What’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 Article£19 billion lie – how Mr Blunkett fiddled the figures
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 ArticleRich 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 ArticleSystem failure – the story of one headteacher’s nightmare
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 ArticleRadical solutions: lessons from Holland
If Tony Blair can do it, then so can we. Let us think the unthinkable. Repeatedly.
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 ArticleThe Big Cheat – the problem with rising standards in schools
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 ArticleTruancy and exclusion in schools
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 ArticleA book about schools
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...
View ArticleChris Woodhead and his unreliable facts
They really don' t know . The world of education is rather like the world of the Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena. A few years ago, the magazine totted up the number of reports which...
View ArticleThe former education secretary admits all
Lord Baker is laughing . He is recalling the dark suspicions he aroused when he ran the department of education in the late 1980s. He dismissed them at the time as the whining of an establishment that...
View ArticleCritical Mass: the research that supports the ideal of comprehensive education
At its root, the idea of a comprehensive school rests on the possibility of using bright middle class children as an asset for the educational system, to be distributed like fertiliser to help the...
View ArticleThe killing of the comprehensives
Once upon a time, in the late 1960s, well-meaning politicians accepted the most progressive idea in the history of British education. They decided to establish a national network of new schools which...
View ArticleHow the government used and abused educational research
The greatest dream of all good experts is to find a government who will listen and turn their research into reality. Some succeed. Peter Mortimore did. But the greatest frustration for any expert is to...
View ArticlePoverty and education: the evidence
This is the secret that everyone knows: the children of poor families are far less likely to do well in school than those whose parents are affluent. For the last ten years, this has been almost buried...
View ArticlePoverty invades the classroom
This is the moment. The teacher with the Bleeper has legs like an ostrich and takes the stairs three at a time. Within 30 seconds, he has reached the classroom which has called for help and there, he...
View ArticlePoor Places series 1 – the school
There is a small boy in the playground, probably about eight years old, and he is crying while his young mother stands and looks away. In a flat voice, she says “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. “Shut...
View ArticleThe thief who tried to change
No one ever said it was going to be easy. Daniel had spent years getting in and out of trouble. He'd been thrown out of school without taking his exams, he'd fallen out with his parents, he'd started...
View ArticlePoor People series 4 – the thief’s tale
The little thief sits on the old park bench with his chin on his chest and his feet in the dust, wrapping a long blade of grass around the knuckles of his hand and trying to explain his dream. Do you...
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