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  • One of the most important books of the Noughties

    It’s getting to that point when we’re all looking back at the decade and thinking about what are the really important books. My vote goes to Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy With A Top Knot, a brilliant memoir about Sathnam’s quest to find the truth about his father’s madness. Satnam grew up in Wolverhampton in the […]

  • Abu Dhabi — The only city thriving in this recession

    Abu Dhabi is not suffering like Dubai because this Emirate has cash reserves of billions, built up over the years by storing the profits from its oil. Now it’s beginning to spend it, building Dubai-style malls and hotels. I’m here visiting a friend who is the Business Editor of the National, a new newspaper set […]

  • Truants, bullies and the recession

     We must help families torn apart by truancy, not criminalise them – but the services that help troubled children are under threat The news that truancy rates are soaring won’t surprise many teachers like me. Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that children skipped more than 8m days of school last […]

  • Why have we gone so wrong with the way we educate our children?

    The Cambridge Review of Primary Education is speaking sense to me. We have constructed a curriculum that fundamentally alienates our children with its emphasis upon attainment and its lack of thought on how we intrinsically motivate our children. Document 1 Document 2

  • Working The System: How to Get the Very Best State Education for your Child

    Written by an experienced teacher who has established a reputation as a voice of candour and clarity in the world of modern educational doublespeak, this highly readable guide will help you navigate the complexities of the system and get the very best education for your child.

  • Child Neglect — Is the problem getting worse?

    A new report suggests that child neglect is a growing problem. A new report from Action for Children suggests that we’ve got a worsening situation on our hands. Health professionals, nursery teachers, midwives, doctors, primary teachers and social workers are reporting a rise in child neglect. But what precisely are the indications that a child is […]

  • How to get a foot in the door at Oxbridge

    With the deadline of October 15 looming, it’s a crucial time for students applying to Oxford and Cambridge universities. They’ve got two days to fine-tune applications and little more than a month to prepare for the infamous Oxbridge interviews. For some parents, this time of year is the culmination of years of blood, sweat and […]

  • Teaching school texts by txt

    Teachers should relax about pupils’ mobile phones – they can boost standards and liven up the lesson if used imaginatively   It appears lots of teachers like me are up in arms about pupils using mobile phones in the classroom. Teaching unions are terrified that if schools don’t ban them absolutely, chaos will ensue: the […]

  • Michael Gove’s ruinous plans for education

    Today’s speech showed a party committed to micro-managing schools, using policies that have no empirical backing Michael Gove delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference which played to the prejudices of his audience. His oration was peppered again and again with talk of how the Labour party has failed the country in creating schools […]

  • Why I moved my son from a prep school to a state primary

    As a private schools tsar extols their virtue, one teacher tells how he transferred his son from a public prep school to a state primary It seemed so perfect at first. Every parent at our son’s nursery was desperate to get their child into the exclusive prep school. On the open day the school was […]

  • Sacking top teachers will be a bloodbath

    Ed Balls’s latest plans will be disastrous for schools such as mine It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious — the Government’s latest wheeze is to sack thousands of teachers. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, announced yesterday that to cut spending 3,000 teachers could be kicked out of their jobs in the coming […]

  • Why ARE so many of my fellow teachers breaking the ultimate taboo?

    Heaven knows what it must be like to be among those parents with children at Headlands School in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. And who could blame them if they feel utterly betrayed by an education system that would seem to have failed lamentably in its duty of protection and care? In just three years, three male […]

  • Labour ripped the heart out of education

    Scratch beneath the surface of successful GSCE figures and you’ll find a morass of ‘robot teaching’ that fails our children So the first generation of students to be entirely educated under New Labour has just got its GCSE results. On the surface, the government’s achievements look fabulous: boys have caught up with girls in maths; […]

  • Should parents take their children out of school during school time?

    I argued on BBC Breakfast that they should not. I cited the example of ‘Katie’ (not the pupils’ real name) who had missed weeks of school because her parents were taking her out regularly of school during term time, going on cheap holidays. They lied to the school and said that she was ill. There […]

  • 🎓 Should You Hire a Solicitor to Help You Get Your Child Into the Right School?

    The truth about lawyers, school admissions, and what really works in 2025 Every year in England, thousands of parents are disappointed when their child doesn’t get into their first-choice school. It’s stressful, emotional — and confusing. One question often comes up immediately: 👉 Should I hire a solicitor or education consultant to help win my […]

  • Are Blair’s children better educated than previous generations?

    So the first set of GCSE results have come through of children entirely educated under New Labour. Has Blair’s mantra of ‘education, education, education’ worked? I think not. The GCSE results are just now trust-worthy; they are effectively rigged. Proper analyses, such as the OECD rankings, where countries are compared for their pupils’ attainment in […]

  • Teachers’ pets win prizes

    Are there far too many teachers’ pets in England? Do too many teachers from England unfairly favour certain students over others? A survey supervised by researchers at the University of Birmingham, in which 14,000 14- and 15-year-olds from England, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, Italy and France were questioned, suggests that English teachers are the […]

  • Should a teacher be sacked for writing about his/her pupils?

    Leonora Rustamova was suspended from her post as English teacher this January because she wrote a book about her pupils. At first glance, it sounds monstrously unfair: a teacher tries to motivate the disaffected teenage boys in her class by writing a book about them. Initially, her headteacher was very supportive of the plan, but then had […]

  • The uses and abuses of jargon

    Have we gone mad with the way we use jargon? A sentence used by the police in this article suggests so. I appeared on the Steve Nolan show, talking about this, partly defending jargon. In some cases, it can be helpful. For example, the label “Special Educational Needs” is jargony, but it’s far better than […]

  • Should parents be banned from sports’s days?

    This is a tricky one. Sports’ days are about children doing their best on track and field and not about parents soaking up reflected glory. One headteacher has done exactly this though: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197284/Schools-bar-parents-sports-day–paedophiles.html?ITO=1490 I appeared on BBC Breakfast explaining why the head had good reasons to do this, given the horrific climate that the internet […]

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