An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
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 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
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
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,
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
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
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
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:
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,
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
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
‘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
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
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
The government has rightly identified that improving education will help ‘level up’ Britain. Higher-quality teaching is one tool to get there, but with roughly a third of teachers leaving the profession within five years of qualifying, better teacher training won’t be a quick enough fix to turn things around within its eight-year target. What’s needed
‘I think I might be transgender!’ How should schools react to such revelations? By the time they find out, the child may already be convinced that their identity lies on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Probably with its own multi-coloured flag. But while social media influencers are quick to dispense answers, schools are left to cope with
Sometimes a school wants to exclude a child but can’t. The student might have difficult needs that are costing money or taking too much time to deal with. Or their exam results might be looking likely to damage the school’s standing. But children can’t lawfully be excluded for getting bad grades or for needing more
My philosophy of education has always been simple and I believe it unites right and left: namely, what wise parents would wish for their child, so the community should wish for all children. It’s a paraphrase of R.H. Tawney, who — being a socialist — said ‘state’ rather than ‘community’. I much prefer ‘community’ since
We were allowed one phone call, faint and crackling along the many miles of copper wire which connected Hampshire with Dartmoor. In those days (this was the early 1960s) the operator had to connect it. I had watched those wires, swooping alongside the train which had borne me all that way, wisps of smoke and
Colville Primary School Based just off Notting Hill’s Portobello Road, Colville Primary School occupies a Victorian Grade II-listed building that was once a laundry. Today, it accommodates pupils up to the age of 11 who are taught under the school’s ‘three key values’: respect, aspiration and perseverance. Colville also says it believes in the British
It is our belief at Tadpoles Nursery School that if we want the world to change, we must begin with the teaching of the very young. Our early years are the moment when our minds are the most open and the most receptive; when we see the world around us with wonder and without judgement
For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the
The pandemic has sparked an entrepreneurial revolution as the business sector has adapted to consumers’ rapidly changing needs, with nearly half a million businesses launched in the UK between March and December last year. This national surge of entrepreneurs — enabled by ongoing technological development, together with a national shortage in practical skills — begs
Although there is little scientific proof of the story of Noah’s Ark or the accompanying flood, we are told that building the Ark was no small task and Noah was working to a deadline. When UK schools were told to close classrooms and switch to remote learning back in March last year, many were caught
When Michael Gove was selling his school reforms a decade ago he was asked to define success. ‘I hope that thanks to the reforms we’ve introduced the next Guardian editor but three will be a comprehensive school boy or girl.’ It was his little joke: that the loudest critics of private schools, the people who
I never realised how much I enjoyed the sweaty, overcrowded journey into school until it was replaced with a half-asleep crawl from my bed to my desk, 30 seconds before my first lesson was supposed to start. It’s a routine which most of us students have had to get used to since March last year and
There were a few things that my school — St Mary’s Convent, Arklow — had going for it but as far as I was concerned, the choir trumped most other activities. That was on account of the nun in charge, Sister Agnes, who had been, we had heard, a professional singer before she entered the
Teaching methods today are no longer appropriate. The reasons are twofold. First, schools do not teach children how to think, they teach them how to parrot back the right answers. Second, exams define children’s futures. They tell them who they are, what jobs they can get and what their prospects in life will be. With
Music is far older than language. The FOXP2 gene associated with speech has been recovered from Neanderthal fossils, yet rhythm and melody have been around for millions of years before that, as attested by the fossils of chirping crickets and singing birds. Sapiens evolved on the ape line, and our songs evolved from the vocalisations