Schools
World Book Day is here again. God help us
For parents of primary school children, the first Thursday in March has got to be the worst day of the…
“I’ll eat you alive” – Angela Rayner interview
Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk.…
Sadly, true grit can’t be taught
I am currently wrestling with a dilemma. I have agreed to contribute to a panel discussion on character education at…
Hard lessons
George Tomlinson, the post-war education secretary, declared that politicians should leave exams to the teachers because ‘the minister knows nowt…
Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has just published a report looking at the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds…
Purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
The snowflake factory
We’re training our children to be thin-skinned, censorious and belligerently entitled
Barometer
Name check 306 business people signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying that Britain would be better off outside…
Middle-class warriors
Tuesday’s protest against Key Stage 1 Sats was moronic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to…
Barometer
Squire power The village of West Heslerton in Yorkshire was put up for sale at £20 million after its owner,…
Big heads
Private-school ‘superheads’ are wonderful for publicity.They may not be so good for teaching
A lesson in self-censorship
Surviving as a Tory teacher means keeping quiet
In defence of gender
Children are not all ‘gender fluid’. It’s dangerous and wrong to try to persuade them that they are
Q: What is a good school? A: One that other people like
A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed…
Lessons in jargon
Schools are becoming addicted to acronyms. It’s not just silly, it’s dangerous
The fine art of talking bunkum
At the last minute, a friend invited me to a ‘Distinguished Speakers Dinner’ at the Oxford and Cambridge Club earlier…
She could be a contender
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan thinks a woman should run to be the next Tory leader
The cruellest month
My August-born toddler is being marked out for failure – thank God the rules are changing
How to build a school
Lessons from the first year of our specialist maths school
The lessons of exam results season
Every year without fail, as the trees start thinking about losing their leaves, the papers are full of the same…
Don’t act white, act migrant
Black British boys are being held back by fear of betraying their background. Immigrant children know how to deal with that
Portrait of the week
Home At least 30 British people were among 38 shot dead at a beach resort at Sousse in Tunisia by…
The best way to end the ‘poshness test’
There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on…
Diary
For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side…
Dear Mary
Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had…
