Royal Academy expansion reveals hidden life of art schools

May 13, 2018, 6:43 am

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Sir David Chipperfield’s £56m project includes a subterranean vault, which offers visitors an enticing glimpse of studios

The architect Sir David Chipperfield would be quite happy if you visited his £56m expansion of the Royal Academy of Arts and couldn’t quite tell what he had done. Unlike the British Museum’s Great Court or Tate Modern’s Switch House, the illustrious Piccadilly pile in central London celebrates its 250th birthday with less of a flashy architectural statement than a series of discrete acts of corrective surgery – which, together, promise to transform the entire institution.

“I’m hoping this might take us from one star in the Michelin guide to two or three,” says Charles Saumarez Smith, the RA’s chief executive. “We’ve never really been a destination for cultural tourists before, as there hasn’t been much to see between the big shows.”

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NHS spends almost £1.5bn a year on temporary nursing staff – report

May 13, 2018, 4:01 pm

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Money could pay for 66,000 qualified registered nurses to fill shortfall, according to research by the Open University

The NHS is spending almost £1.5bn a year on temporary nursing staff to cope with shortages, research has found.

The NHS has a shortfall of 40,000 nurses in England, according to the Royal College of Nursing. A report from the Open University, Tackling the nursing shortage, argues that the £1.46bn being spent on temporary staffing to plug the gaps could pay for 66,000 qualified registered nurses.

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Deaf children losing out as English councils cut support, charity warns

May 13, 2018, 4:01 pm

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National Deaf Children’s Society says councils in England cutting educational services by 10%

More than a third of councils in England are cutting educational support totalling £4m for deaf children, according to figures obtained by the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS).

The figures, gained through freedom of information requests, show that councils in these areas are cutting 10% on average from deaf children’s services, which the charity warns are already near breaking point.

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Must do better? Why parents plan boycott of school Sats tests

April 21, 2018, 11:00 pm

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Cheating, pressure to improve results, stress. Now campaigners call for a different approach to assessing children

When children across England start their week of Sats tests next month, 30 primary schools will be under particular scrutiny. That is because children from those schools have performed poorly once they have moved to secondary schools. That has raised suspicions that their good Sats results – more properly known as key stage 2 tests – were the result of cheating. Children from other primary schools feeding the same secondary schools, meanwhile, have performed roughly as expected.

“For example, if the children were predicted 10 Bs [at GCSE], they would get 10 Cs,” said Dave Thomson, chief statistician at Education Data Lab, which carried out the analysis. “I don’t think we can say with absolute certainty why this is happening but it warrants further investigation.”

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Becoming fluent in another language as an adult might be impossible – but I’m still going to try

May 2, 2018, 4:48 am

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If you haven’t started a new language by the age of 10, you have no chance of achieving fluency, according to new research. But one writer is not easily discouraged ...

Learning a foreign language in adulthood can feel like an exercise in futility. At best, you will struggle to find time to practise, lack a support network and never really be able to experience the total immersion required to become fluent.

Your woes may be compounded by a paper published in the journal Cognition, which suggests that those who start learning a language after the age of 10 are doomed to never achieve fluency – and that even basic learning abilities fade by 17 or 18.

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10 things academics say students get wrong in exams

April 30, 2013, 12:46 am

≫ Next: After 30 years of ‘go compare’, English education is a wild west | Fiona Millar

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From lack of analysis to regurgitating lecture material, don't let these 10 common mistakes scupper your chances of exam success

Not many students would admit to enjoying taking exams or writing essays, but if you want to get a degree, they're an ordeal you have to survive.

So we've worked out how to make the whole thing a little less stressful. We've persuaded four academics from a range of subject areas to tell us the top 10 things students get wrong in exams and coursework. This is what they've told us:

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After 30 years of ‘go compare’, English education is a wild west | Fiona Millar

May 7, 2018, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: The way you're revising may let you down in exams – and here's why

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The 1988 reform act led to league tables and the schools market – plus back-door selection and even corruption

School market supporters argue the case for the defence

When Gary Phillips started his career as a young teacher, the education world was a radically different place. There were no league tables, no Ofsted, no academies or free schools. Parent choice and competition had barely registered on the national consciousness.

All that changed 30 years ago this summer with the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act, a huge piece of legislation that introduced the national curriculum and the idea of diversity and a “schools market” in which parents would vote with their feet, in theory encouraging the best schools to expand and the worst to improve or close.

