Guardian Education News
Schools must earn poor pupil payment, charity tells Gove
Disadvantaged children would be expected to be given priority in order for schools to get incentive reward
Schools would be expected to give priority to poorer children when admitting new pupils and judged on the extent to which they narrow the gap between disadvantaged youngsters and their better-off classmates under plans submitted to government by an influential charity.
In proposals which are being studied closely by education secretary Michael Gove, the Sutton Trust has advised that only schools which agree to give priority to disadvantaged children should get the full benefit of the pupil premium, a new financial incentive to reward schools for accepting poorer pupils.
This funding should be set at £3,000 a child if it is to have an impact, the Sutton Trust's paper suggests.
Schools rated as outstanding by Ofsted should have poorer children automatically entered into their application process, the paper argues.
Ministers are expected to review the school admissions code in the coming weeks amid concern that schools have skewed intakes which do not reflect their neighbourhoods.
The best secondary schools in England take on average just 5% of pupils entitled to free school meals.
The Sutton Trust's paper also calls on government to ensure that academies and parent-led free schools declare how they will deploy resources from the pupil premium to benefit disadvantaged children.
As increasing numbers of schools opt out of local authority control, councils could find a new role monitoring the use of this funding, the charity suggests.
The Sutton Trust, which campaigns to improve social mobility and funds projects aimed at narrowing the gap between rich and poor in education, draws attention to concerns that the coalition's school reforms, by expanding academies and enabling parents to set up their own schools, "will lead to further social segregation among schools and hinder social mobility."
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "This is a really interesting report that we will study in detail. We agree that the attainment gap in our schools is too wide and we need to ensure that children from poorer backgrounds enjoy far greater opportunities in life.
"That is why we are introducing a pupil premium so that extra funding is targeted at those deprived pupils that most need it, as well as reforming the admissions system to make it simpler and fairer for all."
Britain's biggest children's charity, Barnardo's, warned last week that impenetrable "clusters of privilege" are forming around the best state schools. Poorer families are losing out to better-off neighbours who move house or attend church to get a better education, Barnardo's said.
Proposals to make admissions fairer are being looked at as the government confirmed yesterday that more than 140 schools are expected to convert to academy status in the coming school year.
The schools, which are taking advantage of a new law allowing every school in England to opt out of council control, will take charge of their own admissions.
Some fear this will widen the gap between poorer families and their better-off neighbours. Gove said yesterday the reform would give head teachers more control over how schools are run.
"This will give heads more power to tackle disruptive children, to protect and reward teachers better, and to give children the specialist teaching they need."
Gove wrote to every primary, secondary and special school in England in May inviting them to apply for academy status as the government moved swiftly to pass a new law that enabled schools to convert.
The schools converting this year include the first primaries with academy status. Among them is Britain's biggest primary, Durand, in Brixton, south London.
Greg Martin, Executive Head of Durand Academy, said: "The freedom that academy status brings will allow us to deliver and develop a flexible curriculum to ensure that [our] children reach their full potential."
Meanwhile, business leaders will today call on the government to make it easier for the private sector to help run schools.
In a report published today, the CBI welcomed the expansion in the number of academies and plans to set up free schools.
The employers' group urged ministers to set out a clear strategy for business involvement in education. The CBI wants to see more federations of schools set up, in which good schools support struggling ones. These could be run by a business, the report suggests.
It also urged the government to broaden the range of organisations that can set up a free school. Currently, only parent and teachers' groups or charities are eligible.
Susan Anderson, CBI Director of Education and Skills, said: "Businesses have a key role to play in raising educational outcomes, not just by offering students work experience and career support, or acting as school governors, but also by bringing their vast, largely untapped, reservoir of experience to bear in advising, managing and partnering with schools."
142 schools to convert to academies this year
In response to Michael Gove's education reforms, 32 schools will open as academies this month out of 2,000 that have expressed interest since May
Over 140 schools are expected to convert to academy status in the coming school year after the government passed a new law to allow every school in England to opt out of local authority control.
A total of 32 are expected to open as academies this month. It is understood that the majority of those opening are "outstanding" schools, or involved in federations with such schools.
Gove wrote to every primary, secondary and special school in England in May inviting them to apply for academy status while the coalition government moved swiftly to pass a new law to allow schools to take up the offer.
The speed at which the legislation moved through parliament led to accusations that ministers rushed the reforms using a timetable usually reserved for emergency laws, such as anti-terror powers.
Official figures from the Department for Education will today show that six weeks after the legislation became law, only 32 schools have completed the process to open as academies this month, with 142 in total expected to convert over the coming academic year. More than 2,000 schools have expressed an interest in becoming an academy.
Announcing that every school could apply for the freedoms in May, Gove said academies could become "the norm" in England's education system, adding he anticipated a high take-up of his offer. He insisted it was down to individual schools to make the decision.
Schools rated "outstanding" by Ofsted were pre-approved, meaning that those under this category who applied immediately are the most likely to open as academies first.
A spokesman forGove said today: "This is part of Mr Gove's overall vision ? that teachers and heads should control schools, not politicians and bureaucrats."
The announcement comes as children across the country prepare to return to school after the summer holidays.
Among the schools which have converted is Durand, Britain's biggest primary, in Brixton, south London. Jim Davies, chair of governors at Durand primary school, said: "For Durand, gaining academy status gives us freedom to develop and structure education tailored to our intake, supporting each and every child to reach their full potential.
"The Durand Academy will provide excellence in education for children from one of the most socially disadvantaged areas of the UK."
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union said there were concerns that schools had not properly consulted with staff, parents and their local community over decisions to convert.
She said: "However, despite the unacceptable tactics to seek to tempt schools into becoming academies and repeated claims by the secretary of state for education of widespread interest in academy status, only a handful of schools it seems will convert on 1 September."
The reason for "low take-up" is because the government has "misjudged the situation", Ms Keates said.
"Those promoting academy status are bankrupt of strong, persuasive arguments. Assertions of vast amounts of additional money for academies have proved to be gross exaggerations.
"The fact that on becoming an academy a school becomes a charitable company limited by guarantee sits uneasily with many governors and parents. The unseemly manner and speed with which the Academies Act was bludgeoned through parliament has left important points of detail unaddressed.
"But the killer blow is that there is no evidence to present that academy status is the key to raising standards."
You can't judge the value of a degree course by the number of contact hours
Any student willing to engage will get good value for money
The Browne review into the funding of higher education has led to a debate on whether a university education provides value for money. In the last three months, there have been two comment pieces by arts students complaining about the "paucity of teaching" within their degrees and suggesting that the disparity between arts and science contact hours should be reflected in the fees.
I'm entering my third year of a chemistry degree at the University of Manchester and I would not be surprised if, as a result of the Browne review, science undergraduates are asked to pay considerably higher fees without any real debate about whether they actually get more value for money than arts students.
Last year, my fees "bought" between 15 and 20 contact hours a week. Eight hours of lectures, nine of labs, along with regular tutorials and workshops. I got the chemicals I needed to run my experiments, the support I needed to do them safely and the journal subscriptions necessary to place my experiments in context. So far so good.
And what experiments did I do? The same standard set of experiments that were performed last year and will be performed next year. That's not a complaint; learning the basic techniques is an essential part of any science degree. But it does preclude original thinking; all my assessments to date have involved "right" answers that can be logically deduced from the available knowledge.
By comparison arts students, if they are lucky, get six to eight hours of lectures, seminars and tutorials a week. Instead of labs and workshops, they get extensive reading lists: they are "paying for the privilege of reading textbooks". So for three years and almost £10,000 in tuition fees, what do they really get?
Well, for one thing, they get a sounding board for their ideas. Once arts students have worked through their reading list, they're going to have ideas about what they've read and how these ideas fit into the grand scheme of things. At university, they get access to a knowledgeable faculty and, through discussions, can clarify and better express their ideas.
Their fees also pay for the supply and maintenance of the huge collection of books necessary to develop the required depth of knowledge ? otherwise known as the library. It's a telling fact that at the main University of Manchester library, there is part of one floor devoted to science and nearly five wings devoted to the arts.
Another, more abstract, way of looking at value for money is by examining the skills learned through a degree. Again, arts students apparently don't get value for money. What do they learn? How to read a book? How to analyse a theme? Compare that to a science student who has potentially learned the basics of probing the nature of the universe.
Yet the majority of graduate entry jobs simply require a degree, irrelevant of specialisation, so there must be something valuable about an arts degree. All students are essentially taught the same skills; the ability to work self-sufficiently, a toolkit of problem-solving methods and the skills and confidence to apply it in unknown situations.
The more you put in to your degree the more you get out. Those who take the time to seek out lecturers and use all the resources their fees pay for get far higher value for money than those who simply cruise through. Also, whether you're studying 10th-century Norse poetry or the stereochemistry of heterocyclic molecules, degree-level study requires a stupendous amount of work to reach the standard required.
