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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 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 Monday, February 07, 2011 8:43 PM
I really want to write something positive about Scotland, and I can grant myself this wish if I stick to writing about the people and the country. All very well in theory, but it only applies if you pull the shutters down, don’t pay heed to political programmes and avoid bombardment from all the talking heads. Why do they imagine that we all spend our time weighing the political options? Whereas of course most of us spend our time with our fingers in our ears, hoping against hope they will all go away. |
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Posted on Thursday, February 03, 2011 6:12 PM
Professor Richard Kerley, respected authority on local government in Scotland, shattered a few myths in Tuesday’s Scotsman. Proposals for educational change usually involve altering the structure or throwing more money into the pot, as though moving schools round like pawns on a chess board was going to improve Scotland’s education. (This is not to say all such change would be unwelcome. East Lothian wants to devolve more control to school clusters, where headteachers and parents influence the budget locally. |
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