‘Schools give poor pupils easier texts’: Ofsted head’s list of areas to improve

September 15, 2018, 11:00 am

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Speaking as the schools body faces criticism, Amanda Spielman tells of anger at teens being given books for younger children

Some secondary schools are failing teenagers from deprived backgrounds by giving them reading material for primary-age children, the head of Ofsted has warned.

Amanda Spielman said she had been angered to find schools setting lower expectations for children simply because of their background. It follows evidence that students as old as 14 are being given English texts designed for primary children.

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Cross-party effort to save state-maintained nursery schools

September 15, 2018, 10:00 pm

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Almost 400 schools are at risk after extra government funding runs out at the end of next year

A cross-party group of MPs has launched a campaign to fight cuts in funding for state-maintained nursery schools, warning that they will worsen inequality in children’s education.

More than 70 MPs, including 12 Conservatives, have signed a letter to education and Treasury ministers urging them to secure the future of 400 maintained nurseries by continuing the current financial support beyond 2020. Among the signatories is Robert Halfon, the Tory chair of the education select committee.

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From the archive: teenagers in close-up

September 15, 2018, 10:00 pm

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The report in the cover story of 12 September 1976 failed to notice the impending punk generation

How sweet is 16, wondered the ‘Teenagers in close-up’ cover story for the Observer Magazine’s issue of 12 September 1976. According to this ‘definitive report on young people in Britain by the National Children’s Bureau… the archetypal 16-year-old here is a long way from the idle and anarchic teenager of legend.’

About 14,000 boys and girls took part in the detailed study. It was the same birth-cohort who were surveyed in 1969 in their final year of primary school, ‘a cross-section through differences of class, affluence and education’.

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Private education spending in Australia soars ahead of other countries

September 11, 2018, 2:00 am

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Global report reveals proportion of public money spent on education dropped significantly between 2005 and 2015

The proportion of public money being spent on private schooling in Australia is higher than in any other advanced economy and has increased significantly over the last decade, a new report reveals.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released on Tuesday night its annual education at a glance report, a major compendium of statistics measuring the state of education across the world.

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Sixth form and FE funding has fallen by a fifth since 2010, says IFS

September 16, 2018, 4:01 pm

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Spending on post-16 colleges cut ‘much more sharply’ than for primaries and secondaries

Funding for school sixth formers has fallen by more than a fifth in the past eight years amid declining investment in post-16 education, according to an authoritative study.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report said funding for sixth form and further education (FE) students has been been cut “much more sharply” than any other area of education, with spending per sixth form student down 21% since its peak in 2010.

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This picture signaled an end to segregation. Why has so little changed?

September 17, 2018, 2:00 am

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In 1957, Dorothy Counts endured a taunting mob to integrate a North Carolina school. Sixty-one years later, her work is being undone

One afternoon in early June, graduation week in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dorothy Counts-Scoggins answers the landline phoneand waits for an update on the white people who want to flee the local school system she was the first to integrate.

“What happened?” she asks me, her voice low, as if she already knows the answer.

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Glasgow University to make amends over slavery profits of past

September 17, 2018, 3:33 am

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University received ‘significant financial support’ from slavery in 18th and 19th centuries

Glasgow University has announced a programme of “reparative justice” after a year-long study discovered that the university benefited from the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds donated from the profits of slavery.

The report states that although the university itself “adopted a clear anti-slavery position”, during the 18th and 19th centuries it received gifts and bequests from people connected to slavery.

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UK children inhaling toxic air on school run and in classroom

September 17, 2018, 10:01 pm

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Tiny particles of black carbon from car exhausts lodge themselves in children’s lungs and can enter the bloodstream and potentially the brain

• ‘I was horrified that children are breathing air this dirty inside the school’

Children in the UK are being forced to breathe dangerous levels of toxic air as they make their way to and from school – and even once they are inside their classrooms, according to new research.

The findings from academics at Queen Mary University in London reveal that young children were absorbing a disproportionate amount of tiny black carbon particles during the school day with potentially devastating health consequences.

