a global summit in London on Wednesday.

Hosted by Google, Thursday’s launch saw local schoolgirls participate in interviews, networking sessions and workshops, and gain advice from women who have excelled in their chosen fields.

Guardian: Humanists UK launch religious-free assembly materials for schools

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.

Family, Education, Media Article, ReligionSarah NorrisNovember 4, 2019Lando Educationeducation, religion, schools, faith, 1944 Education Act, Humanists UKComment

The Guardian: Too many children are unhappy. We need to let them know they are not alone

It 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.

Family, Charity, Media ArticleSarah NorrisOctober 20, 2019Lando EdcuationThe Guardian, children, campaign, mental health, Children's SocietyComment

The Guardian: We should be alarmed by schools' creepy plan to monitor students

This 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.

Family, Education, Media Article, TechnologySarah NorrisOctober 20, 2019Lando Educationthe Guardian, monitoring students, Florida, school, Big BrotherComment

The Times - Warning: boomerang children don’t bring financial returns

Grown 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.

The Times: Manchester pollution study tackles ‘invisible school bully’

Six 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.

The Guardian: Exam board AQA to pay out £1.1m over rule breaches and errors

Watchdog’s reprimand comes after failings such as markers re-marking their own work.

The exam board AQA is to pay more than £1.1m in fines and compensation for a string of rule breaches, errors and failings in GCSEs and A-levels that regulators said could seriously undermine public confidence in the qualifications system.

Ofqual, which oversees school exams in England, said it had levied its largest ever fine on AQA after 50,000 appeals for exam papers to be reviewed or re-marked, spread across three years between 2016 and 2018, were carried out by AQA staff who had already marked the same papers.

Business, Education, Media ArticleSarah NorrisOctober 18, 2019Lando EducationThe Guardian, exam board, AQA, reprimand, fines, rule breaches, Ofqual, appeals, examsComment

The Times: Beating screen time curbs is child’s play

Children 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.

The Guardian view on creativity in schools: a missing ingredient (Editorial)

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.

Education, Media Article, ArtsSarah NorrisOctober 18, 2019Lando Educationcreativity, The Guardian, schools, edcuation, governmentComment

The Times: California gives pupils a lie-in to boost results

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.

Education, Family, Media Article, ScienceSarah NorrisOctober 16, 2019Lando EducationThe Times, California, lie-in, pupils, schools, educations, teenagersComment

The Times: The other Brexit effect: more pupils see a future in politics

It can sometimes feel as though Brexit has triggered only frustration and fury in a country that barely used to think about the mechanics of the EU.

But analysis of the subjects chosen by children for their GCSEs, A-levels and degrees shows that the 2016 referendum result has had one unexpected effect — a huge increase in the number of young people studying politics.

The number of teenagers sitting the subject at A-level has jumped from 14,195 in 2016 to 18,240 this year.

Higher Education, Education, Media ArticleSarah NorrisOctober 16, 2019Lando EducationThe Times, MPs, training, teenagers, a'levels, Brexit, EUComment

The Guardian: Excluded: former pupils in spotlight in play about school system

In a Victorian Gothic church behind Harrods in west London, a group of young people from troubled backgrounds have gathered to rehearse a play about school.

Excluded is a new production, set in a turbulent GCSE class in a Londonsecondary school in 2019, that attempts to shine a light on the problems faced by vulnerable young people within the education system.

The content of the play is close to home. At an early workshop exploring the issues, it emerged that all but two of the young performers had been excluded from school. Some are care leavers, some have mental health problems, others have been young offenders. Many have been affected by the consequences of knife crime, which they link to the increasing number of exclusions.

BBC: How women students put a rocket up Cambridge

Women's long struggle to gain fair access to university is commemorated in an exhibition opening next week at the University of Cambridge library.

What's most shocking, perhaps, is that it's all so relatively recent - with women not allowed to graduate from Cambridge on equal terms until 1948.

