Schools

Female bishops The Reverend Libby Lane was ordained as Bishop of Stockport, the Church of England’s first female bishop. — By the time the first 32 female C of E vicars were ordained in 1994, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts had had a female bishop, Barbara Harris, for five years. — Yet the first Anglican woman priest was ordained half a century earlier. Florence Li Tim-Oi had been deacon at Macao Protestant Chapel in the early 1940s. When the war prevented a priest travelling from Japanese-occupied territory to administer communion, Li Tim-Oi was ordained by the Bishop of Victoria on 25 January 1944. Cash or card? The managing director of Visa

Jonathan Sacks has an impressive track record for predicting the age we are in. In his 1990 Reith Lectures, ‘The Persistence of Faith’, the then chief rabbi pushed back against the dominant idea that religion was going to disappear. In the early 2000s, he predicted a century of conflict within Islam. And he was one of the first religious leaders and thinkers not only to critique multi-culturalism (‘the spanner in the works for tolerance’) but to try to think of a path beyond it. We recently talked over some of this at his house in London, where he lives during gaps in a busy teaching schedule that also takes him to

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the great nature/nurture debate. Though we’ve squirmed and baulked, we mostly now do accept that genes inform (to a greater or lesser extent) not just our height and eye-colour, but our personalities: our intelligence, our disposition. We’re more like our parents than we are like strangers — and what, after all, was so very controversial about that? So now we’re at peace with our genes, here’s another mental challenge, a curious discovery by geneticists that’s even more at odds with our intuition. This one concerns what we’ve come to think of

I was pleased to read this week that my old headmistress, Judith Carlisle, has launched a campaign to root out perfectionism in girls’ schools. Her initiative, which she is calling ‘The death of Little Miss Perfect’, is designed to ‘challenge perfectionism because of how it undermines self-esteem and then performance’. After 11 years in selective all-girls education, I’ve experienced the perfectionism Ms Carlisle describes. I was, indeed, a prime example: disappointed with anything less than an A*, I felt relief rather than joy when I found out I’d been offered a place at Oxford. The pressure my classmates and I put on ourselves was immense. It extended into all areas

Better capital makes us richer. That’s uncontroversial when it comes to fixed capital like machine tools and computers, but it’s also true of human capital. Better educated workers create more productive jobs, increasing the total amount of wealth in an economy. In a new Adam Smith Institute report released today, Incentive to Invest: How education affects economic growth, we found a very significant relationship between improvements in education and growth. In our model, a 10 per cent increase in TIMSS Advanced test scores generates a long-term 0.85 per cent increase in annual economic growth. We argue that getting more children into independent schools through vouchers may be the easiest way

The Trojan Horse reports are in, and they make for damning reading.  ‘An aggressive Islamist agenda… a coordinated, deliberate and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos’. Teachers who claimed that the Boston marathon bombing and the murder of Lee Rigby were in fact hoaxes and an ‘Attack on Islam’. And so on. The grim details are out. But there is a story behind this story which has not been thought about, though it ought to be. That is the response of Britain’s Muslim communities to these awful revelations. Ever since 9/11 a considerable appeal from the non-Muslim majority in the West has been ‘where are the moderates?

Thirty years ago, as editor of the Salisbury Review, I began to receive short articles from a Bradford headmaster, relating the dilemmas faced by those attempting to provide an English education to the children of Asian immigrants. Ray Honeyford’s case was simple. Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers therefore had a duty, not merely to impart the English language and the English curriculum, but to ensure that children understood and adhered to the basic principles of the surrounding society, including racial and religious tolerance, sexual equality and the habit of settling conflicts by compromise and not by force. Honeyford complained of

Britain’s skills crisis was addressed by the country’s leading educationalists today at The Spectator’s half-day conference, Giving Britain the skills it needs. Matthew Hancock, Minister for Skills and Enterprise, delivered the key note speech. In it he outlined his plans for better preparing young people for employment. ‘I’m determined that apprenticeships  become the established route for all school-leavers who don’t go to university; not as a second option,’ he said, before adding that ‘demanding higher standards of people isn’t setting them up for failure, as we’ve often heard from the left.’ Hancock’s speech focussed on the need to establish how technology must be used to ‘spread opportunity.’ Schools and colleges should

As metaphors go, calling the alleged plot to take over schools in Birmingham a ‘Trojan Horse’ is a pretty powerful one. This allegedly was a devious attempt by a group of extremists to invade a protected space, ousting headteachers, making false allegations against staff and employing dirty tricks with the aim of imposing a fundamentaist Islamic ideology. I agree with David Cameron when he states: ‘…the issue of alleged Islamic extremism in Birmingham schools demands a robust response.’  So how should we respond? In 2011 I was privileged to chair the independent review into teacher standards, a document that details the minimum requirements for teachers’ practice and conduct.  As part