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Saturday

Stephen Arnell

The enduring appeal of the Bond villain

Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as Bond may not have as many pulses racing due to No Time to Die’s frequently cancelled release dates (the first trailer was back in December 2019), but fans are still keen to see the return of the iconic British spy. Indeed, recent events have conspired to make 007 more relevant than in previous years, with shiny-pated Amazon boss Jeff Bezos emulating both villains Blofeld (who took over the entertainment assets of billionaire Willard Whyte in Diamonds are Forever) and Hugo Drax (Moonraker) with his recent acquisition of 007 studio MGM and brief space flight. Until No Time to Die is released, the jury

Friday

Emma Byrne

Why there’s never been a better time to see Venice

You’re never going to see Venice quite like this again. Usually swarming with tourists – not to mention the enormous cruise ships that dock in its waters ­– the city has been given a serious breather by the coronavirus pandemic. Those lengthy queues to get into its most famous hotspots have disappeared; the picturesque back streets lie empty and a dramatic fall in water traffic has seen the sediment in its 150 canals settle, allowing their vibrant colour to return. La Serenissima – much to many of the locals’ relief – has become serene once more. Where to stay Belmond Hotel Cipriani In a city where five-star luxury errs towards

Robert Jackman

How to have a Russian weekend in London

Benedict Cumberbatch’s turn as Greville Wynne – the British engineer who helped MI6 smuggle secret intel out of Soviet Russia – in The Courier has shone a light on London’s Cold War past. While the USSR and KGB might be gone, our capital still has a few souvenirs from the era – not to mention plenty of modern Russian culture and cuisine to boot. If you’re feeling inspired by The Courier, here’s the guide to throwing the ultimate Russian-themed weekend in London: Where to eat and drink While the old Soviet bloc wasn’t exactly famed for its cuisine, London’s eastern Europe and Slavic food has come on leaps and bounds

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The surprising history of Garibaldi biscuits

I’m not sure that many people would choose the unassuming garibaldi as their favourite biscuit. Garibaldis aren’t flashy: there’s no luxury chocolate, no pretty, brightly-coloured icing, no fancy-pants shapes. They aren’t squidgy, trendy cookies, or wholesome buttery shortbread. In fact, they’re often called squashed-fly biscuits because the currants baked into the dough resemble, well, squashed flies. And yet, they persist. Garibaldi biscuits have stuck around for 150 years, outseeing fads and fickle consumers, keeping their place on supermarket shelves for longer than almost any other biscuit. The biscuits have an unlikely namesake: Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian General, who fought for Italian unification. By the time Garibaldi sailed to the UK

Nicole Trilivas

The French Riviera: where to pull off a September getaway

The French Riviera is one of the world’s most legendary travel destinations. Just a mention of the Côte d’Azur can conjure up glamorous images of yachts bobbing in the Vieux Port of Saint-Tropez, sun-splashed beaches studded with striped parasols and endless bottles of pale pink Provençal rosé. Now that France is on the Amber List, start dreaming of your next trip to one of these high-end hideaways. Hotel Metropole Monte-Carlo Hotel Metropole Monte-Carlo is located in the Carré d’Or (Golden Triangle) of the Principality of Monaco, which in itself is a gilded mini-metropolis of excess. Dating back to 1884, this independently own Belle Époque bolthole is all about opulence, from

Thursday

Benenden School

Embrace a change to higher education

The pandemic has sparked an entrepreneurial revolution as the business sector has adapted to consumers’ rapidly changing needs, with nearly half a million businesses launched in the UK between March and December last year. This national surge of entrepreneurs — enabled by ongoing technological development, together with a national shortage in practical skills — begs one to question whether the traditional university route will best prepare our young people for their future careers. There will undoubtedly always be an important place for traditional university degrees but a blinkered focus on this as the only viable option for further education will, I believe, disadvantage career and earning potential in the future.

Plum Innovations

Building an Ark of Remote and in-classroom learning

Although there is little scientific proof of the story of Noah’s Ark or the accompanying flood, we are told that building the Ark was no small task and Noah was working to a deadline. When UK schools were told to close classrooms and switch to remote learning back in March last year, many were caught by surprise by being forced to change teaching practices and administrative processes overnight. However many schools thrived under the extraordinary circumstances, continuing to offer the highest standard of teaching to their pupils. Staff and pupils at those schools who excelled during the pandemic were often already familiar with cloud platforms or had been employing remote

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Books railing against private schools are actually the best marketing for them

When Michael Gove was selling his school reforms a decade ago he was asked to define success. ‘I hope that thanks to the reforms we’ve introduced the next Guardian editor but three will be a comprehensive school boy or girl.’ It was his little joke: that the loudest critics of private schools, the people who rail against the injustice of the whole system, tend to be people who went to these schools. There is a long tradition of books by public schoolboys decrying public schools. The latest is Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England whose author, Richard Beard, went first to Pinewood, a prep school on

Nic Rackow

Zoom schooling sounded like fun – until reality kicked in

I never realised how much I enjoyed the sweaty, overcrowded journey into school until it was replaced with a half-asleep crawl from my bed to my desk, 30 seconds before my first lesson was supposed to start. It’s a routine which most of us students have had to get used to since March last year and it was a massive change. When we were first sent home from school, it wasn’t with a fanfare, but with a bleak mass email and assurances from our teachers that we’d be back after Easter. Our group chats on social media erupted in celebration. It took less than half a day for the excitement to

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Our school trip: how we sang for our supper