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The way you're revising may let you down in exams – and here's why

May 7, 2016, 1:00 am

≫ Next: I was a poor kid at a wealthy private school. It gave me social mobility, but also a sense of shame

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Most people practise the wrong tasks, reveals a psychologist. Take your head out of those textbooks for a few minutes and read his advice

Even the most dedicated study plan can be undone by a failure to understand how human memory works. Only when you’re aware of the trap set for us by overconfidence, can you most effectively deploy the study skills you already know about.

As a psychologist who studies learning and memory, I know quite a few scientifically informed revision tips: space your practice out rather than cram it all together, practise retrieving information rather than recognising it, reorganise what you’re trying to learn. Probably you’ve heard these before, maybe even from me.

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I was a poor kid at a wealthy private school. It gave me social mobility, but also a sense of shame

June 17, 2017, 3:00 pm

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Scholarships at private schools might be highly sought after, but they cause otherwise progressive people to support institutions that maintain structural inequality in society

I can’t remember why or when I set my pre-adolescent sights on a fancy private high school. I certainly don’t recall being pushed into applying for scholarships when my time was winding up at the local state primary school. If anything, I was the one marching my slightly bewildered and sheepish parents around to open days, on a quest to fulfil my burning desire to make it among the Toorak set. I was an upwardly mobile 12-year-old.

I vividly remember their horror when, while touring us around her sprawling utopia for girls, one principal proudly proclaimed, “When our girls leave they’re shocked by what they find in the real world, because everything is so perfect here”. I turned down a scholarship in her promised land to take up another at a co-ed equivalent widely considered progressive ... on the spectrum of uppity private institutions anyway.

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Artists condemn exclusion of arts subjects from English baccalaureate

May 8, 2018, 9:28 am

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More than 100 leading artists say policy will seriously damage many young people’s futures

British artists’ letter: Ebacc will damage self-expression

More than 100 of the UK’s leading artists have joined forces to condemn the exclusion of arts subjects from the new English baccalaureate, warning it will seriously damage the futures of many young people.

Artists including Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Phyllida Barlow, Anish Kapoor, Jeremy Deller and Antony Gormley have signed a letter, published by the Guardian, calling on the government to rethink a key secondary school policy introduced by the former education secretary Michael Gove.

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New graduates want to be their own boss – here's how to do it

May 13, 2018, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Mental health referrals in English schools rise sharply

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More than half the current crop of university leavers say they are planning go it alone as entrepreneurs or freelancers – what advice could help them make self-employment a success?

As the academic year draws to an end, research has shown that more than half of UK students are turning their backs on graduate jobs to go it alone. According to a study by Solopress, 56% of students are considering setting up their own business, and only 33% are planning to apply to graduate schemes once they leave university. Here are some tips for early self-employment success ...

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Mental health referrals in English schools rise sharply

May 14, 2018, 1:47 am

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NSPCC says number of schools seeking help from NHS mental health services up by more than a third

The number of referrals by schools in England seeking mental health treatment for pupils has risen by more than a third in the last three years, according to figures obtained by the NSPCC.

The charity found that the number of schools seeking professional help for students from NHS child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) was 34,757 in 2017-18, equivalent to 183 every school day. In 2014-15, there were 25,140 referrals.

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Pauline Dempsey obituary

May 14, 2018, 9:39 am

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My friend Pauline Dempsey’s teaching career was spent in primary education in Manchester, where she was an inspirational leader who valued every pupil, believed that most parents wanted their children to make progress and that all staff had crucial parts to play.

Pauline, who has died aged 63, was appointed headteacher at Wilbraham primary school in inner-city Manchester in 1990, and in 1996 moved to neighbouring Claremont primary school, Moss Side, a rundown area where families from diverse backgrounds are often deprived. The school now provides a nurturing environment and good education, and is orderly and happy, stemming from Pauline’s strong leadership until her retirement in 2014.

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Story of a transgender schoolteacher: ‘I limp through life being open where I can’

November 9, 2015, 11:15 pm

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Why do trans people working with children face greater judgment than others? Andy Johns just wishes he could be a true role model to his pupils

Last Monday, primary school teacher Andy Johns (not his real name) arrived in his classroom at 7.20am to make an early start after the half-term break. The cleaners had been in and reorganised things, which threw him slightly. A minor thing, but Johns – who is transgender – was already feeling fragile.

It followed a week of intense media interest in trans issues, which had a profound effect on him. First, there was the campaign to halt Germaine Greer’s planned lecture at Cardiff university because of her controversial views on trans women. Then there was the imprisonment of trans woman Tara Hudson in a male prison, swiftly followed by reporting of the transition of a school lunchtime supervisor in a Cambridgeshire primary school – the school was supportive, some parents’ comments apparently less so.

