I half-watched The Apprentice last night while going through the email backlog - both experiences made slightly more bearable by the other. But my attention was suddenly caught by a Maths Problem.

The teams had to invent and sell a new flavour of beer. (Flavour of beer? I thought...

Ever since Kenneth Baker first introduced a National Curriculum for schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1988, governments have periodically had a bash at improving it. It's one of those cyclical things. The business of defining what children should study at different ages remains - perhaps regretfully -...

Who'd have thought it? Me, the most reluctant of sports fans, whose disdain for the subject was, I thought, unparalleled, who times the weekly supermarket run to coincide with any major TV sporting event so that I have the place to myself - me, actually getting excited by the Olympics?...

England's school inspectors - known collectively by the little-loved acronym of Ofsted (www.ofsted.gov.uk- that's the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, in case you were wondering....) - have just published a report on the state of mathematics in English schools. Like most education reports, it's a tale...

Last week I spent a lot of time talking about some rather grim statistics. Nearly 17 million people in England - almost half the working-age population - have the numeracy skills expected of children at primary school. What's more, half of those have the skills of a nine-year-old or younger....