If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
It's landmark day - a major milestone. Tots are called pre-schoolers. Everything gears towards this. You picked four schools you wouldn't mind the apple of your eye attending for seven precious years. Three months later, you receive notification... WHERE?
One in ten UK children has dyslexia, a disability which affects how one reads, counts, spells and organises thoughts. In an exam, this can play havoc with how one structures written answers, processes information, recalls from memory or, say, weighs up contributing or overlapping factors.
In Northern Ireland, there is already curriculum covering relationship and sex education, but, difficulty comes in the lack of consistent implementation. This must be addressed urgently by the Education Minister, John O'Dowd.
My point is, if our schools are to remain more than institutions of academia, if we want them to remain the backbone of our communities and a moral compass as well as an educational one, then we need to open up our schools to the support and involvement of local communities and organizations looking to do just that.
Who remembers sex education at school? I do (it is permanently etched onto my frontal lobe). We were given a book in year eight with a well-thumbed page showing a cross section of sexual intercourse which looked more like a ham sandwich with legs than the beautiful act of love.
I understand that, for some, exposing their children to the non-Jewish community is unacceptable but outlawing them will help no one. Welcoming them as part of the rich variety of our society is a responsibility for those who believe in a tolerant, welcoming community.
Karen Morehouse has taught English at Huntington Beach High School for nearly 40 years. In a room overlooking the main street of a southern California town she works magic, imbuing lessons in Shakespeare and grammar and the five-paragraph essay with compassion and infectious enthusiasm.
If you were in a debate about the meaning of British identity or citizenship, one of the key values that would no doubt be highlighted is fairness. So you would expect fairness to apply especially to the educational system - but instead... it is absent in many state-funded schools which have a religious character.
It is a great testimony to the resilience of Amy's family that soon after her death they decided to work on retaining her legacy by setting up a new charity in her name, with the aim of preventing the effects of drug and alcohol misuse on young people.
The education industry has not yet caught up with the daily and continuous changes in technology. Classroom based learning on the other hand, still incorporates note taking from white boards, reading through bulky textbooks and filling-in-the-gaps in hand out after hand out.
Like any country with a reputation for extremism, it's history will always be judged on the actions of extremists. The usual saying that history is judged by the victors does not yet apply to Northern Ireland, as it sometimes seems that the state of conflict has never really ended in the minds of much of its population.
Now that the arts have safely returned to the classroom, we need to ensure they are utilised as much as possible, across all subjects in the curriculum. we have seen that using the arts in the classroom helps nurture children's communication and language skills, analysis and teamwork.
Using Google Glass to 'gamify' education may, in the short term, lead to lessons being more entertaining - children always love screen-time, any parent will tell you that - but my experience tells me that it won't lead to greater understanding and greater educational empathy with the deep ideas being studied.
Michael Gove seems to think that the GCSE is too easy, and that we should wind back to the good ol' days of O Levels, and the CSEs, remember? But lets have a proper look at what the GCSE does, in comparison to O Level/CSE.
Inspirational, quality teaching is one of the topics I present to the UK's department of education along with cyber bullying, raising standards, bringing programming and code into the curriculum, academies, the rise of male teachers and more.
We know from our own work with families that children who come from vulnerable and disadvantaged families are most at risk of experiencing problems with school readiness. In 2011 the Sutton Trust found that children who come from low-income or disadvantaged families are often up to a year behind in their development...