There were a few things that my school — St Mary’s Convent, Arklow — had going for it but as far as I was concerned, the choir trumped most other activities. That was on account of the nun in charge, Sister Agnes, who had been, we had heard, a professional singer before she entered the convent. She was brisk, upright, her habit immaculate, with beady blue eyes and the kind of focus that set her apart even in the convent. Her choir was legendary, at least in our circle. We won every competition we entered, and we entered lots: Dublin, provincial music festivals, Llandudno in Wales. Not winning would have

Cristina Koppel

Our Sputnik moment: it’s time to revolutionise old teaching methods

Teaching methods today are no longer appropriate. The reasons are twofold. First, schools do not teach children how to think, they teach them how to parrot back the right answers. Second, exams define children’s futures. They tell them who they are, what jobs they can get and what their prospects in life will be. With such a narrow path to success, and deprived of cultivated reasoning skills, it’s little wonder that so many pupils are anxious and depressed. How did we end up here? The chemist and Nobel laureate (and inventor of the PCR test for Covid) Kary Mullis believed that schools today are a consequence of the space race.

Michael Spitzer

Top notes: why does music make you cleverer?

Music is far older than language. The FOXP2 gene associated with speech has been recovered from Neanderthal fossils, yet rhythm and melody have been around for millions of years before that, as attested by the fossils of chirping crickets and singing birds. Sapiens evolved on the ape line, and our songs evolved from the vocalisations of non-human primates. One of the traits, however, which sets us apart from our chimp cousins (with whom we share 98 per cent of our genetic material) is that we continue to learn, develop and mature far beyond infancy. Humans may well be born with a musical instinct, yet music training changes the structure of

Dorothy MacGinty

I banned mobiles. Should other heads?

In September 2018, I made the decision to ban mobile phones during the academic day at the school where I am head teacher in Scotland. I’m pretty sure we were the first British school to make this leap of faith. It made headlines across the country. How would everyone react? I knew that I needed to explain the thinking behind the decision to convince doubters and encourage support. It wouldn’t be a popular decision, so it was with a churning stomach that I rose to address the assembled pupils, having just pressed ‘send’ on a parent-body email. Fast-forward to August 2021 and the banning of mobile phones is now part

Kat Pierce

Love letters: why has the alphabet fallen out of fashion?

Last term I invigilated a reading examination at a fee-paying prep school where I work as a supply teacher. About five minutes in, a little girl called Maisie raised her hand. She looked downcast. ‘Yes Maisie?’ She pointed, unspeaking, at the first question. ‘Shall I read it to you?’ She nodded. I read it. ‘Does that make sense?’ She shook her head. ‘Well,’ I began, stalling, as I tried to work out which bit was confusing for her, ‘why don’t you have another look at the text? The answers will be there in the story.’ She mumbled something. ‘What’s that?’ She mumbled again, and this time I heard her: ‘I

The Spectator

The Oxbridge Files. Which schools get the most pupils in?

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2020 UCAS application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have roughly doubled the proportion of pupils from state schools: 67 per cent, up from 52 per cent in 2000. Of the 80 schools, 35 are independent, 22 grammar, 15 sixth-form colleges, seven comprehensives or academies, and one is a further education college. (Schools are ranked by offers received, then by offer-to-application ratio. If schools received fewer than three offers from one

Miranda Morrison

How to win the Maths Challenge

Simon Singh, founder of the Good Thinking Society and author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, believes that parents should ferociously ‘lobby their children’s schools’ if they still don’t run the annual Maths Challenge. For those not familiar with it, the Maths Challenge is a phenomenally well-organised competition run by the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust (UKMT). It doesn’t cost much to enter — £13 for ten papers (for ten pupils) — and is a massive opportunity for children from all backgrounds. UKMT, a charity founded in 1996, aims to ‘advance the education of young people in mathematics’. It works with schools and volunteers to arrange junior, intermediate and senior

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

How Harris Westminster conquered Oxbridge

Westminster School is being kept on its toes by its partner sixth-form college round the corner, Harris Westminster. There’s no imminent threat yet, in the ‘How many did you get into Oxbridge?’ stakes: last year, Westminster (private, £10,497 per term for day sixth-formers) got 71 of its pupils into Oxbridge, and Harris Westminster (state, £0 per term) got 36 in from a cohort about twice the size. But watch those Oxbridge statistics draw closer to each other in the next few years, as Harris Westminster’s highly motivated and excellently taught students continue to soar, and Oxbridge colleges become ever more nervous of offering places to the (as they see it)

William Cook

The secrets to brilliant teaching

‘Why not be a teacher?’ asks Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s great play A Man for All Seasons. ‘You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.’ ‘If I was, who would know it?’ says Richard Rich, the young man who betrays him. ‘You, your pupils, your friends — God,’ says More. ‘Not a bad public, that.’ I’ve been thinking about those lines a lot since the finest teacher I ever knew, Audrey Judge, died. Audrey was 93. The last time I saw her was before Covid. She died of cancer during lockdown. She taught art at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in New Cross — formerly a state grammar school, now a

Anthony Seldon

Have we let exams become too important in shaping schools?

I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’ ‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’. Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed

The Spectator

School portraits: a snapshot of four notable schools | September 2021

Brampton manor academy This co-educational state school in Newham, east London, is setting the standard for the academies programme. With hundreds of high-achieving pupils, its selective sixth-form, which opened in 2012, has attracted attention for its stand-out Oxbridge achievements. This summer, 55 pupils secured Oxbridge places, beating Eton for the first time. The sixth-form receives around 3,000 applications for about 300 places per year, while some two out of three pupils are eligible for free school meals. One pupil puts its high achievement rates down to discipline, highlighting the rules around punctuality (there’s detention if you’re late) and a strict uniform code. Ofsted highlights the school’s ‘relentless ambition and high