Education

Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and wary of not lobbing their mortarboards too vigorously, students graduating in the coming weeks are set for a tough time – there’s a housing crisis, a difficult economic climate, and the average starting salary for graduates hovers perilously on the £20,000 mark. Comforting, then, that the National Union of Students has our back. Fighting valiantly against the so-called ‘marketisation’ of higher education, they offer dogmatic principles we can rely upon: namely, that university education must be free to receive; that all elected governments are secretly conniving against the people; and that all those on large salaries are somehow inherently evil. All very honourable and right-on, but these are metrics worth measuring the

When politicians and tutors talk about underrepresented groups at universities, few expect men to feature on the list. Yet as a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute today shows, men are now an endangered species at university, with women being 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. Men are also more likely to drop out, or get a lower degree mark. The report worries that this is a trend that could get worse – and argues that instead of being a victory to celebrate in a battle of the sexes, that men falling behind in education is something that policymakers should take seriously. And besides,

Tuesday’s protest against Key Stage 1 Sats was moronic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, it wasn’t a ‘kids’ strike’. Did a national committee of six- and seven-year-olds get together and decide on a day of action? Even in Brighton, the centre of the boycott, that seems a bit far-fetched. The grown-up organisers of the protest clearly believed that was a cute way of packaging it for media consumption, but the thought of such young children engaging in political activism is actually a bit sinister. It’s like something out of a dystopian satire — a cross between Brave New World and

Another British university has been revealed as a mini GDR. And this time it’s not the fault of those speech-policing students’ unions. The University of Edinburgh – which recently hit headlines after its students association banned head-shaking – has been slammed for an Orwellian new practice designed to keep tabs on its staff. Under a new scheme, reported in Times Higher Education, university staff will be required to report their whereabouts ‘when officially at work, but not in their normal place of work’. The provisions, originally meant to apply only to staff from outside the EU, have been extended to all 13,000 employees, in an effort to ensure they are applied

A few months ago, David Cameron made an incendiary claim that splashed the Sunday Times and set the news agenda for days: black boys, he said, were more likely to go to prison than university. It was a shocking statement, that quite rightly sparked much discussion. But there was one flaw: his claim was nonsense. I had to submit a Freedom of Information request to find the real story: black men are twice as likely to go to a top (i.e., Russell Group) university than to prison. Include women, and it’s five times as likely. Include all universities, and there’s no comparison – black teenagers have a higher university entry rate than

In part of his Budget manspreading this week, George Osborne stole Nicky Morgan’s announcement that councils will be forced to relinquish control of all schools, so every single one is an Academy. As Philip Collins says in the Times today, this doesn’t mean they’ll all get better – he rather scorns the idea. But his old boss, Tony Blair, had precisely the same idea: to (in effect) privatise every single state school, so each one is independent of the council and has a direct financial relationship with Whitehall, cutting out local authorities entirely. Blair was vetoed by Brown and had to settle for a few hundred Academies. But in this,

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,