Education

The genius of Mo Farah was only underscored by the plodding stupidity of Downing Street’s statements about the “All Must Have Prizes” culture this weekend. If this is the culture which produced Mo Farah then surely we should be celebrating it. But the truth is that it doesn’t exist and never has done. How does David Cameron think we managed to get 28 gold medals if not through the promotion of competitive sport in schools? Mo Farah attended an inner city comprehensive his talent was spotted and encouraged. What’s wrong with that? Considering the scale of the success of London 2012, it’s no surprise that there have been attempts from

A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, who said: ‘The Tory-led Government’s decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.’ It’s easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee

The pace of reform in education has been stepped up again today. The model funding agreement for all new academies has now been changed by the Department for Education to remove the requirement for all teachers to have Qualified Teacher Status. Any existing academy will also be able to change its funding agreement to include this new freedom. This change might sound technical but its importance is that it means that academies will now be able to employ people who have not gone through a year of teacher training. Previously, an academy couldn’t have employed, say, James Dyson to teach design without him having done a year in a teacher

Last night I attended a public meeting to discuss the successful bid by parents in north London to set up a free school in East Finchley. The Archer Academy is to be a non-selective, non-denominational community school. It was an extraordinary occasion, with hundreds of local parents prepared to throw their weight behind the project. Tellingly, a local Labour councillor was on the panel to answer questions about the new school which has cross-party support. This is due, in no small part, to the desperation of the community in the face of consistent refusal on the part of the local authority (Tory-controlled Barnet) to do the right thing and build

The discussion of Britain’s latest tennis nearly man has turned inevitably to the culture of a sport which, in this country at least, remains laughably exclusive. Asked on the Today programme why we fail to produce consistent numbers of good tennis players the tennis evangelist and comedian Tony Hawks (who knows a thing or two about what is laughable) made a good suggestion about opening up our ridiculously expensive (and often empty) courts to the public. But the debate about tennis reveals a deeper malaise. In this country we are prepared to accept mediocrity because the last thing we would dare tamper with is the class system. There is a

The self-styled enfant terrible of the new radical left, Ms Laurie Penny, has taken her one-woman revolution to the heart of the establishment. Yesterday, she caused quite the ruckus at the Sunday Times Education Festival, hosted at Wellington College on a panel with David Starkey. As well as being banned from the speakers dinner at the behest of the Sunday Times, Penny later alerted her Twitter followers to the fact that ‘violent old thug‘ David Starkey had ‘attacked‘ her ‘on stage’. ‘That’s what racists do when you call them out on their bigotry’ she Tweeted. ‘Bit shaken but I’ll be ok.’  Penny’s version of events was soon questioned, not least

Primary school children studying subordinate clauses and foreign languages? What an outlandish but suddenly very real idea. Michael Gove announced earlier this week a curriculum reshuffle to restore rigour and aptitude to primary education. But why is liberalising Gove instigating a top-down approach, prescribing what teachers teach?   It’s not the first time that Gove’s policies have become contradictory. Earlier this year, Tristram Hunt MP wrote a magazine article about the Tory divide over forcing secondary schools to teach British history while also increasing their freedom.   The Times’ Alice Thompson (£) provides an answer for these dilemmas in her column this week. She wrote: ‘Some schools have given up