Spectator Life
An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Why maths to 18 is a bad idea (by a maths teacher)
Whenever I tell people I used to be a maths teacher the most common response is: ‘I absolutely hated maths at school.’ It is an age-old tale, to loathe maths lessons (or indeed your maths teacher). So, what better way to make children loathe maths even more than to make it compulsory until the age
How to raise a genius
If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements in the field. To learn how to paint beautifully, visit the National Gallery. If you want to be a great scientist, spend some time in cutting-edge laboratories. If you want to write, read great literature. But this is not what parents usually think
Why become a teacher?
There was an article in this magazine’s last Schools supplement in September that, just for a moment, made me panic. ‘Why I’ve quit teaching’ was the headline. Not great timing. I’d just resigned from my secure civil service job in the Department for Transport to start a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in secondary level history.
School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools
Roundhay School, Leeds ‘While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write,’ said Liz Truss of her alma mater three years ago when she was minister for women and equalities. Roundhay School’s record begs to differ – it has been ranked ‘outstanding’ by
Why I betrayed my friend over a bottle of rum
There are moments in a boy’s adolescence when he catches a glimpse of the man he will become. Faced with adversity, is he the brave sort – or the sort who runs away and lets others suffer? Aged 13, on a school trip to Portsmouth, I discovered I was the latter. Tom insisted he’d found
9 Feb 2023
The true cost of Labour’s war on private schools
In a newspaper article five years ago, Michael Gove singled out the tax exemptions enjoyed by private schools thanks to their charitable status as one of the ‘burning injustices’ of our time. He took it for granted that scrapping these benefits would raise money and proposed spending it on children in care instead. ‘How can
16 Dec 2022
Bring back the handwritten school report
The end of term is here and parents up and down the country will be awaiting the arrival of their child’s end-of-term report. But I hope they won’t be expecting too many pearls of wisdom from the impersonal emails that will ping into their inboxes shortly. Ten or a dozen years ago (the exact date
5 Dec 2022
What teachers really want for Christmas
As the end of term approaches parents may be wondering what to buy their child’s teacher for Christmas. It’s the season of goodwill, after all. It’s also a golden opportunity to win a way to Sir or Miss’s heart, so they’ll continue to take good care of little Olivia or Oliver in the new year.
1 Sep 2022
Carol Vorderman: My maths manifesto for the nation
A glittering TV career, an MBE, various honorary degrees, tens of thousands of TikTok followers and the only person to win the (now cancelled) Rear of the Year award multiple times. There are many accolades that Carol Vorderman has been afforded during her 40-year career, yet few mean more to her than her claim to
The long game: independent schools are coming round to football
Until recently, football was viewed with suspicion in independent schools – the poor relation to its big-hitting step-brother, rugby. That well known saying about football being ‘a game for gentlemen played by hooligans’ seemed to sum up independent schools’ attitudes perfectly. Well into the new millennium, promising young players would be cajoled into playing rugby
Why I’ve quit teaching
For the past four years I have worked at an academy in Hackney. I was deputy head of maths for three of those years, and head of maths for the final term, managing 16 staff. After nearly a decade teaching in the state sector, I’d finally worked my way up to a well paid and
How a skiing trip turned me into a megalomaniac
In the instant I first became aware of the unpleasant nature of the cosmos we all infest, my megalomaniac nature and a desire to marry Rupert Murdoch, I was on a school trip to Gstaad. Now and then the night train stopped at snow-capped stations, which I could see from my lower bunk. My teenage
School portraits: snapshots of three notable schools
Trinity School, Croydon Headmaster Alasdair Kennedy says he wants students to leave the school ‘without any sense of entitlement, but with a humility that acknowledges the fact there is always more to learn and others to learn from’. The former grammar school, which accepts boys from the age of ten, now offers a co-educational Sixth
How to get through a school reunion
T here’s no need for a mirror at school reunions. Just look all around you to see the cruel effects of anno domini on your old contemporaries – and don’t fool yourself that you alone have miraculously dodged the hair-thinning, waist-expanding horrors of middle age. Is that really the semi-divine girl who scored a modelling contract
The struggle of summer with a disabled child
Day one of the school holidays this year set the tone for the sprawling six weeks ahead. My teenage son rolled out of bed at a leisurely 1.05 p.m., by which time my daughter had smashed her head repeatedly against the kitchen wall, bitten my leg and trashed our living room. And so began a
Primary dread: the horror of school plays, fêtes and trips
Primary school drama has a rule which is a variation on Chekhov’s gun principle: if your child has a part in the school play they won’t get to speak until the end of the final act. And you’ll have to sit through the part of every other child before their moment finally comes. You will
Gift of the gab: all children should learn public speaking
What is the secret to a billionaire’s success? When Warren Buffet was asked how young people could mimic his wealth, he said: ‘Hone your communication skills, both written and verbal… You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it, and the transmission is communication.’ Buffet knows
What would you make all children learn? A Spectator curriculum
Matthew Parris My father was an engineer. As a child I enjoyed ‘creative’ writing: stories, poems and so on. Dad said: ‘Try writing something useful. You know how to mend a bicycle puncture. Write for me, on one page, instructions for mending a puncture, to be read by someone who knows what a bike is,
The truth about getting into Oxbridge
Liz Truss suggests that all students who score straight A*s at A-level should be interviewed by Oxford or Cambridge. They, and their parents, might well wonder why they would not be summoned for an interview if they can achieve such impressive results. But it’s not that simple. Post-A-level candidates are much fewer in number than
The Oxbridge Files: which schools get the most pupils in?
Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2021 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from
3 May 2022
The dos and don’ts of school tours
There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking
10 Mar 2022
The hidden victims of lockdown: an interview with the Children’s Commissioner
When schools were closed during lockdown, it wasn’t only education that suffered. The classroom can offer an opportunity to identify children in danger of abuse, with tens of thousands of pupils on the at-risk register. Take away schools and this safety net vanishes. Now and again, stories emerged of just how badly things went wrong:
The enduring appeal of school name tapes
I hadn’t thought about Cash’s name tapes for many years. My mother used to sew them into clothes I planned to take to school. Occasionally I find one in a sock or a threadbare T-shirt and feel wistful for the years past. My name tapes were white, with a navy, serif typeface. The other day,
Why handwriting still matters
I work in learning support at a prep school in the South-East and have started teaching my pupils handwriting. It seems that the future of education, especially for children with special needs, is digital. But why should those who struggle to write legibly be given a laptop instead of extra lessons in handwriting? Faced with
School trip: My déjeuner sur l’herbe
In 1966 we were 17 and about to do A-levels and leave our convent school for ever at the end of that summer term. Two girls were having a lesbian affair, another had been tempted to sleep with a boy, dramatically confessing this to our head nun, Mother Benedicta, in Mother B’s terrifying private room
The curious social backlash that comes with private education
‘If this is the top of the class, I would hate to see the rest of them.’ That was the withering verdict of the woman I had just handed over hundreds of pounds to on a hunch that my child wasn’t doing as well as I was being told. Gloria (name changed) is what misogynists
From the brainiacs to the bluffers: a guide to public school stereotypes
A Wykehamist, an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian are in a bar. A woman walks in. The Old Etonian says: ‘Fetch her a chair!’ The Wykehamist gets it. The Old Harrovian sits in it. It’s the oldest public-school joke in the world — and it still has the ring of truth. (Though you might
The march of the middle-class apprentices
Tony Blair used to joke that he could announce the start of a war during a speech on skills policy and no one would notice. Like all the best jokes, it contained more than a grain of truth. Britain — or rather educated Britain — has never been interested in the parts of our education