For teenagers currently filling in their university applications, it would be hard to imagine that within living memory at Cambridge there was such blunt discrimination.

The "Rising Tide" exhibition shows the level of resistance, including violence, against women wanting to study at Cambridge with equal rights to men.

This includes the remnants of a firework thrown by protesters in 1897 as they rioted against the revolutionary idea of women getting degrees.

But in the end it was the women who put a rocket up Cambridge, rather than the other way round.

Education, Higher Education, Media ArticleSarah NorrisOctober 16, 2019Lando EducationBBC, women students, Cambridge, Cambridge University, womenComment

BBC: Royal National College for the Blind threatened by financial crisis

One of the country's most historic educational centres for young blind people is warning that financial pressures are threatening its survival.

The Royal National College for the Blind, which has operated for almost 150 years, says without extra funding it will cease to be sustainable.

Lucy Proctor, chief executive of the college's charitable trust, has blamed a squeeze on special-needs budgets.

But the government is promising a £700m increase for special needs.

Media Article, CharitySarah NorrisOctober 16, 2019Lando EducationBBC, Royal National College for the Blind, blind, financial crisisComment

The Guardian: Why mathematicians just can’t quit their blackboards

Another year, another wave of students trampling across autumn leaves, making their way to their first lectures heady with a cocktail of excitement, apprehension and a nasty hangover. But while every year brings new faces, one feature of the academic landscape remains ever-present: the huge, imposing blackboards.

Now photographer Jessica Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has thrown a spotlight on this workhorse of academic endeavour, travelling across the US and beyond to capture the blackboards of mathematicians.

The Times: Don’t close private schools, open them up

This social divide is much deeper in Britain than it is in other countries. In America, though there are some swanky schools, regular prosperous families send their kids to the local state school. In France, Italy and Germany, private schools tend to be for the religious or the troubled. It is only in Britain that the professional classes willingly go without holidays to ensure that their children are educated apart from the great majority of their compatriots.

The divide is much more important than it used to be. The top private schools used largely to be patronised by the cream of society (thick and rich). But as the growth of the “knowledge economy” outpaced that of the manufacturing industry, and children’s educational achievements increasingly determined their futures, they became highly selective and highly academic.

The Guardian: School gates 'breeding ground' for vaccine myths, says NHS chief

School gates can be a “breeding ground for harmful myths” about vaccines, the chief executive of NHS England has said, as he called for a zero-tolerance approach to misinformation about their alleged dangers.

Simon Stevens said it was often the parents who did their best to find out more about the impact and effect of vaccines on their children who were liable to be deceived by “fake news”.

“In this way the school gates themselves can be a breeding ground for harmful myths to catch on, spread and ultimately infect parents’ judgment,” he wrote in the Daily Mail.

The Times: Trash TV makes boys ‘less intelligent’, researchers claim

In the 1980s glamour came to Norwegian TV: out were staid documentaries on fjords and the leather industry, in were flashy game shows and the Scandinavian version of Blind Date.

Some 30 years later researchers have spotted an unexpected side-effect — the earlier boys were exposed to cable television the worse they did in IQ tests.

Family, Media ArticleSarah NorrisOctober 13, 2019Lando Educationtv, television, the times, Norwegian study, cable tv, IQ tests, europe, media artcileComment

The Times: Mother’s data-mining algorithm knows best

A director at the world’s most successful strategic consulting firm has brought the data-mining techniques of her day job to a decision with which many parents wrestle: how to help offspring choose a university course.

Tera Allas, director of research and economics at McKinsey and a self-confessed geek, said that it came as “no surprise” to her family when she launched a fact-based analysis and created a “prioritisation algorithm” to help her daughter weigh up courses.

The Times: Power of violin helps transform problem school

An inner-city secondary school that transformed behaviour and results after giving every new student a violin and three years of music lessons could have its success replicated across the country.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Nicola Benedetti are patrons of the scheme, which is being taken beyond London for the first time and eventually aims to reach every school in England.

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