Arts and science degrees are different but equal, and equally valuable. So please, stop demonising science students because we spend more time in labs and less time in the library.
Social class affects white pupils' exam results more than those of ethnic minorities ? study
Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school
A child's social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered.
The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.
They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers' grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals ? a key indicator of poverty ? achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found.
This gap between social classes ? of 32 percentage points ? is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.
For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.
The study ? Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance ? will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow.
It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.
The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.
Professor Ramesh Kapadia, who led the study, said this may be linked to "cultural aspirations and expectations, as well as parental support for education. This appears to have been the case for Indian and Chinese pupils for many years," he said.
A separate study has found that a similar pattern can be identified for children in primary schools: social class is more likely to determine how well a pupil will perform if that child is white than if they are from other ethnic groups.
Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.
Professor Steve Strand, who will present the findings to the British Educational Research Association's conference today, said the effects of poverty are "much less pronounced for most minority ethnic groups".
"Those from low socio-economic backgrounds seem to be much more resilient to the impact of disadvantage than their white British peers," he said.
However, he added that well-off white children may do particularly well because their parents might be "a bit more savvy about ensuring that they go to schools with similar pupils".
"More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you've been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don't necessarily believe that education is going to change that.
"All of these factors may combine to make the effect of socio-economic status remarkably strong for white British kids."
Meanwhile, headteachers' leaders have warned secondary schools to consider axing subjects that few pupils take to cope with imminent budget cuts.
The Association of School and College Leaders told the Times Educational Supplement that A-levels in foreign languages, for example, could be scrapped. Last week, French dropped out of the top 10 most popular GCSEs for the first time. "Languages in some schools will be vulnerable," he said. "We are already worried about them and this could speed up the decline."
School lotteries fail to help poorer pupils
Middle-class families still dominate best schools despite attempts to close class gap
Middle-class families monopolise the best schools even when a lottery is used to allocate places, according to a study published today.
Lotteries have been seen by some educationists as a way of reducing deep-seated class divisions in the school system. The highest-performing schools tend to cluster in the wealthiest neighbourhoods; if places are allocated according to how near a family lives to a school ? rather than by a lottery ? children from the poorest areas miss out.
Lotteries are said to be used to distribute places in at least one school in up to a third of councils across England. In Brighton and Hove, all pupils have been assigned secondary school places in this way for the past two years.
But researchers have found lotteries alone fail to give poor children a higher chance of attending a top school, and marginally narrow the likelihood they will win a place at a high-performing school.
Their study analysed how far Brighton and Hove's lottery admissions system had improved the chances of poor pupils attending top schools, and who the main winners and losers were when places were allocated randomly.
The researchers, from the Institute of Education, University of London and the University of Bristol, analysed which schools thousands of pupils attended before and after the lottery system was implemented. The study is being presented to the British Educational Research Association conference today.
Brighton and Hove council does not allocate places entirely randomly. Parents can apply to any school, but priority is given to those who live within a designated catchment area. First, a lottery is used to decide who gets a place within a catchment area. A second lottery is used for any spare places that are not filled by those within a school's catchment area. But there are few spare places for children outside the catchment area of the best schools, so the lottery does not help the poorest, the academics found.
Pupils on free school meals ? a key indicator of poverty ? were "slightly" more likely to be at school with other pupils on free school meals under Brighton's lottery system than under the previous system that allocated places to families living nearest the school to which they have applied, the academics discovered.
They also found that when places were assigned through a lottery, the brightest pupils, as well as the poorest, lost out. Pupils with high scores were less likely to attend a high-performing school than they would otherwise.
Rebecca Allen, senior lecturer in the economics of education at the Institute of Education and one of the main authors, said Brighton's lottery system would just lead to families relocating to the catchment areas of the best schools. House prices would adjust and keep the poorest families out of these neighbourhoods.
"It seems unlikely the reforms will substantially lower social segregation across schools even in the long run," Allen said.
"Differences in the quality of housing stock across areas of Brighton are deeply entrenched and the boundaries of the new catchment areas mean that families living in the most deprived neighbourhoods have little chance of accessing the most popular schools in the centre of the city."
The study, on the early impact of Brighton and Hove's school admissions reforms, will be published by the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at the University of Bristol.
Currently a pupil eligible for free school meals is 30% more likely to attend a school with exam results ? well below the national average than an otherwise identical child from a better-off family.
Maths prodigy, now 15, heads for Cambridge
Arran Fernandez, who hit headlines in 2001 for his mathematical prowess, set to become university's youngest student since 1773
At 15, most teenagers are struggling to get their heads around the algebra and equations of maths GCSE. Not Arran Fernandez.
Next month, he will become the youngest student at Cambridge University for 237 years ? aged 15 and three months.
Arran, an only child who has been home schooled, will study maths at Cambridge, the youngest to attend the university since William Pitt the Younger was offered a place as a 14-year-old in 1773.
Arran first made headlines in 2001, aged five, when he gained the highest grade in the foundation maths paper. At the time he said he was considering becoming a lorry driver.
He has now decided he wants to be a research mathematician and find a solution to the Riemann hypothesis ? the unsolved theory about the patterns of prime numbers that has baffled mathematicians for 150 years.
Fernandez will live with his father, Neil, in rented accommodation. He said he would miss his mother, Hilde, who will stay at the family home in Surrey and see her son at weekends and in university holidays.
The teenager plans to join the university's bird watching society and develop his interest in English literature.
"I'm excited about starting the course and advancing my knowledge of maths," he said. "It isn't the youngest bit that is so important to me ? I am more interested in going to Cambridge than comparing myself with other people who go there."
He was not upset that he would be barred from the bar at the college that has offered him a place ? Fitzwilliam College.
"I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. Even if I was 18, I wouldn't want to go out drinking," he said.
His parents said they were very proud of their son, who scored an A* in maths GCSE aged seven and has just achieved top grades in maths, further maths and physics A-level.
He will join the likes of Isaac Newton, who also studied at Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking, who like Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics there. But he will also be following the path of other child prodigies, some of whom have come to regret being separated from their peer group and starting university so early.
Sufiah Yusof achieved a place at St Hilda's College, Oxford University, in 1997, to study maths at the age of 13. But In 2001, she ran away after taking her final exam for the academic year. She was discovered working as a waitress in a Bournemouth internet cafe two weeks later, but refused to return home. She claimed her parents had made life difficult for her and lived with a foster family instead. She never finished her course.
In March 2008, a reporter for the News of the World found her advertising as a prostitute under the name Shilpa Lee. She is now said to be working as a social worker.
In 1985, Ruth Lawrence became Oxford University's youngest-ever maths graduate at 13. She had been tutored by her father. She is now a maths professor in Israel, married with two children and has said she would not want to do the same to her son.
Paul Chirico, a senior tutor at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said Arran had achieved the conditions of his offer to read maths. "Fitzwilliam considers all applications to the college very carefully, regardless of background. Arran was assessed as part of this well-established process and his considerable academic potential was recognised." Children cannot live in student accommodation, because the university cannot carry out criminal record checks on all the other undergraduates.
Margaret Way
My great-aunt Margaret Way, who has died aged 92, taught speech and drama in Taunton, Somerset, for more than 60 years and was an integral figure in the performing arts community there.
Born in Taunton, she took a three-year course when she left school at 17, and began teaching elocution, speech and drama in 1941. One notable lesson in Exeter took place during a second world war bombing raid. After a year's teaching, Margaret joined the ATS, the women's army service. By the end of the war, she had become a captain, in charge of ATS permanent staff at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire.
On her return to Taunton, she rebuilt her teaching career. She established Saturday morning drama courses for primary school children, taught for more than 40 years at St Christopher's school, in Burnham-On-Sea, and was teaching at Queen's College and King's College, Taunton, until earlier this year.
As well as coaching many entrants for the annual Taunton festival, Margaret became a committee member in 1946, a patron of the festival in 1963, lifetime vice-president in 1978, and competitions secretary for speech and drama in 1979, a position she held for the next 30 years. Since 1935 she had also been a member of the Taunton Thespians, directing and acting.
Margaret was passionately committed to her work. She kept in touch with an incredible number of former pupils, and had taught three generations of several Taunton families. She was always cheerful, warm, lively and fascinating. In 2007 Margaret received the Somerset High Sheriff's award and a Taunton Deane citizenship award. She was appointed MBE in 2009.
She is survived by her brother, Michael, her nephew and niece, Robert and Katherine, and myself.
Australian school drops 'gay' from Kookaburra song
Headteacher says he only substituted word 'fun' into Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree to stop pupils sniggering
An Australian school headteacher has asked students to stop using the word "gay" when singing a classic children's song, but today said no offence was intended ? he was simply trying to keep the children from laughing.
Garry Martin of Le Page primary school, in Melbourne, said he instructed students to substitute the line "Fun your life must be" for the original "Gay your life must be" when singing Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree. The song about a native Australian bird is a favourite around campfires.
