What kind of education do we believe our children deserve?

TES | January 10, 2019

Here’s a late-breaking new year’s resolution. Let’s make 2019 the year when we regain our ambition for our profession, and for our children and young people.After all, if 2018 taught us anything, it’s that more of the same is merely likely to deliver more of the same. Take the publication in December of the Year 6 results. Here’s how the BBC reported them: "Primary school tables: poor pupils won't catch up for 50 years."And just in case we hadn’t grasped the gist of the story from such a headline, the first sentence of the report hammered home its dispiriting message: “If the pace of change remains the same as it has done since 2011, poor pupils will not catch up until 2070.”So, enough is enough. If we’re not careful we’ll look back to this era of convulsive social, political and technological change, and notice how there in the middle of it all, we stood, the teaching profession, allowing ambition to wither, with English education reduced to the platitudinous language of accountability and performance measures, the arts squeezed out of too many schools, the curriculum mechanistically narrowed.And if, as I sense, there is a growing hunger for a new educational direction, then it may just be that the secretary of state has done us a favour. Freshly-appointed to the position, Damian Hinds announced at ASCL’s annual conference last year that there would be a moratorium on any further curriculum or qualification change for the lifetime of the parliament.

Spotlight

The Anthology Education and Research Center has engaged with four leading higher education data practitioners who work daily to support their institutions and their students. They represent different roles and work in a varied set of institutional types. Their extensive experience provides them with unique perspectives on how data can be used across the many dimensions of a modern university.

Spotlight

The Anthology Education and Research Center has engaged with four leading higher education data practitioners who work daily to support their institutions and their students. They represent different roles and work in a varied set of institutional types. Their extensive experience provides them with unique perspectives on how data can be used across the many dimensions of a modern university.

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