Following on from our feature on St. George’s School in Switzerland, we speak to Hazel Hogg, who lives with her husband and her daughters Morven (11), Rowan (8) and Alexa (3) in France – practically on the border with Switzerland, where they enjoy stunning views of the Alps and Lake Geneva.  Her children attend the International School of Geneva. Here Hazel talks about living overseas, and tells us more about choosing this school for her children. Read more.

Could you explain how you came to be living in France, and why you chose an international school for your children?

Read more…

With the on-going riots starting in the capital and moving into towns and cities across the country, there is now more debate than ever as to who is to blame for this breakdown in our society where criminal behaviour has become so widespread and uncontrollable. While there is a never-ending list of who to blame –  the government, youth culture, parents and society in general – we have taken a look online to see the teacher comments and media reaction to the riots and the education system.

‘BBC NEWS: Heads challenge parents over riot youths
By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent

Head teachers’ leader, Brian Lightman, says there need to be some “hard questions” and “uncomfortable truths” for parents and families, after youngsters were caught up in an unprecedented night of violence and looting.

‘Daily Mail: Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters
By Max Hastings

It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control…..So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable.

Blog post: Most of the kids are alright
Insights from a teacher

I’ve taught the ‘unteachable’, despite being punched, kicked, having chairs thrown at me. I’ve taught fledgling criminals to read, and helped the ones who weren’t beyond help to fly in better directions. I’ve taught probably a couple of thousand kids, of all races and abilities by now and taught them exactly what I had the privilege of being taught, in my Home Counties grammar school. Some of the kids were rightly proud to go on to jobs in cafes and shops; some made it to Oxford.

Blog post: A UK teachers overview
Posted by Pooky Hesmondhalgh (@creativeedu)

John Cunningham works with 12 academies, some of which are in the areas affected by the riots.
He looks at how we can go about rebuilding a feeling of community and accountability following this week’s riots. .. Perhaps it is due to both parents or carers working, creating a lack of accountability for their whereabouts. Or maybe it is the fact that they see others looting shops, ‘getting away with it’ and trying to do likewise. Perhaps their role models of today are not setting good standards. Indeed we may ask who are their role models.

Eugene Spiers, an Assistant Headteacher thinks about what approach teachers should take when discussing the riots with their pupils.
We must talk and listen to our young people about rights AND responsibilities and how engaging in their communities is a powerful thing with many opportunities.

Neil Jeffery, a UK teacher, shares his views on the UK riots…
I was truly saddened, though, to see young children, not adults, children of around 12-14 years of age, joining in as if it were some kind of game. I tried to think of where I had seen it before…

Social Media:
@ Tenuviel riots – what we are seeing on the streets is the animal behaviour that is present in our schools on a daily basis – I know, I am a teacher.

@CherylBernstein A London-based teacher friend sees a direct connection between the riots, the school holidays, & the cuts to youth programmes

If the young feel so alienated from their own communities that they loot on their own front doorstep and create such devastation – what can be done about it?

Links to all media sources are to provide a news insight and are not the opinion of Eteach or the author.
For more up to date news on education and teaching you can follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/eteach and www.twitter.com/til (Teach in London)

Attendance certificates often penalise children who have absolutely no control over whether they can attain the required standard, and perpetuate a gung-ho culture, argues Annette Jenkins.

I asked my daughter’s friend when she came round for tea what she’d done at school that day. The almost inevitable “Nothing much” was the reply!

With a little coaxing, however, she revealed that attendance certificates had been given out, but reported that she hadn’t received one.

What had prevented her attending, I asked. It seems her family had taken some extra holiday, so of course her attendance record had not been up to par.

Unnecessarily penalising children

Now most of the school children I know have little or no say about when their parents or carers choose to book their holidays, and many families need to take some of their holidays outside of usual school vacation periods to be able to afford one at all.

