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Big up Stormzy. But Oxbridge must do more for black students | Jason Osamede Okundaye

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The star’s scholarships are welcome, but the top universities need to engage and support more BAME young people

Stormzy is the people’s champion. In the past two years, he has proven himself to be one of the most committed public figures to furthering the interests of young black British people. He has made surprise appearances at youth sports days, access conferences and even singing at a funeral for a fan. From sponsoring Oxford University alumna Fiona Asiedu to take up a place at graduate school at Harvard, to launching the publishing imprint #MerkyBooks in partnership with Penguin, Stormzy has kept us on our toes, eagerly anticipating his next big move.

So I was proud to participate in a photoshoot last Friday to announce his latest initiative: a scholarship fund to cover the tuition and maintenance fees of two black students a year to study at my alma mater, Cambridge. Against the background of A-level results day and celebrations for those achieving top grades and entering their first choice of university, the scholarship has been met with roars of praise, hashtags of #blackexcellence and black students eagerly asking how they can secure one.

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Aretha Franklin’s voice ripped and caressed ... and liberated black girls like me | Candace Allen

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Until she came along, we swayed on the sidelines. Then, suddenly, we were enraptured and empowered

That voice, in 1967. Before the homage, the titles, the analyses and even the wonder, it was that voice, penetrating our ribcages, grabbing up all that we were and ever would be, laying down and providing beacon light for our ways out of no way. Most every single one of us who were black girls in 1967 has our own personal Aretha story that has been generating smiles and tears. Here is mine.

Related: Aretha Franklin obituary

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I managed to become a doctor, despite my devastating A-level results

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After missing the grades I needed for medical school, I found another way to realise my dream

It was August 2007; I stood in the classroom, surrounded by my school friends, clutching the large brown envelope that contained my A-level results. I wanted to become a doctor and had the next five years of my life all planned out. I opened the envelope to find three As and two Bs staring back at me. My heart sank.

Related: ‘I ran to the toilet and cried.’ A-level students whose results were a lesson in life

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The Guardian view on higher education: more egalitarianism please | Editorial

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The UK government’s review into post-18 education must recognise that it is clearly a good that would benefit society if more widely available

Has the engine of education concentrated ability of a certain kind under the latest changes? It would certainly seem so. Students in England receiving their A-level results on Thursday were the latest to do so under a revamp wrought by Michael Gove when he was education secretary. They are part of a move away from grades awarded on the basis of coursework to marks based on a final exam in such subjects as geography and drama. The result seems to be the persistence of trends in educational achievement – with girls continuing to outperform boys in most subjects and sciences attracting more entries. This will encourage the backers of this approach to laud it.

Adopting this outlook means considering the downsides. We must beware of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values. After all, 1.5 million children took A-levels and 3.8 million people took vocational qualifications. To the government’s credit, it has belatedly realised that there needs to be a serious look at post-school technical and academic options. When Theresa May launched her wide-ranging review in February of post-18 education, it was expected to take a year. However, with the chaos in government engendered by Brexit, no one is sure where Mrs May’s review is going.

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A-level results are out, but what about those not going to university? | Fiona Millar

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A significant number of young people are turned off by traditional higher education. They should have a decent alternative

This year’s A-level results day saw grades down slightly, universities awash with places, and signs that young people might be starting to vote with their feet, and not in the direction successive governments have predicted. What is going on? For the past 20 years, encouraging more young people into higher education has been a central aim of education policy. Until now there was no real reason to think this plan wasn’t working.

Around a third of all school-leavers go on to higher education at 18, and that figure rises to almost 50% by the age of 30. But a survey tracking aspirations for a university education among pre-GCSE pupils released on Thursday by a social mobility charity, the Sutton Trust, suggests that the wind might now be blowing in a different direction. The trust has been monitoring aspirations for the past 15 years and reports a falling proportion of young people who think university matters. The survey also shows there is still a marked difference in attitudes towards higher education between students from different social backgrounds.

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A-level results: foreign languages suffer further slump

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Number of people studying German fell 16%, while French also experienced steep decline

A-levels in traditional foreign languages have suffered a further slump, with the number of people taking German falling so steeply that it has been overtaken by Mandarin.

About 3,000 students sat German A-levels, a drop of 16% on last year and a 45% fall since 2010. French, the most popular modern foreign language, also suffered a steep decline, as part of a shift by students away from humanities towards the stem subjects of science, maths and computing.

