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

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If you’re disabled, BAME or from low-income background, the barriers to a good education kick in long before university

A thinktank’s suggestion for how to get more students from disadvantaged backgrounds into Oxford and Cambridge– open a new generation of colleges – is the sort of solution that unwittingly tells you much about the problem.

Inequality in Britain’s education system is so entrenched that, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute, the best way for elite institutions to include disadvantaged young people is not to change but to create separate buildings.

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As a pupil, I was not ‘poverty-proof’. At least give children their dignity | Dawn Foster

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A schools initiative encourages teachers not to single out poorer kids. I just wish it had happened earlier

The most recent novel by the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus, begins with a couple fleeing the law after taking their child out of school because he hates the lessons and community so much. It’s an extreme example, but one millions will find it easy to empathise with. Fewer people than you might think seem to have truly enjoyed their formative education and, for those who did not, one theme in particular recurs: the breathtaking cruelty of children. Bullying leaves permanent psychological scarring and young people become adept at learning what hurts, verbally and psychologically. Looks, personality and status are all easy targets, and particularly difficult to change.

Related: Children in north 'face double whammy' of poverty and bad schools

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Seeing the unseen: the exhibition opening up the universe to teenagers

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Scienceworks museum takes a new approach to getting young people interested in Stem subjects – with playful results

Dr Kendall Ackley pushes her fist into the universe: purples and pinks and flashes of yellow, two black holes spin across the screen. As she pushes, the universe responds, concaving inwards. Her fist becomes a “potential well”, its gravity overriding that of the other black holes, pulling them into its orbit.

Ackley was a member of the team of scientists who discovered gravitational waves in 2016. Looking at her work displayed in a tactile, interactive form, she grins: “This is unbelievable. It’s everything that I could’ve wanted to show about how this work goes.”

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Invest in Sure Start as tribute to Tessa Jowell, government urged

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Labour calls for increased commitment to early years scheme late MP helped set up

Ministers have come under pressure to increase their commitment to Sure Start early years centres as a tribute to their political architect, Tessa Jowell, who died of brain cancer at the weekend.

Labour MPs lined up to urge the government to invest in the flagship programme, which was established by the Labour government in 1998 to help give disadvantaged children the best possible start in life.

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Sex education in schools is from an era when the Spice Girls were equality icons | Laura McInerney

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Next year sex education will become compulsory in England – but without teacher training we’ll only repeat the past

Each generation thinks it invented sex, so the saying goes. But perhaps each merely adds a new perspective. I recently saw the 10-year-old daughter of a colleague, nestled in a corner, diligently reading a book at a work event. Like the irritating former teacher I am, I inquired what it was about.

“It’s about two friends,” she said. “One is transgender and the other is bi. But it’s mostly about school and their lives.” All very matter-of-fact. “Bi … sexual?” I checked, trying to contain my surprise. She looked at me as if I was stupid: “Errr, yes. It means you like boys AND girls.”

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Headteachers turn to charities as families sleep by bins

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With schools struggling to help growing numbers of deprived pupils, we look at organisations that can offer practical support

It was a sight Lorna Jackson, a London headteacher, had never expected to see: two pupils at her primary school sleeping behind bins at the station with their parents. “Mum, dad and the two little children were all sleeping on a mattress they’d found. The family had been evicted and the children had very little to eat.”

Jackson’s school, Maryland primary in Stratford, is in a deprived area of east London. As well as suffering homelessness, her pupils are regularly victims of domestic violence. “I realised that my role had changed. Unless I addressed our children’s wellbeing, their education was not going to have impact at all.”

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'These tests only measure a little bit of you' – the teachers' letters that go viral

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Sats tests for primary pupils in England are time for teachers’ encouragement to go viral on social media

It is a ritual almost as established as the exams themselves, but with the year 6 Sats tests for primary school pupils in England starting this week, it is also that time of year when encouraging notes and messages from schools and teachers get the opportunity to go viral on social media.

This year, one of the notes to gain national attention has come from Micklands primary school’s headteacher, Mark Frost. In it, he tells pupils “Here is what you need to do over the weekend in order to be fully prepared for the tests.”

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Mexico’s education reforms flounder as more spent on PR than teacher training

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Five years after Enrique Peña Nieto’s ambitions programme to reform education, Mexico still ranks last among 35 OECD countries

It was a flagship policy of Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto: an ambitious reform programme which would revolutionize the country’s education system, improve standards, tame an all-powerful teachers’ union and crack down on rampant corruption – such as wages for non-existent “ghost teachers”.

Related: 'The help never lasts': why has Mexico's education revolution failed?

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Schools pulled into row over helping transgender children

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As more teens come out as trans, experts clash over how schools should help

Miles Everitt, 18, thinks himself lucky to have been well supported by his school when he came out as transgender. Growing up female, he’d always preferred to wear boys’ clothes and play the male character in online games; at secondary school, after he cut his hair short, many teachers assumed he was a boy. It was seeing a trans character on Hollyoaks and then reading blogs by young trans people on Tumblr that made him realise he could be transgender.

Three years ago he came out in a video he posted on Facebook. His mother’s response was to go into his school at Wadebridge, Cornwall, to talk to Miles’s “awesome” headteacher, Tina Yardley: “She went in, and said, ‘My child wants to be called Miles,’ and she [Yardley] was like, ‘That’s fine. We’ll make sure all teachers call him that from now on’.”

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Does music really help you concentrate?

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‘I won’t be able to focus if you turn that off,’ a gazillion teenagers have whined at their parents. Is it possible that they’re right?

