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January 15, 2017 at 08:15AM A new inquiry has been launched to discover why speech and language disorders are going unidentified in the majority of primary school pupils. The review follows a Schools Week investigation that uncovered such disorders were being missed by local authorities amid overly-simplistic assessments. Experts said councils were reluctant to pay […]

January 15, 2017 at 01:57AM A free school supported by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson against local opposition will abruptly close next month after attracting only 60 pupils since it opened in 2012, and struggling to recruit staff and find a permanent site. Parents of pupils at Southwark free school, housed in a community hall

January 15, 2017 at 01:50AM The other day I read Greg Ashman’s post Why Education is like smoking which talked about the way teachers often generalise from anecdotes in the same way that when smokers are confronted with statistics about the health risks of smoking they might say things like, “Well, my nan smoked 400 cigarettes

January 15, 2017 at 12:09AM Are you a student? Based in the Midlands? In possession of such a crippling compulsion to be correct that you’re willing to devote several years of your life to it? Great news, because Birmingham City University has just announced its new Centre for Brexit Studies. The centre promises to “further

January 14, 2017 at 11:59PM The Christmas edition of the Economist contained an article called ‘Animal Factory: the evolution of a scientific meaning’.  It was about the difficulties of conducting experiments on laboratory mice.  I learnt that ‘Not all mice are equal, even if their genomes are.’  Two sets of littermates that have been raised

January 14, 2017 at 08:51PM In a book published in 2000, the Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has died aged 91, deployed a metaphor since taken up by the anti-globalisation movement around the world. Liquid Modernity analysed the disappearance of the solid structures and institutions that once provided the stable foundations for well-ordered modern societies,

January 14, 2017 at 08:09PM Guest post by Krista Taylor. An earlier version of the post originally appeared on Angels and Superheroes.   Teacher professional development has a reputation for being notoriously poor. So often it’s a top-down approach that’s out of touch with the challenges of being in a classroom. But what if teachers

January 14, 2017 at 07:09PMI’ve been reconsidering good ways to begin lessons and share objectives.  Looking beyond writing objectives on the board (and perhaps copying them into books), Rob Phillips (2001) suggests using Initial Stimulus Material.  He argues that stimuli such as stories, images or problems can help us outline objectives in “a clever, meaningful way”, posing hypotheses and establishing