Due to a house move, there won’t be any Christians in Education updates next week. Don’t go away – we’ll be back just as soon as the new broadband provider permits.
England could be facing a shortage of up to 19,000 senior teachers by 2022 if action is not taken to plug the gap, it has been suggested. Almost one in four schools across the country could be affected by a lack of head teachers, deputy heads and assistant heads, according to a report by three education leadership organisations. Read more
The government’s controversial Prevent counter-radicalisation strategy is to be toughened rather than scaled back despite criticism that it is a toxic brand. The Home Office confirmed that a Whitehall internal review of Prevent has concluded that the programme ‘should be strengthened, not undermined’. Read more
A primary school head teacher has revealed that she ended up on anti-depressants after parents used a closed group on Facebook to criticise her. It was ‘a constant stream of complaint and comment about tiny issues, often out of context’, she says. More than half of the 1,188 head teachers who replied to a survey by schools management service The Key say parents’ online behaviour is a problem. Read more
The principal of a Dorset academy which is planning to require poorly behaved pupils to apologise to classmates in assembly has defended the policy. It was part of a much wider system, he said, where pupils are rewarded with points which they can use to buy items such as manicures and footballs. Some parents accused the school of humiliating or bullying pupils. Mr Tutt said his students were rewarded far more than they were punished. Read more
The idea of education as a form of indoctrination is often seen as a thing of the past, something belonging to the old Communist and Nazi regimes. But the blurring of the line between education and the promotion of certain ideas is still a feature of modern, liberal-dominated education. Read more
Meanwhile, although journalism is a competitive field, students at City University have taken action to narrow the field further. They have voted for a campus ban on the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express. Why? The student union has deemed the views expressed by these popular papers unacceptable — claiming their editorial lines fuel ‘fascism, racial tension and hatred in society’. Read more