My year 7 daughter has begun her 12 week countdown to the UKMT (UK Maths Trust) JMC (Junior Maths Challenge - year 8). This year she's decided to use only past papers, which has meant I spent part of last week printing papers & answers to create folders (JMC 1999-2019, Kangaroo bonus 1999-2019, Olympiad 1999-2019 and IMC 1999-2019 papers). She used the IMC (Intermediate - year 11) for her Kangaroo bonus round practice last year, scoring 112/135.
Read MoreA boy of 15 is well on his way to becoming the youngest British male to hold the title
He started reciting poetry at the age of one, studied with the Open University when he was nine and passed an A-level equivalent maths exam at the tender age of twelve.
Now Wang Pok Lo, a prodigy whose family moved to Scotland from Hong Kong, is poised to become the youngest British male to hold a PhD.
Read MoreFor anyone with children in an independent or state school, the Sunday Times Parent Power is now online and in the shops tomorrow.
Very pleased to see St Paul's Girls’ School retain their number 1 slot for independent schools, with Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet topping the state schools list.
Read MoreDavid Walliams has joined a select group of authors to have sold more than £100 million worth of books.
The comedian turned children’s author joins the likes of JK Rowling, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson, Jamie Oliver and Dan Brown in reaching the landmark figure.
Read More“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand,” sang Stevie Wonder in 1976 and now a study backs him up.
Researchers who analysed hundreds of cultures say they have evidence that music is a kind of universal language. Not only does it exist everywhere — it also appears to have an underlying structure that carries meaning between the most distant societies.
Read MoreGirls should be taught that sexism in the workplace is an “attractive challenge” rather than developing a “hostile attitude” towards men, the former head of one of the country's top schools has said.
Female students should learn about the challenges of the future in a positive light rather than teachers “throwing a pool of gloom” over it, according to Clarissa Farr, who was High Mistress at St Paul’s Girls’ School from 2006-17.
Read MoreAn eccentric 19th-century poet who dressed in white and barely left her bedroom might seem an unlikely role model for today’s teenagers. One headmistress, though, says that girls could learn a lot from Emily Dickinson about dealing with the pressures of modern life.
Read MoreOne child wrote of a suicide bomber; another of the ‘sweet honey mangoes’ of home. Kate Clanchy helps them tune into their inner voice
Kate Clanchy, tall, fast-talking and slightly intimidating, lays out more than a score of slim books on the kitchen table in her Oxfordhome. They are collections of poetry written by children she taught, published with the help of grants that she tirelessly raised.
Read MoreLatin 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 MoreOften, gifted kids are referred to as being bright. We want to be careful when labeling them with this because it is not always accurate.
There are a few clear distinctions between the two. For instance, the bright child is a hard worker, while the gifted child tests well. That does not mean that all gifted children do not work hard, but what it does mean is that some gifted children do not have to work hard in order to achieve good grades. As a result, some of these gifted children have learned not how to work hard, but how to hardly work. And who can blame them?
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.
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