Outcry after photo shows female cleaner scrubbing out graffiti celebrating rights movement
Oxford University has said it is “deeply sorry” after a female cleaner was pictured removing chalk graffiti saying “Happy International Women’s Day”.
Sophie Smith, the associate professor of political theory at University College, shared a picture of the scene on Twitter, writing: “What an image for #IWD.”
Continue reading...The performance measure stifles pupils by forcing them to take subjects they do not enjoy, according to NUT survey
The government’s English baccalaureate is stifling pupils by forcing them to take subjects they do not enjoy, in some cases creating problems for motivation and behaviour, according to a survey of schools funded by the National Union of Teachers.
The survey of 1,800 NUT members, carried out by researchers at King’s College London, found a large majority blamed the Ebacc – which is a school performance measure– for narrowing the range of subjects being taught for GCSE examinations, with creative and vocational subjects being squeezed out.
Continue reading...Through her politically engaged books and essays, Doreen Massey, who has died aged 72, electrified geographical scholarship. From the 1970s onwards, her writings on space, place and power inspired generations of geographers and many others, including creative artists and trade unionists. From challenging the tendency to blame poor regions for their own poverty to articulating a progressive politics of place, she shaped a passionate belief that unequal spatial relations could, and should, be different.
Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984) demonstrated that a Marxian approach to uneven regional development and capitalist production could be combined with an attention to the dynamic trajectories and cultures of particular places. The essays in Space, Place and Gender (1994) brought a feminist perspective to the rethinking of power relations. Her concept of “geometries of power” drew attention to the ways in which different people and places experienced processes such as globalisation.
Continue reading...Poll finds 90% of heads had to use cash for disadvantaged pupils to prop up budgets
A majority of headteachers say a new funding system introduced this year to iron out budget inequities between schools in different areas has left them worse off, a poll has found.
Despite the introduction of the national funding formula (NFF) in April, school leaders reported that their budgets were still in crisis, with 80% of schools having to cut numbers of teaching assistants and support staff, and 60% removing teaching posts to balance budgets.
Continue reading...From legal questions about the tenancy to budgeting for bills, here’s how to find the right student property
Moving into your first student house or flat is a rite of passage for a lot of young people. It’ll be your home from home for many months, so you need to find the right property. Whether you’re after a warm place to study or a pre-drinks venue, here’s what to consider before signing up.
Continue reading...From sorting out practical arrangements to avoiding faux pas, follow our guide to graduation day
“At my first graduation I got my boyfriend and best friend to pretend to be my parents,” says doctorate student Lindsay Jordan. “My friend dressed up like Jackie Onassis. It was pretty funny, but I’d rather my real parents had been there.”
Jordan’s parents didn’t attend either her undergraduate or master’s graduation ceremonies, as “they hate travelling and formal occasions”. While they may not be for everyone, graduation ceremonies are a chance for parents to celebrate their child’s achievements – and mark the end of university life. But they can also be expensive, stressful and the cause of family arguments. Here’s how to make your student child’s graduation day a happy one.
Continue reading...One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was from a friend in the restaurant business. If I were planning to complain about any part of my meal or service, he said, I should wait until I had eaten all I was going to eat that night. He illustrated this warning with examples of what can happen to food prepared for awkward customers, and so I’ve followed this advice ever since. It’s a good principle: don’t complain to people on whom you’re relying – unless there’s no way they can wipe your steak on their bum or drop a bogey in your soup.
As with restaurants, so with schools. The difference with schools is that you’re likely to be stuck with them for a lot longer than one meal. So think carefully before putting on your Mr Angry face and marching into the school for a spot of ranting.
Continue reading...My aunt Joyce Fletcher, who has died aged 88, was an educationist who taught in Britain and Nigeria, where she worked on a series of maths books for primary schools, including teacher guides and workbooks, which became widely used. A couple of years ago when she was in hospital, one of the nurses, Nigerian by birth, saw a textbook my aunt had written among her possessions and said, “I learned maths with that book!”
Known to everyone as Joy, she was born in Birmingham along with her twin sister, Sheila. Her father, Arthur Fletcher, was an electrical engineer; her mother, Winifred, nee Russell, had been a nursery nurse before she had children.