Martin said he was playing a recording of the song for the students about a month ago when the line "gay your life must be" produced a flurry of giggles throughout the classroom.
Some of the students use the word "gay" as a schoolyard taunt, he said, but don't understand its true meaning. And so, to calm them down, he told them to swap in the word "fun" for "gay".
"It wasn't misplaced political correctness, it wasn't homophobia, there was nothing really calculated in doing it," he said.
"I could've stopped the whole class and gone into a very caring, supportive explanation of gay being quite a reasonable choice in lifestyle that some people make, but I was only talking with seven and eight year olds, and I think that sort of thing is better explained more fully with parents."
His decision erupted into controversy, he said, after one of the students told his parents about Martin's change to the song. Word then spread from the parents to friends to the local newspaper, which ran a story ? and Martin found himself being bombarded with angry emails.
"Some think I'm the devil incarnate," he said.
Crusader Hillis, CEO of the gay and lesbian advocacy group The Also Foundation, did not go that far ? but he did call the lyrical swap an overreaction.
"It sends a signal to people that just because a word has two meanings, that one of those meanings is unacceptable and that's really putting us backwards," Hillis said.
"Even if it's done for good intentions because 'gay' is being used in schoolyards as a slur, I think they need to use the word as a conversation rather than banning it."
Martin said his decision was a mistake made with the best of intentions, and he plans to speak to the students about how different words hold different meanings across generations.
He also plans to ask students to sing the original version of the song. But, he added: "We might not sing it that often now."
Degrees in lap-dancing? | Deborah Orr
It seems qualifications in traditional subjects are no longer useful
Earlier in the summer there were rumblings of rage at the recent trend towards educating half the population to degree level. This expansion appears to have spawned the disagreeable but predictable consequence that university qualifications have been devalued. Then, more recently, the news that one in four lap-dancers have degrees was greeted in some quarters with suggestions that lap-dancing was, ergo, a perfectly respectable career choice for intelligent young ladies. Clearly, fewer degrees in English literature and classics should be offered, to make way for the range of degrees in sex work that must be swiftly established.
Margaret Gray
Margaret Gray, who has died aged 97, was head of the Godolphin and Latymer school in Hammersmith, west London, from 1963 to 1973. Her ability to listen to and empathise with the girls, especially the younger ones, made her the kind of head every school wants.
For all of us descended from the Gray family of Edinburgh, which still has its name above the door of the large hardware shop in George Street, Margaret was the undoubted star of her generation. She was the youngest child of Mary and the Rev Herbert Gray, a Scottish Presbyterian minister who founded the Marriage Guidance Council in 1938.
Margaret proved an apt pupil at St Mary's Hall, Brighton, and a diligent undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, before taking a postgraduate fellowship to Smith College in Massachusetts. Her professional life began in 1937, teaching history at Westcliff high school for girls in Essex. She went on to head the history department of Mary Datchelor girls' school in Camberwell, south London.
In 1952 she took her first headship, at the Skinners' Company's school in Stamford Hill, north London. In 1963 she moved to Godolphin and Latymer. Soon after her official retirement, in 1973, the school lost its voluntary aided status and had to either amalgamate with another school as a comprehensive or go private. It chose the latter, but Margaret was left in a dilemma. She wanted the school to keep what made it special but strongly disapproved of entrance restricted to the wealthy. She launched, and for many years ran, a bursary scheme.
My first encounter with Margaret happened when she was in her 30s while I was doing national service at the air ministry and living in London with two of my great-aunts, strong admirers of their niece Margaret and particularly her "wonderful" driving. I was offered a trip and soon deduced, from her alarming speed between and up to traffic lights, that she was not a woman who wasted time. In Who's Who she listed motoring as a main recreation along with gardening and walking. Even at 91 she was driving around the Scottish Highlands, blessedly free of traffic lights. At school she had used traffic lights outside her office: green for "come in", amber for "please wait", red for "not free for ages".
Margaret was once asked if she had ever been in love. "Yes, but never enough to get married," she replied. She was always surrounded by friends, nephews and nieces, including the journalist Katharine Whitehorn. She finally settled in Kew, south-west London, with two other retired schoolteachers. She was a tireless correspondent and a regular assistant at the local Oxfam shop.
Six to watch: TV schools
As a new term begins at Waterloo Road, which are the programmes it should it be taking lessons from?
This week the nation's kids return to school, all bright-eyed and smelling of hope. Ditto the cast of Waterloo Road ? basically Holby City for former soap actors who don't have complexions that suit medical scrubs ? which will also return for its sixth series tonight.
It's all change at the school, with Amanda Burton's fiery new headteacher replacing Eva Pope's fiery old headteacher, and the likes of Angela Griffin and Denise Welch replaced by someone from Waking the Dead and, later in the series, him out of Spandau Ballet. Still, at least Grantly Budgen ? the marvellously gloomy English teacher with a face that resembles a melting waxwork of Geoffrey Palmer with gout ? is still around. That's something.
So let's ring in the new term ? at Waterloo Road and elsewhere ? by revisiting six of our favourite school-based TV shows. As ever, don't hesitate to remind me of any glaring omissions...
Grange Hill (1978-2008)
The definitive school-based show. Grange Hill ran for so long that several successive generations could each take their own iconic moments from it. Some loved Grange Hill for Tucker Jenkins, some for Just Say No and some for the time that little Kevin accidentally took LSD and got freaked out by a piece of chalk. And the flying sausage. Never forget the flying sausage.
Teachers (2001-2004)
Post-This Life Andrew Lincoln vehicle that destroyed the myth of the teacher as the uptight fuddy-duddy. Instead, Teachers showed that educators could get drunk and have as much casual sex as anybody else. And what's more, they could do it to a soundtrack of forgettable millennial indie music, too.
Please Sir! (1968-1972)
Boasting a theme tune that rivalled even Grange Hill for catchiness, Please Sir! followed the adventures of John Alderton's idealistic new teacher Bernard Hedges in a school where all the pupils appeared to be in their mid-30s. Creepy.
Saved by the Bell (1989-1993)
Like a funnier Beverly Hills 90210, Saved by the Bell showed us how great life was at Bayside high school under the watchful eye of dumbly benevolent principal Mr Belding. Not always that great, as it turns out.
Glee (2009-)
The show that accurately describes what it's like to be a student. So long as you're needy and self-infatuated. And you can't go for more than five or six seconds without bursting into a semi-ironic rendition of a 1980s power ballad. And you mistakenly think that it's clever and cute to add the letters 'Gl' to the start of most things you say. And you're relentlessly annoying.
The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (1983-1985)
Not entirely school-based, but memorable for its classroom scenes nonetheless. Charlie Brown's teacher refused to speak English to her students, preferring to communicate via a bizarre wordless method involving a wah-wah trumpet. The knock-on effect of this is that Charlie Brown and his friends failed to learn anything at school, dooming them to a lifetime of head-smackingly inane pseudo-philosophical conversations with each other. Let this be a lesson to teachers everywhere ? it helps to use actual words during lessons.
Honourable mentions
Gloriously observed Australian import Summer Heights High, genuinely terrifying The Demon Headmaster and good old Sweet Valley High. Also worth noting - despite their not-entirely-classroom-based nature - E4's The Inbetweeners, and Skins.
Schools converting to academies in September 2010
A list of the 32 schools converting to academy status this month
Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet
Kemnal Technology College (part of the Kemnal Trust), Bromley
Brine Leas High School, Cheshire East
Fallibroome High School, Cheshire East
St Buryan Primary School, Cornwall
Seaton Infant School, Cumbria
Broadclyst Community Primary School, Devon
Uffculme School, Devon
Cuckoo Hall Primary School, Enfield
The Cotswold School, Gloucestershire
Watford Grammar School for Boys, Hertfordshire
Watford Grammar School for Girls, Hertfordshire
Lampton School, Hounslow
The Westlands School (in federation with The Woodgrove Primary School), Kent
The Woodgrove Primary School (in federation with The Westlands School), Kent
Heckmondwike Grammar School, Kirklees
Durand Primary School, Lambeth
The Giles School, Lincolnshire
Eaton Mill Foundation Primary School, Milton Keynes
Healing School, a Specialist Science and Foundation College, North East Lincolnshire
Tollbar Business Enterprise & Humanities College, North East Lincolnshire
Northampton School for Boys, Northamptonshire
George Spencer Foundation School and Technology College, Nottinghamshire
Arthur Mellows Village College, Peterborough
The Chadwell Heath Foundation School, Redbridge
Holyrood Community School, Somerset
Huish Episcopi School, Somerset
Westcliff High School for Boys, Southend-on-Sea
Hartismere School, Suffolk
Audenshaw School, Tameside
Urmston Grammar School, Trafford
Hardenhuish School, Wiltshire
Source: Department for Education
Imperial College to establish medical school in Singapore
Joint teaching venture sees the London university forge presence in funding-rich Asia
Imperial College London is to set up a new medical school in Singapore in the latest move by an elite British university to establish a presence in Asia.