Likewise, children don’t have much input over when they fall ill, and have to remain at home or even in hospital, and therefore have no opportunity to win the dangled carrot. To lump a child who breaks a limb – or indeed has had to take time out for any other illness – with the kids who skive, is unnecessarily penalising them.

But the premise of attendance certificates, which is presumably that the more children go to school the more they will ‘achieve’, is questionable. (Others would go further, and suggest that the ‘reward culture’ of certificates, stickers and charts, and even positive reinforcement, is generally detrimental to development.)

Gung-ho attitude

Attendance certificate culture also perpetuates the gung-ho attitude that people should struggle in to school or work, no matter how terrible they’re feeling, dosed up to the eyeballs on Lemsip or other drugs and ready to knock out their peers by spreading their lurgy to all and sundry; how that might affect overall attendance isn’t widely mentioned.

One website reported that when a school sent a child home for looking ill, it then said she’d missed a day and couldn’t have her certificate! There are other extreme reports of children prevented from attending an awards disco with their peers because they’d had time off – because a parent had died.

The small proportion of people that this system is presumably designed to motivate – the malingerers, no-shows, runaways, shirkers, skivers and their families – probably couldn’t give a fig about Gold, Silver or even Bronze attendance certificates. 

It’s true that in life not everyone can win every prize, but to create a system of prizes that many children have no hope of winning through no fault of their own seems particularly pernicious.

Wellington College threw open its doors to the cream of the education world over this weekend and welcomed all those that support and work in the profession. Eteach was there in force to speak with teachers and heads and discuss ways in which we can help with recruitment.

From Secretary of State Michael Gove to Sir Bob Geldoff, Sir Robert Winston and David Starky (to name but a few) the programme was packed with superb speakers. It was such a hard decision to decide which sessions to target and which to leave out, that one visitor admitted to starting in one session and sneaking out the back half way through, to visit another.

Credit must go to Anthony Seldon, Head of Wellington College, in organising a festival which featured an open forum to discuss and debate a range of topics across education. These included Free Schools, the current pension situation, what makes for a good education, how to turn schools around and various developments in different curriculum areas. And these were just the tip of the iceberg!

I was fortunate enough to hear Anthony Seldon outline in his opening presentation the vision and aspiration he has for all his students at Wellington College and the importance of developing the whole student, not just the academic aspect. He also spoke of his commitment to Wellington Academy in Wiltshire, where they are working hard with the state sector to give students there the grounding and aspirations that students at the College already experience. Best of all was hearing from the students themselves, who talked about their experiences at Wellington and what they felt was important in their own education.

Another session was led by Peter Hyman who originally started as a strategist to Tony Blair. He has since trained as a teacher and is shortly to head up a Free School in Newham. When questioned by the audience whether he would have advised the PM in the same way, now he has experienced teaching for himself, he replied that the outcomes would have been the same, but that maybe the methodologies would have been less prescriptive. He was also pressed by several attendees from the Newham area, where his Free School will be based, as to why he felt he could only achieve his aspirations for children via a Free School and not through the LA. If the legacy of Labour education was so good why wasn’t he supporting it and working within the government sector dealing with all the never-ending initiatives and red tape they had to work through? He replied that he wants to work alongside these schools and look at good practice and learn from them too. However, he wanted to focus on English Language as ‘the driver’ for all things and a set of skills that would infiltrate all aspects of a child’s education. These include teamwork, problem solving, confidence, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, resilience, initiative, commitment and motivation. Nothing different then to his ‘state’ colleagues down the road!

The final keynote speech of the day was a question and answer session with Michael Gove. Generally people were polite with their questions, the toughest ones being about the pensions strike and why does education always have to be driven by politics, whoever was in power at the time? Why were successive governments always changing what was being taught and why couldn’t they just leave teachers to do their jobs? He said it was the government’s responsibility on behalf of the electorate to hold teachers accountable, to focus on continuing to raise standards and to move back up the world education ranks rather than continuing to sink lower. Politics needs to drive education, to ensure our education system keeps up with a changing world where economics, social and technological developments are evolving all the time. This final question seemed to link back to where Anthony Seldon started that morning: What are we educating our young people for? Is it to fit neatly into society? For business and the economy? Or purely as learners of knowledge?