Many people listen to music while they’re carrying out a task, whether they’re studying for an exam, driving a vehicle or even reading a book. Many of these people argue that background music helps them focus.

Why, though? When you think about it, that doesn’t make much sense. Why would having two things to concentrate on make you more focused, not less? Some people even go so far as to say that not having music on is more distracting. So what’s going on there?

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Dear Damian Hinds, here’s what your schools minister can learn from Eton | Michael Rosen

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Nick Gibb thinks the ‘core purpose’ of school is to prepare pupils to compete for jobs. Eton college disagrees

I see your hands have been full with inventing a way to price up university courses based in part on how much “value” they give “to our economy”. (Clearly not medicine, say: doctors are too busy keeping unproductive people alive.)

When it comes to religion, though, value to the economy doesn’t come into it: you’re going to allow new faith schools to take in more than 50% of pupils on the basis of their religion: more state subsidised segregation, then. Again, while Theresa May revealed that we don’t have an education system that “serves the needs of every child” (we never knew!), you told Andrew Marr on the BBC that you are enthusiastic about wanting to expand existing grammar schools. You didn’t say this means in effect that you want to expand non-grammar schools. I look forward to you explaining how increasing the number of 11-year-olds labelled as not good enough to go to grammar school will “serve the needs of every child”.

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10 things academics say students get wrong in exams

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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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Parents: not happy about something at school? Here’s how to complain

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Your daughter’s homework isn’t being marked. Your son’s been put in detention for no real reason. What’s the best course of action? A teacher writes …

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.

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Are Soas students right to ‘decolonise’ their minds from western philosophers?

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Outraged headlines erupted when students launched a campaign to challenge the great western philosophers. We went to the source of dissent – London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – to investigate

“They Kant be serious!”, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroe-ish tone. “PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus”. “Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare”, trumpeted the Times. The Telegraph, too, was outraged: “They are said to be the founding fathers of western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that figures such as Plato, Descartes and Immanuel Kant should be largely dropped from the curriculum because they are white.”

Whiteness is not a useful category when talking of philosophy. When people speak, they speak ideas, not identity.

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Inside story: Who betrayed Anne Frank?

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Who really turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Gestapo? As Dutch historians reopen the archives in search of fresh evidence, one man claims to know. Anton Ahlers says his anti-semitic father betrayed them - for money. He talks for the first time to Ori Golan

On a warm summer's day on August 4 1944, four Gestapo policemen raided a canal warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. The eight Jewish people hiding in the annex there were arrested: Otto Frank, his wife and two children; the van Pels family of three; and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. They were taken to Westerbork Kamp and from there herded into cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz. Of the eight, only Otto returned.

During the raid, a policeman emptied Otto's briefcase to fill it with the fugitives' valuables. In his haste, he dropped a batch of papers and a small diary belonging to Otto's daughter. This diary, the diary of Anne Frank, was to become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.

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Students demand UK universities take urgent action against racism

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Exeter University students who say they were subject to racist abuse call for systemic change in handling of prejudice

Students at the University of Exeter are calling for urgent changes after a spate of racist incidents, which they say are happening on campus and within student societies.

Chris Omanyondo, Arsalan Motavali and Roman Ibra, all 21, have come forward to the Guardian to describe incidents of racism, including one in which they allege Ibra was called a “nigger” by a group of fellow students, who also allegedly used the word “Paki” and made offensive comments about burqas and 9/11.

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Never go on Twitter after an exam – here's why

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Post-exam discussions about what answers you gave have been replaced by social media frenzies, writes a student blogger

Do you want to write for Blogging Students? Find out how here

A few weeks ago, I took my GCSE English literature exam. Everything seemed to go well – the questions were predictably similar to past papers and the unseen poem, (Long Distance II by Tony Harrison,) was easy to understand and empathise with – or so I thought. But logging onto my Twitter account I found a completely different story.

Twitter unintentionally allowed everyone doing AQA English to link into one huge spider's web. A quick search revealed one very worrying tweet: "Wait, what. The dad in Long Distance II was dead too?" Wait, what? This was not something I had picked up on.

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Guardian University Awards 2018 – video

UK military school audit reveals teenage recruits at risk

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Drive to fast-track late joiners at AFC Harrogate led to issues including skewing staff/student ratios in dangerous activities

Concerns over the safety and welfare of 16- and 17-year-old soldiers have emerged in an internal audit that flagged up a string of issues relating to staff, the standard of education and living conditions, the Guardian can reveal.

The audit found that a drive to fast-track late joiners at the Army Foundation College (AFC), which trains and educates teenage recruits, had led to significant issues including skewing staff/student ratios in risk-to-life activities such as weapons training. It also found some staff had not received criminal record clearance before arriving at the college.

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What have the royals ever done for the arts?

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From the RSC to the ROH, Britain’s most prestigious arts institutions are all by royal appointment. But as Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle, is it goodbye Royal Variety Show and hello Royal Reprezent FM?

The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle means many things to many people, but, while loyalists are bagging their picnic spots and unpacking the union-jack party plates, some hard-pressed arts organisations will be taking a longer view.

Once the party is over, reality strikes: a royal wedding means the admittance of a new member into “the firm” – and for them, a lifetime of public patronage. It has already been announced that Markle will become a partner in the Royal Foundation, set up by Princes William and Harry in 2009 as an umbrella for a clutch of charities. Besides youth work, the foundation’s portfolio is dominated by the princes’ preoccupations with the armed forces and conservation, while the charities that will be picked for Markle’s individual support will – in Palace parlance – “reflect Miss Markle’s own interests”.

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