Some years ago (well, nearly ten if you must know), I gave a dinner to mark my undistinguished half-century. Nothing grand — but a convivial gathering of ten men and ten women in the basement of a restaurant where several of us used to hang out in loon pants in the early 1970s. Looking down
Every year — according to Fleet Street legend — the Telegraph prints a lovely photograph on its front page after the A-level results are published. It shows happy, bright young ladies clutching important letters and leaping into the air with glee. These lissom blondes are, of course, the students with straight As. ‘Yessss!’, they have
In China you can see replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid, St Peter’s Square and a large slice of Amsterdam. But more remarkable than any of them in its own way is a red-brick military-academy-style building in the Hongqiao district of Tianjin. It is a replica — or thereabouts — of Wellington College
The school trip now seems rather quaint. When you can see the whole world on Google Maps, what’s the point of traipsing to the seaside to see longshore drift in action? In an age of austerity, moreover, the school trip might seem an unaffordable indulgence. Yet parents seem to think otherwise: according to a recent
When I close my eyes and think about school sports, I envisage myself on the hockey pitch, stick in hand, a luminous gumshield locked on to my chops and a bandana across my forehead. (Bandanas were all the rage back then.) Boys are watching. I can also hear the booming voice of Mr Markham, our fierce
The traditional edifice of sixth form, university in Britain, and a job for life is still the norm for many, but major cracks are beginning to appear in the infrastructure. As the father of three children, two of whom have been through university and one who is still there, as well as headmaster of a
‘Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man,’ said St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order. Public schools are given children until they’re 18 — it’s no surprise they can control their world view for the rest of their life. And their language, too. When Prince William teased
In the summer before university, I rode a minibus to Blandford Forum in Dorset to attend a Greek summer school. Sitting next to me was a boy with Scout badges pinned to his polo shirt. ‘I like your costume,’ he told me, eyeing my blouse. ‘You look just like an air hostess. Or a Barbie
My brother’s Classics teacher Mr Maynard had a pet rock called Lithos (Greek for stone); his teaching methods included ‘subliminal learning’ sessions, during which he’d walk around the room conjugating verbs in a soft voice while everyone else suppressed giggles. He was also fond of a physical demonstration, hurling himself across the room with no
Ever since it became a required topic in 2002, citizenship has crept into lessons where it doesn’t belong. Languages are one of the casualties. ‘What do you think about the dangers of smoking?’ ‘Do you have problems with pollution in your local area?’ And my favourite — a suggested question for French GCSE: ‘What is
Letter home from prep-school boy, c. 1949: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, last night was the school play. It was Hamlet. A lot of the parents had seen it before, but they laughed all the same.’ Guffaws from the audience at lines that are not supposed to be funny; total absence of laughter at lines that
The handing over of aid money to governments to spend on state schools has often proved disastrous. Thousands of villages in the developing world now have ‘ghost schools’, where buildings are empty or half-built. The teacher is paid but doesn’t turn up. A local official is bribed to confirm that all is well. In a
Have school libraries had their day? The printed book’s previously unassailable supremacy as the medium of learning is rapidly being replaced by other more sophisticated electronic means. Books are still popular among the young, often promoted by social networking, but with the internet and much else, is their future (if they have one) merely recreational?
Ah, happy memories of the 1990s classroom. The flicker of the CRT screen; the interactive whiteboard; the screeching from the dial-up internet modem; the frantic searching for the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-Rom. These images are now as archaic as the blackboard and the slide rule. Gone are the boxy computers under a dust sheet in the
Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the
Market price Independent schooling versus private tutoring: which is the biggest market? Some 579,700 pupils are educated at independent schools, for an average annual fee of £13,788, making for a total market of £7.99 billion. Based on a 35-hour week and a 40-week academic year, parents are paying an average of £9.80 per hour. A
‘Finding the right school for my child is the most important decision I will make as a parent, a major emotional investment as well as a financial one,’ says David Wellesley Wesley, director of the Independent Schools Show. ‘School selection is no longer a question of which old school tie your father wore but rather