Continue reading...Like many people, I view the exclusion of arts subjects from the new English baccalaureate (Report, 9 May) as a major step backwards in our education system. In my first 18 years, living outside Swansea, access to musical training was limited. A violinist gave optional lessons in my grammar school. In charge of the local youth orchestra, the county music adviser couldn’t read a score and conducted from a violin part, leaving me, at the piano, to hold the ensemble together. Succeeding decades saw all that replaced by widespread professional training in music for youngsters, so that our youth orchestras became the envy of the world and numerous star soloists and composers appeared.
The arts are an essential basis for the development of a civilised society. After graduating in music from university, I taught music in art schools and a polytechnic, under the umbrella of so-called “liberal studies”. This gave students a special new dimension to their lives: a few opted for careers in music. Far from being cut, the arts should be more extensively taught, with young people encouraged to cultivate them. Their lives and relationships will be greatly enriched as a result.
Meirion Bowen
London
Few teachers have had quite the impact on so many young lives as my former colleague and friend Derek Fry, a teacher of physics and astronomy at the Grammar School at Leeds, who has died aged 77.
His legacy includes inspiring several pupils to pursue a career in science. More than a dozen former students have dedicated their doctoral theses to him. Derek taught for more than 50 years, the last 18 of which he continued on a voluntary basis following his “official” retirement in 2000.
Continue reading...As with any other millennial, if you asked me if I wanted 10 grand in my account the answer would be yes. Money is good to have: it might not buy you good taste or charisma, but for pretty much everything else there’s MasterCard, right?
But we should be careful to avoid getting carried away with the suggestion made by the Resolution Foundation thinktank, that all 25-year-olds should receive £10,000 to put towards a deposit for a house, a pension or education. The idea is the most headline-grabbing solution in the report from the foundation’s intergenerational commission, but in practice it would be like putting a plaster on a gunshot wound.
Continue reading...Of all the questions flung your way during the stultifying horror that is a job interview, the question whose premise most seductively invites you to lie is: “Why do you want to work for us?” The question bats its eyelids as soft jazz filters in from the background. “You can be whoever you want,” it whispers. “So who you gonna be?”
Up to this point your attempts to bullshit would have been ill-advised in the extreme: tell an interviewer you have a master’s in Portuguese and you’ll come unstuck in your first Skype call to Almada; tell them you can do a handstand and get ready to smash one if not several tumblers of water; but tell a potential employer that you want to work for them because the first thing you said as a baby was their company slogan, and you’ll be driving around in the chief executive’s golf buggy before you can say: “Did that baby just say, ‘Lloyds TSB: for the journey’?”
Continue reading...My friend Janet Walker, who has died aged 82, was a nurse, social worker, scholar, teacher, bibliophile, craftswoman and singer. She left school at 16, but in her 50s gained a BA honours degree in history from the Open University and an MPhil from Leeds University.
By then she had also developed a wealth of knowledge and expertise in archaeology and history, by working on digs and conducting her own research through the partnership between Leeds University department of adult education and the Workers’ Educational Association.
Continue reading...MPs warn that plans to transform NHS mental health services for young people will take too long to effect real change
Government plans to tackle the mental health crisis among young people will fail a generation who desperately need help, two committees of MPs warn today.
Proposals in a green paper to “transform” NHS mental health care for young people through maximum four-week waiting times to access help and improved support in schools will take too long to effect real change, the committees say.
Continue reading...In his series of articles on how psychology research can inform teaching, Bradley Busch picks an academic study and makes sense of it for the classroom. This time: student evaluation of learning
There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren’t always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider student evaluation of learning.
How do schools measure how good a teacher is? Some use value-added metrics, comparing how much progress a student has made (often using test scores) versus how much progress the school would predict they should have made, some evaluate performance by observing lessons, and others ask students to rate their teachers. There are reports that some schools even use students like mystery shoppers to report back on teacher quality.
Continue reading...Which city did Margaret Atwood describe as ‘New York without the garbage and muggings’? Which writer called one London area ‘ungentrified, ungentrifiable’? Pit your wits against our quiz
“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning." Which city was Ernest Hemingway describing?
Bristol
Vancouver
Singapore
Paris
"I love your criminal alleyways / Your dagger-like moon upon the hills,” wrote the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Which city was he describing?
