The Times: School woos 26 ex pupils to teach

Many youngsters cannot wait to leave their schooldays behind — but one head teacher is so inspiring she has convinced 26 of her former pupils to return as teachers or other staff at their old school.

Rhian Morgan Ellis has formed her very own old boys’ and girls’ club at a secondary school in the Welsh valleys. It includes a former head boy and head girl in her senior management team, as well as a former pupil who started as a dinner lady and is now a support teacher for vulnerable pupils after Morgan Ellis spotted her gift for working with children. All 26 are on the 77-strong staff simultaneously.

Education, Higher Education, Media ArticleSarah NorrisNovember 5, 2019Lando EducationThe Times, school, teachers, secondary school, Welsh, WalesComment

The Times: Schools accused of failing black pupils with sickle‑cell disease

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.

The Times: Children who do puzzles ‘reduce risk of dementia in later life’

Reading 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”.

The Guardian: Teens are making historical events go viral on TikTok – what does a history teacher think?

There is a long-held stereotype that teenagers spend a lot of time online, uninterested in real life events.

People who say that clearly haven’t seen them on TikTok, where they are engaging in the unexpected: teaching history lessons.

Nadia Jaferey, a former staffer for Kirsten Gillibrand, drew attention to the phenomenon in October, when she tweeted out a thread of her favorite TikTok history re-enactments. She linked to several videos where teenagers played out key points in history, with special effects and audio to boot.

I asked a history expert to watch the videos and comment: my old history teacher, Izzy Jones, who is now vice-principal at my old high school in London.

Education, Media Article, Music, TechnologySarah NorrisNovember 5, 2019Lando EducationTikTok, Teens, Teenagers, History, Historical Events, The Guardian, ViralComment

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: 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: 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 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

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: 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.

The Times: ‘Super-size’ class packs in 67 children

It looks more like a lecture theatre than a primary school classroom. Welcome to Broadclyst Community Primary School in Devon, where year 6 pupils are taught in a class of 67 — sometimes with just one teacher.

A Sunday Times investigation has found that cash-strapped primary schools are packing pupils into giant classes to boost their budgets. A school receives between £3,500 and £5,000 a year for each child. More than 559,000 primary pupils were taught in “super-size classes” averaging more than 30 children last year, compared with 501,000 five years earlier, according to our analysis of official data.

Evening Standard: 'Stormzy effect' helps rise in black students at Cambridge University

The “Stormzy effect” has contributed to more black students being admitted to Cambridge University, the prestigious institution has said.

For the first time, black students made up more than 3 per cent of the undergraduate intake, reflective of wider UK society, according to the university.

It said the rise was due to a number of factors, including the "Stormzy effect".

The grime artist is funding the tuition fees and living costs for two students each year.

All things Education, Parenting, Fun and Interesting...

LANDO EDucation

Powered by Squarespace