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Top cancer scientist loses £3.5m of funding after bullying claims

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Nazneen Rahman resigned from post before disciplinary action could be taken

One of Britain’s leading cancer scientists has had £3.5m in grant money revoked after allegations of bullying by 45 current and former colleagues.

Prof Nazneen Rahman, who resigned from her post at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London last month, is the first scientist to be sanctioned under anti-bullying rules introduced by the Wellcome Trust this year. In a letter to the ICR, her former colleagues accused her of “serious recurrent bullying and harassment” and creating an “intimidating and humiliating” working environment.

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Student finance: here’s how to plan for the start of term

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From loans to accommodation, here’s our guide to managing your money at university
Students on their money: ‘I regret spending a lot on takeaways’

The long wait was finally over this week, with tens of thousands of young people finding out on Thursday morning that they had got into their first-choice university. Thousands of others whose A-level results didn’t go to plan will pick up a place on a course through the clearing process.

But whether they are celebrating this weekend or drowning their sorrows, the next few days and weeks are crucial when it comes to the financial side of getting ready for university.

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What laptop would be best for a student?

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Our daughter is off to university next month and needs a reliable machine for essays and emails

Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and it’s up to you to help him or her out – a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturday’s paper.

Our daughter is off to university next month and is demanding a new laptop. She needs a basic, reliable, hard-wearing machine on which she’ll write essays and do the usual laptop stuff – without costing a fortune. I know nothing about computers – please tell me what to buy her.

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Trojan Horse review – Islamic schools ‘plot’ powerfully revisited

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Summerhall, Edinburgh
A sobering examination of British children caught in media crossfire

In the spring of 2014, what was the Trojan horse? Was it the Islamist doctrine allegedly smuggled into 21 Birmingham schools by a shadowy group of teachers and governors? Was it the vulnerability in the government’s flagship academy programme that allowed corrupt ideology to slip in unnoticed and set to work poisoning our children? Or could the Trojan horse have been the government’s ideology – a divisive blend of free-market dogma and zealotry that found indoctrination where there were only exemplary grades and restrictions where there were only liberal values?

This last version of events is the proposition of Lung’s straight-talking, clear-headed and elegantly presented piece of documentary theatre that revisits the much reported – and much inflated – news story. It exposes the factors that turned what should have been a quick dismissal of a vexatious complaint into the subject of national outrage. Drawing on 200 hours of interviews, as well as material in the public domain, the play’s writers, Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead, make the case that a government fearful that terrorism was being nurtured on its watch, egged on by a rightwing press too ready to believe it, encouraged the over-hasty acceptance of an anonymous document alleging an Islamist conspiracy to game the system.

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‘Teens get a bad rap’: the neuroscientist championing moody adolescents

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Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s studies of the adolescent brain have won her awards. So when she says GCSEs are damaging to teens’ health, perhaps we should listen

Annual media coverage of August’s exam results has traditionally conformed to an unwritten rule that all photos must show euphoric teenagers celebrating multiple A*s. This year, the images may tell a different story. Radical reforms to GCSEs are widely predicted to produce disappointment, and many teenagers are bracing themselves for the worst.

Parents may be unsympathetic, however, if their 15- or 16-year-old spent the exam year ignoring all their wise advice to revise, and instead lay in bed until lunchtime and partied all night with friends. Even if the exam results turn out to be good, many will wonder why their teenager took so many risks with their future.

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Prestigious universities edge out rivals in UK's battle for students

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Less selective institutions bear brunt of demographic decline in number of school leavers

Prestigious universities are squeezing out their rivals in the battle for undergraduates, setting a trend that could continue for several years and place some institutions under greater pressure to attract students to secure their funding.

The shift comes as the university admissions clearing house, Ucas, reported that record numbers had been placed on university courses a day after hundreds of thousands of students received their A-level results across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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‘I regret spending a lot on takeaways’ – students on their money

How to cope with disappointing A-level results

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Thousands of students missed out on their university choices last week. Five people talk about their experiences and why a setback can be a spur to succeed

Pictures of elated teenagers jumping with joy and stories about high-achieving students gaining places at Oxbridge were all over the news last week. But not everyone has been celebrating A-level success and the publication of the results of new, tougher GCSEs on Thursday will undoubtedly see more pupils unhappy with their grades.

