Iam a teacher in a state secondary school in west London where the ethnic diversity of the pupils is remarkable. My current Year 9 class, for example, includes pupils with parents from Trinidad, Ireland, Turkey, French Guina, Algeria, Yemen, Italy, France, Bosnia, Albania, India, Germany, Iceland, Portugal, Zanzibar, Lebanon, America, and Spain. Over the past
The prep school I went to in the 1970s had changed little since the 1940s. Lumpy mattresses, barely edible food, harsh discipline. It’s why we spent our every day there dreaming of escape; and why we nicknamed it Colditz. Not that I’m complaining. Though no mother now would dream of sending her eight-year old boy
Brighton College As a mixed independent school with pupils aged 3–18, Brighton College covers the full spectrum of students. With such a wide remit, you might expect areas where it falls down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In 2016, every GCSE exam sat (all 2,082 of them), was passed, with A*
The intern stood up from his desk and the button popped off his trousers. He walked over to me and asked what he should do. I suggested he stitch it back on. He said he didn’t know how, so I offered to do it for him – but he declined. Instead, he spent the whole
British education has never been so competitive. Our system, particularly the private sector, is a constant source of fascination and is renowned the world over — even though it educates only 7 per cent of UK children. But the current competition for places has borne a new industry, usually labelled ‘education consultancy.’ Consider education consultants
I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the
Every now and again I ask my daughter, who is a primary school teacher, if she is free for a curry after work. And almost always she replies that she can’t, as she has a ‘parents’ night’. Now, either she has become lazy in her excuses for not wanting to see me, or her school
Of all the reasons for choosing to live in a ground-floor flat rather than a first-floor one, it might not occur to you that your choice could be the game-changing clincher in your child’s educational prospects — but so it is. In the terrifying admissions criteria for Britain’s oversubscribed faith and church primary schools, you
As careers for Oxford Union-debating PPE graduates go, Shaun Fenton’s has not been wholly orthodox. Leaving Keble College in 1992, he took up a job with what is now Deloitte and trained as a chartered accountant. So far, so ordinary. But it was on a trip back to his old school, Haberdashers’ Askes’ in Elstree,
CHINESE SCHOOL IS A FIRST IN EUROPE Europe’s first bilingual English-Chinese school is due to open in London this September. Professor Hugo de Burgh, a leading authority on China, will be the chairman of Kensington Wade School and has been instrumental in its founding. He says the benefits for pupils will be numerous. Yes,
One of the huge benefits of the British education system is the sheer number of alternatives on offer. But when it comes to choosing a school for your child, the choice can be overwhelming. In our cover piece on page 8, Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks at Britain’s faith primary schools, which could be a sensible
Godwin’s law says that the longer an internet discussion continues, the more likely it is that a Nazism analogy will be used. Grammar school debates have their own law. At some point someone will say: ‘Grammars are fine, but do you also want more secondary moderns?’ It’s a fair point. At the height of their
Bedales. A school known for its lack of uniform and its policy of pupils calling their teachers by their first names, it is beloved by some but baffles others. To add to the confusion, its headmaster isn’t the happy-clappy chap you might expect. ‘I’m far from being some kind of trendy character,’ insists Keith Budge,
In August the papers were full of smiling pupils clutching their exam results. Now we’re in September, when children and teenagers across the country are taking the next steps in their academic lives, be that starting school, switching to a new one, or moving on to university or college. Navigating today’s education system can be
No group of the population voted to remain in the EU more enthusiastically than students. According to the polling organisation YouthSight, 85 per cent of them voted to remain, and among the 15 per cent who voted leave, 17 per cent say they now regret it. Moreover, the idea that students were too lazy or
Do you ever tell your pupils that debt is a bad thing?’ I challenged the headmaster of a thriving Midlands prep school. His answer was more nuanced than I was expecting — but since independent school heads are also educational entrepreneurs these days, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. ‘I’d be anxious about too much
Picture the scene: an Englishman loudly-ordering food in a Parisian restaurant. The waiter rolls his eyes at the customer’s stubborn commitment to soldiering on in English, and everyone in the-vicinity has the good grace to look suitably embarrassed. This may sound like a tired 1970s stereotype. Except, tragically, it’s just as likely to serve as a
Rugby When Rugby School first allowed girls into its sixth form in 1976, just ten joined. In 1995 it went fully co-ed and today there are 373 female pupils. The ankle-length skirts that form part of the uniform look old-fashioned, but the school’s co-educational aproach is far more progressive. The transition wasn’t all smooth, though.
The Earl of March, who owns the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, said recently that he ‘hated’ Eton and ‘couldn’t wait to leave’. This came as a surprise to the interviewer, who immediately asked Charles March why on earth he then packed his own three sons off to his horrible alma mater. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’
The curious thing about an art room is that you never remember the look of the place. Each summer, a school art room sloughs its skin: life drawings are unpinned from the walls, maquettes carried home for the holidays, canvases taken off easels, portfolios collected by school leavers, the whole place stripped of colour and