Education

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that

My initial reaction on learning that my secondary school had compulsory CCF — Combined Cadet Force — on Wednesday afternoons was one of horror. As an ‘army brat’, the child of an officer, I was mortified to be following in my father’s footsteps and completing assault courses and weighted swims every single week. However, my view of the CCF was to change dramatically over the following five years. At 14, I aimed to be the coolest camo-clad teenager for our first day. On the evening before, we lurked in our boarding houses and laboriously pinned in our trousers, practised ‘messy buns’ and pouted in a mirror while sporting red lipstick. Unfortunately,

The toughest causes to campaign for are those which are not fashionable. To fight racism in the 1950s or stand up for gay rights in the 1980s took guts – and the progress made today is largely down to those who took up the cause before it became a form of virtue signalling. International Women’s Day should be a chance to remember the billions of women who are treated appallingly in developing countries – but when it comes to Britain, the battle has pretty much been won. The pay gap is a problem for women born before 1975, but not after. The problem is sorting itself out. For the under-40s, there is a negative pay gap: i.e., men are paid marginally less.

Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern medicine and Ryan Gosling’s face, I went to a private school. As much as I’d like to think my career is all thanks to my special snowflake qualities, it’s difficult, when looking around at the rest of my heavily privately-educated profession, to draw any conclusion other than that my schooling might have helped me. Yes,

Something very strange is happening in London: its state schools are going through a huge renaissance – while attainment in many northern English schools is going into reverse. The chief of Ofsted, Sir Micahel Wilshaw, laid the problem bare in a speech to the IPPR today:- Three in ten secondary schools in Manchester and four in ten in Liverpool require improvement or are inadequate compared to one in ten in inner London. The situation in some of their satellite towns is even worse. A third of the schools in Rochdale are not good enough, as is a similar proportion in Salford. In Oldham, six in ten secondaries require improvement or are inadequate and in Knowsley

The term ‘superhead’ was first used during the Blair government in 1998: an eye-catching word for a new breed of Superman-style headmasters or headmistresses, fast-tracked star teachers who would be parachuted into failing inner-city state schools and paid six-figure salaries to ‘turn them around’. It reaped rewards and can generally be considered a Good Thing. Sir Michael Wilshaw, for example, now chief inspector of schools, became known as ‘the hero of Hackney’ for transforming the academic record of Mossbourne Community Academy, built on the site of the totally-failed Hackney Downs School. Sometimes power went to the superheads’ heads and they were caught siphoning off funds to pay for their holidays.

Today’s OECD study of basic skills ranks England lowest in the developed world for literacy, and second lowest for numeracy. We knew that our schools might struggle to compete with the likes of Singapore and South Korea, but this puts the problem in a whole new perspective. It’s the delayed results of a study taken four years ago where 5,000 in each country were sampled so, to some extent, it’s a hangover from the days when a far greater share of children left school without five decent passes. But the report also found that England has three times more low-skilled people among those aged 16-19 than the best-performing countries like

England’s cricketers won a remarkable Test match inside three days in the bearpit of Johannesburg, a victory that put them 2-0 up in the four-match series, with only the final Test to play. It is a remarkable achievement by Alastair Cook’s team because, before a ball had been bowled, most judges expected South Africa, the No. 1 ranked team in the world, to claim another triumph by right. In particular it was a wonderful tribute to the public schools which sharpened the skills of the star players. Stuart Broad, who took six prime wickets for only 17 runs on that tumultuous third day, reducing South Africa’s second innings to rubble, was