We in the Classics world hope very much that Latin teaching will return to the maintained sector, but in the meantime, although there are a few state schools that still have the good sense to offer Latin, it is mainly the independent schools that are keeping the flame burning. It is therefore good news that the government threat to remove the charitable status of independent schools seems to have diminished. The Times reports:   more »

Ofsted reported yesterday that the brightest children in deprived areas were not, in some schools, being given the chances that the government wanted for them. This 'levelling down' attitude, that refuses chances to those who would benefit from them, on the grounds that not everyone would be able to take advantage of them, is just what took the chance of Latin away from the students in my home town, a decade or more ago. ..   more »

From the papers today I have picked up a few facts and opinions about the new Secretary of State for Education:   more »

Our new Education boss is Ruth Kelly. This is what she says about herself on her website:   more »

The news that Finnish children outperform the rest of the world (again) was reported in a lacklustre way by The Times, but the Guardian article has some explanations of what the Finns are doing that we aren't, mostly provided by Ted Wragg. So it's worth reading.   more »

Naturally OCR is an interested party in this matter, but its submission responding to the Tomlinson report is worth considering. We certainly need most of students' exam work to be externally assessed. Coursework, and the proposed extended assignment, are just too wide open to cheating - and the boundary between legitimate help from a teacher (let alone a parent) and plain cheating has always been a fuzzy one. Anyway, here's how the Guardian reports OCR's views today:   more »

David Starkey used the phrase 'national Altzheimers' in a Radio 5 discussion on our ignorance of history today. Apparently a survey has found that:

LONDON - Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.   more »

I've written recently about the difficulties that Modern Languages are having. Now, it seems, other 'proper' subjects are not only in difficulty - university departments are being shut down. This is from today's Times:

Several universities have announced plans to end the study of chemistry. The latest, Exeter, declared last week that closure of its department, along with at least one other, was necessary to cut losses of £3 million.   more »