Graduation – a guide for parents

June 30, 2015, 1:49 am

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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.

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Student accused of being a terrorist for reading book on terrorism

September 24, 2015, 2:00 am

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Staffordshire University apologises after counter-terrorism student Mohammed Umar Farooq was questioned under Prevent anti-extremism initiative

A postgraduate student of counter-terrorism was falsely accused of being a terrorist after an official at Staffordshire University had spotted him reading a textbook entitled Terrorism Studies in the college library.

Mohammed Umar Farooq, who was enrolled in the terrorism, crime and global security master’s programme, told the Guardian that he was questioned about attitudes to homosexuality, Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida.

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Ron Greenall obituary

July 1, 2018, 9:37 am

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My friend and colleague Ron Greenall, who has died aged 81, worked as a history teacher in adult education for most of his career.

Born in Salford to Mary (nee Hooley), a former mill girl, and William Greenall, a police officer, Ron went to Salford grammar school (1948-55), the London School of Economics (1955-58), and then the Institute of Education, in London, where he trained before becoming a history teacher at Mitcham grammar school in south London in 1959. In the same year he married Rita Gibbs, a student nurse.

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We made a film to get women talking about their pubic hair. Here's why

December 16, 2016, 9:12 am

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Our video was created for student TV, but was published by several national media outlets and sparked fierce debate. Which is precisely why we made it

Pubic hair – or a lack thereof – became a talking point this week after several national media outlets, including The Daily Mail and The Mirror, published a video we made for our student TV station. In it, we asked female students at Bristol University how they groom their lady gardens – and the responses have kick-started a debate that is long overdue.

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Dramatic changes in the place of creative arts in the curriculum | Letters

July 1, 2018, 10:01 am

≫ Next: Faith school zealots are abusing girls’ rights. Ofsted is correct to censure | Catherine Bennett

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A plea from members of the National Association for the Teaching of Drama, and a reminder that artists can often be persuaded to visit schools for nothing

Andria Zafirakou and her Artists in Schools project are inspiring and so very welcome (Teacher to use $1m prize to bring back the arts, 27 June). But we mustn’t lose sight of re-establishing the arts as an integral part of the curriculum. We, the undersigned, have been trying to draw attention to a creative arts discipline that is in danger of being lost.

In the second half of the 20th century a new educational practice developed. It used the art forms of drama and theatre to explore any area of the school curriculum and of life that a teacher and her class wished to address.

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Faith school zealots are abusing girls’ rights. Ofsted is correct to censure | Catherine Bennett

June 30, 2018, 10:00 pm

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Claiming religious freedom is no defence for keeping female pupils in ignorance

I long to know which story by Arthur Conan Doyle was judged, by the censors at Yesodey Hatorah senior girls’ school, to be so contaminating to young female minds, that bits had to be hidden. Did it feature cocaine? Bare wrists? Or was the presence, within the same room, of Holmes, Watson and an unchaperoned Mary Morstan more offensive to leaders who also redacted sections of a text on Elizabethan England that mentioned, Ofsted reports, “the Queen’s supremacy”.

These, anyway, were just two of the extensive educational oddities uncovered by Ofsted inspectors: their new report ranks the Haredi-run school as “inadequate”. It found: “Leaders do not encourage pupils’ respect for other people because they do not acknowledge some groups in society.” The word “homosexual” was, for example, redacted in text about the Holocaust.

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Should children be banned from using mobile phones in the classroom?

July 1, 2018, 1:00 am

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France will be banning mobile phones in schools from September. We consider the pros and cons

Many have seen the debate framed by France’s decision to ban mobile phones in schools from September this year. The fact is schools here are unlikely to respond well to an edict from on high, nor does the question have to be about mobile phones, but specifically smartphones. There is a pretty persuasive argument for urging all schools to go smartphone-free. I have never argued the internet is a bad thing, it’s a fabulous resource for children but the fact is that it wasn’t designed with them in mind, and overuse or misuse of it does present some clear problems for children.

