Schools
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…
Cameron's sinister purge of the posh
Should employees be judged by their parents’ income?
Generation Snowflake: how we train our kids to be censorious cry-babies
We’re training our children to be thin-skinned, censorious and belligerently entitled
300 signatures can be wrong. How about 2 million?
Name check 306 business people signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying that Britain would be better off outside…
If the Sats-strike parents get their way only the poorer kids will suffer
Tuesday’s protest against Key Stage 1 Sats was moronic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to…
West Heslerton and other villages with one careful owner
Squire power The village of West Heslerton in Yorkshire was put up for sale at £20 million after its owner,…
Private-school ‘superheads’ are a publicity-seeking waste of time
Private-school ‘superheads’ are wonderful for publicity.They may not be so good for teaching
To survive as a Tory teacher, you have to keep quiet
Surviving as a Tory teacher means keeping quiet
It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’
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 everybody else likes
A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed…
How education jargon hurts children
Schools are becoming addicted to acronyms. It’s not just silly, it’s dangerous
There’s too much bunkum talked about the arts and education
At the last minute, a friend invited me to a ‘Distinguished Speakers Dinner’ at the Oxford and Cambridge Club earlier…
Nicky Morgan's pitch for the Tory leadership
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
What I’ve learned helping to found a specialist free school
Lessons from the first year of our specialist maths school
The lessons of exam results season (and what to do about them)
Every year without fail, as the trees start thinking about losing their leaves, the papers are full of the same…
How to help black boys afraid of ‘acting white’
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…
Peter Oborne’s diary: My Pakistan cricket tour, and what the ‘no’ campaign needs
For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side…
Dear Mary: What to do when a dinner guest won’t turn and chat
Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had…
Did Radio 4 have to deal with the Germanwings disaster as it did?
‘You can hear pretty clearly the sound of one of the helicopters and you can see it in the darkness,’…
The Conservatives should be the party of immigrants — and here’s how they can be
For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative…
A lesson in bias on private schools
What aid experts and academics don’t want to hear about private schools in developing countries
I’m working to make education fairer. But I’m still not sure what ‘fairer’ means
Civitas has just published an interesting book called The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools. Edited by Anastasia de…