The overall A-level pass rate (grades A*-E) was 97.6% this year, the lowest figure since 2010, and the proportion of students gaining C grades or above dropped from 79% to 78.4% in England, following the introduction of more challenging exams.

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The UK’s creative industries are being choked off by bureaucracy

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Fewer children will collect GCSEs in arts subjects this week, as education reforms stifle a sector also hit by petty regulations

This week thousands of young people will learn how they performed in their GCSEs. One thing we already know is that the number of GCSE music entries is down over the last five years by 8%.

Worse, performing and expressive arts entries have slumped by 26% over the period, while the number sitting exams in media, film and TV studies has dropped by 22% and drama entries are down 14%.

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Learning German is just the job for savvy millennials

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Growing numbers of under-30s are attracted to the language to better their career options

Learning European languages may no longer have much cachet among schoolchildren, but for millennials eyeing the job market, German appears to be more attractive than ever. Growing numbers of young adults aged between 18 and 30 in Britain are learning the language of Friedrich Schiller, Christa Wolf and Thomas Mann, according to the Goethe-Institut, with more than 3,000 people signing up for courses run by the cultural institution.

About the same number of students took a German A-level this year, a 16% drop compared with last year that has caused further angst among education professionals who are concerned that Britain is sliding further into monolingualism as it prepares for a future outside the European Union. Research by the British Council shows that 34,300 students took A-levels in French, German or Spanish in 1997, compared with 19,200 this year and just 17,505 applications for next year.

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How the gap year became a 'gap month' – and the best ways to spend it

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A year abroad between A-levels and university is now a thing of the past. Instead, frugal would-be students are saving up for a life-enhancing month away

Who remembers the viral skit Gap Yah? Probably not Generation Z, which will be too young to remember it. Gap Yah (“I’m literally in Burma”) took aim at posh kids called Tarquin who went on “spiritual, cultural, political exchange things”. This was back (eight years ago!) when making fun of Old Etonians was as vicious as the internet got.

But for Gen Z students, who picked up their A-level results last week, a gap year in a far-flung place may be looking like a far-flung idea. Witness the rise of the “gap month”, the result of an economic climate in which teens are preparing for up to £27,000 worth of student debt and, after that, stagnant wages and soaring rental costs. These gap months are alternatively marketed as “micro gap years”, in the way that bedsits with the square footage of a porch are now “micro flats”.

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An educational system not fit for purpose | Letters

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Distinctions between academic and vocational qualifications are increasingly outmoded argue Pam Tatlow and Roy Boffy

Government reforms to the curriculum and exam assessment are out of kilter with good educational practice and the wider skills and competencies that employers’ organisations like the CBI have identified as being a desirable outcome of the education system (We need an alternative to universities, 17 August). To this list can be added the fragmentation of the school system, an obsession with academies and grammar schools, school performance indicators fixed to favour progression to a limited number of universities and the Ebacc, which has undermined the study of art, design and other creative subjects in schools.

In spite of the media’s obsession with A-levels, thousands of students study for BTecs each year and the majority who enter university now do so with a vocational qualification. Many study for higher education qualifications that are vocational and professionally and technically focused, include placements and projects with employers as well as degree apprenticeships. A third of students enter university when they are over 21, having spent time in the workplace, while others combine study with part-time work and caring responsibilities. These students are more debt-averse and the real national scandal is that their numbers and opportunities are declining as a result of high tuition fees in England. 

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Here is the expensive truth about private schools and student learning | Peter Goss and Owain Emslie

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Many parents believe they are ‘purchasing’ a better education for their children by choosing a private school. Are they wrong?

When Australian parents shell out fees to send their children to private schools, they like to think they’re getting many things for their money. So they may be surprised to learn that superior student growth in literacy and numeracy is not one of them.

Conventional wisdom holds that private schools generally perform better than government schools academically. Many parents believe they are “purchasing” a better education for their children by choosing a private school. But new Grattan Institute research suggests the conventional wisdom may be wrong.

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New GCSEs put pupils under more pressure, say school leaders

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Students to receive results with grades 9-1 after changes initiated by Michael Gove

The tougher standards demanded by the new style of GCSEs being awarded for the first time this year have put pupils under a great deal of additional pressure, according to school leaders.

Hundreds of thousands of pupils in England will receive their results this week, with grades from 9 to 1 replacing the familiar A* to G.

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