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'Vilified too long': Teachers' unions fight back after supreme court ruling

July 1, 2018, 3:00 am

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In Pennsylvania, organizers go door-to-door to make a personal case for educators as a court decision threatens union funding

Gunshots ring out from the nearby hunting range across the railroad tracks in Westmoreland City, Pennsylvania, but Jason Davis is not easily deterred.

“You never know what’s going happen when you knock on someone’s door,” says Davis as we get out of his car to start walking the hills of this blue-collar, Trump-supporting community in the foothills of the mountains of south-western Pennsylvania.

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Government guarantees EU students' fee and loan rates past Brexit

July 1, 2018, 4:01 pm

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EU applicants to English universities in 2019 will be eligible at same rates as British students

European students applying to universities in England next year – after Britain’s formal exit from the EU – will be eligible for student loans and tuition fees at the same rate as domestic students, the government has announced.

Damian Hinds, the education secretary, said undergraduates from EU countries attending English universities from September 2019 will incur the same annual tuition fees as their English peers and have access to the same government-backed student loans for the duration of their degree course.

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10 things teachers want to say to parents, but can't

June 9, 2014, 11:20 pm

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The long school year is coming to an end and one primary teacher has a few things to share

• 10 things parents want to say to teachers

1 Your kids are not your mates

Something I'm starting to hear with worrying frequency within the primary school setting is "my daughter's my best friend". Often, this rings alarm bells. Your kids aren't your mates. You're their parent, and your responsibility is to provide them with guidance and boundaries, not to drag them into your own disputes. Your nine-year-old doesn't need to know about your bitter feud with his friend's mother, or which dad you've got the hots for at the school gate. In the years to come he or she may realise that some of their own problems (social alienation, in its various forms, being a prime example) might have something to do with exposure to that sort of talk at an early age. Continue at your own risk.

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Words you can write on a calculator

January 10, 2014, 3:48 am

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If you were ever bored enough in a maths class to turn a number on your calculator into a word you may have only been scraping the surface. There is much more to this art than meets the eye

I own a Casio fx-85gt plus. It can perform 260 functions in less than a second, it can tell me when I've got a recurring decimal and it has a slide-on protective cover so that the buttons don't get pressed when it's in my bag. And even if the buttons do get pressed, I've got two-way power – solar and battery – so I'm sorted.

But as soon as I bought it I was disappointed. If I happened to be bored in a maths class, typed out 0.1134, turned my calculator upside down and slid it across to a friend I wouldn't get so much as a smile. The numbers look too much like normal typeface.

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How to appeal if you fail at university

January 8, 2013, 2:18 am

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Many students are preparing for January exams right now. But what will they do if their results aren't what they'd hoped for?

What do you do if you fail a university exam, or worse still, get thrown off your course completely? Usually you accept the verdict and admit that the work you produced wasn't up to scratch. But what if you are convinced you have a really good reason why you shouldn't have failed?

Here are my top tips, gleaned from first-hand experience as a barrister, for students who want to appeal without getting professional assistance.

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Top 10 podcasts to help you learn a language

February 9, 2015, 4:45 am

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From videos in Japanese to news in German, language blogger Lindsay Dow recommends her favourite podcasts to keep you motivated and inspired while improving your skills

I became a language addict way back in the early noughties thanks to Shakira. Since then I’ve gone on to pursue a degree in French and Spanish with the Open University, and I’ve also studied Mandarin, Italian, German and various other languages along the way. With formal studying never quite being enough, I’m always looking for other methods to engage my language learning brain, podcasts being one of them. Here’s a few of my favourites:

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

February 23, 2015, 11:30 pm

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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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Thinktank issues new report on madrasas

November 28, 2011, 12:05 pm

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A new IPPR report finds that though many are very good, a significant minority of madrasas, supplementary schools for Muslim children, have poor teaching standards, use corporal punishment and do not conduct CRB checks on staff

Seven four- and five-year-olds stream into the classroom and sit down quietly. All look extremely smart in impractical white uniforms. Books are taken out and the pupils turn to where the class left off last time.