Jointly run by Imperial and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, the medical school will teach over 750 students when it is fully established, the majority of whom will be local residents.
Professor Martyn Partridge, who holds Imperial's chair in respiratory medicine and is to be senior vice dean of the new school, said Imperial had developed an "innovative" course employing electronic learning and simulations of patient care, which the university hoped to develop further in Singapore.
The medical school will be publicly funded. Imperial, which was invited to set up the partnership by Singapore's government, will benefit financially from sharing expertise and the college hopes the partnership will lead to long-term benefits. The college aims to tap into "generous research funding" available in the Asian city-state, Prof Partridge said.
"I don't think anybody knows the exact bottom line, but I can categorically say that Imperial is not going to do this in any way at a loss."
International students are a significant source of revenue for British universities, and increasing numbers want to study here. Overseas applications rose from just over 55,000 last year to over 71,000 this February. At present the proportion of overseas medical students at UK schools is capped at 7.5%. A foreign medical student who starts at Imperial this autumn can expect to pay £26,250 a year.
Other top British universities which have expanded abroad include Nottingham, which has a campus in Malaysia, while Liverpool has set up a partnership with a Chinese university in Suzhou, near Shanghai.
The new medical school will admit its first 50 students in 2013. A British student who trained at the Singapore school would have no automatic right to practise in the NHS, as it is outside the EU. However, the college hopes to set up student exchanges between the UK and Singapore.
Sir Keith O'Nions , rector of Imperial College London, said: "We are extremely proud to be working with Singapore, a country we have long admired for its support and application of world-class science, engineering and medicine.
"We have many members of the Imperial family already in Singapore ? the country is home to nearly 2,000 of our alumni."
Paul Madden, British High Commissioner for Singapore, said the partnership was a further example of the "deep linkages" between Britain and Singapore in science, culture and trade.
Imperial's school of medicine, formed in 1997, is one of the largest in the UK. Over 2,000 undergraduates and 500 postgraduates studied there in the last academic year.
School dinners or a packed lunch?
What do your children eat for lunch at school and why?
It may not have felt like much of a summer but school's back this week and in a few days the autumn term will officially start; new shoes are being bought, PE kit labelled, and unopened book-bags and forgotten homework unearthed from the deep recesses of children's rooms around the country. One thing you may or may not need to dig out is a lunchbox, depending on whether you, along with just over a third of British parents, decide your child should eat school dinners.
There is little doubt that it is essential for children to eat a good lunch, but what this is and how it is best delivered is contentious. When canvassing opinion from other mothers I discovered that one friend has such horrible memories of her childhood school dinners she refuses to inflict them on her own daughter. Another who is particularly nutritionally-savvy is adamant that school dinners are the best choice from a health perspective; having assumed she'd be packing additive-free lunchboxes I was somewhat surprised, but it has been suggested that it's parents who are less likely to feed their children healthy food that prefer the packed lunch option.
Of course, cost is important too and some people find the daily rate of around £2 per child prohibitive, making the lowest income group the segment of the community where take-up is at its lowest. Across the board time pressures also appear to be a deciding factor, with many I spoke to saying they opted for school lunches because they had enough to do in the morning without packing a lunchbox or three.
Since the 2005 Jamie Oliver school dinners campaign lifted the lid then nailed shut the coffin of the Turkey Twizzlers and other junk food being served to schoolchildren across the country, school dinners have enjoyed a far healthier reputation. Or at least they did until Andrew Lansley put the boot in by denouncing the campaign as an abject failure. But Oliver hit back equally hard and in fact not only did the uptake of school lunches increase by over 320,000 in the past academic year alone, but research also indicates the meals are improving children's performance at school. So Jamie remains canonized by the public and probably deserves his plaudits and awards.
What I would most love to see is a bit of European savoir faire when it comes to school lunch culture. In France and Italy pupils and teachers sit down together for a three-course meal of fresh, seasonal food; in Japan manners are emphasised as pupils serve the midday meal of rice, soup, fish and milk to their peers and teachers alike.
Although our school meals conform to stricter nutritional guidelines than in the past the culture is still bolt and run. Once, the the youngest children ate before the general rabble hit the canteen and dinner ladies watched over them to make sure they ate some vegetables. Not any more, and at secondary schools the temptation is to avoid the cafeteria completely and buy (often less healthy food) elsewhere, though there are heartening reports of some secondaries offering healthy meals that pupils genuinely want to eat.
But what of the packed lunch? I remember feeling smug as can be the day I carried my new pink Barbie lunchbox into school aged about 11, but I can't remember what was inside, probably because it was exactly the same as everyone else's lunch. Not so the recollections of a friend whose Spanish mother packed him long rolls filled with ham she'd imported from her native Catalonia, rice and garbanzos and other very un-English delicacies. He says having to open that box with all its accompanying smells has scarred him for life - well, almost. From what I have gathered the same holds true today - foodie parents beware if you're thinking of offering anything other than plastic ham sandwiches on cotton-wool bread.
On balance, I incline more towards a hot meal in winter than in summer and confess to sometimes finding the morning lunch-packing too much of a grind. But for me the worst part is that unless your child is a speedy eater, before much more than the second bite his or her mates will be off to play, at which point the food will be forgotten. What do your children eat for lunch at school and why?
From the archive, 1 September 1930: Obituary: Dr WA Spooner
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 1 September 1930
The death occurred at Oxford on Friday evening of Dr. William Archibald Spooner, who was for twenty-one years Warden of New College, Oxford.
Dr Spooner was born on July 22. 1844, and was the son of a Staffordshire County Court judge. He was educated at Oswestry and New College, of which he became a scholar in 1862 and a Fellow in 1867. Ordained a deacon in 1872 and a priest in 1875, he became chaplain to Archbishop Tait in 1878 and was examining chaplain to the Bishop of Peterborough from 1809 to 1916. He became Warden of his college in 1903 and held that office till he retired in 1924. A lecturer and teacher of ability, he devoted himself to the college and its members.
He published little, and the outside world knew him only from the scholarship of the well-known edition of Tacitus' "Histories" and his memoirs of Butler and William of Wykeham.
But to a series of generations of his countrymen Dr. Spooner was known not for his administrative abilities nor his scholarship but for the "Spoonerism." A "Spoonerism" is defined as "a ludicrous form of metathesis or the transposing of initial letters to form a laughable combination."
In 1879 it was a favourite Oxford anecdote that Spooner from the pulpit gave out the first line of a well-known hymn as "Kinkering Kongs their titles take."
The anecdote is well enough authenticated, but according to most people who knew Spooner well that was the only "Spoonerism" he ever made ? the essence of a "Spoonerism" being, of course, lack of intent, ? though later when, thanks to indefatigable undergraduate and alas! graduates and dignified Fellows of colleges, the legends had become legion, he often used deliberately to "indulge in metathesis," to live up to his reputation.
All sorts of stories, probable and improbable, were invented, the most of which have only to be heard to be recognised as unauthentic. Of the well-worn ones the best are those which made Spooner declare that he was leaving Oxford by "the town drain," that some unauthorised person was "occupewing his pie," that at a marriage it was "kistomary to cuss the bride," and that he was tired of addressing "beery wenches." Much better authenticated and not even a Spoonerism is his famous reply to a young lady who asked him if he liked bananas. He is said to have retorted, "I'm afraid I always wear the old-fashioned nightshirt."
Although other famous men have been guilty of "Spoonerisms", it was the doctor who had to bear the brunt of most of them and to be honoured by having his name enshrined in a word that is a permanent addition to the English language.
Why demon heads of children's fiction are role models for trainee teachers
Roald Dahl's Miss Trunchbull or Gillian Cross's Demon Headmaster demonstrate the exercise of power, study finds
They may be sadistic figures who hate children, but a study suggests that the savage portrayal of headteachers in children's literature possesses a grain of truth and may even be helpful when it comes to training teachers who aspire to lead schools.
Characters like Miss Agatha Trunchbull, from Roald Dahl's Matilda, or the Demon Headmaster, from the sequence by Gillian Cross, can teach children to think about power and how it can be used for malign purposes, Professor Pat Thomson, director of the centre for research in schools and communities at Nottingham University school of education, has found.
The study of 19 fictional headteachers found that nine are portrayed as evil or authoritarian, a further six are remote figures of power, and just one - JK Rowling's Professor Albus Dumbledore - is a positive role model.
The study traces the origins of school stories to 19th century British fiction which ? in stories aimed at boys ? focused on the muscular discipline and militarism required for empire building.
The books in the study were published between 1975 and 2009, and included Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events as well as Matilda and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Many of the books show power can be used corruptly, according to Prof Thomson.
