Schools

Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students to solve ‘complex problems’ like (they suggest) knife crime. Really? The key to problem solving is the development of two essential faculties — the imaginative and the critical. Can LIS really teach for those — or just how to pass exams? The philosopher Seneca insisted that the search for what really counted (his example was virtue) ‘cannot be delegated to someone else’. He illustrated it by telling the story of Calvisius Sabinus, who had the brains and bank account of the Roman equivalent of Sir Philip Green. His memory was

The yearly scramble for school places is about to start and, as all British parents know, trying to find a school for your children can be an all-consuming business. When searching for a decent state primary for my own children, I was faced with intense competition for places in London along with soaring house prices. So I did what plenty of other middle class parents have done before me and moved out of the capital. For better or worse, my children’s education has dictated everything: from where I live to my choice of career. On this week’s Spectator podcast, Leah Mclaren takes issue with mothers like me. Isn’t the British obsession

One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that is schooling. ‘So where do your kids go?’ I’ve learned is just as loaded and inescapable a London dinner party question as ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Where are you on Brexit?’ If you choose private, you’d better have a plausible explanation (e.g. ‘We just didn’t want to make our child the social experiment’). And

According to data released by the Department for Education today, free schools have topped the league table when it comes to Progress 8. This metric, introduced three years ago, tells you how much progress children have made in a particular school between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to the progress other children have made with similar starting points. It’s a way of controlling for the fact that children enter secondary school with varying levels of prior attainment. If you just look at raw GCSE data, those schools that get the best results might not be the most effective; it could be that they’re attracting children of above average

It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach