Latin and the works of Sophocles are no longer the preserve of public schools thanks to a project that links professors with underprivileged teenagers.
An initiative between King’s College London (KCL) and Newham Sixth Form College in east London offering lessons in Classics to bright sixth-form pupils is now in its second year.
Read MoreThe criminal, the banker and the person who may not make it to 21 are all there, says the artist and film-maker of his extraordinary project to exhibit pictures of 76,000 of the capital’s kids
Earlier this year, the actor John Cleese, now 80, repeated his claim: “London is no longer an English city.” In 2011, he had told an Australian audience: “I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates you’re left thinking: ‘Well, what’s going on?’” He had previously declared: “I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”
In May, he doubled down, insisting his foreign friends felt the same way, “so there must be some truth in it”, and describing London (wrongly) as “the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU”.
We will leave aside the fact that Cleese lives in the Caribbean. His meaning was clear: in a familiar, wilful and tiresome confusion of race and place, he was disoriented by the multiracial and multicultural nature of Britain’s capital.
For his own peace of mind and ossified sense of nostalgia, Cleese should steer clear of Tate Britain for a while. Because next week, the artist and film-maker Steve McQueen’s Year 3 will open there – a display of school photographs from almost two-thirds of London’s primaries. There they stand: more than 3,000 photographs, showing about 76,000 children. The project’s photographers have captured the full range of the capital’s seven- and eight-year-old citizenry: from state, private, religious and special education schools, uniformed, non-uniformed, daffy grins, big ears, long braids, scuffed shoes, ironed headscarves and wild afros.
Read MoreStories and mathematics have always been woven together in my mind – two foundational ways of looking at the world, not incompatible but complementary. When I was growing up, my mother told me myths and fairytales at bedtime, while my father recounted stories of famous mathematicians and gave me his favourite maths riddles to try to solve. Which is maybe why in my new novel, The Tenth Muse, I try to bring the two together, while challenging the many mistaken assumptions people hold about maths. My protagonist is a brilliant and ambitious mathematician who happens to be a woman tackling one of her subject’s most pressing conundrums.
I hope her journey provides a history of mathematics and the ways it has changed the world, the challenges women in particular have faced in trying to join its professional ranks, and a glimpse of how exhilarating it can be. My favourite kind of maths reveals the outer reaches of the imagination and how in finding a solution it is possible to illuminate an idea. Maths can shine a light on both the simplest and most complex things; the same is true of my favourite literature.
Read MoreOur sense of the world and our place in it expands by the hour. This 21st-century jungle is incomprehensible in its complexity and fullness; the Earth is saturated with people and information. Just think about how much stuff is out there, from scientific and medical discoveries, books written, works of art created, the 500 recordings of Elgar’s Cello Concerto – the inordinate documentations of our collective pasts, and the continuous stream of current inventions is overwhelming.
We also have so many things in every shape, size, colour and form conceivable, and for every purpose imaginable. And many of these things are designed not to last. Mobile phones are downgraded through a process called “upgrading” – the companies that do it have admitted it!
But what about a thing that does last and is intended to? Do we understand the weight or value of a timeless thing? “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” wrote TS Eliot in 1934. If he felt that then, I wonder what he would be saying about us now.
Read MoreWhat happens when you bring together high-school students, teachers, and technology entrepreneurs to experiment with new ideas for learning? Christoph Wittmer talks about shaping the future of education with innovation.
Read MoreYour average American 14-year-old just started his or her freshman year in high school. They might be trying out for their school basketball team for winter sports or they could be auditioning for the school play.
But Kara Fan is not your run-of-the-mill 14-year-old. She is America’s Top Young Scientist.
Read MorePre-Us, the alternative to A levels created and used by many English public schools, are to be scrapped.
The last Pre-U qualifications will be taken in 2023, with resits in June 2024, Cambridge Assessment International Education said. The small number of pupils taking the qualification had made it unsustainable, the exam board added.
Read MoreThanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years.
Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn’t materially changed since Sputnik was sent into orbit in the late 1950s. Our high school students are taught algebra, geometry, a second year of algebra, and calculus (for the most advanced students) because Eisenhower-era policymakers believed this curriculum would produce the best rocket scientists to work on projects during the Cold War.
Read MoreThe Evening Standard’s Women Tech Charge podcast is back for series two and Entrepreneur First co-founder Alice Bentinck is this week’s guest.
Hosted by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, the CEO of STEMettes.org, Women Tech Charge invites women from all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) to share amusing and insightful insights into their careers and what it’s really like to be part of the 17 per cent of the UK’s tech workforce that identifies as female.
Bentinck had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she was 16 and tried the Young Enterprise programme at school. Her team was given £10 and tasked with coming up with a product.
“It was just the beginning of understanding that business was a thing and that start-ups were a thing and just the rush of having a small team, creating a product and then selling it to people and they will give you money.”
Read MoreItaly is to become the first country in the world to make classes on climate change compulsory in schools, Lorenzo Fioramonti, the education minister, said yesterday.
From September, schoolchildren will dedicate an hour a week to learning about global warming and the possibilities of sustainable development.
