Category: Articles
I like words. I think about words. I dream about words. I sometimes wake up with words, sentences and paragraphs in my head. Words explain a thousand pictures. For me, anyway. I am looking at a new website – a fabulous website – progressive education.org. I love this website. It contains so many rich ideas, […]
“OK You’re certified,” said the friendly twelve-year-old boy. Throughout 25 years of advocating the democratisation of schools I have often feared these words yet when they were finally delivered the context was delightful. I was visiting the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. The introductory tour took us to the music room. As a one-time […]
Thinking about homeschooling your child? These 20 insights from Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor Lara Zane shed light on making the decision and what it takes to get a good start. When my son was nearly six, we pulled him out of the small, friendly local school where he’d been for the past two years, […]
On the day that an exams algorithm robbed a significant number of working class children of the results they needed to access their university places, I watched Jon Snow’s interview with Nick Gibb on the Channel 4 news. Looking beyond the immediate problem, it gave me a very useful insight to an accountant’s view of […]
Hold on to your seats…. This may get a bit ranty! I absolutely love my job, the autistic children I get the privilege to meet and get to know are incredible. I’ve said it before but it needs saying regularly; they are brave, resilient, and beautifully natured. This makes it all the more frustrating, overwhelming […]
I would rather Summerhill produced a happy street sweeper than a neurotic Prime Minister” A S Neill, pioneering funder of Summerhill School A lot of things are emerging during this lock-down period that people had not really noticed before. Things about our lives, about ourselves, things about our friends and families too. Surely such recognition […]
What is ‘freedom to learn’? Arguments on this point stretch back into history. For example, Alfred the Great of England (849–899) expressed a wish for children of ‘free men’ to be formally taught to read English and for those boys with the aptitude to ‘be brought to higher office’ to learn Latin (Cunningham 2006, p.51), […]
Parents and the State have an obligation to provide education for all children. To this end, compulsory education has been institutionalised and, depending on the country, it may take place elsewhere than in a school. At the moment, with the Covid-19 lockdown, almost all children are being taught at home. It’s a paradox: compulsory education […]
Six weeks into lockdown, you might be looking for new inspiration for home-based activities for children and young people. We’ve pulled together 10 blogs and articles which list hundreds of imaginative ideas for online learning at home. 1. Freddies Mummy UK Lists over 80 free or cheap online home education resources: Https://freddiesmummyuk.com/homeschooling-websites-uk/ 2. Clinical Psychologist […]
Unschooling, in its most basic form, is living a life without school. It challenges us, as adults, to consider what learning looks like without school and whether conventional methods of tuition are necessary for learning to occur. Often our deepest assumptions are challenged when we consider how our children will learn to read or learn […]
It is 2 April 2020 and we were in the early stages in England of the coronavirus or Covid-19 crisis. Schools have been closed and many problems are occurring from this. One example is around the well-being of children. Walker, 2020, comments that even at this early stages of the crisis, the National Society for […]
Introduction In this essay I will use as my starting point the ‘Manifesto for Change’ elaborated by Robinson et al, 2009. Each of the nine points in this manifesto summarise exceedingly well the basis of the global crisis explored in their paper [SEE ENDNOTE]. Others have commented on a range of aspects of the socio-economic-ecological […]
Some people have suggested that the only change from Victorian schools to those of today is from black to white – blackboards have changed to whiteboards. We still have classrooms that are not much different from the 19th century with curricula that have progressed little since then and with lessons of standardised times delivered in […]
Since qualifying as a teacher in 1994 I have learnt so much more about how children learn. Out of those 30 six year olds, there will be approx. 10-15 of them who can sit and listen and don’t really mind being passive. I was one of those children as a child. I was quite happy […]
Successive governments, concerned about the underachievement of British children and the detrimental effect of this underachievement on the economy, have been determined to raise academic standards in education. This aim has underpinned changes to the state education system since the early 1980s, in particular the introduction of the National Curriculum in England, with its associated […]
A Review of Recent Research into Children’s Rights Based Education in State Schools in Hampshire, England by Derry Hannam for the Spring 2011 edition of the EUDEC newsletter In 2002 one of the county education officials in Hampshire, England learned of research carried out by researchers at Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia, Canada, into the […]
That’s a heck of a question! When you think about it deeply that is, and don’t just accept the conventional answers that education is to get intelligent enough to get qualification and thus a good job defined by high pay and so on and so on… We’re sucked into that conventional definition of education and […]