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Posted on Monday, August 15, 2011 10:27 PM
Carole Vordeman’s report on the teaching of maths (see Doing our sums properly, below) has elicitedthis responseposted it on the ConservativeHome website today from John Bald, an independent education consultant.We urge anyone remotely interested in education to read it. Mr Bald thinks Ms Vorderman’s report does not go far enough. We should not only ignore leftist educationalists, we must go back to basics, and should apply her idea of separating everyday maths from ‘abstract’ maths to the teaching of English too. |
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Posted on Sunday, August 14, 2011 7:35 AM
Rainforests have been sacrificed this week in an attempt to analyse the riots in English cities. One of the best efforts appears in the current edition of The Spectator - fromHarriet Sargeant, who points the finger squarely at education – or lack of it – that has made a swathe of young men and women unemployable. Quoting figures on literacy released in the week before the riots Sargeant maintains that |
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Posted on Wednesday, August 10, 2011 3:47 PM
We in Scotland have been a tad reticent this week in intruding on the private grief that has overtaken London and other major cities in England. Professor Tom Devine says we are a more conservative (with a small c) society, not given to civil unrest. How can he be so sure? The best way to alleviate poverty has long been to heave a brick through a designer shop window, and if poverty is the cause of the rioting, then we have communities every bit as materially poor as Tottenham. |
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Posted on Monday, August 08, 2011 4:32 PM
Those at the helm of big business like Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco right down to small businesses in the High Street constantly bemoan that school leavers are not prepared for the world of work. A good many who knock on their door seeking employment, even with Scottish Highers or A-levels, apparently cannot spell and are incapable of stringing a sentence together, let alone writing a report. Now comes evidence that a huge proportion are also leaving school without the basic numeracy skills that enable them to function properly in either their work or personal lives, with almost half of those sitting GCSE Maths in England failing to achieve a C grade. |
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Posted on Tuesday, August 02, 2011 8:12 AM
We’ve said it before. They’re looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. We can’t help feeling that unionists down south are missing a huge opportunity for political point scoring and increasing the union dividend immeasurably by not starting HST2 from this end and working south. The project could adopt the Waverley line, now stuck with contractual difficulties in that no-one is quite sure how the Scottish Futures Trust not-for-profit alternative to PFI actually will work. Trains need only stop at the new Tweedbank station before heading south-west to Carlisle, opening up the largest swathe of countryside in Europe not served by a railway to freight and passengers. |
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