Sometimes this can have a contemporary, political twist: in The Inflatable School by Peter Wynne-Willson, the "evil, messianic" Mr Stemple plans to turn his school into an academy sponsored by a business with whom his family has a profitable relationship.
Miss Trunchbull is one of only two female heads in the books studied and is described, as "formidable and repulsive". Thomson says Matilda's triumph over Miss Trunchbull ? who is replaced by the forgiving Miss Jennifer Honey ? as "designed to show the benefits of the gentle use of pastoral power".
In a study to be presented to the British Educational Research Association's annual conference at Warwick University today, Thomson says the books' willingness to encourage children to think about power may help to make the stories more truthful than many adult discussions about school leadership. The books encouraged children to take responsibility and overturn unreasonable social conventions. The stories also acted as cautionary tales, warning that children who made the wrong choices must learn to be responsible.
Children were encouraged to acquire self-discipline "not because of the need for adult citizens to serve God and empire as in the traditional school story, but rather because the ? modern citizen needs to serve and save themselves in a world where adults are often fallible, self-serving and myopic, and sometimes venal, corrupt and brutal."
Power is often regarded by real headteachers as a dirty word not to be discussed,says Thomson, while serious texts on school management often avoid identifying the head's central task as the exercise of power. Children's books could be used as part of school leadership courses to address this gap.
"Children's stories come clean about headteachers' work in ways that mainstream educational leadership texts often do not," Thomson concludes. "The implied reader of children's books is a child who recognises that power can be used wisely and to ethical ends ? or not; who understands that pupils can use their individual and collective power to challenge authority."
Girls think they are cleverer than boys from age four, study finds
Teachers' expectations may reinforce gender gap in school performance
Girls think they are cleverer, more successful and harder working than boys from as young as four, a study has found.
Boys come round to this view by the age of seven or eight and assume that girls will outperform them at school and behave better in lessons, research from the University of Kent shows.
The study ? Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat ? will be presented to the British Educational Research Association's conference tomorrow.
The paper argues that teachers have lower expectations of boys than of girls and this belief fulfils itself throughout primary and secondary school.
Girls' performance at school may be boosted by what they perceive to be their teachers' belief that they will achieve higher results and be more conscientious than boys, the academics claim. Boys may underachieve because they pick up on teachers' assumptions that they will obtain lower results than girls and have less drive.
The findings come just over a week after exam results revealed that the gap between boys and girls at GCSE is widening. This summer, the pass rate for girls was 72.6% at A* to C, compared with 65.4% for boys. Last year, the rate was 70.5% for girls and 63.6% for boys.
The gender gap has been the focus of public and academic concern for at least 20 years.
The study's findings are based on detailed questioning of 238 children aged between four and 10. The researchers presented the pupils with statements such as "this child is really clever" and "the teacher is taking the register and this child sits very quietly". They asked the children which the statement best fitted ? a picture of a girl or one of a boy.
The academics, Bonny Hartley and Robbie Sutton, also asked the children to point to one of the pictures in answer to the question "who do you think is cleverer" and "who is better behaved".
Girls at all ages said girls were cleverer, performed better and were more focused. Boys aged between four and seven were evenly divided as to which gender was cleverer and more hardworking. But by the time boys reached seven or eight, they agreed with their female peers that girls were more likely to be cleverer and more successful.
In a separate experiment, 140 of the children were divided into two groups. The academics told the first group that boys do not perform as well as girls. The second group were not told this. All the pupils were tested in maths, reading and writing.
The academics found the boys in the first group performed "significantly worse" than boys in the second group, while girls' performance was similar in both groups.
Teachers should be discouraged from using phrases such as "silly boys" and "schoolboy pranks" or asking boys why they can't "sit nicely like the girls" because this may help break the cycle of lower expectations of boys, the researchers argue.
"By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less focused, able and successful than girls ? and think that adults endorse this stereotype," Hartley said. "There are signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling in influencing children's actual conduct and achievement." Hartley said that while it was unacceptable to divide classes by the race of their pupils, this was not the case for gender.
"This is likely to be due to gender bias being represented as much more socially and normatively acceptable in society," Hartley said. "In this way, it is widely acceptable to pitch the boys against the girls or 'harmlessly' divide the class in this way for practical ease."
Jenny Parkes, senior lecturer in education, gender and international development at the Institute of Education, University of London, said there had been marked changes in girls' achievement in the UK in the latter half of the 20th century, in part thanks to feminism's influence on the way girls view themselves.
"This seems to be particularly the case for middle-class girls. Some studies have looked at how academic work is seen as 'feminine' and so for some boys achieving highly at school risks being labelled as feminine," Parkes said.
"At the same time, this differs across different countries, ethnic and social class groups and from subject to subject. Adults do have an important role in helping children ? whether they are girls or boys, high or low achievers ? to have confidence in themselves as learners."
Michael Gove's odd schools obsession | James Plunkett
If US charter schools have inspired Tory reforms, academic excellence can't be the reason
The new school year was supposed to bring a great wave of new academies. In the event, it will be a trickle. In June Michael Gove claimed that 1,100 schools had applied for academy status. Then it turned out the true number was 153. Take away those not yet approved, and it looks like fewer than 50 academies will open this year. Gove's obsession with school freedom is not being driven by demand from headteachers.
So what is driving Gove's reforms? It is ideology all the way. Look first at his changing justifications: back in 2009, he claimed that his inspiration was Sweden, where a system of free schools was giving parents new choices and driving up results for the poorest. Then the evidence came out. Even in that most equal of countries, free schools had benefited only the children of wealthy parents, widening opportunity gaps.
Since then Gove has quietly shifted his attentions to the US charter school movement. Run by independent providers, charter schools are free to set their own curriculums, and operate outside local controls. Speaking to MPs in June, Gove praised them for doing a "fantastic job, free from bureaucratic control, of transforming the life chances of young people". The reforms he planned were "exactly analogous".
Watching from the US, that still seems a strange star to be chasing. Yes, the best charter schools are thriving: freed from constraints, they're fighting in the ditches ? with 10-hour days and Saturday school ? to buck trends for disadvantaged kids. But with over 5,000 of the schools now serving 1.5 million children, it's not enough to talk about a handful of successes.
The hard truth is that, the more you look at the US charter school movement, the more the glow fades. Stanford University found that fewer than one in five charter schools were outperforming comparable state schools; about half were performing at a similar level; and 37% were doing "significantly worse".
So yes, Gove can point to successes, but for every one there are two hidden failures. Indeed, of the 5,250 charter schools that have opened here since 1992, one in eight has closed. Last year, nine out of 10 schools in the Texans Can group were rated "academically unacceptable" by the state. On one campus, slated for closure, not a single freshman had gone on to graduate. Yet the Can chief executive still drew a salary of $236,000 (£150,000).
Elsewhere, charter providers have been charged with serious financial mismanagement. Several have been caught excluding huge numbers of students to boost results. Serious concerns are growing over the large, for-profit industry that has sprung up around this lucrative sector. One school offered students $100 to recruit friends, chasing the public money that would come with them.
The point is not that additional freedoms are bad but that, on the basis of evidence, they're a curious obsession. As the US experience shows, schools are not all helium-filled balloons, tethered by government and straining to soar. But nor are they all lead weights, destined to sink without support. Instead, cast adrift, some thrive and some fail; they simply float apart.
Gove may talk of charter schools as a system forging ahead of the pack, but in reality they're a roll of the dice from one that's falling behind. On international tests in reading, science and maths, US students made no gains from 1964 to 2003. On almost all measures the US school system now trails the UK's. Many in a school system paralysed by toxic union relations, perpetual funding crises and fragmented governance have given up on improving from within. Charter school leaders have become vigilantes, going it alone.
That's not an ambitious reform agenda for the UK, any more than it is one based on evidence. In June Gove told school leaders: "Government action has held our education system back" ? and that basic disbelief in government ? tired old Tory ideology ? is driving this destructive experiment.
Stephen Wall obituary
Literary historian, academic and longstanding editor of Essays in Criticism
The achievements of Stephen Wall, who has died after a lung infection aged 79, were exceptional for their humane generosity. As a literary historian and a critic of the Victorian novel, pre-eminently of Trollope and Dickens; as a reviewer ? at once welcoming and discriminating ? of new fiction and of theatre; as a director not only of Shakespeare but of Henry Purcell, informed by a love of enduring music; and as the author of a novel rewardingly patient in its nocturnal rhythms and chequered crosscurrents, he exercised an influence always benign and never sentimental. Likewise, as editor for 40 years of the quarterly journal Essays in Criticism, he was gently exacting, attentive to the very wording in a manner that contributors never forgot; and he was an inspiring teacher of English at Oxford University.