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'I was horrified that children are breathing air this dirty inside the school'

September 17, 2018, 10:01 pm

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Head of Holborn primary school shocked to learn air pollution in classrooms far exceeds World Health Organisation guidelines

Children inhaling toxic air on school run and in classroom

Headteacher Gwen Lee had not expected the results to be good but had been unprepared for what the air pollution engineer found.

Levels of dangerous particulate pollution exceeded WHO guidelines in every classroom of the school – and two were more than three times over the limit.

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Blame cuts – not headteachers – for school exclusions | Laura McInerney

September 17, 2018, 10:45 pm

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Damian Hinds should stop pointing the finger at schools – troubled pupils need specialist help that’s no longer funded

Have you heard the stories about headteachers callously excluding children to make their school’s results improve? In a few instances, it’s true. But for the most part, the exclusion figures are not because evil school leaders suddenly care more about exams. The real problem is squeezed budgets. Heads care about every child:what they cannot do is afford to provide pastoral services for all of them.

When people think of excluded children, they often imagine a gobby teenager sent home for wearing an inappropriate skirt or flashy trainers. In reality, schools deal with far worse. Teenagers are often angry and physical violence erupts. In my first year of teaching, I had my ribs broken in a fight and a pupil came at me with scissors threatening to stab me in the eye. Some are intent on physically harming themselves but take others down in the process, setting off fires or throwing around chemicals. Some steal from friends, or plot horrific assaults, or spread indecent images, or bring in weapons. It’s no surprise heads feel compelled to do something to keep the other thousand-or-so pupils safe.

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From Highlands headteacher to Lego’s global director of play

September 17, 2018, 11:00 pm

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The head who transformed a small Scottish school has a new job description: to counter rote learning with play

When Ollie Bray arrived as headteacher of a 450-pupil secondary school in the Scottish Highlands five years ago, it was in need of improvement with below-average pupil attainment. He threw out the curriculum in favour of “joyful”, project-based learning, and today the pupils’ mastery of technology and problem solving attracts visitors from around the world, including tech powerhouses such as Google and Intel.

Now Bray, 40, is moving on from Kingussie High School to a bigger stage: his success has brought him to the attention of Lego, the Danish toy company, which has appointed him to explore ways of establishing play-based learning in schools worldwide. As the director of global initiatives to connect play and education, he will join the Lego Foundation, the company’s education arm, with a brief to counter “an outdated emphasis on standardised testing and rote learning”, which Lego says equips children for the world of yesterday, not today.

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Labour plans to remove incentive for teachers to 'off-roll' students

September 17, 2018, 11:15 pm

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Party says ‘unintended rewards’ need to be revoked for excluding students on basis of predicted GCSE results

Labour has revealed plans to tackle the problem of “off-rolling” in schools, when headteachers exclude students who are likely to do badly in their GCSEs because their results could compromise the school’s performance in league tables.

Recent analysis by the schools watchdog, Ofsted, found that more than 19,000 pupils who were in year 10 of secondary school in 2016 vanished from the school roll by the start of year 11, when they sit GCSEs, of which around half do not reappear in any state school.

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‘End education snobbery. There’s no out-of-work brickie or sparkie’

September 17, 2018, 11:15 pm

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For Angela Rayner, giving every child the best chance is personal – her mother couldn’t read. Now Rayner has a blank sheet to draw up Labour’s ‘NHS for education’

Angela Rayner, shadow education secretary, MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, former careworker, trade unionist, mother-of-three and grandmother-of-one, is seated in her office in Westminster, ready and waiting for our interview. She is impeccably well prepared (notes in front of her, hair smoothed back into a high ponytail) and she speaks at a rate of knots as we romp through the education litany of free schools and academies, Sure Start, “off-rolling”, tuition fees and more.

We are meeting because in less than a week she will deliver a speech at the Labour conference in which she is expected to flesh out the party’s plans for a national education service (NES) in England. It will be an important moment for Rayner. While Labour’s promise to abolish tuition fees is likely to be the big vote-winner, its “NHS for education” has quietly become its big education idea – and Jeremy Corbyn has placed it in her hands.

