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There is an interesting article in this week’s Economist about Welsh schools. In 2001 the devolved Welsh government abolished school league tables. A decade on, the results are not encouraging. The Ec…

Shirley Valentine is one of my favourite films. I watched it a lot with my parents when I was younger; I think they liked it because it made relationships between English women and Greek men temporari…

Stephen Twigg is quoted here in the Guardian as saying that: ‘While in government, Labour made huge efforts to raise the status and quality of teaching; introducing programmes like Teach First to attr…

In my last post, I referred to a great post by Andrew Old where he uses a quadrant to clarify a common misconception in educational debates. I have drawn up a quadrant to represent something similar….

I just read an excellent post here by Andrew Old which clarifies a frequent misconception in debates about education. Put simply, there are two key debates in education – one is about the content of t…

I just posted a blog about 21st century skills over here. I got some very interesting and thought-provoking responses from people in the comments and on Twitter. All good. One person, Sam Freedman, re…

Whenever I hear anyone talk about preparing students for the 21st century, I am always sceptical. Partly this is because it is never made clear exactly what is so different about the 21st century that…

In my post here, I talked about the pervasive modern idea that Google renders memory irrelevant, and explained why this idea is false. I want to return to this point here with some further explanation…

A very similar post to this was originally published on the Policy First website here. In modern education, traditional knowledge often gets a bit of a hard time. Critics of knowledge-based curriculum…