"Of joy in widest commonalty spread" ? Wordsworth spoke to Wall as no other poet did, while there was added something for which this poet was not notable: a vivid sense of humour, together with a laconic wit, a sidelong glance endearingly free of anything furtive, a gift for offering advice in a way that made it a pleasure to take it and a mischievous delight that was the opposite of mischief-making. In his happy possession of these qualities, Wall was always keen to acknowledge how much he owed to the character of his friends FW Bateson, founder of Essays in Criticism, and Ian Hamilton, poet, wit, and founder of the Review. And, lifelong and supreme, to the love and the loving kindness of Yvonne, his wife of more than 50 years, and his daughters, Alisoun and Cassandra.
Not every obituary should be a tribute, but this one should. For it is necessary to speak here of that which Wall himself judged it his responsibility not to invite attention to: his having been struck down by polio 54 years ago and lived since then from a wheelchair. Confined to a wheelchair is not the right way of putting it, though, since, thanks to courage, self-discipline and indomitability, his life was in so many respects unconfined.
He travelled to the dramatic and musical performances that he loved and needed, to the professional occasions that helped him to help others to think, and to the country that meant almost as much to him as England did: France. Widest of all was the circle of his friends, particularly of those who having been his pupils, or contributors to Essays in Criticism, became for ever his friends. But whereas Yeats could say "and say my glory was I had such friends", for Wall it was not a matter of glory for anyone, but simply a happiness. Wordsworth, again: "The best portion of a good man's life,/His little, nameless, unremembered acts/Of kindness and of love." For unremembered, read unforgotten.
Wall was not concerned to make a mark, still less to make his mark; secure in his sense of his own self, he especially valued the opportunity that writing, teaching and editing gave him, the opportunity to help others to be, or to become, themselves. His sense of succinctness was an art and not just an economy, and he valued humour not as a diversion but as a mode of persuasion against the absurd, the pretentious or the professionalised.
Born in London, Wall had a Quaker background and schooling that fortified him despite changes in his beliefs, and an Oxford education at New College that confirmed him in the liberal humanism by which he lived. His research at Oxford in the late 1950s gained from the supervision and friendship of John Bayley, and led to his becoming, first, a tutor at Mansfield College, and then a fellow of Keble College, a post that he held from 1964 to 1991. In the 1970s, for the Oxford University Dramatic Society and at the Oxford Playhouse, he directed several Shakespeare productions, and for the Oxford Operatic Society, Purcell's The Indian Queen.
At the invitation of Bateson, in 1969, he joined the editorial board of Essays in Criticism, becoming in 1973 its editor, a responsibility that he exercised with fervour until his final illness. The editor of Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology (1970), of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1972) and (with Helen Small) of Little Dorrit (1988), he was the author not only of Trollope and Character (1988) but of many pieces that have greatly affected editorial enterprises (for instance, his essay on the claim that classic novels should have annotation on the substantial scale that has long been usual for classic poetry) and also of the novel Double Lives (1991).
He is survived by Yvonne, Alisoun and Cassandra.
Seamus Perry writes: Stephen was an editor of genius. He brought to Essays in Criticism the very highest academic standards, but also something of the spirit of the literary journalist. An issue of the journal was not a catch-all of recent submissions, but a paperback book that someone ought to enjoy reading, and everything had to be right.
Having a piece edited by Stephen, consequently, was an experience no one forgot. Preferably, he would invite you to his flat in north Oxford, a little before tea. After a long and anecdotal chat ? he was a brilliant raconteur, though he never hogged the stage ? Stephen would come to the matter in hand. Out would come your typescript, now decorated extensively in his filigree strokes of pencil or fine black ballpoint pen, every page ? often every sentence ? tightened and tuned: inelegances and stock expressions would be trimmed, jargon discarded, jokes improved, ease added.
When I had the honour of being appointed the baby editor of the journal, there were, in the least constrictive of ways, serious editorial dicta to be learned: every essay should join a conversation and take it a step further; a theory should be used to elucidate what mattered about a text, and not a text deployed to exemplify the general truth of a theory; there was no article that could not be improved by losing a few hundred words. His judgments were kindly, catholic, discursive, firm.
He enjoyed especially the company of younger members of the profession and saw a key role of the journal as encouraging new talent. Even rejection could be a form of encouragement. The first piece I sent to the journal when still a graduate student, a comparative account of Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney, earned the gentlest of rebukes for its structural incoherence: "I liked it very much, but felt it had a bit too much 'meanwhile back at the ranch' about it." Magisterial surveys of the critical scene did not win favour either: "The trouble with a tour d'horizon is that there is just so much horizon."
The strength of an Essays in Criticism essay, by contrast, lay in the humanity of its response and the agility of its voice, its independence from formulae and its specific eye for textual detail. With Christopher Ricks, he presided for almost four decades, in the least showy of ways, over one of the most remarkable literary periodicals to appear since FR Leavis's Scrutiny, with wonderful wisdom and humour and self-deprecating grace.
? Stephen de Rocfort Wall, literary scholar, born 29 July 1931; died 6 August 2010
Banded school admissions provide a quick route to fairer education | Charles Hotham
Let's expose disadvantaged children to a culture of achievement
Over the course of my five years as a teacher at a central London comprehensive school, there was a noticeable shift in the tone of conversation among students about university applications. Increasingly the talk was of Russell Group universities, Oxford and Cambridge, medicine and law. By the time I was in charge of university applications, students were asking for advice on applying to the country's best universities, and requesting support for admissions tests and interviews. This sort of interest raises everyone's sights and tends to happen when you have a critical mass of students (and their parents) who want to aim high. This happened here partly because of the school's banded admissions policy.
Such policies are a way to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children quickly. Realistically, pupil premiums and independence for more state schools are only ever going to help in the long term, and we can't afford to fail another generation of children in poor schools while that happens.
In a report released last week, the children's charity Barnardo's recommended that all state-funded schools pursue a "fair banding" admissions policy. Under their proposals, oversubscribed schools admit a fixed proportion of students within defined bands across the ability spectrum as measured by a short admissions test.
The result is a "true" comprehensive, rather than one that simply reflects the local area. That catchment area may be very disadvantaged and therefore present concentrated challenges, or may be made up of "high-involvement, high-aspiration" families who have been able to move into the area to take advantage of the good local school. As a young-ish researcher with the thinktank CentreForum, who has spent the last five years teaching in one these "fair-banded" schools, I found myself listening particularly intently to the discussion last week. Barnardo's has argued that a change in the admissions policy of schools would improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged considerably. They sketch a picture of the existing system as one in which parents who demonstrate very little interest in the school choice system are put off further by a complex process dominated by parents who make the effort ? the oft-mentioned middle-class pushy parents. Those children already disadvantaged by their parents' inability to manipulate the system are therefore condemned to join similar children in schools wracked by the challenges associated with poverty and which struggle to attract good teachers.
David Green from the thinktank Civitas criticised this on Radio 4's Today programme as "a kind of social engineering that's based on animosity towards middle-class parents" and suggested that the solution was to "plonk brand new schools of the best kind into our poorest inner-city areas". Well, as education secretary Michael Gove agreed, this would indeed help, but how difficult is it? Gove rightly suggested that the proposed pupil premium would help, especially if the schools in receipt of the extra funds have the flexibility to attract, retain and train the best teachers through discretion over pay.
The recruitment of a handful of good teachers could in theory happen almost immediately. A significant proportion of the children in that school will start benefiting quickly (though, without increasing the overall supply of teachers, another school will lose out). But how long will it take to attract large numbers of good teachers? How long for the reputation of the school to increase sufficiently so that those "high-involvement, high-aspiration" parents start to send their children to the school? When this does happen, an environment is created in which the whole tone of the student and parent body becomes one of aspiration and achievement ? a tone which is possible for teachers to create against the tide, but is more difficult, and slower, without the assistance of students and parents who demonstrate that same desire more openly.
It is now widely acknowledged that the single most important factor for improving schools is the quality of teachers. What seems to be stated less often is that the teaching profession is like any other walk of life ? there will always be better teachers and worse teachers. Given the universally acknowledged importance of education, however, there is an understandable desire to eradicate the "bad" teachers.
Of course we should aim to improve the overall standard, to ensure minimum standards are met and to attract high achieving graduates into the profession. But we should also set a framework in which the moderately good teachers can achieve the best possible outcomes for the greatest number of children.
The pupil premium may not reach as many students as we would wish. New academies and free schools may take a while to recruit the best teachers, especially if their budgets are limited. The elimination of inadequate teachers from the system will be very slow and tortuous to achieve. At a time when funds are scarce, a fair banding admissions framework is a much quicker way to enable our most disadvantaged children to be exposed to good teaching and a culture of achievement and aspiration.
