My home office stinks right now. It's a temporary "new plastic object" stink from the large inflatable ball I'm sitting on in an effort to strengthen my back muscles and keep me from being completely sedentary while typing. My on-campus office stank this morning. The electricity went out in the buil...

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist. The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmac...

Children's lives are being impoverished by the government's insistence that schools focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of creative teaching, the biggest review of the primary school curriculum in 40 years finds today. Labour has failed to tackle decades of over-prescription in the curricu...

I'll give Bill Gates credit for directing a huge amount of money, through his foundation, at education reform. And I very much appreciate his effort to try to determine what works instead of resorting to fads or politics. But when he writes,The private high school I attended, Lakeside in Seattle, ma...

In discussing new employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when disaggregated by educational attainment, Andy Rotherham argues that "problems are hardly equally distributed and again the returns to education are apparent." Looking at the table (and at the seasonally-adjusted figures), it'...

Bad behaviour in schools is being fuelled by teachers' failure to properly identify children with special educational needs, according to the government's chief adviser on school discipline. Schools are labelling children as naughty when they have serious problems and have been failing to address th...

Since other bloggers I read have used various quizzes to spice up their entries, or maybe do something online while they're waiting for a bus, here is the all-purpose Performance-Pay Personality Quiz. Oh, wait: "personality" isn't quite appropriate here. But to mix metaphors, what personality is YOU...

Parents, business leaders and education campaigners last night condemned the decision to close 8,000 schools across the UK yesterday even though the snowy conditions gripping the country eased in some areas. The anger was most acute in cities where every schools was shut. Birmingham and Bradford clo...

My sentiment toward the stimulus bill has been what I might call optimistically credulous. That is, I'm pretending that the goal here is to actually stimulate the economy. Thus, my reaction to the inclusion (or removal) of sensible public policy proposals has been to ask, "How well does this fit wit...

White, well-off middle class families still exert a stranglehold over places at the top universities, despite the millions of pounds spent encouraging the poor and moderately well-off to apply, new research reveals. Children from the richest 2% of all households, are more than four and a half times ...