This is no ordinary reception class. It doesn't start till 6pm, and the children in the classroom at Crown Hills community college, Leicester, will spend the next 90 minutes studying Arabic and prayer. Welcome to Crown Hills madrasa. Ahmed Burani, "five and a half", says he loves coming here five days a week. He particularly likes Arabic. "I know my numbers and colours," he says proudly.

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'Panic attacks and crying': how the new GCSEs affected pupils

June 22, 2018, 4:03 am

≫ Next: A plague o' both your houses: error in GCSE exam paper forces apology

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Many of those doing revamped exams report mental health problems and extreme stress

Pupils have delivered a damning verdict on the revamped GCSEs, saying they have caused mental exhaustion, panic attacks, crying, nosebleeds, sleepless nights, hair loss and outbreaks of acne.

About half a million 16-year-olds sat the tougher exams, which were initiated by the former education secretary Michael Gove and tested for the first time this summer, with grades ranging from 9-1 rather than A*-G.

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A plague o' both your houses: error in GCSE exam paper forces apology

May 26, 2017, 7:56 am

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OCR exam board faces censure after question on Romeo and Juliet implied that Tybalt is a Montague rather than a Capulet

One of England’s biggest exam boards has been forced to apologise after thousands of students sat an English literature GCSE paper with a mistake in it.

The error appeared in an question set by OCR about the character Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet. It implied he is a Montague when he is in fact a Capulet.

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Exam board rules on punctuation are wrong, wrong, and wrong

May 31, 2016, 7:43 am

≫ Next: How researchers can help the world face up to its 'wicked' problems

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Linguistics expert David Crystal tells Hay festival that school advisers are ‘not aware of complexity of decisions they are asking kids to make’

Is that a tall, dark, and handsome man standing over there? Or a tall, dark and handsome man? The vexed question of commas, where to use them and where not to, was raised at Hay festival by the linguistics academic David Crystal.

Both of the above are correct, he said, but he criticised the Department for Education for not realising that, and for allowing exam boards to wrongly penalise children. He said the current guidance for schools “leaves a huge amount to be desired, especially in areas of punctuation.

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How researchers can help the world face up to its 'wicked' problems

July 1, 2018, 11:30 pm

≫ Next: Banning school skirts is a dangerous trend. Here’s what we should do instead

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We’re running out of time to deal with issues like climate change. Researchers must work at a local level to effect change

Sometimes, the sheer weight of the social, economic and environmental “wicked problems” in our world can leave us feeling frozen, unable to take any kind of action. But these are exactly the kinds of problems that researchers everywhere can help with – especially if we use methods that include and draw attention to the communities most affected by them.

First, let’s define our terms: the concept of a wicked problem dates to the 1970s, when two researchers used it to describe problems with no obvious or clear solution. Today, they’re also thought of as problems for which time to find a solution is running out.

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Banning school skirts is a dangerous trend. Here’s what we should do instead

July 2, 2018, 6:49 am

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This change in school uniform policy is trying to address bigger issues – misogyny, upskirting and sexualisation – and ends up blaming girls. A gender-neutral approach would be much wiser

Is the school skirt – usually navy or black, always knee-length until rolled up in defiance (or, in adult hindsight, vulnerability) – on the brink of extinction? Maybe. Does it matter? Definitely. According to an analysis of uniform policies across schools in England, at least 40 secondaries have banned girls from wearing skirts in favour of a gender-neutral uniform for everyone. The future for 11- to 16-year-olds appears to be trousers.

Now Wide Awoke is a massive fan of trousers and all things gender-neutral for moral, aesthetic and practical reasons. In schools, where belief systems are formed and bullying is rife, a gender-neutral uniform policy demonstrates a commitment to equality, the inclusion of transgender and non-binary pupils, as well as basic common sense. Try scaling a climbing frame in a knee-length skirt with zero give in it. Or just sitting on the floor with your legs crossed. Now add the low embarrassment threshold of your average secondary school pupil. And a highly sexualised and vaguely threatening atmosphere. Possibly a period. See what I mean?

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