Faith in science is not enough ? people deserve proof | Alom Shaha
Education must be at the heart of science communication, or else we are simply asking people to 'believe'
I am an evangelist. But instead of spreading the gospel or any other religious message, I spend my time trying to share the knowledge of what I believe to be humanity's greatest cultural achievement: science. There is a more mundane term for what I do ? "science communication". It's a horrible term, smacking of exactly the kind of thing that turns some people off science. It covers a wide range of activities ? from science film-making to working for medical-research charities to going into schools and throwing liquid nitrogen around in a desperate attempt to convince teenagers that "science is fun". Funnily enough, it's not used to describe those who teach science, even though science teachers arguably do more "science communication" than anyone else.
The UK's best known science communicator is probably Professor Brian Cox. He's doing a great job of making science seem cool and sexy to the public and, in my opinion, deserves the accolade of modern-day Carl Sagan for his contribution to the cultural status of science. I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to all the TV commissioning editors who rejected my suggestions to use him as a presenter. I suspect Brian finds it as ironic as I do that TV companies now regularly put out adverts looking for "the next Brian Cox".
As much as I love Brian's work, I don't think we need any more like him at the moment. Instead, we need more really good science teachers, and here's why: I don't want to see science become something that people "believe" is important and cool and sexy without understanding why. I don't want people to mindlessly buy into the geek scene in the same way that they might have bought into the alternative lifestyle scene, had they encountered it first in the right circumstances. But that's what I've seen happening ? people attending the lectures, events and festivals organised by "science communicators" and going home convinced that science is the "right" way to look at the world, without really understanding why science is special. I've encountered people who are desperate to hang out with the science in-crowd (yes, there really is such a crowd), and even "science communicators" who struggle to explain what it is they think is special or important about science. When I ask them why they want to be science communicators they invariably talk about wanting to share their love of science with the world. Perhaps this is not so different from people who want to share their love of Jesus, Muhammad or Krishna.
It seems to me that many of these people are looking for an identity, something to believe in, and they've "found" science in much the same way that others find religion or spirituality. Some of these science groupies are scarily reminiscent of the kids who were in the Christian Union at school.
As a child, it would frustrate me that my friends would bang on about how great Islam was and how the Qur'an was this amazing book with the Truth in it ? when they had little idea what the Qur'an really said or what the details of the Islamic faith were. Recently, I've been feeling a disconcertingly similar sense of frustration when talking to people who are part of the "sceptic" movement, or the geek scene.
Sure, science by its very nature requires us to take things on faith ? we cannot individually verify every scientific statement ever made, heck, few of us know how to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way round, but without ensuring that education is at the heart of science communication, we are simply asking people to "believe" in science. If we can't do better than that, than we're no better than the religious leaders that so many self-proclaimed geeks are contemptuous of.
I have encountered priests who seemed simply to want to increase the numbers of their flocks, and I've met others who genuinely want to pass on their understanding of god. There is a parallel with science communicators ? there are ones who think that getting people to believe "science is fun / important" is what matters and there are others who want people to understand why this is so. It's a subtle but important distinction ? the latter is more difficult to do and my feeling is that the best place to do it is in the classroom.
My friend Jonathan Sanderson, a science communicator I admire hugely, has pointed out that it looks like I am advocating a return to the "empty vessel" model of communication. I'm not sure he's wrong, but I'd happily concede that, particularly with adult audiences, we need a range of approaches, from saying "this is how the greenhouse effect works" to "take a look at this, you might find it interesting". But Jonathan agrees with me that, "most science communicators would have a dramatically larger impact over their lifetimes if they quit the scene and took teaching jobs". I'm not disparaging the good work that many science communicators do, but some of the most talented, creative people I know work in this peculiar field and I just wish more of them would aspire to become teachers instead of dreaming of becoming the next Brian Cox.
JK Rowling gives £10m to set up multiple sclerosis research clinic
Harry Potter author funds Edinburgh university research centre named after her mother, who was killed by the disease
The author JK Rowling has donated £10m to set up a clinic to research treatments for multiple sclerosis, the degenerative disease that killed her mother at the age of 45, it was announced today.
The Anne Rowling regenerative neurology clinic, which will be based at the University of Edinburgh, will carry out research into a range of degenerative neurological conditions and diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntingdon's and motor neurone disease.
The Harry Potter author has championed research into multiple sclerosis. In 2006, it emerged that she had given a "major" but undisclosed gift to Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland towards setting up the university's centre for multiple sclerosis research.
She had served as the patron of the society, but resigned last year after an internal battle over the charity's reorganisation.
The university said the £10m was the largest direct donation Rowling had made to a charitable cause, and the biggest single gift the university had ever received.
"I have supported research into the cause and treatment of multiple sclerosis for many years now ? but when I first saw the proposal for this clinic, I knew that I had found a project more exciting, more innovative, and, I believe, more likely to succeed in unravelling the mysteries of MS than any other I had read about or been asked to fund," the author said.
"I have just turned 45, the age at which my mother, Anne, died of complications related to her MS.
"I know that she would rather have had her name on this clinic than on any statue, flower garden or commemorative plaque, so this donation is on her behalf, too, and in gratitude for everything she gave me in her far too short life."
Unlike laboratory-based research centres, the new clinic will work with MS sufferers and help develop and test new treatments that could slow, stop and eventually reverse degenerative diseases. It will be based in a purpose-built unit within the BioQuarter medical research campus, in south-east Edinburgh.
Staff will work closely with other university and NHS research units specialising in regenerative and neurological diseases.
Rowling's £10m gift is being included in the university's campaign to raise £350m towards research, increasing scholarships and bursaries and conserving its historic buildings.
Prof Sir Timothy O'Shea, the university's principal, said: "This exceptionally generous donation will provide great help in the worldwide effort to improve treatments for multiple sclerosis.
"Work at the clinic will build on the already existing important research strengths in neuro-degenerative disorders at the university, which benefit very considerably from our close partnership with NHS Lothian."
Rowling, whose personal wealth was estimated at £519m earlier this year thanks to the bestselling Harry Potter novels and films, has a long track record of charitable donations. She has also given £1m to the Labour party.
She had previously set up another trust ? the Volant Trust, commemorating her mother's maiden name ? which has an annual budget of £5.1m to support women and young people at risk of social exclusion.
University architecture shapes up for a revolution
Learning Landscapes, a research project into the relationship between students, lecturers and researchers and the buildings they use, aims to bring a new creativity to campus design
Student hostels aren't hotels", says Professor Mike Neary, "nor are university campuses business parks." That, though, is what they have been in danger of turning into over the last decade, says Neary, political sociologist, dean of teaching and learning, and director of the centre for educational research and development at the University of Lincoln. "A decade," he says, "in which neo-liberal economics and the business model for education and politics, as well as business itself, appeared to have triumphed. Yet, it's all over now. Finished."
You can tell that Neary is more than pleased that attitudes to education in Britain are changing now that politicians and educators have finally realised that the brutal, roller-coaster ways of global capitalism are no friends to learning. And yet, over the last decade, many universities have invested in eye-catching architecture aimed, he says, at attracting investors and business, as a way of transforming places that should be free-thinking and outside the immediate commercial equation into marketing-driven "brands". Students have become "customers" in business-style machines for teaching; these are expected to serve the economy by slotting graduates neatly into profitable jobs.
To counteract this tendency and help re-think what universities are, what they are for and how they might build, occupy and use space intelligently ? even critically, Neary has spent much of the last three years leading the research for a project called Learning Landscapes in Higher Education. This was set up at Lincoln with Professor David Chiddick, former vice-chancellor of the university, in the chair. Chiddick is the town planner, urban and transport economist who led the University of Lincoln from its old home in Hull to the cathedral city in the 1990s. He has been responsible for some fine-looking buildings on the new Lincoln campus, not least the elegant new school of architecture designed by Rick Mather in the long Gothic shadow of the medieval cathedral.
The Learning Landscapes project probed the ways those who commission university buildings, those who run them, as well as those who teach, learn and research in them actually relate to built space. What role, if any, do students and academics play in the design and use of lecture theatres and other conventional teaching spaces? To what extent are new buildings simply supplied, something that staff and students blindly accept? Is there a growing gap between the concerns of academia, architecture and estate management?
Working with the architects and space-planners DEGW, Neary and his colleagues visited 12 universities in Scotland, England and Wales, conducting extensive interviews in each. The team asked their hosts, including student representatives, what buildings on their campus they would like to "keep, toss or create". What sort of buildings and spaces did they think might live up to Neary's "three Es" ? "efficiency, effectiveness and expression"?
As John Worthington of DEGW puts it, the practical aim of this research has been "to dissolve the division between estate departments and teaching and learning that so often results in silos of responsibility and a lack of understanding of each others' work and needs."
Neary, though, believes that the research ? published in the spring ? is only a stepping-stone on the way to campuses that function as well as they should. "It's been an academic exercise," he says, "and this is just what it needs to have been. Universities are academic. What we need to do is to think of the ways in which the process of research, of critical, academic thinking by students and teachers alike can shape the physical environment around them. A university's architecture and the spaces within it, though, might adopt many different forms and models."