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Steve McQueen aims to photograph every year 3 pupil in London

September 18, 2018, 1:29 am

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About 115,000 children in 2,410 schools invited to take part in Tate Britain project

The Oscar-winning film-maker and artist Steve McQueen is to create a portrait of thousands of schoolchildren from across London in a work described by its backers as one of the world’s most ambitious art projects.

The photographs aim to capture the nerves and excitement of the 115,000 year 3 pupils starting their academic year in the capital. All 2,410 primary schools in London have been invited to register over the next nine months.

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Rihanna: Growing up in Barbados, school was a grind. But I was lucky

September 18, 2018, 2:19 am

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We must fight for the quarter of a billion young people still denied an education by conflict, poverty, sexism and bad policy

Education is a lifelong journey. We never know everything, but we constantly evolve as we learn more about our communities, this ever-changing world and ourselves.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m still learning. I’ve grown tremendously as an individual through my formal education as well as the global education I have received by travelling the world through music.

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Welcome to Guardian Universities

September 18, 2018, 3:45 am

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Our new site will cover higher education from every perspective

Universities are rarely out of the news these days. In recent months, stories about lecturers on strike, soaring pay for senior staff and fears of university closures have run amid rising concerns about graduate debt, sexual harassment on campus, and a system that still favours the white and wealthy.

Most of these tensions come from a similar place: higher education is changing. We’ve moved from an elite higher education system to one of mass participation. Today almost half of all young people in the UK go to university, and this is altering how we understand universities, what they are and who they’re for.

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Educating Greater Manchester head quits over 'council vendetta'

September 18, 2018, 6:02 am

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Harrop Fold school head Drew Povey, who was suspended over ‘administrative errors’, hits out at Salford council

The headteacher star of Channel 4’s Educating Greater Manchester has quit, accusing the local council of having a vendetta against him.

Drew Povey was suspended from Harrop Fold school just before the summer holidays, along with three other members of staff, after Salford council began an investigation into the school.

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No fresh meat: how to eat vegan on a student budget

September 18, 2018, 7:26 am

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From homemade Vietnamese pho to takeaway tofu scampi, there are plenty of cheap and healthy animal-free options

I first arrived at university to find my whole flat was vegetarian or vegan. It was a surprise to see the fridge was full of Alpro desserts and homemade hummus. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked: we students are six times more likely than our parents to avoid meat.

Students are increasingly ditching animal products for environmental reasons, with four in 10 young people expressing sustainability concerns about their food: just under half (47%) of those who go vegan point to the environmental impact of meat production as a swaying factor.

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Universities must follow Glasgow and own up to their role in the slave trade | Afua Hirsch

September 18, 2018, 10:49 am

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The legacy of slavery in the UK should be studied, starting with universities acknowledging their own history

Pity our universities. They have become globalised into a competitive market, each one’s brand resting on the depth of its history, the accomplishments of its alumni, and the integrity of its intellectual rigour. What happens when these very features turn out to be in conflict? Take the University of Glasgow, for example, one of whose most historic figures, a former student and rector, went on to use his education to assist in the lucrative tax affairs of the slave trade. It’s hard to ignore the story of Robert Cunninghame Graham, receiver-general in late 18th century Jamaica, and owner of numerous slaves.

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Oxford 'spends £108,000' to recruit each extra low-income student

September 18, 2018, 11:00 pm

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New figures reveal scale of challenge as pupils from independent schools still dominate admissions

Oxford University spends more than £100,000 for each additional student from a poor background it admits every year, according to a new analysis of its efforts to improve access.

Figures published in Prospect show that Oxford’s “cost of acquisition” for every extra student from a low-income area admitted since 2009 is £108,000. The data is based on Oxford’s record of admitting about 10 extra students from low-income postcodes each year between 2009 and 2016, spending at least £14m a year on access and widening participation as required by higher education regulators.

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