Kristina Murkett is an English teacher, private tutor and journalist
In 1902, Holly Mount School in Bury was shut down following a scandal over alleged brutality against the children. The next year, the House of Commons noted that one reason why the abuse was allowed to continue for so long was because of infrequent and cursory inspections, which one MP said were nothing but ‘hard
Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the
This week the government has started rolling out their free breakfast club scheme, which will be trialled in 750 primary schools until July. The initiative – which, as many are quick to point out, is not actually free but funded by the taxpayer – will cost around £30 million. However, many headteachers have warned of
The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’ It is of course true that
Something is rotten in the state of British schools. According to primary school teachers, one in four Reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, increasingly demonstrating poor language skills, delays in basic motor functions, and a
Parents of young children should be happy: since September 2024, those with an income of less than £100,000 a year have been eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week once their child is nine months old. From September this year, that will increase to 30 hours a week. However, once again, it seems
When I first became a teacher, I bought into the notion that single-sex schools were an anachronism – a result of historical happenstance that no longer had a place in the 21st century. I imagined all-boys schools as a macho world of Spartan dormitories and testosterone-charged classrooms. I assumed the boys graduated with repressed memories
When it comes to behaviour policies, schools have fallen into two extremes. Across the border in Scotland, schools practise ‘restorative justice’: a relationships-based, non-punitive approach that favours constructive conversations over traditional sanctions. On the flip side, academies across England are adopting an authoritarian, zero-tolerance approach, where detentions are given for minor infractions and routines are
January can only mean one thing: The Traitors is back. For those of you who haven’t been initiated into this cloaks-and-daggers drama, the premise is simple: the traitors attempt to remove players by ‘murdering’ them, while the faithfuls try to work out who the traitors are. Each night the group votes someone off after a
As an English teacher, one of my favourite poems to teach, to pupils of almost all ages, is Chinua Achebe’s ‘Vultures’. In the poem, the speaker describes various images that uncomfortably combine love and violence: a vulture picking apart a corpse before nestling up to its mate; a Commandant at Belsen buying chocolate for his
The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after an external review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the
The government has today announced a £45 million work drive, with proposed changes to the welfare and out-of-work support systems, in a bid to get more people back in work and off benefits. In particular, the government has said that it wants to tackle the statistic that one in eight young people aged between 18
In an address to 1,500 school and academy trust leaders, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson last week asked schools to stop focusing solely on exam results. She said the government would not have a ‘tunnel vision’ on academic success, but ‘widen our ambition’ to give students a ‘sense of wellbeing and belonging’. On the surface this
Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working
Few franchises have the cult-like devotion of Harry Potter. One only has to watch the video of hordes of adults counting down the arrival of the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross, and their fury when it didn’t arrive, to understand the religious fervour people feel for the wizarding world. Yet one announcement did come last
In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents
As I have been driving across England’s green and pleasant land visiting friends and family this summer, I discovered that the UK’s phone signal is really, really terrible. I expected poor connectivity on coastal paths in Cornwall, but everywhere I went I experienced problems: network dropouts as I tried to navigate the M1, recurrent outages
This morning, students up and down across the country will anxiously open up their GCSE results, with local papers publishing photos of glowing over-achievers and other heartwarming success stories. The national media will, in all likelihood, focus on the number of top grades, and how this fits into recent trends concerning grade inflation as exam
There have been lots of reasons to be optimistic this summer: the glorious spectacle of the Olympics; the (relatively) good weather; the Bank of England finally cutting interest rates amid falling inflation. Yet this summer has also seen a pernicious epidemic of violence, hate and prejudice. I’m not talking about the right-wing riots, but the
As part of the ongoing review into the primary and secondary school curriculum, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced that children in England will be taught how to spot misinformation and extremist content online, so that students can arm themselves against ‘putrid conspiracy theories’. In the wake of weeks of rioting, with children as young
