Uncategorized

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d inadvertently turned back the clock. Cross the threshold into the majority of British schools and what appears to confront you is a workforce of unmarried women. Surely it’s 1904 not 2024, and teaching is still a spinster’s business? For, in the average 21st-century school, each and every woman teacher – married, unmarried, divorced, celibate, cat-loving, asexual or simply overworked – is addressed by her pupils as ‘Miss’. The problem comes when ‘Miss’ is more than linguistic laziness. Could it in fact imply contempt? I’m not talking about ‘Miss’ as a regrettable replacement for a name, as in ‘I asked Miss for some lined

Teaching for a new GCSE in natural history looks likely to begin next year. It’s part of the Department for Education’s ‘flagship sustainability and climate change strategy’. Apparently this subject is intended to teach pupils ‘how to keep the world safe’. Baroness Floella Benjamin, for instance, suggests it will show them how they can ‘save the world from catastrophe’. Paying attention to non-human life might cure some teenagers of their unhealthy obsession with selfies However well-meant such declarations may be, natural history is in fact about identifying and studying plants and animals, not fretting about ‘the plight of our planet’ and ‘how to rescue it’. Worried about what teenagers would

Outside a visit to the dentist, there are few things in life as unappealing as a school reunion. That’s particularly the case when it marks an anniversary with a big number attached. In our case, 30 years. On the face of it, it’s a micro-disaster in the making. The plan is to take a hundred or so men and women – many of whom are deep in the grip, knowingly or otherwise, of a mid-life crisis – wrench them away from their daily lives and transport them back to the boarding school where they were all teenagers together. You then throw in a free bar and disco – and let