Before I get the chance to ask how such buildings and spaces might possibly look, and how they might be used, Neary points me to Virginia Woolf's advice on how to build a university in Three Guineas, a book-length essay published in 1938. Seeing, during the heyday of totalitarianism in Europe, that our universities had done precious little to breed either a respect for liberty or a hatred for war, Woolf believed such institutions should go back to true basics. "Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap easily combustible material, which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cages. Let the pictures and books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation by their own hands cheaply."
"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."
Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge."
Now that Neary had given me a concrete, and successful, example of what a new "learning landscape" might be, my mind flashed back to the visit I made a few months ago to the new Rolex learning centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Designed by the Tokyo-based architects, SANAA, this extraordinary curved and light-filled building, with its garden courtyards, its continually shifting floors, its almost complete rejection of conventional rooms, its lack of corridors and doors, and its gentle spirit of playfulness and inquiry, has been built to bring students from all faculties together. Here is a happily uncertain place of research, of academic inquiry, of debate, research and new thinking. Everything seems possible here. No restrictions on physical movement or thought. "Our focus", says SANAA, "is always to find different relationships."
This is very much what Neary and his colleagues are rooting for, too. It implies, though, nothing less than a quiet revolution in the ways British universities are designed and run. It also demands fresh and original thinking. "One thing I noticed as we travelled from university to university", says Neary, "was how there's a tendency to copy or clone what other universities have already done. While this leads to some incremental learning about what makes teaching and learning spaces work, it does point to a rush to conformity rather than experimentation."
"You can't contain a university," says Neary, meaning that its academic mind should always be expanding and that architecture and space planning within buildings need to respond to this idea. "I suppose you could sum up my approach, in headline terms, as a damning critique of the neo-liberal university. It is, but it's far from impractical. In fact, as Woolf implied, you could create a new, innovative and academically challenging environment in buildings designed in a spirit of poverty."
Neary doesn't demur when I suggest that is what certain orders of medieval monks tried to do. The austere beauty of a Cistercian monastery was no real bridle to thought, although, of course, such places were there to serve God before anyone or anything else.
So, has much of new university building been carried out in vain over the past decade? "Of course there've been some beautiful and excellent buildings", says Neary. "What's been wrong is the whole approach to treating universities as businesses, as an appendage to the economy, rather than places where ideas can be dangerous."
Learning Landscapes in Higher Education makes the point that while academics have been able to make an important contribution "as clients and customers of the project management process", they need to inject academic ideas into the shaping of university buildings and campuses. The Learning Grid at Warwick and the Rolex learning centre at Lausanne give some idea of what may yet be done, and yet, as Neary would say, these examples, no matter how alluring, are not there to be copied. Universities must work things out for themselves.
Meanwhile, as Morag Schiach, pro-vice chancellor for teaching and learning at Queen Mary, University of London and one of Neary's interviewees, bluntly reminds us, "the extent to which higher education should foster intellectual and cultural liberty in the face of pressing economic demands from industry and government is still unresolved."
Secondary school: how parents can help make the transition easier
Moving up to year 7 is a big step. Here are 10 tips on how to help your children make the change smoothly
For families of year 6s, the summer holidays can seem like a long run-up to that great mountain of mystery and fear that is big school. Some children will be starting a new school that is 10 times larger than their primary. Moving up to year 7 is a big step.
Professor Julian Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University, says: "For many children, secondary school represents a step towards autonomy and the whole process of growing up and leaving childhood behind." It can be overwhelming for children and parents alike.
But there are things you can do to make things easier, and things you can think about now that will help your child adjust and settle in quickly.
? Build your child's confidence. Settling in well is all about self-esteem. Children with high self-esteem are less likely to be bullied, or to bully, or belong to gangs. They are more likely to gather a wide circle of friends. They can confidently say "no" to anything with which they don't feel comfortable. So tell them how great they are. When did you last pay them a compliment? They don't have to have done anything special to deserve one; a compliment on how well they look after a pet, or that they are kind or thoughtful, goes a long way. Do this daily and watch their confidence develop.
? Listen to their fears. Your child is possibly anxious and also afraid their concerns will appear trivial. For instance, if they become lost in the maze of corridors, what should they do? They could make their way to the school office ? they should have a map ? or find a pupil or teacher to direct them. What they shouldn't do is hide in the toilets until the lesson is over. Talk through the options with them. Do this for every concern they may have so that they know you take it seriously.
? Remind your child that being a good friend, especially to shy and quiet children, is one way to make friends. Be encouraging if they want to invite friends home and suggest it if they don't.
? Show that you feel positive about their school and "talk it up" even if it was not your first choice or you lost an admissions appeal. If you have high expectations, these will be sensed by your child.
? Have a trial run of the route, especially if they walk or cycle. If they miss a school bus home you need to talk through what they will do, especially if you are working and can't pick them up straight away.
? Get up earlier during the last week of the holidays so that early starts for school aren't a shock to the system.
? Stick to the uniform code. Your child will feel more comfortable from day one.
? Make sure they have emergency money and credit on their mobile phone ? if it's allowed in school.
? Think about any changes you might need to make at home so they have the time, space and energy for homework. One parent who has three children shared her strategy: homework begins at a set time every day, after dinner, with all three children working simultaneously to avoid distractions. In the early days you should check their homework diary daily and if it looks empty, check with other parents or the school. Your child may simply forget to write it down.
? Encourage them to join lunchtime or after-school clubs. They are a great way to make friends. If after half a term they really don't enjoy it, they can drop it.
Give your child a few weeks to settle in. Ensure you know who to contact for any situation, and the school's preferred means of contact. If they are having any problems, social or educational, make an appointment to see their form tutor.
? Glynis Kozma is author of Secondary School: A Parent's Guide, and was a teacher for 30 years
Vocational education is vital for Britain's business future
It is disappointing that business studies is becoming less popular, says Dragon Peter Jones, because Britain needs entrepreneurs and inspired employees
Last week's GCSE results highlighted the perennial debate about attitudes to traditional and more vocational subjects. While it is fantastic that the pass rates improved for the 23rd year in a row, with over two-thirds achieving five A*-Cs, I am disappointed that languages and business studies seem to be increasingly unpopular.
In the absence of more vocational GCSEs, it is a shame that there were 7% fewer entries for business studies this year and that almost three-quarters of students didn't take French. Yet both teach skills that are vital for UK industry.
For those with an interest in traditional subject such as English and science, the pathway to success is clearly laid out. However, for those with a flair for business and a keen interest in enterprise, it is not so clear, and their experience of education so far has not always been a convincing one.
While it's true that traditional business GCSEs equip students with a wealth of valuable theoretical business knowledge, the English education system has not looked particularly kindly on business studies, in particular the topic of enterprise. Too often, there has been confusion between entrepreneurship and business studies. Enterprise is not the mechanics of setting up and running a business, but a state of mind, a confidence that you have the knowledge and the right mindset to be successful. A lot of people think you are born with it. I couldn't disagree more. The skills of how to be more enterprising are real and can be taught.
I believe we are still missing key ingredients that are discouraging young people from following their entrepreneurial dream, particularly in relation to academic versus vocational GSCEs. Not every student has a flair for textbook education, and generally many young people who have a flair for business and enterprise perhaps do not excel through traditional education methods.
But should we assume that these individuals who did not receive good results will not make successful entrepreneurs? We need more options available for students who are passionate about business and enterprise, but perhaps do not have the desire or academic talent to follow the traditional and more accepted route of taking A-level business studies. While there is definitely a place and need for business courses at GCSE and A-level, there is still a gap that needs to be filled.
My career path was not a traditional one. Although I obtained O-levels and A-levels in economics, biology and geography, I decided not to go to university. Two years ago, however, I was challenged to sit the A-level business studies exam and was awarded an A. The fact that I took, and successfully passed, the exam later in my career demonstrates that experience and the qualifications gained from hands-on, vocational learning are equally as beneficial as those offered by academic routes.
My primary point here is not to discard traditional business studies courses ? they have their rightful place within the education system. However, as we look towards the future, we have the opportunity to take a serious look at how to unlock the entrepreneurial talent within this country through better business education.
My experience of education is that we tend to put everyone, all the learners, in one room and expect them to learn in the same way and at the same pace, but not everyone learns like that. What we need to unlock entrepreneurial talent in this country is to give young people high-quality, practical experience that fosters their skills ? and this should begin early in their education journey, with vocational GCSEs being a prime opportunity.
To date, there have been a series of unsuccessful attempts to get industry involved in running schools, starting with Education Action Zones in 1998. Education providers and businesses must learn to collaborate much more effectively. The UK needs entrepreneurs to stimulate the economy, and businesses need inspired employees to help their companies recover quickly from the recession. In order to achieve this, we must foster greater links between the business and the education world through vocational education.
? Peter Jones appears on Dragons' Den, is an entrepreneur and is founder of the National Enterprise Academy