Read MoreMyopia rates among under-16s have tripled since the 1960s. Opticians urge parents to send their children outside
An epidemic of short-sightedness is linked to youngsters staring at screens, reading books and doing homework, say scientists — who recommend removing their gadgets and sending them outside for at least two hours a day.
Researchers have found a direct relationship between the time youngsters spend on “nearwork” and myopia. They also predict a surge in the numbers of people who become blind or visually impaired, as people who develop short-sightedness early in life are at far higher risk of serious eye problems when older.
Read MoreThey are denounced for preserving privilege and ensuring the wealthy keep their grip on society’s glittering prizes. But one boarding school charging up to £35,000 a year is accepting pupils from troubled families in a move that could ease the pressure on Britain’s care system.
Kingham Hill School, set in 100 acres of Cotswold countryside near the home of David Cameron, has admitted its first pupil part-funded by local social services. Oxfordshire county council is contributing £14,388 a year to the boarding fees of a girl whose fostering arrangements fell through. The same sum will be contributed jointly by the school and Buttle UK, a children’s charity.
Read MoreEver tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. But try to succeed 85 per cent of the time.
Scientists have discovered that there is a perfect amount of failure, suggesting that those who get the answers wrong 15 per cent of the time while studying have found the optimum difficulty level to stimulate fast learning.
Researchers said that a success rate of 85 per cent, or getting about six of every seven questions or challenges right, was the “sweet spot” for fast learning, explaining that anything above this is too easy and anything below is too difficult.
Read MoreThe Chinese government has attempted to curb criticism on British campuses of its regime by pressuring universities into limiting academic freedom, MPs have said.
“Alarming” evidence of Chinese interference has been found by the Commons foreign affairs committee, which says that it appears to be coming from the embassy in London.
Read MoreAs someone who was badly bullied as a teenager and again in my adult life, at work, I found this article very interesting. I now realise that my interactions with others were closely linked to my relationship with my own mother. We had an extremely toxic and dysfunctional relationship. I was incredibly shy and found making friends hard, something I've worked extra hard at as an adult to change. I still find the thought of being in a room with people I don't know, terrifying. Will they find me boring, what will we talk about, how awkward I feel about air kisses, yet I'm very happy to hug someone. Aged 45, following my father’s disappearance and subsequent suicide, I finally had the courage to walk away from her permanently.
Guardian Article
Gestures, facial expressions, posture – they are all crucial to what we’re communicating, though many of us don’t realise it
My interest in human behaviour and psychology started in primary school. In my attempts to socialise with other children, I had a constant, nagging feeling that everybody else had received a manual entitled How to Interact with Others. I was socially awkward, to put it mildly, and this meant I was picked on a lot, which in turn meant I started to ask myself some questions: how did my behaviour differ from others? Why did my antagonists act as they did?
Read MoreParents should avoid leaving blanks on their children’s school application forms since they risk being assigned to the least popular school in the area, according to experts.
Calling for an overhaul to simplify the system, the Good Schools Guide said parents were forced to conduct labour-intensive research and fill in reams of paperwork during a process that “no doubt favours certain sections of society”.
It notes that there is significant variation in school admission policies, with individual schools demanding different information and using different criteria for admitting pupils. The Local Government Association (LGA) has called for a review to make the system more inclusive.
Read MoreMany youngsters cannot wait to leave their schooldays behind — but one head teacher is so inspiring she has convinced 26 of her former pupils to return as teachers or other staff at their old school.
Rhian Morgan Ellis has formed her very own old boys’ and girls’ club at a secondary school in the Welsh valleys. It includes a former head boy and head girl in her senior management team, as well as a former pupil who started as a dinner lady and is now a support teacher for vulnerable pupils after Morgan Ellis spotted her gift for working with children. All 26 are on the 77-strong staff simultaneously.
Read MoreSchools are under fire for penalising pupils who suffer from a rare blood condition that mainly affects people from African and Caribbean backgrounds.
Campaigners say schools and workplaces are failing to support people with sickle-cell disease, an invisible condition that affects 15,000 people in the UK.
Sickle-cell anaemia is a hereditary disease in which the body produces unusually shaped red blood cells that clump together, blocking blood vessels. This results in painful episodes called sickle-cell crises, which can last for months, as well as organ failure and, in some cases, death.
Read MoreReading fairy tales and solving puzzles with your children could reduce their risk of developing dementia in later life, it has been claimed.
The suggestion came after research found that eight-year-olds with strong problem-solving skills retained them in old age.
Scientists studied 502 Britons born in the same week in March 1946 who took thinking and memory tests at eight and again between the ages of 69 and 71. They found that “childhood cognitive ability was strongly associated with cognitive scores . . . more than 60 years later”.
Read MoreThere is a long-held stereotype that teenagers spend a lot of time online, uninterested in real life events.
People who say that clearly haven’t seen them on TikTok, where they are engaging in the unexpected: teaching history lessons.
Nadia Jaferey, a former staffer for Kirsten Gillibrand, drew attention to the phenomenon in October, when she tweeted out a thread of her favorite TikTok history re-enactments. She linked to several videos where teenagers played out key points in history, with special effects and audio to boot.
I asked a history expert to watch the videos and comment: my old history teacher, Izzy Jones, who is now vice-principal at my old high school in London.
Read More
