Rich school, poor school
It is speech day at Roedean College. The string orchestra plays Mozart's Divertimento in D as the parents gather in the Centenary Hall. They have come to hear the Chairman of Council report on the...
View ArticleA £19 billion lie – the big budget boost for schools that turned out not to...
There are many mysteries in David Blunkett's Department for Education, but the greatest of them all is this: where has all the money gone?
View ArticleWhat’s wrong with private schools
Let us begin with the story of what the historian Professor Brian Simon once described as “probably the biggest hijack of public resources in history”. This was plotted 131 years ago when the...
View ArticleSitting and spitting: the excluded and the truants with nowhere to go
One good thing about spitting is that it helps to pass the time. It's morning, about nine o'clock, and down on the streets of south London the school buses have dumped their loads and the playgrounds...
View ArticleThe Big Cheat – fixing the figures to please the education secretary
There were eighteen children in a classroom. All of them had three things in common: they were all studying Macbeth for GCSE English; they had all turned in essays to be assessed as part of their GCSE;...
View ArticleFailing schools and failing solutions
In the bizarre world of Britain's target-driven schools, it is not only teachers who have joined children in cheating to get good results. The Department for Education are in there, too.
View ArticleRadical solutions: lessons from Holland
If Tony Blair can do it, then so can we. Let us think the unthinkable. Repeatedly.
View ArticleThe headteacher, the crack dealers and the system that failed.
It is no longer shocking to hear of secondary school students becoming involved with drugs. It would be shocking but not unprecedented to find primary school students doing the same. However, this is...
View ArticleHow our schools suffer from dodgy politicians and gullible journalists
Nothing I have ever written has produced a reaction like the Guardian series on schools which is now being published as a book - a torrent of readers' letters spilling over with passion, more than a...
View ArticleThe trouble with Chris Woodhead
The kindest thing that critics say of David Blunkett is that he knows he's wrong - he's just forced to implement daft policies by the bullies in Downing Street. There's nothing so kind to be said about...
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