Kristina Murkett

Kristina Murkett is an English teacher, private tutor and journalist

Teachers deserve their long summer holidays

What’s the best thing about teaching? July and August! Or so the old joke goes. The long school holidays are an easy riposte to teachers’ complaints about the profession. Below inflation pay rises? At least you get the school holidays. Lack of flexible working opportunities? Six weeks off over summer. Disruptive behaviour? At least you

Every boy needs a strong male role model in their life

Imagine you are the parent of a primary-school aged boy. Outside of family, how many men do you think your son would interact with, compared to women? The answer is unlikely to be balanced. In the UK, 98 per cent of childminders and nursery workers are female – as well as 99 per cent of health visitors, 87 per cent of

Labour owes it to special needs children to reform SEND

They say that history repeats itself, but the Labour party won’t be expecting it to happen quite so quickly. Last week, a ‘Starmtrooper’ rebellion forced the government to make a series of last-minute concessions and compromises on its welfare bill for fear of a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons.  Now, Labour is facing

The biggest reason people aren’t having babies? FOMO

In his book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, economist Bryan Caplan notes that, due to modern conveniences and our better quality of life, parenting should be easier than ever. Plus, in theory, as society grows richer, people should have more children. Instead, we have fewer, and parenting seems harder than ever.  Why is this? Caplan

The sad decline of reading

At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore? For too many children (and adults), reading

Child stars and the curse of Harry Potter

A spell has been cast. Three children – Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton – have magically gone from obscurity to global fame, after HBO announced that they will be playing Harry, Ron and Hermione in the new Harry Potter series. HBO released a photograph of the trio, kneeling in the grass looking earnest,

Bonnie Blue deserves to be cancelled

Dr Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, defines the ‘pornification of society’ as a culture where explicit content isn’t just tolerated, but actively celebrated: the hardcore becomes mainstream, the shocking becomes desensitising, the transgressive becomes ever-more competitive. Leading this race to the bottom is OnlyFans ‘model’ Bonnie Blue. Blue, ever-the-expert in attention-grabbing

Bridget Phillipson’s Ofsted reforms are a mess

In 1902, Holly Mount School in Bury was shut down following a scandal over alleged brutality against the children. The next year, the House of Commons noted that one reason why the abuse was allowed to continue for so long was because of infrequent and cursory inspections, which one MP said were nothing but ‘hard

How Trump could reverse America’s baby bust

Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the

In defence of ‘free’ breakfast clubs

This week the government has started rolling out their free breakfast club scheme, which will be trialled in 750 primary schools until July. The initiative – which, as many are quick to point out, is not actually free but funded by the taxpayer – will cost around £30 million. However, many headteachers have warned of

The teachers’ union should be on the side of private schools

The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’  It is of course true that

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

Something is rotten in the state of British schools. According to primary school teachers, one in four Reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, increasingly demonstrating poor language skills, delays in basic motor functions, and a

In defence of single-sex schools

When I first became a teacher, I bought into the notion that single-sex schools were an anachronism – a result of historical happenstance that no longer had a place in the 21st century. I imagined all-boys schools as a macho world of Spartan dormitories and testosterone-charged classrooms. I assumed the boys graduated with repressed memories

Strict schools are sapping the joy out of learning

When it comes to behaviour policies, schools have fallen into two extremes. Across the border in Scotland, schools practise ‘restorative justice’: a relationships-based, non-punitive approach that favours constructive conversations over traditional sanctions. On the flip side, academies across England are adopting an authoritarian, zero-tolerance approach, where detentions are given for minor infractions and routines are

How The Traitors betrayed itself

January can only mean one thing: The Traitors is back. For those of you who haven’t been initiated into this cloaks-and-daggers drama, the premise is simple: the traitors attempt to remove players by ‘murdering’ them, while the faithfuls try to work out who the traitors are. Each night the group votes someone off after a

The problem with ‘diversifying’ the curriculum 

As an English teacher, one of my favourite poems to teach, to pupils of almost all ages, is Chinua Achebe’s ‘Vultures’. In the poem, the speaker describes various images that uncomfortably combine love and violence: a vulture picking apart a corpse before nestling up to its mate; a Commandant at Belsen buying chocolate for his

Labour’s axing of Latin lessons is an act of cultural vandalism

The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after an external review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the