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Eradicating pupil illiteracy in Scotland

July 10, 2007, 3:55 pm

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Once upon a time, in a deprived part of Scotland, a plan was put into place to wipe out pupil illiteracy within a decade. Ten years on, it's worked. Kirsty Scott reports

It is mid-morning at St Mary's primary school in Alexandria, a bleak, post-industrial town north-west of Glasgow that often features on Scotland's list of areas of multiple deprivation. In Margaret Mooney's primary 1 class, 20 five-year-olds have gathered on the floor at the teacher's feet, pretending to be trains. "Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch," they intone, small arms circling wildly like the wheels of a locomotive.

Mooney turns the page of a giant, colourful book. "This is the one where you are allowed to be cheeky to the teacher," she says, pointing to the letters "th". "What sound do they make?" The children stick out their tongues and blow through their teeth, before dissolving into giggles. "Cheeky, cheeky children," says Mooney. "Let me see how cheeky you can be."

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Food, clothes, a mattress and three funerals. What teachers buy for children

April 30, 2018, 11:15 pm

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Teachers describe how child poverty has become the norm in many schools

In 2014 Gemma Morton, the headteacher of a large secondary school, told Education Guardian her school had helped to pay for the funeral of a student whose family couldn’t afford it, even after they had sold their car. Three years on, she has helped to pay for two more funerals. “When a child dies, nobody’s saved for it,” says Morton. “There is literally nowhere for families to go apart from the people they already know, and most of them are poverty-struck too.”

Over the past few years, as austerity has deepened, more schools and individual teachers are bailing out disadvantaged families because they simply can’t say no. The latest government figures show 100,000 more children propelled into poverty in just 12 months. There are 4.1 million children – nearly a third of the entire child population – living in households on less than 60% of the average income.

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When they ask ‘Miss, are you a lesbian?’, I tell them yes

June 15, 2015, 11:20 pm

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It isn’t easy for a teacher to be out in the classroom. But being seen to be accepted can be of real help to gay students at school

“Miss, are you a lesbian?”

It’s never going to be your favourite question from a student. But at this moment, what could be worse? We were in the middle of filming a documentary, Mr Drew’s School for Boys, in a summer school for boys with behaviour problems. This was the one question I was hoping would not come up on camera.

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Gay and Northern Irish: ‘Teachers called me sissy and compared me to a plague’

September 25, 2017, 11:15 pm

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Campaigners call for swift action as report on LGBT pupils reveals the scale of homophobia faced by young people in the region

David, 15, sporting a Goth-style haircut, is explaining how support at secondary school helped him come out as gay and how the school is a comfortable place for LGBT students. “In primary school, and even in my first year here, I got called ‘gay’ or ‘fruit’ quite a lot,” he says. “A lot of the kids learn these attitudes in primary school.”

David’s school, Shimna integrated college, under the shadow of the Mourne Mountains in Newcastle, Co Down, set out to eradicate such homophobia. It has a Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) group, developed after an English teacher, Shirley Anne McMillan, heard about the GSA groups in US schools. David explains: “What we have been trying to do is change attitudes from when people first come here, so what happened to me doesn’t happen to others.”

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Five secrets to revising that can improve your grades

April 21, 2014, 2:00 am

≫ Next: ‘I was Claire at home, then Mr Birkenshaw the headteacher. It was challenging’

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An expert on revision gives his top five tips on how to revise for exam success

Read more: students share their revision stories

How do you get the most out of your revision time, and end up with the best grades you can? Or, if you're a different sort of student, how can you get the same grades you're getting now, but spend less time revising?

Either way, you need to know how to learn better. And fortunately, decades of research carried out by psychologists about learning and memory has produced some clear advice on doing just that.

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‘I was Claire at home, then Mr Birkenshaw the headteacher. It was challenging’

March 13, 2018, 12:15 am

≫ Next: A few more Oxbridge places for disadvantaged children is just tinkering | Frances Ryan

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A former Hull principal tells about transitioning at school and her campaign to support transgender pupils and staff

A framed letter hangs in the dining room of Claire Birkenshaw’s neat Victorian terrace in Hull. Signed by the last education secretary, Justine Greening, it is a prized possession.

“My ambition is to build a society that is free from discrimination, in any form, and utterly free and equal for everyone,” the letter states. “You should feel proud that, through your openness about your own gender identity, you are directly contributing to this goal – it is going to make a difference to so many.”

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