Tell us your ideas: What are we educating young people for?

What are the hot topics in the world of education at the moment? Here we take our regular flick through the papers, to see what’s got people talking. From one school where dancing is seen as the best start to the day, to teachers in trouble over the use of music videos and controversial calls for climate change to be taken out of the curriculum – join us and have your say.

Climate change off the curriculum

A top government adviser, charged with an overhaul of the school syllabus in England, has said climate change should not be included in the national curriculum.

In an interview with The Guardian, Tim Oates said there is a need to get back to teaching the ‘science in science’, and that it should be up to schools to decide how they engage pupils on issues of climate change – and whether to do so at all.

Climate change has featured in the national curriculum since 1995. Those opposing to its removal from the classroom have warned it may make science less interesting for pupils and allow sceptical teachers to abandon teaching the subject altogether.

Oates is also calling for algebra to be taught from a younger age. His full review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year.

Best way to start the day…get dancing!

For one infant school in Hampshire, dancing is the only way to start the day, reports the BBC. Pupils at Liss Infant School are treated to a short song and dance session each morning, before they start their first lesson – and it’s working wonders for their learning, according to teachers.

Around 180 five to seven-year-olds brave all weathers to take part in the motivational dance routine, performed each morning in the school playground.

US teacher in trouble over playlist

Meanwhile across the pond, a teacher from the Amercian state of Massachusetts has landed in hot water after showing pupils risqué music videos, as part of a lesson on media analysis. Parents reacted strongly to Eminems’s ‘Superman’, and Jessy J’s ‘Do it like a dude’ videos being played to pupils.

One enraged parent went straight to the police, who confirmed the versions used were edited and not ‘obscene’. Yet many parents remain unhappy and an investigation is underway, reports the Metro West Daily News. 

Failing schools to become academies

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that hundreds of failing primary schools could be removed from local authority control and converted into academies under new government plans, reports the Daily Telegraph.

While addressing head teachers in Birmingham, Mr Gove warned that Britain risks falling behind developing economies unless the pace of improvement in the education system is accelerated.

Plans to ‘clamp down’ on the worst performing schools in the country could see hundreds become academies and placed under the control of a third party sponsor, who will have more powers over management, including admissions and pay.

Secondary schools will also be ordered to ensure that at least half of pupils leave with five good GCSEs, including English and maths, by 2015.

From Radio 2 to the classroom

Radio 2 breakfast show host, Chris Evans, is waving goodbye to his long-time sidekick Jonny Saunders, as he quits the popular show to become a teacher.

Sports reporter Jonny, 36, has completed an Open University teaching degree and now plans to give lessons in English and games at a secondary school.

Speaking about his decision, Jonny explained that teaching is something he has always been passionate about. The married dad-of-two told the Daily Mirror that working on the radio show had been ‘an absolute joy… but there’s only so long one can cope with the 3.50am alarm calls.’

Seeing double at one school

A primary school in Stockport is facing an unusual challenge, as it welcomes a multitude of twins into its classrooms.

St John’s Primary in Heaton Mersey now has six sets of twins – three of which are identical, and all aged between four and 10, reports the BBC (link launches video and report).

And finally….

New comedy ‘doesn’t send good message about teachers’

Finding that Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake have joined the teaching staff at your school must be a dream for many pupils – and teaching staff alike! Sadly, it’s only a reality in the latest Hollywood film to delve into the teaching profession, ‘Bad Teacher’.

The film comedy centres on a teacher with her sights set on bagging a rich man. It sees some major misbehaving in the classroom and ‘doesn’t exactly send out a good message about teachers,’ concludes a review by Ok! Magazine.

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