Valparaíso
Bogotá
Santiago
Medellín
On clear days, in which city can you see "beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and patches of thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak and one a little higher", according to a famous pseudonymous novelist?
Rome
Naples
Athens
Palermo
In a memoir, the winner of the 2006 Nobel prize in literature described his home town as follows: "For the more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture." Name the city.
Damascus
Istanbul
Athens
Rome
Which city is the subject of this quote from a famous US playwright? "In this part of [town] you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played …"
San Francisco
New Orleans
New York City
Atlanta
"Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never came here. Here bust is permanent …" Which celebrated contemporary author described an area of London in those words?
Andrea Levy
Hanif Kureishi
Zadie Smith
Martin Amis
“Lost and beaten and full of emptiness”, “a neon-lighted slum” and a place “with no more personality than a paper cup”. But which town is this famous private eye – who admits he'll “take the big, sordid, dirty, crooked city” every time – talking about?
Los Angeles
Chicago
New York
Boston
Which North American city does Margaret Atwood describe as "New York without the garbage and muggings"?
Chicago
Toronto
Vancouver
Seattle
Which city was described by Charles Dickens as a place where "the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh" and by George Orwell "as a gathering-place for eccentric people, people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent"?
London
Madrid
Barcelona
Paris
"The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game centre crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar ... dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs ..." Which city is full of late-night energy?
Las Vegas
New York City
Tokyo
Berlin
Which war-torn city did Khaled Hosseini describe as follows in his 2013 bestseller? "... the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. [The city's] vivid, arresting details – the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window."
Aleppo
Mosul
Gaza
Kabul
Which city – built to "cut a window into Europe", according to Aleksandr Pushkin – did a seminal novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky describe as "a city of half-crazy people ... there are few places where you'll find so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of a man"?
Moscow
St Petersburg
Vienna
Kiev
Where are the characters of an Irvine Welsh novel when they "go fir a pish in the auld Central Station at the Fit ay the Walk, now a barren, desolate hangar, which is soon tae be demolished and replaced by a supermarket and swimming centre"?
Glasgow
Leith
Aberdeen
Dundee
Which city is this poem about? "We make brilliant music. We make brilliant bands / We make goals that make souls leap from seats in the stands / And we make things from steel and we make things from cotton / And we make people laugh, take the mick summat rotten."
Manchester
Newcastle
Liverpool
Sheffield
13 and above.
Excellent
14 and above.
Excellent!
12 and above.
Well done
11 and above.
Well done
10 and above.
Well done
9 and above.
Well done
8 and above.
OK
7 and above.
OK
6 and above.
Not great
5 and above.
Poor
4 and above.
Poor
3 and above.
Hmmm
2 and above.
Hmmm
1 and above.
Oh dear
0 and above.
Oh dear
Continue reading...Free speech rows at universities have become central to the recent culture war: an easy way to lambast snowflaky students, the latest thing to induce eye-rolling and groans about “political correctness gone mad”. The most recent involves Theresa May, whose portrait was moved from the attic in which it has been mysteriously degrading to be included in a display of famous female geography alumnae at Oxford’s school of geography and the environment.
Students then stuck messages around the painting arguing that, as Brexit trundles on and the Windrush scandal continues, the prime minister’s image went against the diversity and inclusivity that the school – and geography as a subject – should stand for. Academics also argued that an institution with an intellectual responsibility to hold power to account should not be honouring a head of government in this way.
Continue reading...One overslept, one played in cowboy boots and one’s next gig is the royal wedding … five past winners of BBC Young Musician relive the thrill of the competition
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, cello, 2016 winner at 17
What’s your ideal city to study in? University experts QS have released their annual student cities rankings, based on criteria including affordability, student experience, job prospects and friendliness to international students
Continue reading...Headteachers and campaigners say ministers must review policy that leaves poorest families without access to benefits
The government is being urged to review a policy that campaigners say bars children of virtually destitute families from receiving free school meals because of their parents’ immigration status.
Headteachers and campaigners have expressed outrage that pupils who are among the poorest in society are missing out on free school meals because their parents have no access to benefits as a part of a condition known as “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF).
Continue reading...
