The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues’ 2016 Thank You Letter Award has just been announced. All participating organisations and schools are given a £50 prize fund. The aim is to recognise and celebrate young people between the ages of five and 16 who have shown gratitude to others in their everyday lives. Letters can be created in range of media. Read more
The government is currently passing a law that will require it to grab land from the churches. Not just allow it to, but require it. Once the land is seized, the government can parcel it out to its best buds – no questions asked. Historically, such escapades almost always end badly. How have we ended up in this situation? And what does it have to do with schools? Read more
Colleges ‘will not be insulated’ from funding cuts in the chancellor’s spending review next week. Skills minister Nick Boles called on colleges to ‘change your approach’, and be ‘more flexible, more entrepreneurial and quicker off the mark’. He also set colleges a target of increasing the proportion of apprenticeships that they deliver to two-thirds of the total number by 2019-20. Read more
Students at Harvard this term have been doing something for the first time in the university’s long history. Promising not to cheat. Or more specifically, to sign up to an honour code in which they pledge to uphold values of academic integrity. It means students have to commit themselves not to cheat in exams, make up figures or dishonestly claim other people’s work as their own. Read more
Bullying and violent behaviour has dropped off within schools in England over the past decade, according to figures released by the Department for Education, although more than one in 10 young people now say they have experienced cyberbullying. The behaviour statistics were released to mark the start of anti-bullying week. Read more
Boko Haram has destroyed an estimated 1100 schools this year in their stronghold region surrounding Lake Chad, the UN envoy to the area said this week. Toby Lanzer, who became the envoy to central Africa’s Sahel region in July, said that the targeted schools were in Cameroon, Niger, Chad and Nigeria, the four countries most affected by the extremist uprising. Read more
Teachers at the school at the centre of the Trojan Horse scandal fed pupils ‘on a diet of Islam’ and isolated them from British society, a panel found. The two men had denied a central allegation they had agreed to the inclusion of ‘an undue amount of religious influence in pupils’ education’. The panel concluded pupils had been ‘immersed in orthodox Islamic doctrine’. Read more
Across 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, fewer than half of all children have access to decent, functioning toilets at school. Hygiene should be prioritised in the same way as arithmetic, reading and writing, says Lizette Burgers, a senior advisor to Unicef , but deep cultural discomfort about toilets in many countries has hampered efforts to provide sanitation facilities in schools. Read more