When three East London schoolgirls fled Britain to join Islamic State in Syria in February 2015, the education world was forced to ask itself some difficult questions. The government's counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent, had been in place since 2011, but many teachers and school leaders found the guidance vague and hard to enforce. It's better und...
EdBlogs
I recently taught a PSHE lesson to a year 8 group on the assumptions we make about people. I started with the word "Australian" – students said common judgements were that they would say "g'day", wear cork hats, like beer, wear shorts, have barbecues all the time and be good at rugby. Then we moved on to "American" – apparently they like burgers, a...
It's not often that an education policy inspires unison in the sector, but the government's proposal to re-introduce grammar schools seemed to do just that, bringing the vast majority of education professionals together to say what a terrible idea it was. "The aims are entirely honourable," says Patrick Watson, a policy analyst and communicati...
We've all heard that it's the most important meal of the day, but research has made it official: breakfast is linked to better performance in the classroom. According to a study from Cardiff University in 2015, the odds of an 11-year-old student achieving above average in a test were twice as high for those who ate breakfast compared with those who...
In the latest international Pisa tests, carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 22% of 15-year-olds in the UK performed at the lowest level of mathematics proficiency. In practice, this means they may be unable to carry out simple tasks, such as recognising that travelling four kilometres in 10 minutes means going...