Education
Tales out of school
In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents.…
Don’t let these figures depress you, girls
Are British teenagers suffering from an epidemic of mental illness? Yes, according to a ‘government-funded study’ which found that 24…
Hard lessons
George Tomlinson, the post-war education secretary, declared that politicians should leave exams to the teachers because ‘the minister knows nowt…
As easy as 1, 2, 3…
The amount of nonsense being talked about the new GCSEs in English and maths, whereby exams have been graded 9-1…
London calling
What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know…
Letters
Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the…
Cameron's sinister purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
Generation Snowflake: how we train our kids to be censorious cry-babies
We’re training our children to be thin-skinned, censorious and belligerently entitled
Prue Leith: British hotels still serve filthy food
Why do we assume all doctors are good? We don’t think there are no bad cooks or bad plumbers. But…
The many, many resting places of St Thomas à Becket
A man in full A relic said to contain a fragment of St Thomas à Becket’s elbow arrived from Hungary for…
Equipped for life with a copy of Thucydides
‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled…
300 signatures can be wrong. How about 2 million?
Name check 306 business people signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying that Britain would be better off outside…
Let’s make assisted dying legal for Brightonians
I am having terrible trouble with my hair at the moment. It is lank, flat and lifeless. There are split…
If the Sats-strike parents get their way only the poorer kids will suffer
Tuesday’s protest against Key Stage 1 Sats was moronic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to…
Putting a price on Winston Churchill’s head
Getting a head Barack Obama dismissed Boris Johnson’s accusations that he shown disdain for Sir Winston Churchill by removing a bust…
I have seen classroom miracles at Michaela Community School
It was like being on the set of an inspirational Hollywood film about a visionary teacher who transforms the lives…
Private-school ‘superheads’ are a publicity-seeking waste of time
Private-school ‘superheads’ are wonderful for publicity.They may not be so good for teaching
Why I now believe in positive discrimination
The Prime Minister no doubt knew he would be fanning the flames when he waded into the argument about the…
To survive as a Tory teacher, you have to keep quiet
Surviving as a Tory teacher means keeping quiet
Who speaks up for poor white boys when it comes to their education?
David Cameron can be a frustrating figure at times. He wrote an article for the Sunday Times this week in…
Why Pakistan’s most successful businesswoman should be celebrated
The entrepreneur Seema Aziz has founded 256 schools and transformed the lives of many thousands of people. So why does the West ignore her remarkable story?
Q: What is a good school? A: One that everybody else likes
A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed…
Osborne's ringfence cycle
By now, George Osborne had hoped to have completed his austerity programme. Instead, he finds himself making what is, still,…
Guinness and oysters — or beef and Haut-Brion — in deepest Ireland
We were talking about the West of Ireland and agreed that there were few greater gastronomic pleasures than a slowly…
How education jargon hurts children
Schools are becoming addicted to acronyms. It’s not just silly, it’s dangerous
